comes from somewhere

i have recently discovered what lou discovered on his trip to china in january 2001: poinsettias are trees. like lou, i was overflowing with smiles. poinsettia trees are in full bloom now in el salvador. of course they are trees. of course they are trees that bloom in december. this is obvious now, but i had never spent much thought on the origin of the ubiquitous christmastime poinsettia-wrapped-in-cellophane. the more you know.

today a woman in the community was telling me excitedly about how her 4 year old and 7 year old daughters went with her to cut coffee. sure, that is amusing, children make amusing day laborers. she then excitedly showed me pictures of the event on her cameraphone. i thought, this is some kind of moment of clarity. you might ask, why does she have a cameraphone if she makes roughly $1.50 an hour cutting coffee, a job that will not last more than a few weeks? do not ask that question. she has some other inconsistent sources of income of course - selling handicrafts, maybe money from family in the US. but the moment is typical. people with dirt floors may have televisions, and sometimes dvd players. this confuses americans who visit. do not be confused. if you live in a house with a dirt floor in a village in el salvador, your desire to connect to the larger world is probably very strong. best way to do that? radio, tv, sweet american pirated dvds and their fanciful worlds of pretend. it's the easiest way to connect to the outside reality and also join in the outside fantasy, the promise that with all your new shoes and gadgets and t-shirts you can forget about the fact that you went into early labor from shock because you saw someone get shot outside of your house.

yesterday i met an 11 year old girl named marta. she was very bright, going into 6th grade, but she said sometimes she didn't have time to study. why's that? she gets up at 5am so she can make coffee for her mom before she goes to work. then she has to make breakfast for her siblings, clean up, soak the corn, go to the mill and get the corn milled, make tortillas, etc etc. 11 year olds - busy little beavers! she has an older brother but obviously he cannot do any of that as it is girl work. she said she liked drawing, and that although some people found it difficult, it was quite easy for her. i snuck her two big H1N1 posters from the training we were giving and told her to do some drawings on the blank side and come show me. i asked her what she drew with, and she said a pencil and sometimes colors but she didn't have any colors right now. it's hard not to feel guilty that at her age i was taking weekly art lessons and my mom brought me to meet the town watercolorist and i had all kinds of brushes and pastels and colors and encouragement and marta has a pencil and no time to draw. well, now i have a box of colored pencils with her name on them, and depending on how the epidemic goes, a lot more H1N1 posters.