Day 13
The day before, we left the community at 3 pm and drove straight through to Estelí where we found a hotel to sleep for the night. This morning, we’re all grumpy and tired.

We eat breakfast at La Casita, a gringo-owned restaurant a little ways out of town where, when I was in the midst of language studies and home stays (16 years ago when we first started our MCC term), I fled as often as possible.

We eat fresh cheeses, brown bread, tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade yogurt and granola, fresh juice, and coffee.

The kids sleep for much of the drive to Managua.

Once back in the city, we unload our stuff at the guest house and then drive around downtown before heading to the Huembes market.

We get tailed by market boys selling doo-dads made out of tall grass. We eat Eskimo ice cream. A shoe-fixer guy patches my daughter’s torn flip-flop. I stock up on rosquilla and coconut candy (it’s fabulous in granola).

Day 14
We spend the entire day trapped in a bus. (I think we get out three times.) We leave Managua at 4:00 am and arrive in Guatemala City at 8:00 pm.

The good news is that the bus is a double-decker! They provide food and movies (spy-torture-shoot ‘em up! yay!) (yay, not really) (when the next one starts out with explosions, I send my daughter up to ask for a kids’ movie and they put on a kid-friendly Jackie Chan), blankets and pillows, and useable bathrooms. When we get to San Salvador, we switch to a different bus and my two older children get assigned seats at the very front of the bus: great views and their own TV.

I have the joy of sitting with my youngest. He’s a whir of activity (for an example of what that exactly looks like, go here) for 15 hours straight. It’s not until the very last hour that he falls asleep.

When we arrive in the city, we take a taxi to CASAS and crash.

Day 15
Fellow MCCer Nancy (along with Raul, the van driver) takes us on a learning tour of Guatemala city.

What a hoot! 

We visit the national cemetery. 
The children are entranced by the house-sized graves and the busted open tombs.

Overlooking the dump.
At the far end of the cemetery, we examine the spot (some famous dude’s statue) for bullet holes where so many Guatemalan were executed, their bodies then tossed into the dump.

Day 16
We have a brief team meeting before catching the bus back to Cobán.

We’re home by supertime. There’s no water and the house is dirty, but it’s home!

And thus concludes the exhaustive recounting of our epic journey of 2013.

Day 12
Elias, the kid who threw rocks at his sister as he chased her down the path by our house and who stole candy and then lied about it, shows my older daughter how to milk the cow. She never quite catches on.

My husband takes the truck and a whole bunch of neighbors way back in to the boonies to visit Don Humberto’s coffee farm.

While they are gone, I take the kids and, starting up at one end of the community, work my way down through, visiting all the neighbors.

At Maribel’s house, her husband lets the kids ride the horse.

Doña Angelina, one of the more educated women in the group, has moved to Spain to work as house help. Her husband tried to kill her, so she fled.

At Marina’s house, she shows me the cross and stone marker on her front porch where, about ten years ago, her husband was murdered.

Don Alejandro and Doña Angélica’s house is now surrounded by their children’s houses. It’s a colony, the neighbors joke. (The community has nearly doubled in size—there are new adobe houses everywhere.)

When we lived here, I held weekly meetings for the community children. Some have moved away (I’m sad I don’t get to see Flor Elizabeth, the girl who carried our baby with her everywhere she went), but Ofelia and Meyling are so excited to see me. They recount the scrapbooks we made, the cookies we baked, and the songs we sang. Ofelia now has two children of her own, and Meyling has a cherubic baby girl.

Regarding Jeaneth and Gustavo
Jeaneth and Gustavo were the couple closest to our age, and always appreciated their can-do spirit. I am in awe, even more now than before, of their passion, drive, and never-ending energy.

When we left, they had two little boys. Now they have five; the youngest is forty days old, the magic age at which the mother and baby are allowed to emerge from the bedroom and join the living.

Jeaneth steams around her house making tortillas, nursing the baby, showing us her bio-stove (or whatever you call it—a burner that’s fueled by methane gas that’s collected from cow poop) and the bicycle mill sitting in the middle of the kitchen.

She makes me a fresh tortilla and pours in a little runny, off-smelling sour cream which kinda ruins the experience. When I discreetly set it down and try to ignore it, she picks it up and hands it to me again, so I eat it all.

Her boys are amazing to watch: quiet, helpful, smart, and handsome. She proudly tells me that her boys and husband know how to make tortillas, take care of the house, and do the laundry—she was able to rest in bed for the required 40 days after this last baby because they did everything. This is extremely unusual and I tell her so.

Besides raising her herd of boys, she teaches at the local school and is the community leader. She’s been aggressively advocating for running water in the community but has yet to succeed.

Gustavo is excited to show my husband his welding mask, the house he built, the ovens he makes for people who ask (he improved upon the ovens my husband built), and the well he dug for a neighbor.

