Dearest Rachel –
Despite the fact that I didn’t have any assigned tasks on Thursday, I wound up with a busier day I could be reasonably afforded time to write about yesterday. So here we are, preparing to fly out later this morning than we would usually have to commute to the Just One campus, giving me a little more time to cover those details for you as best I can. With any luck, you can expect a few more letters before takeoff.
And I imagine that this would amuse you, as you would generally admit to being the procrastinator in the family – hearing me admit to doing some of the same might give you a touch or schadenfreude. But as it so happened, I never got around to signing up for any of the cultural visits, so by the time Thursday rolled around, I realized I would need to go on one of these things. If nothing else, I didn’t have any particular duties that day, whether with working on pilas or teaching a class; and as with my last visit, part of the whole point is to learn the story of the person teaching us, and how Just One has impacted their lives.
But Doña Brenda – the woman who hosts the tortilla-making ‘excursion’ – has this… reputation… for being a tough taskmaster when it comes to her craft. Nobody gets a ten out of ten in this class; except Mike (well, the middle-sized one leading the construction team, and that turns out to be partly because, on earlier tours down to Honduras, he led the team that built out her house from the central adobe structure to the living space and separate cooking area and porch, so I wonder if her doesn’t just get a bit of a pass for that). To be fair, this is partly because she’s comparing our rank amateur efforts to her professional work; it’s to be expected that we would suffer greatly from the comparison.
I say ‘surprisingly’ because I don’t, as a rule, like corn tortillas as they’re available back at home, even from the local Mexican markets. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about their taste and texture that I just can’t seem to appreciate. Given an option between flour and corn tortillas, I will choose the flour one every single time.
But this was different, and I couldn’t tell you what it was that made it so. Maybe it was that it was fresh off the griddle, nice and warm. Maybe it was that it was handmade rather than some kind of industrial process. I honestly couldn’t tell you. I might rethink my attitude towards corn tortillas, or at least try to fry them in a skillet before actually eating them, just to see if that’s what makes it palatable.
Either way, she can, on a good day, make some eight hundred of these little corn platters for sale in the market in downtown Siguatepeque. And this is what she’s done for years, seven days a week, 365 days a year, to raise ten children, including putting at least one through secondary education (although several since have received scholarships through Just One, and as I mentioned earlier, the construction team has built out her home a bit as well). She may be something of a professional at this, but she leads a hardscrabble life even now.
And yet, she has a gratitude for the life she’s had that would put most of us Americans to shame, given what we have – let alone in comparison to her. I’ve told you about Agur, the writer of Proverbs 30 before (indeed, you and I had begun to collaborate on a children’s story about him at one point), and I’ve often wondered about his request not to be allowed to be too rich, lest he find himself saying “Who is the Lord?” But I don’t know anyone offhand – and definitely not myself – who will throw in “thanks to God” so much as a normal part of her conversation. Maybe one has to understand and experience abject poverty in order to truly appreciate even the littlest things He gives us here on earth.
To that end, I suppose I should ask you – as always – to keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck, as I’m definitely going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 