Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Description of Service - Chapter 11

11. Green Mangos

If life in the countryside generally required a certain level of tolerance for imprecision, there were some undertakings in particular could be completely ruled out without an even larger dose of the requisite patience. Travel, for example, called for a highly developed ability to suppress frustration, to a much greater degree than had ever been demanded of me in the time-oriented culture back home. When I did venture forth from San Juan, something I was doing gradually less of as the months passed, it was with good reason, meaning that I would necessarily set out with certain goals and specific objectives, the achievement of which normally required that I actually reach my intended destination. But I had at least learned to limit my immediate agenda to merely arriving, a simplification that reduced by many degrees the complication of the long trip from San Juan to anywhere.

I had little choice but to adapt to such a reality if I wanted to leave the village, given the irregular state of the bus service. So many factors - the state of the road, the condition of the bus itself, the not always cooperative weather - all conspired to make transportation to and from San Juan, at times, close to impossible. Over time, as I was compelled to cut back drastically on the frequency of trips, it became obvious why so many of the region’s inhabitants had never left that valley. On many levels, it was not worth the effort.

A journey to almost anywhere on public transport meant awaking at sunrise to catch the bus to La Esperanza, for a ride through the hills that consumed at least three hours over the rough road, sweeping along high above deep ravines at the bottom of sharp cliffs which hug far too closely to the roadside, at speeds that did little to preclude a tragic end. If headed on to the capital, I would arrive in La Esperanza mid morning, covered in the dust of a sweltering summer morning in the hot season.

That was if the bus even made it out of the valley. Once the rainy season set in, it was quite common to never even make it as far as La Esperanza, waylaid by the downpours that washed away sections of the road, leaving thick, slippery patches of mud all along the route, and rendering it impassible for San Juan’s primary mode of public transport, one of the ubiquitous yellow school busses imported used, in less than ideal condition, from the United States.

Each day, regardless of conditions, Ronni, the local bus driver, would optimistically set out along the route, as long as the bus was in working order. More than once that swashbuckling confidence was soon extinguished, his bus stuck tire deep in mud somewhere along the way, leaving his passengers to wait for alternate transport, most likely back to San Juan, their travel plans aborted. The very first time I attempted the journey in Ronni’s bus, just a few weeks after arriving in San Juan, on a what I had envisioned as a day trip to La Esperanza to purchase a few things not available locally, we had made it only a few kilometers out of town before reaching a muddy incline, past which Ronni, despite repeated efforts, could not manage to maneuver the bus. Foiled, I headed rather indifferently back to San Juan on that day.

Perhaps experiencing first hand those serious impediments to departure helped me to assimilate the long term nature of my future in San Juan. Gradually, what had at first been a strong if uninformed desire to find an alternative and more accessible work site had faded, and I accepted the reality that my time in San Juan looked like it would continue for the time being. The isolation of the villages was not fully disadvantageous. For on thing, no one seemed to be supervising my work out here, and I used that freedom to venture back to the capital for long breaks in a number of occasions as the months passed, as frequently as my patience and energy for travel allowed. But I wouldn’t linger there, and the periods I spent uninterrupted in San Juan began to grow ever longer. At first I had rarely stayed in San Juan more than a few weeks straight before looking for one excuse or another to travel, but now a month or even two might pass before the urge for a change of scenery would set in.

Even as the town grew on me, though, I came to recognize one important detail that made my semi-permanence in San Juan bearable: that very freedom, to come and go as I pleased, limited only by my own lack of motivation to overcome the irksome but usually not prohibitive obstacles the journey presented. When I so desired, I could leave. It was a luxury shared by very few in town, and perhaps it made the gradually longer spells I spent there more tolerable.

I had lived for more than half a year in San Juan, and I had not been away from the village for more almost two months, when I again decided to exercise that freedom, and go looking for Miguel, in the town where he worked. It had been quite a while since I had seen him, having not coincided on our last trips to the capital. What I knew of him was through news that Jorge had passed on to me when I last visited the house in Kennedy, months before.

The trip to Miguel’s town required me first to travel to La Esperanza, followed by a detour off the main road leading east from there, down a dusty route into the blazing hot valley to the south. The morning I set out in that direction from San Juan was cloudy and cool. A heavy rain had fallen the night before, and remnants of small, gray clouds, free of their cache of liquid, now floated aimlessly through the valley, like caged animals looking for an escape, trapped by the concavity of the hillsides now exploding with green vegetation.

