light enough to travel

i am spending the week in El Tuma de Dalia, a small village that is fresher and greener than Managua, almost four hours north. i am here with Elliet, the consultant who is conducting much of our nutritional research in the several different agricultural communities across the country for a food security project that will last the rest of the year. she and i have met a handful of times for meetings prior to this trip, but my bi-lingual colleague Rosa has always been in those meetings too, and in turn, Elliet and i have usually spoken through her. today is the first day of our first trip and our first day alone together; we will spend most of the next twelve weeks traveling side by side. i’ve been nervous about these trips for several reasons, primarily because so much time traveling together requires good communication. and while i’m doing pretty well with Spanish, there are a lot of reasons it could still be difficult to communicate well.

but we’ve begun, and Elliet is lovely. she speaks slowly, in a way that allows me to understand every word. she is smart, direct and i think she likes me; she laughed and asked for more when i taught her some of the Nica slang i’ve been collecting. we arrived at our motel tonight when the sun was just setting in a dark orange glow. we passed through the modest entrance, and in the distance, i saw the silhouette of a brisk, older woman with crazy hair rummaging around a desk, looking frantically for something. i finally heard the jangling of keys and she came towards us with a flashlight, telling us with zero apology that there was no light, there had been no light all day and not to expect light to return before morning. Elliet and i dropped our stuff into our dark bedrooms, and walked down the street to a small restaurant for dinner, where there was also no light. we ate beans and rice by candlelight, and while were eating, i wondered how many people sit at two-tops in restaurants by candlelight asking each other questions like “Could you tell me again how to pronounce your name?”

after dinner, we walked back to the motel in the pitch black dark, along the road that was pocked with holes and mud puddles. we held onto each other’s shoulders and arms as we walked. i literally couldn’t see anything—my feet, the ground, Elliet—and there was no moonlight by which to read her lips. i was feeling around for everything—how to make it back in the dark, how to move the conversation forward in a language i can kind of speak, how to hold onto her but not too tightly, as we lumbered down the steps to the motel. when we finally arrived, Elliet held out her keys and we felt around together with our fingers for the longer one, the one that would get us in the front door. she asked the Senora in charge for two candles and a box of matches, and we bid each other goodnight in the pitch black dark.

now i’m inside my motel room with my one lit candle. there is a small bat who’s hugging the ceiling and i kind of like the company. it seems like he’s bumping into things he doesn’t know are in front of him. but even though he looks ridiculous, i’ve just remembered how deftly he can navigate in the dark. it’s part of who he is, part of what he’s been given and part of how he moves through the world. still, he looks so small in this big, dark room. i’m not sure how i’ll pass the next four or five hours more before bedtime, but i’m certain they’ll include a conversation with him or maybe a simple barter—some of my sick Spanish slang for a lesson about finding light enough to travel.

to dream the impossible dream

a few weeks ago, i came home to my precious Nicaraguan family and the usual bustle of evening commotion—the kitchen was busy in dinner preparation, the two-year old Jeshua was running around in his sandals and cloth diaper, a soap opera was screaming from the television, a woman was selling rice pudding and yelling her price from the street and all of us were hustling to pull the clothes down from the line before they got wet in the evening rain.

back in the kitchen, huddled over the tiny stove, i was tasting Martha’s soup with a spoon when Wendi, her adult daughter told me she’d found a job—something she’s been looking for since i met her over two months ago. Wendi was smiling, but Martha, who was making lemonade over a big plastic bowl, was not. i asked Wendi how she found the job, what she would be doing, where it was located in the city, which bus she would take. she answered the questions one by one, and ended in quiet tears as she explained that the work was outside of Managua and she’d be moving three hours away to Chinendega to take the job.

