Saira

I didn't know until about 5:00 this afternoon when I was at Casa Uno, but this morning, Saira left. Carlos Omar came up to me and told me that it was just him and Ricky left. I didn't understand. And then he said she had gone. I asked around. Ricky and others confirmed. So after, Abdul and Cristian Guerra wanted to teach me about soccer. Of course, I couldn't focus on their Spanish explanations of the rules. They had to say them over and over. Finally, for a few seconds, the indistinct shock and pain did disappear into the game, into the gateless driveway that we were using as a goal.

In Spanish, the word for fun is diversión. A diversion, a distraction. And it did distract me from my worries for a few minutes. Of course the kids love to play fútbol, to have fun.

I heard that she ran away, escaped from school during a test. I imagined her, white and navy uniform and all, crawling through the hole near the end of the chainlink fence. Now I know that she left in a car, with her mom. Karla saw her go, said she left with only her plastic, shoebox-sized Ayyám-i-Há gift box in her hands and the clothes on her back.

I think Saira was twelve. She may have been just a mediana, but she was my friend. She taught me the handsong with that really fast part, "Hola, comadrita. ¿Cómo estás?" I taught her how to knit.

The other girls tell me that she wanted to go. That she had been crying. I didn't know. I hadn't seen her for a few days. And I ate with the grandes instead last night. I taught her class yesterday, but she didn't participate. Quiet and invisible. So, the last I really remember of Saira was when we walked back from the terreno together. I got a picture of her swimming that day. She didn't talk much as she walked beside me with wet hair and shoulders wrapped up in a towel. Rosa and I were having a linguistic discussion about words like cheque and masiso. I guess I lost Saira that afternoon, somewhere on the road. I didn't know for how long.

I am asking myself several questions: Was I really her only friend, someone else to disappear? Did she get angry with me after I gave her a pretty stern lecture about how to treat books? Why didn't she tell me she was leaving? Because others seemed to know.

But there is one question I just can't get out of my head.

Were there two wooden knitting needles and a small ball of yarn in that little plastic container she left with?

26 March 2008, 7:23 pm

sitting on the back porch in afternoon

I'm reading in the shade while my clothes, the ones I just worked over an hour to wash by hand, bake in the sun. (So it must be that our house faces east.) The back yard is more of a gulley of dust, rocks, and roosters than a yard. And there are enough banana trees, with their hearts hanging out, to wrap a clothesline around so that it zig-zags once, twice, three times toward the place where we throw our biodegradable trash.

A wind just came through, gusting across the tops of the banana trees, and I worried about my laundry that I can't see. It's blocked by the white wall of the porch, with its garlic growing in cut-off bottoms of plastic pop bottles. But I can see through the break in the wall, where the steps are, that my skirt didn't even flinch at the wind.

As I watch it dry faster than I've ever seen clothes dry in the sun, I remember "helping" Nana when I was a kid, putting out the laundry and gathering it back up again. I didn't know then that it meant she was -- we were -- poor. We might have been saving electricity, but it wasn't to save the environment. No, there was nothing green about us, especially not the insides of our pockets. Green. I guess I was. I just liked running through the damp, billowing sheets, like they were the walls of a palace labyrinth. So we were as rich as I thought we were, as happy and as high as these bananas and mangoes that won't be ready to be picked for another few weeks.

02/23/08, 3 pm

This is just to say

I'm in Honduras.

The people are beautiful.

I start teaching English next week.

I don't know how often I will be able to update.

Email is more personal.

I hope everyone is well.

I am.

How much stuff does it take to make a gringa feel safe?

Apparently, a lot. I mean, I know I have a stuff problem. I know I'm taking too much with me, but after several rounds of elimination, I can't pare it down any more. Something tells me this needing stuff thing is going to change soon. I hope so anyway.

If I'm lucky, three hours of sleep, and then I'm off.

thawed out

Yesterday was our third day without power. Ice dragged down trees and power lines while we slept on Monday night so that, on Tuesday, we woke up without lights or, more importantly, heat. We all complained about it. Oh, the inconvenience, the cold, the unwashed hair.

Several people joked with me that it would be good practice for Honduras, which has frequent power outages.

During the day, we took refuge in the houses of family members with power (ie, hot water, American Idol) or at the Poole Restaurant, whose owners seemd not to mind that we used their electrical outlets to charge our cell phones. But at night, we would come home, light the kerosene heater upstairs to keep the pipes from freezing, and crawl under the covers in the basement, where the temperature remained, due to some fact of geothermal science, a steady 55 degrees.

At about 5:45 yesterday morning, Mom's shuffling around to get ready for work for the first time in a few days woke me up, and I had to pee. I went upstairs, where I had to bypass the kerosene heater on the way to the bathroom. On my way back, I couldn't convince myself to go back downstairs when I could stay by the heater. While I hovered around the heat, I noticed the sky getting pink around the edges of the fields. The sun was going to be up soon.

Instead of going back to bed like I would have done if the whole house had been warm and cozy, I stayed up and watched the sunrise. Everyone knows the sunrise is beautiful, magical, something almost miraculous that, when you actually see it, you can't believe it happens every day. So my description would be superfluous.

At 1:17 yesterday afternoon, the power came back on. I was sitting upstairs beside the heater with two layers of clothes on and reading the newspaper. I was quite comfortable, so the lights popping on, which I hardly noticed because the natural light was sufficient, was sort of anticlimactic. Needless to say, we were grateful, though. I wasted no time to get in the shower once the hot water heater recovered.

However, I have to admit that I was also a teensy bit grateful for the power being out. It was humbling because it reminded me of how incredibly spoiled I am. Though unpleasant, a gently wake-up call is much appreciated. And it got me just uncomfortable enough to get up to see the sun rise over the snow-covered fields and the ice-coated trees. How could I be upset about that?