Hush, little baby . . .

When Lynn and I walk in the city center here in Cochabamba we frequently pass beggars. A few may be walking and holding a hand out to catch your attention, maybe holding an old medical bill that they say they need help to pay.  Others, frequently women, sit on the sidewalk and beg with their possessions and often their infants or small children gathered close around them as well.  At first it seems charming that the babies--though usually wrapped too tightly for comfort--are sleeping.  However, not long ago Lynn pointed out how unusual it was that so many of the babies were asleep and remarked that maybe they were drugged. ¹


A week later Lynn brought this up again during an adult English conversation group. One of the participants said she believed that some of the children were drugged by letting them inhale the vapor of glue. We often see glue sniffers here, usually boys from about age ten to mid teens, passed out on the sidewalk, or reeling along in a semiconscious state. Despite the bleakness of this approach to a depressing life, it shows some small measure of choice that perhaps can be corrected before permanent damage occurs. With the sleeping infants, the destructive choice is made for them by their care givers. Tightly wrapped and quiet, they  promote sympathy for the poor mother with mouths to feed.


My first inclination was anger that infants would be victimized by their mothers, but then I wondered how much must have happened in the lives of these women that some of them at least were willing to risk their babies' health by rendering them more suitable as props in what must be a competitive business to maximize plight as a selling point. The competition here is acute because along some blocks we may see three to four such family units encamped at intervals along the sidewalk. And this method of attracting attention can only add to the long-term difficulties each mother will face if her children grow with less than normal faculties. 


I would like to say that suddenly--despite the risk of addiction--the Victorian use of quietness doesn't seem so bad, but I don't really feel that way.  Instead,  the women seem like desperate prisoners on the sidewalk, in need of any kind of education that will enable them to support themselves and their children in some less destructive way.² And where are the fathers?

_______________ 

¹We knew about the practice in Victorian England of using quietness to make children and babies sleep while mothers had to work.  This reminded me of a recent passage from Isaiah 49:14-15: 

"Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget,

I will never forget you."
²Of course, we see healthy relationships, like a young mother and her two-year-old son on a road on my way to Abra. He apparently had gotten his feet dirty. She sat him on a rock and was washing his feet with handfuls of water she dipped from a bucket. And as she ran her fingers over his toes he was laughing, and then she was too.

Potholes

Two weeks ago I was on my way to teach at Carcel Abra. The rain was falling steadily but not hard. As usual here the temperature dropped before the rain began so the air felt like what I remember from a cold spring in the United States.  The trip east was a little more challenging than usual, with standing water in the curves as the rainwater quickly exceeded the capacity of the drains--when there were drains--or the capacity of the surrounding terrain to absorb any more water. Rooster tails of spray shot out as vehicles spun along.

At Sacaba the detour for the highway east was still in place. The paving crew had to stop during the rain.  This sent me and my transit buddies over a section of road paved with rock and with numerous potholes and what on these roads serves the same purpose as a speed bump--a trough or indentation. At least the rain kept down the otherwise thick dust in the road (especially when unusually heavy traffic rumbles over it, dropping visibility to about a car's length), but the traffic was just as thick and unmanaged as we all dashed forward in land rush free-for-all style on both lanes and in both directions to get back to the main road.  This was at times like those moments of disorientation when maybe surrounded by nothing but water and sky or just stolen away by my own thoughts I suddenly look about and briefly am not sure of what's up and what's down. At least the blockade from earlier in the week had also stopped and we could pass to our destinations.

We merged back onto the main road. After two more kilometers we passed from pavement to stones to mud, city giving way to town and then to sparse community, brick giving way to adobe, adobe giving way rain-by-rain to mud and then dust again. My appetite for it all was a bit dampened too, but then I was and am in the cuaresma¹, so 'tis the season.

Between watching for potholes and--it was impossible to read with this much jolting--musing on a movie scene², I wondered if I would have a good class, good being when more than a few students show up, that they seem interested, and that my own mind can stay on topic enough to reward their interest.  I recalled that toward the end of the previous semester attendance dropped and with that my interest sometimes waned. My challenge then was to keep my own attitude from influencing that of the students.

