Jeffrey

Just thought I'd use this beauty shot as a teaser.  That was my abuela in the campo.  A feisty old woman with serious mental problems.  Her primary job was to water the earthen floor to keep the dust under control and she took it very seriously.  She also had a thing for me, and I am not even kidding.  She would peer out from behind the kitchen door and cackle at me.  Due to the fact that her tongue often sticking out of her mouth, it was kind of hard to understand what she was saying, but I definitely heard her offer to bathe me once. 

So I'm back from the campo.  Holy crap.  As we like to say at Brown, there's a lot to 'unpack' from the experience.  On a selfish level, I had an amazing time in La Laguna, a mountain-side (literally) pueblo of about 500 people.  Unbelievably beautiful scenery, satisfying work, tons to learn, friendly people, fun kids, etc, etc.  But at the same time, it was incredibly bizarre and painful.  As good as our intentions are, there's something inherently, well, unnatural about what we did.  "Hi!  We're just here to learn about your way of life, please continue on with your peasant-y activities while we take lots of photos and attempt to help out."  I'll write a post later with more photos and details about what this campo thing was all about.

But all the macro issues of power imbalances and systemic poverty aside, the defining part of my campo experience was this little guy:

Meet Jeffrey.  He appeared to have just two sets of clothes - his school uniform and the dirty Ninja Turtles shirt, ripped pants, and splitting rain boots he wore the rest of the time (later accented by the Brown baseball cap I gave him). This kid broke my heart.  In my homestay family structure, he was my campo nephew.  8 years old, father in the military, and a family too busy with their own business to pay much attention.  When this ex-camp-counselor gringo showed up with his backback of wonders (a deck of cards!  a bouncy ball!  a headlamp!) and no agenda except to hang out, he got real clingy real fast. 

And it was great at first!  Once you got past his shy front, he had a seemingly boundless reserve of energy.  When I went out to their land to work, it was Jeffrey who trained me in proper machete use and taught me which plants I could annihilate and which were supposed to be left alone.  Yes, this 8-year-old could handle a machete.  He could also carry what appeared to be many times his weight in firewood down the mountainside, scale papaya trees, herd sheep, and perform dozens of other campo tasks with an ease this 20-year-old envied.  He also functioned as my translator as he hadn't yet fully picked up the campo accent.  And the campo accent is tough, man.  It's less of an accent, and more of a pronouncing-only-every-third-syllable thing.  

But this kid ate up attention like candy.  Once I showed him how to play a few card games, it's all he wanted to do when we were around the house.  When we hung out with his friends or mine, he rarely left my side.  He wanted to be in physical contact whenever possible.  Piggy back rides, sitting in my hamaca with me, holding my hand while we were walking.  From my second day there, he kept asking when I had to leave and when I would be coming back.  It was both touching and extremely depressing.  I felt like I was just setting him up to feel abandoned, but I didn't know what else to do but keep spending time with him.  He looked miserable my entire last night. 

But leave I did.  The program wisely gave us a transition day in Matagalpa, the nearest city of any size to speak of, to decompress, sanitize, and begin to process the shocking experience they just threw at us.  And now I'm back 'home' in Managua.  It's nice to see my family here again and reconnect with the rest of the group and staff and feel genuinely clean and experience running water again (at least, part of the day).  But I miss him.  And I'm terrified that, in the end, even though I left him with the cards, and the bouncy ball, and the flashlight, I might have done more harm than good.