The Man with the Wire

There is this guy that stands on the side of the road holding a piece of wire. He is there pretty much every time I ride the bus to town. He is just standing there, his feet planted in the same exact place everytime I go by, with the wire rather carelessly dangling in his hands. It is attached to something, I assume, but nothing appears to be happening. As we bump on by, he turns, squinting with his eyebrows in a perturbed arc, as if questioning what in the world we are doing passing by on this motorized vehicle. I stare back, mimicing his expression. I assume we will have this staring contest for many months to come.

There are many types of plastic bags here. There are the typical grocery store bags, that you occasionally have to pay a couple centavos for... and maybe a few extra if a little child tears it from your hand and fills it with your groceries before you can beat him to it. There are the large black ones you get when you want to hide your packages from the campesinos so they don´t ask you for some remesa money. But the most intriguing of plastic bags are the small, transparent zip-lock without the zip-lock ones. They come in 3-5 different sizes of small, but are NOT interchangeable. The tiny-small ones can only be used for Charamusca...aka frozen kool-aid. I once tried to use a medium-small one and got laughed at by a 6yr old who eerily resembled a kid from the Kool Aid commericals Dane Cook rants about. The medium-smalls are only used for bagged fruit & snacks. Anything from sliced mango topped with salt, lime and hot sauce to enchiladas that are really just deep fried tortillas with shredded lettuce on top is acceptable. The large-small ones are often where you find your soda being poured or agua de coco. If you are at a classy food stand, you get the straw placed in opening. But, most of the time you bite the bottom corner off. You spit it out on the person sitting next to you and then drink 20oz of soda in 30 seconds so you dont have to worry about falling asleep on the bus with a bag of soda spilling out on your lap and onto the person you just spit the corner on by accident.

There is a box of random pieces of old, useless items sitting in the corner of our Community House. There is an empty bottle of liter soda. Some rusty wire. A shoe. Some leaves and probably a family of bugs camping out. At first, I thought ¨cool, there first garbage can in La Montana.¨ But then I watched as a member of my class of adults belched and then dropped his large-small plastic bags of empty soda on the floor. Modesta brushed her hand across the table to get rid of some pieces of thread from our hammock project and her son ripped out pages from his notebook and let them sail across the room, to land just outside the box of useless items. Next week, Dora would grunt as she swept the accumulated garbage out into the landfill-of-a-futbol cancha... only to be the first one to drop some more basura at the start of the next class.

There is a fear in Peace Corps that if we give someone something, they will forever depend on Americans to hand stuff over to them. I usually refrain at all costs from setting this precedent. Yet, my refrigerator is full of gifted bananas that will surely go bad before I get the chance to overdose on Potassium. Last night I made the mistake of eating dinner before I visted 3 families and then had to eat 3 more... Which leads me to the lady who fixes my clothes for free. After the 4th reparation to my pants, I reeeeally feel like I should be paying. A couple days ago I walked through the community with just books in my bags and walked home with a brand new bottle of Avon lotion, half-full bottle of body oil and a tube of antibiotic cream. Maybe its because I have bug bites, cuts, scrapes, scabs and unidentified marks forming a Connect-the-Dots puzzle from a Highlight´s magazine on my legs... and a likely staff infection on my foot...but still.


There is an ever present knot in my gut that grows everytime I see a soda can tossed out the window. My curiosty about the wire man is still there but the lift in my eyebrows has subsided. I am very careful about the choice and usage of plastic bags... and readily accept any gift that comes in them, as long as I make a mental note of their name and repay them with a smile and promise of future visitation.

There was a spider sitting on the wall by my ¨kitchen¨ for the past 2 weeks. My first 2 weeks in this house, I beat with my shoe everything that moved, which more often than not turned out to be a leaf. But this guy was different. I had grown so accustomed to the spider watching me peel potatoes that I didn´t want to kill it. But it wasn´t the most pleasant sight to eat my breakfast next to. So, when it would get too close for comfort, I would slap the wall below it...sending it scurrying up to the window. But sure as the exponentially increasing mosquito bites on my body, the spider would be there the next morning. Last night I walked into my house and stopped at the wall by the kitchen. The spider was gone and in its place a little scorpion. Him, I didn´t have a problem wailing with my shoe. This morning, the wall was bare. I was eating some cereal topped with rotten banana and I turned to the barren cinder blocks.

I missed the spider.

There are things about this country that I will never understand. There are things I have accepted. And there are things I have come to love. That parts my favorite.