Blast into the Past

Rainy day. Stuck inside unless I want to drown in puddles and slip and slide on our muddy dirt road. I must say, these days are really nice. The air is even a little chilly today. That’s a first.

I’ve had a lot of time during my diagnostic and interviewing time to really observe the people in my community. I’ve developed strong relationships with certain people in the community. One person that I want to share with you worth mentioning is my 76 year old grandfather. This man works like a caballo-it is written all over his sun kissed wrinkled skin. Three times a day he walks to and from his farm where he grows all the food that the family eats. He also walks his five massive cows (yes with a leash made of rope) around the community to bring them to the places where they feed on the land. I went with him one day to see part of the land that he farms. We walked over tons of plants and bushes. Thinking that we were just crossing through overgrown weeds, he explained to me that each plant actually was a crop. Great, I am stepping all over the family’s food. No te preocupes (don’t worry)-they all run over their crops apparently. Most of his crops are viveres, or starchy vegetables like potatoes, what is equivalent to sweet potato, pumpkin, and yucca. I would’ve never known that these plants actually bear food or that each one was a different type of plant as most of them looked the same.

There is something that draws me to my abuelito. Maybe it is his knowledge of the land, knowing every leaf to pick from our yard that can be used to make tea, using the direction of the sun to tell what time it is, his ability to trek up a mountain faster than me, how he walks through the streets with his machete in hand- I don’t know. There is a sense of peace that shines from him that must come from living his simple, stress free, yet laborious life. And although he is an elder in the community who is still really living by our times, in like the early 1900s or something (and not the city in the early 1900s, think middle of Kansas), he just understands me. When my uncles are around asking me questions about life in the states and they just refuse to believe certain things I say, like how when a man marries a woman, it is not socially acceptable for that man to be with other women, my abuelo will speak up “Things are different there, it isn’t like here. Men and women are faithful right?” He just genuinely understands. And by understand, by no means can he comprehend the life of someone who lives in the States, who drives to the grocery store to choose from an entire aisle what type of cereal they want for breakfast (“cereal for breakfast, what’s that?” he would say). But there is something about him that I just connect with. We are opposites -black and white, but there is some gray where we have come to develop a relationship different from anything I have ever had. I sit for hours with him underneath the big mango tree talking about everything from how the house I live in here used to be fields to grow tobacco or explaining that in California it is really four hours earlier than it is here, learning how he could never eat the cows that he raises, how he is convinced I will be sick of mangos during mango season, together trying to explain anything at all to my very senile grandmother... And sometimes we just sit in silence. But that is okay here. You don’t need to fill silence with conversation. There is no “awkward silence” and I am getting used to this. When I just don’t have anything to say, it’s nice to know that I don’t need to say anything at all.

So I hope you feel like you got a snapshot of Abuelito. He is an intelligent man- not from a University education (he cannot read or write, there was no school here when he was young)- but smart nonetheless. A University education is not the type of intelligence he can use in his daily life. It is his experience and understanding of his surroundings that is his survival kit. Intelligence isn’t necessarily packaged in the form of a book or a classroom education where I live-it is all relative.

But there is something about my abuelito. I wish I could explain in words, but I think you just need to sit with him under the mango tree to really understand.

-picture coming soon. (I know you are intrigued, don't lie) My hand held digital camera broke and with it went the photo of abuelo-