Riches

Ismael went into the woods near his ranch, El Ojo de Agua, to help us find some leaf litter to use as fertilizer for our garden. He knew a place where trees had been felled and sawn into boards years before. Now the bed of sawdust had rottened into soil.

With every swing of his mattock he dug a foot into the ground bringing up a pile of dirt the texture of moist cornmeal. "¡Ire!" Look at this, he exclaimed with every new strike. I felt like we were mining black gold. This well composted sawdust is just what we need in the garden to help loosen the clay soil and lower the pH.

I was working nearby scooping already heaped leaf litter into a used feed sack. In my hand I noticed a cup shaped object about the size of a pingpong ball. "What is this?" I asked in Spanish and put it in his calloused palm.

"Oh, it comes from the trees. It's dirt," he said as he crumbled with his fingers.

"Ire." Again he dug another deep scoop of delicious earth. Now I had half of a nut in my hand; it reminded me of a small black walnut shell.

"Look at this," I said as I handed it over.

"Nogal," he responded. I looked around for the familiar nut tree. He pointed to our left, "It's over there."

We continued working; him diging, me filling large bags. "They say soil is richest if there are many different kinds of leaves and organic matter in it," Ismael informed me.

"Yes, it's true for people, too. Those who are friends with many different kinds of people are the richest in love."

"Estoy de acuerdo," he agreed.

One Pine Tree At a Time

Yuya dropped by yesterday afternoon to get a tour of our garden. She usually has classes at the preparatory school in Ciudad del Maíz on Wednesdays, but the teachers had meetings all day and she got a day off.

Her first question was about all the tall grasses that I cultivate in the garden. They are wheat, barley, oats, and buckwheat that I grow to cut for making compost. Later in the spring I'll let them grow to seed which I'll collect for the next round of compost crops. (I only use open pollinated varieties, so I can save seeds to use and share.) We checked out the new compost pile I'm building up with all the plant materials that I'm clearing before a flurry of planting next week. I described the layers of green materials, the dry materials (sawdust right now because I don't have anything else), and the thinner layer of garden soil that is a catalyst for the good changes in a compost pile. In a way, it feels like I'm making a rich meal for the soil. I feed the soil; it feeds me. This made sense to Yuya.

She told me that she had taken a class last year in which they planted, tended, and harvested a garden at school. She liked to spend every spare moment after class in the garden. Here at home in Papagayos it's hard for her to keep a garden. Her mother's chickens scratch out everything she plants unless she covers the new baby plants with a lot of thorny brush. Even then, the children in the neighborhood often make a mess of things because she isn't around most of the time to watch over her garden.

Yuya went on to talk about her current classes; her favorite is Ecology. She has hopes for planting shade trees here in our village, especially near the Catholic chapel, the three schools, and the town playing field where soccer, baseball, and horse races happen in their seasons. I was delighted to hear of her thinking about this type of project, because I share her interest in planting and caring for beautiful public trees. She was a little frustrated, however, because she had recently found out that an opportunity to do just this had been lost to Papagayos. The town judge had been given the paperwork to apply for a state funded program of reforestation. Signatures had to be collected and the papers returned by a deadline. He did nothing with them. If only she had known, she would have willingly taken this responsibility on herself. "If we don't take action to care for our village, no one will," she said in exasperation.

During our first year here, Steve and I worked with students at the middle school to transplant trees in their schoolyard. Only a few have survived, but it was a start that I wanted Yuya to know about. She and I walked around to the shady side of our house to see the 38 young piñon pine trees that I sprouted last fall. I also have planted and am waiting for the sprouting of a few mesquitillo seedlings. The mesquitillo is a lovely local hardwood tree that has been completely eliminated close to our village because of over-harvesting and no reforestation. Through EcoSol we have made contact with the NGO Reforestamos México. (See the link to their website below.) They are providing educational and technical assistance to local groups all over the country to plant new forests and improve the health of existing woodlands. They are helping me learn to grow seedlings for future transplanting.

Yuya and I agreed that if each person takes action and does what she or he can, we will create a greener world.

