Slowly goes the horse as the baby is sleeping
From the village of Caballero it is one hour on foot or master on horseback through fields of cassava separated by small stands of trees, on a road washed out by frequent torrential rains, before one finally reaches the Burges’s one family bedroom home, where the days and nights are punctuated by the cries of a baby demanding his bottle.
Don’t you think my house is beautiful?
One day, I followed Catalina as she was going to milk the cow at her mother-in-law’s next door. Going back through the fields toward Catalina’s house that didn’t have electricity and still had an open air well, Catalina said to me: “Helene, don’t you think my house is beautiful?” I said: “Oh yes, it is really very beautiful.” And I meant it, since I thought it was one of the most charming houses I had ever seen. I found myself dreaming of having one like it.
With a credit the ministry of agriculture had given one hundred families, she had been able to buy her stove the year before. She had to go to the village and take cooking classes to learn how to use four pots and an oven all at once. Before, she had only had a hole in the ground and a fire.
“Now that I have a stove, I’d like to renovate (finish) my kitchen,” she told me. “I want to replace these three walls of old planks of wood with brick walls. I’d like to finish the floor with nice tiles but first I need a chicken coop to get the hens out of the kitchen. For now it’s the only place they can be quiet to lay their eggs.” Then she looked at the cane wall as the rays of the sun softly came through and she said: “But this wall I want to keep like this, because I really like the light that comes through it.”
His sole source of money comes from chopping wood, which he has time to do only in winter. Simeon might be forced to work in the city, as he has done several times already. By working on construction sites, he managed to buy the materials to build his sixty-square meter house. …(more in economy)
more in economy