I rode in the back of the packed bus, as Ronni guided it intrepidly down the hill out of town. Not far outside of San Juan, the work on the new road had recently resumed, and was progressing at a snail’s pace, as workers attempted to fix the extensive damage caused by the elements during their long absence. At that point, a detour had been set up around an embankment, which was apparently to be flattened to make way for a pass. As the bus began to scale the muddy makeshift road that had been cleared there, up a slight incline, the wheels lost traction, and Ronni’s machine gradually slid backwards down the hill. Unfazed, Ronni tried again to get that old school bus over the hill, but once more, it came sliding back down. With the passengers cheering him on as if it were a game, Ronni refused to give in easily, but after the fourth or fifth such attempt, with the bus once more at rest, having slid into position at the bottom of the slope, the driver disembarked to assess the situation. One by one, the full complement of men on board got followed him off the bus.

Having seen this drill before, I quickly descended as well. I remembered well that very first failed trip in Ronni’s bus to La Esperanza, when the bus had become lodged in the mud, and all the men on board had immediately gotten off. Not realizing what was going on at that time, I had stayed on board. The rest of the men had proceeded to work to free the bus, as I looked out the window and observed their failed but persistent attempts to extract the vehicle, mortified to realize that, along with the women and children still on board, I was part of the weight that my fellow villagers were pushing.

Since then I have always been among the most eager to disembark stalled transportation. I know as soon as a breakdown occurs, as an able-bodied man, I am expected to make my way deliberately to the front of the bus, down the stairs, and around to the suspected source of the problem, where, at a safe distance from the engine, which often would be steaming, revving, or in the close-to-worst case scenario on fire, a group of men like me, with little or no mechanical experience, will gather and observe the work in progress, like a hand full of supervisors, overseeing the bus driver and his assistants. I have even learned to make appropriate comments to my fellow passengers, adjusted for the level of consternation observable on the faces of the bus workers. “This will be fixed quickly, it’s a simple problem,” or “we’d best prepare for a long wait, there’s no way to fix that,” I will say, my interjection measured to match the egregiousness of the profanity employed by those at work on the engine or tire in question.

The other passengers, impressed, will then nod back in agreement, and add their own observations. “Certainly the gringo is familiar with the workings of this machine, which comes from his land,” was a variation of what one of them would often say. I could now understand their logic. After all, the yellow bus in front of us would have foreign words, for instance “Southern County School District,” stamped in neat letters across the side, revealing the intimate connection between its pale frame and my own.

So when Ronni’s bus once again faltered, at that detour around the hill just outside San Juan, I knew exactly what to do. Despite my eagerness, I was among the last to disembark, having been seated towards the back of the bus, and when I stepped out onto the muddy ground, I found that Ronni had already crafted a plan, and was positioning different men all around the bus. Having given general instructions to push at the appropriate moment, Ronni then climbed back on board, as I took my place behind the bus among a handful of my neighbors.

Ronni gunned the engine, and the bus zoomed off up the hill, leaving the group of would-be pushers behind, thoroughly bathed in a stream of flying mud. Those around me began to run behind the bus as it accelerated up the hill, its rear tires slinging mud all about as it fishtailed from side to side violently. Despite what should have been obvious danger, the group continued its pursuit of the bus, and as its forward progress began to falter, caught up to it, the men, me among them, slamming in near unison into the back bumper with just the force needed to edge the large vehicle forward towards the summit of the small hill. With a puff of deep black diesel exhaust and a triumphant sounding of the loud horn, Ronni and his machine crested the hill and continued onward, coming gently to a halt at the bottom of the incline on the other side.

We men ran along exultantly down the muddy slope, towards the resting bus, shouting jubilantly as, covered in mud, we climbed back on board one by one to resume the journey, with the passion of having just won an important soccer match. On this day, at least, we had conquered the elements.

Having overcome the hill’s challenge, I didn’t run into any more serious setbacks that day, as I found my way down the valley to Santiago Puringla, which despite its name, is a town, not a person. The Otoro valley gradually narrows as the road runs south alongside a wide, shallow river, towards the town.

The details of Miguel’s work as a water systems engineer there seemed to have been more deeply considered than my own job description. His work entailed finding ways to provide water to the towns around the area, and that is exactly what he spent his days doing, jaunting about on the hillsides, mapping the course of small streams and watersheds, and planning his water systems. As such he spent a good deal of his time on the picturesque slopes that hemmed the town in at the narrow end of the long gulch, in this relatively isolated corner of the country, separated from the main road by an unbroken chain of large hills. Despite its site in the center of this hidden valley, I immediately noticed as I reached the town that it was far larger and more developed than San Juan, in proportion, as things these things tended to be, to its proximity to the capital.