I passed a dog sitting on top of a rubbish heap, trying to escape the pooling water below.  I was glad that my books and papers were stowed in plastic bags. Water seemed to creep into everything.  And the people along the way looked stressed, hurrying along, trying to stay dry.  I saw no umbrellas or rain gear on them, only the occasional pancho. This soggy day was not for dawdling. I mentally thumbed through some resources.³

As I said, I hoped for a good teaching day--reasonable attendance, interested students, maybe a few jokes to keep it light--and that's just what it turned out to be. When class was over and I chatted with the men about things related to their upcoming hearings, or their medication needs, and  their desire to have certificates for their work in the class so they could prove their progress with a constructive activity and maybe reduce their sentence time. Nothing seems to happen without a struggle.
__________
¹Lent/Carnaval, elige su punto de vista, but isn't that like life.

²It was the scene from the film Amarcord in which a man apparently tired of being alone climbs a tree, refuses to come down, and begins shouting "I need a woman!" Soon his wish is granted. A woman arrives--a sharp-tongued midget nun.   It was a funny scene, but then I thought maybe a midget nun wasn't such a bad thing if she had what he actually needed at the moment, even if he didn't think so.

³"Just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down
And do not return there
till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
Giving seed to the one who sows
and bread to the one who eats,
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it."
(Isaiah 55: 10-11)

"¡Oh alto y glorioso Dios!, ilumina las tinieblas
de me corazón y dame fe recta, esperanza cierta y
caridad perfecta, sentido y conocimiento, Senor,
para que cumpla tu santo y veraz mandamiento."
(San Francisco. Oracion ante El Crucifijo
de San Damian.)

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you

and I hope that I have that desire

in all that I am doing.

And I know that if I do this,

you will lead me by the right road

although I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always

though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death,

I will not fear, for you are ever with me

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."                                                                          
(Thomas Merton)

Change-ups and Connections

Along with my wife's shift to teaching in a different location,¹I decided to change things up a bit, and that now seems fortunate. I had been teaching three days a week at Carcel Abra, the men's prison for those with longer term punishments.  Attendance was declining so it seemed that I could reduce the time there to two days per week and combine two classes into one.  So far, this has been a good idea because the more advanced ones can help the beginners, and if need be, I can always change again since attendance is voluntary.   I also hope to shift some of the time to other activities there--a few hours in open invitation to play chess or checkers and talk.  One assistant is himself an interesting case.  He's an African, not Afro-Boliviano, awaiting trial on suspicion of drug trafficking.² His English is pretty good--as well as French and Arabic--but he speaks very little Spanish, so participating in class helps him learn some Spanish and overcome some of his cultural isolation and depression.  He's requested a Spanish/English Bible, a vial of blest olive oil and a phone call to his lawyer. I'm trying to get him the English Bible and have put in a request to the Calcutta sisters (Mother Theresa's gang) for the Spanish Bible and the oil. The call to his lawyer is one more appropriately handled by a Maryknoll missioner who is also an attorney volunteering for the Archbishop's office here in Cochabamba. So, my efforts in this case are mostly that of sorting or connecting, and when it works, it feels good--even with so basic a role as chasqui,³ delivering medications to the prison occasionally when a prisoner has a valid prescription request.

The change-ups were also valuable for refocusing my work at the hospice at Santa Vera Cruz.  I visited this morning to reschedule my work and discovered that new patients have arrived.  Despite their personal health issues they want to participate in a class. Also I decided to try and expand my work into yet one more site, in this case to volunteer in one of the houses in the Amanecer Foundation in Cochabamba to provide a safe, stable home environment for orphaned and abandoned children. It was in applying there recently that I discovered my application would be reviewed by Brian Vetter, a friend and former teacher/track coach of one of the Washington, DC contributors to my mission here.  When Lynn and I were close to departing for Bolivia in December 2009 I was told that I might encounter Brian while we were here.  I had just about decided that was not likely to happen when his name came up in conversation when I was applying to teach in one of the Amanecer houses.  So, I hope to be favorably vetted by Brian Vetter and to volunteer with this lamentably far too abundant group of young people here.
__________

