October 12
Just got back yesterday from four days in another part of the country, a department called Olancho, visiting a friend. This friend, who we’ll call “Todd” just happens to be an engineer in my group, so I thought paying him a visit and staying over at his place was the least I could do for the hours of work he put in helping me transfer my topo study notes into something resembling a water system. “Todd” is a very smart guy and very cool to boot and I would have been pretty much nowhere without his help, so from that perspective the week was a good one. I also now have a much better understanding how these gravity-fed water systems will work and how to create a workable system based on only field notes—this was the key part because I did not want to have to run to an engineer every time I completed a study. The downside was the realization that there are significant problems with the water systems I am proposing to design.
At this point I have gone on three separate trips to do studies: the conduction line section of one village, the distribution network section of the same village a couple of weeks later, and the conduction line and distribution network together of the village I visited last week. Trip one of three, obviously the first study I had ever done, looked just like that once all the information was put into the program we use—I made mistakes left and right and the information made very little sense. So that one needs to be re-done. Studies two and three were a huge improvement and much more accurate (made sense and everything), which is nice, except they reveal that the proposed placement of the tubes or the storage tank (or both in one case) is just not going to work. Both these villages I have done studies in have very, very little difference between the altitude of where the water source is and the altitude where the community is located, something that’s obviously crucial to a gravity-fed system. The great part is now I know exactly where the problems begin and end so I can go to the community and say, “from this particular point XYZ we need to lower the conduction line 15 meters until we get to point ABC and from there we’re fine.” But both systems are going to need a lot more work and will not end up exactly how either community had hoped. Asi son las cosas.
October 14
Sunday at the moment and I just had confirmed something I had suspected, something that has become nearly a tradition in recent years…and that is Boston College traveling to South Bend and winning. Let’s be accurate—that happens in Chestnut Hill, too. Ok, ok, I shouldn’t kick a leprechaun when he is down. Yes, I understand that the Irish are going through a season of major growing pains, the kind to be expected when you lose major stars on both sides of the ball to the NFL or to graduation or both. Understood. But this most recent defeat is the fifth in a row between these two schools, if I am not mistaken, and possibly sixth in the last seven meetings. And included in there is a top-10 ranked, Brady Quinn-led Irish squad as well. Can we say “pattern”?! No, ND fans, the students and alumni of Boston College will have none of your, “It’s only because we lost all our stars this year—just wait until next year.” Between ND and BC, this year was just business as usual.
In Honduras news, Friday was my sitemate Gen’s birthday, so there was a little get together at her casa that included the breaded, sesame seed covered, topped with spicy mandarin sauce chicken I mentioned in an earlier entry. Good eatin’! And then Saturday night there was a fiesta in the town hall and that was a very good time, dancing with the locals. More to come.
October 18
Just confirmed plans for next week. Next Tuesday I will take a couple of buses to a town about 5 hrs away (it’s amazing this place is still in my town’s municipality) and from there I will be visiting six or seven villages I have never been to before to see what their water problems are. That will be good, I have been wanting to get out to these communities for awhile but never had the means. Now I have been introduced to a gentleman who works with the Centro de Salud here in Victoria who spends a lot of his time out where I am going next week, so he’ll be showing me around. The whole thing should take around three or four days which means I should come back by Friday or Saturday.
As for the communities where I did topo studies and need to return to, that planning is still ongoing. I have been fortunate to see members of both communities so far in town this week and been able to explain what the deal is with the designs. But at this point I can not say exactly when I can return because of a couple of PC meetings that have been scheduled for November. Frustrating at the moment, I know more for them than it is for me.
October 20
Happy Birthday, Cutrone!
October 22
I have been feeling sick and have not really slept well in recent days but today decided to get up early to run anyway—actually mostly because I’ll be gone for the rest of the week starting tomorrow and won’t have a chance to run. Anyway, my headache and sore throat and stuffy nose ceased to be a burden the moment I looked at my phone…three text messages and a voicemail all telling me the same thing. SOX GOING TO THE WORLD SERIES!!! I had been completely in the dark and for some reason these same friends who broke the great news had disappeared earlier in the week. The last I had heard from anyone was this past Wednesday that they were down 3-1 and game 5 was in Cleveland on Thursday. And then nothing from anyone. Maybe I’m exaggerating; someone did text me on Saturday morning that Boston had won game 5. But aside from that one there were no texts or phone calls all of Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. The tension was excruciating! I did not know until early this morning (Monday) that the Sox won games six and seven, too! Unreal. I know by the time I am able to get to an internet town and post this there is a decent chance the World Series will already be over, but that’s the risk you take with the rolling update, eh?! Go Sox!
