flightless bird, american mouth

i’ve been seeing someone here in Nica named Ghasem. he’s Iranian and we met each other in our level one Spanish class at the Universidad Centroamericana. he speaks Farsi, a little Spanish, and not a word of English. talking with each other is exhausting because Spanish is so new for both of us, and we have to work so hard to communicate with words. we laugh all the time, make lots of mistakes, find ourselves in huge misunderstandings and an occasional outburst in our native languages. we spend forever on explaining one thing, and that we like each other continues to be a good incentive for us to practice more.

yesterday after class, we sat in a garden on campus and talked for about an hour. there was a huge flowering bush in front of us, and while we were talking, i watched a hummingbird hover over the same dark-colored flower for a long time—maybe four or five minutes. the bird was flapping its wings so fast, perched on nothing but air. it was breathless, but resting.

we held hands on the bench and talked. i teared up while i was talking, and he found enough Spanish words to say you have some crying in your eyes. i laughed and flapped around to try to respond. and then i saw some crying in his eyes too and realized i could stop working hard for more words. and so we sat quietly without words, and watched the hummingbird and the flower. and i thought, of course we are working so hard to be in the face of just a little beauty, of course we’re using these words like wings to hold us up, of course we can take all the time we want to hover here, to perch on almost nothing in common but some crying in our eyes.

it’s so sweet to go slow, to pick around at the same sweet flower, to look at every side of its beauty. i am so full of breath for that kind of flight; i am so breathless.

the things they carried

i have carried syrup home from Maine, apples home from Vermont, fish home from Washington and peanuts home from Georgia. i’ve dragged heavy sticks up mountains, collected sharksteeth in film canisters, kept cardboard from the streets of Harlem and brought rocks home from every place i’ve ever been. i’ve rallied friends and family to help me move street furniture in New York, old window panes in Boston, a heavy metal sink in rural Tennessee, and sheets of plate glass in Kentucky. i’ve snuck honey in and out of so many countries, packed suitcases full of garden clippings for papermaking, held a sourdough starter on my lap in a moving truck and transported thousands of leaves pressed in hundreds of books. the first Thanksgiving i was in seminary, my church hosted a big community dinner for members of our congregation and the wider neighborhood. i signed up to help serve and after the midday meal, i asked the cooks if i could take the turkey bones home to make stock and soup. i dumped a dozen or more carcasses into a black garbage bag and asked the youth group to help me carry them uptown.

here in Nicaragua, i see people carrying the most outrageous things: an eighty-year old woman walking toward her home with a humongous pile of sticks under one arm, a long machete in the other; a young woman on the back of a motorcycle, holding a newborn baby in one arm, a five gallon bucket of charcoal in another. and people are always asking others to carry the most outrageous things for them: a fifty pound sack of mangos for someone’s mom, a skirt with seventy straight pins sticking out along the hem for someone’s sister, a flannel sack of marbles for someone’s cousin’s son or a box of dog medicine for someone’s niece’s neighbor’s sick puppy.

yesterday, i was visiting with a community in Mateare, and after we finished the meeting, we packed up our truck to head back to Managua. a woman from the community asked us if we might be able to carry her and her six children in our pickup. we said no problem, and they piled in with their long really long stick—some of them in the cab of the truck and some in the back. we were squeezed in pretty tight. a couple kilometers down the road, an old man with his thumb up asked us if we could carry him to the market in the center of Managua. we said no problem, and he piled into the back, dragging a huge black suitcase behind him. i was so uncomfortable inside the pickup, sitting bitch and backwards, on no cushion, looking out the back window. i saw the old man unsnap the black suitcase and pull out what looked like magic tricks. he performed one for the woman and her children in the moving vehicle, and then began to juggle three balls, while he was straddling the long stick. after the woman and her family got out and left for home, a young man with his broken-down moto asked if we’d take him to the motorcycle shop. we said yes, and he started rolling his moto towards the back of the pickup. i was thinking in my head, dude, there is no way we’re getting this thing in here with the big black suitcase of magic tricks, the magician and the coolers we brought. but we juggled it, and like magic, we lifted his moto into the bed of the truck and he climbed in too, and we drove towards town.

i thought the bag of turkey bones was the most outrageous thing a person could carry home, but living here is stretching my scope of our world in so many ways. today, i got in the same pickup truck to head back to the same community. twenty minutes into the drive, we stopped to pick up thirty blocks of ice, something we’d been asked to bring. i reached into the backseat for my wallet, and found a real, live bunny rabbit on the floor—a request from one of the community members for her farm. the bunny amazed me, kind of like a magic trick does when it works. Nica culture leaves me lost in translation at every turn. but if there is only one thing i understand about living here, it’s that no swollen expectation of how much i can carry or ask another to carry for me is too swollen. we bring the bunny, we make more room, we sit bitch and straddle the stick. we learn how to juggle and it’s magic. i mean, there are some things you just can’t leave behind.