Given the size of the town, I had some difficulty locating Miguel’s home. The townspeople, who I imagined would have by now developed encyclopedic knowledge of Miguel’s comings and goings, much as had happened to me in San Juan, instead looked slightly puzzled to have before them an unusually light-skinned individual asking about town for the local Peace Corps volunteer.

“I had a bit of trouble finding your house,” I told Miguel, when I finally arrived at his small apartment to find him just returning from one of his mapping expeditions on the hillsides. “No one seemed to know where the Peace Corps volunteer lived, but when I asked for Jose Miguel, they directed me with no problems.”

“I don’t really tell people that I work for Peace Corps,” Miguel explained, pleased to see me after overcoming the initial surprise of my unexpected visit. “It doesn’t help with my work. There have been some pretty useless volunteers stationed here in the past, and people tend to think of Peace Corps as a bunch of white people bumbling about the countryside. I’m not white or bumbling, so I just explain that I’m an engineer working on water projects.”

I understood what he meant. When away from San Juan, I had further developed the habit of disguising my own identity to prevent being stereotyped. In the village, I described myself as an employee of the cooperative, and never tried to explain the complex arrangement with Peace Corps.

Furthermore, I was far from anxious for the company of other foreigners in what I now considered my village, a preference I knew Miguel shared. Born in Puerto Rico, Miguel had explained that he often felt he had much more in common with the people he found here than he shared with his fellow volunteers. I had also come to understand the irreconcilable differences between me and my fellow volunteers, and through that lens, my similarities to those around me had come into focus. Many of the workers who had begun service with Miguel and me had already gone home, unable or unwilling to adapt to this country and culture. Those who remained spent much of their time cloistered together in small cliques, many of them in a house they had rented together in La Esperanza, where they congregated to escape the monotony of their villages. Ever since I had turned down the invitation to participate in that commune, and in so doing to pay a share of the exorbitant monthly fees, much of which went to buying alcohol for weekend parties, and amenities to make life seem more like home, my rupture with the rest of the volunteer community had been consummated. I now preferred to avoid La Esperanza all together, lest I run into one of my fellow workers, including my pairing at the cooperative, Sally, who was the most troublesome among them, having developed a disconcerting penchant in her centralized role as zone supervisor of critiquing the work and undertakings of her fellow volunteers, particularly in my case.

Understanding all that, I had come, at times, to crave the isolation of my village for a slightly different reason. I had began to realize that only in the context of a closed village, free from outside influences, was I free to develop outside the bounds created for me by the society from which I had come. The presence of another foreigner for a protracted time could lead to comparisons and judgments that could greatly disturb that delicate balance.

“Besides,” Miguel continued, as he pulled a pair of plastic chairs onto the small, shaded patio in front of his house, and offered me a seat. “It’s not many people would be able to make it out here to visit, even if I wanted them to.”

Miguel had at once allayed my fears of having intruded unwanted in his territory, and also pointed out the serendipity of embracing isolation while living in a remote village. Amidst such observations, we broke out the bottle of rum that I had brought from La Esperanza. As we drank, we spoke of the usual range of topics, from development, to the local people, and just living in the countryside.

“Have another cup,” Miguel said as the bottle neared completion. “We can buy another bottle around the corner when this one is through.”

“Really?” I asked. “That’s an unusual luxury for me. In San Juan, there is no alcohol for sale. It’s a dry town.”

“Here it’s no problem,” Miguel said. “Me and my friends drink together all the time.”

“Normally, in the village, I cut off the drinking after a few cups,” I said, nevertheless allowing him to fill my cup once more. “Drunkenness in the village leads to nothing good. In San Juan people are always getting drunk and then shooting at each other. Maybe that’s why they outlawed alcohol.” I stopped there, only half the story told. In San Juan, according to the town statute, to possess or consume alcohol was not illegal. Only the actual sale, and the state of drunkenness itself, had been outlawed. Since those who sold alcohol had staunch connections in town, the jail, such as it was, was used mainly as a holding tank for drunken residents of the surrounding aldeas, to make sure they couldn’t harm anyone but themselves or their fellow drunks while inebriated. And with good reason, as drunks seemed to be able to find little else to do other than fight, often with guns.

