Cow Mud and Torrential Rain Add up to Adventure

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This adventure, as for the others, started innocently enough. My friend Suyapa works at a school about 7 miles from Copan, where children from the nearby village attend. Most are quite poor. I told Suyapa I wanted to visit her school, thinking there might be a possibility in the future to work with the kids or school in some way.

Before I left, Orphilia and Elda teased me about how I was coing on an expedition to the jungle with animals and all kinds of dangers. Just visiting kids in the country I thought, nothing very adventurous about that. Suyapa and I left in the morning, and rode a bus-van that serves the area. The road travels through beautiful hills with coffee plantations and other cleared land, all wet from the previous night´s deluge. Suyapa is very proper at times, always laughing, and seems to enjoy the company of people from other countries very much. However, she wouldn´t let me take her photo because her hair was still wet from her morning bath. She said I was silly when I begged her to tell me dirty Spanish words, and only told me one that I already knew, and even that one she would only write down and not say out loud.

Kids were kicking a ball in the road when we arrived. The boys all wore black rubber boots, the girls sandals. Most were dressed in ragged and worn clothes, all were wide eyed. The kids got quiet when I arrived, and seemed very shy, but that did not last long. Suyapa said we would take a little walk, and the kids immediately started running and screaming they were so happy. Suyapa assured me ¨it¨ was very close. I have learned that when someone tells you that, beware. It is never very close.

So we all started on our walk up a muddy dirt road. Soon we came to a very muddy place--the whole road was ankle deep in thick mud, but I noticed it was green and yellow in places. No, not mud, but mud of cows. Nearby was a corral, and they had churned the road up and fertilized it copiously. Suyapa and I found a route above it near the barbed wire fence, where I ripped my shirt. The kids were running right through it, splashing cow poo up to their knees. The girls were getting the worst of it because they were wearing sandals.

In an especially bad place, the kids tried hard to make it easier for Suyapa and me. Some boys laid down a wood plank across the muck, and I had to be careful not to step on the nails sticking straight out of it. Once past this obstacle, we were homefree, and climbed the mountain full of offee plants with white blossoms. And around us the mist hugged the mountains, and cows grew smaller below. The distant hills were spectacular. Guatemala was just a few miles away beyond the hills on the other side of the valley.

The boys were everywhere, running in between coffee plants, finding trails up little hills, jumping on what looked like a pump house. Suyapa laughed and tried to call them to order, but these little guys knew what they wanted on this outing. Near the top after quite a climb and a lot of sweat which the kids noticed, one boy put a small rock on the side of the road, and draped Suyapa´s jacket over it for me to sit on. We rested and Suyapa introduced each child by name, and they all shyly smiled at me. I continued to snap photos, and the kids clamored to see the images in my camera.

Suyapa decided to go down then, and about a third of the way a girl walking next to me looked behind me and said ¨tormenta.¨That means rain. Lots of it. I looked, and there it was. It came quickly, and we were all running and laughing and getting wet. Suyapa gave me her jacket, but it was really too late. We all ran through the rivers of rain to the corral that had a roof. And there we enjoyed the aroma of cow poo and pee, and watched the deluge. The cows wanted cover, so we had to move from in front of their gate. Boys climbed the corral fence. A girl intentionally put herself under water streaming from the roof. She was totally soaked. The kids were covered in muck. I looked at my pants, which had been so clean in the morning, and they were splattered with a pasty poo. I stepped in a pocket of poo. It gushed between my toes, and as I walked I slid.

After about 15 minutes the rain stopped, and the sun emerged. Now the muck was several inches deeper, and we slipped and slid across it to the muddy road beyond a gate. I took more photos of the kids, this time focusing on their fertilized feet. Most of them found fresh rivulets to rinse their feet in, but the rivulets had first traveled through the muck. We made it back to the school, where I rinsed my feet with water from a hose. Suyapa and I laughed about our adventure with the kids. They all screamed ¨adios¨ when I left.

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[Sharing the Journey]

Thanks ...
I really enjoyed your blog. You have visited some really interesting places. Alec