A Spanish Lesson

Before we moved to Mexico, Laurel and I had been enrolled in an advanced level Spanish class in Vermont, so we naturally assumed fluency would be a small additional step once we were surrounded by Spanish-speaking neighbors. Now that we've lived here two and a half years, that ultimate goal of fluency seems farther away than ever. The more we learn, the more we realize we don't know.

There's an expression people use here that caught my fancy. It is used whenever someone is explaining their failure to remember something. For the last couple years I have misheard it as semi olvidé, which I understood to mean "I halfway forgot." I liked the way it seemed to minimize personal responsibility, with the implicit claim that one's memory was only partly defective. It especially appealed to me when the speaker included the adverb completamente, as in "I halfway forgot completely."

I was joking about this expression the other day with our neighbor Chayo, who patiently explained that I had it all wrong. I tried weakly arguing for my version, holding out for the prefix semi. Chayo admitted the prefix has a use; she sells 2% milk in her store that is semidescremada, or "halfway uncreamed." But she wouldn't budge on the phrase in question. And who am I to argue with an expert in the Spanish language?

It turns out there is no halfway about it. The expression I had misunderstood for so long is really se me olvidó, which means "it forgot itself to me." Now that I'm getting used to saying it correctly, I've decided I like it even better than my other version. Before I was halfway responsible for forgetting something, but now, when something forgets itself to me, I am completamente innocent.

Grow Where You Are Transplanted

I've always kept a garden. Our family had a Memorial Day Weekend ritual of rototilling and planting a summer garden in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. One year, a new boy in the neighborhood passed by and asked my father, “Where did you get all that dirt?” I always knew there was good earth under my feet.

In October, 2006, less than one month after we moved to Papagayos, we set to work clearing sods from a three foot by twelve foot patch of ground. We hauled in sand and learned from our neighbor Hector how to collect tierra de la sierra or leaf litter from under the large oak trees in the hills that surround our village. We scratched these soil amendments into the wet native clay soil. Then we planted lettuce, beets, garlic, spinach, and peas which we harvested until April.

Since that first garden bed we have expanded to thirteen double-dug beds for a total of almost 500 square feet of planting surface. Growing a garden here keeps me learning, thinking, and talking with our neighbors.

An elderly friend who has lived here all her life visited that first garden bed. She was pleased to see the greens and root crops and was impressed by the peas. But she had to ask what the plants were with the knife-like leaves. When I told her they were garlic she clasped her hand to her mouth. “I didn't know you could grow garlic here!” I thought to myself, I didn't know you couldn't. We have a lot to share with each other.

Some of the issues that had to be puzzled through included how to work with this heavy clay soil, how to manage a growing season 362 days long, and how to recalibrate my four-season-gardening mindset to a wet season/dry season climate. There is still a lot to learn. I haven't yet found a source for statistics on seasonal high and low temperatures and average monthly rainfall, though there is a weather recording station about two miles from here. Neither have I found a regional seed catalog and the choices in Ciudad del Maíz are meager.

All the challenges are outweighed by the ease of growing greens year round, eating strawberries in January and February, and harvesting peas over a five month period from one planting.

I've heard it said that one should grow wherever one is transplanted – and I intend to keep doing so.

I Really Should Stay Awake at EcoSol Meetings

For about a year now we've been meeting with an organization called EcoSol, which is an acronym for Económica Solidaridad. Sponsored by the Catholic diocese, this group promotes economic solidarity by providing technical and moral support for projects that its members want to carry out. At our local level, there are usually no more than about ten to twenty participants, and it has been lovely to be part of this close-knit community. The main work we have done together is to build eight greenhouses in the last several months (including one at our house, shown in the photo on the day it was blessed back in December). In spite of being the only non-Catholics in the group, we have felt very welcome and included.

