The Mute Screams

First of all, Lisa is better. After one regime of pills for parasites, she went the other hospital in the capital and they took a stool sample, then they kept her on an IV for three days. They said that the original diagnosis was wrong and that she had a bacterial infection instead. At least she is now better and poops like normal again.


We have had some interesting theories put forth from the people around our communities. I´ve come to believe that they are largely a combination of poor education and guess work:


The other night around 3:39 a.m., a man was yelling at the top of his lungs in the middle of the road, obviously straining for every last decibel. AAAA-OOOO-EEEEE! After a half hour of this serenade, during which several dogs offered their own counterpoint to which he responded in kind, he went suddenly silent. While no one around here complains when their sleep is interrupted (except for Lisa and I) they had all heard the man and had some ideas about what was going on.


One suggested that he was inebriated, as Lisa and I assumed, and called him a borracho, which is a derrogatory term for a drunk, then got himself falling down hammered a few days later. Another said he was a witch and could bring an evil wind to make people sick. And yet another, Lisa´s favorite, said that he was a mute...who was screaming. I think that theory involves a curse or something but they didn´t offer any kind of coherent explanation.


And we have picked up on some other strange statements. After I said that we weren´t getting a good signal today due to the thick, dark clouds, I ¨learned¨ that cell phone reception gets better when its sunny because the sun recharges the signal with electricity. Rice is the most nutritious food in the world, which is why everyone eats it, every day, for every meal. When the earth shakes with anger, the weather changes...and after our recent 6.2 quake near David, the weather did in fact change (from wet to wetter) and we had a 40-year flood!


We´ve also been discussing a bit of astronomy. It seems that the people from a nearby town believe that people can walk to the sky. People I´ve talked with think that the stars are holes through some kind of fabric or dark film. The moon is strong enough to break through the ground up there, but the stars cannot, and if we wanted to we could walk there. We can see that the world is not flat because there are all kinds of mountains and water, but round like a ball, you´re crazy, Gringo!

I´ve tried explaining that the objects in space are spherical, including the earth and that the distances between them are incredible. I talk about how the moon rotates around us and us around the sun and that they are in no way close to each other. I was pretty sure I lost some credibility when I tried to explain that the light of the moon and the light of the sun are actually the same, but that the moon is reflecting that same light off a white surface. It sometimes feels like I´m the wharthog from The Lion King: After Simba says that the stars are our ancestors watching over us and Timon says the sparkly dots were ¨fireflies that got stuck in the big bluish-black thing,¨ Pumbaa responds, ¨Oh. Gee, I always thought that they were balls of gas, burning billions of miles away.¨ Timon-¨Pumbaa, with you everything is gas!¨