sally

๑

I've mentioned before that Sally, our youngest resident, is incredibly attached to Pippi. She adores her. She calls her "sister" and brings her presents and sets aside food for her at mealtimes. She does these things for me, too, but I suspect this is primarily because I am Pippi's friend.

For her part, Pippi treats Sally like a sister. She is endlessly patient with her, brings her ice cream from the city, takes care of her when she's sick. She lets Sally use her cell phone to call her mother, even though Sally always gets confused and ends up calling half a dozen of Pippi's family members and friends. She'll run back to our house, brandishing the phone like a hand grenade, tinny Australian voices whispering, "Hello? Who is this? Do you know what time it is?"

Pippi stayed with Sally at the hospital, drowsing in chairs and empty beds, long after Robin and Harriet had left for the day. She was the only one there when Sally had her baby, a teeny-tiny girl approximately half the size of a Cabbage Patch Doll. When they wheeled Sally out of the operating room after the c-section, she squinted up at Pippi with her brow furrowed and murmured drowsily, “Sister. Baby?”

"Baby," Pippi confirmed, stroking Sally's arm. "Baby OK."

"Oh," Sally said, as if she'd been expecting a different answer. "Baby."

๒

Sally was deeply unhappy in the week following the birth. She'd never wanted the baby, had tried valiantly to ignore her belly and pretend there would never be a baby at all, despite the growing evidence to the contrary. Faced with the reality of a flesh and blood child, her flesh and blood child, she sank into a deep depression. Her silly, impossibly wide smile disappeared, replaced by a thin grim line. She avoided touching the baby. She barely spoke, just lay there staring into space, eyes wet and unfocused.

"What if we've lost her?" Pippi asked me quietly, as we sat worrying together at the foot of her bed. "What if she never comes back?"

It didn't help that Sally had had a cesarean section, a necessity considering her narrow, childish hips. The doctors had decreed that she was allowed to take one acetaminophen every six hours to manage the pain. Fucking Tylenol for what amounts to a minor disembowelment. Say what you will about the U.S. health care system, but you can get enough codeine to dope a rhino if you stub your toe real bad.

From my journal, five days after Sally came home from the hospital:

If this were the end of a feel-good movie or paperback novel, [Sally] would probably have named her baby something nauseatingly touching, like Hope or Faith. Here in the real world, she hasn't named her at all. She also doesn't want to breast-feed, so she ignores the baby's cries until one of the other women forces her to feed her, generally by saying, "HEY [SALLY], CATCH," and launching the baby at her nipple.

Compounding the problem was that fact that Sally was in so much pain that she hadn't been eating, so even when she was forced to breastfeed, she had nothing to give. She wasn’t allowed to give the baby formula, though, and so her tiny, delicate little girl went hungry for a few days, dehydration evident in her dry, dry lips. The baby was quiet, unnervingly quiet, but she mewled occasionally for milk. Her complaints were soft and squeaky, like she was still figuring out how her lungs worked.

Powerless to give this fragile little doll what she needed, I spent a lot of time rocking her in my arms while Pippi tended to her mother, my little finger stuck securely in her mouth to keep her calm and quiet. I sang to her, off-key lullabies and Steve Miller songs, and she sucked ferociously on my finger for hours.

๓

Sally seems so small without the huge hull of her belly. She's a little wisp of a girl, short with a spare frame. She's been up and about for a while now, mostly recovered from the surgery and the depression. Some of her mischievous energy has returned, and she smiles and teases almost the way she used to.

She drops the baby off with me sometimes, when she needs time to shower or cook or gather mushrooms. She checks in every fifteen minutes or so, poking her head in the door and asking, "M, baby OK?" She's feeding the baby formula now, so mother and daughter are both happier. The baby is still tiny, a thin pink fairy girl turning her face into my shirt, pursing and pouting her lips like a little Derek Zoolander. She hasn't grown nearly as much as Fran's hairy baby Blue, though she's just one week younger. She smells like warm socks and garlic bread. My love for her is almost too big to fit inside my chest; it leaks out in embarrassing little dribbles, a kiss here, a tickle there. I understand now what my mother said about not coming home with a baby.

