(Written March 27th)
If you live in a town smaller than most US high schools, everything -- and I mean everything -- becomes a big deal. Rubbernecker syndrome runs rampant. Maintaining any sort of privacy in a community where everyone is related three different ways and knows every person in a 20+ kilometer radius by name, face, and latest rumor is little more than a pleasant fantasy. Pueblo pequeño, incendio grande, so the saying goes, and whether it’s a scandal or a stranger walking through town, it helps to accept that the fishbowl isn’t ever going to go away, as much as it might make life easier if your neighbors weren’t discussing how often you do your laundry or where you go when you leave your house.
But there are ways in which such a tight-knit community shines. This week I had yet another meeting interrupted and indefinitely postponed by a funeral, which made me angry, and then pensive.
Funerals here start, for all intents and purposes, the moment someone passes away. Family, friends, and neighbors come from wherever they are in whatever transportation they can find as soon as the coconut grapevine kicks into overdrive with the news. The body is laid out in humble state, wrapped in white. The house (or wherever the vigil -- the vela -- is held; we’ve had one in the health center before) is strewn with flowers. At least sixty women are crammed into the tiny, smoky kitchen making coffee and washing cups; more bring thermoses or food to pass around, their voices hushed. Candles are lit; men drag out ladders and argue about how to string more bare light bulbs outside. Someone finds the key to the town office and sets up an open tent with plastic chairs underneath, so that people can sit outside to sip their coffee after they pay their respects. The Catholic pastor and the evangelical preacher both come to lead prayers and hymns over the body. People hold hands. They hug. They talk, or they sit in silence. Kids run around, somehow always underfoot.
Eventually most people return to their own homes, their beds, but the vigil is all night: always, someone accompanies the body, sits with the dear one so that they will not be alone in death.
The following afternoon -- after picking more flowers to festoon the simple coffin and the truck which will carry it, after digging the hole in the cemetery next to relatives already passed on --there is Mass, or a simple celebration with music and prayer in the church if no priest can make the journey out. Many people will attend; more still will arrive to sit and wait patiently in the shade, buying soda and homemade popsicles and complaining about the heat while the ragged hymns rise up on the parched air. The final words said, everyone moves slowly outside, chatting and laughing while the driver of the truck is found, while the nearest family members gather to follow behind as it moves slowly up the road. Everyone else falls in after, strung out along the short distance, ambling in a boisterous parade: accompanying the body once again, to the grave itself.
More prayer follows -- and more flashes from cell phones and cameras alike -- and it is only after the first dirt is thrown into the grave that the crowd turns and makes its way back to town, leaving a few men to finish the work and plant a simple wooden cross over the grave, perhaps painted light green or a violently neon shade of pink, a name and date painstakingly handwritten in large, wobbly letters on its face. Even then the remembrance is not yet over; nine days after the burial comes the novena, a celebration of life and death and the life after. Family members walk out to the cemetery often, to visit and lay flowers, to make sure the cross has not gone crooked and the grave is swept clean of debris.
So yes, to tell the truth, I was peeved when a meeting we had been planning for a month fell through after an unexpected death -- an older man from an outlying community, by all accounts beloved (perhaps too well-loved by the ladies, if one listens to the gossip), someone I had never met. But I think, if there is a good way to leave this world, this might be one of the best: surrounded by family, by friendly hearts and wagging tongues, conducted and accompanied toward whatever might lie beyond; that final lonely journey made, perhaps, not quite so lonely after all.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
(spring)
There is a bird here with a mango-orange belly and a brighter back; it perches quietly for the most part, its more somber colored wings thrown over the raucous color like a black coat covering a party dress, until it’s startled into flight, throwing off caution and the coat alike to wing away with an alarmed chrr-chrr-chrr to warn its friends. I disturbed a flock of them this morning, stood for a moment while they flew chattering away: they were annoyed at the surprise, and didn’t hesitate to let me know it.
It disorients me whenever this happens, whenever they rise up out of the gray-brown scrub beside me: my first thought is, inevitably, orioles! -- though we’re several degrees of latitude too far south for them -- followed quickly by the thought, the sense, of spring.
Spring is of course far from us here. We are in the height of summer, the months when everything is dry and crackling underfoot. Even when we passed through what could be considered springtime, it never truly felt like spring: the wind here never has that damp smell of living growing things running riot after a long winter sleep. There is something visceral about that smell, the particular scent of dark earth warming the frozen seeds within it, some ancient instinct tied deep down to silently announce yes, yes, spring: light and life and newness, and seeing my fake orioles jars that instinct uncomfortably in the half-second it takes me to remember where I am.
