Thoughts from El Roblar, written August 9

Sitting in my eight by six foot brick room, I contemplate the walls (three plain brick and one half of one brick painted white), the single light bulb, and the tin roof, squeaking tat tat tat as the rain falls down. My bed, a wooden frame covered with a few pillows and a fabulous wool blanket, is covered with an exotic looking light green mosquito net, which I hope is keeping me safe from such interesting illnesses as malaria and denghue fever. This small room and comfortable (if hard) bed, as well as electric plug to which I can connect this foreign laptop computer, strike me as absolute luxury in this setting. Who would have known that I could here sleep so well.
En el campo, everything is made with corn. From guerila (green corn tortillas), to atoll (ground corn cooked with sugar until thick), to tamales dulces (corn meal mixed with sugar and then cooked in the cascara of the corn), to nacatamales (corn meal and rice and pollo cooked in banana leaves), to regular tortillas. Maiz, and the other “granos básicos” make up the regular diet of almost all campesinos, interspliced with some cooked tomatoes, avocadoes, papas, or something of the like. Dessert can be anything from atoll, to an actual sugar cane, which you suck on until you wish to spit it out. According to my plan, and that of the family abuela, I should come home able to make any and all of these meals.
Rubber boots seem to me an absolute necessity for campo life, where, despite there being a huge amount of work to be done, life moves slowly. People are all awake from 5 or six in the morning, making tortillas, or feeding the pigs, but then pass the day either in the kitchen (a large room with a mud floor, an open flame stove top, and a stone slab onto which a faucet drops water) or on the veranda, playing guitar and talking. As the day draws to a close, the family (and others, who suddenly appear from anywhere) gather around the small television to watch the novellas of the “mexicanos dramaticos”, in which the wife of one man now has to move with him to the house of his brother, who is actually the father of her newborn child. Gasps and giggles emanate from the entire crowd as the hour progresses.
Who knew how many new things a person can learn in a day, or feel adjusted to. Today I climbed a waterfall, ate sugar cane cut with a machete, used a giant malanga leaf as a rain hat, and walked along with two young men who brought a machete “en caso de que”. I played at piedritas con Jocelyn (throwing up a marble, trying to agarrar some semillas antes de que the marble lands again on the tile floor). Tomorrow, the five foot grandmother Dora is to teach me about the washing of clothes here, which will then be hung up on the barbed wire clotheslines dispersed around the outside of the house. Funny too, and wonderful, how all of the sudden, in this atmosphere, things like cold showers attained by pouring bowls full of water over one’s head, and putting on one’s boots to traipse through the mud to the outhouse seem perfectly natural.
As I continue to live here, my mind moves more and more back to its Spanish language banks. Las palabras se me salen, though they may not be proper “nica” speak. But I am learning it, chinchelas for sandals, calcomanillas son stickers, para alli voy.
Though I am not sure just how this project or this year will take shape, I am trying to soak up all that I can. To come away knowing much more about agriculture, about coffee, about cooperatives (not in theory, but in practice), and about what it is to wake up under a mosquito net in a small brick room, to face the day, and find out what is entailed in that.