sin senos no hay paraiso

i played hand games with an eight year old for an hour and a half Friday night. i was visiting a friend for the weekend at her home in San Marcos, a small mountain village an hour outside of Managua. the power went out in the evening, while we were watching everyone’s favorite novela Sin Senos, No Hay Paraiso, a Colombian soap opera that airs five nights a week. i was thrilled we lost power during Without Breasts There is No Paradise, since it is, without a doubt, the most absurd hour of television i’ve ever been asked to sit through. we lit some candles and Rosa’s daughter and i made hand shadows that came alive on their clay wall. our combined repertoire didn’t really reach beyond the basics—chomping alligator, bunny rabbit with wiggling ears and a bird in flight. it got kind of boring after ten minutes, but made for an hour of more age-appropriate drama. and i thought about how those hand pictures are universal, no matter what language you speak.

another hand motion that’s universal is that ubiquitous middle finger. this dude gave it to me on my way to work this morning, when i didn’t respond to his obscene kissing noises and degrading remarks about my body on his body. i know so many women have to find ways of safely responding in these situations; i chose to keep walking and let him be the star of his one-man drama. i’m not sure what it’s called, something like Sin Senos, No Hay Paraiso.

simple tether, hold this together

i passed a long weekend sitting in a rocking chair that doesn’t rock anymore because one of its bowed legs is snapped off in the back. it seems like everything in Nicaragua is broken or almost broken or was at one time broken and is now half-repaired with a belt or an old bra strap. a couple nights ago, i came home from my office and found Martha, the Nicaraguan woman i live with, fixing the nasty, gnawed-up clicker for the TV with some super glue and a crayon. she was listening to Crocodile Rock when i walked in. the Elton John Greatest Hits record is the only CD they have that doesn’t skip, and i think we listened to it eighteen or nineteen times Saturday afternoon. i sat in the rocking chair.

passing a day here is like a lesson in knot-making—figuring out how to tie one outrageous situation to the next one, how to make double knots out of bungee cords and pieces of old, rubber hose, how to make the ends meet. things that are usually so simple are so complicated and regular daily life is held together by whatever old things will reach. when i walk into my room and turn on my overhead light, it only sometimes works. it’s suspected that a neighbor is stealing electric from our wires—a totally hilarious claim since our electric is already spliced half a dozen ways to feed power to our cluster of homes. when i walk into my bathroom to wash my hands in the sink, the faucet only sometimes works, because there’s a leak in our pipe, so we keep the main switch turned off. when we need water, we walk down the street to unscrew it—not a huge deal except when it’s the middle of the night and i’ve got no clothes on and my bedroom door is stuck in its frame if it’s a humid night, which is like every night. my taxi driver Gregorio is late in the mornings, and when we aren’t running out of gas which is almost once a day, a tire is flat or we drive in the night without headlights or the clutch just falls off onto the car floor. people show up late everywhere and they may call to say they’re coming or not coming, but chances are good one of our cell phones is out of minutes, so the call doesn’t go through. passwords to semi-reliable wireless connections get changed and no one knows the new ones or who we might ask to find out or why the old one stopped working in the first place. there is no haste in solving any of these problems or getting answers to any of these questions, and i assume the chain of command for finding out is probably broken anyway.

but something holds daily life together—maybe it’s god or the strength of human will or maybe it’s just that daily life has to keep going, because what would be an alternative? i sit in Gregorio’s piece of shit car and resent him for continuing to drive it and i turn on the dry faucet or wake up to turn off the overhead light when it comes on three hours too late or sing along to Elton John again and then again, again. and these are the times i have to pull from some small spool of patience and faith and gratitude to tie a knot and try to hang on.

i’ve been here for 23 days and have roughly 342 left. i figured out the numbers when i was talking to Julia on the phone last night; it was so good to hear her voice over the thin phone line until the call was dropped, without warning. i walked down a few houses to the shop where i usually refill my phone, but tonight they were only selling minutes for the other cell phone company. i have all the spanish words to ask why, but not enough to collect a good answer, if there’s even one. so i walked home to the rocking chair that does not rock, and i just sat still there and thought about how making it through one day is tied up in having made it through the day before. it’s a simple tether that’s holding all this together, maybe as thin as the thinnest thread. and surely the broken heart, the broken Spanish, the broken pipe and the breaking-down car are testing the strength of it. but learning how to tie a new knot with paperclips and extension cords is learning the lesson about hanging on—which is what i did last night, which is what i’m still doing now, and it’s what i’ll wake up and do again tomorrow.

castaways and cutouts

there’s a New Testament passage in Mark that tells a story of Jesus returning home to Capernaum and healing a paralyzed man. Jesus is inside a house speaking to a crowd so large that people are spilling out into the street. four men carry a paralyzed man up to the house to be healed, and realizing that they cannot get him inside because of the crowds, they cut a hole in the roof and lower him down to Jesus. the rest of the story includes what is usually called a miracle—Jesus telling the man his sins are forgiven, to pick up his mat and be on his way.

