El Manzanito (The Apple Tree)

Original version in spanish from: http://lideres.ethos.org.mx/

“El manzanito” is a community of Chignahuapan, Aquixtla contiguous municipality. The road is unpaved and extremely sad. The region was until recently one of those special forests in the world, located more than 2000 meters above sea level, the views were spectacular: mountains full of trees, which seemed to change color with the time of the day, the hues of nature offered a daily symphony of colors with shades of blue and green. Now the road seems to be the gateway to a desert. The lack of opportunities forced people to profit from the only asset they owned: the forest. Today when one begins to climb the hill, you can only see a bald earth, with some occasional cactus, the grass is yellow, the earth exhales heat, and the horizon is the same: heartbreaking. It reminded me to Juan Rulfo´s tale: Luvina. This desolate place, where it seems that everything is dead and the only living thing is the rumble of the wind.

There is electricity in “El Manzanito”, but no water. The community is a set of about 10 houses, all randomly arranged around the elementary school. In these dry days, women have to walk an hour and a half to get Drinking Water. Sometimes a truck with water comes to the community, and that day becomes a festivity. The water from the truck must be divided among all, and each will only get a buck of water. With that you have to survive a month, until the next truck full of water comes back.

People are cautious, and do what they can with what they have: collect rainwater, which falls from their tin roofs and is stored in big buckets. It is yellow like beer, and with that water they take showers and with that water they sometimes cook, and that same water is recycled all winter and spring, until the earth is blessed again with water.

Unlike Luvina in El Manzanito, sadness does not nest here. The women we met have made their extreme living conditions, a recurring motif of jokes and satire. I spent a most memorable afternoon because I did not stop laughing. They make fun of everything: their starving, their lack of water, the beating of their husbands, or anything.

When the wind stops blowing strong, up in the sky you can hear the engines of the airplanes. In meters, the distance between them and us should not be much, but there is another kind of distance that can not be measured, which seems as big as impossible to count. They, who are seated on the plane, waiting for the hostess to pass them their food, probably don´t even imagine the crumbs that life has left to these people.

Doña Sandra is responsible for collecting the money from the irrigation system we took them among the other women of the community.Her husband is lucky: the municipal government launched a temporary working program to rehabilitate a road. To reach his place of work, he gets up every day before sunrise, returning only at sunset. He earns 50 pesos daily (around 5 dollars) which must be enough for his living.

That day in El manzanito,we spent it installing irrigation systems, and Mrs. Sandra asked each one of the women the money from the system. At the end of the day, when we finished, Mrs. Sandra realized that she was missing 500 pesos (around 47 dollars) that were in her purse. At that moment, her face began to change, it was no longer smiling, it was now full of concern. She went home to find them, and as she searched the money, she shouted desperately for their children to help her locate her purse while she ran from side to side in her little wooden house. Her children, one 6 and the other 3, were stiff, with downcast eyes, not knowing what to do, listening to the cries of their anguished mother who slowly began to transform her shouts in grief, her voice breaking gradually, and it seemed that at any moment would burst into tears. Mrs. Sandra had lost the equivalent of 10 working days of her husband.

It was night, and it began to get very cold when we started to go back to Aquixtla. I had a big hole in the stomach from hunger, the day had been long. But the hunger I felt no longer had the taste of before, from few weeks ago, I felt privileged to feel it, but overwhelmed by something that I did not know what it was, something that left a huge lump in my throat.