Cartoon 36: Soledad (Loneliness)

On a bus in Argentina leaning my head on the seat next to me imagining it's someone's shoulder... 

Riding a bike through the streets of Santiago de Chile, closing my eyes for an instant.  Feeling the wind brush the hair off my forehead imagining it's loving finger tips...

Laying down to sleep in Guatemala and spreading Coelho's (my teddy bear's) arms around my neck imagining that his weight is that of a familiar embrace...

Watching the scenary go by wanting to offer my sister one of the rice cake sandwiches that I'm eating because I know she doesn't like to eat so much bread either...

Cartoon 35: To the Mamas Latinamericanas

The love of a Latin American woman is just a whole nother story.  So many women that I've met along this trip have shown me a level of dedication and commitment to the lives of others that drops my jaw.  Without the support of these women, countless times I would have been a bit lost, a bit alone, and very hungry :)  So this cartoon is dedicated to my Latin American Mamas who manage to make me feel at home as I get farther and farther from my own... 

               Thank you to.... 

       Vicky and Mela... Joaquin's mother and grandmother who housed and fed us for the time that we lived in Mexico City as we did shows in schools and in the traffic lights to earn money for the trip. Vicky woke up every morning and prepared breakfast and lunch for her husband and three sons before going to work at her convenience store to help bring home the bacon... 

           

       Gaby... a friend of KQDA (the group I began traveling with but that fell apart before ever leaving Mexico). Gaby cooked us the most amazing meals and stopped us from killing each other while we argued incessantly about missions and objectives and strategies for the trip that we never took together haha I'm so glad I can laugh about that now!!...

            

       Beth... an honorary Latin American Mama from the US but lives in Mexico, she and her family took me in and feed me when the KQDA trip fell apart and I needed a place to live...

       

       Piquis... a friends mother who opened up her home as a studio and fed home cooked meals everyday to the cast of the Vuelo de la Mariposa as we put together the show that we would be performing in communities throughout Central America...

       Liliana... a Colombian woman that I met one time in Mexico... When the night before arriving to Bogota I couldn't get in touch with the people who were supposed to receive me, I called Liliana and without hesitation she gave me her address and offered to host me in her home for as long as I needed...

       Mely... a woman I met on the Amazon River boat who took me under her wing and shared her dried fish with me when we got stuck together for 5 days on a broken down boat...    

     

I could go on and on and on but for now so this entry doesn't get too long I'll shout out to Nibia, Ana Sofia, Flor, Carolina, Ana, Anabel, Faithy, Pacha Mama and the countless other mamas that hold Latin America together AND I'd like to tell one more little story about one more little mama named Mariana... 

      This Christmas, I was going to be in Chile surrounded by generous and fabulous new friends but far far away from a familiar face and a familiar hug.  Although one wouldn't think it based on the life path that I´m on, I am really a family gal.  I suffer a lot being away from my loved ones and days like Thanksgiving and Christmahannukwanzikah (Christmas-Hannukah-Kwanzaa) are particulary hard.  When Mariana found out that I was gonna be alone in Chile on Christmas, she decided that that was just not an option.  She came up with a crazy plan and called together all her friends and family and basically everyone she knows in Mexico City where she lives.  With each person giving what they could, they organized a huge party with a raffle for a 3 liter bottle of tequila and ten bucks at a time, they sold enough tickets to buy me a thousand dollar flight to arrive to Mexico City on Christmas Eve.  I got to stay there for a full two weeks just lulling about with my Mexican family and storing up energies for the last 6 months of this journey.  Now THAT is the power of love. 

Cartoon 34: Birthday Blues My Butt!

 It was Ana's birthday and we were all sitting around her living room in Villa de Salvador, Peru. I was wading into her jungle of hair to give her a special birthday hair-do when her husband and son walked in saying, 'Sorry we are late, we were in the market and all of the sudden they closed all the doors and no one could get out!' 