October 29
It is a Monday, I am still feeling sick, and that must mean there is good news about the Sox. Congratulations to RED SOX NATION—WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS 2007!!! Was it really just last week that I had gotten word that they were going to the World Series? Yes, yes it was. Did the whole damn series take place from Wednesday to Sunday? Apparently so. Amazing, I don’t know what else to say. And I really shouldn’t try because, unfortunately, I did not see a single game of their playoff run so I have only bits and pieces from people to form a picture in my head of how things went. Man, another come-from-behind seven game ALCS followed by another World Series sweep…that’s crazy. As soon as I get to an internet town I plan on copying and pasting the recaps of every single game I missed. I may do it for Colorado’s NLCS run, too, because from what I’ve heard it sounded like they were on a tear until this week. But you already know about all of that, so I digress…
On Saturday afternoon I returned from my northern-Victoria-village-jaunt ‘07 and not in a good state. As my entry for the 22nd mentioned, I had been feeling sick even before I left but over the course of the week it got worse. The work aspect was good—I saw towns I had never seen and met with the people who know what their water scene is like, saw water sources in the middle of forests, and now have a good idea of who is ready for what. But I left sick and was in places where the elevation is three times what it is here in Victoria just as a cold front moved in to Honduras. I really do not think I saw the sun more than twice over the five days I was gone and it was cold and wet nearly everywhere I visited. Anyway, I came back on Saturday afternoon, having begun the day in a village 3 towns and 6 hrs hike away from Victoria, exhausted and shivering to the bone. I only did 2 hrs of the 6 hr hike on foot, luckily, because I was fortunate enough to be on horseback for the first three hours and then caught a bus for the homestretch which turned the last hour into twenty minutes. I had not showered in five days but the last thing I wanted was to stand under a cold stream of water. Woe is me, I know!
I will say this: my romantic notion of life in these villages has been thoroughly squashed. Although three of the four villages I spent the night in had some sort of solar plant that brought electricity to certain homes until about 9pm, many of the others that I visited during the day did not and almost none of them had latrines of any kind. Part of it is that I was not feeling so hot during the trip, but the experience definitely dragged on me. All of the people were very hospitable and generous, of course, and I did not lack for food or a bed wherever I went. It seemed like I had a cup of coffee every couple of hours during the day; with every new village I encountered there was at least one or two cups in different homes to be had. I have nothing eloquent or profound to say about this, but I still have an image in my head of the final village I stayed the night in. At dinner all seven of the family members crowd into the kitchen to eat in turns by the light of the wood burning stove, the only light and heat source in the house. And these are not malnourished, weak children either, but young men in their late teens or early twenties who have been working alongside dad in the corn or coffee fields for years, and teenage girls who are helping their mother with everything from carrying buckets of water from Lord knows how far away to cooking and cleaning for the entire household; all of them doing the kind of manual labor that would have made me shudder or cry if I were asked to do the same at their age. And still the image of life in these villages has gone from humble and peaceful to exhausting. More to come—I’m going to an internet town mañana and need to get to bed because I’m still coughing up a lung!
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Andy Griffith wasn’t the bombshell…?
October 6
I just got back yesterday from doing a topo study in that town I was supposed to visit a couple of weeks ago but couldn’t because heavy rains had ruined the path. Two men came to my home on Monday morning with one horse between them and we set out for their village (~200 people) soon afterward. It turned out to be a solid three hour trek over very unforgiving terrain, much like I had been warned about. Devotees will remember I was advised against making this particular journey last month because of how difficult it would be…I thought at the very least they were exaggerating. Not so. First off, the three hour trek is exactly that—we left shortly before noon and arrived around quarter past 3pm. Secondly, while the journey itself is a bit less than 10km one way, you are climbing a solid 800 meters in elevation from my town to theirs. Finally, and most unfortunately, the path itself is not nice…nightmare is too strong a word, I think, but difficult doesn’t quite do it justice.