at some point this week, we inherited a gigantic cardboard box, and Jeshua and his nine year-old cousin Ali have been rolling across the tile floor inside of it with their four legs and two heads sticking out. the box has been crushed and flattened and has ceded any of its former shape and hard edges to the rough love of these little boys. watching them roll around in it, stopping only for cement walls and so much laughter would make anyone believe that lack of resources keeps people together, keeps people talking, keeps people in the same room to invent with wild imagination how to pass time. since being here i have received a lot of mail and email from friends and family who express a want to escape the excesses that life at home affords. i totally get these sentiments and understand how attractive a simpler life often seems to those of us burdened by too much activity choice, responsibility or stuff. from a distance, those of us with plenty can reach a conclusion that poverty somehow equals a simplicity or a basic happiness that we who are comfortable are not capable of living.

but i don’t think anything about my Nicaraguan family’s life is simple, certainly not their poverty. while we were watching the cardboard box game and eating dinner, i asked Martha how she felt about Wendi’s new job. her whole body held worry, grooves of heartache worn into her face like tattoos, like marks that will never leave her. she kept her eyes on her grandsons in the box and slowly listed the things she hoped to be able to give her daughter before she left—a big bag of oatmeal from Pricemart, a couple pounds of rice, some beans, a few dollars worth of minutes on her cell phone—but she didn’t know if she would be able to do it.

poverty busts up families, often at the cost of draining their one greatest resource—each other. chronic poverty ruins dreams or replaces the human capacity for dreaming with something sadder than i have the words to describe. most days it feels like i am living among people who do not dream, who’ve not been taught to dream, who cannot afford to dream, or in Wendi’s case, whose one dream of raising her child comes at the cost of living apart from him, at the cost of missing his most precious growing-up years.

i watched the boys in the cardboard box until it was time for all of us to go to bed. Wendi called her son Jeshua into her arms and he gave her the biggest, wettest kiss on her eye. i went into my room and washed my face with soap that cost at least three-times as much as the combined cost of those modest things Martha wanted to send with Wendi. and when i turned out the light and pulled the sheet over my tired body, i cried for i don’t know how long. as the reality of their poverty unfolds, i pray every day that my tears aren’t ones that paralyze, but ones that galvanize. that there are many people living without dreams only makes me want to work harder for my own—the impossible ones that would establish economic justice—ones that require a few of us having a lot less and a lot of us having a little more.

the today show

every weekday, i take a morning walk with a bunch of the women i live with. i wake up at 4:55 for a 5 AM departure–just enough time to get dressed and put on my shoes. if i woke up even five minutes earlier, i think there would be time to convince myself to sleep instead of walk, which is, of course, exactly what i would do. but once i’m on the walk, i’m more or less glad to be moving and i start to wake up. as we go along, we gather little pieces of information about our neighborhood and our neighbors: who’s dumping their garbage into the stream that goes to the lake or who’s lighting theirs on fire; who’s drunk and strolling home at such a late (early) hour; who hasn’t cleaned the dog-doo off their stoop. last week, we saw the man who lives across the street kissing his next-door neighbor’s maid goodbye at five in the morning. the week before, we huddled around a hole where a lime sampling had been pulled up and stolen at some point in the night. and the week before that, we were only thirty-five minutes late to a minor crime scene and a pool of the perpetrator’s blood was spilled fresh on the sidewalk as proof. we see shirtless men in their house shoes and old women wearing thin nightgowns. we see bony dogs with pink skin, long tits and dried scabs. we see drug deals on the footbridge and tiny gorgeous children getting dressed for school. we see men squatting on corners with emptied bottles of rum and the light of television sets inside every home. we see tortillerias opening up, the men working the coals and the women working the masa. we see neighbors sweeping up yards of dirt and hosing down dusty sidewalks. it’s our version of the today show that unfolds in real time, where we take the pulse of how the night passed and how the day before us might unfold. it’s weather, it’s local news, it’s how we open up our day—just a long and sleepy loop around the block.

