Hasta Luego Oaxaca

The kids are finally starting to let it sink in that they’re leaving a place that they’ve come to love. I had a good cry when it finally got through my thick head that I’d lost the battle and we were headed home. Talia has really found her groove with her school friends, it’s a small clan of 8 with a teacher that seems to match their playfulness and mischief. Sabina has found her groove at the stable where she’s been riding a few times a week including helping out with grooming and shoveling a full day a week. The bribery card for staying with her has always been a horse which she refused for love of her family and friends to whom she was loyal back in the states. That resolve began to crumble in the waning weeks as she began to say goodbye to the horses and the stable manager, Sisika, who was enormously affectionate and supportive of Sabina’s emerging talent (for which she received many kudos). She seems to have quite a connection with the horses, a real horse whisperer. Sabina painted a beautiful portrait of Sisika out in the corral and gave it to Sisika as a goodbye gift.

For us bigger people, the goodbyes were sweet and bitter. We each had our cries – Sabina in her goodbyes to each horse she came to love and to Sisika, Talia, after a wild bonfire evening with her schoolmates, Tyler, in an embrace with a mother in the Casa Hogar program where she worked, and me, all too stereotypically, alone one day working and leaky. As you might suspect, friendships really began to take hold in the final months and weeks, the fruit of cultivating relationships all these months. Tyler had joined a dance class, zapateando to Son Jarocho music. La zapateada is a kind of tap or clog dance performed on a short wooden box in front of a group of jaraneros (a mandolin type instrument). The dance itself is a form of percussion to lead the jaraneros. It was the first time she’d jumped whole hog back into dance since her brain surgery some 15 years back. She danced with a group called Las Raices, composed mostly of family members – parents and their 3 kids (from 13 to 24) and assorted friends. The music comes from neighboring Veracruz state and they lend their own style and lots of radical Oaxacan politics. The parents are active in the teacher’s union, which has been leading the social movement here for the past years. Raices encouraged and entertained the masses at barricades in the 2006 uprising. I had a great time getting to know the dad, Gonsalo, a mischievous, talented child in a 48 year old body. Sound familiar (except for the talented part)?