The Last Battle Leads to a New Garden

So the title is a reference to the Chronicles of Narnia, in case you didn´t get it. So the Friday before last I finally set off for my new community, Chambala, for real. Chambala is up in the mountains and covered in lush green vegetation. Most mornings I go up into the hills with one member of the family or another to help with something they´re doing - today we went up to pick green beans, and up by their onion plants, you can see all the way out over the valley where El Transito an Usulutan are, the volcano of San Miguel, or El Chaparrastique, the volcano of Usulutan, and various mountains around the edge of the valley, a rather stunning view.

My new family is brimming with people, Miguel and Sirian my host parents and eight children, six of which are actually theirs and two of which are grandchildren, but whom they raise as their own. There´s Mauricio, just turned twenty-one, like me, Juan, 18, Miguelito 15 or something, no one really seems quite sure. All three of them like to joke around a lot, although Mauro is the most serious, always working on something. He went to school until fourth grade, at which point he started helping his dad in the fields full time. He´ll call out one, two, three and I´ll respond four five, six. Juan always goes along with his father to community meetings. Miguel is one of the main community leaders. Sometimes Miguelito jokes that he´s going to fly to the U.S. on a tortilla or ridiculous things like that. After Miguelito comes Noemi, 13, which often gets shortened to Nemi. She helps with various things around the house and in the fields but she also really likes to dance and play hand clapping games. She can be really silly a lot of the time. She´s often humming random snatches of song and dancing to it. Maura, the next sibling is ten almost eleven and everyone calls her Pita. She´s a bright one and also loves to play. She and Mauricio have the same smile, lips stretching tight without showing their teeth. Milagrito is the youngest of Sirian and Miguel´s actual children. She´s six, always smiling, and extremely adorable. She also loves to dance, which mostly means sticking her hands on her butt and shaking it around wildly while singing - pompas, pompas-. Ronald and William 9ish and 5ish are the two grandchildren that have joined the family. Their actual mom lives nearby, with a new ¨husband¨(few people here actually like to get married because it´s expensive and they´re poor) and baby. William has big eyes and a really cute smile, but he can also be an obnoxious little scoundrel. Like when I was drawing Milagrito, or Pili, or Milita as she´s also called, and he kept saying how ugly she looked in the drawing.
My host mom makes tortillas every single morning, so I often make a couple. I´ve also gotten to go help fertilize the corn, or milpa, and sprinkle insecticide in the top of each plant.
Everyone in the family loves Uno. One day eleven of us were playing, everyone except Sirian and Miguelito, and plus Tio Fidel and his ten yr old son Diego who everyone calls Lindo. It´s funny the first few days everyone introduced themselves by their actual names and then they all called each other by those names, but then they slipped back into habit which is never to call each other by those names and instead to use all sorts of others.
Well perhaps more next week, we´ll see. I never know when I´ll make it into the office.