Massaging out the Memories of War

I wear a number of hats in my non-profit FUNDAHMER: poet, artistic enthusiast, translator, sport promoter, icebreaker facilitator and perhaps the most important, masseuse. About once a week, my lovely director comes up to me with a withered face and say something like, “Fíjate Jenny I feel like my shoulders about to fall off. Would you mind…?” I don’t at all. Giving Anita massages is one of the greatest ways I contribute to the wellbeing of my organization.

Anita, the executive director, needs massages. In addition to running our foundation, which includes 10-12 hour days 6 days a week, Anita is a single mother with three kids, and takes care of her sick mother on Sunday. When I sit down with her, and put my hands on her aching back, the tension of her present and past pop out like a cardboard cut-out. That knot: which staff members to cut given the funding crisis? This bump: are the gangs going to infiltrate her children’s’ school and force them to drop out? The longer I rub, the more I feel the tension of her past that she’s repressed for 30 years inside her. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, all 5 of her brothers were murdered by the Salvadoran Army because they were fighting for the liberation of the poor. Anita had to spend 12 years as an internal refugee not knowing where her other family members, who were scattered throughout the country, were alive or dead. Massaging, I try to imagine my fingers as pipelines sucking out some of this pain that Anita harbors inside her veins.

Massage has also been the solution for the difficult question of to give my host families in the communities in exchange for sharing their hammocks and tortillas? Money is inappropriate. Ice cream melts long before dinner. After months of trial and error I have come up with a wellness cocktail that works wonders. Because vegetables and fruits are expensive and not commonly grown in the communities (we’re working on that) I usually stuff my backpack with bags of zucchini, onions, tomatoes, carrots etc and top it with a huge pineapple to make juice with. And after dinner, I sit down with the mother of the house, who has spent the last 14 hours bent over watching her children, washing clothes, feeding the chickens, working in the fields, scrubbing dishes, grinding corn, making tortillas, sweeping the floor, and I massage her back. The knots that riddle the backs of these women in the communities are as hard the bullets they fled from, the bullets that took the lives of their husbands and children throughout the war. The hour we spend together barely strokes the surface of that pain.

Tomorrow, a professional masseuse and meditation expert will give me and my colleagues all a class on how to properly give massages. I’m quite excited about this. Not only will this help me do my “work” better, but it will empower my colleagues to help one another feel better, and to share this cost-free health miracle with the communities for their wellbeing.

In the darkness with Dolores

She sits down in the hammock
And sighs
As I dip my hands in aloe vera balm
And place them on her neck.
Her knots are like bullets.
I wish I could pull them out
And eras the days she spent eating weeds
inside the cave,
the days she withered wondering
if her brother, husband, father, nephew, son
had yet been sliced open by the booted men who
buzz in on their helicopters
to kill and rape and kill
until their biceps sting
so bad it aches to button
up their slacks.

Sitting with Dolores in the darkness
With my fingers on her spine.
Untangling the tension strings
Woven together so tight
They form a hammock in
The curve of her back,
A flimsy net struggling to
tuck away reminders
of the death that stayed behind.