Sheila Marie Tobbe interview, 09 August 2016

Abstract

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe is an Ursuline Sister and served as a member of the Cleveland Latin American Mission team during the 1990s. In this interview, she shares her experiences in El Salvador, working and living with the Salvadoran people during the civil war and the nature of the work performed there. She discusses an earlier visit to El Salvador during Christmas 1979 and New Year's 1980 when she stayed with Sister Dorothy Kazel and the impact that trip had on her desire to serve as part of the mission team there. Sheila also details the founding of the InterReligious Task Force and the issues of gang violence and drugs in El Salvador in 2016. The interview culminates with her discussing the legacy of martyrdom, not only of the four churchwomen murdered in 1980, but also of every catechist who was killed during the Salvadoran Civil War.

Interviewee

Tobbe, Sheila Marie (interviewee)

Interviewer

Randt, Naomi A. (interviewer)

Project

Protest Voices

Date

8-9-2016

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

71 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Sheila Marie Tobbe interview, 09 August 2016" (2016). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 750011.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/774

Related Resources

Protest Voices @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:01] My name is [Naomi A. Randt]. It is the 9th of August 2016. I am with Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe at the Ursuline Institute of Learning. Would you please state your name for the record?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:00:12] Sheila Marie Tobias.

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:15] Could you spell your last name?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:00:17] T-O-B-B-E.

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:20] Thank you. And we’ll start with some background info. When and where were you born?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:00:25] I was born in Cleveland Heights. I was actually born at St. Ann’s Hospital in 1944. December… 1944.

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:32] Did you grow up in Cleveland Heights?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:00:34] I grew up in Cleveland Heights, correct.

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:37] Did you have any siblings?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:00:39] Five. Yeah. I have four older and one younger. The first two were boys, and the rest of us are all girls.

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:50] What was it like growing up in Cleveland Heights?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:00:53] It was very comfortable. We were very close to the church. My mother taught at the school and my father was the Boy Scout leader. People from the church came over to our house all the time. As one of the younger kids, I sort of saw this activity going on, and it was comfortable.

Naomi A. Randt [00:01:18] What did your mother teach?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:01:20] She taught kindergarten, first grade, and then eventually went up to fifth grade. And right at the school where I was attending, which was right across the street from us. So, St. Ann’s? Yeah.

Naomi A. Randt [00:01:38] When did you decide to become a sister?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:01:42] Right after I graduated from high school. The Ursuline Sisters taught at St. Ann’s and at Beaumont, where I went to high school. And so I had gotten to know them quite well. When I was growing up, my mother drove, and she had access to the car. My father took the bus to work, so the sisters did not have a car, so my mother drove them everywhere. So from the time before I even started school, I rode around in the car with the nuns, and so I knew them. And we would go to the grocery store, so I’d have to help unload the groceries into their kitchen. And I knew the convent as well as I knew my own house, which was further from the church than our house. So I grew up, you know, very much surrounded by the congregation. So when I graduated from high school a long time ago, 1963. In those days, you know, some of my classmates were getting married. I mean, women were moving on to the next phase of their life. So I entered the Ursulines. I said I moved from St. Ann’s Church, which is right near Fairmount, up to Beaumont, which is on Fairmount. Out here on Fairmount. I never got out off Fairmont Boulevard for 30, well, 43 years.

Naomi A. Randt [00:03:03] What did your parents think about you entering the convent?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:03:08] My mother was enthusiastic. She had a very close relationship with the sisters. Of course, my father was reluctant. He wanted me to go to a- Not that he didn’t. He was very religious, didn’t want me to enter, but he did think I should do a couple years of college first. And so he questioned me about it, but then he said, okay. He had a brother who was a Christian brother in Detroit, so he was very familiar with religious life, too. He was fine, and they were supportive through all of my years of Novitiate and Juniorate and so forth.

