Your journey is amazing

AmberS — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:43:32 -0500

I'm just enjoying reading about your journey so much. Thank you for sharing it with us all.

And I really hope that you find a way to make it work financially. I'm pulling for you.

~ Amber

www.strocel.com

a day in a jungle life

GirlPlusTwo — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:11:48 -0500

Most days we wake up sweaty with the sun, the humidity isn’tquite as striking as it used to be and it pleases me to realize we are growingaccustomed to the weather here. I wakeup and put the kettle on for coffee, there is no creamer here but we do havefresh milk. J is usually up and headedover to our land where he will spend the day planting trees or chopping downtall grass sometimes with a machete. Everyone here uses a machete and many have the scars to prove it, theycan be unwieldy little buggers and as such M and I keep far, far away.

Our fridge is about a third the size of a normal one andsince critters forage unabashedly more food than you would think needs to bekept inside. As such it can only hold somuch and that means I need to go to the market nearly every day. I like the ritual of that, driving out of thevillage and into town and visiting the vegetable and fruit sellers and seeingwho has what. We’ve been here longenough for me to have a favorite stand and the woman there is accustomed to mebringing recycled bags, a rarity here.

In between I do a bit of work, but non profit consultingisn’t working out as I’d hoped, the US economy troubles mean folks arelooking to do less and there hasn’t been much demand. It’s starting to getworrisome, our future survival here is predicated on being able to earn enoughto live and poverty work ironically doesn’t seem to be paying these days.

Lunch is generally rather meager, bread from the localbakery and cheese from the local dairy, my child is starting to revolt ongrilled cheese sandwiches but unfortunately it’s often the best I can do. Dinners are generally more creative, I’velearned to make some local dishes, escabeche and refried beans, a passableflour tortilla. Lacking a microwave anda toaster I’ve learned to cook most things on the stove. I’ve taken to making creamy soups chock fullof vegetables, broccoli and squashes and peppers and such.

Since it’s summer and there is no such thing as organizedsummer camps or classes M and I have devised our own schedule of learning andplaytime. We work on phonetics andsimple math, recognizing words in books and solving puzzles. After we are done with that and before Istart dinner we often go for a swim in the river, a quintessential amazon-esqueof a river with floating vines and little fish and lush green riverbanks. Parrots call to us in the water and sometimeswe watch the lazy iguanas fall headfirst out of trees once they fallasleep. The river is a panacea, it’sflowing and cool and more often than not we watch Mayan families across thebank doing their laundry in the shallow areas using rocks to rub stains out oftheir clothes. We do our laundry aslightly more sophisticated way in a plastic tub that has a little spinner; wewash a few things at a time and hang them on a line outside. Unfortunately for today, it rained as soon as I got the wash on the line meaning I get to do it all over again later.

Once dinner is over and baths are done we generally takerefuge under mosquito netting with books or a movie, one of several that myparents gave to M before we came down. I’ve seen Bee Movie more times than I wish to think about but without TVand after a long day running around outside sometimes we all need to simplyrelax and let the day ride.

It took me awhile to get used to this, not necessarily theslower pace because to be honest am busy every single day but to the lack ofresources and stimulation, no 24 hour news cycle or commerce focused anything,our lives have been made intentionally simple by our choice and a littlescarier and a lot richer. Our waste has been drastically reduced, we produceabout one small barrel of trash per month versus one per week and we compostall our food and are even starting to grow our own. So all and all I’d say that after five monthsthis experience has changed me in many ways, not least of all is therealization that I can do more than I think and that problems require creativesolutions and that even here duct tape can fix most things.

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Your journey is amazing

a day in a jungle life