Psalm 23 B

Psalm 23 B

Ada's husband left

her to wash clothes and cook for coin

at the great casona of the chief 

and chew stale bread at the table

with one tooth missing

in front.

In late afternoon

she trudges the trail back

to Ulwas village.

Now, at night Ada loves Jesus

with children curled motionless 

on the floor like spilled macaroni

she talks to her Lord 

--fireflies wink outside the door--

though she doesn't like men

to wash for but one

that she be married again.

Adds her Amen 

to the yank-grunt of a white hair growing

in front, and lays down

beside a pool of dark

still water.

housewife

the smell of my mom 

iron steam on cotton clothes

before the day 

of synthetics.  

the sound of my mom 

listening, listening  

harry belafonte on the phonograph 

and the iron's hissing. 

i never knew 

till after she was dead 

my mom had a job 

editor for a womens' magazine she was

before my dad and she were wed.

the memory of my mom 

housewife, cleanser of boys' tongues. 

her gifts to us were these 

grammar and lilt of words

when my bros and I were young.  

Ain't Got No Surfer Ticket On Me Now (Part 1)

Child taking a breather at the health clinic

The registration table at the public health clinic in Waspam is a grade school desk "manned" by a stern looking middle aged woman. Although there is no intent to keep unregistered people out of the waiting room, it is set up in such a way that it clogs the doorway and makes it difficult to get in or out. This is not a deterrent to local people, however, it just makes things more congested. The scowling gatekeeper, sour voiced and rude, dressed in a white nurse's uniform, ignores the crowd shuffling in and out; their milling is the only force that moves the stifling air.

Like most employed people in the Autonomous Region of Nicaragua called RAAN, she won her job by standing up and being counted in her party's organizational structure. She so hates the work, but would defend her job tooth and nail if someone ever tried to take it away from her. At her station she she goes through her routine, gruffly asking the patients' names, villages of residence, dates of birth, and whether or not they've been treated there before. She speaks to each of them with a strange mixture of aggressiveness and vacuity, as though she were using both sides of her brain--one to confront with and the other to search her memory, thinking, "I remember you from somewhere--you lied to me." 

Village Feet

The last time I went to the clinic I observed a common scene. An elderly woman stood before the desk,  holding a small girl by the hand. Her bare feet announced that she had come from a village along the river. Distinctive feet: the big toe ranging free, never having been jammed inward by the prison of pointy shoes; rather it faithfully kept the line of her insole, separating itself from the other digits. The four smaller toes on each foot curved sharply downward and turned as though  giving obeisance to their large kin; the result of daily gripping in the slick mud of village pathways. She balked when asked the date of birth of the child, who appeared to be four or five. Although this was standard clinic procedure, though she'd surely been there dozens of times in the last couple of years, the question caught her by surprise. She thought about it for awhile and then blurted out a date ... a day and a month, neglecting to supply a year.

-The year?- snapped the woman in white.
-Tu towsin pipe- the old woman replied, giving the numbers in Miskito pidgin.
The registrar looked at her incredulously. -Are you the mother?- she asked. The woman standing before her had obviously gone through menopause years before the little girl had been born. 
-No- the old woman replied weakly.
-Then who are you to the child?
-I am the grandmother.
-Why did you make up the child's date of birth? Do you think I'm stupid?


The registrar began a humiliating public interrogation that promised to hold up the line for another thirty minutes. It was pretty safe to assume that the elderly lady was the girl's grandmother. Nobody in fact--not even the mother--likely knew what day or even year the child had been born, because that's the timeless way of life in the villages. You could be sure the child hadn't even been given a name suitable for "official use" until she was a couple of months old, and that by the time she received one, she was already exclusively known in the universe of her extended family by her Miskito nickname--the only handle she would need in her world until she got sick like this or made her quasi entrance into the System, the baptism undocumented indigenous children undergo when they first set foot in the village school. 