“Santiago Puringla is not exactly like San Juan, I think,” Miguel said as he sipped slowly on his rum.

“I think you’re right. For one thing, I would never sit out on my front porch and drink like this. For another, this town is a lot bigger, and a lot closer to the capital.”

“Right, which means people are different. A lot of people have lived or studied in the city, and everyone else has been there many times. Later on we’ll invite some friends over and you can see what I mean. There are a couple nice girls that live down the street.”

“Girls?” I asked in mild disbelief. San Juan at times would have seemed a Puritan village, given the rigid separation between the sexes.

“You can’t tell me you don’t have a few girlfriends in your village?”

“None at all, my friend,” I told him quite honestly. The closest thing I had to a female companion in San Juan was a local school teacher who I occasionally flirted with, if mildly, at the market. But she wasn’t even from San Juan. Then, I thought to myself, there was Indira, a friend of Doña Aida’s daughter Nancy, who frequented the kitchen at the Perdido house, and who I had occasionally caught staring at me from afar. Though certainly beautiful, in her own wholesome way, she couldn’t have been older than eighteen, and we had seldom actually spoken. Yet that was what passed for romance in San Juan.

Miguel, on the other hand, did have in his village a handful of friends our age, some of them girls, a couple of whom stopped by later that evening as the sun set over the valley. Whereas in San Juan any activity taking place after nightfall, particularly one involving members of the opposite sex, was looked upon with the utmost suspicion, evening gatherings here seemed to be considered an acceptable part of normal life. Perhaps that change was largely due to another difference that had suddenly become apparent as night fell. Unlike San Juan, this town had electricity. Whatever spirits had once roamed in the darkness of the night here, frightening the people into the safety of their houses, had long since been driven into the dark hills in the distance.

“There’s no electricity in the town where you live?” one of Miguel’s friends asked in disbelief, when the subject came up.

“No,” I explained, quite calmly, ironically defending my village to a resident of the very country in which a town the size of San Juan could still be without electrical power.

The group stared at me in continued bewilderment. “How do you live there?” her friend asked.

“There should be electricity, sometime soon,” I answered, repeating the hopeful story I had been told so many times in San Juan, even though I didn’t quite believe it myself. “The power lines in town have been up now for quite some time. We’re just waiting for the lines to be run from the nearest town. It should be anytime now.” It was the same story I had been fed by Peace Corps when I moved out there, and that was almost a year ago now.

In such discussions, we passed an agreeable evening with those girls, who were university students home from the capital on break. They proved quite informed, so when trivial issues did enter into the conversation, it was purely by choice. My country routine already shattered, I woke up much later the next day than I ever would have in San Juan. With little to do but lie around and wait for the midday heat to subside, Miguel and I discussed the possibility of another weekend in the capital. I had already travelled most of the way to the capital from San Juan, and was determined to go on, and to convince Miguel to come along as well. From here, it was a decidedly easy trip. We could hop on any of the passing busses that frequented the nearby road, and we would be in the capital in an hour or so.

But Miguel, who took pleasure in debating the benefits, mostly economic, of staying in his village, refused to give in easily. So we passed a lazy afternoon under the mango tree in the courtyard, sucking on salted slices of green mango, which the old lady next door made a business of selling. The mangos, distilled in vinegar to make them palatable, normally sold for three pesos a bag, but Miguel was able to acquire his for free, since the old woman secured her supply of raw materials from the mango tree in front of his house. I had learned with practice to eat the sour green flesh of the unripe mango, which was sold everywhere, but it was difficult for me to enjoy the taste, especially since I was of the opinion that, with a bit of patience, a ripened mango would have made a much tastier treat, and more prized commodity.

“Why do we eat green mangoes?” I wondered aloud, as I gnawed at a slice. “The people in this country seem to love them. You see them everywhere. But, I mean, ripe mangos are much better.”

“Many here would disagree with you,” Miguel said, assuming the contrary, as he frequently would when he sensed that a local custom was under assault.

“Many here would disagree that one and one make two,” I said with a laugh, before elaborating. “This whole green mango issue - it seems like a lack of patience. Just economically speaking, wait a month or two and the tree will be full of ripe mangos. Even if people don’t eat them, certainly they could sell the ripe mangos for more than they get for these green mango slices, and that’s after all the work of cutting them up and putting them in these little bags.”