It was raining when we left which did not make things any easier because the first rough patch upon leaving my town is a steep and winding climb on solid rock. This is not gravel but stones the size of your foot and slightly bigger surrounding chunks of exposed boulders. You can imagine how annoying this can be, especially on a steady climb—in wet weather you want to avoid the boulders because they are slick as ice but in dry the smaller stones are anything but a stable place to put your foot. I was on horseback (they brought it for me because they thought I was bringing a whole host of heavy equipment which I was not and because they understand that gringo = hiking burden due to a lack of basic outdoors competency…that’s fair) and they were on foot, the two men accompanying me, which made me feel like a princess. But they were not carrying anything and I had a rather full backpack of clothes, notebooks, some equipment and was not about to refuse their offer of the horse. The horse did not much like the stone climb but was pretty confident and we made our way up without incident. The only other part of the journey worth mentioning came toward the end, deep in a forest where the light of the sun rarely penetrates. There we encountered the part I was most nervous about, the part where the men from two weeks ago said is so nasty even horses fall over. What it amounts to is a twenty minute climb and descent, both fairly steep, over nothing but mud; clay-like at parts and marsh-like at others. The horse did well, especially considering one of the men was walking behind us occasionally whipping him with a small branch over this section—the last thing I wanted the horse to be worried about going over this mud-covered forest was being whipped from behind, but he managed well. There was definitely a spot or two where the depth of the mud surprised even the horse and we stumbled a bit, splashing mud and water everywhere, but overall no issues.
And then we arrived at the village. My decision to not bring a camera was an unfortunate one, both because from atop the village I suspect you can capture the entire 25 houses, school, and church that encompass it AND because this village opens up onto a valley on the other side and the surrounding mountainous areas as well. It is a very impressive view to say the least. I won’t go through a day by day list of what all we did but will run briefly through some of the highlights. Shortly after we arrived there was a small town meeting where I mentioned what I would be doing and what I needed from them and the town discussed other organizational items among themselves. After we had everything concerning the work covered, one of the ladies in charge put out this question to the assembled group—“Ok, so who is going to feed him?” And there was silence. A prolonged silence. It was, for nearly a minute, one of the most awkward situations I think I have been in. No one said anything, everyone kind of absently looked around the room, waiting for someone else to say something. After awhile I started to suddenly not feel so awkward as I realized that sooner or later they would figure it out. That I was in fact there to help them AND that they had known I was coming for several weeks at least. At no point was I worried that the lady in charge would walk over to me and say, “I’m sorry. We can’t find anyone who will feed you. We’ll take you home now.” Then someone brought up tortillas and they were talking about that for a bit and I absent-mindedly kept one ear to the conversation as I chuckled to myself about the uniqueness of the situation. Then the lady in charge got my attention and asked me, “How many tortillas do you eat in a day?” I was stunned with the question; I was sure it was a joke even as part of me knew that it was not a joke at all. I unconsciously made a weird face, I’m sure, as I tried to rack my brain to find an appropriate answer, and there were clearly others in the room who appreciated the awkwardness of the scene because no sooner did I hesitantly offer a number than several people began laughing hysterically. I couldn’t help but laugh as well and soon everyone in the room was laughing.
In the end I did not lack for food at all; on the contrary they were over-generous and gave me much more than I asked for. Another one of the funny things I noticed as the week progressed was just how the meals the family that was feeding me grew in complexity. Tuesday, the first day of the topo study, a group of ten or so men from the village and I make our way deep into the forest to find the water source and get things going. We are working for several hours, one group just hacking away at the vegetation with their machetes, making a path so the other group of us could slowly mark our way and plot the changes in elevation. One can imagine this being a very masculine, even savage type of work—we’re in the middle of the wilderness, after all, blazing our own trail, making the forest bend to our demands at the end of a machete. And then around noon who appears almost out of nowhere but the wife of one of the men helping me, with her two little girls, holding lunch for me and her husband. How long they had been there before I noticed them or exactly how they made it out to where we were I have no idea. All I know is that my illusions of us being Lewis and Clark type adventurers was dashed as I watched the little girls with pig-tails walking hand in hand with mom, calmly making their way back to the community after leaving us our lunch.
