Tranquilo

There are quite a lot of things to report on this week, and unfortunately, I had written an entire post just moments ago when my internet connection failed, the computer shut off, and I lost everything.

Tranquilo.

This word, translated literally, means ´´tranquil.´´ In Colombia, it is an expression which means ´´relax, no big deal, don´t worry about it, take your time.´´ It is important to me to continue to remind myself to be tranquila because sometimes once you lose something, it´s gone. It´s fine. I can re-type this. My intense, type-A perfectionistic, idealistic personality is really getting a good exercise in patience. Latin America is a good place for me to learn these lessons. If all else fails, you can always abandon your work for the moment and go take a nap, or drink a cup of coffee, or work on something else, and go back to it later.

Many things are unpredictable in life, and even more so in Manizales, largely in part due to the ever-fluctuating weather. I might even go as far to say that they experience more of a range of climate than we do in my beloved New England. They even have the same expression we often hear during the winter in Boston, ´´if you don´t like the weather here, wait a minute.´´ Today was a good example.

As today is Saturday, we woke up later than usual. When I crawled out of bed and stepped outside to stretch, I remarked on the great difference between the warmth of the sun at 8am and its heat at 6:30am, which is when we get up on weekdays. The sky was bright and the air was dry. It felt really delicious. Jenn and I made plans to go into the city, so after our morning chores, we packed our bags and prepared for the four kilometer trek down the dirt road to the bus stop. Not one second after I closed the zipper to my bag, I heard the resounding crack and boom of thunder in the near distance. The sky darkened, and the crescendo of falling water approached us, until we found ourselves under attack by gumball sized drops of rain, which fell from the sky with an intensity I hadn´t experienced.

Determined not to let a little (or a lot) of rain hamper our city plans, we trudged ahead anyway, and marched headfirst into sheets of precipitation. About a minute or two into our soggy stroll, a rickety, rusty truck rattled its way down the road towards us and stopped a few feet ahead. The driver rolled down his window and asked us if we wanted a ride down to the bus stop. I peered inside his vehicle and saw that there was already someone sitting in his passenger seat, and that the backseat was stacked with boxes, farm equipment, and bunches of freshly-picked bananas. ´´But, there´s no room,´´ I said. ´´No, the back!´´ he replied. Of course. How very American of me, thinking inside the box of safety and low-risk. Of course there was room--on the back of truck, especially if you grip onto the racks on top of the roof. Jenn and I exchanged affirmative looks and hopped on.

The rain and wind picked up, and it would appear that we got our ride in the nick of time. The dirt road became a mud river, and the water fell with such concentrated showers that it pelted us in the face in sharp needles. I had to keep my eyes closed out of fear of losing a contact lens (or eyeball). I waved to every neighbor we passed, even if I didn´t know them. We certainly were a sight to behold--I can only imagine what the onlookers must have thought. Gangly white giantess and her equally pale compatriote, dangling off the edge of the truck, bodies swaying with each curve and bump of the road. We both had smiles plastered to our faces for the entirety of the five minute ride. It was not unlike what I imagine an Epcot parade to be. We arrived to the bus stop completely soaked, like, we-just-jumped-in-the-lagoon-with-our-jeans-on-soaked. But elated. This is what traveling is all about.

Yesterday was another soggy day, and another lesson in tranquilidad. When I went to go visit my chicken friends at mid-morning, to check for eggs and refill their water, I forgot to close the door behind me. As I greeted my gurrrlfriends and we had our typical repoire (´´awwww gurrrrl whatchu doinnnnnn bwahhh bwwahhhhh gurlll whatchu got in that nest gurrrrrrrl´´[see my last post for insight into this relationship]), about fifteen of them streamed out behind me, a reddish-brown sea of poultry. Crap. I ran out after them, and began to grab them two at a time with impressive swiftness, especially given the fact that three weeks ago I had never touched a chicken in my life. I picked one up by the legs even, since I had read somewhere that if you pick them up that way they become peaceful and dream-like. Not true. The little bugger squawcked and flapped like nothing else, and I hurried to dump her back in her home. Just as I was rounding up the last few, I caught The Bully jumping on top of the babies´ cage, pecking at them, causing their trap door on the top to cave in on top of them, which allowed them to escape out as well. They hopped and peeped around in an anarchous mess, and I had to take a deep breath and find my tranquila before deciding on who to chase down first, and how to do it. I finally grabbed the last of them, put them all back where they belonged, and then sat down to have a one-on-one with The Bully.

I had been noticing that The Bully has been picking on the younger ones for a few days now, so I asked Trinidad, the animal guru at Cecilia´s farm, what the deal was with her. She told me that this chicken had been persecuted when she was a baby, and was certainly at the bottom of the totem pole, of the pecking order, literally. So, there I sat with Bully, and tried to reason with her using kindergarten logic. ´´Don´t you remember what it was like when they picked on you? Why are you doing it to them? Be a role model and break the chain!´´ She cocked her head to the side, and I thought I got through to her, until I caught her moments later picking through the compost heap, which is pretty much closed off, except for a little hole. This heap is where we throw the chicken poop and the leftover feed that has been pecked-through and clogged up with poultry saliva. It was then that I realized that a chicken who eats her own excrement, and the excrement of her brothers, sisters, and contemporaries, probably lacks the mental capacity necessary to comprehend empathetic logic. Ingesting poop and ABC feed certainly won´t increase brain mass. Oh well. I now fully understand the term pecking order. I will write about the social breakdown of the chicken community in later posts.

Other noteworthy points from the week, in bullet point, since this post is already obnoxiously long:
-I learned how to make goat cheese.
-I sorted and cleaned about 50 pounds of dried coffee beans, which are now ready to be roasted and processed
-Horses poop about 30 pounds a day!
-You can eat orange peels, if you scoop out all the white parts and soak them in water for a week, then dry them and sweeten them with a little sugar or honey
-I learned how to make peanut butter, by hand
-Manizaleños also dress up for Halloween. There are armies of little nugget children wandering around the city in costumes, and it´s really cute.

It rains here like I´ve never experienced. Right now it sounds like someone is pouring a dump truck-sized bag of quarters on top of the tin roof of this internet café. I get these wild daydreams of our little house on the farm being swept away into the coffee valleys.

Life on the farm can be simplified into two acts: pooping and eating. We eat, we poop, we throw our poop (and the poop of our animals) on the food we will eat in the future, we feed ourselves this food, we feed the animals this food as well, we all poop, and we throw this poop back on the future food. It´s beautiful.

Our goat is named Navidad, or Christmas, and she is the furthest thing from merry you will ever meet.

Thanks for reading! Tranquilo!