¹She is now teaching English and Catechesis in a Franciscan high school, San Francisco and Santa Clara, in a neighborhood to the west of where we live.
²This seems to accord with a remark in the Rough Guide to Bolivia (thanks, Tim Marcy) that there are a number of foreigners languishing in Bolivian jails related to drug trafficking charges. This person, A, told me that he made the mistake of agreeing to carry a couple of suitcases for a man in exchange for a free airplane ticket back to his homeland--Ghana, I believe--and was arrested in the Cochabamba airport when the bags were inspected. If any of that can be proven, he might be released after review, but that will take place in a minimum of 6 months. So, he has some time on his hands.

Chas Chasquito

³A messenger for the Incas. Here's one pictured on a replica amulet Lynn bought on Isla del Sol. We really have enough of these items--we have a small collection of them hanging from nails on the mantel of a small fireplace in the house that we rent.

"Come, and you will see."

Frequently I am too caught up with the details of my own activities¹ to be aware of events that might change my opinions, improve my outlook. This morning I was setting up a couple of pots of water to boil and filter. Someone rang at the outside gate.  It was raining, just as it has been every day for the past two soggy weeks.  I didn't want to go to the gate because I didn't want to walk out in the rain. I didn't want to be diverted by someone selling something. I wanted to complete the simple task of preparing more water for daily use. Then the ringer sounded again--three buzzes, quick and sharp. All right then. I left my task, ready to be just as quick and sharp with dealing with the intruder.  After all, I was busy with . . . boiling some water.

It was Pedro from up the street.  I wasn't expecting to see him.  He owed me 200b. Then I remembered it was Saturday, the day he said he would pay it back.  He was grinning. He handed me 200b and thanked me for the loan. I quickly said "any time," glad that he had repaid me--both because of the money and because I didn't want him to feel awkward for having an unpaid debt.²  His need was honest enough--the day before school resumed for his three children he didn't have enough to cover the cost of fees and books. And now he was covering the shortfall.  We stood there chatting about whether this year we were having more rain than usual, whether the walls and roofs of the houses--especially the adobe houses--could take it, which communities had flooded.³ Then we realized that we were both getting wetter. We started laughing and took a rain check on the chat.

I returned to the kitchen where I noted that the unwatched pots of water were boiling.  Also the sun came out. Apparently it and the rain were doing the vegetable garden a lot of good. Our garden was originally created by the family that lived here before us, the Cuthberts.  We're just trying to maintain their good work and keep the compost heap turned.  We've got tomatoes, chard, spices (sage, parsley, anise, oregano, mint, and basil), and compost.

__________
  ¹Like the shepherds in the song I quoted in my previous post, I sometimes need a reminder to attune myself to significant events and deeper meanings around me, to look beyond the borders of self for needed answers.  So it was with a portion of one gospel passage, Ῥαββεί (ὃ λέγεται μεθερμηνευόμενον Διδάσκαλε), ποῦ μένεις; λέγει αὐτοῖς Ἔρχεσθε καὶ ὄψεσθε.' (John 1:35-42), which I read very late one night and more or less sailed through without more thought than that to discharge a chore, which was not my intent.  In Mass later that day Padre David urged the congregation to pause and think about the implications of that brief peripatetic exchange between two disciples and Jesus, so I did, running across Socrates' remark again, "the unexamined life is not worth living," and continuing on the road.
 ²He cuts grass in his spare time. In the rainy season the grass grows quickly. He does well so long as the grass is dry enough to cut. Earlier I had been listening to Merle Travis sing Sixteen Tons, reminiscing about the hard life of coal miners that Lynn, Emer, Norbert and I learned about once when we visited Stearns, Kentucky. The thought of Pedro converting to debt bondage on my watch wasn't cheery.
 ³The week before I had been traveling on Heroinas, one of the main thoroughfares in the city, when it had over a foot and a half of water that did abate quickly.  And on another avenue in the city, Suezia, that would mean raw sewage running out onto the street from the overloaded drain system. And life keeps on going.