Ok, so lunch on that particular day was in a tupperware type deal with beans, rice, and corn tortillas—a good, solid meal and pretty standard fare, you just use the tortillas to scoop up the beans and rice. The second day for lunch the mother did the same, made her way out to our location around noon with her girls to bring lunch, emasculating us all. My meal was similar to the first day only this time it came on a dinner plate with silverware, all wrapped tightly in one bag and in another a plastic bottle of a kool-aid type drink with a glass cup to drink it with! Meanwhile her husband is eating his lunch out of a plastic bag, no plates or silverware or anything. By day three we were doing our work in the community itself, so there was no hike involved in bringing us our meals. But on this day when the mother arrived at where we were working, she asked if I was ready to eat, I responded that I was, and she proceeded to withdraw a dinner plate with rice, beans, cheese, and flour tortillas. Then she whipped out a tupperware dish, pulled two drumsticks out and placed them on the rice, and then poured some of the marinating juices onto the rice…and only then was my lunch ready for me to eat. What is that banana dessert dish where the waiter lights it on fire just before serving it? It was like that. I was impressed by what she was doing and a little embarrassed she had gone to so much trouble for me. Yes, all of the meals were excellent and if anything, despite all the hiking that I was doing, I think I left that village a bit heavier than when I arrived.
The work of the study itself was good, nothing exceptional about it. This village was much smaller than the first one I did, only twenty five houses as opposed to over a hundred, so it was nice to be able to complete everything in less than a full week. I was put up in their church, which amounts to little more than a barn-looking structure with a dirt floor and a few benches inside. The family taking care of me was extremely kind and generous with everything and hung a hammock up in there so I could sleep and gave me a fantastic thick blanket to use at night so I wouldn’t freeze. Overall the conditions in this village were more spartan than the in the first village. There is absolutely no electricity in this one whereas in the first there were a series of houses linked to some sort of solar battery which provided light until about 8pm or so. This village has no roads that cars or buses can travel over to get to it while the first has a bus that comes through twice a day. Really and truly, the only way the people in this village interact with the mayors office or sell the crops they grow to the city stores is to make the three hour hike into town. They do it often and within an hour or two they turn around and head back home.
One of the best parts of the entire week was every night at around 7 or 8 when I would prop a little chair outside the church where I was sleeping and just sit. The only lights outside of the stars, which absolutely cover the entire sky, are those of a small town across the valley and at the top of a nearby mountain. It is probably a good couple dozen kilometers to the town but it looks so close because of the lights. The church sits on a hillside overlooking the little soccer field they have 30 meters below and the field itself overlooks the valley some 500 meters below that. The nights were cloudless when I was there and with all the stars and moon it was easy to make out the shadows of the outlying mountains and descent to the valley. It was so incredibly peaceful to just sit there, staring out at the landscape, taking in the stars and the lights of that town across another mountaintop. It is not altogether different from the peace one might get by looking into a burning candle in the middle of a darkened room, for example, but even in the town I live in I can not find a view—nothing close to it—like the one in this tiny village of 25 houses. Extremely peaceful.
We finished up on Thursday afternoon and then on Friday morning I headed back home. There was a family headed back to my town intent on selling several large bags of frijoles they had grown in the village, so they loaded up two horses, the owner was on a third horse and his wife and her sister and I followed on foot. I was aprehensive about being on foot because of the condition of the path, but I actually did not want to be on a horse because I had a vision of a nasty fall over the tricky mud part. I figured I could go as slowly as I needed to on foot and, after all, I was walking in boots I bought here that handle mud better than anything one can find at REI or any sporting good store Stateside. On top of all that I was only carrying my own weight because the man on horseback offered to wear my backpack, while the women were switching off carrying an infant and their purses and were only wearing flimsy shower sandals. How in the hell can they make this journey in those things? I thought to myself as we started out. I would soon discover that they barely walked at all—over the treacherous mudslide section they seemed to float effortlessly from tiny exposed rocks or roots. I looked at nothing else for entire sections besides the back of their sandal-clad feet and tried to mimick their foot placement as they danced over any and every nasty surface the path offered. It did not matter if they had a child in hand or not—as I struggled to steady myself by grabbing at everything I could, they would just nimbly hop from point to point. The women’s ability to navigate the terrain was dumbfounding and truly humbling and made me think maybe I did belong on horseback after all, with a placard hanging around my neck proclaiming, “Princess.”
I just got back yesterday from doing a topo study in that town I was supposed to visit a couple of weeks ago but couldn’t because heavy rains had ruined the path. Two men came to my home on Monday morning with one horse between them and we set out for their village (~200 people) soon afterward. It turned out to be a solid three hour trek over very unforgiving terrain, much like I had been warned about. Devotees will remember I was advised against making this particular journey last month because of how difficult it would be…I thought at the very least they were exaggerating. Not so. First off, the three hour trek is exactly that—we left shortly before noon and arrived around quarter past 3pm. Secondly, while the journey itself is a bit less than 10km one way, you are climbing a solid 800 meters in elevation from my town to theirs. Finally, and most unfortunately, the path itself is not nice…nightmare is too strong a word, I think, but difficult doesn’t quite do it justice.