Sally has taken to studying English with me, or at least pretending to. "ABCD one o'clock, OK?" She's not the most diligent student, but she likes hanging out. I praise her on her stumbling recitation of the English alphabet, and she praises me in turn when I manage to name all forty-four Thai consonants. "M, very good!" she says, one of her standard lines. She doesn't speak or understand much English, but she is an extraordinary improviser, managing to communicate a multitude of ideas by cobbling together a mish-mash of pidgin Thai and English with her hill tribe language and a healthy dash of pantomime. For the first few weeks, it seemed to me as though she and Pippi were speaking in code, like little kids who had invented their own super-top-secret ninja spy assassin Navajo language. I understand it now, for the most part - sometimes I even correct Pippi when she misinterprets what Sally is trying to say - but I'm still on the outside, looking in.

I'm Sally's friend, a good friend - but Sally and Pippi, they're family.

๔

What Sally wants most in the world - more than most people want money, or power, or to meet the love of their life - is to go home to her mother.

She's something of an unreliable narrator. Every day she has a different story: when she’s going, where she’s going, today or next month or next year, back home to her village or to stay with her aunt in the city, with or without the baby. When she doesn’t want us to go to the city for the day, she tells us she’s going that very day and she’ll be gone when we get back.

The assistant director Robin says she's been working on it, trying to negotiate the terms of Sally's return with the village elders. As it stands, Sally might be allowed to go home as long as she doesn't bring the baby with her. The thought makes my stomach hurt, but Sally doesn't seem to mind. Her aunt is willing to take the baby, and Sally just wants to go home, to forget the whole terrible business ever happened.

๕

Sally is gone.

Pippi and I stumbled over to her room at six o’clock this morning to help her move her belongings, a seemingly endless number of black garbage bags stuffed with clothes, baby things, and God knows what else – a whole watermelon, knowing her, or five kilos of rice. The burdens of motherhood have not made her any less of a klepto.

We found a few of our things balanced conspicuously on top of the diapers and blankets: a Thai-English phrasebook, the flashlight Sally had borrowed to navigate the dark path between our houses. Even my camera, which had a habit of wandering off and reappearing loaded with dozens of grinning, out-of-focus self-portraits.

Sally's sister was there to pick her up, and her older brother, the one she's afraid of. Her aunt was there, too, the one who is reportedly adopting the baby. The aunt took the baby from Pippi and cradled her, swaying almost imperceptibly as anonymous family members moved around us, hauling Sally's things to the pick-up truck they'd borrowed for the trip. The baby was asleep, oblivious to the new set of arms. She had a name, finally, though the aunt would probably change it.

The departure was abrupt. One by one, they all climbed into the truck without saying goodbye - the sister, the brother, the unnamed cousins. Sally. The aunt, cradling Sally's baby, our baby, little Pippi Two.

And then, just like that, they left.

Pippi and I waved as they pulled away, but the truck's windows were tinted and dark. We couldn’t see if Sally waved back, couldn’t even tell if she saw us standing there, fixed smiles on our grimy faces, pockets weighted down with the hard lines of the things she'd left behind: a phrasebook, a flashlight, a camera.

the argument

"Seriously, cut it out."

This was just not my day.

"I'm tired of arguing with you. Just go, already."

All I wanted was to finish setting up the new volunteers' room. Was that asking so much? I didn't think so. And yet, every step of the way, something stood in my way.

"I'm doing my best, here. Help a sister out."

The room was mostly furnished already; the previous occupant had left the week before. I knew that George and Ruthie were an older couple, so I got the construction team to switch out the single mattress for the double bed from Pippi's room. Then I realized that the existing mosquito net was too small, so Robin scrounged up a different one for me, a round princess net with shiny pink ribbons. To tie the net to the rafters, I had to get one of the men to stand on a chair on top of the bed, wobbling around like a circus elephant.

"This is stupid. I can't believe I'm even having this conversation with you."