Spring will be coming soon to the States, ice melting slowly away through rain and the steadily tilting earth; the dirty mountains of snow in parking lots will gradually give way to tulips and road repairs, wood smoke subsumed by the tang of new asphalt, the smell of it hot in the back of your throat. I hear the cherry blossoms are out in Washington DC already. By Easter, perhaps, the lilacs at home will be in full bloom, every garden an eager chaos of bulbs and weeds exploding from the ground, desperate for space and sun, while the peonies dip their heavy heads down to earth for the ants to shelter in. Robins will lead the orioles north before the goldfinches arrive to gossip and scold en masse at the feeders.
We will keep our own coat on a little longer, here, quiet and moving slow beneath the sun -- the heat stronger every day. There is no snow to melt except for what I have in a little can marked INSTANT SNOW (for the purpose of decorating Christmas village miniatures,) but the rain will fall on us too, eventually, slowly turning the whole country greener, the jungles deeper -- a dangerous sort of green, a green I’ve never seen in the north: too thick and wet to be fully trusted. We’ll have corn again, and wobbling foals, and colors dripping everywhere from the flowers tucked away in unexpected places.
And my mango-bellied bird, who is not an oriole, will still be waiting quietly in the bushes, ready to fly up and tip me off-balance from the sudden shock of orange streaking out into the sky.
It disorients me whenever this happens, whenever they rise up out of the gray-brown scrub beside me: my first thought is, inevitably, orioles! -- though we’re several degrees of latitude too far south for them -- followed quickly by the thought, the sense, of spring.
Spring is of course far from us here. We are in the height of summer, the months when everything is dry and crackling underfoot. Even when we passed through what could be considered springtime, it never truly felt like spring: the wind here never has that damp smell of living growing things running riot after a long winter sleep. There is something visceral about that smell, the particular scent of dark earth warming the frozen seeds within it, some ancient instinct tied deep down to silently announce yes, yes, spring: light and life and newness, and seeing my fake orioles jars that instinct uncomfortably in the half-second it takes me to remember where I am.
Spring will be coming soon to the States, ice melting slowly away through rain and the steadily tilting earth; the dirty mountains of snow in parking lots will gradually give way to tulips and road repairs, wood smoke subsumed by the tang of new asphalt, the smell of it hot in the back of your throat. I hear the cherry blossoms are out in Washington DC already. By Easter, perhaps, the lilacs at home will be in full bloom, every garden an eager chaos of bulbs and weeds exploding from the ground, desperate for space and sun, while the peonies dip their heavy heads down to earth for the ants to shelter in. Robins will lead the orioles north before the goldfinches arrive to gossip and scold en masse at the feeders.
We will keep our own coat on a little longer, here, quiet and moving slow beneath the sun -- the heat stronger every day. There is no snow to melt except for what I have in a little can marked INSTANT SNOW (for the purpose of decorating Christmas village miniatures,) but the rain will fall on us too, eventually, slowly turning the whole country greener, the jungles deeper -- a dangerous sort of green, a green I’ve never seen in the north: too thick and wet to be fully trusted. We’ll have corn again, and wobbling foals, and colors dripping everywhere from the flowers tucked away in unexpected places.
And my mango-bellied bird, who is not an oriole, will still be waiting quietly in the bushes, ready to fly up and tip me off-balance from the sudden shock of orange streaking out into the sky.
Friday, February 18, 2011
a valentine, of sorts
The sun is strong today, though it’s not quite as warm as it has been, and we bring a grand umbrella, large and bright pink and decorated with flowers, to shield ourselves from the worst of it. Being the tallest by a foot or more, I’m more likely to get poked in the neck than protected from the sun, at least until it’s my turn for shade duty -- holding the umbrella becomes a communal job, as no one really wants to do it.
It is Saint Valentine’s Day, and we are going to the rodeo.
We are on time -- that is, half an hour late, and just in time to see the aftermath of an escape, one lively bull breaking through the makeshift wooden barrier and running for the hills, everyone screaming with delight at the unexpected sideshow as men who have spent all day polishing their boots go running through the dust after it, waving their broad-brimmed hats as if that will stop the bull in its tracks and bring it meekly back.
The spectacle takes the better part of an hour to resolve itself: enough time for a good gossip about who likes who; which boys have said they’re going to the dance later; who has red nail polish to finish painting the flowers on our nails, since Janeth’s ran out; and to buy a few enchiladas from María, hot and greasy and perfect.
