Day 4 I’m a little behind

Day 4.

We walked around the city of El Fuerte for awhile after breakfast. The square is beautiful. Many palms and pink and orange bougainvilleas. The sky was blue. Mountains in the distance. Joel and I walked through some hotel lobby’s. All these hotels have an open patio in the middle on multiple levels. You walk through these big wooden medieval doors with wrought iron locks and down this cobblestone pathway to the bottom level. The walls are lined with ivy. It opens up at the bottom and you walk into this tropical rainforest. If you look up, you can see the sky and the lush green palms. The roof around the edge is covered with that grass-looking thatch. You follow this rock path up steps and around, see dining rooms on patios set with goblets and pink table cloths, red napkins. There’s shady spots to sit and read or drink a margarita on comfy red couches. We walked out of the hotel and then up to the top of a hill to an old stone fort that has been turned into a museum. Beautiful view of the river and forest from the top. Then on down to the bus station where we took a loaded jostling bus to Joel and Mabel’s place for the afternoon meal. We were met at the bus station with a rusty red rattletrap and a smiling Joel. The house is low and looks dumpy from the outside. Iron bars across the windows. Sticky screen door. Dusty yard. They haven’t had rain here since October! Anyway, Mabel and the boys, Marven (18), and Erven (16), and the little sister, Joselyn (11) or Josi as they call her, came out to meet us. They all smilingly shook hands and the boys took our backpacks indoors. Their table is not big enough for everyone so they serve dinner in two settings. Visitors first of course. It was a delicious dinner. I can’t even remember what all we ate. Then we walked outside and Marven and Joel told us about the tall spreading trees around their house. The one in the front yard is a grapefruit tree, while there are two mango trees and one lemon tree in the back yard. The grapefruit at the top of the tree were ripe and Marven said they were still from last years crop, but as long as they stayed on the tree, they stayed good. He got a long stick with a metal hook on the end and lifted it way up to the top branches where the ripe grapefruit were and managed to get a few down in one piece. At least one splattered on the ground because Dad dodged instead of catching properly. Then Joel and Marven and I stood behind the house under the mango tree where they have service and stumbled along in conversation in our rocky Spanish, his broken English, and Google Translate. We found out that he is studying to be a nurse. He is in his first year, soon going to his second. It’s a four year course. Anyway, he told us there are two youth girls in his church, his cousins, and they live right across the yard. Did we want to meet them? Of course! So we walked across the yard and met two smiling Mexican girls wearing coverings and dresses from bags from the Center. More Google Translate and then they decided to take us on a walk down to the Rio. But we were going to need tennis shoes, not sandals, because there is cactus and stickers. Also scorpions. And sometimes snakes. It turned out to be the funniest walk ever. Erven and Erika and Joselyn came along with us older kids. There wasn’t much service back there, so when we couldn’t figure out the meaning of a word, we would use wild hand gestures and the few Spanish words we knew. We found out that Ava and Lucía (the youth girls) were terribly afraid of the dogs around there. Made lots of drama whenever more than one showed up. And they found out that I was scared of snakes. So there was lots of crying wolf. “Perro!” “Snake!” (Which is about the only English word they knew!) we walked along the river for a very long time, then sat under a bungalow for a siesta. The Spanish kids suddenly began talking muy rápido in Spanish to each other. Laughing and glancing at us. We didn’t know what was going on. Eventually we caught on that they wanted to take us swimming in their swimming hole. Okay, sure! We reached this little “lagoon” type place. It’s a perfect swimming hole, run through enough by the river to keep it clean but closed off enough by natural dams to keep the fish out. Happily, there is a big log that stretches out over it and a small rope swing. All of us, fully clothed, went splashing into the water. It might have been six or seven feet at the deepest point. The boys did flips and dives off the log, swung from the swing, and we all just had a grand time getting soaked and soaking each other. Finally it was time to get out and dry off. We walked up to where there is a massive dam. Maybe time and a half the size of Charles Mill? Maybe a little smaller than that, I don’t know. Walked along it, listened to the water roar for a while. By the time we walked back, the sun was setting behind the mountains. It was a wonderful afternoon. We ate supper with Ava and Lucía and their family. After supper, they got out their book of translated songs and we sang Spanish for awhile. A bit stumbly but it was fun! Erika and i stayed there for night. We crawled into our cool bed and fell fast asleep. It had been an amazing day.