He has continued his education and is now a leader in the Catholic church.

Observation #1: The community is much more green than I remember it being. It’s practically lush.

Observation #2: There is almost no trash. All through Nicaragua, streets and gutters are clean! We ask what happen and are told that there was a massive push for awareness raising. Guatemala, get your act together!

Observation #3: This community is really isolated! It’s farther out then I remembered, and it’s still pretty disconnected from the rest of the world. Cell phones hang from the porch eaves because that’s the only place they can get reception. 

Observation #4: Conversations go nowhere. People talk about the basics—who is doing what, projects, weather, crops, health—and then they do it all over again. After only 36 hours in the village, already I am starved for a deeper connection. No wonder I felt like I was going out of my mind when we lived here!

Observation #5: Rural Nicaraguan Spanish is hard to understand! I catch 70 percent of what is said…if I’m lucky.

As the children and I set off to visit the lower section of the community, my older daughter, who is wearing flip-flops, playfully kicks at a rock and takes off the entire nail on her second toe. My son carries her back to Dona Aurora’s and we assess the damage. It’s not pretty.

Doña Aurora brings out a pan of warm water with salt and lemon leaves for soaking, I give her two tylenol, and the pain gradually subsides.

(Later that day, she puts a band-aid on the toe, but then it sticks and we have another ordeal on our hands. Eventually, my husband just rips it off, which ends up not being as painful as my daughter thought it would be. She travels the rest of the way through Central America with an exposed and bloody toe.)

Because of the toe injury, I don’t end up getting to Cristela’s house until shortly before it’s time to leave. I had visited her the day before, but Jeaneth had accompanied me then. This time it’s just the two of us.

Cristela’s husband Evelio, a good friend of ours and one of the most forward thinking men in the village, left her three years ago. This morning I ask, “What happened?” and she plunges into a story of a good marriage gone strangely sour, a terrifying episode of physical abuse, and then complete abandonment.

The marriage break-up isn’t her only hardship. Three years ago, her daughter Ruth (a beautiful little girl who participated in my children’s group) died from an unspecified illness that involved horrible headaches and blinding pain (perhaps a brain tumor?). Ruth left behind a then two-year-old son who lives with Cristela. Cristela’s older daughter, Carolina (I taught her English until she ran away at the age of 14 with her boyfriend), has two kids in their early teens and all three of them live with Cristela. Anita, the youngest daughter, has an eight-day-old baby who, the doctors say, has an undeveloped brain. They sent mother and baby home from the hospital saying, The baby won’t live beyond three days. They didn’t bother to schedule another check-up.

“It’s like the baby is already dead,” Cristela says, heat in her voice. “It’s like she doesn’t exist. But look! It’s been eight days and she’s doing fine!”

Anita seems disconnected from the baby. It’s Cristela that smothers the infant in kisses.

So Cristela is running the homestead by herself, struggling to plant the beans and corn and make ends meet while caring for a house full of children and daughters, plus her senile grandmother. I listen, and when Cristela finishes talking, we sit together, quietly. There is nothing for me to do. It hurts to see this sharp-tongued, witty, good-hearted friend so alone. I linger until my husband comes to get me. I have to tear myself away.

From that point until we leave an hour later, I cry. Through the tears, we take pictures of families and give our final hugs.

Who knows, we might see you again, my husband tells everyone, but I know better. We won’t be going back. This is goodbye for good. I think they know that, too.

My husband lays on the horn as we slowly drive out of the village. My boys are the only ones not crying—the girls have their heads down, sobbing, and my husband can’t talk. I ugly cry the whole way to El Jícaro.

To be continued…
(It’s like the song that never ends.)

Day 11, continued

The road between El Jícaro and our community is not paved.

We walked this road every day while we were building our house, we brag to the kids.

There’s where we took the short cut…
There’s where people drive down to the river to get sand and wash their trucks….
This bridge got washed out in the hurricane…
There’s where Papa forded the stream in his underwear.

As we approach our village, we scrutinize faces of the people we pass. Do we know anybody? We drive by the first house without recognizing it. But then we start to see familiar buildings, and then—there’s Doña Aurora’s gate! Pull in! (We built our house on Doña Aurora and Don Humberto’s property, and we even lived with them for a couple months while we finished up our house.)

We turn in and my husband jumps out to open the gate.

I get out of the truck and here comes Doña Aurora walking down the steps towards us, an incredulous look on her face. We hug fiercely, all of us crying, then step back, look at each other and laugh, and then hug some more.

Within minutes, Aurora is taking us on a tour of the property. She shows us the new well, the fruit trees, the corn field with four different varieties of corn (an experiment funded by an outside group). As we finish up the tour, she hollers across to her daughter’s house, “Guess who is here!”

