Mud mud and more mud

There’s only so much you can say about mud. Either you’ve worked in it or you haven’t. If you work outside at all, chances are you’ve encountered mud. If your house was recently flooded, you probably had to shovel some mud. If your street was overrun with a pond or a river, at some point you may have had to slog through some mud. If your town was flash flooded by a volcanic landslide, it is safe to say that mud is the single, primary and most important adversary. I now know what it is like to work with mud.

Today dawned bright and beautiful in Antigua. It’s like after all the recent natural disasters, the earth decided to give us lovely spring shiny days as an alms. I soaked it up, happy in the sun, happy in my life, happy to be helping and giving, loving and learning. (I sound like someone I know, hey B!, but I guess that’s not such a bad thing.)

My classwork wasn’t very productive. Both I and my teacher were distracted by the preparations for the afternoon. I was on fake organizer duty again, a job I despise. Meanwhile my teacher was telling me how her family, especially her brother, was so happy to hear how were were organizing something. She handed me a little bundle of food and things to take up with us. That’s when I noticed the piles and piles of food and clothing in the corner. I didn’t see it when I walked into the school. I don’t know where it came from, but my teacher asked me if I wanted to help organize it. I said ok.

They were taking the clothes out of the plastic bags and putting them into boxes for men, women and children. My favorite was the box for Ancianas, old people. It was mostly big shawls and woolen jackets. It wasn’t too long into the sort process that I realized someone needed to mark all the boxes, otherwise what was the point of sorting them. I went to the office and asked for a Sharpie. (Sometimes in English, and other languages too I imagine, we forget that product brand names are not the name of the noun. In this case Sharpie got a big laugh. They told me that Sharpie was “something new” and what was the old name for it? I thought a moment. Sharpie? Sharpie is what? a large pen that marks well. A marker. Aha! A marcador! They had one of those, and we were in business.) I marked all of the boxes for distribution ease, and my apologies to the poor chap who had to suffer my misplaced tildes.



After class, we were all supposed to meet back at the school for our ride up to San Miguel. We loaded all the supplies into the back of a pickup and piled in for the drive. San Miguel was just as muddy as the day before, perhaps more so since it has rained a bit in the night. Our group got separated, (a long story, important but unrelated), but it almost didn’t matter, there was so much to do.

Ashley and I were part of a group put on sidewalk and house duty. The goal was to clear the mud from the sides of the houses and throw it into the middle of the street where the CAT could scoop it up and not damage the sidewalk or buildings. A clear goal, but nearly impossible. Lexi commented that it was like a giant salad, the kind that you get at a large American restaurant chain, it just goes on and on and you eat and eat and never get anywhere. I felt like I had been thrown into a giant salad, and I and others dug and dug and never got anywhere. It felt like that, but then I would stop and look down and see the sidewalk peeking out from under mud, or watch as the floor of a house gradually appeared. It was grueling, but I guess it did good.





I'm not sure I need to describe how difficult it is to shovel mud, especially when it is filled with large river stones. However at one point I found myself in a bucket brigade, in the middle, the absolute worst position. Buckets of water and mud were scooped out of a house and passed down the chain, thrown into the middle of the street and then passed back empty. Except there were only three buckets, and the house entrance was small. The mud rose up steeply, so someone had to stand halfway in the house and halfway in the street, one leg on floor and one leg about a foot higher on the mud. Take the full bucket from your right, pass it up, and take the empty bucket from the left and pass it down. I did this for about 30 minutes before I almost passed out. Thankfully it was getting dark about this time and our group needed to head back to Antigua. I relinquished my brigade position to someone else, and we began to regroup. The guys had been steadily digging a car out of a house, and when we arrived they were just able to push it into the garage.

(in progress... waiting on photos..)