Ortiga

This has been a week much like any other in my time here, although there are always points of interest. For example, this week, I was teaching the months of the year. One of the biggest attractions for most children in this topic is the chance to say when their birthday arrives. Much to my surprise, a good fraction of the children of Tolte do not know when their birthday is, which is especially strange because they do seem to have some notion of how old they are. But there you have it: there are children in the world who do not have birthdays, at least in the sense that children in the States have birthdays. And they don’t seem to miss them. I seem to recall that my birthday seemed like a day that belonged to me alone, and that seemed really exciting, at least when I was a kid. Not so much now…

As usual, Saturday provides the events that seem most worth reporting here, which makes no real sense, because I am actually accomplishing more during the week. The kids are learning English, sort of. What I do on Saturday is just something to entertain myself. This week, there was a “Padres de Familia de Escuela” minga to clean up the weeds in the little piece of land that belongs to the school. I don’t quite understand this piece of land or its purpose. I think that the idea is to grow things that can either be eaten during school lunch or sold somewhere. Crops include corn, beans, turnips, cabbage, and acelga, which my dictionary translates as beets, but looks a lot more like chard (sort of big, tough, leafy greens). Weeding here is especially exciting because a lot of the weedy growth is stinging nettle, ortiga, although not of the most ferocious kind. My hands are still burning a bit.

Ortiga is regarded as sort of a cure-all here, and maybe I’ve mentioned it before. You use it sort of like Ben-Gay. Whatever injury you have, no matter how severe the pain, you take some ortiga and flail it around the injury like a feather duster. This, of course, hurts a lot more than when you started, but rumor has it that it does something to heal the injury or reduce its pain somehow. There’s even a verb, ortigarse, for treating yourself with ortiga. So I could say that me ortigue las manos, but it was sort of by accident.

One really great thing was that the head of the Padres de Familia, Martina (whom you will recall from the episode about my perfect day in Tolte that involved me getting locked out of my house), gave me the chance to talk to the assembled parents, though not all of the parents came to this event. I had wanted to talk to them about using the library themselves, that the library is not just for kids. They seemed to capture the idea that reading was good and necessary for the future of their children, but I got the impression that few of them feel comfortable reading either. I did promise to help anyone who wanted to read, and to lend books on the spot, but nobody took me up on this offer. I’m going to continue to push this idea, though.

Another interesting word is lampa or lampon for shovel, which is called pala elsewhere in Latin America. It also has its own verb, lampear, shoveling, which is how I spent the rest of the day. I went back to the road crew, figuring (correctly) that they could use another pair of hands. Besides, Damasio was up there, which always makes for a fun day. I started by shoveling cement, which took me up to lunchtime. Pablo and Martina treated us all to lunch at their house. After lunch, a woman from Nizag and I were assigned the task of digging the trench that the cement forms would sit in. This wasn’t as atrocious a job as last week’s digging, but still pretty intense. The woman from Nizag didn’t give her name, but the crew decided that Mama Grande would be appropriate. I guess I agree, although I was more impressed with her strength and fortitude than her size. After shoveling cement until lunchtime, she did a swift job of picking a trench along the road for the cement forms, and then went on to shovel more cement. I was left behind in the trench, trying to drive the shovel through the stones that lay just under the loose soil. A couple of these stones were so large that no one is sure how we will get them out of the way. But most of the trench did get cleared eventually. Then I went and stirred cement with an azadon while Mama Grande and Damasio shoveled it into wheelbarrows.

I asked Damasio if his lower back didn’t hurt, kind of assuming that his didn’t. Mine was really in pain. Somewhat to my surprise, he said that his hurt, too. I figured that after years of bent over labor the muscles in his lower back were so strong that the awkward posture no longer mattered. It seems that the difference is more in knowing how much pain you can ignore, and how much you can’t.  Still, I think that I should continue to work on strengthening my back. The good news is that in spite of all the strain, I haven’t had any signs of sciatica or other spinal symptoms. And that’s good with me.

Tomorrow I’m off to Chunchi. Rumor has it that my paycheck will finally clear.