Day 4: Second Day of Work

A late-night game of cards and writing 75 reminder slips in Spanish for the families' stove and water filter trainings left me tired:

"Favor de presentarse el Jueves a las 8:00am en la Iglesia Methodista."

Our progress on Monday left us with the possibility of finishing the work early enough to visit the Mayan ruins on Friday. The group was averaging 20-30 stoves per day with a total of 77 to install, including one at the school.

Once again, we were greeted by the roosters and the children of the community. Monday's work was somewhat close to the church. Today we walked 1-1.5 miles away. Winding paths through banana trees, following washed out drainage ways.

The children in the community have been so memorable, yet the mothers have been silent but strong figures standing in the background. (Most of the fathers have to leave the community for months at a time for work.) The mothers do not scold, they do not hover, and they do not spoil. They allow the children to find their own voices and senses of responsibility early in life. They let the children make their own mistakes, and even still, there are few. However, the children do not need to be corrected often. They do not need constant supervision and over-protection. Instead, the children are sure-footed and confident in their emotions and their actions. The students on the trip have found their peers in our guides and some of the mothers in the village. Today I found a peer of mine in a woman who ran a local store. She had 4 children, all adorable of course. We have been spending so much time with the children that I wonder whether the adults still have that kind of joy in them. I offered her a Tic Tac, which has been a nice ice-breaker with most people. She accepted. We spent the next 10 minutes in broken conversation about her children, her husband who works in other parts of the country to earn a living, her store. While it was only 10 minutes of the entire week, I was given a glimpse of, what seem to be coincidental, circumstances can lead to similar people having completely different lives--neither aware of the other until they meet. Her daughter stood beside the store in the kind of pose you see on a Sally Struthers fund-raiser. With the store sign on one side and a Coca-Cola sign on the other, she stood still and silent and looked at me. I took her photo because she was so beautiful and yet looked so confused about who I was and why I was there. Seconds after snapping the photo, I noticed the girl's croc-like sandals and realized that her shoes had no soles in them. Only the space between her heel and the ball of her foot was covered.

The next house was one where the entire floor in a multi-room home was concrete (husband worked in the U.S.). The kids there wanted to see the photos on my camera. When they saw the photos of other children, they pointed and said their names. When they saw the photo of the girl at the store, they laughed. I wondered whether Pabeya played its own cruel social game between the haves and the have nots. It would be a question for another day.

We were on to another house where I heard a woman coughing in the room next to where we were working. I knew the stove we installed would not save her, but it would save her grandchildren. Sydney and I finished our stage of the work and said the familiar "estufa nueva" (new stove) since completing our phase made the stove look like a stove. The woman walked out of the room as I passed by, and she hugged my arm. I was overwhelmed. If I needed confirmation that I was where I needed to be, doing what I needed to be doing, that was it. This work isn't for everyone. Some people could never get past the layers and layers of trash that is everywhere--in the woods, on the paths, in the creeks--yet the homes are incredibly clean, taking into account that most had direct floors and soot icicles hanging from the ceiling. Thousands of passes by little feet (people and animals) has pounded the earth into a hard surface, which was swept several times a day.

On our arrival day in Pabeya, Dan, a returning member, said he hoped they didn't have slaughter day, while we were here. Today, a cow was slaughtered, cut, and sold. It wasn't as bas as the scene that played out in my mind after Dan's comment. I think it's only fair that people who eat meat should see how the animal grows and matures and then how it is killed and chopped up. I have now seen a cow at all phases of its life and death, but I don't want to talk about it. We had spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner.