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.