I'd planned to put the shelter's one large bedspread on the bed, but one of the women had wandered off with it. I asked Robin to put the word out; in the meantime, I struggled to make do with a too-small duvet patterned with enormous, clinically-rendered mushrooms. I'd had the foresight to stash an extra pillow in the cupboard, but I realized that I needed to go grab a clean pillowcase from my own room.

"Oh, come on, what do you want from me?"

I attempted to leave the house the same way I'd come in, the door where I'd left my sandals. However, while I'd been messing around with the mosquito net, someone had made the curious decision to padlock that door from the outside. I had no choice but to go out the other door, which meant abandoning my shoes.

Hmm.


CHOICE A: Turn left, cross this bridge


and this one


and collect my shoes at the other door.


CHOICE B: Take the long way, barefoot, past the pig sheds with their heaps of excrement and mud



and the chickens


and through the piles of organic debris where cobras love to sleep


and across the rickety bamboo bridge that cracks audibly every time an especially large mosquito lands on it


and over the potholed patch of ground where I sprained my ankle


and up the uneven brick path to my house


and then down the spider path (remember the spider path?)


and behind the women's residence, leaping over and tip-toeing around the mud puddles


and across the random stretch of pointy stones


and then back down the path to collect my shoes.


Naturally, I initially went with CHOICE A, but I lost my nerve at the first bridge. Normally I prance across with surprisingly little fear, ignoring the very real possibility that I could lose my balance and topple into the filthy, snake-infested water. This time, though, I could feel every creak and tilt of the board under my bare feet, and I skittered back onto solid land before I'd gone three steps.

I made it as far as the pig pens, and that's when I ran into my final obstacle, something standing literally and inflexibly in my way. Not the smell, which on a good day has a nearly physical impact. Not the inevitable pig shit, which squished unpleasantly into the arch of my foot. Not the chickens, who scattered in front of me like so many cockroaches. Not a snake or a brick wall or the Mongol army, but...






...a pig.


Perhaps you were expecting something a little grander. "A pig?" you say. "Is that all? It's a freaking pig. Are you telling me you can't outsmart a walking side of bacon?"

Your incredulity tells me that you have never shared a narrow path with an excitable pig on the lam. You have never taken a tentative step forward, hoping to scoot around the pig and continue on your way, only for the high-strung animal to squeal like Ned Beatty and dash down the path away from you. You have never stepped forward and then back, shifted uncertainly from side to side - like a chess piece, or a cha-cha dancer - trying alternately to mollify or outmaneuver an animal that will happily eat its own poop.

You have never stood barefoot in the cobra grass, warm dung clinging to your heel, and attempted, in all earnestness, to negotiate.

"Okay, pig. Here are my terms."

So what the hell do you know?

new faces

We've had a sudden flood of volunteers recently. There are several new "9 to 5" volunteers - foreign, usually twentysomething folks who come to the shelter through volunteer-sending organizations. These volunteers pay a king's ransom to their organizations, and in exchange they receive food, housing in the city, and a ride to and from their "internships" every day. I can't really rag on the organizations, even under the cover of Internet anonymity, because I think that they generally do good work, and I'm quite fond of most of their staffs. However, I will say that it's way cheaper for a volunteer to deal directly with the shelter and either live on-site or rent a room nearby. On the other hand, some of the volunteers are city mice who probably wouldn't dig living full-time on an isolated farm and fishing spiders out of their tea. Different strokes.

Speaking of on-site people, it was just me and Pippi until this past week, when we welcomed three new long-term volunteers. There's Teddy, a sturdy Australian in his mid-20s, who will be living in the slightly decrepit bamboo house for the next several months, potentially through July. He's a very nice guy - a childhood friend of Pippi's, actually, and let me tell you, the combined force of their Australian-ness is sometimes overwhelming.

Then there's George and Ruthie, an older American couple who are planning to stay until the end of March. They also seem nice, if a tiny bit more flustered than your average volunteer. Normally I'm pretty good at connecting with older adults, possibly because of the whole Baba Yaga thing, but Ruthie and George are apparently resistant to my charms. It's all I can do to squeeze the barest smile out of them. Tough crowd. Hopefully they'll relax some as they get used to the pace and atmosphere of the shelter.

