The month of October kicked off with the Amigo Secreto dance. I failed to correctly guess who had me and sang a lackluster song in English as penance. The boy who I had correctly guessed me, leaving me a failure in both uncovering and keeping secrets. I was given a fuscia (and I do mean FUSCIA) skirt that reminds me of a Disney princess. Despite my fashion sense, I have been told by multiple neighbors that this skirt is in fact in style. The night of the dance everyone was out and about, dressed to the nines (except us, because we always are in our nasty FOR shirts). People came from other veredas to join in the festivities and when a neighbor invited me to ice cream I looked around to see none other than an icecream vendor (where the hell did he come from and can someone lock him up here). We danced well into the morning and I probably lost 15 pounds in sweat. To bed at 3 only to wake at 6 and head to our team retreat in Medellin.
It’s weird to leave the community and, just like that, arrive in Medellin. This is the first time I’ve been so close to a community of people that I can literally picture what any given person is doing at any given hour of the day. And at the same time, from far away in Medellin it’s like the LU reality couldn’t really exist. Our retreat was a success, full of work plans and work calendars and talking things through as a team and planning a fundraising campaign and listening to music and designing tshirts, playing fun games and generally enjoying having the whole team in one place. This only happens twice a year, so must be taken advantage of. I think my faovorite moment of the whole week was when Jon forgot the rules of charades and, during his Tony the Tiger interpretation, actually roared out loud. He really sounded like a tiger. And he scared the shit out of me.
Coco juice is delicious and I have no idea why my neighbors don’t make it daily. I have sort of decided that this should be a personal goal. They laugh at us “crazy gringos” because “coco is not for juice” but we gulp it down just the same. A blender can do amazing things. Multiple neighbors have taken to doing us the favor of macheting down coconuts until they look like a shaved egg. A work of art widdled with what could be a deadly weapon.
After baking the cake, she made homemade frosting in white and pink and blue. All of her kids and her husband sat around her while she decorated the cake for a neighbor’s 5th birthday. She delicately added curlycues and boxes to the white frosting while simultaneaously telling stories. She had her five kids aged 4 to 15 laughing so hard they were crying. She impersonated voices and reminded them of a time when bats took over the roof of a house. After her story had died down a bit her husband took a large drink of coffee. She surprised him with one last hysterical tidbit and he spit out his coffee all over me. So much laughter. So much love. Laughter and baked goods = success.
And sometimes things are just so hard. And the mind gets all shuffled up or concentrated on itself. And then I run in the downpour of the rain. Or cartwheel down the street to mix up my mind and take it off of itself. One day Emily and I did Richard Simmons reminiscent excersizes across the soccer field, jumping and flipping and kicking and looking like idiots just to get our minds off of everything. Then we sprinted up the mountain in our rubber boots. Later our neighbor said we brought her such joy, “playing on the soccer field like a pair of baby sheep.”
Emily said she’d “never be able to understand time without seasons” and in the constant tropical heat here, I have to agree. It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s autumn in the north country with the apples and colors and pumpkin-pie and costumes. That Midwestern calendar that actually works by physical change in season and not by calendar dates. And it does affect how we think about time.
Despite me being the most obnoxious cheerleader possible at the soccer game, we lost in the semifinals.
There was a surprise dance when a little boy turned 4. It came outta nowhere. First there were children and cakes and balloons and then the sun went down and all the adults showed up and danced the night away. Dances are the only time it is appropriate to hug in this community and since I love dancing and hugging, they are pretty much my favorite activities ever. I win.
When a poisonous snake bit a neighbor’s dog, a group of guys went up to “find and kill it.” They can do this because after this particular snake bites it stays in one place for three or four days, “being mad”. I guessed that it was “mad” because it was low on venom, but they all assured me that this is actually the most dangerous time to get bitten by the snake. You would, “die at once.” And I said, “So you are going to look for the meanest snake at it’s angriest moment and hoping that you kill it before it bites you?” They laughed. Hilarious.
I have been waking up around 5am for a few months now. I get up and sit on the most beautifully constructed bench in La Union and drink my morning coffee. My morning coffee is strong. No sugar. No milk. (We don’t have the later anyway) and very different from the way that our neighbors drink their coffee (more aptly described sugar water, and often with milk). And sometimes he comes to sit next to me and share a cup of coffee. Everyone else knows better, so one day I ask him why he drinks my coffee when I know full well he doesn’t like it. “We all come into this life to suffer,” he says. I laugh, “That doesn’t mean you have to go out looking for bitter coffee- or any other additional reason to suffer.”
When her husband goes off to work the fields at another vereda for a month, she sleeps at her mother in law's house. In her mother in law's bed. She can’t sleep alone: “When I’m alone in a bed all I can do is think about the people I know who have died.”
About a half hour into a hike, it was obvious that neither of our guides had been to the destination for quite sometime. In fact, it seemed that nobody had walked this path in quite some time. Ahead of us a 40-something year old woman was literally macheting the vines out of the way to clear a path through the jungle. Somewhere in the second hour it was awknoledged that we were significantly lost and so the women started to whistle. This whole whistleing across canyons and actually finding eachother in the jungle is something I can't describe or even believe, even though I see it daily with my own eyes. Out from behind the caucao trees comes a boy to guide us to the path. He wasn’t gonna come up and meet us, because he "didn’t know who we were and nobody in this zone would respond to a whistle of someone they didn’t know," but then he heard our voices and felt safe and came out. The trip went without other incident, but on the way home I ran out of water and was grabbing limes and oranges and cacao to suck out the juice and keep me hidrated on the way home. We jumped over canyons and pulled ourselves up vines. After a trip walking through the jungle like that, my body felt so strong. And so exhaiusted at the same time.