“Foto! Un foto!” The older girls have discovered the huge and magical world of Facebook, and now that they’ve all made accounts they need pictures for their profile: good pictures, they say; I am not allowed to put anything embarrassing up. A straw hat makes the rounds: the resulting pictures are declared absolutely forbidden from appearing anywhere online. The younger kids just want to take pictures of everything: themselves, each other, the bulls, the sky, everything slightly out of focus, blurry, with strange, inexplicable angles that might make good Art if anyone could figure out what the pictures are of.
This is cowboy country, the Wild West of Nicaragua, and on days like this, where the sun beats down and dries the earth to an unforgiving red-brown, it’s easy to get caught up in the feel of the place, to imagine that the Man with No Name might come striding into town at any moment, a pistol on each hip. It’s all scrub brush here, cactus and pine, the houses slung low to the earth, red-roofed, their crazy porches running wide where women sit you down for conversation and coffee boiled over a fire with milk from their own cows. The men walk with bowed legs from too many days of riding horses, the worn spurs on their heels clicking on every step. Their boots are dusty, their shirts unbuttoned at the top from the heat. Hard work, a lifetime of it, shows on everyone’s face: they are burned bronze-brown from the sun, the lines deep around the corners of their lips and eyes from laughter and from hardship -- memories are long, and the war was not so very many years ago. Here there is a man who lost an eye to a bullet; there someone missing a leg or an arm; there someone whose brother fought or was killed or simply disappeared.
But today, no one is thinking of that: today is for amor, for amistad, for competing to see who can yell the loudest for the hometown boys: so young, so intoxicated with life and themselves and the bull moving underneath them until they fall, scrambling away from the heavy hooves while the handlers move in with lassos, everyone heckling everyone else and laughing.
We heckle along with them, giving everyone fair play: the riders, the handlers, even ourselves, joyful spectators. We scream at the bulls when they kick too close, or when they come out and simply stand in place, dark tongues lolling and their eyes rolling at anyone who tries to make them move. Marcelo is standing next to me, filming with his own camera, narrating for posterity:
“Next is Josue, Josue on Coqueto, here we go -- here they come, Josue and Coqueto!”
But it is only Coqueto in the ring; Josue has been left behind while Coqueto does his best to kick down a wall and escape and Marcelo cracks jokes about the rider and this coquette of a bull that after a year here I still only half-understand.
The shadows grow slowly longer, the crowd more restless on the rough wooden stands. Marcelo has packed up his camera and moved on, and finally it is the last rider, the last bull, and everyone is trickling out of the field back down the road to town. There are no winners today, no losers, only the same sturdy men clicking their tongues to their tired horses, separating their cows expertly from the rest and herding them away.
Later, there will be a fiesta, regatón and bachata echoing off the dark sides of these hills which are never fully silent, the bass writing over the sounds of the wind swishing through the pines, the nightly conversation between the dogs and roosters. There will be music, Black Eyed Peas mixed with Shakira, with Luis Enrique and Dimensión Costeña and Aventura; there will be food and dancing and moonshine of all varieties, and in the morning everyone will get up before the sun climbs up the mountains to peer down on our valley, and go back to work. But for now, we are riding back to town, to the tight cluster of houses and families that is our home, dust in our hair and our mouths as everyone talks at once, and men on horseback lift their hats as we go by.
It is Saint Valentine’s Day, and we are going to the rodeo.
We are on time -- that is, half an hour late, and just in time to see the aftermath of an escape, one lively bull breaking through the makeshift wooden barrier and running for the hills, everyone screaming with delight at the unexpected sideshow as men who have spent all day polishing their boots go running through the dust after it, waving their broad-brimmed hats as if that will stop the bull in its tracks and bring it meekly back.
The spectacle takes the better part of an hour to resolve itself: enough time for a good gossip about who likes who; which boys have said they’re going to the dance later; who has red nail polish to finish painting the flowers on our nails, since Janeth’s ran out; and to buy a few enchiladas from María, hot and greasy and perfect.
“Foto! Un foto!” The older girls have discovered the huge and magical world of Facebook, and now that they’ve all made accounts they need pictures for their profile: good pictures, they say; I am not allowed to put anything embarrassing up. A straw hat makes the rounds: the resulting pictures are declared absolutely forbidden from appearing anywhere online. The younger kids just want to take pictures of everything: themselves, each other, the bulls, the sky, everything slightly out of focus, blurry, with strange, inexplicable angles that might make good Art if anyone could figure out what the pictures are of.