Happy New Year and Looking Back at Some Photos

Happy New Year.

One Sunday in November at the La Salette chapel in our neighborhood we were treated to musical accompaniment by a class of students (some from the neighborhood) and several of their professors.  From their level of coordination as a group, they obviously were accustomed to playing music together.  The instruments they included (charango, guitar, tambor, acordeón, and bandolina) also created a fuller sound, all of which seemed to encourage the congregation to sing with more gusto and seemingly with greater attention to key.

While we happily attend Mass with the people in our neighborhood and enjoy the convenience of being able to walk the few blocks to attend, we still attend services at different churches (in total maybe about three times a week), sometimes because it's closer to where we are at the moment, sometimes just to see what a service is like in this building or with that group. If it were just for the sake of hearing a more professional sounding musical accompaniment, I suppose we'd attend the San Pedro Iglesia on Avenida Herionas.  Their harmonies are  interesting and spot on, and--maybe this is just because of the songs they choose to sing--when they sing, the number of syllables per measure seems to be more regular and predictable rather than, well seemingly, sometimes 4, sometimes 18 or so, the latter occasioning my musical bewilderment, silent awe, and admiration for those who can track this vocal slalom sin choque. But, of course, the music is only a part of a complex ritual/mystery, only a portion of which we grab with our senses, and I'm still enamored (well now, but certainly not then) of the pre-folk Mass days of my youth at Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys when usually there was no more music than that of our adolescent male voices, some of them pretty good, and that seemed enough for the purpose, probably sponsoring my attitude that the music of Mass ought not to be so competitively good that the average person can't feel welcome singing along comfortably nor so bad that enduring it qualifies for due penance no matter what the sin. Hmmm. I suppose I'm a centrist.

On another weekend in November we were invited to the home of Sylvia (in pink), one of Lynn's friend's from her work at Pastoral Juvenil (PJ) in Cochabamba (Cbba). Sylvia is majoring in English language study at San Simon University and has another year of classes before beginning to write her thesis, a requirement for all here to complete their bachelor-level education.  Sylvia has been very helpful with coordinating meetings for the Filmania program at PJ and seeing that we have what equipment we needed when it was time for setup. During the week Sylvia lives in the city of Cochabamba in rooms there at the Pastoral Juvenil along with a number of other Catholic students who attend San Simon. On the weekends she returns to her hometown, Arani, by minibus about an hour south of Cbba.

We had a pleasant lunch (pollo, carrot fritters, salad, juice) in the courtyard of her house in Arani, just a few blocks off the town plaza. While chatting at lunch we learned that the daughter and son-in-law of one of Sylvia's neighbors live in New York.  It's very common for young people here to leave their country in search of work after they have completed their educations, often leaving behind children with their own parents. Sylvia said she hopes to return to her hometown and teach English and French to the young children in the town. When she's home on the weekend Sylvia likes to visit her mother's grave,  work as a radio announcer at the local station, and pray at the church on the central plaza.  We went there and toured the church along with other visitors.  At the time we were there no service was being conducted, and despite the bright midday sunshine the interior was dim from the shuttered windows and closed doors.  Even so, we paused to think about our own family, the circumstances of being so distance-challenged to stay in communication, and why we continue to do the work that we do. Thinking of Sylvia and others, we knew we weren't alone in this. This took the edge off of the sometimes spooky sense of being in a large dim room with a variety of what one guy referred to as three-quarter life-sized action figures.  Reverence takes its various forms, and I appreciate the captivatingly frank assertion of one of my Carmen Pampa students that she did not see the point of worshipping dolls.  I realize that the Latin American Catholic Church is unique and that in any religious or worship environment one can get lost in the symbols or absence of them. I also realize that outside of these environments devotional attachment knows no bounds. Lynn and I enjoyed the quiet time inside and went on our way.

