coffee.mill

Tuck the sadness away...

 Disclaimer: Views presented in this blog are those of Roger German.  They do not represent the views or opinions of the U.S. Peace Corps or the Government of the United States.

                I remember Mother telling me that when I was born, she stayed in the hospital for 10 days, doctor’s orders.  She said she was ready to go home the very next day after I was born, but laid in the darn bed, because that’s what the learned men thought she should do.  By the time she got home, she said she really did feel tired.

                Things have changed some since then, and it appears that the U.S. is finally catching up with Mayan childbirth practices.  I visited down in Tracy’s village of San Miguel over the weekend, and as usual came back humbled.  Tracy’s host mom, Juvena Pop, gave birth on Friday.  She’s 39, and this is her 8^th child.  Six of her children were born at home with the assistance of a midwife.  She had this one and the last in the hospital, about an hour away.  When her labor started, she got on the bus and headed for the clinic in Columbia, and they put her in an ambulance for the hospital in Punta Gorda. The next day, she bundled up her baby and boarded the bus back to San Miguel.

                Tracy’s friend Christina had all three of her boys at home.  We were visiting with her on Saturday, telling her about the new addition to the Pop family, when she told us her mother-in-law helped her give birth to her first son, at home.  And it was no easy delivery.  She went into labor Friday night and didn’t deliver until Sunday afternoon.  The next two she had by herself, on the hard dirt floor of her thatch home, with only her husband Domingo present.  As way of explaining she said, “I saw how it was done.”   The boys are now 22, 20 and 18, and two of the three helped us build the playground in San Miguel.  So much of what I see in the villages reminds me of stories I heard of life in the Midwest during the 20s and 30s.  Dad born at home, in the kitchen, a difficult delivery; electricity coming to the farm with the REA in the 30s; Woody Fogle stringing telephone lines in Pierce County; children dying from measles, scarlet fever, polio…God’s will.

                I don’t think I can tie this all together, but then, there is a thread in here somewhere, and I hope to find it.  We volunteers received an email that our monthly allowance would be late by a week or so, and there was some belt tightening, as we all live pretty close to that allowance.  But by Belizean standards we live well.  Then I received an email from my friend Manissa Pedroza, living in Sarteneja, a fishing village on the north coast of Belize.  She wrote:

“What a reality check morning!:

- was talking with my neighbor's daughter who found out she cannot attend graduation because she hadn't/can't pay the $75 fee ...

- saw the man who lost his legs to diabetes waiting outside the little tienda hoping for some food

- a boy who I know does not get enough to eat, came by with a shilling he found, asked me if I would give his new puppy some medicine, promising he would bring more (meds are $1) as soon as he could

 …I am so deeply thankful to know these people, to bear witness to their struggles ...

And having had a tiny sense of what life is like for most Belizeans every day, every month, every year - not knowing where their next meal or job or income will come from - I am so grateful that my coffers will shortly be filled again.  I hope I will always remember this moment of have-not, even knowing the whole time that it would pass, so that I will appreciate all that I do have that much more.  If only there was a way for our fellow Belizeans (and the other 80% of the planet living in poverty) to have their bank accounts magically filled too ... Hang in there everyone - have a good weekend!”

                 That reminder, of our difference and our similarity with those we serve here, was a shot in the arm for me and for many.  One of the little ways we as volunteers give a hand to each other.  How we become family.
                And then my youngest sister Sherri, who embodies all of the best traits I think of when I hear someone described as a “farm wife,” tied me back into my family back home when she wrote of the upcoming wedding of our niece Nikki, a wedding I will miss as will my sister Sandra Lorraine.
                Sherri was writing of how great it will be to get together, but also how she is  “so sad to miss having (Sandy’s family) at Nikki's and equally sad to miss sharing a very proud moment (Sandy’s youngest daughter’s graduation) with my sister......will have to tuck the sadness away and be satisfied with what is......have learned to do that very well :)”

            Tuck the sadness away and be satisfied with what is...

            It takes a life lived well to learn such a universal truth, and then to have the depth of insight to recognize it.  Always there is sadness, always there is joy.  When it is time to celebrate then, “Tuck the sadness away and be satisfied with what is…” 
                That in no way means we cannot live with the goal of changing those things we believe we can change.  But the Maya women in San Miguel, and the little boy buying medicine for his dog in Sarteneja, and my sister in Pierce, Nebraska, USA all share a very admirable human ability to decide to “tuck the sadness away and be satisfied with what is…”

                I have not always done so well with that.

Time Left

 

.  Disclaimer: Views presented in this blog are those of Roger German.  They do not represent the views or opinions of the U.S. Peace Corps or the Government of the United States.

            Whatever your job or profession, it takes a while realize you don’t know all that much.  And then after a time, some of the fog clears, and you begin to see how things really work, and you develop some competency.  Then it’s time to go.

            I don’t do all that much with my time, though I would like to think otherwise.  This Peace Corps service is compressed in the extreme, with 3 months of training that reminds me mostly of the game we used to play as kids where we would spin around and around, then try to stand up, or walk a straight line.  We are told as we are spun out into our new life to slow down and just assimilate the culture for 3 to 6 months.   But most of us pick up our ball bats and try to hit a home run, or at least get on base, while we can barely balance without holding onto something.

            Then the dizziness abates and we look around and see that everything is at once familiar and strange, and we get our feet under us, we roll up our sleeves and hope we can make a difference.  What is familiar is that there is a right way to get things done, a wrong way, and then there is the way that works.  It’s why Vice-Grips were invented.  They are seldom the right tool, but they are often the only one. 

            So I’m more relaxed now even though I see how little of what I started will be finished on my watch; I have 6 months left.  At least that’s what my contract states.  But I’m more aware of time of late, and of how valuable that vague notion is.  I am enjoying my rice and beans, my 109-degree days and the company of Tracy, who besides doing the near impossible in a Mayan village is gently and patiently repairing a human heart.

            There is no premonition in the thought that I am not guaranteed 6 months more here in Belize, just some reminders of the brevity of life.  My friend T’s mother Betty Loos died last Saturday.  She was a woman with a generous laugh, though her life had not been easy.  She made a mouth-watering apple pie, and was kind enough to get out occasionally and sit through some of my gigs at coffee houses in Lincoln.  From time to time I would grab the guitar and play for her and her friends at the assisted living home where she stayed. 

            That same Saturday that Betty died, Brad Schumann, a friend and fellow contractor in Lincoln, also died, after a protracted battle with cancer.  He had maintained an amazing good humor and positive attitude about life as long as I knew him as he endured one treatment after another.

            Later that Saturday I was hosting a married couple at my home, new Peace Corps volunteers from upstate New York visiting for the weekend as part of training, and I received a call about 9:00 p.m. from Chepe the town foreman.  A family was at his house needing a cemetery plot, and he was not able to find his map of the cemetery, one we had laid out a few months prior.  I had a copy at my office. The family wanted to start digging the grave the next morning a 6 a.m. 

            Like I said, I’m a little more relaxed now and I told him I’d meet him in the morning, rather than walk the half hour into town that night.  So he picked me up at 5:45 a.m. and we drove to the cemetery, where the woman’s two brothers were standing by with shovels. 

            The woman who died was 30.  Pancreatic cancer; she lasted about 3 months.  Five kids, and a husband had abandoned her, according to one brother.  I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t really there at the cemetery that morning, holding a shovel to bury his sister.  He was somewhere else, distant, staring into an unknowable future.

            So that weekend was a tough one.  Got me to thinking about time, and the immutable fact that it is the only thing any of us have of any value, and that it would be a good thing to make the most of what I have.