We find a cd from 2007. ExFORistas listened to this same CD in this same house. A wrinkle in time.
Here the roofs are used for drying cacao seeds. They are also my new beach. Tanning on the roof has me hidden from peering children and is making some leeway on my FOR farmer’s tan.
Everyone warns that living here will change you. Here my thought
pattern itself seems to be different. I think about sunrises I dream of caucateras.
Caribbean style is much different that my flowing skirts and non-fitted shorts. In my 8th month in the community I finally decided to go by the “when in Rome” motto and buy some tight fitting jean shorts. They are ridiculously caribe and everyone besides myself and co-workers think they are very in style. When I let the little girls braid my hair and wear the jean shorts matched with my cacao secadora tan, I could practically pass for Paisa. Casi.
After climbing the hill through knee deep jungle mud we arrived at a clearing. We saw the troops, but were more interested in the views. When the camera came out, they dove into the bushes and it was as if they were never there. It is sometimes as if there are no armed actors at all, just beautiful views and beautiful people. But they are there always, hiding in the bushes.
My favorite walk is to the boca toma. It takes us through caucateras and up past gorgeous jungle overviews, across small rivers and wider ones. Passed mossy rock and hills of wild grass and wild flowers. Through thick jungles and vines and trees that look prehistoric or out of dreams. The last time Emily and I went she didn’t have her glasses on and went stumbling over rocks and vines.
Thoushands of hawks circling. THOUSANDS. Circling just at the level of the clouds where the storm was about to fall. A child asks his dad why they are having such a big meeting and his father responds, “I don’t know, but if I were a chicken I would hide under a log.”
Accompanying the community to their work days we see tham cut down all of the jungle so that their crops can grow. They hack through bees nests and they hack through snake houses and they hack down so much green that it is hard to believe in two weeks time they will have to do it all again. The rhythmic sound of the machete.
One neighbor comes late at night to tell jokes and another to teach tonguetwisters and couplet verses that have to do with the campo. Language in all of it’s beauty will always inspire me.
I accomplished my dream of riding on the back of a horse with a campesino. The picture in my mind in my mind was something out of Braveheart- romantic and fun. The reality was quite uncomfortable and I don’t think I’ll repeat it.
I was practically running home one evening, trying to beat the sunset, when it started to drizzle. I stopped in a point on the path where there is a slight break in the foliage and oen can look over the river rushing below. I saw the raindrops gain strength and for a moment I seemed to see millions of individual raindrops all falling individually. Millions of raindrops and then a split second later one continuous sheet of falling rain, like a wall before me and then on top of me.
Other images from the month of October:
The first week I was here our neighbor helped us plant her beautiful flowering bushes in our garden. This week the first one has blossomed flowers.
A baby horse stumbling by, not quite knowing how to walk
My neighbors write the vallenato lyrics out for me and then laugh when I sing them
Riding bareback down the street
Sitting in knee deep grass amoung army ants
listening to the rhythmic thwak of machetes clearing the jungle
Sitting in a neighbor’s kitchen talking about death while surrounded by geese
Listening to the quebrada below and the birds and bugs all around
Seeing our home town from afar, nestled in the mountains jungles
Watching half the town chase down a goose for dinner
The sun hidden behind clouds but we still feel it
the bomber plane hidden behind clouds, but we still hear it
At a FARC funeral there is a Colombian flag waiving
Carrying lena down through the caucatera with a neighbor
Balancing a tree trunk on my shoulder
Fog lying low over the filo de la cruz
A neighbor singing ranchera while saddling his horse
The oldest LU resident walking hunchbacked down the hill with a homemade cigar hanging out of his mouth,
camo and combat and falling in thornbushes,
walking through mango groves, and knee deep mud.
Soldiers on the march twenty feet away
Bomber planes overhead
Shots and machine gun fire
helicopters flying so low it alwost feels we could reach up and touch them
A friend gazing out over the hills before he goes to work
Walking through ten foot cana fields
Beautifully barked trees with camoflauged three inch spines growing off them
Sitting at the honey making machine, looking over the plateau, and listening to the rain come in while talking about life decisions with my neighbor
Deshelling beans and removing caucao seeds from the shells
Vericose veins and smoke billowing from kitches,
police requisas and baking cakes
bunuelos in the shapes of campo animals
Standing in the cacautera in the rain feeling the earth turn to a stream beneath my feet
Climbing avocado trees and caucao trees and climbing zapote trees and trees I don’t even know the names of and getting bitten by the bugs on these trees and
how things moves and how things change and how we are so good at adapting to them
Soila peering out from the second story of her house while balancing a jar on her head and putting her finger over her mouth as if to say, “shhhhhhhh, everything that happens in life is our little secret…”
The war zone unravels, layer by layer revealing itself to the observer. As do the histories of my neighbors, of everyone and of everything- layer by layer we are discovered.
And time here sometimes passes so quickly I lose track of the month and other times I am so caught in its swell. Only one month left and then i will bus to Bogota and arrive in the city and just like that i will wonder if this indeed ever did happen, or if it was just the most incredible dream.
