This afternoon, we went to visit three of James’s English students: Lea, Maria and Dulce. Dulce lives with Lea and Maria lives just next door. Lea and Maria each have three children. Lea and her husband have Alondra, Leo, and Josué Benjamin. Josué had heart surgery about 6 weeks ago, and he’s doing remarkably well, considering.
An American foundation did the surgery for free, but his dad had to go work in Costa Rica for a month to make enough money for the special food he has needed, and for related costs. Maria has Celeste (who was very taken with Zoe), and two others: both boys, I think.
They gave us enormous glasses of purple pitaya juice and then took us to visit Lea’s father on his farm nearby: “you like to walk, right?” they kept asking. Jeremy wanted to be carried, which led to a discussion of mamita vs. papita children. Our kids are mamita (mama’s boy/girl); theirs are papita. On the way, they gave us a fresh coconut to drink the milk from (harder without a straw! You put your mouth to a thinly shaved hole in the side of the coco and suck out whatever you can: I gave up about half way through and handed the coco to Alondra. Ten minutes later, Maria had somehow broken off a piece of the shell and was using it to eat the meat out of the rest of the coco). Every few minutes, they would point to or hand us another kind of fruit: coco, mango (oh, the strings in the teeth!), piña, pitaya, papaya, banano, guyabara, and so on.
Lea’s dad was a real character: a Sandinista during the war, a supporter now. He was hard to understand, partly because he spoke Nicaraguan, partly because he was talking about things in unfamiliar terms. I wish I could remember some of his expressions. He’s selling a part of his farm because he’s now 77 and he’s got a lot of land for one man to manage: two manzanas? (I think). A manzana is evidently the size of two football fields. One of his children moved to Costa Rica, but he had nothing but disdain for people who go to Costa Rica. “They just want quick money: farming takes patience. You put in a piña in and you have to wait 18 months to get one fruit. People with no patience have no stomach for it.”
Coming back, we came up a narrow arroyo, cut by the rain. It was a slippery slide down the hillside to get to the bottom of the arroyo. Lea’s dad came with us to the bottom, then told James: “This is where we stood when the Somocistas were coming up. We had to really plant our feet, hold the rifle firm.” He acted it out in body language and it made the war very vivid: one could almost see the soldiers coming around the curve.
Lea and Alondra took us back on the microbus, and left us with a bag containing some 5 peeled coconuts, 8 mangoes, 4 pineapples. Just overwhelming.
Zoë and Isabel continue to keep each other entertained with cards during breaks...
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