December 4, 2009
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Today I walked into a different world. It was about 2.5 kilometers away. Far enough to get my feet dusty and my nose rosy red. Patricia and I set out to visit some of the kids from the Living Stones program. She said it was far, but I figured if the kids could walk it every day, I could once. Some of the kids live in better kept houses than the others. None of them are really furnished, but…some families, while poor, their children do not go hungry
—probably about 20% of the kids in the program. Another 30% are the fluctuators—most of the time they have enough food, but that can change at any time. Then we have the 30% of the kids that most of the time don’t have food. Where being on their own to get food is normal. Where they work odd jobs, often skipping school. Then we have the 20% who don’t have bathrooms or running water or more than two changes of clothes. Many have already dropped out of school to take care of themselves and those younger than them in the family.
We saw Bruna’s house. Her grandmother takes care of them, and you can see it reflected in how they act and care for themselves. Two houses down is Iasmine’s house—an unfinished brick and cement call with two rooms the size of my closet for rooms. They held matrices for sleeping 5. It is Iasmine’s grandmother’s house. Iasmine’s mother abuses her mom, as well as regularly working at a prostitute and bringing home men into this small block building. Then to Marconi’s house, where he hid under the bed that sleeps at least 6 brothers and sisters.
The kids joined us, making a parade towards the city dump, where Karla’s dad works. I looked in and saw the piles of mess around crude constructions of trash that someone calls home. Many families live inside the dump, sorting through trash to find things to recycle. Karla’s house is made of dried compacted mud and sticks. Think of settler’s houses in the wild west. Inside held five girls under the age of six and their pet pigeon. There are nine kids all together. The youngest was born two weeks ago. Next door is Andreza’s house, where her mom told us that she was going to “take care” of Iasmine’s mom with her knife, because the girls were fighting. Patricia invited everyone to come to the church and talk, without knives.
We walked up one side of a hill/mountain and down the other until we are hot and dusty. The kids didn’t even take off their sandals before jumping into the lake. The water was perfect. I did take off my sandals first though. I dripped my way to their house—there, in the middle of nowhere, their dad decided to build a mud house. They put sticks around it, tied with barbwire to make their own area. The mom and two girls were washing clothes in the creek that runs through their fenced in area, which also served as their source of running water and I hoped not—their bathroom. Chickens and ducks rand around and one kid climbed the palm tree, got a coconut, and slip it open for us. I drank greedily, and then we ate the meat of the coconut. Delicious.
Imagine living a mile from anything, your own lake to swim in, but no bathtub. No electricity, except a neighbor’s radio blasting Fergy’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” Eight kids in a mud house the size of my living room. And my living room is small.
I walked into a different world today. And then I walked back. Over dirt trails and around lake Orar. I got home and took a shower, because I’d already been warned that everyone who swims in lago Orar gets worms. And I just finished taking worm medicine for the last time I got them. Then I cut up a fresh pineapple for dinner and watch a bad bootleg copy of New Moon. In Portuguese. It is a different world. And I seem to drift through worlds fluidly. Until I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder where I am. In less than two weeks I will be in a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. The airport is a world of it’s own. And then cold and snow and family and Christmas. That is another world. I like visiting them all. I smile with my sun burnt cheeks and belly full of coconut. It would be an adventure to live in a mud house. To learn to wash clothes in a river before I learned how to read.
