The Grand Finale
One of our mission goals for many years has been to raise awareness of the Salvadoran reality. Gathering and sharing their stories as we have heard them has been a way to awaken and enrich our readers to that goal. That mission is not ending, but rather taking a turn.
Interviewing and writing stories has been a passion, but requires a willing team of support. My ever capable editor, Lloyd, teaches me much in terms of grammatical structure, voice, agreement, and more. Yet I only ask him for help when he is not overwhelmed with his own work. He and Pat, who graciously hosts visiting Salvadoran guests, have always endorsed and supported our trips to El Salvador to interview our storytellers. We are so grateful for that.
Originally, we put together two booklets of our initial Salvadoran stories together with the help of Ron Atticks, graphic arts director at our local Cumberland Perry Vocational School. His patience and understanding for our story project and his involving his students in design covers was extremely helpful. As our stories kept growing, we realized we needed to do something bigger to increase their circulation beyond local readers.
When my partner Don approached me with the idea of putting our stories on a website, I fought kicking and screaming. The website would open it to a larger audience, but my limited knowledge of technology put me on edge. Reluctantly I came around to agree. For many years I posted one story on the first of the month and a second story on the fifteenth of the month. In recent years it has changed to offering only the first of the month.
When you reach out to people for help, they bend over backwards to assist. Unlike us retirees, most of these folks work full-time and still manage to help us out. And they have become our world-wide web of connections.
This was true of Dan who consulted and helped put the idea into reality. Thank you, Dan. I might add that Dan is located in Berlin.
Derrick designs and manages websites as a profession and took ours under his wing. He is always available when questions or kinks arise. Thank you, Derrick. I will add that Derrick is in Minnesota. He gets help from his freelance website designer friend, Khurram, in Pakistan. Thank you to Khurraam.
Noah helped us with early tech issues as we got started and created our videos for us all while attending American University. Thank you, Noah.
Scott also helped out in a couple of crises when tech issues happened during my visits to State College. He is a good resource and handles things from a calm level-headed perspective as opposed to my frenzied panic.
After stories are written, they need to go into the queue to get posted into WordPress. That is where Bill comes in. I send him three to four months of stories at a time, and God love Bill, who gets them lined up and ready to go. He also adds the Spanish translations AND sends out the Mailchimp notices to our subscribers. It is a big job, especially adding the pictures. Thank you, Bill, for all the patient tech support.
Then there are the translators. Tony and Jeannette are retired local high school Spanish teachers we personally know. They graciously agree to help translate for us. We try to give them only one or two stories a year. They are retired, after all, and we do not want to over-burden them. Santiago is a young man from Spain we also know personally. He studies/works in the Netherlands, U.S., and Luxembourg yet is willing to translate, regardless of what continent he is living in at the time. Juan is from Ecuador and is always available as well. We have appreciated their helping with some of the “people” stories in recent years. Thank you, Tony, Jeannette, Santiago, and Juan. These folks all volunteer their time to help us.
As you see, what began as a mere local idea expanded to include friends of friends across the globe willing to help us! The same was true of our storytellers who started within El Salvador but soon spread to expats living in other countries. It takes my breath away to think about the far-reaching corners of the world this whimsical idea has and continues to spread.
Laura has faithfully posted all stories and photos on our church Facebook account.
Countless other people have helped us obtain our stories from suggesting names, setting up interviews, serving as drivers and translators, feeding us, and providing for our safety when in-country. They are too numerous to mention, but suffice it to say they believe in our project. We could not have pulled off a website without every one of their help. THANK YOU, Brian, Francisco, Jenna, Stephanie, Claudia, Wuilver, Ruth K., Ruth C., Ricardo, Luis, and others!
Our local El Salvador Task Force has been supportive of our vision and mission throughout our journey. We thank each of them for free reign of our project.
We have had growing pains as we learn along the way. There was the ad issue we dealt with early on. Ads popped up for items that were incongruous with our philosophy. We cut out all ads despite the possibility of their generating income. We lost our entire list of subscribers a couple of times. I lost my favorite website feature which was the scrolling list of stories, but after so many stories, it became too cumbersome to manage. Our photo library filled beyond its capacity.
Interviewing Salvadorans for this project was only an aside to the myriad other reasons we visited El Salvador. There were Rotary sanitation projects, checking on churches and pastors whom we had relationships with, well drilling and solar cell projects, election monitoring, synod sister relation meetings, meetings with the bishop, checking on scholarship students, etc. Days were jam-packed full from sunrise to well into the evening.
I’ve heard it said that when you write about another person, you are sharing a bit of their soul. I believe that is true, and I hope I have been faithful and accurate in representing those persons.
Now nearly 250 stories over 12 years – people and travel memories – it is time to alter this website. We no longer travel to El Salvador and therefore cannot interview her remarkable people we love. At one time Don wistfully suggested, “Wouldn’t it make a fun trip to go back and re-visit all those people we interviewed?” Yes, it sure would. I think about every one of them. Some have died making our stories a lasting tribute to them. Many continue to stay in touch. For that we give thanks.
Thank YOU, our Readers, for following our stories for the duration.
We thank both Tim and Linda Muth, who have supported our project while writing their own websites. If you don’t already subscribe, here is their information:
https://www.elsalvadorperspectives.com/
https://blog.walkingwithelsalvador.org/2016/03/no-sides.html
David and Nancy Slinde are also among our supporters who write a blog.
https://oslcslinde09.blogspot.com/
With the help of this supportive team, it has been our privilege to share stories of a variety of spirited souls whose lives speak of dignity and hope despite living in extreme poverty.
Compiling their stories into an historical memory project to raise awareness of their reality and having many translated into Spanish has been one of our ongoing ministries. It has been an honor and privilege to share them with you, our readers. Although no NEW stories are being written at this time, we are archiving our past stories on this same website.
Yes, we are taking a turn from sharing new stories on the first of each month on our website; however, we are making them available for you to continue to read.
They will all be listed on our website by category to re-read or catch earlier ones you may have missed. Feel free to recommend them to others who share a passion for the people of El Salvador.
Our scholarship program would not exist without our faithful donors. It is YOU who make it possible for young Salvadorans to fulfill their lives’ dreams. We are blessed by serving some very bright youth. We shall continue to focus the majority of our energies on developing our growing Salvadoran educational scholarship program now under the guidance of in-country coordinators, Cristian and Pablo.
Blessings abound,
Caroline Sheaffer
cjs12@comcast.net
Don Seiple
Dseiple12@verizon.net
