In all the spare time we've had during
the school vacation over the past two months, Davie has been laboring
away, creating a garden from the dry dirt in our back yard. We've
planted papaya, zucchini, tomato, pepper, celery, basil, and mint. So
when our friend Pedro whipped out a bag full of ginger – my
favorite spice ever – to sell at the market last Friday, Davie was
all aflutter, wanting to know how he had grown it and what other
delicious produce he was hiding from us on his little farm.
Obligingly, Pedro invited us to come over to his house the next day.
So on Saturday we hiked an hour through
the mountains along the dirt road to Pedro's house in the community
of Potrerillos. It was a little adobe house with an orange tree out
front, nestled in the complete silence of this remote community.
After offering us the obligatory too-sweet cafecito, Pedro took us on
a tour of his farm.
At first glance, it didn't look like
much. He showed us the fields of green onions and cabbages, where his
brothers and father were working, and then took us up to an area that
looked to be covered in weeds. But then he started pulling those
weeds up, one by one revealing them to be ginger, cilantro, onions,
oregano, lemongrass. And with each delicious new herb that he
unearthed, he gave us some to plant or eat.
On and on the magical
farm-of-hidden-produce went. We hiked up through thickets of banana
trees and Pedro pulled up a “malanga,” a potato-like vegetable
that people deep-fry to make “tajadas,” or chips. He gave us the
malanga and threw its buds back into the ground to sprout anew. He
took us to see his garden of chamomile and red lettuce, which grow
well together, he said. And then, before heading back to the house,
he hacked down a long stick of sugar cane with his machete, peeled
it, and cut off bits of it for us to chew on.
By the time we got back to his house,
Pedro's sister had cooked up some beans and tamales for us for lunch.
After lunch, Pedro climbed up the orange tree in front of the house
and picked all of the ripe oranges, tossing them into a sack for us
to take with us. We tried to give him some money for everything he
had given us, but he refused it, and we walked away weighted down
with a huge sack of just-picked produce.
Since we were already in Potrerillos,
we decided to go visit our friend Maria, who lives just next door to
Pedro. Maria is the only teacher at the primary school in Quebrada de
Agua, just down the road, and I tutor her in English.
When we got to her house, Maria was out
back doing laundry while her husband showered with their three kids.
She invited us into their kitchen and I helped make some orange juice
with oranges she had just picked, while she made cuajada, a kind of
cheese. Pigs and chickens wandered into the kitchen while we talked,
and her kids scared them off. Her daughter sewed dresses for her doll
from scraps of old pillowcases and showed them off to me.
Before we left, Maria loaded us up with
the cuajada she had just made and three eggs that the chickens had
just laid, and sent Lenard Paul, her oldest son, to accompany us up
the hill. We would have to come back sometime, she said, so Davie
could slaughter one of their chickens and she could teach us how to
make chicken soup.
When we got to the road that descends
to San Nicolas, a little snag-toothed boy who we had never seen
before road up to us on his bicycle. “Hi!” he said (in Spanish),
“What's your name?” We introduced ourselves and he introduced
himself, and then he said, “Okay, I'll see you on Sunday!” and
rode off on his bike. Having never seen this boy before, we thought
it was pretty funny that he was so confident that he would see us on
Sunday. We laughed and went down the hill to San Nicolas.
But the next day at mass, during the
offering of the peace, there was that same snag-toothed little boy.
He came up to us, smiling shyly, offering his hand, saying, “Paz.”
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