WHAT FALLS FROM THE SKY

A few days ago I returned to Cahuita.  While in Monteverde I went to my favorite library in the world, the funky little one at the Friends School, and took out some books.  One of these is a 2005 publication – “They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan” – a disturbing, raw account by three young men about their experiences starting life in southern Sudan where all hell was about to break out. As young boys, they survived the world’s longest war on foot, moving from place to place, trying to stay one step ahead of the fighting but suffering just about every other indignation to humanity. They finally ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya which kept them safe from the war but not famine and human desperation. Their stories began in the late 1980s and continue until these boys, now young men, safely arrived in the USA and were able to record them in this beautiful book.

 

 

I have posted the links for the book website (www.theypouredfire.com) and for the International Rescue Committee which brought the boys to the US (www.TheIRC.org) on my links page.

 

 

 

Reading first hand accounts of lives lived is usually interesting, often thought-provoking and sometimes soul-shattering. Having just published a true-life book, Walking with Wolf, we have hoped that Wolf’s often humorous tales of a life lived in a mostly positive and productive way will bring  joy and inspiration to people.

 

A book like They Pour Fired can’t possibly bring you joy although you certainly feel relief that these boys survived the horrors. There is a great warmth that fills me in knowing they are alive and working towards their dreams of being educated and sharing the truths with the world of what is going on back in their homeland, Sudan, by telling their incredible tales in such a direct and honest way. Just the phenomenal strength of the human spirit has to be celebrated. But the accounts of injustice, desperation, greed and the war that still rages on – that these children neither understood or caused or benefited from, only suffered through – that’s another thing. They fill my heart with disgust at the forces in this world that continue to insist that another war is going to bring better conditions to the masses when the majority of wars bring more of that thing now so casually referred to as “collateral damage”, with horrors so traumatizing that for many death is the easier way out. 

And worse, there is inevitably a group of people making immense wealth off of all this and so war, under whatever excuse or guise, carries on. There are things on this planet that are hard to swallow, the bitter pills of life, but we can’t remain totally ignorant either.

 

Finishing this book the other morning struck me down from my pleasant perch, made me sad and that eventually moved into melancholy. Roberto began one day last week in that space as it was his 56^th birthday and well, birthdays will do that to you. Although we had plans to go to town to celebrate, a steady rain started around 5 p.m., finally washing this dry earth, and it lingered through the evening until we decided to miss the wet walk and stay home. Instead I let him beat me at dominoes, it being his birthday and all.

 

As it goes with melancholy, his passed quickly enough, as has mine.  A troop of howler monkeys moving into the trees directly above the hammock has helped. They inevitably make me joyful with their family-style living, raucous jumping and expressive voices. As I was watching them I realized that I was also looking up at a sloth. I’m guessing she’s a very pregnant female as she is quite big and round.  I haven’t been able to see her feet to count her toes so don’t know what kind she is, but I’m filled with happiness knowing she is above me and will probably stay around for awhile. I love these neighbors we have. 

Roberto had his big joy a couple days ago when Costa Rica whipped the tail of the US soccer team in an important game on the road to next year’s World Cup in South Africa. The US was in first place in the section but Costa Rica took over that spot with this game (and then reinforced it by winning against Trinidad/Tobago a couple days later.) You could feel the smile of this country spread across the radio waves as we were listening to the game.

 

A howler above me just let out a huge roar, making me jump, and reminding me to pay attention as he may be moving into peeing-down-from-the-sky range. Which brings me back to “They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky”, as I watch how nature has given traits to the sloths and monkeys so that they can co-exist in forests, sharing the food that is available, having their leaf preferences so there is plenty to go around. I can hear a male from a different troop chanting not far from us and another a little further away still. Of course if the trees were cut down, their habitats and food destroyed, theses creatures would have to compete and suffer and die over what little resources are left for them. As is what has happened to the innocent sons and daughters of Sudan.

I highly recommend that you find this book. It is beautiful to read though it is a retched story to consume but this never-ending war in Sudan needs to be understood by those of us living our sweet lives elsewhere.

 

 

 

As for co-existing with those monkeys, that male just about peed on me, but fortunately, his aim was poor! Maybe next time.

 

A few days after writing this, Roberto and I slashed our way through his plantain and banana plants, under the cool shadiness of the old cocoa bushes and to the base of a tree a little ways from where we had first seen the sloth.  She was now moving quietly through the leafy branches, her newborn baby gripping her belly. The sweet side of life.

JUNGLE LOVE

I’ve started writing this while laying in the hammock – it’s early morning and the heat is beating down the slight coolness that accompanied us in the night. If I try to count the number of types of leaves I can see without moving my head, face turned skyward, I reach twenty shapes and quit counting, the effort a little too much.  Or if I try to isolate the sounds – the voices of the creatures, the frogs, the morning birds, the cicadas – what are all those other insects anyway? – and the sound of a big bushman chopping firewood to get the coffee brewing – well, I get lost in the various layers of songs coming out of this steamy, verdant landscape. The only sound that could be deemed intrusive is the occasional passing of a vehicle on the highway a couple hundred meters through the bush. No matter how jungle-bound one may feel, civilization is never really that far away.

