There's a gringa in the latrine!...and other occupational hazards

Spanglish vocabulary needed to read this blog entry:
1)Campo: The "country" or rural part of El Salvador. Not to be confused with "village" which is a defined cluster of houses. Mom called my village "Bri's campo" for the first year I was down here. Isn't she cute?

2) Companeros: This word should have a tilde, but my gringo computer won't make that happen so you'll have to imagine it. Companero/a means "co worker" in this case. We'll leave the political implications of this word for a future blog entry.

3)Desvio: Literally, a junction between two or more roads. The desvio is an important concept to understand when getting/giving directions in El Salvador because no matter where you go, you'll have to turn at or pass a desvio.

4) Vaca: cow. You should have all learned that one watching Sesame Street as a kid. If your parents didn't make you watch Sesame Street, sorry for you.

5) Potrero: A line of trees used to shade livestock and form a "fenceline" around property.

Lately I've been a little nostalgic for campo life. I get this way when I'm holed up in the office for too many consecutive days for too many consecutive weeks. I long for fresh air and refried beans.

Due to the cyclical nature of my job, there are times of year when I LIVE on the road and spans of time (like now) when my routine becomes administrative in nature.

Wednesday, I took an unexpected but not uneventful trip to the campo enroute to an interinstitutional coordination meeting out East in San Francisco Gotera (google earth that bad boy and you'll see what I mean). My roomate, we'll call her Mariah (she has many nicknames)and I left in the cover of night to make our way along the Panamerican Highway picking up companeros along the way and hoping to make it to the meeting in Gotera by 8.

Not so much.

Nearing the pick up spot of the first companera, she called to say that she had dropped her phone in the latrine (again) AND the bus broke down and she wasn't able to make it out to the highway to meet us. So we went to her.

Unexpected campo visit number one.

The road from the desvio to Potrero de Joco the village where our esteemed companera lives is a long, narrow, muddy one occupied by cows and young men on horses and bicycles who herd them with varying degrees of success. Cow traffic is heavy in the morning and afternoon when the boys on bikes herd them out to pasture and then back home again. Cows are large, slow, stupid animals who do not respect ones schedule.

This crisp morning, on the unexpected visit to the campo the cow traffic jam was in full effect. Now, months before I had learned how, in the event that the boys on bikes were ineffectual, to part the sea of cows and continue on along the narrow muddy road. What one must do is stick her head out the window and bellow "VACAAAAAAAAAAAA! VACAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

I was Moses in the Red Sea of cattle and little by little, prodded by my well practiced "VACAAAAAAAA!" they parted. Imagine the delight of the of boys on bikes and they witnessed a gringa in the middle of the campo driving around in a $60,000 SUV parting her way through cow traffic.

Mariah, my co-pilot liked it so much that she decided to try it. We're all about capacity building in my organization, so I was happy to pass on my little piece of wisdom. Up the road a ways, Mariah got her chance.

"FUCKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! FUCKAAAAAAAAAAAA!" She yelled, and dutifully the cows parted ways. Apparently, they don't care if you're cussing them out or yelling their name- all cows need is the right intonation.

The second unexpected venture in to the campo occured an hour later when another companero was left by a different bus and thus could not meet us at his particular desvio. As we waited for him to emerge from the forrest on foot, I realized I'd drank an entire thermos of coffee, been on the road for 3 hours and hadn't gone to the bathroom.

I left Mariah in charge of the $60,000 gringo-mobile and searched for a nearby house where I hoped to find a friendly Salvadoran with a clean latrine. Nearly 6 years of health education told me that the possibility of finding a friendly Salvadoran was high, but a clean latrine was slim to none.

At the closest potero I came accross that smiley, friendly Salvadoran I expected. She was a woman of about 50 who carried a huge bucket of water on her head and sang loudly to the ranchera music blasting from her front porch.

"Alla esta!" she said pointing customarily with her lips as friendly Salvadorans in the campo tend to do. "Its in that adobe hut."

Confidently, I wandered past the chicken coop and blasting ranchera to the back of the property, not failing to think how strange it would be if a stranger came to my door in the US and asked to use the toilet.

It was a pit latrine with a cement "bowl" which was uncovered and swarmed by flies. Pretty much par for the course. I had to duck to get in to the structure and when I whirled around to shut the door I noticed the hinges were bare and the piece of ply wood was sunk face down in to the mud outside.

Unphased and with a thermos full of coffee itching to get out I dropped trou and did my thing thinking nothing of the fact that I was, essentially, exposed.

Mid stream, I heard leaves crunching and figured it was one of the family's mutts coming to sniff out the gringa. I hoped he was friendly.

What a heard next was an adolescent male voice screech "Hay una gringa en la letrina!"

There's a gringa in the latrine!

Oh how I miss the idyllic campo life.