Corpse story.

I'm tired this evening and don't have a lot of brain energy left for the blog, so this will be a quick post!

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about our trip is this process Chris is engaged in with Florinda. For those of you nearest and dearest to us, you know how absolutely improbable it is that Chris would willingly engage in a chat with someone, period. And then to do so for four hours in a row and then to do that for five days. At this point, he has probably talked with Florinda more than he has talked with most of you, and likely she knows him better than most of you do, too.

Today, he mustered up his very best Spanish to tell her about the kayaking debacle and what he considers his near-death-by-drowning experience. She listened with interest and then explained a little bit about living with the water here. In immediate response to his story, she told him that years ago, before Florinda was born, her grandmother and one of her uncles were doing laundry in the lake, a common practice we have seen many people do, and the boy started to swim. Obviously the people stand at the shore and use the rocks there to assist them in their chore, so the boy was not in terribly deep water, but he was still caught in a current and drowned. She went on to explain that when she was a girl, no one in her town had running water in their homes. They had to traipse to the waterfall, fill their pots and carry those pots home on their heads. It took almost an hour for her to get to the falls and back each time her family needed water. They were aware that the water in the falls was not fit to drink, but it was the only water available to them so they used it. She said that they were sick often, sometimes extremely so. She told an awful story about a time when she and her sisters and mother walked to the falls to do laundry. They brought their lunch with them to eat while they washed their clothes and they drank from the falls while they ate. When they returned to town, they saw the firemen heading out in the direction from which they had come. A man's body had been discovered, decomposing, in the falls just above where they had been washing their clothing and drinking. Again, she mentioned that they were made sick from the water time and again.

Today, there is running water in their town but the houses do not receive it 24 hours a day. In the summer (our winter and their dry season), Florinda's house has running water for about eight hours a day. Where her parents live in the hills above her town, they receive running water for two hours a day. Unfortunately, those two hours sometimes come in the middle of the night and so the women wake to do their chores at that time and then return to bed until it is time to start the day.

Florinda is currently living with her husband and two children in her father-in-law's house, but she and her husband are having a house built in the same town. They saved 6000 quetzales (about $750) to do so and planned a 30 foot by 60 foot house with four rooms. Much of the work was done when it flooded, and the walls were destroyed. It is uninhabitable and needs to be rebuilt but they spent their savings having it built the first time.

Tomorrow is their last day together, and I don't know who we will get to answer all of our questions after that!