I’ll always remember the first time I spent the Christmas “holidays” in a refugee camp.
It was the early days of 1982, on the Honduran border. Close enough to spit into El Salvador, we could sometimes hear bombardments. Families had next to nothing: they had fled the army’s “scorched earth” campaigns by swimming across the bordering Rio Lempa.
Tens of thousands of Salvadoran refugees huddled in makeshift huts scattered over dusty, bone-dry hills. We all slept in hammocks or on the ground. Almost equally impoverished, Honduran campesinos were the refugees’ most gracious hosts, and ours, as we gathered for liturgy on the Feast of the Epiphany.