People All Around Us

But very little intimacy.  I am beginning to understand the loneliness and isolation of immigrants. While we have the unique experience of getting to spend each and every day together as a family from sun-up to sun-down, I am beginning to miss the voices of others.  

Language barrier, it is called-- and rightly so because the inability to talk with anyone beyond casual greetings and simple chatter creates an invisible yet tangible wall between their lives and yours.  There are thousands and thousands of people around us every day.  We look down into their houses and yards and streets, we see their cars and motorbikes and children as we walk past daily; we encounter boys buying meat for their mothers at the shop down the road, we hear the owner bid them "tell your mami hello" but we are locked out of the intimacy, of the knowing, of the sending a greeting to a relation.  And it is lonely, in a strange way, to be around so many people and know no one.  There is a constant feeling of being conspicuously invisible: conspicuous because we look different than the locals and invisible because we are not part of their world but only passing through.

The strangest interactions create familiarity when humans cannot connect through words.  

A man on a horse pats my head three times.  

A prostitute beside us on the bus bonds with Annika.  Annika, being enamored with the black netting on the woman's arm and kept reaching out and stroking it so gently, saying "hmm," and "mmmm" empathetically (I don't know if she thought it was some kind of bandage or what?).   After the initial awkwardness of my child insisting on touching this woman's arm wore off, the woman took Annika's foot in her hand and tickled it softly while Annika relaxed and laid her head down on my chest. 

After the woman had gotten off at her stop Annika fussed and pointed to her foot, saying "more."

A gracious man at the farmer's market slowly and carefully explains how to eat the mysterious fruits at his stand and then compliments my Spanish (which is terrible, I feel, by now)

And Rigo, the landscaper here plays endlessly with Annika and the dogs, both shouting with joy in their own languages at each other and the dogs while laughing and running around.

There are so many things I want to know about life here.  What do the children do during the day?  Do most women stay home or do a lot of women work?  What do people eat for dinner at night and what time do they like to go to bed?  How many people go to church and what is the divorce rate?  What are their pet-peeves with their government and politicians? What organizations and causes do people here support? Who travels and where? 

But I am locked into my usual "which way is the bus stop?" or "do you sell aspirin?" 

I am learning a lot about what it means to be an outsider-- sometimes it means being unable to find out what you want to know at all. 

Blank

Writer's block follows you wherever you may go.

Out in the World

We are here in Costa Rica and we are having the time of our lives.  After just a few days we are falling into the routine-- early rising but late departing, slow but decided traveling interspersed with patchwork conversations in Spanish, lots of cooking, little spending, and a wealth of experience.  

We are living about half-way up a mountain in a house that overlooks Escazu and San Jose and we are looked-over by Tiquicia, the mountain-top community.  Yesterday, we walked down the mountain in the rain to see something of the city and today we walked up.  Yesterday traffic increased to a nerve-wracking and constant zoom of trucks, taxis and cars as we descended (pedestrians do not have the right-of-way here in Costa Rica and the roads are very small with no sidewalks in many places) and the smell of food cooking, car exhaust, and general human activity filled our nostrils.  Today on our hike upwards traffic all but stopped completely when the high roads became unnavigable paths, the people were most scarce and spread out, all busy within their occupations solitarily picking berries from coffee trees nestled in mountainside groves, or slowly ascending a path home with a sac or basket in hand.   One woman sorted bottles for recycling in her kitchen and two men worked a tomato and pepper farm under long strips of plastic that create a greenhouse.  Some invisible people called down from a neighboring mountainside dense with vegetation.  Who knows what work they were doing.  

We met various tios, tias, una mama, muchos amigos, y primos y primas of the people working and living where we are staying; we made awkward and choppy conversation in Spanish and then rehashed the conversations later in English.  Almost everyone has been very nice-- all except a taxi driver who tried to swindle us for not even taking us anywhere the other day!  

It's worth mentioning that since we've been here the three of us have eaten about six avacados, a load of beans and rice, fresh local huevos bought at room temperature and home-made tortillas from a vendor down the road.  We have also been drinking local coffee.

It's also worth mentioning that I have seen a species of hummingbird that I do not recognize at all, several butterflies and birds that I have never seen, a ton of lush floral vegetation that I have no name for (I feel like an infant sometimes in this country!)  Even as I have been sitting here writing this post we had a species emergency.  We both had to drop everything to stand at the window and gawk at a flock of about 50 bright green parrots or parakeets swooping around just outside of the house.  Vultures are regular patrolers of our view, some bright blue bird likes to play in a tree in the yard, and we've even seen the occasional seagull, even though there are no beaches around here.  Our environment is a caucophany of birdsong day and night which mingles with the goat bleeting, dog barking, and occasional cow-moo of the other local creatures.  

