One (And a Half) For The Birds

I know there are volunteers working all over the world, some of them living in straw huts with no electricity or running water, working fourteen hour days under horrible conditions, fighting poverty and disease, and never complaining. So I realize we're incredibly fortunate to be here in Suchitoto. But when you get used to something and it's taken away, I suppose it's human nature to feel slighted or hard-done-by.

I recently heard of a visiting Canadian staying in a first class hotel here whose room air conditioner suddenly quit working. For two consecutive nights! During a hot spell. Oh, the horror, the horror.

I also heard tales of a guest spending an hour in the normally scrupulously clean swimming pool last Sunday afternoon. The same pool that is scrubbed and vacuumed every morning at seven am. Spotting what he thought was a large and previously unseen flower blossom floating on the surface, the unidentified guest swam closer for a better look, picked up the blossom by what seemed to be the stem, and discovered he was holding the back half of a large mouse, or a small rat, by its long grey tail. The front half of the creature was never found; one theory is that a turkey vulture, one of the many that constantly circle over the adjacent ravine, might have dropped half his lunch on the way home from Rodent Hut.

But these stories may only be urban myths. Whether the events actually happened, I cannot say.

However, I can report with unbiased honesty and photographic proof that a pleasant little non-event for the memory scrap book occurred this morning on our way to Escuela Taller. We had stopped at a small hardware store in town to purchase some supplies. The floor space available for customers was literally the size of your dining room table. Less than that if you have a ton of kids or too much money. Walking around on the floor and squawking loudly were a couple of green parrots, each about the size of a starling, but resembling, well, a parrot. Frank finally convinced them to hop onto his lowered hand and up his arm they came. The two of them seemed quite content to perch on his shoulders, lovingly administering little pecks and bites to his ears and neck. When Frank had tired of the affection he gently placed them on the counter, but they wanted more, so up they marched again. We got a few photos, a couple of them taken on Frank's camera by the proud and smiling store owner on the other side of the metal counter. Who hadn't given his birds names, an omission I found rather strange.

When Frank had finally really had enough, he set them down once again, this time with finality. Naturally, I couldn't pass up the opportunity, so I invited them to climb aboard. They felt weightless but wonderfully alive on my shoulders. Then they discovered the beads I wear dangling on the end of two short braids behind my left ear. It sounded like a feeding frenzy back there. The tugging became firmer and more insistent and when I reached my hand back to loosen their grip I was rewarded with a warning bite on the thumb. It took Mr. Holte's intervention to pry them off. I'm not positive, but I think I had three beads in each braid when I left Canada. If we stop at the same hardware store on too many more occasions and the birds have their way, no one at home will recognize me.