It was raining when we left which did not make things any easier because the first rough patch upon leaving my town is a steep and winding climb on solid rock. This is not gravel but stones the size of your foot and slightly bigger surrounding chunks of exposed boulders. You can imagine how annoying this can be, especially on a steady climb—in wet weather you want to avoid the boulders because they are slick as ice but in dry the smaller stones are anything but a stable place to put your foot. I was on horseback (they brought it for me because they thought I was bringing a whole host of heavy equipment which I was not and because they understand that gringo = hiking burden due to a lack of basic outdoors competency…that’s fair) and they were on foot, the two men accompanying me, which made me feel like a princess. But they were not carrying anything and I had a rather full backpack of clothes, notebooks, some equipment and was not about to refuse their offer of the horse. The horse did not much like the stone climb but was pretty confident and we made our way up without incident. The only other part of the journey worth mentioning came toward the end, deep in a forest where the light of the sun rarely penetrates. There we encountered the part I was most nervous about, the part where the men from two weeks ago said is so nasty even horses fall over. What it amounts to is a twenty minute climb and descent, both fairly steep, over nothing but mud; clay-like at parts and marsh-like at others. The horse did well, especially considering one of the men was walking behind us occasionally whipping him with a small branch over this section—the last thing I wanted the horse to be worried about going over this mud-covered forest was being whipped from behind, but he managed well. There was definitely a spot or two where the depth of the mud surprised even the horse and we stumbled a bit, splashing mud and water everywhere, but overall no issues.
And then we arrived at the village. My decision to not bring a camera was an unfortunate one, both because from atop the village I suspect you can capture the entire 25 houses, school, and church that encompass it AND because this village opens up onto a valley on the other side and the surrounding mountainous areas as well. It is a very impressive view to say the least. I won’t go through a day by day list of what all we did but will run briefly through some of the highlights. Shortly after we arrived there was a small town meeting where I mentioned what I would be doing and what I needed from them and the town discussed other organizational items among themselves. After we had everything concerning the work covered, one of the ladies in charge put out this question to the assembled group—“Ok, so who is going to feed him?” And there was silence. A prolonged silence. It was, for nearly a minute, one of the most awkward situations I think I have been in. No one said anything, everyone kind of absently looked around the room, waiting for someone else to say something. After awhile I started to suddenly not feel so awkward as I realized that sooner or later they would figure it out. That I was in fact there to help them AND that they had known I was coming for several weeks at least. At no point was I worried that the lady in charge would walk over to me and say, “I’m sorry. We can’t find anyone who will feed you. We’ll take you home now.” Then someone brought up tortillas and they were talking about that for a bit and I absent-mindedly kept one ear to the conversation as I chuckled to myself about the uniqueness of the situation. Then the lady in charge got my attention and asked me, “How many tortillas do you eat in a day?” I was stunned with the question; I was sure it was a joke even as part of me knew that it was not a joke at all. I unconsciously made a weird face, I’m sure, as I tried to rack my brain to find an appropriate answer, and there were clearly others in the room who appreciated the awkwardness of the scene because no sooner did I hesitantly offer a number than several people began laughing hysterically. I couldn’t help but laugh as well and soon everyone in the room was laughing.
In the end I did not lack for food at all; on the contrary they were over-generous and gave me much more than I asked for. Another one of the funny things I noticed as the week progressed was just how the meals the family that was feeding me grew in complexity. Tuesday, the first day of the topo study, a group of ten or so men from the village and I make our way deep into the forest to find the water source and get things going. We are working for several hours, one group just hacking away at the vegetation with their machetes, making a path so the other group of us could slowly mark our way and plot the changes in elevation. One can imagine this being a very masculine, even savage type of work—we’re in the middle of the wilderness, after all, blazing our own trail, making the forest bend to our demands at the end of a machete. And then around noon who appears almost out of nowhere but the wife of one of the men helping me, with her two little girls, holding lunch for me and her husband. How long they had been there before I noticed them or exactly how they made it out to where we were I have no idea. All I know is that my illusions of us being Lewis and Clark type adventurers was dashed as I watched the little girls with pig-tails walking hand in hand with mom, calmly making their way back to the community after leaving us our lunch.
