LLuvia

It’s almost surprising, the relief that comes with rain pounding on the zinc roof, though maybe this is more for the absence of other sounds, and for the way that any simple change can bring back a world outside of this one.   Suddenly I could be in another place, as I pull on a sweater and look out at sheets of rain, flooding the streets and finally filling the dry riverbed.  For a time, there are no signs of life – radios and motorcycles drowned out, the houses across the street invisible.  I light the stove with a match and the coffee pot is edged in flames, burning blue around its base.   Peace. 

When it rains, most people stay where they are.  Meetings are forgotten, classes don’t happen… which makes running evening classes somewhat difficult in the rainy season.   But the young people in this community aren’t so afraid of the rain that they stay indoors.  When it pours, kids and jovenes roam the streets, drenched and laughing, barefoot in the mucky water, making their way to the park where they’ll stand in circles and drink rum from the bottle.  Doñas will tell you that this is a problem in the community:  Who goes to the bars?  Not mature women in their 20s and 30s.  No, the girls in the bars are 18, 15, 13 years old, drinking rum and dancing to dembow.   The men are older, of course.  

I’ve become so accustomed to this strange country and my place in it that things no longer seem so strange.  People bathing in their yards?  The man next to me on the bus holding a live pig?  A woman hitting her child with a shoe?  Chickens wandering in and out of the house?  Hardly even registers.  But young girls with much older men?  This still bothers me, and will always bother me.  A 16 year-old girl “dating” a 36 year-old man who already has 3 children, the oldest of whom is 12 years old?  Not ok.  Pretty disgusting actually.

I don’t like the woman hitting her child with a shoe either, obviously…