Verjaardag/cumpleaños in Matezano

I ¨celebrated¨ my 24th birth day in a Matezano, a community two and half hours driving from San Cristobal. The car we drove away with at 7 in the morning, hit a stone and the oilpan started leeking: we got stuck in Matezano. Marcelino and Alfonso spend all day trying to get the car back to the nearest town and provisionally repaired.

We hold a workshop on nutrition: with pictures (start getting a bit more creative to work with analfabetics...) for the people to show what is eaten, what they produce and buy. We show how to prepare nopales, a cactus that grows in the community, but is not eaten yet by the people. The women laughing silently, speaking in tsotsil. Their dresses have two splits viewing their nipples, ready for their children to start drinking whenever they want. Their bellies always round, either because they are pregnant or because they have been so so many times, combined with parasites causing colitis (swollen intestines) and oedemia.

José Luis, 4 or 5, is happily playing his ¨guitar¨, a piece of wood with strings.

It is hot, very dry and windy. The grass is singing. Men, plants, animals all waiting for the rain. Some say it will rain with Santa Cruz, 3 d of May. But it may take another few weeks.
For a lack of water, no mushrooms are being sown. No vegetables. Not even bread baked in the newly build oven. But most of the small fruit trees seem to survive, Rúben gives them a few drops of water every day.
About sixty liters of water (of poor quality like all unbottled water here) a day per large family are distributed. For drinking, cooking, washing, the chicken, the mule. In contrary, to every other community where I have been, hands are not washed before starting the meal. We are the only ones offered a glass of water with the meal, which we leave untouched.

The school teacher says ´whe are progressing like a turtle, slow but secure´, about his job to teach some twenty children from the first to the sixth grade in one small class room.

I buy honey, where do the bees find flowers here?

We start the long walk back through the heat. When we arrive at the car mecanic in town, he goes ´Guerita, can you help me translate the manual, I don´t understand English´. He tells how his little son often cries at night, hitten by the ´bad eye´, which can be cured by passing a chicken egg over the body.

Finally when the sun is already setting, the others sing me the ´Mañanitas´, the traditional birth day song, with whom you wake up the celebrated person. In the car, we sing along with the Northern music. I love my little family. Alfonso, puts on another sleasy birthday song for me. ´When we get back to town let´s go for a beer to celebrate´. When we finally arrive at 11 o´clock we only long for food and our beds. I don´t resent it, because with Alfonso (Poncho they nickname all Alfonsos here) it is never one beer. And after a few he becomes a little tragic and very romantic. Not very womenfriendly, or very friendly in his eyes.