so much present inside my past

the summer after i graduated from high school, i took a trip with Sarah and Katie to the Newport Folk Festival—a real pilgrimage for anyone who grew up on good songwriting or kept collections of concert playlists and ticket stubs. in so many ways, it was the ultimate road trip, complete with mix-tapes, camping out, a million inside jokes and a map of every vegetarian restaurant between Nashville and New England. we packed so many miles onto the wheels of my little white Volvo and racked up an obscene amount of roaming charges on my mom’s car phone. but despite these things, it was an incredible trip together.

someone brought dozens of sheets of little ladybug stickers for the ride and before we’d left Tennessee, we’d started putting one on ordinary things we passed along the way that were made special for us by our encounter with them—public toilets, payphones, restaurant booths, road signs, gas pumps, license plates and sometimes people. the stickers were such a real part of that whole experience that it seems like we would have had some clearer understanding of what they symbolized, but i’m not sure we did. maybe we thought we would pass certain things again and each sticker would serve to help us recognize those things in a future time? or maybe we thought that we would never pass certain things again and we wanted to mark them in recognition of having lived them in our past?

regardless of our reasons or our reasonlessness, what i love about this story now is that we looked out the window for the ordinary things, that we slowed down for happiness, that we let the regular stuff matter and that we ritualized the present moment. i want to pull off the road tonight and stick a little ladybug on the occasion of that bright, young wisdom.

looking for the water from a deeper well

i arrived in Nicaragua in April, towards the end of the dry season. my first day on the job, I was invited to go into the campo to visit a community in San Ramon de Matagalpa with my colleagues. while they were speaking with some of the community’s leaders, i watched a young woman lower a plastic bucket down into an almost-empty well. she held one end of a battered rope in her hands and lowered the bucket down. i could hear it finding the bottom—one empty thing scraping against another—but i watched as she drew the filled-up bucket towards her body, with shaky, strong arms. she poured the water from the full bucket into an empty one beside her, and carried the water out to her garden, a project she has planted in an effort to ensure a secure source of food for herself and her family. driving home that evening i thought about how the fullness of their well affects the fullness of their garden which affects the fullness of their bodies, and i wondered what the community would do if the rains didn’t come in soon.

making a choice to move to Nicaragua was, in many ways, connected to my old boyfriend’s love for Latin America. his dream to someday return influenced my own dream of us someday coming together. some dreams don’t get lived into the way we expect they will, and i guess that’s the oldest story in the books that tell the stories about dreams. i arrived here soon after our break-up and when i touched down, the emotional landscape of reasons for being here seemed pretty dry. the dream that was supposed to be fat and wet and full felt more like a tipped-over bucket, with the dream spilled out everywhere in Spanish and other stuff i didn’t understand. in a million nameable ways, the bucket of being here has felt like that dream dried up.

many people in the world spend whole days in the work of moving water from full places to empty ones, using buckets and bowls and hands. this daily work is often ensures that there will be water for the next meal, the next day, the next need. i’ve been living in a house with a lot of water issues—the pipes are dry, the pipes are leaking, the faucet is broken or the water is not potable. when the water does run, the family i live with saves it for the next time there will be none. this usually involves moving around a dozen oddly-shaped plastic buckets with ill-fitting lids, and stacking them for various needs—washing, drinking, flushing, cooling down. a hundred times i’ve gone to the pipe for water and there is none, and i’m learning how to move the water from where it is to where it isn’t.

exactly what i expected would be so full is so empty: the dream’s down the drain, the faucet is dry and it hasn’t rained in so many days. but the rainy season has just started and the water is slowly coming in. i like to imagine the well in San Ramon getting fuller every day and their gardens growing fat and green. and as time passes, i have to believe my own water lines will rise too and that a new dream can grow inside this shell of an old one. while i’m waiting for the water to fill in, i’m trying to move the buckets around in a pattern all my own—lowering down into what feels empty and trying to love up what i can find there. and maybe one day, i will find myself fat and full from swallowing down this kind of empty.