Miguel sat quietly, contemplating the barren tree above us as he formulated his rebuttal with the serenity of a father asked by his child why the sky is blue. An engineer by training, Miguel was a sociologist at heart, who always had at the ready a logical defense for the peculiarities of behavior that could be observed all around. Those days, I found myself agreeing with many of his theories, as experience slowly taught me that life here was often about day to day survival rather than the maximization of long term well-being. While I waited for Miguel to emerge from his deep concentration, I considered my stance on the green mango question, and thought it strange indeed, given the amount of patience displayed in other aspects of life, like getting from one place to another, that people here would so uniformly harvest mangos before their peak.

“Wait a month for the mangos to ripen on the tree?” Miguel now interrupted my own deliberations with his question. “Do you remember the guava tree at Jorge’s house?” I did remember that guava tree, one of the many fruit trees in the courtyard in front of his house.

“The last time we were there, it was full of guavas, slowly ripening,” Miguel reminded me. “I can still smell them,” he added, seemingly for emphasis.

“Yes,” I laughed. I recalled perfectly well the rest of the story. “We had big plans for those guavas.”

“But they didn’t work out, did they?” Miguel asked. There was no need for an answer. We were going to use that fruit to make fresh guava juice, and then mix it with aguardiente. We planned a whole party at Jorge’s house around the ripening of those guavas, and invited our friends, and some of the prettier girls in the neighborhood, over, the weekend we anticipated harvesting the fruit.

But we had planned prematurely. Birds ate many of the guavas as they ripened. But mostly, they just disappeared. Finally, when just enough fruit remained to make the undertaking still worth our trouble, we resolved to pick the remaining guavas. But that very day, we looked out front and saw a pair of the neighborhood kids in the courtyard, up the tree. They had jumped the fence and climbed up there, and they were plucking the rest from the tree. Jorge shouted through the open door at them, and then, amusingly, ran out front, waving a broom menacingly, as the boys fled, spilling most of the pilfered harvest on the driveway, and trampling it in their hurry to escape. Not one guava remained in tact on the tree.

“Wait a month, and there will be nothing left,” Miguel concluded. “Green mangos may be only a fraction as good as ripe ones, but they are an infinitely superior option to nothing at all.”

Jose Miguel’s abstract mathematical calculations may have seemed out of place there, in the countryside, but it seemed to me that they were indeed the true calculus of this upside down land.

“What you say is true,” I admitted, in defeat. “Everyone is always after the mangos, whether they’re ripe or not. I guess the chances they will ripen are pretty low,” I finished, as I spat out the indigestible hulk of fiber left over from a mouthful of hard, green mango.

“So the choice isn’t between green mangos and ripe ones,” Miguel continued, clearly pleased with this new theory. “It is between green mangos and nothing. This country is like mangos in so many ways. There is so much potential, and yet there are so many reasons why that potential can never be realized.”

That issue resolved to our satisfaction, we sat in silence, and looked up at the bright afternoon sun, shining between the thick leaves of the mango tree.

“Let’s go to the capital,” Miguel said eventually, admitting defeat himself, in his own way.

We caught a late afternoon bus. Compared to the journey from San Juan, it was a quick and entertaining trip. Miguel slept as I, already energized by the thought of the capital’s streets, observed the people who live in the small villages flanking the road leading into the city, anxiously awaiting arrival. Alongside the road I saw frequent stands, where motorists occasionally would stop to purchase whatever goods were on offer there, ranging from clay pots to firewood, honey, and, of course, green mangos.

“It’s interesting about these people, selling on the side of the road,” I said, nudging Miguel to life as we passed a small cluster of homes, each with its own stand out front, all of which, in this case, displayed a number of small bottles of honey impossible to differentiate from one another. “All the people in a given area sell exactly the same thing.”

When we passed the occasional car, stopped by the side of the road to purchase, I saw how dozens of anxious honey sellers had rushed over, instantaneously annulling any pricing power that an individual seller might have had. A few miles down the road we passed a similar set up, only the stands this time displayed clay pots and ornaments. There was not a drop of honey to be seen.

“Sometimes, like in the case of these clay decorations,” Miguel, now aroused from his nap, said as he pointed out the window, “some aid organization has come and trained the people, all in the same thing. There’s a program like that near my village.” He shrugged as the latest set of stands disappeared behind us.

