The angel opens her eyes

"But I do love the world," I whispered to a waiting presence in the empty room. "I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again...I love the lost ones, the failures of the world." --Loren Eisley from The Star Thrower. I think of that story so often here. It is spiritually stunning to me, and not just because Robby and I had to plunder Hugh Nibley's grave to retrieve it. :)


These are part of a mural some of the kids did at the JUCONI office in Volcanes. I can't take pictures of the kids without permission. You would love them, though! Take a second and look at these murals. There is a lot in them.


I was telling my father tonight that when we go out to the villages to visit families, I want so badly to capture what I see: glowing dark eyes in thin dirt-smudged faces, pigeons bobbing on the kitchen table, the mother who doubles over and rocks herself back and forth as she tells us about her husband's "other family," an old man slowly trudging up the street with firewood on his back, teenage father building an extra room on the back of the house with concrete bricks, five little children in their peering through a broken wooden gate. The houses scattered on the hills. It seems crass though, to snap pictures of these things and label them as poignant/tragic when they would be pictures of someone's life, someone's home. I don't want to be exploitive. There is beauty in it but I think most of it will come with me learning to be a star-thrower, ("Throw well. One can help them.") which I want so badly, which I am starving for. So, not too many pictures...I will need to learn to make them with words.

I did snake this shot of the murderous turkey who brought me grief last week. There he is in all his foul glory. The leche and jugo in the corner of the picture are part of the "dispensa" we brought today to all of the families. It was like Christmas.

One more picture. This is Manuel Isai Rojas Solano. My co-star in the telenovela that is my Puebla social life. :)