The host family got a new host student last night - his name is Jamar and he is fresh out of high school. He is very attractive and very young and slightly ghetto and I feel slightly frightened for him. I wonder what it would be like to live in a foreign country for 3 months fresh out of high school?
We gave a presentation in Spanish yesterday. It was about the first time we met our host families. I played the warm, welcoming, nurturing mother. We made everyone laugh. That was cool.
Anyway, I think that I've written about the deaf/half-blind/mute worker who lived in and out of my host family's house and who has been around for 17 years. Well, he died last night.
When I came home from school last week Boli, my host brother, told me that "Mudo," (this is what everyone called him), which means mute in spanish, had run away, back to his family's house. Yesterday, I was told that he was in a coma. Last night, after we got home from a night of merengue/bachata dancing, Boli got a call saying that Mudo had died.
Mudo is the "Tom" (my uncle who has down syndrome) of the Dominican. Everyone knows him and loves him and he is practically famoso (famous) here. He spoke his own language, using hand gestures and making sounds to express himself, just like my Uncle Tom has his own language. But after being around him for a while, you begin to understand him and you can speak his language too. Mudo was hilarious, just like Tom, always making funny, exaggerated gestures. He cleaned dishes and did other small household tasks and my host family (my host mom is excellent) took him in as one of their own - sort of like they do with everyone. For my host mom, everyone is her child.
Before we went out dancing last night I told Boli the story of a fish that we got in Brooklyn who died a week after we got him. My roommate and I painted a picture of him after he died and wrote "...Just passing by" as the caption. Boli and I talked about how amazing it is that people can enter into your life for such small amounts of time, yet make such deep, lasting impacts. This is how I feel about Mudo - I knew him for a mere 3 days, and then he was gone with the wind.
So at 4am last night we went to Mudo's house. There were lots of tears and lots of people sitting around and lots of spanish consoling and mourning that I didn't understand. Mudo's stepmother lit a candle for him and said that he was in heaven (I think?). He really was an angel. They had his body wrapped up and his head wrapped in a cloth so that only his face was showing. He looked so peaceful. It was such an experience.
This morning I showed my host mom a picture that I had taken of Mudo (the one on this page) and wrote in spanish on google translator: "I am so blessed that I got to meet him. This picture is special because it is one of the last ones taken of him."
This trip has had so many extremes. I have felt extremely happy when I went out dancing or while we were playing with children or at the beach or just being at home or in the warm weather or immersed in this beautiful enviroment. But I have also, at times, felt profoundly sad or, I guess, humbled by other experiences- last night at Mudo's house, the earthquake in Haiti, the orphanage, walking with Dean and watching him interact with homeless Haitian boys, hearing about the plight of Haitian's form Lauren, seeing extremes of wealth and poverty existing side-by-side, etc. etc. etc. That, I think, is the theme of this trip - extremes - of emotions, of wealth, of lifestyles, of understanding, of...everything. There is so much beauty here accompanied by so much inhumanity - what is different about the Dominican is that here, the extremes are amplified.
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
No comments:
Post a Comment