They're hardly new arrivals, but I've been spending a lot of time recently with the director Harriet's three kids, all of whom attend international schools but speak fluent Thai.

12-year-old Elsa is a complicated soul. She's a nerd who doesn't much care about school, a geek who loves Twilight and Tamora Pierce but has never read Harry Potter. She seeks me out regularly, and I truly do enjoy her company. She's surprisingly mature for her age, so much so that I often forget that I'm talking to someone who's not allowed to shave her legs yet. She has strong opinions on just about everything, from Edward vs. Jacob to the prevalence of slavery and misogyny in ancient Rome. She asks for piggyback rides, then tells me quite seriously that the longer I stay at the shelter, the more I'll understand the human face of true evil.

Elsa's little sister Dotty is an odd duck herself. She is brutally honest in that way that only 8-year-olds can pull off, blurting out whatever comes into her head with no padding or editing. A couple weeks ago, she wrapped her arms around my waist, then said to me, with a certain degree of awe, "You're even fatter than my mom." Minutes later, she told me that she was glad I was the new volunteer coordinator, because no one else would have been as nice and funny as I was. She also loves to do that little hand trick where you slot your fingers in with another person's and then part your hands, allowing you to view what looks vaguely like either an anus or a certain part of the female anatomy. I once overheard Elsa scolding Dotty about her little hobby, saying, "When I was your age, I was learning massage, not showing people buttholes."

Finally, I've been trying to charm Elsa and Dotty's 14-year-old brother, Dexter. Everyone has told me that he doesn't really talk to anyone, refuses to be drawn out, so I always feel inordinately proud of myself when I engage him in conversation or persuade him to help me with a Sporcle quiz. What can I say? My days are a string of embarrassments and misunderstandings, peppered with small victories and pleasant surprises. I'll take my little pleasures where I can find them.

retro: a terrible thing to waste

I love brains.

Yeah, I said it. I hate stomach, intestines make me gag, and the next person who tries to feed me bull testicles is getting a sharp stick in the eye.

NOT FOOD.

But brains - oh, delicious brains. I am a fervent disciple of the Church of the Sacred Encephalon. I would eat that shit with a spoon. Straight from the skull, if necessary. Straight from your skull, maybe. Watch yourself.

I have not always been this way. I did not sally forth from the womb as some slavering, brain-hungry zombie child. In fact, for nineteen years, I lived a full, happy life totally devoid of brains in any form.

Picture unrelated. What?

Then I went to Mexico.

Michoacán had great food. Have I mentioned that? I cannot stress it enough. Mexico has one of the highest obesity rates in the world, right behind the U.S., and I don't blame them one bit. If I lived and ate in Michoacán full time, I would be the size of a house.

Our little city was swarming with taco vendors. My staff came to favor one near the town square, a small but efficient operation that sold the world's most delicious soft tacos for less than it cost to buy a corresponding antacid tablet. The meat was finely minced and expertly grilled, spicy and savory. I couldn't get enough.

I assumed, like an ass, that the meat must be beef or pork. In my own defense, let me remind you that I was very young, very stupid, and very, very hungry.

Anyway, it wasn't until the third or fourth taco that a fellow staff member let the cow out of the bag. "You know that's brain, right?" she asked around a mouthful of tortilla - so casual, like she was remarking on the weather or the latest project gossip. No big deal. You know your bra strap is showing, right?

I looked down at my half-eaten taco. What had so recently seemed innocent and nourishing now represented a personal betrayal on the scale of long-term adultery. I considered discreetly disposing of it via our entourage of street mutts, but I knew I'd never live it down. Besides, it was pretty tasty, brain or no brain.

So I ate it. And then bought another, and ate that too.

All told, I ate an estimated five billion tacos that summer. They were all delicious beyond the telling of it, and every last one of them wreaked unspeakable horror on my G.I. tract. Totally worth it. Besides, in the end, that little taco stand provided me with not only the best damn tacos I've ever had, but also an incomparable source of entertainment.

