Every Tuesday I visit our first host grandma- Amalia. Amalia calls me 'mi hija' (my daughter) and always prepares a special meal for our Tuesday visits. These special meals are, unfortunately, not always things I actually want to eat (mmm....cow hoof soup! For me? Oh, Amalia you don't need to do so much!) but she usually makes me a hot chicheme (hot corn or rice...drink? I guess...but it is good!) or a good hot meal. I don't visit Amalia, though, for the food. I visit her because she is amazing.
Amalia has given me reason to reflect on definitions of beauty, strength, happiness and success. The more I learn about her the more she both amazes and teaches me.
I know that Amalia cannot be understood in a blog post, but Amalia is such an important part of my Peace Corps experience that I feel like I have to do my best.
Amalia is 70 years old. She came to Boqueron 'oh! hace añññooooos' which means a long time ago but she has no idea what year it was or how old or anything.I do know she was one of the first four families in Boqueron. The way she explained it me was that she came to Boqueron after she had, and later lost, her fourth child in Santa Fe where she was living before. She and her husband, Alfredo (they were married in the Catholic Church, by the way, something very rare for folks in our community. She has a lot of pride in this) picked up and moved out this way (halfway across the country) because there was more potential work for her husband. She had her family there in Santa Fe but had gone through so much pain with the children that she knew it would be best to moved.
Amalia and I first became friends when, after we had been in their house/Boqueron for three weeks, I had a rough day. For one reason or another, at this point I really don't know, I was crying. I didn't want to make a big deal out of anything and thought I was just doing the little sniffle thing, but Amalia came over and started telling me about when she and Alfredo moved from Santa Fe to Boqueron, the first time she had been away from her father and her brother and sisters that she helped raise (her mother died when she was 12 making Amalia the woman of the house). She said being away form her family was so hard that sometimes she would cry too. She told me that it was OK to miss my family sometimes, that it would be hard living so far away. Instantly I felt a connection to Amalia that I had not felt before. It personalized her in a way that I hadn't felt yet, sill feeling at that point like a gringo living with Panamanians...not that the experience up to then hadn't been nice, but I just started seeing Amalia in a compltely different way that has since stuck.
Now every Tuesday when I go over I get another glimpse into her life. Just a few weeks ago she explained to me about giving birth to all 12(!!!) of her children. Never in a hospital. Never near a hosital. Every single one in the campo, rural, usually alone sometimes maybe just a child or two around. She took care of the umbilical chord, of everything, on her own. She told me that one time a neighbor had heard her screaming and the next day told her. She told me that this was because "when you give birth there is a lot of pain" (downplayed a bit, wouldn't you say?) Sometimes she talks to me about what it was like to lose her children, sometimes she will say it as though it was all one big experience and other times she will talk about one specific child. Of the 12 children Amalia had there are 4 living.She didn't lose her children in childbirth, they were children, some adolescents, who caught illnesses that could have been cured or treated with then-modern medicine. She just had no access to a hospital. Some children died in accidents. She told me once that for a long time she was scared of the night time because all of her children died during the night.
But she will say these things- things that in one breath can just break my heart into a million pieces just thinking about her living those experiences- and then she will say something happy or see a toucan flying past and smile the biggest broadest smile you've ever seen. And the woman laughs all day long. Sometimes in her own world, sometimes winking at me across the way, but laughing laughing laughing. Sean once described Amalia as our personal Buddha and if you could see her smile and laugh (the smile in the picture above is almost there, you can pretty well see how happy she is) I think it would make sense. She is a woman who is very at peace with where she is in life. She takes pleasure in the everyday things life has to offer- cooking and eating, being with people she loves, sharing what little she has with others, etc. Here is a woman who has been through more pain that anyone desrves to experience and has come out the other side with nothing but happiness for those things she does have. That kind of happiness is contagious.
Amalia can do some amazing things. She taught me how to make cornstarch out of arrow root, how to peel corn from the pre-cooked cob, how to take the rice her son harvested in the morning and turn it into sellable new rice (he brings it on leaves, she takes them off and cooks the rice for a few hours to make it more valuable), how to de-shell coffee....let's stop here for a second. This deshlling coffee business is no easy task. You watch her do it and it blows your mind. How can one tiny body have that much strength? She essentially puts the coffee beans into a giant (like stomach-high) mortar and uses a humungous pestle (though not so wide at the bottom, more just like a really huge wide wood stick that weighs a lot) lifting it up high, using all of her back and then slamming it down into the container again and again until all of the shells have seperated from the beans. This is life! She is working her ass off all day everyday and with the biggest smile you've ever seen. She tells me "When we moved here there would be women who would buy rice! Buy rice! Can you imagine? I peeled our rice and that is what we ate every night. I saved our family a lot of money" She has that same philiosphy all of these years later, working any way she can to save some money for the family.Amalia is pretty sick. She is 70 years old (71 on the 26th) and her body has been burdened with every one of those 70 years. Sometimes she seems so frail- when her arthritis is acting up or when I surprise her and no one else is home and I find her with her head in her hands clearly in pain. Her knees and feet are almost always swollen, her neck currently has two large lumps and I know they found a lump in her breast last year. She will have weeks of major stomach problems and the years of cooking over a wood-burning fagon or breathign in burning plasic fumes when burning her garbage can be heard in her coughs and respiratory problems. But then other times, maybe most of the time, it is impossible to tell that Amalia could possibly be sick, or possibly be 70. She doesn't seem frail at all, instead she seems like she has more strength in her arthritic pinky than I do in my 27 year old body. Watching the way she works day in and day out I forget that just a week ago she was having headaches or...whatever.
The thing about Amalia is that she doesn't let you remember her weaknesss...or maybe she doesn't even let herself remember her weaknesses. All day she wakes up with the energy and desire to play a vital role in her family (it is, by the way, herself and her two youngest sons (47 and 28) in the home). The go out and work the farm and she takes care of the product/food once it gets back to the house. She makes sure that everyone who swings by (myself included) has a hot plate in front of them. She doesn't say no to work, to a stroll to the neighbors house or an unexpected visitor. And most luckily for me, she doesn't say no to a friend. How lucky I am to have had the last year to get to know her and I only hope I've added an iota of the light to her world that she has added to mine.
Just walking home from a neighbor's house
The last bit of trail on the way to her house. She wanted to be barefoot but said her son would get mad.
