Leap Day

The strangeness of February 29 makes it a good time, I suppose, for me to return to the work of reporting on our activities here in Ecuador. Our return to the US for the Christmas holidays proved to be something of an obstacle to my developing sense of belonging here, I'm afraid. It set back the Spanish somewhat. (Of course we COULD have spoken Spanish every day for an hour or so with Danny and Cristina Oviedo, who visited us from their temporary home in Florida, but we were charitable and helped them with their English.) And since at least for me, communicating with people is paramount to feeling at home, the month away slowed me down.

But in the last few days I have realized that I'm understanding the mothers at CRN better than I ever have (still not completely), so I feel that I'm back in the saddle. And it only took six weeks!

Three things from today are worth commenting on. Those of you who were in 4-H will doubtless remember "demonstrations", those little presentations each member did to show how to make something in the kitchen (I remember doing humble stuff like tuna salad, but Carroll and Alice Holder did some kind of amazing cupcake-decorating thing that involved mirrors and palindromic names like Sis and Otto). In a little conversation this afternoon a few of the mothers expressed enthusiasm for being shown how to prepare nutritious food. (One would think that such sessions would already be a part of a program such as CRN's, but they're not). So starting next week we're going to begin demonstrations.

I accompanied the CRN social workers on a visit to check the progress of a child who came to the Center for a period of time a while back. The home is in a neighborhood of mostly stick houses that have been built on top of a former dump site. The baby is still "hinchado" (swollen, a sign of excess water retention and malnutrition) and will be coming back to the Center with the mom and a couple of siblings starting Monday. They (family of 8, I believe) live in a place with an uneven dirt floor, one large room with two double beds and a stovetop/dish area, and a curtained-off space where a very decrepit-looking grandfather was lying flat on his back, asleep & wheezing, on a wooden bench with no cushioning or bedding of any sort. There was one other room: the "store". Like way too many of their neighbors in this little forsaken neighborhood, they had a few bagged snacks for sale, maybe 10 or 20 items. I am really curious what force is at work making such families invest their scarcest of resources in trying to sell stuff to other people. It seems impossible to me that these enterprises produce income, and I am planning to look into the matter and see what's going on.

I finished up the day hanging out laundry upstairs on the terrace. This is the warm rainy season in Santo Domingo, and oftentimes it's impossible to get clothes truly dry. But today there was a nice breeze, so we're in luck. In these days of worrying about global warming and sustainable lifestyles, it's a wonderful and simple thing to hang clothes on a line.