A day in El Sunza

We walk through town. Down dirt roads or trails littered with rocks and trash. A flow of muddy, milky water braids its way downhill, further.

We stop at one of the many wire and wood gates fixed into the brush fences along the road marking a house. A mother holding a small child comes to the gate to meet us, two more daughters at her sides. They are shy. It takes them some time to work up to a wave, then a smile. Before long they wave warmly and share their names. Such beautiful faces. The boys are less timid. They play in the road by themselves and watch us. One boy without shirt or shoes, maybe four years old, stares at us blankly, unblinking, while he beats a plant beside him with a stick. He’s emulating hammering. Two more boys appear in the road, both barefoot and without expression. They sit close side by side. One of them hammers into the packed mud with a sharp rock. He does so with precision as if he’s looking for something. The world’s smallest archeologist.

The mother says buenas to each of us and we continue down the road, further and deeper. The dirt path narrows, the footing crumbly but not precarious. When our path flattens out we turn and head up the side of a hill. Everything is covered in scrub, tropical green bushy scrub, and is checkered with trash. We climb a one-person dirt trail. Near the top is a dilapidated shelter. Four sheet metal walls with tree branches acting as pillars. An open space for a doorway and a sheet metal roof weighted down with igneous rocks. Surely the roof cannot keep out the rain. And it rains every day.

Children emerge and a round woman wearing a humble skirt, t-shirt, and sandals. Dee, our nurse, goes into the dark room to talk with the mother and her children. She has six, Dee says. In a ten by ten shack, live these six children and mother. No father, he left her, they were never married.

There is beauty in this house, however. All around it. Being on the edge of the hill at the very end of the village, the house has a grand view of the valley below the village, and the small mountains. Square plots of corn and sugarcane checkerboard up to the mountainside. The closest little mountain is densely vegetated. Our friend and guide, fourteen year-old Santos, climbs onto a rock and beckons to me. He’s lived here his whole life and knows what a view it is. He says there are coffee trees on the mountain. And that the mountain has a twin to its south. That there is another town on the other side of the mountain. And another after that.

-David Volk