           Apparently, in one of the big street markets downtown there was a heated conflict between police and workers.  The government and big business owners had decided to move the formal businesses that were at the center of the market to a different location in an effort to erase the informal economy that had grown up around them.  As I've seen all over Latin America, millions of small illegal tent stores had filled the streets surrounding the mall creating a whole market where a certain lawlessness reigns. Inside, it's a fast life of tons of people and noise and any product you could possibly want and cheap.  To me it looks like chaos that's organized in an incredible web of relationships where life bursts at the seams with activity and stimulus.  This economy is an important source of income for many families who struggle to find work within the formal economy.  In this case, when their livelihood was threatened, the workers took matters into their own hands and as the businesses tried to move, the workers blocked their departure.  Basically all the police in Lima were called in to defend and boom, a stand off. 

       While this was happening, petty robbers saw an opportunity...with all the police in Lima busy downtown, there was no one available to protect the smaller markets in other areas.  They began to sack stores all over the surrounding neighborhoods and store owners were on their toes ready to defend themselves.  At the smallest commotion, stores, like the one that Ana's husband and son were in, would close and lock their doors no matter who was inside.  No one was leaving until the root of the commotion was determined.  Eventually, most businesses in our neighborhood decided to close to avoid the threat causing yet another problem...birthday cake.  The youth that we work with wanted to surprise Ana with a birthday celebration but with no stores open, they couldn't buy a cake. So they went on a crazy search through the neighborhood and eventually found someone who had just had a birthday and was willing to offer the remaining half of their cake for Ana's party.  Imagine the look on her face when everyone yelled 'Surprise!!!' and she found a half eaten cake under her birthday candles :)  To me this was a testament to the resilience of this community and to the Latin American community in general.  What I have learned of the story of Latin America is filled with oppression, violence, tragedy, and laughter.  I learn over and over through their example that depending on each other, we can find the way to laugh like crazy at our half eaten cake that because of its story tastes better than a most beautiful 15 layer cake made just for me. 

Cartoon 33: Still Thinking About Body Hair

The Arawak, indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada in Colombia, believe that our body is a representation of the Earth. Our hair represents the jungles and if we cut it off, we are throwing our bodies and therefore the Earth out of balance.  When they do cut their hair, it is traditional to take it to the river as an offering.  As they drop it in, they speak the words, "We are one", reminding themselves that we are just another part of nature.
 The particular sect of Taoist monks that I visited in Duitama believed that our hair acts as our antenna.  It can allow us to perceive our surroundings and the world with more depth.  Cutting it off is like loosing our whiskers.
In Bogota, often even the men shave their armpits.  Mine were particularly bushy when I was there and two girls that I was working with pulled me aside one day and timidly said, "Señora Sara, do you know that in Colombia it´s seen badly to have armpit hair?"  Based on my example, I think they thought that all women in the U.S. sport bushy armpits hehehe. I giggled a bit and said, "Yes, it´s that way in most of the cultures I´ve lived in, but it's important for me to choose for myself what I like." I explained how important it is to accept and celebrate ourselves exactly as we are, hairy and round and sometimes even stinky. I was surprised when they said they had never heard anything like that before and I appreciated my mom and her wonderful earthy woman friends.  (Just for the record, I still shave. However, through this exploration I have lost the shame that I once felt to lift up my arms or show my legs if I hadn´t been able to shave for a few of days. Heck yeh.)
An indigenous group in the Amazon called the Ticuna practice a ritual called the Pelacao. When a young woman gets her first period, she goes into a room with only women for three days.  There, they feed her and talk to her and care for her and they pluck out all of her hair a strand at a time.  They explained to me that this is a right of passage and a symbol for excepting that being a woman is difficult and we have to be tough.  Now with more emphasis on childrens rights, they often just cut the girls hair.
On Taquile, an island in Lago Titicaca on the border between Peru and Bolivia,    as soon as they are married the indigenous women began to collect the hair that falls out when they brush or comb it.  They give this hair to their new husband and eventually, when there is enough, he combines it with wool and weaves himself a belt!  How romantical!!