Somehow electricity and city water make it all the way up here.  Any higher, in Tiquicia, for example, there is still electricty but instead of city water, huge trucks haul up to fill tanks in people's yards .  How the people at the top get water?  No se.  Although I have to say that I have been constantly amazed at the wide variety of trucks, buses, and manual-shift vehicles that negotiate the perilous steeps all day long.  I wouldn't be surprised if water trucks somehow do make it to the top.  From my window I shake my head as I see long buses and weighed-down trucks huffing slowly upward, practically perpendicular to the tiny road they drive on.  I am equally amazed at how fast the local boys speed down the same tiny roads on their motorbikes, whipping around no-visibility turns without the slightest hesitation, even knowing that they might be rudely greeted by the grill of a truck or bus.  

This is where I feel at home.  Even though I feel completely conspicuous, totally naive and utterly inept at communicating, I feel at home where I get to see another culture in action.  I am constantly wondering and speculalting about people's lives, histories, futures, and passions.  I feel totally invigorated by the challenge of making sense out of a culture that I do not understand.  I revel in the paradoxes and desire to know more and more.  

I know this will be a great vacation; I know it will be too short.

Pura Vida!

I Like Paying Taxes

Benjamin Franklin:

“I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

OUT OF CONTACT

Well, folks, Jeremy and I have been wrapping up our affairs here in Rockford to prepare for our trip! I have been working triple-time on my homework to get a large portion of it out of the way, we winterized our yard and did a nice thorough cleaning this weekend, we are packing and arranging to get away!

We will be off the radar though. We will have a very frequent online presence but, it sounds crazy, you won't hear our voices while we're gone. Neither of our phones will work where we'll be at so that's it... we'll be conversing in text for the next month. Stay tuned in to the blog (you'll find all the greatest goods here at Fly, Mama! yeah!) and we'll keep you updated. We'll be on Facebook too and checking our email, so keep in touch!

YOU GIRLS who are having babies while we're away, I want all of the details... I can't wait to see your new family members; I'm getting nervous for you. I wish I was going to be here with you. So please, have your husbands update at least for you... especially while in labor, if possible!!!

Okay! Well, separation is good for the heart, so I know you all will love us when we get back! (Finally, damn!)

REVOLUTION

Okay Folks,
It's time for a revolution. It's called the no-garbage revolution! In the spirit of the last post, I would like to challenge you and all your friends and family to rise up and make some not-so-difficult lifestyle adjustments that will make a huge impact on our environment, our cities, and our own lives!

I am asking you to make and meet a goal of producing only 1/4 of the garbage you produce today by the end of 2009. Watch what you bring to your curb for a couple of weeks. Imagine that garbage out of the bag, and on your lawn. Then multiply it by 52 for that number of weeks in one year and add a few more imagined bags of gobble-de-gook garbage to account for the number of times you have parties, or clean out closets. Can you still see your yard? Well, let me tell you that you would have to have a mighty big yard to not fill it with the trash you throw out in a year. This may not concern you, friend, readers, busy folks of the world who don't think about trash because it is whisked swiftly from your curbside each week while you sleep. But it should.

It should because you are indeed filling up some yard somewhere with your trash every week and so is your neighbor to the left, your neighbor to the right, and all your neighbors, friends, colleagues, enemies, and ministers. Can you fathom the amount of garbage that it adds up to?

I cannot. I also cannot fathom the fact that we have no useful way of getting rid of this enormous amount of reek-ed waste besides piling it up and then burying it and then piling it up again and burying it.

Think about your garden this next spring: imagine the delicate tendrils of pea plants reaching up and unfolding their delicate purple faces, your soft sage and sweet basil, the ripe and rotund red tomatoes bulging on their vines. Imagine the rich black soil-- and just beneath the surface: batteries leaking acid, old cellphones and radios bleeding mercury and poison into the earth, disease-laden dirty diapers and rusty needles, sharp broken glass and even wadded soaked and molding phone books, fat and useless but unable to decompose in their anaerobic environment of sewage and squelch.

Wait! Don't burn the garden yet. While this is the reality of many low-income Americans whose homes have been built on old covered waste piles, it doesn't have to be yours-- or anyone else's. This is a problem that must be solved by the makers of the waste. Believe me, in this economy and political climate (especially for those of us who live in bankrupt Illinois) improving our "waste management" system is at the bottom of a long list of other priorities-- the only thing below that is improving our education system... But happily, while we cannot all go into the classroom and teach, we can all put a GREAT HALT on the amount of garbage that we dump into the system.