News travels fast—her daughter yells back, “Jennifer?”

I respond with a loud hallo, and then I’m wiggling between two strands of barbed wire and hugging Jeaneth, her newborn baby wedged between us.

Doña Paula, Jeaneth’s mother-in-law, is in the garden, hoeing. There are more clinging hugs, more tears. “We never thought we’d see you again! We thought you forgot us!” This is what everyone says, over and over again.

Just as we feared, no one knew we were coming. Their letters of the last few years never got through to us, and vice versa, so it’s been years since we’ve had communication. And, as no other foreign volunteers have ever returned, they’d given up hope.

What a miracle! they tell each other, shaking their heads.

The men come in from the fields. Children cluster round. The children we left thirteen years ago are now young adults, married and with children of their own. It’s both heartbreakingly nostalgic and gratifying to see that life has, indeed, gone on.

Don Kilo slaughters a kid (a goat kid, not a child) in honor of our arrival.

No small children are permitted to watch the killing, but afterwards they all gather to watch the master machete-wielder at work. Don Kilo’s wicked knife skills impress my husband to no end.

My younger son quickly makes friends with Jeaneth’s boys.

My younger daughter becomes bosom buddies with Aurora’s granddaughter.

Soon my children are running back and forth between and through houses, exploring wells, discovering shortcuts, and chasing pigs.

I need to do laundry, so Jeaneth sets me up at the well.

I welcome the solitude, a brief reprieve in the storm of emotions. Afterwards, she helps me hang the clothes on barbed wire and I hope I haven’t just succeeded in poking holes in all our clothes. (I haven’t.)

I visit with Doña Paula while she makes cuajada, something I’ve watched her do so many times before…

David, the youngest of Aurora’s 12 children, shows us our old house which is now his house.

He and his wife and their little girl sleep there, but they have a kitchen (with wood-burning stove) up at his mother’s house.

Our little house now has green walls, and a peace corp worker who lived there painted some trees on the walls, but aside from that (and minus our pretty lamps, cozy rugs, and rocking chairs, tables, mini fridge, and gas stove), it looks pretty much the same: sturdy and cute.

David takes us on a walk down to the well where we used to get our water.

In the beginning, we hauled the water up in a little bucket, and later my husband helped them seal the top and add a rope pump, but now the well is used mostly for watering animals. The baby trees that Doña Aurora planted are huge—it’s practically a forest.

Everywhere we go, there are pictures of us on people’s walls and in their photo albums.

And everywhere we go, people feed us.

Doña Paula plies us with large mugs of milky, sweet coffee and fresh rosquia and mango cake (I taught them how to make cake!) from the previous day’s baking. Doña Aurora is dismayed that we won’t be eating supper at her house and shows me the freshly killed chicken simmering away on the stove.

But we’re having goat for supper up at Doña Paula’s, I apologize.

What? You’re eating there? But what about all the food I made for you! she says, pretending to be stunned by my “betrayal.”

Irritated with her controlling, possessive behavior (she and I have always had a prickly relationship), I refuse to eat. My husband, however, accepts a plate. And then she hands out loaded plates to the children, too. They have yet to recuperate from their big lunch and look at me, panic in their eyes. You don’t have to eat it, I say. Just taste it and then hand it back and say thank you.

That evening, the women’s group and some of the husbands gather for dinner at Doña Paula’s house. Her daughter Silvia has come from up the road, and Teresa has come from a community an hour and a half away.

The women fill us in on all the group’s activities:

*After all these years, they are still an active group.
*They have a community “bank” and each year different members take on the role of accountant and president.
*They have guided three other communities in forming women’s groups and starting “banks.”
*They are a registered group, which means that the government sends new projects their way because they know the women of Casas Viejas will get the job done.
*They make braided bread and French bread at Christmas.
*They have taught other women’s groups how to make donuts and the metal cake pans that my husband taught them to make. “We teach anyone who is interested,” they say proudly. “There’s no point in keeping what we know a secret.”
*They tell me, “We have had other groups and organizations come to help us, but you were our base. We didn’t do anything before you came.”

I helped to get them started, sure, but they—these hardworking, capable, intelligent, go-getters—did all the work. I am so, so, so incredibly proud of them.

After supper, we get baths down at Doña Paula’s well, in the dark. It’s … an adventure.

And then we head over to our little house to sleep. David and his family have generously turned the whole place over to us. I am briefly dismayed by the sleeping arrangements: two beds—one a single and the other a smaller-than-normal double bed—and a hammock.

My older son sleeps in the hammock, just like he did when he was a baby, and  Doña Aurora tucks him in.

The rest of us line up like sardines and do our best to find a comfortable spot on the rock-hard beds.

To be continued…