This is cowboy country, the Wild West of Nicaragua, and on days like this, where the sun beats down and dries the earth to an unforgiving red-brown, it’s easy to get caught up in the feel of the place, to imagine that the Man with No Name might come striding into town at any moment, a pistol on each hip. It’s all scrub brush here, cactus and pine, the houses slung low to the earth, red-roofed, their crazy porches running wide where women sit you down for conversation and coffee boiled over a fire with milk from their own cows. The men walk with bowed legs from too many days of riding horses, the worn spurs on their heels clicking on every step. Their boots are dusty, their shirts unbuttoned at the top from the heat. Hard work, a lifetime of it, shows on everyone’s face: they are burned bronze-brown from the sun, the lines deep around the corners of their lips and eyes from laughter and from hardship -- memories are long, and the war was not so very many years ago. Here there is a man who lost an eye to a bullet; there someone missing a leg or an arm; there someone whose brother fought or was killed or simply disappeared.
But today, no one is thinking of that: today is for amor, for amistad, for competing to see who can yell the loudest for the hometown boys: so young, so intoxicated with life and themselves and the bull moving underneath them until they fall, scrambling away from the heavy hooves while the handlers move in with lassos, everyone heckling everyone else and laughing.
We heckle along with them, giving everyone fair play: the riders, the handlers, even ourselves, joyful spectators. We scream at the bulls when they kick too close, or when they come out and simply stand in place, dark tongues lolling and their eyes rolling at anyone who tries to make them move. Marcelo is standing next to me, filming with his own camera, narrating for posterity:
“Next is Josue, Josue on Coqueto, here we go -- here they come, Josue and Coqueto!”
But it is only Coqueto in the ring; Josue has been left behind while Coqueto does his best to kick down a wall and escape and Marcelo cracks jokes about the rider and this coquette of a bull that after a year here I still only half-understand.
The shadows grow slowly longer, the crowd more restless on the rough wooden stands. Marcelo has packed up his camera and moved on, and finally it is the last rider, the last bull, and everyone is trickling out of the field back down the road to town. There are no winners today, no losers, only the same sturdy men clicking their tongues to their tired horses, separating their cows expertly from the rest and herding them away.
Later, there will be a fiesta, regatón and bachata echoing off the dark sides of these hills which are never fully silent, the bass writing over the sounds of the wind swishing through the pines, the nightly conversation between the dogs and roosters. There will be music, Black Eyed Peas mixed with Shakira, with Luis Enrique and Dimensión Costeña and Aventura; there will be food and dancing and moonshine of all varieties, and in the morning everyone will get up before the sun climbs up the mountains to peer down on our valley, and go back to work. But for now, we are riding back to town, to the tight cluster of houses and families that is our home, dust in our hair and our mouths as everyone talks at once, and men on horseback lift their hats as we go by.
Friday, January 28, 2011
BEEF: IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER
So I live in cowboy country, which other than affecting where I do my laundry (never do it downriver of where the cattle are being watered, never ever,) means there are lots and lots of cows around, always. But most of the cattle here are for dairy, which means there is always cheese and milk but very little meat, since it is expensive. But last week I came home to find NO ONE around, and then, three hours later, this is what my house looked like:
MEAT. EVERYWHERE. Cows are big, right? But you never realize exactly how big they are until you are:
a) standing right next to them,
b) in the middle of a herd while they're moving pasture, or
c) WHILE THERE IS AN ENTIRE COW'S-WORTH OF RAW MEAT FILLING YOUR HOUSE.
The pictures don't really do it justice, but the amount of meat one can get from an adult cow (including intestines and stomach and everything else, to make things like mondongo,) is approximately (I am being very scientific here in my measurements) A LOT.
We gave most of it away, but our ancient little refrigerator is still loaded to the gills. Too bad there are no burgers here... but carne asada? Yes please! (Legs asada, on the other hand... maybe not so much.)
MEAT. EVERYWHERE. Cows are big, right? But you never realize exactly how big they are until you are:
a) standing right next to them,
b) in the middle of a herd while they're moving pasture, or
c) WHILE THERE IS AN ENTIRE COW'S-WORTH OF RAW MEAT FILLING YOUR HOUSE.
The pictures don't really do it justice, but the amount of meat one can get from an adult cow (including intestines and stomach and everything else, to make things like mondongo,) is approximately (I am being very scientific here in my measurements) A LOT.
