[Note: We recently received two updates from Elizabeth Griswold, a former Los Angeles Catholic Worker community member now working with a rural indigenous community in Guatemala. Both updates are included in this post.]
   I wish everyone a Happy Spring and also a belated Happy Ashura, Happy Purim, and Happy Easter!
    Here are some pictures from Semana Santa here–Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter. It is a really big deal here. We had no classes at school (a Spring Break), and I got to experience other traditions like eating crocodile meat, bread and honey, sweet garbanzo beans, and beet salad. There were big processions through the streets, Wed-Sun, with people marching and carrying large floats depicting Jesus´ final week.

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Ed Birmingham, a longtime guest and friend of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker died this morning. Ed had stayed with us off and on for several years, so long that no one seems to remember when he first came to the LACW. When he came to us he was no stranger to the CW movement, since he was the first guest to stay at the Martin dePorres House in San Francisco, and had lived with Karl Meyer in 1958 at a CW House in Chicago. He has been a guest at many other CW Houses, and has used many aliases over the years. He would often sit in our living room making collages while listening to classical music or simply waiting for a new person to talk to who can listen to all of his many stories.

We love Ed and we miss him.
David Gardner
Los Angeles Catholic Worker

We are happy to announce that our annual Good Friday Stations of the Anti-War Cross was well attended and was a success. For those who are interested I posted some pictures of the event. lacatholicworker.org/g/stations-05

[Note: Former Los Angeles Catholic Worker Community Member Elizabeth Griswold has been in Guatemala the last few months working with rural indigenous communities.]

Hello to all,
   I´ve been meaning to write another group e-mail for awhile. But I keep getting individual ones to which I use my time responding (which is great too—I´m not discouraging anyone please!). Then I tried last week, but the whole thing got erased in the end.
   All is still going pretty well. My schedule is basically teaching every morning from 8 to 12:30 while I visit different elementary-age classrooms. Then I go home for lunch and go back to the school in the pm for middle school teaching Mon and Thurs and helping in the office the other days, if I can´t get out of it (There´s not much to do there, the only value is trying to become better friends with the secretary, because she´s invited me for dinner a few times before. It´s nice to broaden my social contacts, and it´s a really good dinner. They´re the richest people I´ve met, since they have family working in the US.) I enjoy the older kids a lot more—the preschoolers can bring me to such frustration since I don´t know how to reach them and they´re so clingy, but the 6th grade almost brought me to tears over how well they had learned “Hello. How are you?”.

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Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Our demonstration at the Downtown Federal Building this morning was a sucess! As planned LA Catholic Workers Catherine Morris and David Gardner along with Jesuit Volunteer Corp. member Sara Suman were arrested as part of a planned civil disobediance action in front of the Federal Building. Unfortunatly our friends from the Dept. of Homeland Security were a little anxious and we were unable to setup our altar mourning those who have died during the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Initially the officers told us that we would be immediatly booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center, however after, two hours in holding cells we were released on our own recognisance. According to the officers this was because they were going to be getting busy and be bringing in the real criminals soon.
Click here to see more photos from this event.