Naomi A. Randt [00:03:46] What was that experience like for you at Novitiate?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:03:50] Challenging. Challenging. Because I had grown up in a family that was older and very active. To be that enclosed was difficult for me. And it was right after the Vatican Council. Things were just changing in religious life, and I would like to have seen the changes happen faster. So I was on the leading edge of pushing for change and had my challenges in the process. [laughs]

Naomi A. Randt [00:04:23] What were some of those changes that you were pushing for?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:04:26] To be less enclosed, less enclosed, less conformist, if you will, to the old church, less emphasis on high control. You know, definitely I was a child of Vatican II. [laughs]

Naomi A. Randt [00:04:51] Did that have an influence on your want to do mission work?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:04:56] Oh, of course. Of course. In fact, it was probably the fact that in 1968, the mission started in ’64, so it was already in the congregation and, you know, we were receiving information about it because religious women were being asked to serve on the team. And then in 1968, when the congregation said, you know, yes, we want to serve, I was still finishing up my Novitiate and Juniorate, my formation years, and I immediately volunteered and, of course, was turned down. So it was from 1968 on, it really influenced the direction of what I thought I wanted to do as a religious.

Naomi A. Randt [00:05:46] Why were you turned down?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:05:47] I was too young and too inexperienced. [laughs] And at that point they were saying that we all had to have a permanent teacher certificate before we went so that our teacher certificate wouldn’t expire in the times that we were in missionary service. So, you know, there were all these hoops I had to jump through first, but eventually I got there.

Naomi A. Randt [00:06:13] What was your teacher certificate in?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:06:15] In my primary area was math, and my secondary area was physical science. And, of course, I also taught religion.

Naomi A. Randt [00:06:27] So what drew you to those subjects?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:06:33] Well, I always enjoyed math and science, so I was happy, but I didn’t have a choice. [laughs] I was told. My choice would have been kindergarten, first grade, like my mother. But the superiors said, you will, and so you did. And I’m grateful, actually, because I went to Ursuline College. My classmates went to St. John’s, who were going to teach in elementary school, but I went to Ursuline College at the time, the college was changing radically, too, and I appreciated- There was a particular sister who was very involved with, in social studies, actually was her area, sociology. She had her doctorate in sociology, did a tremendous amount of work with NDEA grants in inner-city education and things like that. And I took a course from her just to fulfill my course requirements. So she got to know me, and she decided that she needed a secretary, and she could pay me and pay the congregation to be her secretary. So while my field was math and science, I was her secretary. So I was very engaged because she didn’t drive. So I had to drive her to pick people up for all of the different meetings she was going to. And it was a- It was that opening up that I had been looking for in the Novitiate that I didn’t find. And had I not gone to Ursuline, I don’t think I would have found it either. But Ursuline was a great opening up for me to the world that I was drawn to.

Naomi A. Randt [00:08:15] What was the name of that professor?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:08:17] Do you remember Sister Miriam? Miriam Lynch. Yeah, she was a real change agent in Cleveland.

Naomi A. Randt [00:08:28] Did she get any sort of pushback for the changes that she was trying to make?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:08:35] She, of course, all religious women at that time were in such a state of change that the pushback came from various places. Sometimes it came from within the congregation, sometimes it came from the church community. We were overstepping our bounds, things like that. But she managed it very well. Her spirit stayed strong, and she- There were plenty of other sisters with her, you know, at the college that had been, had their doctorates, were very engaged in a lot of things in the Cleveland area, some younger ones that were very involved. And so she had a circle, a tremendous circle of support at the college, and so did we, the younger sisters, because we all ate together over here in the dining room [laughs], and we all lived together in this house. So there was a lot of foment going on through the college and the changes that were happening in the college as a women’s college, the awareness of being a women’s college, but women in the world and religious in the world, all of that, the nun in the world, the church in the world, was all very much a part of what was going on at the college particularly, but in religious life, too. So we all had our experiences of being challenged. But.

Naomi A. Randt [00:10:20] Did you end up going to El Salvador right after you graduated college?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:10:24] No, I went to Beaumont to teach. I actually replaced one of the sisters who went to El Salvador at Beaumont and that meant she came back every year and spent- The arrangements with the mission team are, you have a month off every year back in Cleveland, partly doing support work for the mission and partly time to visit with your family and congregation and make retreat and things like that. So she would live with us when she was home on that month. And, of course, I would talk to her incessantly every moment that I could get to find out what it was like to be on the mission.

Naomi A. Randt [00:11:03] What were some of those stories that she told you?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:11:06] Oh, she showed a lot of pictures and talked a lot about how the people, the poverty and their lack of education. And, you know, so the focus of the mission team at the beginning was strongly around education, not only catechesis, but also healthcare, basic reading and writing, agriculture. They worked in a variety of areas and had a training center in El Salvador. So she talked about working in the training center and what it was like and the people, stories of the sadness of some of the lives of the people in terms of their living with such poverty, such extreme poverty, and yet the joyfulness, too.