We gave most of it away, but our ancient little refrigerator is still loaded to the gills. Too bad there are no burgers here... but carne asada? Yes please! (Legs asada, on the other hand... maybe not so much.)
Thursday, December 30, 2010
alternative career options
(...I have a month and a half of written & unposted blog posts to catch up on. Best get cracking!)
Peace Corps, they say, teaches you to be flexible. Always. Be flexible when things come up last minute and you have to catch the bus RIGHT NOW to the city to meet with someone Very Important. Be flexible when that Very Important Person has other Important things to do all day and so you’re left kicking your heels waiting instead of doing all the things you had planned. Be flexible when you organize meetings and no one shows up. Be flexible when fifteen more people than planned show up and you don’t have food for them all. Be flexible especially when you’re traveling, for when the buses don’t come or leave early or sit and wait for three hours because the driver refuses to leave until all the seats are full. Be flexible when there are approximately 2893492326 people on the bus you’re trying to get on, and 953 more people try to board in front of you... and all of them are in your way when you're trying to get off Be flexible when you’re standing on that same bus clutching onto whatever you can reach to stay upright in your six square inches of space while the cobrador squeezes by you collecting fares and the bus tears around corners as it climbs into the mountains.
Be flexible enough to stop and breathe when the rain is coming as the sun sets and brings a double rainbow with it. Be flexible enough to actually enjoy the company of nine little kids all wanting to hang out with you and look at all your things. Be flexible enough to know when you can’t be flexible at all.
Also, I am learning, be flexible in terms of your future career! Who says what you have planned is actually your true vocation? In the interests of exploring all possible options, I have been testing out possibilities in my free time. I would make a terrible washerwoman (I always get sand in all my pockets when I wash things in the river), but I’ve found a few other choices to consider:
I would make a passable manicurist...
...a middling sort of chef...
...a pretty decent poster-drawer (with some help)...
...and a hilarious dancer...
...But for the moment, at least, I guess cosmetology school and So You Think You Can Dance stardom can wait until after I’m finished being a volunteer.
Peace Corps, they say, teaches you to be flexible. Always. Be flexible when things come up last minute and you have to catch the bus RIGHT NOW to the city to meet with someone Very Important. Be flexible when that Very Important Person has other Important things to do all day and so you’re left kicking your heels waiting instead of doing all the things you had planned. Be flexible when you organize meetings and no one shows up. Be flexible when fifteen more people than planned show up and you don’t have food for them all. Be flexible especially when you’re traveling, for when the buses don’t come or leave early or sit and wait for three hours because the driver refuses to leave until all the seats are full. Be flexible when there are approximately 2893492326 people on the bus you’re trying to get on, and 953 more people try to board in front of you... and all of them are in your way when you're trying to get off Be flexible when you’re standing on that same bus clutching onto whatever you can reach to stay upright in your six square inches of space while the cobrador squeezes by you collecting fares and the bus tears around corners as it climbs into the mountains.
Be flexible enough to stop and breathe when the rain is coming as the sun sets and brings a double rainbow with it. Be flexible enough to actually enjoy the company of nine little kids all wanting to hang out with you and look at all your things. Be flexible enough to know when you can’t be flexible at all.
Also, I am learning, be flexible in terms of your future career! Who says what you have planned is actually your true vocation? In the interests of exploring all possible options, I have been testing out possibilities in my free time. I would make a terrible washerwoman (I always get sand in all my pockets when I wash things in the river), but I’ve found a few other choices to consider:
I would make a passable manicurist...
...a middling sort of chef...
...a pretty decent poster-drawer (with some help)...
...and a hilarious dancer...
...But for the moment, at least, I guess cosmetology school and So You Think You Can Dance stardom can wait until after I’m finished being a volunteer.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
thanksgiving
A happy belated Thanksgiving to all!
There is no possible way to not enjoy a holiday and be full of thanks when your view is this:
There is no possible way to not enjoy a holiday and be full of thanks when your view is this:
Saturday, November 20, 2010
i admit it
I am a terrible blogger. It is true. LE SADFACE.
In return I bring you pictures of the yard sale and medical brigade we had last weekend to raise money for building our community-based health center!
It was a bit of a madhouse (complete with cows and dogs and all manner of creatures wandering about), but we made some good money -- enough to buy 2 beds for the house! Awesome!
In return I bring you pictures of the yard sale and medical brigade we had last weekend to raise money for building our community-based health center!
It was a bit of a madhouse (complete with cows and dogs and all manner of creatures wandering about), but we made some good money -- enough to buy 2 beds for the house! Awesome!
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