El Salvador Intercultural Learning Trip

From July 7th though 17th 2026. Nate Secrest and Sarah Ludwig will lead a trip to El Salvador coordinated by the El Salvador Projects Committee of Palo Alto Friends Meeting. This abridged interview, edited for brevity and clarity, explains the history of the trip both through the Meeting and via Nate’s personal experience.

Western Friend: Can you describe the trip to El Salvador that you're co-leading?

Nate: The trip is a ministry that grew out of a long history with Palo Alto Friends Meeting (PAFM) and the El Salvador Projects. Carmen Broz, a member of PAFM who was born in El Salvador and lived in the US much of her life, returned to El Salvador in the 1980s - in the midst of the country’s brutal 12-year civil war. Like many countries, El Salvador has been negatively impacted by U.S. Imperialism in an ongoing way. Carmen was supported by PAFM in her ministry to form cooperatives in four different regions of El Salvador. Out of that grew the El Salvador Projects, a scholarship program for university students with the goal of uplifting Salvadoran communities.

The El Salvador trip I’m co-leading was started in 2006 by the amazing Barbara Babin as a way to connect the U.S. Quaker communities with these projects. The trips are fundamentally about relationship-building and intercultural learning, while simultaneously honoring and exploring the history of El Salvador and the Civil War, and in particular the global impact of the U.S. backing these wars. On the trip, we do a mixture of many activities: hiking to waterfalls, visiting historic sites, learning to make pupusas, hearing stories from Civil War survivors, experiencing homestay, and much more! Honestly, it’s super cool. All this is done alongside current or former students from the scholarship program. Again, our main goal is to create an intercultural exchange. It’s an organic melding where English speaking Americans practice their Spanish and Salvadoran students practice their English.

I went on these trips when I was a teenager, and then I lived in the country for 6 months when I was 18. During that year, I joined soccer teams and made lifelong friends who I stay connected with via social media. I’m 34 and my Salvadorian friend, who’s my age, has a 14-year-old and just had his second kid. Our lives are different and yet we share the same passions for soccer, justice, peace, and communication. It’s a cross-cultural friendship that I don’t have anywhere else.

Western Friend: Can you talk about the El Salvador trip through a spiritual lens?

Nate: The El Salvador trip is meant as a spiritual growth experience through exploration of yourself and expansion of our community outside of the usual friend group. It's a chance to get to know people worldwide and to understand what living in another country is like. It can be a life-changing experience to understand life outside of your bubble. The people of El Salvador are some of the most kind-hearted people I have ever known, and you would never have thought that to be true based on the amount of suffering and pain they went through. As Bad Bunny said at the Super Bowl: The only thing more powerful than hate is love. El Salvadorians have gone through such hard times and yet have been able to overcome that pain through love and caring for each other. Carmen Broz was a pillar of love that helped create cooperatives across the country, and we're just here trying to support that continued ministry even decades later.

Western Friend: How has Quakerism offered a scaffolding or support for you to learn about and live into your gifts? Or not.

Nate: Maybe it'll help me to go chronologically. Back to my teenage years, this El Salvador trip opened my eyes to global politics. I had never really considered how the country that I live in impacts the rest of the world. I was so focused on friends, community and living a good life. Traveling to El Salvado helped me see a different way to live, not bad or good, and often with drastically fewer resources.

I'm grateful for the tools of Quakerism for silent reflection. If I didn't have these tools, I don't know if I would take the time to be with myself in silence and let anxious thoughts drift away. When you first start thinking about something, the initial worries come up, and sometimes you just have to let those settle to really see what the truth is underneath.

In many ways I decided to go to Guilford College because I had an incredible teen Quaker experience where I was allowed to be fully myself. That started with going to the Ben Lomond Quaker camps and being goofy at the campfires. That acceptance led into feeling more deeply spiritually connected to myself.

However, when I was 18, I was craving more. I didn't feel supported as a Quaker learning about the history of Quakerism. It all felt very amorphous: "Believe what you want!" To be perfectly honest, since my Guilford experience, I have sometimes been disappointed in Quakers. We would learn about history, but then I’d go back to a normal meeting and it felt like surface-level debates. I think a lot of Quakers in the modern day are "spiritually wounded"—they come from other traditions they left, so there’s a resistance to diving in fully to another one.