Naomi A. Randt [00:11:55] How did you feel about when you heard those stories?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:11:59] Still very attracted to that type of mission activity work. Mission ministry, actually, is what we call it, mission ministry.

Naomi A. Randt [00:12:12] What was the name of the sister who that you would talk to that would come home?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:12:17] You know, I can’t remember her religious name. It’s Janet Kearns. She left the community and got married, and I don’t even remember her married name. She lives out of town.

Naomi A. Randt [00:12:33] Can you spell her last name?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:12:34] K-E-A-R-N-S. Martha or Khaled [phonetic] in the Archives will have all of her information.

Naomi A. Randt [00:12:47] When did you end up going to El Salvador?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:12:50] Not until 1990. My first trip was in 1979, and it was a discernment trip. By that time, I had completed all the requirements. I had my permanent teacher certificate. Dorothy came home that summer, 1979, and she, too, was from Beaumont. So she stayed at Beaumont when she came back and at the convent there. And so we were in dialogue quite a bit. And two people had just been chosen because, of course, things were getting very unsettled in El Salvador. So they just chose two people who spoke Spanish fairly well to go. And so she was still encouraging me, and she said, well, it’s only five years. You know, in five more years, we’ll need some more people. You know, you’re freer now because you’re not studying to get your master’s degree and all that, and so you could start learning Spanish. And so why don’t you come down and visit me? Martha had come home. And she said, you know, I’ll be the only Ursuline in El Salvador at Christmastime. Why don’t you come and visit me at Christmastime? So I said, well, that sounds like it would be a good thing, because I am getting older, and I probably do have to do some discernment here whether this really is a real call that I could manage. So I got myself- Got the permission to go and started to get arranged to go. And at that point, there were tourism groups going, and they were trying to develop the sense of tourism in the country. And so I got on a charter plane. I was only gonna ride back and forth with them on the plane, but I already had the ticket and everything. And the coup happened in October of ’79, so they canceled the whole trip, and, of course, everything was on hold, so I didn’t think I was going to go. And then Dorothy to the rescue, she talked to our superior on the phone and said it was really a very nonviolent coup. It looks like things could calm down here. There’s no reason that she can’t come. So. But then, trying to get a ticket at the last minute, the only ticket I could get was Christmas Eve. So I arrived late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Dorothy was very engaged with pastoral activities, so she couldn’t come to pick me up, so she had to send Jean, and Jean’s mother and dad were there visiting to come and pick me up. Fortunately, they were very North American-looking and very blonde, so it was not hard to figure out who they were. But my luggage didn’t come. It was just, by the time I landed, I was- Why did I think this was a good idea for Christmas? [laughs] Then we went to Zaragoza, where I eventually served, and then we went on to- And we had supper there, and then we went on to- No, we had a 9:00 mass there, and then we went on to the port of La Libertad for a midnight mass, and that’s where I met Dorothy, and we met in the streets, in the market. That was at the end of the day they just threw all the refuse out into the streets, and the pigs would come and eat it up. So I’m running to meet her, and I slide garbage and fall down [laughs], and I’m a mess, and I have to go to mass. And then there’s- Between the firecrackers and the guys running around with machine guns, the military, I thought, this is not the idyllic village picture I had at all. [laughs] So from the moment I arrived, practically, it was culture shock. Yeah. When we landed, it was still the old airport, and you had to go down onto the tarmac, and it was completely, the whole plane was surrounded with guys in blue jeans and t-shirts and submachine guns. And I thought they said this was safe. So when I finally got a chance to ask Dorothy about it, she said, oh, that’s just because all the wealthy people are coming back into the country. Those are their bodyguards. She said, that’s not the military. [laughs] I said, oh, wow. Glad to know we had all those bodyguards. So it was those two weeks where that kind of experience continuously being, you know, just overwhelmed at the level of militarization in that country. And we went into Guatemala, too. And it was a realization of, part of my discernment was going to be, can you live with this? So, yeah. At first, you know, and the next day, Christmas, we drove all the way across the country to Chirilagua for Christmas dinner and then drove back late into the night. Now, in my time there during the war, we would never have been out at night like that. So it was very disconcerting. And as we drove and I saw the countryside and saw the intensity of the poverty, it was like, this is like a National Geographic special, you know [laughs], I can’t believe this is human beings living this way. And, you know, it’s like everybody’s camping out. There’s really, the housing is so inadequate. And so it was all of that kind of culture shock for two weeks. And then we went up into Guatemala, and we stopped quickly in Guatemala City, which is a pretty good-sized city. And then we went up into the mountains where June knew some priest, and we didn’t get there till late at night either. So her parents were very, very tired. We put them to bed, and we came back in to just have a drink with this priest. And he said, well, I think you better leave fairly early in the morning because the guerrillas left today because the military is on its way into this area. