Cricket in my kitchen
There is a cricket in my kitchen. I can´t find him hidden among the pots and pans under the cement rectangle that is my counter, but every morning his song pulls me across the barrier from sleep to my day. Winter has finally set in, people say. The rains have begun; there are huge muddy puddles to pick my way around as I walk to buy bread in the mornings or visit my animadores in the evenings.

It was after the first big rain we had that the crickets came out. The gym I go to is on the 3rd floor of a building on a busy road, and through its cement arches enter the evening breeze and city lights. They also let in crickets. The night after it rained I went to the gym with some friends, and the little black insects were zooming around the gym, colliding with my face, arms and legs as I moved between weight machines. My friend Carolina squealed as they hit her or clung to her shirt, we´d laugh and I´d brush them away.

The next morning I woke early, thinking the cricket´s chirp, amplified by my cement walls, was an alarm. I investigated and discovered my kitchen cricket, whose racket soon mixed with the recording of bells being blasted from the church next door. My apartment building is across a dirt road from one of the Catholic churches in the neighborhood. There are powerful megaphones mounted on the roof, and every day the Padre blasts recitation of the rosary, Ave Maria´s, jaunty Catholic church songs or the Mass from his cement tower. You can hear it for blocks and blocks.

I want to tell him God likes silence. I do enjoy listening to the ancient ritual of the Mass, but the rosary reminds me of feeling imprisoned in a rocking chair with the 3 nuns in the Dominican Republic. Leigh Ann and I had to sit with them every afternoon, rocking, sweating and reciting row after row of prayers. My fingers would always loose track of the beads as my mind wandered. Maybe it´s defiance of those nuns and their narrow-minded beliefs that makes me reach over now and crank my music, wondering if Usher or the B52s can be heard from within the church. Friends who come to visit during church-time sit two feet from me, our shouted conversations interspersed with squinted eyes, cocked heads, and "Como?" yelled back and forth as we are sandwiched between competing noises.

In the background of my house there is always the buzz of my refrigerator and the soft whirring of my silver fan. I just got the fan last week, it is bliss in this hot muggy Guayaquil winter. I also just painted my refrigerator, glossy white over rusty off-white. After painting it I walked to the hardware store laughing at myself, my fingers stuck together with oil-based determination. The man working there sold me an old water bottle full of paint thinner, soaking a rag in some of it first so I could unstuck my digits to grab the bottle and walk home.

The fridge, which died and then revived itself after leaving a lake in my living room yesterday, is actually borrowed from my friend Wilmer, along with my sofa and chairs. I have a rocky table, actually a rusty barrel with a slab of pressboard on top, lent to me by Marjorie, who also sewed my curtins and matching tablecloth. Cesar contributed my desk and bookshelf, Ceci my bed, shower curtin, mirror, and pots. Gladys and Bladys lent me dishes, and Jose´s family the blender with which I make smoothies for breakfast every morning. I look around my little home and I have to smile. Childrens drawings and pictures of my family and friends are taped to my walls, and the stuffed dog that Ana and Daniel saved their money to buy me sits on my bed where he was when I arrived back here in January with his sign Welcome Dana.

Aside from the stuffed pup and my cricket, there are plenty of other animals in my apartment. There are weevils of varying sizes in my oatmeal and my flour, and this morning when I opened my oatmeal container a moth flew out. Hormigitas, little ants, appear instantly whenever food hits on the counter; they are so small you can barely see them. I often realize their presence only when my arm hairs tickle as they climb toward my shoulder. Some days my apartment is full of mosquitoes; the morning I woke up on the outside of my mosquito net I looked like I had chicken pox. Yesterday I spent some time removing from blue bedroom walls the bugs that cling to the painted cement like flounder do to the ocean floor. I dont know what they are, but Wilmer said they don´t bite. I call them flounderbugs. The strangest animal occurrence I have so far experienced, however, was when Cecis kids and I found a little fish swimming around in the water jug of bottled water.

Living in a place where one must buy or boil water to drink it becomes more precious. I have had a fever for the past week, and so craving water, grateful for how it quenches my thirst and cools my body. I stand under the showerhead at night and suck in my breath as the cold water hits my upturned face. It contrasts with the air, my fever, and I think is part of how I make it through the night under my mosquito net. But it is always welcome, as by the end of the day if I scratch my leg the dusty film that coats my body rolls into brown sticky balls on my legs and under my fingernails.

It is so weird to walk around in 90 degree weather and feel hot from the inside out. Though the sun beats on the surface of my skin, a stronger heat radiates from within me, and I sometimes feel dizzy from the combination. I finally went to the doctor yesterday, who said I ate something bad, put me on antibiotics and told me my stomach has a lot of gas. She prescribed something for the gas too; I didn´t bother telling her its just genetic. I decided finally to take a day off, so I stayed home today, and bought a movie for a dollar from the man who walks the streets pushing his cart full of peliculas.

There are many people, who, like Manuel, go out looking for work. There is the man who rides his bicycle around with brooms, mops, and toilet brushes tied on it. I went running after him a few weeks ago to buy a broom for my apartment. There are wooden carts of sandals, pineapple cakes, mirrors, grapes and strawberries that zig zag up and down our dirt roads. There is the man who walks the streets with plastic bowls hung from his shoulders. There are the children who shoulder long sticks, bags of colorful fruit swinging as they walk. There is the man who balances a huge tray of fish on his head and whistles his fish-for-sale whistle every few steps. A combination of laziness and a desire to help local enterprise makes me wait weeks to buy something hoping to catch the right vendedor as he wanders past my house.

There are always noises here. Inside my apartment there is the cricket, fan. From outside: the church, cats and goats crying, vendors announcing their wares, cars and busses, blaring music, and the night whistle of the security guard. One of Mi Cometa´s programs is a neighborhood security program, and at night when my visitors have finally left I often hear the comforting sound of the man walking the streets, blowing a whistle to let the people know he is there.

He is there and I often wonder how I got to be here, in Guasmo Sur, next to a vociferous church on a muddy road trying to get teenagers and kids to take initiative and mold their lives a different shape than they have seen and experienced. Here where after 4 months I have more friends than I have time. Here where I try to keep myself balanced in the midst of everything so I am able to reflect back to these people the generosity I am reminded of whenever I look around my house.


- posted by little monk @ 6:25 PM