It has been about a week since I last wrote (now two I admit as I finish this), thus my blogological clock is ticking and telling me to write. The time has gone by in a haze of lazy jungle love. From the moment I saw Roberto’s tall dark silhouette outside the airport doors, I felt myself breathe deeply again and knew I had come back to where I should be. When we arrived in Cahuita the next day and walked up the bush road, down the jungle path, crossed the now quiet (yet often fast-flowing) moat that encircles the place, and settled into his rancho nestled beneath the tall Guanacaste trees, I felt like I had come home.

 

We’ve barely left the place except to get food and to go dancing a couple of nights. The Quebrada Suarez, the twisting stream, provides enough sunning and cooling time that even taking the twenty minute walk to the beach seems like too much work.

 

 A woman moving into a man’s domain always shakes things up, so we’ve been “remodeling” – making space for my things, increasing the comfort level, Roberto building rustic furniture as we sense the need – assemblage art it would be called back in Canada.

I brought a minimum of “stuff” with me, being very selective, simple living being one of the things that I truly appreciate about this place. The two most important things are my coleman stove which needs a different connection for the gas tanks here - in the soggy tropical forest cooking with wet firewood can be a full-time affair, not always a bad thing but often a frustrating one - and the components to hook up a solar system. My pal Chuck lent me a small solar panel and I bought the power inverter and now just need to buy a boat battery to get it all working.  With a bit of effort , a few dollars, and a little luck, I should soon be able to write directly on my laptop being powered by that free and easy big ol’ sun, the same beast that keeps us moving slowly and conserving our own energy – unlike the bustling hummingbirds who are zipping about me and the butterflies of all colors who don’t stop their fluttering all day long.

 

 

However, we haven’t got around to getting the stove or the solar stuff working – as I said, it’s been hard just getting out to buy food.

 

 

 

Instead we’ve been watching the howler monkeys fearlessly leaping about the tops of the fifty meter high trees.  There are moments here – mostly at daybreak and sunset – when the cacophony of jungle life swells to a crescendo before settling back down to a background buzz. It is often the male howler monkey who officially starts the day with his lazy roar – if he is in one of the closest trees it is as subtle as the engine of a Harley Davidson revving outside your bedroom window.

A pair of green and black poison dart frogs lives in the hammock tree (along with at least four different kinds of herps – geckos, lizards et al.)

Other constantly noisy neighbours are the oropendulas, tropical relatives of the orioles.  Like ecstatic percolating coffee pots, they bubble away while getting food in the treetops and building their long dangling nests.  The last couple of days the squawking parrots have taken over – it seems to me that there is a domestic dispute going on high up in the trees and those loud green birds are really having issues with each other.  Not everyone can be so content in the jungle it would seem.

The other afternoon we spent time watching a King Vulture, a strange sight here in the vibrant green forest – they are more usually seen around open places or where there is rotting food of some kind or circling high in the sky. This guy came and sat down on a branch in the cool jungle, as if pretending to be an exotic quetzal seeking a quiet refuge from its adoring fans. We were laying in the hammock watching him watching us when a weak rope holding Roberto and I finally gave out and sent us to the ground. I swear that vulture had a smile on his waiting beak, always happy to see an accident in progress.

As it turned out, he had his eye on the corpse of a large toad, laying dead in the foliage on the far bank. Who knows what killed it or when, but that vulture knew its worth and struggled to lift it up. This was one of those big cane toads, big enough to fill a coffee pot. It was a fight for the vulture, and he was under pressure when he realized that I was chasing him with my camera, but he managed to get that big carcass up and away before I could get a decent picture.

The humidity has been building around us, night skies are filled with lightning and thunder rumbles in the distance, but not more than a drop of rain has fallen in the now two weeks I’ve been here. The rest of Costa Rica has had wild storms and deluges – the one night we went half an hour down the coast to Puerto Viejo to go dancing where it was pouring – but it remains dry and hot and steamy in Roberto’s piece of jungle paradise.

The country is waiting in anticipation of a big earthquake on the Pacific side and last night the Caribbean coast of Honduras suffered a significant earthquake. One never knows what one will be dealing with here in the tropics – it isn’t all pretty.

I’m now in San Jose with Wolf, awaiting the arrival of the shipment of the second printing of Walking with Wolf – we have all our ducks in a row, the Reserve truck is coming to get us, the money is in the bank, our customs man, Eliecer, is on the job – and the books seem to have got hung up in the same highway closure I did last night on my way here from the Caribbean. So our ducks are about to get scattered again and we will all be winging it. 

As I made my way to the city yesterday, having left on the 11:30 a.m. bus, the highway from Limon was closed for several hours, the result of at least ten landslides from the heavy rain.  The workers wouldn’t clear the rocks and earth and trees while the rain was still pouring down and so the traffic sat – me in a dry bus so in no discomfort – but we pulled into the city about five hours later than usual, at 8 p.m. in the dark.  And I expect that is what happened to the books – slowed down by the forces of nature. Like our ducks.

 Once we have those books we’ll be heading up the green mountain and I’ll stay a few days in Monteverde talking book business and visiting friends. It’s nice to be out of the mosquitoes and humidity, but I am already looking forward to getting back down to the jungle next week. After all, love awaits and that is worth a little sweat.