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. I mean, I didn’t sleep a wink that night. Get me out of here. [laughs] Then we get back into the- We stopped in Panajachel, and we spent a day there, and it’s a tourist place. Beautiful, lovely. But I wasn’t feeling beautiful and lovely. And we heard there that the border was closed and that we weren’t gonna be able to get back into Guatemala, I mean, back into El Salvador from Guatemala. So Dorothy and Jean and I were sharing a room and her parents were in another room. So the three of us were reconnoitering and they said, well, we’re going to go up to a bar and find out if we can get some accurate information. But the best place we’ll get information is tomorrow. We’ll go back into Guatemala City, and we’ll go to the Maryknoll house, and they’ll know. So we’ll send you with Jean’s parents to the hotel to get lunch and tell them we have to buy something at the Maryknoll shop and go over to the Maryknoll house and find out. So when they came back, I’m sitting at the table looking at them, and they started nodding. So I thought, well, the border must be open, because her parents were supposed to leave from El Salvador the next day. So it took us forever to get across the border because there was some kind of political something going on between the two countries. But we finally got back fairly late in the evening and got them packed up and got them to the airport the next day. Then I had a whole week with Dorothy, just really engaging in the ministry stuff that she was doing, and that was transformative, very transformative. We went to a mass with Archbishop Romero on the way out. It was so crowded, we had to get there two hours early. And I didn’t speak much Spanish, you know, a few words at that point, so she was, like, trying to translate. We got a seat, thank goodness, and then at the end, everybody was, like, standing on the benches, cheering as he walked out. And we got to the front entrance, and she introduced me to him, but couldn’t have much conversation since I didn’t speak Spanish. So we went down the steps, and she turned around and looked at him, and she said, that man is gonna get killed someday, and no one’s going to know whether it’s the right or the left that did it, because he speaks against violence on all sides. And she said, he was preaching today to the basic Christian communities, don’t let yourself be used for political causes. That’s not your reason for being in existence. So she said, he’s vulnerable on both sides, and his life is being threatened all the time. She knew him well, and so three months later, he was assassinated. That, you know, and then a year later, so was she. So my life changed dramatically through all of that. The last day I was there, we were gonna go to the beach with the team and have a picnic at the beach. And Dorothy had made all the arrangements with everybody for their day off to go there and have a picnic with me on the beach. And the night before, she got a phone call from a gentleman who was he kind of, like, was one of the coordinators of a village. And he said there was a very sick man that needed to go to the hospital. And, you know, could Dorothy come with the vehicle the next day to this village to take him to the hospital? And she said, okay. So she said to me, you go with the team to the picnic, and I’ll go take care of this first. And I said, no, I want to come with you. That’s what I came here for. So we picked up the guy, and that called, and he was directing us into this village. And we kept getting further and further in the vehicle that they were eventually killed in up the side of the mountain. And the road was, like, disappearing. And Dorothy kept saying, are you sure we can drive here? And he’s saying, yes, and I don’t think so. We finally get to the house, and sure enough, the vehicle gets stuck in a big rut. So all the men, they were- It was just a couple little houses in this. The village was so small, you could count the number of houses and just very small houses. And they were probably about- Looked like maybe ten people living in this house. And they had one bed that was just a wooden frame with rope across it. So we went into the house, just the women and me, because the men were outside trying to figure out what to do about the vehicle, and not speaking Spanish I was just sort of observing everything. The man was very, very sick. He was delirious. He had a very high fever. And so the women picked him up and carried him. And by that point, they had gotten the vehicle out of the rut, and I got into the vehicle, and they put the man in my lap and in the backseat. And then Dorothy and the gentleman that we picked up were in the front seat, and he was speaking to her in Spanish very fast. I couldn’t understand any of it. Finally, she turned around, and she said to me, well, here’s the story. That man fell by the side of the road sick last night, and they took him into their house and took care of him all night, gave him their one bed, and made sure that this guy got to me by phone so that they could get him to the hospital today, because he is, you can see he’s very sick. And I thought, I’ve heard this story before in the gospels. The good Samaritan, I’ve never seen it lived out like this before. [laughs] It was so transformative. And a couple days the next day, when I was headed back into Cleveland, it was the end of Christmas vacation. And the Miami airport was jam-packed with people and all. With their tennis racquets and all their gear from their Christmas vacations. And the schedules had gotten all messed up. It was so crowded, you had to sit on the floor. So I’m sitting on the floor watching all this crying, saying, I don’t want to go back to this. I don’t want to go back to this. So that’s during the week. I kept saying, I don’t know if I can do this. But by the end, I knew something had to come through for me around all of this. So it was very transformative being there with Dorothy. And during the time we were there, they got word from BBC. In fact, it was the day that we went to the mass with Romero that evening, that people, some of the generals were, the nonviolent generals, were resigning from the coup, from the junta, because they couldn’t deal with the level of violence, and they could see that war was coming. And they already had worked with the Maryknolls and were planning to go to Nicaragua to find out how to run refugee camps. And particularly, we’re talking about the children and the women who were most affected during war. So the beginnings of what we now know as COAR, the children’s village, were happening right while I was there. January of- Yeah, it was January 2000 by then. I went down in December of ’79. So. So that story, I mean, that trip was really the transformative thing in my life.