“I’m looking forward to getting to Kennedy and eating some of those baleadas, they sell around the corner,” I said, changing the subject as I looked forward to the variety of the city. “I’m sure Jorge will be glad to see us. It’s been a couple months since I’ve been to the capital.”

“We might not find him at home,” Miguel answered. “You haven’t been around. Jorge’s got a new love interest.”

“Oh really?” I said, anxious to hear the usually amusing story of one of Jorge’s misguided forays into romance, uniformly with foreign girls of Caucasian origin.

“He’s dating some German girl that works for a development organization. He actually spends most of his time at her house now. She has a huge apartment overlooking the city. The neighborhood is on a hill above downtown, it’s called La Leona.”

Having been away from the capital for so long, this was the first I had heard of any of this. “Do you think we’ll see him at all?” I asked. “I mean, if he stays all the way downtown?”

“Oh, we’ll see him,” Miguel said confidently. “I stayed at his girlfriend’s apartment with him last time I was in town. It’s really big, and quite luxurious compared to the house in Kennedy.”

“I don’t know,” I said, somewhat disappointed in this news. “I like the house in Kennedy. It’s authentic.”

“I know. But don’t get too used to it,” Miguel said. “One of the reasons Jorge doesn’t stay there much anymore is because he says his older sister, the dentist, is coming back from the United States any time now, and according to him, she’s not much fun to be around. Besides, his girlfriend is gone a lot of the time. They fly her all around to meetings in different countries, to talk with other development workers about poverty, and how to help poor people.”

“Sounds nice,” I said, considering the old school bus we were riding in. “Maybe one day we can have jobs like that, and travel in planes instead of old school busses.”

“I don’t know,” Miguel replied. “Sure it pays well, and you live in a nice apartment, and fly all around to different countries, where you stay in nice hotels, and eat well. But I spoke to her about it last time I was there. She says all they really do is talk, and spend a lot of money for conferences and such. I’m not sure I could live with myself, having tons of money spent on me, just to talk about poverty, when there is so much work to be done.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s better to work directly with the people, as we do, even if the scale is smaller.”

“It’s not so much about scale,” Miguel said. “It’s about really getting to know the people, in order to work with them and realize their needs. You can’t do that from a nice hotel or an expensive apartment. You just can’t get the feel for it that way. You end up promoting projects that teach an entire village how to make bird cages, when only so many bird cages can be sold in the countryside,” he concluded, looking out the window as the bus passed yet another town with stand after stand by the roadside, these laden with bird cages of every size imaginable, but with no potential buyers anywhere to be seen.

As I stared down at those unoccupied vendors, I remembered something our Peace Corps business training instructor Oscar, a lifetime employee of non-profit organizations, and as such generally considered an expert in the field of development, had said during our training.

“The people in the countryside,” he had told us, “are uneducated. You will find that they have no reason or logic for most of the things they do. You must teach them everything, even to count.” Those words had stayed with me for many reasons, and I remembered them still. I had been quite sure all along that they were inaccurate, but it had taken time to begin to understand exactly what didn’t sit right about them. I wondered now if I hadn’t been working under the same premise anyway, much like the organization that Miguel suspected was at fault for the unsold bird cages lining the roadside here. Perhaps, as I tried to teach new things, I was ignoring the big picture, one which the community, having been in that situation forever, had indeed assessed with their own precise calculations in a math that they understood perfectly, but which I was just learning. I thought of the green mangos. There was much more I would need to learn from the people here, I thought, before I could teach them anything.

Pleased with my newly developing understanding, which yielded explanations for the unusual things I saw around me that didn’t involve assuming the subjects of my observation were unintelligent or irrational, I passed the rest of the journey looking silently out the window, as the bus rumbled on. It seemed, I thought, that I had been led down the wrong path, perhaps unintentionally, by people like Oscar, who were convinced that they had the solution to all of the problems of life in the countryside. That manner of thinking, I now understood, worked fine for people like him, who lived in large houses and had their land rovers to drive around the capital. But Miguel and I lived lives far different from that, and to do so in harmony, if we ever hoped to be effective in our work, we would have to be able to explain things in a different way.

Night was fast approaching as the bus sped down the long, steep road into that final valley, the bright city awaiting below. Our deliberations on development had ended for now. We wouldn’t solve all the riddles facing us, and the country, at least on that day, as the sun was quickly sinking over the hills in a spectacular blaze of orange that only the contamination of thoroughly polluted air can produce. It would soon be night in the city, time to turn my thoughts to easier pursuits, at least for the moment.

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