matagalpa

when you are on the road it so hard to imagine ever again getting used to normal domestic life. there is no common ground between nicaragua and coming home to complaining about an appointment i´d tather not keep or traffic in downtown auburn or laundry that cries to be folded. HELLO? In the meantime here in nic. a woman nine months pregnant is being kicked by her husband like a downedhorse because the 100 pound sack of coffee beans she was carrying down a So amid houses of sticks - not logs, not boards but literally little sticks ' i work in a clinic where the wall iscarefullly prepared for my work and the mural looks fantastic - huge and so fun to work BIG!! while i hear the chopping like a thousand woodpeckers as the rain forest falls and dozens of 13 and 14 year old mamas sweetly bring their babies in for check up or colds and share with me in my broken spanish that the father is 24, 28 .....criminals i say and they smile....fathers raped as children and raping as adults....boys and girls.. nightmare amid vistas too glorious to describe. tho the woman in the tny house of sticks not 6 feet by six feet and hardly roofed....sharing the house with her 4 baby girls. offered a fine, block, secure, wind proof house by the clinic if she will just have her tubes tied....but she declines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!impregnant me again?? squeeze another child into this world, into your matchbox sized space?

But the mural is alive!
we travel together up roads too miserable to describe and all the worse forthe killer rains of the past month.

i am so absolutely joyful.....we are doing what we can do.. passed out one of my water filters to a tiny school today. 30 chldren working with one teacher in a 8x10 foot space on the edge of a dusty path with no electricity and only recently a latrine.

my filter for clean water? uuuuuHHHH NO CUPS! how could i have been so oblivious? they drink like little doe eyed deer from the filthy streams...running with pesticides, sewage and trash...but the jungle -what remains - is a true wonder of sound, shadow and color.....

bless this place. it calls to me.