Naomi A. Randt [00:26:52] Is COAR an acronym?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:26:54] Yes. It stands for- It’s capital C, capital O, capital A, capital R, and it stands for the Comunidad of Oscar Arnolfo Romero. So it’s really named after Romero, and it’s still in existence. I’m still on the board of it and was just there with some seminarians in June.

Naomi A. Randt [00:27:18] And that’s an all-children’s home, like an orphanage-type place?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:27:22] It started as an orphanage. It started because very shortly after I left and they went to Nicaragua, they were contacted by Archbishop Romero, who asked them to go into the refugee camps. We actually had visited one, two of the refugee camps while I was there, and just attend to the people’s needs, like, if they needed clothing, if they needed food, if they needed medicine, to let the archdiocesan staff know. And of course, we had vehicles, so if they needed to go to a hospital, they could transport them and so forth. They thought at that point, Romero, I think, thought that the presence of North Americans would be protective, and to some extent it was. And so they had already begun a little bit of that when I was there. And then that expanded. And so by June, Father Ken Myers was starting to notice how many children there were and finding out about the children. And they, they kept saying, there’s a lot of children here that we don’t know where their parents are. We don’t know whether they got killed. We don’t know if- Some of the children would say they had seen their parents killed. So they did know they were killed. So he started to gather a small group of them. He said, well, I can at least take them to the parish, and families in the parish can take care of them, and we can protect them, because these refugee camps won’t last forever, and eventually maybe family will come back and find them. So he sort of let it be known that he was taking in these children that were abandoned in some way. Well, initially, he was just gonna work with the families in the parish. He got so many so fast, he had to start building. And then eventually he was given some land. It was a Belgian family that was leaving the country because of the war. So they gave him some of the land, they sold him some of the land, and it took him about eight or nine years, but he eventually built what’s now known as COAR. And by the time he turned it over in 1990, and I was there by that time, to the Incarnate Word sisters, there was a full clinic with laboratories and everything, a full school through high school, and about two to 300 kids at any given time. Kids were coming and going, but- So it was a rather major endeavor by the time he actually turned it over to the sisters. And he did all the initial fundraising and then set up the office here in Cleveland to do fundraising. So we’re still the primary funders of the children’s village. We now have about 50 children. It went from being an orphanage for war orphans, but not a full orphanage, because some of the parents did come back and find their kids or other relatives, grandparents, etcetera. So he never would allow children to be adopted from there. And then, as the sisters worked with the local parishes, were finding a lot of families where the parents had gone to the United States, and the grandparents were taking care of the kids and were aging out while they were waiting for the parents to call for the kids. So we started to take those children, then single mothers who had had to work and couldn’t take care of their kids. So it moved into being a place for poor children, but more like foster care. Now, the government has, within the last five years, installed a lot of laws around child protection, similar to the laws in the United States. So children have to be assigned to us by the government, by the courts, and the children have to go regularly to the courts to review their cases. We have a few that are true orphans. Most of them are more foster care because of families that are- And they’re really children from the streets much more than they used to be. They used to be more children from the outlying villages, but now it’s more kids who are emotionally abandoned because their parents are drug-addicted, prostitutes, you know, all the very much like the United States. I mean, it’s the drug situation. The violence situation in El Salvador right now is just beyond imaginable. The staff of the children’s village are robbed regularly coming to work. We’re constantly getting word that of another tragedy. One of the young women that worked as a house mother, she was about 25, 26 years old, went home, and her home was several hours away by bus. On her return trip, she went home for her two or three days off. And on her return trip, no one really knows what happened, but she never returned. So we contacted. I happened to be down there when this happened. So they contacted the family, and the family said, we put her on the bus to come back. About three days later, they found her body. She had been murdered. So we think she got picked up in the main terminal when she was transferring buses in the capital by the gangs. And she was an attractive young woman, but very clean living. I mean, she was a model. All the kids loved her at the village. They never actually told the kids what happened to her because these kids are already so traumatized. So it was very, a very tragic situation. And we’ve had children who can tell you stories of those kinds of tragedies, pretty bad stories. So the need is still very intense for this kind of residential facility for children.

