Snapshot: Correlitos

I’ll post snapshots occasionally to report experiences that touch me particularly strongly. Without much commentary, I’ll give you a snapshot of what happened.

Last week we visited an aldea called Correlitos. Aldeas refer to small villages outside the town of Talanga. Most aldeas are only about 3-4 miles outside of town, but the drive is about 45 minutes to an hour due to treacherous roads up hill (aside: our truck has gotten stuck three times in two weeks in holes). The families that live in the aldeas are very isolated; they live very simply entirely from the land and rarely leave the aldeas, with the exception of fathers, husbands, and brothers who work on larger farms or sell their crops in Talanga – a two hour walk there and back. On a particularly nice day, we six volunteers and Father Lucian visited a family in Correlitos that former volunteers frequented. The matriarch, three of her daughters, and their collective 10+ children were there. After they made us a great lunch, the other volunteers took the children to a river down the hill to wash the car and play. I stayed behind with Father Lucian because there was little room in the car and I didn’t really feel like going in the river at the time. It turned out to be a great decision. I hung out in the kitchen with the mom and her three daughters (all in their late twenties, I think) as they made tamales and gossiped, in Spanish of course, about a pregnant friend who has no husband or money. It was really refreshing and felt very natural to be among a family just sitting around, preparing food, laughing and talking about people. The parallel to my own family should be obvious.
The experience leveled the playing field in a way and deepened my understanding of why I’m here in Talanga. While there are vast differences between the family in Correlitos and my own in New York, we are also very much the same. I’m here to find those similarities and forge relationships with them, to find a common understanding of each other.