Of course the registrar knew all this. She herself had grown up in a little village somewhere along this Wangki River, but had managed to get through the sixth grade. She had accepted the prerequisites of society: a standard name for herself--a first name to be spelled the same way each time, and two last names. It didn't matter whether the surnames belonged to father or stepfather, mother or grandmother, or even an odd pair of more distant relatives; she just needed two of them and had to practice their written form until she could reproduce them without hesitation or error. She had also decided on a date of birth which she committed to memory before leaving her village. Her political party made sure these data were all duly entered into the record books and an Identity Card emitted to her that she could present at the voting booth. The objective fact of coming into the world a at certain place and time was unknowable; she learned to shrug her shoulders at the fact that it was lost to her--it had no real value. Having a date of birth isn't any cause for a birthday celebration; it's just a reminder that while yet a  girl the shadow of the System had covered her backward Miskito life like a Secular Spirit, a maculate conception whose only inconvenience was the requirement that she embrace an invented factoid in exchange for access to such blessings of government as vaccinations, a high school diploma, or the possibility of obtaining a job. The woman in white had accomplished this small feat, reinventing herself like a third world Madonna, and had survived just fine.

After years on the job, the System had produced its fruit in her. She now had no patience whatsoever with the hundreds of people who show up at her desk each and every day, endeavoring to obtain services without paying such a simple price. Empathy had been battered out of her until she no longer recognized she ever had a connection. "After all," she thought,  "you're still the same person. It's not like they charge you money to see the doctor .... What ignorance!"


The elderly woman, humiliated, replied to the sharp questions with any answer she thought the registrar might accept, which only increased the disdain. She didn't understand that she was patient number X for this Tuesday in May who by virtue of accumulated collective faults had been slapped with this penalty of opprobrium, like a team technical foul. The ensuing interrogation wasn't going to end soon.


-You should set up another table for detective work- I muttered impatiently. 
The registrar turned to a patient, a skinny woman in a plain purple dress who had been standing behind her, listening in. 
-I'm being insulted- she said. 
The patient nodded politely and moved away. 


I thought of my introduction to Christianity in the United States, for it had been Honduras where I first accepted Jesus' rule over my life. I'd had a powerful personal interaction with Him under a sisin dusa--a ceiba or silk cotton tree. I remember what I had been doing at the time:  I was in a club attempting to take a girl home with me and had gone outside for some air. Finding a vantage point from which I could watch the exit, I stood scheming to myself until Jesus showed up instead. I can visualize it, I remember that it was late at night, powdery dark moths with impressive wingspans hovering around a single streetlight; I can even take you to the tree where I had stood. Jesus saved me but never informed me that I needed to remember the exact date. When I went to the United States to apply to Bible school in  in 1992, however, I had to fill out forms that asked for this detail. I left the space blank, but was told filling it in was a requirement. I was very surprised they took these things so seriously.  You are supposed to know your spiritual birthday. I told them that the best I could do was to put down an approximate date. I scanned all the memory images surrounding my new birth with great care, and AHA I remembered that a few weeks afterward I had gone to a little village called Auka to see some missionaries. We had all gone to a swimming hole together. The water was clear ... it had been in the dry season! I scribbled March 17 in the blank: St. Patrick's day. I could remember that date.

So technically, I had lied to get into Bible school. Wally, the minister who took my application assured me that he understood March 17, 1987 might not have been the exact date of my entry into the kingdom of heaven, that it was only to fulfill a requirement. With these words I hesitatingly handed him the completed form. This jungle-born Christian had met with the System in the carpeted, air-conditioned garden of a landscaped mega-sanctuary. The System said, "Ye shall not surely die..." and with that action was conceived a struggle to walk in integrity before the Lord in the duplicity of the modern world. 

