Day 60: Love and Sugarcane

My mother is leaving for the Dominican Republic next month. A talented nurse, she is spending ten days assisting in surgeries and travelling to scattered towns and villages to administer primary health care. And dad is staying home. It's a matter of frozen pipes and such, but this mission of her reminds me of my own trip to Nicaragua nearly ten years ago.
I was young and in college and still convinced that I could save the world because I was American. And so I was miserable for the first week. Stuck twenty miles outside Managua, I was chipping at dirt with a pick ax, trying to clear a foundation for a basketball court. I know! A basketball court! I wanted to swoop over the valleys with my superwoman cape and eliminate poverty and violence with a glance and a flick. And instead I was working on the free-throw line.

After a week of hard labor we toured the city, on an ancient school bus that still had Cincinnati School District printed along it's yellow sides. I'll never forget the houses- row after row after row of gray squatted shacks that pressed up against the horizon. Children jumped onto the bumper of the bus, hanging onto the edges and sticking their fingers through windows. They were holding out for pennies or gum or whatever they could grab, I suppose.

We walked through a old man's home. It was one room that was split into two. The first was a store of sorts. One dusty glass bottle of coke. Two spoons. A string of beads. Tires that were shaped into flip flops, the pattern of tread still visible on one side. We walked into his backyard, an area smaller than my living room and filled with sugar cane. These stalks were rowed together and stretched as high as his house, maybe higher. Our interpreter explained that he lived off the profit of these two dozen sugarcane. And I'll never forget the way he didn't stop to hesitate but pulled out his machete and hacked off thirteen branches. One for each of us. It was about hospitality. It was about pride. It was about giving whatever you had to the ones who walked through your door. We sucked and chewed on the sugar cane out of respect, but I couldn't help feeling embarrassed and unworthy. That a man with so little could love a group of strangers so much to give them what he could not afford to give his own family.

Afterward we stopped at a Pizza Hut in the touristy part of the Capital and I remember gagging on the pizza- the way the cheese mixed with sugar cane in my mouth. The flavors of hospitality and greed. And I wonder, who loves more? Is it the white American who can pay to travel South and chop up dirt for two weeks, or is the Nicaraguan native, the man who gives more than he can afford to people who already have so much? All I know is Love is giving what you cannot bear to lose to another, even when they don't deserve it. Maybe it's your piece of sugar cane. Maybe it's your heart.