I purpose for all of my friends, relatives, and colleagues to give this challenge their greatest effort for one year just to see how it goes. Here is the plan:

1. If you don't have recycling bins and a smoothly-running system for recycling at your home, do that first! This is the foundation of the plan. Almost everything can be recycled... and it's not very hard to do. The easiest way to ensure that things get recycled, is to create bins for recyclable items that are right by the garbage can or as easily accessible-- especially in the kitchen. If it's a pain to bring the items to the bin, they won't be brought. Instead of just a garbage can, have two-- one for recycling and one for garbage. You'll be amazed at how less-quickly your garbage can fills up, just because of recycling.
2. Compost Foodwaste. I realize that this is where I start to lose people, but hold on! This is so easy. People get very intimidated by things they have never done before and have a hard time taking that first step. I want to encourage you to take the step and find out later how easy COMPOSTING can be! For a container, there is something for everyone: you can make your own if you're industrious like that, or you can buy any kind of container: underground, cone-shaped, solar powered, a rubbermaid box container, or even a round turning container. These come in a very wide range of prices from $20 all the way up to over a hundred; each style has pros and cons, and you should choose not by price but by convenience. If you don't mind turning the pile and adding water on a regular basis, go cheap and do the work yourself. If you know you won't want to turn the pile or do the extra work, splurge and buy the one that works for you so that you can make good use of your purchase. And then USE IT! It is so easy. Almost everything can go into a compost container: Food scraps (but not meat, folks), yard waste (and it should go in, between layers of food waste), torn up paper, paper towels and napkins, tissues, swept-up debris from your floors, even the stuff from your vacuum cleaner!
3. Try to buy with some amount of consciousness about packaging. I know this is hard because everything is over-packaged in America, but lean away from boxes of singly-packed food items and buy in bulk for things like laundry detergent and other things you use a lot of.
4. Somewhere in your house-- whether hidden away in a closet or whatever-- label a few boxes for those things that you just know you're not supposed to throw away but you just sneak into the garbage -- just a few AA batteries at a time doesn't hurt right?-- because you don't want to go find a special recycling place every time you change a lightbulb or a battery. Then you have an easy place to put those items when you use them. As the box is filling up over time, you can consider your options for disposing of the items in a responsible way. By the time you're ready to dump them, you'll know where the most convenient drop-off place is for you.

The thing to do when changing some long-lived habits, is to do it in a way that works for you. Don't make it a chore to recycle and compost. Instead, create reliable and easy systems that do the work for you. You will see that all of this can be so easy if you get creative in planning your system so that it works around the needs of you and your family.

At the end of 2009, after having successfully implemented these core goals of responsible waste management, you will be able to look at the amount of trash you're adding to the big pile and feel good because it won't be much-- it will be less than a quarter of what you add now. So when you're calculating all those nasty trash numbers in your head, think about how your cutting back and being responsible will carry over years and years of less garbage. It's one place where we can make a huge difference without much inconvenience at all.

So I challenge you, friends, 2009 Take Responsibility for Your Footprint

Your garden will thank you too, in 2010 when you pack all that rich compost on it-- and you will thank you when those tomatoes, peas, and herbs come bursting from their bed.

Sometimes a Stiff Drink is in Order

Some coping mechanisms when motherhood tramples and you become defeated.

1. Take a walk-- Rain or shine, even though it's the last thing you want to do when you're feeling beaten down. If you make yourself do it, you are sure to feel better-- even if only for the time you're walking.

2. Get OUT of the house! Go ANYWHERE that your child can get out and play too-- likely she needs exercise too because when moms don't exercise, the kids don't exercise... and it's a recipe for disaster. Got to n indoor or outdoor park, to the play area at the mall, find a pool to go swimming in or go to the library and let her hang with other kids in the children's section.

3. Forget the nap that she won't lay down for and read Dora books together in a secret fort.

4. When she does finally lay down for bed or nap (because everyone eventually sleeps) DO NOT clean your house, do homework, or any other such work. Instead, kick back to an audiobook and a glass of wine in bed no matter the time of day or night. Or lay down and sleep hard no matter what time it is.

5. Surround yourself with other moms whose parenting you respect and who can be honest about their hard times too, then lean on them for mama-support!

6. Don't lose control. In other words, don't hit, push, squeeze, slap, or hurt your child in any way

7. Then, LOSE THE GUILT. All mamas and dads make mistakes-- but these mistakes help your kids to see you as a complete person and helps them to understand that people are complex and nothing is perfect. It spices up their perspective of you! So, consider your mistakes learning experiences and don't beat yourself up.

8. Breathe. Isn't this what we tell our children to do? Let's remember it ourselves.


Tomorrow is another day. This is the adventure of a lifetime.