Just outside the church the central plaza and the streets leading onto it were jammed with people participating in the Arani Bread Festival. I realize the pan-jaded bunch might not see the point of so much excitement about bread, but despite its rich agricultural regions Bolivia has experienced stark food shortages due to its political upheavals and unstable productivity following land reforms in 1952. The cost of pancitos (how many per peso) is now an important gauge of food prices, and any rise in the price is sure to get ink in the local papers. 

The bread then that I was seeing in all of the local stalls--some with just pan (but toco, mariketa, and tortilla [leavened, not the Mexican flatbread variety] but also the standard type that I heard one American couple in Coroico refer to disdainfully as "those little hamburger buns they eat"), some with pan y vino, some with pan and various types of local fare such as silpancho, and some with giant bread wheels as big as car tires--was an important symbol of prosperity, and the locals were proud to celebrate it because they had it: hay pan, indeed! This was a staff of life celebration. We also learned from Sylvia that the town of Arani figured prominently in this celebration because Arani was earlier the site of many family-owned grain mills. I wondered if Molino and Molina were more frequently occurring last names in this locale.¹


More later...

Wanting to hear some traditional Christmas Carols, I downloaded the album Classic Christmas Carols by the King's College Choir at Cambridge.  Many of these carols were new to me and pleasant to hear through the season.  One especially I have listened to--Quittez, pasteurs--because of the gentle exhortation from the angels to the shepherds not to get so caught up in their work that they overlook the big event, the good news happening maybe three hills over, and that all of them were called, not just the ones that hadn't made any mistakes or the ones that were always doing a great job. At cyberhymnal.org I found an English translation of the hymn.²  I also wondered at the relationship between the French verb quitter in the hymn and the verb quitar in the Spanish version of the Catholic liturgy:

Cordero de dios
que quitas el pecado del mundo
ten piedad de nosotros ( bis)

Cordero de dios
que quitas el pecado del mundo
danos la paz, danos la paz.

With the nearness of beginning another year, the rethinking of past failings to quit the old one, the need to continue and the sometimes difficulty of continuing, the song's emphasis on the prospect of redemption held my focus.

__________

¹ Mill
² LEAVE, SHEPHERDS, LEAVE, YOUR PEACEFUL FLOCKS

Leave, shepherds, leave your peaceful flocks agrazing!
No longer grieve, but come, O come away!
Come and adore, your tears all changed to praising;
Of Him the heav’nly King, O sing, O sing
Your Savior born this happy day.

There, lowly laid, within a manger narrow,
A lovely maid and Infant thou shalt see!
His tender love hath sought thee in thy sorrow—
Thy darkness to remove! He came, to prove
A loving Shepherd’s care for thee!

Kings from the east! His star will guide thee truly!
Where He doth rest, in love and faith draw near:
Our rising Sun receives thy homage duly!
O bring to Him, each one—Each one! Each one!
Your incense and your gold and myrrh!

Who canst do all things surely, hearts enshrine
Thine ardors sweet and fair! For peace is his
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             For peace is His that through Thee liveth purely!
And added unto this, all joy, and bliss—
Since God hath sent His Savior here!

Merry Christmas

On Christmas Eve after Mass at the Bishopric we walked through the Plaza Colon and watched a variety of Navidad-related activities, such as posing for photos beside nativity scenes, riding horses, riding in kid-sized battery powered cars, jumping on trampolines, sliding on slides, dancing, watching street performers, just looking at the lights and feeling good. We saw many happy families there.

After making the circuit around the Plaza, we walked north on the Prado, past the booths for silpancho, pasteles, and jugos and other refrescos (yes, lots of Coca Cola, and on one of the taller buildings on Avenida Heroinas there is a US-style Coca Cola billboard of that iconic jolly figure in red rather than a Father Christmas/Santa Claus or elf. Whatever opinions there may be about this secularized Santa icon--and there is a great history of these images at the following address:  http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html --it seemed a better billboard subject for mixed audiences than a previous one in the area depicting a man and a debriefed woman glaring at passers by as though they ought to mind their own business.) We passed more people riding horses at a walk--up one side of the block and down the other--and I noticed that the children riding seemed especially absorbed in the activity, maybe transported into dreams of galloping on the open range, and one horse making a turn on a tiled area lost its balance for a moment, the steel shoe of one rear hoof skating suddenly out wider than expected, but a quick sidestep and recovery, and the young rider never seemed to notice.


