A good friend of mine, actually the best of the best, Amy Greenwood, told me that while the text is nice and all, pictures might be a nice break from the riptide of words I have slung upon my blog as of late. So, in turn, the first picture blog:
The three pictures above show the house and 2 family members (out of 7) with which I stayed the first night I stayed in El Jardin. Every home in El Jardin has a view just as the second picture mainly because it consists of about 4 dirt roads all connecting in some long, tangled manner. I'm surprised the place even has a name... The houses are built right along the gravel pathways because, as you can see, there's really no reason to build a home "secluded in the country" because anymore secluded and they'd be living in the banana trees themselves. The mother on the right was on her way to work on the banana plantation at 6:00am after she had already risen at 4:00am to prepare everything for her family, as I've already told you.
Above is a little girl named Jahayda. Her family is Nicaraguan and though she was born in Costa Rica, as I've told you, she probably will be considered a Nicaraguan immigrant the rest of her life because her family has not registered her in San Jose to get her legal documents due to a lack of financial resources and time. She is one of the girls I spent two hours with the first time I went up to El Jardin and grilled about schedules and subjects and teaching materials so I could get a good idea of what to expect when I began teaching. They were more than obliging. After I got done, Jahayda asked me if I could read and I said yes. She ran to her house (she is part of the family that lives on the church property and takes care of it while Nehemias is gone) a few yards away, grabbed a book, and threw herself back into the children's room we were sitting in at the church. She asked me to read her the book. It was in Spanish so I began. After I read a couple pages, unable to contain it any longer, she burst into recitation and tore through the rest of the pages at record speed. She was so excited at her ability and my unwavering attention that she stuttered and stumbled over words but they cost her no discouragement. She would often look up at me for affirmation, while still mumbling the words she no doubt knew by heart, smiled, and then returned to the page.
Many times the girls in El Jardin who live in an around the church will come up to me and ask me to speak English. I always speak at the breathtaking speed of the tail end of an infomercial warning of a product's possible result in things like death and cancer and use ridiculous words that even sound funny in English like "thing-a-ma-jig" and "discombobulated." Throughout my entire spiel, the girls jaws drop inch by inch until they are half smiling and half drooling. I figure if the ability to do that isn't encouragement to learn English, I don't know what is. It's funny to consider speaking English a talent though, as a native speaker. It's like them asking me to scratch a bug bite or blink. But as an English speaker in a Spanish-speaking country I can empathize with their fascination at the fluidity of a foreign language.
The church here is built on a piece well-sized piece of land. It is a one-roomed church/sanctuary/fellowship hall. Behind the multi-functional church room is the house of the family who lives on the land to take care of it when no one is here. They are lines of clothing zig-zagging their way across the yard to a small awning that houses a place for a wooden fire pit to make bread, cook chicken, etc. In front of that is the water pump and small well. Finally there is a small room with open windows built for children's activities. The rest of the land is occupied by a garden.
Behind Jahayda is the "ecological sanctuary" that is being cultivated on the church's land in El Jardin. It is Nehemias's goal to help the community grow their own produce instead of buying it from the grocery store, develop their own medicine, create their own shampoo and perfume; sustainable stuff like that. They have planted over 200 species of plants in the garden including vegetables, fruits, flowers, ferns, trees, and so forth. To look out over the small piece of land budding (pun totally intended) with potential and fertility is quite a site. At times the whole garden seems to be raising its arms in praise, swaying back and forth to the hallelujah of the wind, and multiplying right before your eyes. It is brimming with promise of color and nourishment and often it feels like the garden's fence will burst at the seams. He says that many community members and children, some not even part of the church, will come in certain days and just water a few plants or pull some weeds.
I took a walk through the garden while I was there on Monday and stopped when I saw five butterflies playing musical chairs on some long-stemmed red flowers. I stood close enough to watch them tentatively drink the plant's nectar through their straw-like tongues and move on to the next. I have never been a garden person. I don't really enjoy looking at plants nor care what their names are. I forget enough peoples' names enough as it is. I've always enjoyed gardens as a solid background, a backdrop for something more entertaining - a picnic, game of football, a serious talk on a park bench. However, looking at this garden now, watching these butterflies carry on listlessly, I realized that this garden was here, in part, for the sake of being here. Because someone thought it would bring beauty and fruitfulness, not solely for practical reasons, but for the purpose of existence. And it reminded me of the saying "art for art's sake" then I thought "beauty for beauty's sake," and finally, "garden for garden's sake." People create things that are beautiful because even though we are broken, we are good. And even though we are good, we need art and beauty and gardens to remind ourselves that there are things worth believing in whether or not we can prove it.
The girl in the first picture is named Wendy. She is the neighbor of the house in which the pictures above were taken. The other girl is Marilin (Maryilyn). She lives in the house. She lives there with her mother, Estebana (Hondurian) who is in the last picture, her father (Nicaraguan), and her sister, Hazel who is in the second to last picture. Hazel is 20 and Marilin is 10. They have four other brothers and sisters living in different parts of Costa Rica so it is only those four that occupy the house. This the family with which I have been staying when I go up to El Jardin. They are beautiful, beautiful people and carry themselves with an ease and comfort that gives you no choice but to relax in their presence as well.
The fruit that you see above is called a mamon chino. I don't think we have a translation for mamon in English, but it is a "chinese mamon." I talked about them before and told you how delicious they are. Well now you can see for yourselves in what a strange package God put them in. I'm not sure if this is Marilin's favorite fruit, but I sat with her one afternoon and watched her eat 32 of these back to back. It couldn't have been 30 minutes before she finished the entire bowl, then finished the ones in front of me, after politely asking of course. If this isn't her favorite fruit, I'd pay to see her interact with what is and with what hunger she would approach it.
All the houses here are essentially made out of wood, a cement base, and a tin roof. There are usually a couple bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. There are also huge windows cut out in each wall that are promptly opened as soon as the sun rises to let the air circulate since there is no air conditioning. It's one of my favorite parts of the house. The front porch and the huge open window behind it that allows light and air to filter into the living room. It is from this window that I often stand propped up against the window sill sucking an orange's pulp dry or juggling a handful of mamons and watch the world, as it is in El Jardin, saunter by on the road in front of the house.
In this house I sleep in an extra room they have on a mattress on the floor. Everyone goes to sleep around 7:30 or 8pm as everyone rises around 4-4:30am. The roosters start cock-a-doodle-dooing around 3:30, the chickens cluck cluck soon after. The dogs begin their morning banter around 4am as if lazily trying to mark territory with howl instead of urine. The crickets and frogs, carrying the banner throughout the night, take a bow at 4:30am and are replaced by a steady stream of gravel-churning wheels from bicycles to busses to taxis to motorcycles to cars. But what puts all to shame and mediocrity are the howler monkeys that join in around 5am. It is these band members that are said to be the loudest land animal on the planet in which their bellows can be heard up to three miles away. The thing about that is, I am not three miles away from them, so you can imagine the rise in decibels in which this close proximity results. It goes a little something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdnwLX5m3G8. It is this orchestra of noises to which I wake up to in El Jardin.
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