Vignettes

I´ve been reading La Casa en Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in Spanish. I read it in English back in high school - excellent book, about a Mexican American girl growing up in the U.S., her hopes, dreams, what her neighborhood is like, and it´s told in a series of short poetic chapters, little vignettes that give a window into a specific aspect of her life or her neighborhood. I´ve been wanting to write some vignettes about my community in a similar style, give little windows into life here.
Griselda
Griselda lives nearby, basically next door and she come over almost every day to visit or to help Daisy with the chores, sweeping the yard or washing clothes, or even making tortillas before the delegation came. Marilu almost always comes with her. The two of them married a pair of brothers. Marilu, shy and quiet while Griselda talks and talks. Marilu, who doesn´t even know how to write her name, but who comes to all the community meetings, is going to get one of the chicken coop projects, and has a beautiful smile. One day she told me that when Judith/Ana and I talk in English, it´s like we´re not even talking and they just look at us with their mouths open. Well, sometimes it´s like that for us when people talk in Spanish, especially the old women without teeth. Griselda knows how to read really well. The other Saturday when we had the workshop on risk management, Guillermo had her help read the laws related to risk managment. She finished up to seventh grade in school. I suppose that´s a lot farther than many in the community, as there are many people, both men and women who can´t write more than the three letters that are their initials, which they use for their firma, or signature. Griselda with her tight brown shirt with a hole right over the lower part of her boob. Griselda with her open face and ready smile. Griselda is nineteen and she already has two children, one of whom is five years old and no longer lives with her, her daughter. Her son is ten months old and always sick. Sometimes she takes me over to her house to visit. She lives in one small room with a hammock outside and a couple of plastic chairs, one of them sewn together with twine at the top where it broke. We play soccer with an old ball. Neither she or the kids in the community can kick it very hard because they have bare feet and it stings like heck to kick it hard without shoes. Today when Griselda left Daisy said esa es pobrecita. Le doy aguacate, limón, ... por el niño.
Por las Moscas/Because of the Flies
Sometimes it seems like we do everything because of the flies. They are always on the table, laning on my arms, my legs. We have to watch each other´s food if someone gets up from the table for a moment, because of the flies. If I want to drink juice while I eat I need to remember to get it out of the fridge before I sit down to eat, so I don´t have to have someone watch my food or go get it for me while I sit and eat. Sometimes Daisy will ask me if I want fresco (what they call fresh juice) while I´m eating and she says, - Espera, yo te traigo, por las moscas - wait, I´ll bring it to you, because of the flies. The other day I helped keep the flies away while she squeezed the liquid out of the cheese she was making. And when she decided to get up from her nap in the hammock today, it was because of the flies.
Tortillas (originally written in my journal, 6-18)
We always eat tortillas with every meal. It doesn´t matter what it is: cheese and cream, french fries, chicken, and rice, guacamole, eggs, and beans, or boiled pipian a delicious squash-like vegetable, we always eat tortillas. Medium sized thick corn tortillas fresh and hot, tucked away tightly in a cloth inside the red plastic basket - because of the flies, and to keep them warm. Daisy told me she was going to teach me to make tortillas my first week, and Monday morning she was washing corn. One moment it was sitting drying and the next I noticed there was suddenly a mound of dough sitting on the mortar. I watched Daisy as she kneaded the dough and expertly broke off a small piece, rolled it back and forth, slapped it into a small patty, and began molding the dough with both hands like a small wheel of clay over and over in circles with small motions that have become second nature tortilla after tortilla week after week, year after year. As a fat thick circle forms, she begins slapping the edges quickly rotating the tortilla with one hand without even seeming to move it, continually slapping the tortilla with the other until it´s ready for the fire. Watching her deft movements, I knew I was going to suck at this, but I wanted to try anyway. I felt ridiculous because even after watching I really had no idea what to do with my hands. Daisy patiently shoed me how to pinch the tortilla with one hand while constantly turning it with the other. The slapping part though was much more difficult. My first two tortillas turned out well enough all things considered, but then the third one kept ripping and I must have started over seven times before Daisy asked me - ¿Qué pasó Betania, ya no puedes? - What happened, Bethany, you can´t do it anymore? and took the dough and felt it and said ya no sirve. Para el cabrito. It´s not useful anymore, we´ll give it to the goat and gave me a new lump of dough, with which I did so-so, and then she told me -ya has hecho dos o tres, ya otro día hagas más- You´ve already made two or three, another day you can make more. Relieved I went back to sitting and watching her hands ba-doom, ba-doom, from patty to thick circle, slap slap, from thick circle to tortilla.