Naomi A. Randt [00:33:47] I take it there’s other facilities like that around the country?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:33:51] There were quite a few during the war, quite a few developed. Most of them were church sponsored. But when these laws came in and everything had to go through the courts and they began to demand social workers and psychologists and so forth, all of which are important, but it meant that a number of them had to close. We got some of the children from a few of them that closed, but so now there are far fewer residential facilities. I mean, the laws themselves are good. The way they were implemented were not so good. I know a lot of people in El Salvador and social workers and so forth, people that were my kids and that we trained in our catechetical program that are now, you know, professionals. And some of them said the children that went were sent home. Some were sent home from, because they had a family, supposedly, but they would get to the families and there was no food, they couldn’t go to school, and many of them got murdered. One of the ones that was a family of three girls that we had were told to go back to their parents, and the parents were very poor. And one of the children had a very severe stomach condition that needed special medicine. The parents couldn’t afford it. She died. So the implementation of the policies was not good. But that’s what we’re working with now and become a real challenge to running residential facilities in the country. So that’s why you’re seeing so many fleeing and coming to the United States. And I’m doing some English as a second language. And this week I’m gonna meet a young man who is one of those kids at the border. Fortunately, his father is here in Cleveland, and he’s been able to reconnect with his father at 16 years old. But, yeah, so the situation went from war to, you know, all the unsettlement after war, and then the whole drug scene has been- It’s really rooted in the country now so that the gangs are- And the gangs are kids that were deported from the United States. And our involvement and our complicity in the problems of that country and all three of them, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, as sad, you know, that after all three of them had terrible civil wars and we didn’t do anything to help them, and therefore - we did very little to help them. The UN stayed around in El Salvador for three years, and I was part of that. And they did make some real efforts at training civilian police, training judges, and training mayors. And that’s what I say to people. Those are the people that need training, not the military. The School of the Americas doesn’t have much effect because you’re training military. Military are not the basis of democracy. It’s civilian police, it’s mayors, it’s judges that are the basis of democracy, and that’s who we should be training. That’s who the UN was training. They only stayed for three years, and it wasn’t long enough.

Naomi A. Randt [00:37:28] That was three years after the end of the war?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:37:30] After the end of the war. They were everywhere. There were UN cars everywhere. They took over one of the big hotels. And we had several incidents within our parish boundaries because we had several refugee camps within our parish boundaries. So I got quite involved with the UN for a while there.

Naomi A. Randt [00:37:50] What was that like working with them?

Sister Sheila Marie Tobbe [00:37:52] I found it very inspiring. The UN people that I worked with were very, very dedicated people and very committed to the people. And we had

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