Early Quakers were deeply engaged in discernment and struggle. I missed the long meeting for worship. Quakerism did support my love of being fun and weird, and helped me develop skills working with youth. But because I was so talented at working with children, I felt pigeon-holed. Young adults can get over-asked and then burn out because their role becomes about supporting the larger meeting rather than being supported in their spirituality.

I requested a clearness committee for my career and it was a struggle because I kept asking for support and didn't receive it. The answer was, "We're busy, why don't you organize it and then we'll attend?" I was doing all the legwork to support my own clearness committee. I sometimes struggle with the admin and process side of Quakerism because it can bog people down.

Western Friend: I resonate with the part where in Quakerism it feels like, "Okay, you want help, then you have to do all the admin to get the help." It’s a big ask. I’ve heard that people get Clearness Committees provided to them but it’s been my experience that I’m setting that up for myself. Thank you for sharing. Can you tell me about your around-the-world trip?

Nate: My wife Sarah and I had both recently finished grad school, and we wanted to pause our jobs and travel around the world as cheaply as possible. Starting in July 2023 we were able to do that for a year. Huge shout out to an organization called Servas, which has deep connections to Quakerism. It is like "couch surfing for peace" and intercultural exchange. Travelers can contact hosts and stay with them for two nights, with the expectation of eating dinner together each night. I thought we were going to cook collectively and maybe help chop vegetables, but most of the time people were like, "Oh my gosh, you're here, we made this decadent dinner because we love to host!" We stayed with hosts in Italy, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom showed us incredible kindness and generosity through airport drop-offs, city tours, decadent smoked salmon dinners, and so much more. A lot of Servas hosts were young travelers decades ago, and when they became retirees with resources, they became hosts themselves to show people their city and pay it forward.

Because we were traveling for a year, friends also joined us. We hiked the Camino Portuguese and went backpacking in Patagonia. It deepened our connection as a partnership and as a team. Over the course of our travels, we learned to move quickly from "I'm frustrated" to "We can do this, we're adaptable."

Western Friend: You're working towards a vocational call to hospice. When did that calling enter your life, and who helped you harness that vision?

Nate: I've always been a caring person. Credit to my mom for the idea that when I had a habit of hitting people as a tiny kid, she pivoted that into doing karate chops on people's backs as a massage. Now I'm a massage therapist. My dad was a hospice nurse, but as a teenager, I didn't want to be anything like my parents.

In 2013, when I was a junior in college, my dad was diagnosed with ALS and it progressed really fast. Over the summer break, I went home and became his caretaker. I learned a lot from him, but I also felt woefully inadequate. I didn't know anything about body positioning, and it’s hard for the person suffering to talk you through that stuff. I left that experience with a new fire—I wanted to know more and be better at this skill.

It was about 5 years later, after I had worked in outdoor education, that I accepted that I was okay being like my dad. I could become a nurse and it wouldn't feel like I was just doing the same thing as him. I decided nursing school was the quickest way to become a medical professional. In the meantime, I was finishing a massage degree. I always thought they would be a perfect fit—supporting patients more holistically and reducing their pain.

My dad helped harness this vision, but I'm also thankful for a Quaker named Barbara Christwitz. She showed up on my clearness committee and asked really good questions. It turns out she had spent her first career working in a hospital, so she knew that world. I really view her as living her life in accordance with her spiritual path.

I was shocked in my first year as a nurse how limited my time to interact personally with patients was. I spent my whole shift giving out medications, rushing around because of bureaucratic and capitalistic pressures. On the night shift, around 1 AM or 2 AM when I finished charting, was the only time I had 20 or 30 minutes to do massage. There was one person who was paralyzed from the neck down and she got so uncomfortable. All she really needed was a neck massage every night. That was one of my favorite experiences—combining those skills. I truly want to connect massage with healthcare and nursing. Hospice is a way to do that because it is a specialty focused on comfort and pain management. That's where my skill sets meet.