Later in the week, when it came time to make tortillas again, Griselda came over and washed the corn and then together we went up the hill to the molinero, the grinder. A good walk up the hill a man has a motor powered machine with three different metal grinders. The whole area smelled of gasoline. We put the corn in the top, turning on the water spout above so water flowed in too, and it came out the bottom as dough and Griselda grabbed it off the wheel chunck by chunk and patted it down into the bottom of the big plastic basket. Back at the house, she and Marilu tried over and over to show me the motions of tortilla making, but they´ve been making tortillas since they were little girls. This time I lasted for at least ten tortillas at which point the dough was nearly gone, although they probably made three for every one of mine.
Plástico/Plastic
Everyone here just drops their trash where they´re standing. All over the yard, the street. There´s plastic all over the place, all over the driveway up to our house, all over the dry riverbeds that fill up when it rains. Back when the packaging for things wasn´t all plastic, it didn´t matter if people threw their trash all over the place because it would decompose, but with plastic it´s going to be around for years. It causes all sorts of contamination when it rains, etc. but a lot of people don´t know that. The thing is throwing trash äway¨in landfills like we doin the U.S. isn´t really a solution either, it´s a real problem for the environment as well, although maybe better than it just being all over the place. The real problem is with using plastic/not reusing things and just throwing them away, using materials like plastic and styrofoam for disposables, just the one time when they´re not going to decompose for thousands, perhaps millions of years.
Religión: Solo Dios, Aleluya
In my community in the campo in the DR, religion was like a loose garment, tightly woven but not close fitting. Everything happened si Dios quiere, and when the old man died they had a reso, a little liturgical service every afternoon, but few of the families went to church regularly. I know that some of the other people in my group had a very different experience, where they went to church three times a week, sometimes for three hours at a time, and that´s more what my family here is like. My birthday was on a Sunday so we went to church, which they also sometimes call the culto, at a Baptist church called Friends of Israel. Only about fifteen people were there. They sang a lot of praise songs kind of off key (I´m definitely missing the four part harmony) and had a sermon that I had a hard time staying awake during. When we went to church where Romero is buried, the homily was really interesting, very lib theo, but I can´t so much say that of this one. Also, since it was my birthday, they made me go stand up front while they all sang to me. Fortunately there was another girl w/ the same birthday, so I wasn´t alone.
We also have a culto in our yard on Mondays and Thursdays. They set up plastic chairs amidst the mango trees, an altar, and a microphone. They have a time where anyone can take a turn to go up and lead everyone in a song or share their testimony. The microphone is really crackly and they belt out the songs at the tops of their voices. The resulting sound is not the most pleasant, but it comes very sincerely from their hearts. Most of the songs are praising God, Jesus, and the holy spirit. One they sometimes sing is Solo Dios Hace al Hombre Feliz. The chorus goes Solo Dios hace al hombre feliz. La vida no es nada, todo se acaba, solo Dios hace al hombre feliz, or Only God can make man happy. Life is nothing, everything ends, only God can make man happy. Not exactly the sort of theology that I tend to believe in, but they all think it´s wonderful that I come to the culto with them. Every so often they´ll stop and pray. Usually a man leads the prayer, and his voice gets slowly louder and louder until he´s shouting about how wonderful God is, how blessed the day is, saying the people are in need and praising God. The pitch of the voice sounds like fire and brimstone, but not so much the words. The people respond to the songs and prayers and every few sentences of the sermons with cries of aleluya and amen.
Last Tuesday our neighbor Pati took me to visit her cuñada, or sister in law who makes pupusas and is also named Pati. When we got there Pati the sister in law asked me what religion I was. I said Menonita, she said what? and so I said Cristiana, and she immediately replied ¨Want to go to church?¨ Me: What? Now? Her: ¨Yeah let´s go.¨So I went to another church. We were up in central Piedra Azul, rather than El Chirrión, the lower part where I live. The church service had already started, but Pati took me right up to the front row, as if I didn´t already stick out like a sore thumb. As far as worship style, it was very similar to the culto with two people running the service and various people coming up to the front to lead songs. At one point they started singing a song and all of the women went up to stand in front. I didn´t know whether I should too or not. I didn´t know the song at all or what exactly was going on, but when the women went up, only about four or five people were still left sitting. I ended up being glad that I stayed sitting because then each of the women recited a Bible verse, one after another. The thing that was really nice about the service, that I really appreciated and that made me like the service better than any of the others that I´d been to was that every time someone would get up to sing they would say ¨Bienvenidos a nuestra hermana¨o ¨Bienvenidos a nuestra amiga¨ ¨Welcome to our friend¨or ¨Welcome to our sister¨in reference to me, which was really sweet. I started feeling like I should get up and say something in return, and then they got to a point where they were asking for more people to come forward and sing or share or whatever, and no one was coming, so I got up and said thank you for welcoming me and sang the one church song in Spanish that I know, ¨Tú has venido a la orilla.¨The fact that they never sing in tune made it much less intimidating, and on the chorus they all started singing along, which was really cool.