With all these different ideas it´s been interesting to ask myself, "So what does hair mean to me?" I know that sounds like kind of a weird question but after sharing time with some groups that find meaning in everything, it seems clear to me that although we dont necessarily assign it consciously, everything does have meaning and its added a lot of meaning to my life to make conscious and choose what I want things to mean for me.  Does that make sense??

Cartoon 32: Alien Encounter

              From Leticia, Colombia to Pucallpa, Peru, I traveled for about 9 days on a series of boats down the Amazon River.  I think this was the most disgusting experience of my life.  I hope to share my honest experience while being respectful and expressing my deep appreciation for the people who work and consistantly travel on these boats.  They were my famlily for those days which for me, were a real test.  They helped me keep laughing and playing. They shared their stories and experiences and taught me to find an inner calm that I coundn't imagine was possible. 

     But dang ya´ll this ish was narsty. (Translation: Man, this boat was gross!) Not all the boats are like this but the one we 200 strangers were stuffed on one that was built for 100.  It was soooooo stinky that when I came off of it and got to my destination a week later, my new students asked me why I smelled like dead fish!  The bathroom and the shower were one and the same so all the surfaces were covered in brown wet goo, origin unknown.  Everything was covered in the feathers of the chickens who were dismembered daily on the deck in front of our very eyes and then thrown into a pot to feed us.  We slept in hammocks so close together that swinging had to be a boat-wide coordinated effort.  There was a family that slept under my hammock because their was no other space.  The walls were covered with drying clothes because the women of the boat did laundry and washed their babies daily in the 3 bathroom sinks.  It felt like being trapped inside of a vibrating tuna can because the old old motor made the entire boat shake uncontrolably.  And it was so HOT that I left puddles anywhere I sat down.  I don't mean to be negative, in fact as I write this I'm sitting here laughing at myself, poor little gringa girl who thinks she's hard staring at the ceiling at night completely overwhelmed by the other realities of the world. 

     All that said, I hope that ya'll can feel why the following story is so important to me.  On day three,  a man came up to me as I was taking air on the front deck.  I had just seen a toddler taking a poo in a corner and I sprinted out front to try not to vomit. I think he noticed my upset and he said 'Hey girl, draw a squiggle.', and handed me a piece of paper.  I did and gave him the paper back.  In under a minute the paper was back in my hand again and the man had turned my squiggle into a super funny expressive cartoon character's face. 'Wow!' I said, 'Let me try!' and thats how it all started.  The man was the nightwatchman on the ship.  He spent the dark hours on top of the boat watching out for river pirates.  And from that point on, I spent the first hours of every night at his side. His name was Roman and it turns out that he had always dreamed of being a story teller and cartoonist.  He showed me notebooks filled with characters that he had drawn in the wee hours of the morning while the passengers slept swaying slightly to delicate waves of the Amazon. His favorite character to draw was an alien named Tito.  Every night, he would tell me a different story about what happened when the character that I draw meets Tito.  Below you will find my favorite one... 

Cartoon 31: A Light One

 

This is an image that was gifted to my sleepy eyes one night as I brushed my teeth outside of my little borrowed bamboo cabin in the pitch black deep inside the thick forested mountains of Boyaca, Colombia.  In the stillness of the drizzly night, a monk made his way through the trees illuminating his way by a candle whose light rose and then expanded around him as it bounced off of his clean white umbrella.  He looked like a little bubble floating through the forest completely surrounded in darkness.  He didn't know I was there, I didn't really know if I was there. The image was so unreal.

I was at a Taoist temple which I sought out in an effort to learn some new tools to help me maintain my center during this crazy trip called life. I made an instructional video with the monks about how to find balance, strength, flexibility, and relaxation through aerial dance. 