Let it never be said that one man's troubles cannot be made more bearable by foisting cow-brain tacos on his unsuspecting volunteers.

Sure, a couple of them said they'd never forgive me for tricking them, but I expect they'll come to appreciate my deceit in time. In the meantime, I remind you all that you should search me out when the zombies come. If I'm clean, I've got a machete and a frighteningly over-thought strategy; if not...well, I know a great supplier.

slapstick

Everyone is slowly warming to me, which is a relief. I have a terrible, near-obsessive need to be liked. My presence must not be merely tolerated, but yearned for and delighted in. It's absurd; you'd think I was a spoiled only child, raised by parents who hovered anxiously and applauded my every sneeze as an act of genius. I was and am spoiled, there's no denying that, but I do have a sister, and MD was never what you'd call a helicopter parent.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I am hell-bent on endearing myself to everyone I meet. I am burdened in this mission by my crummy personality and shitty attitude, not to mention lack of quantifiable skills. (Wait, is talking during movies a skill?) Fortunately, I cannot walk ten feet with falling over or otherwise humiliating myself, and this seems to appeal to people. The staff at my hostel in Bolivia warmed to me only after I sprained my ankle and was reduced to hopping everywhere. My host sisters in Nicaragua were shy and reserved when I arrived; then I fell out of a hammock, everyone laughed, and we passed a pleasant evening making fart noises into our elbows.

Then there's Rosalind, one of the Vietnamese refugees at the shelter. Rosalind is the administrative assistant in the office, and I'm forever asking her for this or that. She's quiet, but I knew from seeing her with the kids and the women that she had a wonderfully playful, silly side. I'd been trying to win her over since I got here. She was unfailingly polite, but she never chatted with me or hugged me from behind, the way I saw her do to a couple of the other farang.

A couple days ago, that all changed. You see, what had happened was - uh - well, I electrocuted myself. Hard. Hard enough that if I were a character in a comic strip, my hair would have stood straight up and my shoes would have flown off, followed shortly by my socks and possibly my entire epidermis.

The current connected powerfully enough that for several seconds I couldn't let go of the power strip, and I let out a little yelp of terror. My screech brought people running. By that time I'd managed to shake off the power strip, and Harriet (the director) assumed I'd seen a rat. I had to explain that, no, I hadn't seen any kind of vermin, it's just that I was a total jackass who didn't understand the concept of electrical current.

It was completely mortifying, and I covered my face with my hands, acting out a little pantomime of shame for the benefit of the non-English speakers. Most of the women grinned, the way Thai people often do in such situations, so as to dispel tension and minimize your loss of face. And then, out of nowhere, sweet, reticent Rosalind laughed - nay, guffawed, serene Vietnamese comportment be damned - and threw her arms around me, and that was that. Within hours, she was talking to me about her zits and offering to paint my nails if they ever grow past "nervous lesbian" length.

Rosalind wasn't the only person here who took a while to decide she liked me okay. Fran told me recently that when she first met me, she thought I was much older and kind of mean. "The kids did, too," she said casually.

Ah. That explained why many of the kids were so distant to start with. I guess I can't blame them. I think about what they see when they look at me: farang, oddly-shaped, mustachioed, with wild frizzy hair and a limp. I am Baba Yaga without the cool house. It's a wonder they speak to me at all.

I asked Fran what made her change her mind about me. She said that it was the way I laughed all the time and chattered with her - she realized I had to be young. In essence, I think, she realized I was too dumb to have yet lived a full life. And that's really the crux of the matter: people are slowly realizing that I am too incompetent to be mean-spirited, too scatterbrained to represent much of a threat. For now, I am just another farang, another wacky white girl sticking my fingers in their babies' mouths and wrestling with their toddlers. But someday soon they'll realize that I'm also a prime source of entertainment, whether I'm falling down, hitting my head, setting my hair on fire, or sticking my fingers in electrical sockets.

