Shoveling Poo

Our little group of volunteers continued on today back in San Miguel. After some quick organizing this morning at school, Lance, Lexi, E and I all headed up to the town for some more digging in the mud. Armed with less this time (no shovels, no duct tape, no 18 vols) we still trudged our way up the hill and were put to work on a giant mud pit.



The goal was less clear today however, as it seemed like the purpose of digging was to move one pile of mud down to another, in a long stream of mud piles until the mud finally reached the street where it could be picked up by the CAT. I shoveled for awhile, calmly digging my shovel deep into the muck and throwing it four feet into another muck bit. Lance was a bit better at the throwing, taking a tip from the locals who flung the mud over their shoulders in a nice long 20 foot arch. The result was some quick moved mud, but also a large splattering of goo over anyone nearby. In about ten minutes I was covered in mud, in my hair, in my eyes, on the mask covering my nose and mouth, and even one perfectly directly shot landed square in my ear. Lance and Lexi cracked up at this, and I learned I had a new friend in Lance when he stuck his finger in my ear and dug out the mud.

Twenty minutes of mud moving however made me less happy with the brigade system. I questioned it aloud, and Lance gave the perfect response. “Don’t think to hard about this. We are moving mud. That’s it. Move the mud.”

Lance has an infectious humour, and his energy kept inspiring everyone around us. At one point he and another local mud slinger had worked out a remarkable system of shovel fling to shovel fling. They rarely dropped a fling, and they were moving fast. Another couple of guys were joking around with the pile making, aiming their flings to the feet of the men in front of them. It took a few moments for the men to realize they were being slowly buried in mud, and it always resulted in a howl and a laugh from the surrounding workers. It was pretty funny at the time, but now thinking back on it, I’m horrified at what becomes fun and funny when conditions are so bleak.



The mud we were working in today was nothing like the previous days’ mud. This mud, I’m convinced, was about 90% poo. Dirty Jobs guy would have had a great show if he’d come down for it. Usually dirt smells, if not good, at least like earth. A clean growing smell. This smelled like waste and methane, and it was slushy and grotesque. There was a whole riverbed full of it, and sometimes you felt as if you were being sucked under. I was happy when it started raining. We had been told to quit working if it started raining. “Don’t be a hero.” So when the drops got harder and faster, we abandoned our mud and headed back to the church. Someone had brewed up some coffee and I drank it gratefully, even with the gallon of sugar that had been used to sweeten it.



About twenty minutes later we piled into the back of a pickup headed towards Antigua. The bed was full of dirty smelly volunteers, and the locals at San Miguel waved and said goodbye as we pulled out of town into the rain. I looked down at the road as we drove down the hill and was shocked at the amount of rain that had collected in the street just in that space of time. If an hour of rain could make a little stream appear, I cannot even imagine what the Agatha flood looked like.

...

Later that evening the poo shovelers met up for a dinner and night out. We ate at this little shop of Russian food, camotes and kabobs, and later on hooked up with some of Lance and Will’s friends. The evening took an unusual turn when I realized that we were all sort of hanging out with the twenty-tens version of Early Modern colonialists. These were guys who ran in different circles, who day-traded or wrote travel literature and ran businesses in Guatemala and Peru. One guy, Mark, lived in a stunning house adjoined to Santo Domingo, the local 5-star hotel, and drove a 4-runner. We played cards at his house and then headed out for some Antigua clubs. The guys knew everyone, and promised to introduce me to the “families.” Matt (who oddly wanted to be called Avatar) had just returned from Pana, after spending a night in jail for doing a headstand in the park and then “looking the police in the eye.” His stories typically began something like, That last time I was lost in Saudia Arabia... or, The police removed their license plates and name tags before approaching our car...

A different world. Poo and privilege.