there are small miracles in all the stories about big ones, and they usually involve  not one person, but a small group of people, making a way where there is no way. several years ago, my minister Hope noticed that our summer church camp in Tennessee served only a particularly privileged group of children and youth living in our state. having worked as a social worker in East Nashville’s inner-city school system, Hope began making plans for a new kind of camp, one that would especially prioritize serving poor children and youth. she wrote a proposal, got support from her colleagues, found a hole in the summer camp schedule and widened it to cover a long weekend. she talked a few teenager friends into helping her make it happen; they went to schools, knocked on doors, met with families, filled out forms and asked church people to donate money for new sleeping bags, swimcaps and sunscreen.

with little preparation and very few resources, lots of small miracles happened that first year—Ulonda learned to swim, Eduardo spent the night away from home for the first time, Taylor went to sleep with a stomach full of healthy food and everyone had a talent at the talent show. these miracles and other ones cut big possibilities into the hearts of every single camper and counselor. now in its eighth year, Hope Camp has turned out so many miracles—grown-up ones, in fact—who come back every summer to counsel. these small miracles are healing our camp and bringing us all to a place we never knew we could be. and so we pick up the mat we’d needed to carry us for so long, and exchange it for the walking we never thought we’d be able to do. and this is the bigger miracle.

i love stories about people who say okay, we’re here and we’ve got to get there and we can’t do it the way we always do it, so let’s go where we never go, and let’s begin by believing that cutting this hole is going to work. we know so many stories of singular miracles, and we cling to them. but there is no final miracle of picking up your mat and being on your way without the smaller miracles of a few people having a crazy idea, a few people believing they can cut away what was always there, a few people being strong enough to do the heavy lifting and faithful enough to let go when they get down by the side of the one who shows us how.

just roll with it, baby

in Managua, it’s not uncommon to be in a taxi that runs out of gas. it’s happened to me four times in five days. on my way home from work yesterday, we whimpered to a stop. after trying the key a few times, my taxi driver, Gregorio, got out of his seat, opened his driver’s side door and started to push. when i realized he wasn’t just pushing us to a gas station, but all the way home, i was like okay, we’re doing this now and opened my door, got out of my seat and started to push too. when we reached a certain speed, he yelled some quick Spanish to me over the top of the car, which i, of course, did not understand. he jumped back into the car, and so i did too and we coasted downhill for a while, him steering and me just laughing, because i didn’t have the Spanish vocabulary to tell him the whole situation was scaring the shit out of me. we leveled out eventually and came to another slow stop. we got out, repeated the drill, both of us pushing on either side of the car, from our open doors. we rolled past a group of guys who were playing basketball on the sidewalk, all with their shirts off and muscles showing. without even asking them for help, they dropped their game and all eight of them got behind the car to run and push. i was really laughing then, and we picked up speed and Gregorio and i hopped back into our seats, pulled our doors closed and we just rolled with it, baby, all the way home.

looking in, looking out

Lauren and i lived in an old, cheap cottage in the Tennessee woods when we were in college. the cabin was spacious and warm, and home to so many mice. our landlord asked us to set traps, so we bought them in packs of six and set them out during the winter months. in an evening, we could put out all six in the corners of our basement-level-den, and within the hour all six would slap shut. later, we’d descend the staircase together to face the inevitable carnage. and we worked out a system to ease the pains of facing it. one of us used a pair of pliers to grab the mousetrap with the dead mouse; the person with this job got to wear a special pair of sunglasses, which we kept next to the pliers. the other one of us held out a doubled-up plastic bag, which we used to carry the dead mice into the woods to bury.

the mouse in the house story is a silly one about a silly ritual that made a bad situation more tolerable. but in the last two weeks, i’ve wanted to reach for some version of those sunglasses a thousand times. at every single red stoplight, children and adults come up to my open window, begging me for money. it feels impossible to make eye contact with any one of them—whether to say yes, to say no or even to say nothing. i’d rather reach for some glasses, pretend to not see them, and all of my guidebooks encourage me to do some version of the very same thing.

it takes so much courage to see the world—a big claim that no small story can adequately accommodate. especially when the world is right up in our face through an open window, or seeping its way into our big, boarded-up life. but many of us have the privilege to choose what to see and when to see it. what a privilege it is to have choices! i know so much about living in big houses, living in big privileges, living into my very own big dreams. i live within easy reach of the glasses, the pliers, the doubled-up bag and i have a stack of guidebooks telling me exactly how to reach for them whenever i want them. and when they’re not there to protect me from what the world really looks like, a hundred other freedoms are.

part of my privilege is not even knowing how many privileges i have, because i have never not had them. when i make choices to look closely and see what is real and before me—the one who is hungry, the one who is trapped, the one who is dying in the trap i set—i see a world that requires courage to live into, a world that begs for my active response, a world that demands a lot of looking in, a lot of looking out.