Having walked a mile in this grandmother's bare feet, I had to admit I could relate to the frustration of the clinic worker also. It doesn't take much to make a guestimation and stick to it; we all have to do it, and anyway we can truthfully say off the record that it's the closest we are able to come to the true record of how the events in our lives went down. This grandmother's ancient reality, however, is that she lacks the sophistication to make an appearance on the grid of legal demographic existence even if she wanted to. Of course, she's too old to want to. Like the WW II generation and the computer, she will cling to the dignity of her days lived in the traditional manner, and feel the dizziness of a world gone crazy. She will be ready to depart when the time comes, be buried under red clay, remembered by the people who really mattered to her, and justified by an omniscient and merciful God according to her faith. She doesn't really believe in doctors anyway. But how about her grandchild? Is she and her generation to grow up in the shadow of humiliation and the collective low self esteem  of her people? Or will she be empowered to access the System without losing her cultural and spiritual integrity?

The question remains, what can I do in a practical sense to resolve the problem? There at the public clinic, the obvious answer was for me to shut up and wait patiently for my turn to see the doctor, even though  I knew I was only going to receive a precursory evaluation and given some generic Ibuprofen. God had sent me here, I knew it. I could have gone to the Catholic clinic, been in and out like a burger stand, and for a very reasonable price buy any medications the doctor prescribed, but I had been led of the Lord to go to this place instead, not in spite of--because of--the brokenness, this place where people go who can't afford the reasonable price. God would have me pay attention ... attentiveness was my price. That paid, then He would show me what to do next.

A few days later Danilo came over for a visit. He mentioned a nephew who had successfully completed high school, but could not receive his diploma on account of the fact that his name had been changed so many times over the school years in the registration process that his present name did not match the records. Was it his teachers' fault, who did nothing but sound out the spelling of his first name Jerry--in Miskito Yeri, Yere, Diery, Diere, or Dieri--each and every time without even checking from one marking period to the next which version had previously been decided upon? Was it his mother's fault, for supplying a variety of last names to the village school, when she herself was unsure of how the patriarchal Spanish system is supposed to work? The bottom line is that Danilo's nephew needed two thousand four hundred Córdovas for a lawyer to make it right, one thousand two for rectifying his first name and an equal amount for his last name. Not he nor his mother had that kind of money. Fortunately Danilo and Truman both chipped in, and Diery got his diploma.


The Lord spoke to me very clearly through Dani's story. I saw that I have direct intervention with fifty elementary school teachers in eleven villages on the banks of the lower Wangki River. The way to establish access identity for people there is to do so when they are still very small, cold turkey, under the direction of the kindergarden teacher when they enter school, and through diligent follow-up by teachers in successive grades, intervening also in the children's families until a standard version of the "facts" are assimilated by all.

Prof Walter at home in Sawa

These fifty teachers, sons and daughters of that mosquito infested swamp, possess real, laminated ID cards, travel to and from the villages, attend seminars and great gatherings sponsored by  the government and well-known international institutions in which lofty ideas about the hopes, aspirations, cultural identity and future of their people are bantered about, somehow without ever moving to satisfy--principally because they don't even think of it--some of these most simple and basic needs which need not money nor legislation but only the transfer of information to satisfy. The teachers themselves feel most comfortable in the world of the village, and grand events are to them like trips to Disney World; they're exciting, fun, an escape from the daily pressures of subsistence; in fact they are so unlike life at home that they can't recognize how the ideas tossed about might have anything to do with it. They're just glad to be hanging out in the other world for a couple of days. Yet of these God has chosen some who will bring transition. He showed me this, I can see it.

Coming alongside them at their experiential and cognitive level, impressing upon them that loving God first, and their neighbor as themselves means that you care about the details of God's truth, and the details of their students' reality as well. Grand ideas about God are nothing if not backed by the tedious detail of hearing His word and obeying on a daily basis. Likewise, singing "We Are The World" is moving, but must be shown to be true in such little details as getting the students' names straight. The Lord would also show me my part, how much I must endure, and how much more patience I must learn, before I could successfully lead them to comprehend and accept this ministry. The alternative would be to become like that woman in white, the gatekeeper of the public clinic in Waspam.