In late January our board members came from all over the U.S. to meet in Chicago for FACES second ever in-person retreat and meeting, the first being FACES’ founding meeting in El Salvador in 2013. Much of the weekend was spent in an extremely fruitful strategic planning session. We restructured the board into a more efficient and task-oriented committee structure, set clear responsibilities and accountability measures, and set an overall action plan for 2018 moving forward. This process offered us a valuable opportunity to collaboratively and creatively think about the work of FACES and how each of us might be best able to contribute to this work. The result of this restructuring will be to make FACES even more effective in supporting our partners in El Salvador.

Perhaps equally valuable to this structural work was the opportunity for the members of the FACES board to connect and reconnect with each other. In doing so we were reminded of each of our commitments and strivings to be in solidarity with the oppressed people of El Salvador. Each of us have a different path that led us to El Salvador, that led us away from it, and that leads us back to it. Each of us have different experiences and memories that keep El Salvador and the people we met there in our hearts. Of those of us that were gathered in Chicago that weekend, some of us had been good friends for years, some of us had never met, some of us had met periodically over the years. We had time to talk about our time in El Salvador, to remember friends and hold them in our minds. In hearing each other’s stories and experiences and recounting our own histories of our relationship with El Salvador, we are able to get some sense of our interconnectedness within a wider story of solidarity and struggle. There’s really no understating the inspirational and motivational value of that sort of experience.

With that in mind I would like to offer thanks to all supporters of FACES for being part of this story of solidarity.

Lord keep the Spirit in us.