Ok, so lunch on that particular day was in a tupperware type deal with beans, rice, and corn tortillas—a good, solid meal and pretty standard fare, you just use the tortillas to scoop up the beans and rice. The second day for lunch the mother did the same, made her way out to our location around noon with her girls to bring lunch, emasculating us all. My meal was similar to the first day only this time it came on a dinner plate with silverware, all wrapped tightly in one bag and in another a plastic bottle of a kool-aid type drink with a glass cup to drink it with! Meanwhile her husband is eating his lunch out of a plastic bag, no plates or silverware or anything. By day three we were doing our work in the community itself, so there was no hike involved in bringing us our meals. But on this day when the mother arrived at where we were working, she asked if I was ready to eat, I responded that I was, and she proceeded to withdraw a dinner plate with rice, beans, cheese, and flour tortillas. Then she whipped out a tupperware dish, pulled two drumsticks out and placed them on the rice, and then poured some of the marinating juices onto the rice…and only then was my lunch ready for me to eat. What is that banana dessert dish where the waiter lights it on fire just before serving it? It was like that. I was impressed by what she was doing and a little embarrassed she had gone to so much trouble for me. Yes, all of the meals were excellent and if anything, despite all the hiking that I was doing, I think I left that village a bit heavier than when I arrived.
The work of the study itself was good, nothing exceptional about it. This village was much smaller than the first one I did, only twenty five houses as opposed to over a hundred, so it was nice to be able to complete everything in less than a full week. I was put up in their church, which amounts to little more than a barn-looking structure with a dirt floor and a few benches inside. The family taking care of me was extremely kind and generous with everything and hung a hammock up in there so I could sleep and gave me a fantastic thick blanket to use at night so I wouldn’t freeze. Overall the conditions in this village were more spartan than the in the first village. There is absolutely no electricity in this one whereas in the first there were a series of houses linked to some sort of solar battery which provided light until about 8pm or so. This village has no roads that cars or buses can travel over to get to it while the first has a bus that comes through twice a day. Really and truly, the only way the people in this village interact with the mayors office or sell the crops they grow to the city stores is to make the three hour hike into town. They do it often and within an hour or two they turn around and head back home.
One of the best parts of the entire week was every night at around 7 or 8 when I would prop a little chair outside the church where I was sleeping and just sit. The only lights outside of the stars, which absolutely cover the entire sky, are those of a small town across the valley and at the top of a nearby mountain. It is probably a good couple dozen kilometers to the town but it looks so close because of the lights. The church sits on a hillside overlooking the little soccer field they have 30 meters below and the field itself overlooks the valley some 500 meters below that. The nights were cloudless when I was there and with all the stars and moon it was easy to make out the shadows of the outlying mountains and descent to the valley. It was so incredibly peaceful to just sit there, staring out at the landscape, taking in the stars and the lights of that town across another mountaintop. It is not altogether different from the peace one might get by looking into a burning candle in the middle of a darkened room, for example, but even in the town I live in I can not find a view—nothing close to it—like the one in this tiny village of 25 houses. Extremely peaceful.
We finished up on Thursday afternoon and then on Friday morning I headed back home. There was a family headed back to my town intent on selling several large bags of frijoles they had grown in the village, so they loaded up two horses, the owner was on a third horse and his wife and her sister and I followed on foot. I was aprehensive about being on foot because of the condition of the path, but I actually did not want to be on a horse because I had a vision of a nasty fall over the tricky mud part. I figured I could go as slowly as I needed to on foot and, after all, I was walking in boots I bought here that handle mud better than anything one can find at REI or any sporting good store Stateside. On top of all that I was only carrying my own weight because the man on horseback offered to wear my backpack, while the women were switching off carrying an infant and their purses and were only wearing flimsy shower sandals. How in the hell can they make this journey in those things? I thought to myself as we started out. I would soon discover that they barely walked at all—over the treacherous mudslide section they seemed to float effortlessly from tiny exposed rocks or roots. I looked at nothing else for entire sections besides the back of their sandal-clad feet and tried to mimick their foot placement as they danced over any and every nasty surface the path offered. It did not matter if they had a child in hand or not—as I struggled to steady myself by grabbing at everything I could, they would just nimbly hop from point to point. The women’s ability to navigate the terrain was dumbfounding and truly humbling and made me think maybe I did belong on horseback after all, with a placard hanging around my neck proclaiming, “Princess.”
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