N. 8 Bienvenidas a Sacacoyo

The sounds of Sacacoyo are very different from the sounds of the city. I wake here between 4 and 5 in the morning to the campo melody of ranchera music, dogs barking, and roosters crowing. Their cries are so intense that sometimes it sounds like they are dying, but Mercedes assures me that this is normal. I no longer use an alarm clock, as the daily rhythm of life here is too eventful to sleep through and there is a lot to be done.
Mercedes is the mother of the 3 year old twins I live with, and the wife of Bili, their father. The twins, Beatrice Alicia and Jasmine are at the peak of their exploration days and my being here and my foreignness are a big source of curiosity for them. For the first few hours after my arrival, they kept their distance, only peaking through my curtain to say “salud” every now and then. But quickly, we began to get used to each other and while they became fascinated with my books and just about everything else in my backpack, I fell in love with their silly and muddled Spanish and their big, dark curious eyes. I’ve been here almost two weeks now and I really miss them when I leave the house and am so excited when I am welcomed home with big hugs and little girls running down the hill to greet me. “Laula” they call me.
The house I live in is made of cement and has a tin roof. Like most families here, the four of them together live on two dollars a day or less, but are considered privileged for the size and quality of their home. There are two bedrooms a living room and a kitchen area. Bili’s sister lives here with her son too. The floor is made of dirt. The windows do not have glass. We bathe with rain water (when it falls) or river water outside in a semi closed booth made of sheet metal and use a latrine out back. Many of our neighbors have homes made of bamboo, cardboard, earth and other materials that are cheaply available. While we do have space and safety (by this I mean we can lock our doors), the simple right to water is not as accessible. It hasn’t rained in over 3 and a half weeks so we have to walk to the chorros when we need to fill the pila. The chorros are a community well and the pila is a big cement sink where we store our water and wash our laundry and dishes. The two wells are meant for the entire population of Colonia las Naranjas, where we live, and they fill on the schedule of Mother Nature. This means that we are never guaranteed water and for better chances, it’s best to go in the early morning or late at night. Regardless, there is almost always at least a family or two there washing clothes and bathing.
Despite the humble lifestyle of this community, they have already offered me so much and have made me feel so at home. With out asking for rent or asking any questions, I had three different families offer me a living space in their home. I settled on two of the three and am spending most of my time stationed here in las Naranjas, but have stayed a few nights with a woman named Teresa who lives in the center of the little pueblo. Teresa has 2 daughters. Kenny is 16 and part of the youth group I am working with in the youth center and Abigail is 3 and is very present at most of the meetings we have. Apart from the girls, Teresa lives with her husband Pedro, her mother, brother, and in the other part of the house, lives a sister and her two children. I really enjoy staying with them, because they are very warm and involved, and Kenny, Abigail and I have a lot of fun together. When I stay over after meetings, Kenny shares her room with me. Saturday night we stayed up late chatting. She read me a beautiful poem from one of her classes and I wove some pink yarn into her hair like I have seen the artisan do outside of FUNDAHMER.
Apart from these families, I have also felt very supported among the other members of the community. Within hours of my arrival, we held a meeting to discuss where and to begin and how to make the most of my time here. Everyone is so eager to hear about my ideas and what we are going to do and they ask so many questions and have so many great ideas. We started out focusing on the youth center, as that is the first priority of FUNDAHMER. But we have also decided that I will be working with the women’s committee, and the cooperative using art to enrich what they have in progress. We are hoping that this year we can get everything in place to have the group recognized as an official cooperative so that they can receive the benefits of a functioning cooperative. I had my second meeting with the women’s committee today. I taught them how to make baskets using macate, the dried bark of a platano tree. We sat in a circle weaving and planning and chatting, while Dora, who I had a chance to teach last week helped me explain the process and proudly showed off the 6 baskets that she had made since last week! We are making the baskets for a mother’s day celebration we plan to have the 10th of May. We would also like to present a mural that same day about women’s rights, but we will see what time allows. I think the biggest challenge I am going to have this year is time and accessibility. The women are only able to come once a week, and while we expected 15 today, only 8 of us were able to make it. The women who come from San Antonio walk an hour and a half downhill in the blazing sun and those that come from the center, like Teresa, walk about an hour uphill. If we do not present the mural in May, we will hopefully do so soon after.