The community was really incredible. It was made up of about 600 people with no cellphones, no T.V.'s, no "aggressive" music (for them this included reggaeton, rock, rap, punk, salsa).  Everyone wore loose fitting clothes and got up at 3 every morning to pray and do exercise until the sun came up. Then they would go about their business and again at midday, one hour of exercise before lunch. Then one last time at 5pm they do a bit of exercise before dinner. Three times a day they would eat sweet corn soup and homemade whole wheat bread.  They drank the fresh water of the mountain which had an amber color from all of its minerals.  They breathed clean air and used only diet, exercise and herbs as their medical care.  I had never been in a place like this and it seemed so revolutionary the idea that we could just decide to remove from our lives anything that might contaminate our mind, body or spirit.  From the outside looking in, it seems like the monks dedicate their lives to being positive, healthy, and strong (wow you should see some of the martial arts flips that this one monk could do)and therefore contribute to the overall uplifting of humanity. Of course their lifestyle is very depthful and strategic and I only got to know a small bit but either way, I am leaving this community with a renewed dedication to making choices in my day to day life that will truly serve me in the long run.  The internal space that these choices create can be my temple for a now... 

Cartoon 30: Be Careful, Not Afraid

 

 

 

 

  

 

I headed out to Colombia on my own about 2 and a half months ago and to be honest I was scared silly.  I said to myself, "I could eat bad food or get bitten by a huge bug and get sick and die!! What if I get robbed?? I could get kidnapped!" I was so scared to be the only one responsible for deciding what to do in an emergency situation.

I can now officially say that I have eaten bad food that made me sick and I got better.  I have been bitten by so many bugs that my legs match my favorite polka dot dress and I haven´t died yet.  My good friend was robbed and said it was the best thing that ever happened to her cuz she doesn´t have to deal with so much STUFF anymore.  And I was even kidnapped in Medellin! A guy was borrowing his friends taxi to drive himself home and he saw my friend and I looking for a cab. He thought we were cute so he decided to pick us up.  About five minutes into the ride he confessed that he was not actually a cab driver and that he had no idea how to get to where we wanted to go.  My heart stopped in my chest.  My friend spoke up fast saying, "Hahahaha you´re so funny, well why don´t you come get drinks with us?" (Her idea was to get us out of the car as soon as possible without causing the guy to escalate.) He agreed and we went to a bar.  After hanging out for a while he turned out to be a very nice kidnapper.  Just a normal guy with a really wierd way of picking up girls...

So I was really scared when I left for Colombia.  And fear is so powerful, after meeting so many people on this trip I would say that its got a pretty strong grip on most of us.  The first thing that people tell me about the places I´m going to are the dangers. They tell me about all the bad things that could happen there.  What´s up with that? 

Fear is so powerful.  In my vida, I have lived in fear of many things: being alone, getting sick, hurting myself, making a mistake, not knowing the right answer, not having what I need (money, companionship,_____). I have often lived my life trying to prevent these things from happening. I feel like life is teaching me that I can´t prevent them and once they do happen, they aren´t so bad.  Traveling alone has opened me up to be cared for by so many people. Its taught me that we are a generous, loving, protective species and adios to the few that are lost and trying to take advantage of others.  

When I first arrived to Colombia, I confessed to a friend my fears.  I said, "Everywhere I go I find people who tell me there´s danger at every turn. ´Be afraid of this!´´Be afraid of that!´ they say. How could I not be afraid of this world??" And she said, "Do they say ´Be afraid.´or ´Be careful.´ Although I do believe that we need to start talking about the fabulous things in the world instead of the dangers, what my friend said was just the redirection I needed.  The key is to be careful, full of care and attention in everything that I do.  Trusting the wisdom of my actions helps me let go of the fear that breeds anxiety and inaction.  

So thank you to Natalia and to life for teaching me to be comfortable as a lone cowgirl holdin´on to caution but throwin´fear to the wind.