Paths in El Tres

June 18, 2018

Greetings from the confluence,

You crowd into the bus that careens down the road between Arpatado and Turbo.  You may have someone else’s child crawl over your lap or be sitting with your knees between those of a stranger.  The driver is shouting out the door at potential customers as he manages money, barks at passengers, and maniacally weaves in and out of obstacles.  The bus will roar between traffic, lurching to a rolling stop to take on riders or spit them out, with barely a still moment.

If you don’t know where to look for it you will miss the narrow path that leads from the main road.  Once you are on it, pitted, rocky and uneven, you can make your way across other farms, stepping gingerly across the cattle guards.  The path rises up over a few hills and in the heat it may seem further than the mile or so it really is.

Every other place you look is filled with banana trees.  If flew you over the area in a small noisy plane it would be all you could see, from one horizon to the next, banana trees.  It is what this part of Colombia runs on.  But this space, green and lush, is open, with a few trees, some crops that are meant for the people who live here. 

The land falls away from the path, slopes down to a modest house.  It is bright against the green; a blue roof and whitewashed walls.  And you have reached where our paths crossed.

My son makes the introductions in Spanish and then English, and there is the awkward smiles and polite, unsure handshakes.  The teenage children flutter around, curious about us, no doubt instructed to be on their best behavior.

Alberto offers to turn on some fans, he can see his guests are wilted by the heat.  There is no glass in the windows to prevent a breeze, but at that moment the fans are welcome.  Lunch is already prepared, and Irlene sets to serving us.  Rice and fish soup and plantains and yucca and an impressive red tilapia that looks as if it just leapt from the water.  It is all delicious.

Lunch disappears, and we have coffee and offer some gifts from our home to theirs.  We try to express through Carson’s translation, what it means for us to have their family caring for our son for this year.  Somehow in that moment we go from visitors to friends.  Something shifted in the normal tension that exists between strangers, especially from such different paths, and our lives converged as they should.

Alberto shows us each tree he has planted.  Here is corn, here is a yucca plant, here will be a tree that will shade the house someday.  Here is where the boys dug a pond that will have fish.  Here is the well, and up the hill, the holding tank for water.  Those are our chickens, our turkeys, our ducks.  God is good.

The children are throwing a frisbee from among the gifts.  As predicted it lands on the roof of the house.  I am asking Alberto questions and Carson becomes a conduit, connecting my curiosity to Alberto’s stories.  Slowly the struggle for expression fades.  I can feel trust forming, friendship, mostly because we have Carson in common.  In that moment literally, but for the months he has lived in El Tres, we have all slowly become closer.  We have been unaware that would lead to this day where our lives would flow together.

After a while we gather in the low shed behind the house.  It is a primitive structure, dirt floors, patchwork walls, held together with wire and repurposed nails.  The roof is a quilt of corrugated metal.  Chickens have lived there.  So did Carson and his family, for a while, until the new house was finished. 

We sit in plastic lawn chairs and listen to the rain fall on the metal roof, a gentle percussion that forms a relaxing background to the moment.  There is no way to measure time or to feel the presence or the expectation of the next thing.  Irlene sits in a hammock and Alberto unconsciously sways her in a gentle arc.  And we talk.

We talk.  The time slows further.  After a while I forget that Carson is translating.  All of us have relaxed into the exchange, the pattern of Spanish, the moment Carson finds the words, and then English.  And then back.  We share our stories, the first layer of knowing each other. 

In a space of an afternoon we exchanged our lives, enough so that we could see each other, and seasoned with laughter and tears, we made a new life that includes one another. 

Among the host of reasons for Carson to be in Colombia there was the idea of building relationships.  I thought I understood that in the abstract, but it wasn’t until I found out that I was part of the relationships did I realize the impact of the connection. 

This morning as I look out my window at the lush green place that surrounds me, I can feel the presence of our friends in El Tres.  We now share an understanding of each other, those first few tendrils of connection that form a relationship.  I find it encouraging to know it can happen.  It is there for us to create with people we see today, some of whom speak our language and share our culture which should make it easy.  In some ways it can be the most important thing we can do in our day.

Hope this finds you lost in translation,

David

Copyright © 2018 David Smith