Mary Maier

Yesterday all the volunteers went to a school in Muisne to prepare a yard for a playground. We spent two hours with machetes, chopping the grass like lawnmowers and only cleared 1-3 yards per person. About 30 other locals showed up to help: kids were picking up raked grass and whell-barrowing it to a pile, women were raking and chopping, and everyone was putting us to shame with their machete skills. We all felt a little useless because the grass would probably grow back before the playground was built and we could have done the whole yard a lot easier with a mower.

In order to build a fence at a daycare center in Muisne, we spent two days gathering bamboo. First, we went to the bamboo forest, which is located up the mountain near some cacao trees. The volunteer coordinators, Fernando and Vicente, who are more skilled with machetes, cut down the 30+ ft trees. We had the job of pulling the trees away from their base so that they would fall down. Then we macheted off the branches and spines and dragged the bamboo to the first barbed wire fence of the cacao farm.

Bamboo is a lot heavier than it looks; to carry it you put the thick end of the tree over your shoulder and either let the other end drag or have a partner do the same. I couldn’t carry more than two at a time and even Vicente only managed 3. Bamboo also has small little hairs that pierce your skin and stay in like splinters.

Second we moved the pile of 30 bamboo trees under another barbed wire fence and up and down a hill before throwing it over a cliff to take back to the station. After returning to the road down the 75 or 80 degree hill, we moved the bamboo past another fence and finally dragged it back to the station.

In the afternoon we chopped it into sections and split it into fourths to make fence pieces for the daycare center. It took 6 people 2.5 hours to chop the bamboo into pieces. Dead from the morning’s work and feeling sick, I could only chop for about 2 hours. Later on I went for a ride with Alvaro on his motorcycle, went back to the station and vomited twice, and finally got some sleep without a stomach ache.

In the morning I walked through a patch of ticks. Here, they collect on the edge of a leaf, hundreds of tiny ones, no larger than a speck of dirt. I didn’t realize it until I turned over my arm and saw about 50 tiny brown spots, slowly crawling in all directions. At that point it’s possible to just brush them off. So far I’ve found 3 I didn’t catch the first time.

Saturday night I along with one other volunteer and Alvaro, Rudy, Hector, Fabricio, and Diego went to Bunche for the evening. There was a Miss Hawaii “pageant” for 3 girls, ages 12 to 15. I and the two other gringas in the room were asked to be the judges while the girls danced on stage in costumes. We sat at a plastic table in front of the stage and were given graphing paper to record our scores.

After the contest was over, everyone danced until around 2am. Because we were a fairly large group of friends, we had our own table with bottles of Pilsener beer, Frontera alcohol, 7up, and the carbonated water that we won for being judges. Afterwards, Hector took the motorcycle home and the rest of us walked back in the dark, Alvaro and I arm in arm, without the light of the moon.

For the past few days I’ve been painting a 2nd grade classroom at the school in Bunche, a 20 minute walk from the station. We’ve painted different objects for each number, so I did 3 leaves, 5 shapes, 7 fruits, and 10 bees. The supplies are rather limited here; we are using gasoline as paint thinner and only have a few small brushes. There are always kids bustling in and out of the classroom and hanging onto the windows to watch the gringas paint.