And you know what? They're going to love me.

retro: the way to my heart

I love milanesa. Of all the foods I tried in Paraguay, milanesa is one of perhaps three that I would voluntarily choose to eat over, say, fried cardboard. It's a pretty simple dish, just pieces of thinly-sliced beef or chicken, breaded and fried, often with a dash of cumin. It's not so different from chicken-fried steak, I guess, except that chicken-fried steak is uniformly disgusting, whereas milanesa is a gustatory delight. Don't ask me to explain the wind, okay?

One evening in mid-July, my partners and I returned from our mid-summer break/training session to find that our host mother had made milanesa for dinner. Thank God. Finally, something we actually wanted to eat. Dude Partner and I dug in happily while Lady Partner, a committed vegetarian, looked on.

As we ate, DP and I discussed the food in front of us. Was it chicken or beef, we wondered? It looked too pale to be beef, but it didn't taste like chicken either. Curious, we peeled away the breading to get a better look at the meat within. This was a mistake. The meat looked distressingly gooey, as though someone had blown his or her nose onto it before frying it up. We chewed more slowly, pondering this development. The milanesa was awfully hard to cut. And it was so chewy, like trying to sink your teeth into a whoopee cushion.

"What kind of meat is this?" we asked our host brother.

He shook his head. "No, no, it's not meat."

The generic word for meat in Spanish mainly refers to beef or pork, which explains why our vegetarian partner was frequently served chicken and, disturbingly, hot dogs. ("I'm sorry, I don't eat meat." "...and?") We tried again. "What animal is it from?"

This he could answer. "Cow."

Well, that narrowed it down. "What part of the cow?"

Mouth full of the mystery non-meat, he merely hammered on his chest.

My partners and I fell into a hushed, heated debate. Heart? No, heart would be too tough. Lungs? Who eats lungs, anyway? Pancreas? Gallbladder? God, what else was even in the chest?

By this time, our host brother was laughing at us. "Tripa," he said patiently. "It's tripa."

Tripa. Sounded like - but, no, that wasn't in the chest. The guy had worked at a carcinería, a meatpacking factory. Surely he knew where the damn stomach was.

Well...he didn't.

At least the milanesa was edible, if somewhat less appealing after we registered its gummy, goopy nature for what it was. The real challenge came a week later, while our supervisor was visiting. Strangely enough, our sup was also a vegetarian, so it was a particularly bad night for our host mother to serve Broiled Stomach Pilaf.

The milanesa had masqueraded well, but this dish was unmistakably composed of offal. Fat, rubbery chunks of stomach nestled on a bed of plain rice. The smell was nauseating. The "meat" was plain, unadorned. It was unashamedly stomach, grayish and weirdly furry on one side. My partners and supervisor and I stared at it, and then each other, each silently running through the same list of options.

A. Eat it. Die.

B. Don't eat it, thereby insulting host mother and risking starvation. Die.

C. Flee on foot, heading for the mountains. Stumble upon the ghost monkeys or the rumored al-Qaeda training cell. Die.

The future was bleak.

Daringly, our supervisor attempted to cut the Gordian knot with an advanced weasel maneuver. "I'm sorry," she simpered apologetically, eyes artfully wide and innocent in her face. "I'm awfully sorry, but the thing is, I'm a vegetarian."

Our host mother frowned. "So?"

Thrown by this brusque response, our supervisor faltered slightly, then pushed on. "Well, I mean, I don't eat meat." Her eyes were growing wider by the second. She looked not unlike a Bratz doll.

"It's not meat," our host mother said, shoving a forkful of innards into her mouth.

Our sup was persistent. "But, you see, I don't eat any part of the animal." Clear, straightforward, unambiguous. Even a master weasel like our host mother couldn't argue with that.

"Ah," our mother said, appearing to concede. "I see. Well, why don't you wait a moment, and I'll get you something else." She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

It seemed that, against all odds, our sup had emerged victorious. She flashed us a triumphant smile. "Was that so hard?" she whispered, a touch patronizingly.

But we had all underestimated the magnitude of our host mother's cunning. Our sup realized her mistake moments later, as Mommie Dearest returned from the kitchen, self-satisfied smile firmly in place, with a plate piled high with cold, slimy hot dogs.