Despite being summer here, the wind was chilly and damp. This promised to be a colder Christmas than two Lynn and I spent years ago in Beaumont, Texas.  (Those years taught me that I really am better acclimated to an environment with four distinct seasons despite my love of puttering along on a motorcycle in the warm sunshine, remembering when it felt just as good to run.) By the time we were approaching the restaurant Brazilian Cafe, I was already thinking expresso. We sat at one of the tables on the deck close to the street.  The double lanes were bumper-to-bumper with vehicles, but the wind must have been blowing away any exhaust fumes, and the sidewalks both in front of the restaurant and on the avenue's inner esplanade remained full but not jammed with pedestrians strolling or hustling and lots of colored lights.  We talked for about an hour about our past semester's activities--what things worked and what needed to change--and what we might be doing in the coming one.


When we left, we decided to walk back across the Plaza and up the three or four blocks to Heroinas where it seemed we might catch a cab more easily for home.  On our way to Heroinas it began to sprinkle, then drizzle and finally to settle into a steady but not heavy rain.  When we reached Heroinas, we saw that the usually busy avenue was virtually deserted, to the point that we felt a little vulnerable waiting there for a cab.  We wanted a radio mobile, a driver actually working for an established company, because it would be more secure.  None came after a ten minute wait so we decided to return to the Plaza and the Prado.  With all the activity there--even if we had to wait to clear the traffic jam--we would catch a cab and be home in no time.


When we reached the Plaza, the rain had already worked its magic.  As if everyone had been made of sugar or salt and had been melted by the rain, the people in the plaza and most of the colored lights were gone.  The restaurant was still open, so we took our place in front of it and soon were on our way back south to our house below Laguna Alalay. The cab was warm, and the red, yellow and green of the street lights we passed spread a reminder on the wet pavement of the happy crowd we had seen in the Plaza.  We looked forward to returning to our place and checking on Blondie the dog and Kitty the cat who was just beginning her recovery from the sterilization operation.

That Time of Year

Christmas: Somehow the handful of ornaments Lynn and I brought with us from our Christmases together as a family in Tennessee¹ were powerful enough to bring back to life many memories and to remind us of the good will we experience in our lives here in Bolivia. Lynn and I celebrated our second and perhaps final Bolivian Christmas. (We are about to enter our third year of this contract period with Franciscan Mission Service.)  As with the preceding Christmas season, we are far from our families but hardly alone. Family, friends, and other mission supporters in the United States have stayed in contact through the many communication modes available in modern mission (email, Skype, Magic Jack, Cell Phones, prayer). Our Bolivian circle of friends, which includes not only Bolivians but many of the broad-based community of missioners from other countries grows as we extend ourselves through our work and social relationships.² We also sometimes acquire new friends on the fly as we suddenly find ourselves displaced and in need and discover that people recognize this and unbidden respond when they can.

Teaching: I'm pleased that our English classes in Carcel Abra continue to stimulate interest among the original students who began to study with us this past February.  Their pronunciation has improved, and they make appropriate responses in English when we look at photos and can construct grammatically correct short sentences. We have also attracted and retained some new students, some with previous exposure to English (one or two with some formal study, and others with exposure to U.S./British film and music).  For those interested, we (Lynn and I) continue to use the textbooks Top Notch Fundamentals and Top Notch Level I and to supplement that with some grammer handouts from the American English Files, some of the downloads and other activities from the BBC's Learning English website and other English language-related websites, some songs in English with lyrics in English and Spanish (very roughly translated with Google translate, but that too becomes an exercise). To add variety(and broaden the language use during discussion to include as much Spanish as they care to use), we still are trying to offer one film per month in the carcel library either in Spanish with English subtitles or vice versa.  The most recent offering was El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth). We had good discussions about the cruelty of Vidal, the depiction of the Catholic church, the affection for fantasy and values of Ophelia/Princess Moana, and the implications of the conclusion.³

