I hopped
off the back of the pickup truck that had given me a ride from town to the
place that I knew as the rural farming cooperative “La Quinta”. There were a group of farmers sitting just
off the road in front of a stone cattle pen.
They had finished hand milking about 20 or 30 cows and had sent the
galvanized pails of milk into town for sale.
They glanced up at me as I hoisted my backpack and walked towards them,
puzzling over this strange gringo.
After
nodding my hello, I began trying to explain to them, in a hesitant and very
poor Spanish, the reason for my being there.
I wanted to know if I could stay there, as part of my internship with a university
in the U.S. (In my bad Spanish, it was
probably something like “Me want living with you. Me study boy”
I wanted to have the experience of living and learning from their
experience of cooperative farming in the middle of a revolution and civil war –
to write about their challenges and successes. (“Know me live here farmer
together - revolution and fight – write something.”
After about
five minutes of my increasingly nervous blather, during which time the farmers
watched bemusedly and what seemed to be uncomprehendingly from in front of the
corral, one man who later turned out to be the president of the cooperative
stood up, came toward me, made a sign for me to basically just shut up, reached
out, grabbed my arms one by one and roughly pressed each forearm between thumb
and fingers, testing to see if there was any muscle there. He then smiled and said; “Sure, you can stay with us.”
That was
the beginning of my 8 month stint as an adopted member of the cooperative, construction
helper, field hand and, eventually, learner of Spanish.
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