Our writer joins a haunting pilgrimage to the beautiful but blood-stained Central American country of El Salvador, still suffering the lingering effects of civil war

Tuesday 5 November
El Salvador, The Economist helpfully informs us on the eve of our departure, has the highest death rate per head of the population of anywhere in the world. “By some measures,” it adds, not entirely reassuringly.

Thursday 7 November
Prompt start at the spartan Jesuit Retreat Centre in the capital, San Salvador (the sight of an armed guard on the gate helped us sleep). To the chapel, looking down on the city and out on to the volcanoes that surround it, for prayers and to meet our pilgrim group. We are well blessed with priests (two – one from Minnesota) plus a retired bishop and a deacon. Then there is what we come to call an “embassy” from Ireland (two sisters plus two friends), a pair of retired special needs teachers, an NHS nurse who works with the homeless, a Quaker former social worker and a group of five from Cafod, some of them staff, some volunteers.

Everyone is slightly apprehensive, but our leader, Clare Dixon, Cafod’s long-serving Latin America projects officer and a trustee of the Romero Trust, gets us all talking happily by sharing a thought on “reverse mission” – the idea that by bringing those from the wealthy West to stand alongside the poor in the developing world, our cosy, complacent lives will be forever “ruined”. It should sound brutal, but we are inspired.