I face the same challenge of time with the youth in the center. We are only able to meet Sunday from 2-4pm because so many of them work and study such long hours. Since being here I have had two meetings with the youth. Like many here, they are very eager to see what I am going to bring to the community, but still trying to grasp the concept of art for transformation and the communication of ideas on a public level and personal level. Most of the meetings/activities I have had in the community have been to get to know the members better and introduce the concept of creativity, communication and organization. Last Sunday I introduced 10 youth to my favorite material, clay. Wearing blindfolds each person sought out a partner who had been given the same number. The trick was that they could communicate anything they wanted with their eyes covered, but they could not say the number. It worked out so that everyone found their partner and once they were seated on the ground together, I brought a piece of clay to each person. I gave them a chance to feel out the material a bit and roll it around in their hands before getting to work. I asked each set of partners to sit facing one another and I put a piece of cardboard between the two for a workspace. Without taking the blindfold off, each set of partners was to form one person using the two pieces of clay. This clay person later served as a symbol for a discussion on the topic of youth formation/growth, which is one of our main objectives at the center. We came up with a list of words to describe the skills and challenges that were involved in completing the task. Our list consisted of the following…
Comunicación/coordinación
Imaginación/Iguales After rearranging these words I realized that they
Relacionar/Respeto formed the acronym for Circo/Circus. I´m trying
Crear/Creatividad to figure out how to incorporate this theme into
Organizar the center so that these elements are always
Present.
From this list, we decided that what the youth center is lacking the most is organization. Since the constuction of the youth center last year, there have been 12 youth semi-consistently involved. I say semi-consistently for the mountain of distractions and responsibility that youth here deal with daily. Regardless, they are hoping to grow and bring new ideas and fresh faces to their meetings and activities. For the past two meetings we have had anywhere from 8 to 10 show up. Our talk about organization and other elements of wonder led me to a class of creativity in the institute here where 25 or so adolescents study the meaning of creativity with a very lais back professor named Edwardo. Rene, one of the young leaders in our group in the center proposed my visit to his school so that I could meet this teacher and talk about recruiting other students who have been introduced to art and the importance of creativity.
Tuesday, I went to meet with him to talk. Instead, he put me straight to work while he taught his first block class. As it turns out, the teacher who was to teach math during the first block never showed up, and this left me an hour and a bit to introduce myself, do some dinamics and find out what they had been learning. What I learned, is that this group of teens is incredibly interested in finding out more about art for social action and are full of ideas of what they want to change in their community. During a dinamic where we got to know eachother and got warmed up, I also learned that they want to do something about deliquincy, violence both gang related and general, environmental abuse, human rights violations, lack of respect... The list went on and I continued to take advantage of their willingness to have me there and willingness to share. What I also realized is that with more youth, there is much more energy, and a wider breadth of ideas and oportunities. By the end of my time in the institute...( I say institute, b-c thats what its called here, but it´s about the same as a highschool)... I had met 25 new enthusiastic youth, a director who is completely dedicated to youth formation and improvement of the quality of life and education, and was offered as much time as I wanted to work with this class and free wall space to paint murals! I´m really excited about this connection and can´t wait to see where it leads us at the center as well as with the others in Sacacoyo.
On my time, I am seeking out as many possible connections I can make to help the youht center grow in size and diversity, but I also want the youth who are already established to be a part of this innitiative and promotion. Through, Levi, my friend who I painted that mural with, I have become connected to another center for youth in the pueblo. It is called la casa de encuentro juvenil Sacacoyo. They are supported financially through Intervida (who Levi Works for,) a branch of Unicef that was established here after the earthquake in 2001. In this meeting I got a bunch of contact information for school directors the local mayor etc, but my main objective was to find out who to talk to to get permission to use the central park to hold art activities. The purpose of these art activities would be promote ideas of youth formation and other FUNDAHMER themes, while allowing the group of youth to interact with a broader population and act as leaders for others.
Well, time is creeping up again, and my bus is going to pass shortly. I am not allowed to walk alone in the pueblo or in my colonia, for factors of danger but also custom. This makes things a little tricky, but I certainly feel supported and closer to the members of my new community every day. Luckily, the buses are safe, and they pass by the places that I frequent. So, feeling sticky, hot and relieved to get this blog up, I leave you to jump onto the 6 o´clock bus.
Con carina y esperanza,
Laurita