Our Growing Family: A couple of months ago we were adopted by a small calico cat.  She was maybe a year and a half old, dirty and hungry, and had a divot out of her left ear. She first appeared on the roof of the empleada quarters by the kitchen.  She had probably been surviving off of bits of dog food, and that probably also explained the occasional piles of bird feathers I had seen by the garden.  She never came very close, and never allowed us to approach her. We decided to leave her some tuna on the top of the wall, and pretty soon she began to eat that.  As we watched her, it seemed that she might be pregnant or might have had kittens.  Eventually we learned that she was sleeping in the woodshed, a real eyesore of a structure on the property that is filled with stacks of lumber, piles of lumber, dust-coated power tools (well, everything within is dust coated) pieces of broken furniture, steel rebar, chicken wire, pieces of pipe with one end encased in cement.  Eventually we caught sight of kittens in the woodshed.  We tried to catch them, but they were already up and darting faster than I could move to catch them, and the woodshed was a perfect shelter.  Eventually we convinced the mother cat to let us approach and then to touch her.  Over the course of a month we eventually captured the kittens and took them to a nearby vet to be wormed and have their first shots.  (Lynn got a nasty bite from one, so just as a precaution we couldn't give them away for ten days to be sure they didn't have rabies.) We were worried that we might not be able to find homes for them, but surprisingly we quickly did, for them and two more (that's another chapter in this burgeoning kitty ministry). The grey and white one went first, then the cream and white one.  The last one, a calico like her mom but long haired, sneaked back into the woodshed and eluded us for another week until we could capture her and award her to a young, very patient woman up the street.  I think all of the kittens got good homes. Then Lynn and I resumed trying to make friends with the mother cat.

She is definitely a cat of the streets--eats anything without hesitation, does not purr, does not particularly care to be touched.  After a week of cat taming, we began to hear the howling and wailing of cats either killing each other or swearing their undying love. It proved to be the latter in a case of dueling toms: one grey and white old boy and a cream and white younger, lighter weight but feistier looking lad.  For several nights they threatened death to each other out by the lavanderia, and it seemed like we were headed for Kitten Time Redux for sure.  Lynn and I took action. We lured mom into the house with a can of tuna, threw her in a plastic trash can,⁴ slapped on the lid, and hailed a cab for the Garfield Kitty Hospital in midtown, right across the street from the Viedma Maternity Hospital. That was a week ago, and now she's back at the ranch, no longer able to bear kittens, and wearing a belly sling for the next few days while she recovers from the operation. The recovery seems to be going well, and we hope Kitty will stay with us at least for a while.

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¹ The big glitter-encrusted snowflake still has six points.  One of the two angels broke a wing, but we repaired this with super glue purchased from a street vendor at the corner of Heroinas and España. I've lost my touch with this stuff and while attempting to pick up tools and also close the tube of glue managed to glue various fingers to my Swiss army knife and a pair of folding pliers.  I looked like a bumbling Edward Scissorhand until Lynn liberated me with her bottle of acetone.
² I think we're on friendly terms with the various groups of evangelicals who knock on the outside gate and leave pamphlets and talk about the Bible with us, and likewise with our meetings with the pastor of the evangelical church inside Abra Carcel where we teach English.  The carcel has two churches inside the grounds, the other being Catholic and erected by former missioner in Bolivia Michael Johnson, OFM, who led one of our formation sessions in Washington, DC in the fall of 2009.
³ We have had equal interest in this film after showings to the university-aged group of students at Pastoral Juvenil in the film series Filmanía that Lynn assists, and at the hospice in Santa Vera Cruz where I work on Tuesdays. The Calcutta Sisters who operate the hospice have also said that they would like to see the film. In each case our goal in showing this and other films has been to use  popular media to promote discussion.
⁴We had tried and failed earlier with a cardboard box.