Chiapas es padre!

There we are again, this time in Ocosingo. The last two days I spend in San Cristobal, where we arrived after 14 hours bus ride.
Chiapas is beautiful, genial, padre! (por fin encontre este equivalento de "guai"!) The beautiful green mountains with tropical vegetation in the valleys and pinos (dennen) in the higher sites like around San Cristobal. And the people are just as colourful. Although it feels strange to be strange (I cannot hide being different with my white skin, altitude and funny way of speaking!), I feel very happy here at the moment!
And how good do we breathe having left the contamination of DF behind us. During the mornings the sun shines and warms us, in the afternoons it rains heavily (in San Cristobal it got a bit chilly then) or is hot and humid here in the lower Ocosingo. Who said it would be cold here? Well, winter has not yet started...
Today I met the first farmers that Carolina is working with. We went by ARIC, the political organization of the region and they have send out radio messages to the communities that we will be arriving. This weekend there will be a workshop on how to cure animals with traditional plant medicines.
This evening we had dinner with Santiago one of the young promoter-farmers who came to ask for a free passage with us in the small airplain we will use this time. He started telling stories about how he came here with his sister-in-law to have a caesarian for her first-born: a boy but the name will only be announced in two or three months at baptism. He also told us about one of his cows that died giving birth.
He speaks the spanish a bit like me, as his first language is tzeltal and sometimes he does not understand our questions or we do not understand his answers. He spoke about his four children, three boys and two girls. Well, that is probably just a mistake, but other misunderstandings seem to have to do also with the way we ask questions. For example, I wanted to know if it happens often that the cows in the village die while calving and he repeated that his cow died. Also when asking about people that die, answers are about specific people, not about generalized data.
It leads Carolina and me to a talk about the scientists in us and the human in us that lives everyday life. To the human/person Jenneke what is important is that she was vomiting last week and she will remember that it happened to her two times before in Spain and in England. What is important to me is that I felt miserable at the time and I will tell about that when asked. But the question: how often have people in your village vomited during the last year? makes no sense to me.