Life from Canada to Latin America, one word at a time.
My sister came to take me from Victoria to her home up island. Before we left, we had to make a slight detour, she told me. We needed to pick up some pigs for her farm. Yet even as Bonnie informed me our plans, she looked dubious. I would have to help with loading, and
I made yogurt yesterday. I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. After a Monday long with meetings and trying to both write and speak coherent sentences, I was done with living in my head. Instead, I boiled milk, let it cool, added a starter, and put it on top of the fridge to ferment. This morning, I woke up to a thermos full of creamy yogurt, the most productive thing I have accomplished in weeks.
“For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what has once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated
Saturday was the 17th anniversary of Mampujan’s displacement and the massacre in Las Brisas. I sat in a coffee shop off the main square of Villa de Leyva and very slowly ate dessert, holding Mampujan to the light. Besides birthdays and Christmas, there are a whole new set of dates that now mark my life:
If I actually had milk and butter in my house, I would be eating pancakes for dinner tonight. However, it appears, at least looking in my fridge, that I have already given up grocery shopping for Lent. Truthfully, besides facetiously giving up everything I don’t have or like- this year, vaccum cleaners and salsa dancing-
The eye doctor told me I have a convergence problem at my last checkup. I couldn’t help myself: I burst into laughter. He looked at me sideways and spoke slowly, “Are you sure you understand me?” How do you explain to a doctor that convergence is a lifelong struggle that goes far beyond bringing eye
I tend to think of myself as coasting through life. I am, in my mind, always a fascinated observer, but not often an actor. I care, but am never quite in the inner circle of activism or commitment to a cause. That is, until Wednesday, when I found myself clenching my eyes shut and gripping
On Thursday night, we arrived to the plaza, arms sore from standing on the corner holding five giant banana breads and trying to wave down taxis. Once we finally got to the peace camp with our offerings, nobody would let us inside, even as they took the cakes. As we started to step away, the
Once a year, I spend a day travelling by jeep through the Montes de Maria. I hate it. I love the communities that we visit, the conversations and meetings, the spaces of reflection afterwards, the green beauty surrounding everything. It’s the transportation that gets to me. Days before leaving, my stomach starts clenching and I
Facebook tells me that exactly three years ago today, and three days before I left Mampujan, Juana finally taught me some basic quilting. As she frantically packed to leave for another meeting in the morning, assuring me that she would say good-by, I stitched a tiny pink, naked looking figure into the corner of a
The Llama Diaries 