the rural communities

I have spent the past three weeks living in the rural communities of La Conquista. I spent 2-3 days in each community where I lived with one of the community health promotors and their family. During the day I walked around the community either with the health promotor or with one of her children to the different houses to conduct interviews. The interviews took up most of the day as I spoke with a minimum of 15 people and as many as 20 people in each community. Sometimes the interviews went well and I felt I was getting a lot of helpful information and at other times I seemed to be getting nothing and I found myself to be getting frustrated. But overall it was really neat to walk around the communities, to meet more of the residents, and to visit the houses of the people I already knew. When I was not conducting interviews I would be back at the health promotor’s house talking with her or her family, playing with the kids, or helping/watching she cooked the food.

My favorite memory was probably when I went with Dona Adilia to visit her family’s farm. She lives in the community of Buena Vista, which is alongside a small highway. It is more like a small town instead of a rural community. All of the people’s lands where they graze their cattle or where they plant their crops are in other neighboring communities, so the men and women have to walk from their homes each morning to their property. Dona Adilia’s son lives on the family property. She began to tell me about their land and I commented that I would like to see it as a way to get to know more about her life. So she said we could go. We left the house and began the 20-30 minute walk through a forest, up and down hills, and over rivers to the community of San Jorge. There we passed by the mayor’s house, stopped to admire the incredibly large tree in his yard, and then finished the last portion of the walk to her farm.

We first went to the house on the property where we stopped and sat with her daughter-in-law. They exchanged news about events that had happened in Buena Vista in the last two days, which included a funeral of a man, a baseball game, and a family feud that almost turned violent. Her daugher-in-law, Salvadora, then got up and brought us boiled corn. Dona Adilia and I ate the corn while she showed me the portion of the garden closest to the house. In this garden various fruits such as bananas, mangos, calala, and other fruits grow that we do not have in the States. Then we walked back up to the house to get a bag and a pale before leaving with her granddaughter to go and collect nancites. Nancites are a small yellow fruit about the size of a grape that have a seed inside. They fall off of the tree and then you can easily pick them up off of the ground. We collected these for a while and then the granddaughter and I went in search of guayava (another small green fruit that we do not have in the states). We went to the guayava tree and began to look for the ones that we more ripe. I began to climb the tree and she asked me in a disbelieving tone of voice – you can climb a tree. Of course, I responded, and continued to climb. We gathered the ones we could reach and then went back to help Dona Adilia carry the nancites back to the house.

We filled a straw bag with mangos and yucca, a plastic bag with the nancites, and then a bean sack about a third of the way full with trigo (a grain they give to the chickens and dogs). We thanked the family for our time there and Dona Adilia laughingly talked about how I would be coming back because I kept saying how much I liked my time there and how beautiful the farm was. We then each began to carry a different bag. Dona Adilia put the straw bag of yuccas and mangos on her head and I put the bean sack of trigo on mine and carried the sack of nancites in my hand. We walked out to the main road this time because of all of the goods we were carrying. Our hope was to find a taxi. But there was no taxi and the bus passed us going in the other direction. It would not return for about thirty minutes. So we decided to begin walking. We walked, talked, and laughed as we exchanged the bags of nancites from one person to another so as to share the load. Finally when we were about at her house a taxi appeared. So we flagged it down and then got in where we road the rest of the way to the house.