The other day EcoSol met to build another greenhouse, and after lunch (we always eat well) there was some group business to discuss. The combination of a warm afternoon, a full stomach, and Spanish conversation flowing too fast for me to comprehend all conspired to lull me into, well, if not an actual nap, then perhaps extreme drowsiness. However, I snapped back into wakefulness when I heard the priest Padre Salvador mention our names "Esteban y Laurel." With us struggling to understand even the gist of the topic under discussion and everyone else struggling to explain (all at the same time), Laurel and I finally figured out that they were trying to create a new volunteer position of group coordinator, and they planned on us being the ones to fill it. When our simple shaking of heads and wagging of forefingers (the classic Mexican gesture for NO) proved ineffectual, we tried to explain that the very fact we didn't understand what they were talking about should be reason enough to disqualify us. They weren't buying it. Finally, we thought of another reason that it didn't make sense for us to lead. We explained that we believe the history of racism and imperialism between the United States and Mexico means it makes more sense for us to back the leadership of Mexicans instead of us slipping into a pattern of taking charge. Although they assured us of our equality within the group, I think they could hear our argument as valid. We promised we would continue to wholeheartedly support the group from within the ranks and without a title.

Cultural Differences

Often it's the little things that stand out as cultural differences. En route from the border the other day, we stopped for lunch at a little shack along the roadside. There was a trailer truck idling outside, so we figured the food would be good. It was, and the woman who cooked and served our meal was friendly. When I asked her for a chocolate milk, she poured me a tall glass of milk and handed me a jar of powdered cocoa so I could mix my own. But I didn't have a spoon, so I asked for one. I hadn't noticed the jar of small plastic spoons in the center of our table. She reached for the jar and accidentally dropped it. The jar shattered, spilling its contents on the dirt floor around and under my chair. As she bent to pick up the mess, she handed me one of the spoons from the floor. I shrugged mentally as I almost unconsciously noted this as a cultural difference. A waitress in the United States probably would have found a clean spoon somewhere to give me. As our Mexican waitress continued to reach under my chair to clean up the spill, I noticed that my personal space (as defined by my culture) was being invaded. And as I measured out the cocoa powder into my milk, I realized that this short spoon would never reach the bottom of the tall glass, and so I wouldn't be able to stir the milk thoroughly. Not a big deal, but I couldn't help thinking that a "real restaurant," the kind I am used to, would have suitable spoons. Meanwhile, the radio was turned up too loud for my taste, and when the trucker outside started playing his competing music at top volume, the cacophony was jarring to me. It didn't seem to bother anyone else.

Laurel and I have come to use the term "cultural abrasions" to describe these small cultural differences They are the little things that rub us the wrong way. Any one incident by itself is insignificant, but they add up to a sense of discomfiture. It is too easy to feel one's own culture is superior; that this waitress, this restaurant, this country called Mexico are all doing it wrong. It is an ongoing struggle to maintain an open mind and heart, but a struggle that is worth the effort. Through the process of accepting cultural differences as valid, I have the opportunity of examining my own values and priorities, and ultimately noticing the similarities we humans share.

Welcomed Back as Friends and Neighbors

We arrived back in Papagayos yesterday afternoon after a month long visit to Vermont and Oregon. As we entered the village we started seeing many friends so we rolled down our windows to shout greetings and wave. Our young friend Alex was heading out to help his cousin feed a horse at his grandparent's house. He caught a glimpse of us before the body of the horse blocked his view. He squatted down to smile and wave to us. We saw him framed between the belly of the horse, its legs and the ground. We felt well loved, returning to this place where we are welcomed as friends and neighbors.

Chayo and Hector didn't come greet us even though their house looked like they were at home. While we were unloading things from the pickup, Chayo whistled so we'd know she was coming over. We stopped our labors and went to shake hands, embrace and exchange kisses on the cheek. She told us she hadn't heard our diesel truck as we drove in. It wasn't until she was sitting in front of her house working on her embroidery that she noticed our truck was here and the doors of our house opened wide. We asked her what was new and she said everything was the same as always.

Even though I'm used to getting all the news of the village from my good friend Chayo, it wasn't until later we found out that the house next door has been sold after a year of being on the market. The roof has been finished on the living quarters for the teachers of the middle school. A neighbor who lives in the compound across the street from us got a bad bite from the fierce dog who lives in back of us. The man needed four stitches on his upper arm. Big news for this quiet town.