Being Campesina

I have been working a lot in the rural communities lately. This work has included evaluations of old drinking water systems, topographic studies for new ones, and small farm management, not that I know anything about farming. I have been working mainly in three communities, two just outside of Olanchito and one near Tegucigalpa. These are communities of 300 people apiece, set high in the mountains at the ends of deteriorated logging roads. As the crow flies, each of these communities is close to a major city where people live with all the modern amenities. But government funds don’t climb the steep green mountains to reach the campesinos. One community drinks water from an unstable system of cheap garden hoses that leads from a creek. Another community’s water source is heavily contaminated by runoff from the large ranches above it. The third community enjoys good-quality water, except for three months of the year when it dries up. Only one of the communities has access to public transportation; residents from the other two communities have to walk two hours down the mountain to reach the nearest bus stop. None of the communities has electricity or a health center.

But what these communities lack in infrastructure is made up for in other ways. Due to their elevation and the shade from their forests, the mountains are cooler than the big cities below. People live farther apart in the campo than in the city, and so malaria carriers like mosquitoes can’t find breeding grounds as easily and don’t bite while you’re trying to sleep at night. Almost no one can afford to buy a car, so exhaust and the dust kicked up from dirt roads are minimal and the air is clear and feels fresh in your lungs. Small family farms border tropical forest where toucans, oropendulas and parrots call all day long. The pace of life is slow and there is always time to chat with whomever you pass on the road, always time for a cup of coffee with your neighbor in the afternoon, always time to be late wherever you are going as long as you eventually get there.

I don’t idealize the agricultural mountain lifestyle. Having spent nights in campesino homes, I have been woken up by women rolling out of bed at 5 am to stoke the wood-burning stove and begin the tedious daily two-hour process of grinding corn to make tortillas. For his part, the campesino man must tend to his farm every day, making vacation time a nonexistent and irresponsible luxury. And I know very well that the richest resource upon which the farmer depends, the naturally fertile land that he clears out of the forest, is endangered by inadequate farming practices that almost guarantee low crop production, leading to deforestation as people move farther up the mountains to clear more farmland to feed their expanding families.

Still, there is a certain elegance to living in a place with a panoramic mountain vista constantly in sight, a place where people know a use for the bark, leaf, flower or root of every plant in the forest, a place where the processes of consumption, growth and decomposition form their own fuel cell and don’t result in global contamination and economic inequality. Above all, my feelings while I’m in the campo reinforce my suspicion that I was assigned the wrong fate when I was born a sheltered suburban girl destined for a desk job. Although I have put up with such work for the sake of having an income, I know that the office is not my calling. My continual struggle is figuring out where to find work that is outdoors at least half the time and involves a lot of interpersonal interaction, yet still allows me to put to use the technical skills that I have worked my entire lifetime to obtain.

Suggestions?