Mamari turns fifteen

Last Thursday Mamari turned fifteen. She announced that if I would like to give her a gift, superglue was a great idea. That way she could patch together her aunt’s broken sandals, and waltz the night away at her quinceaños celebration. The one she is organizing herself for this weekend.

One thing is for sure: Mamari can dance! Every Sunday, as we wait for the soup to boil after a long morning of farming, she kicks off her rubber boots and spins any willing victim around the improvised terracota dance floor to the melodies of tamunangue. That dance may have originated 300 years ago by Venezuelan slaves, but for Mamari, it is now, it is life, it is joy.

I’m not quite sure how she will do with the 18th century European waltzes traditionally played at a girl’s quinceaños. But  have no doubt that Mamari will kick up the dust in style and dance the night away.

In my little town of Palo Verde, anyone is allowed to come to a party, invited or not. If you hear music, you show up. You can dance with whomever you wish. Seven-year-old old boys spin septuagenarian grandmas around the floor, Four-year-olds move their hips like lava, using muscles that mine never developed. Pre-teens grab a partner with the confidence of Maradona in front of a soccer ball.

But for most guests, the highlight of any party these days is the food - soup, and then the grand finale, cake!

Cake has become a status symbol here in Venezuela, its ingredients symbolic of what has gone missing in our lives today. With no wheat grown in the tropics, and the exchange rate $1 = three million bolivares, importing wheat flour is a thing of the past.

Cane fields still produce, but sugar refineries have gone the route of most industry: shuttered. The remaining sugar is controlled by the government, purportedly for our monthly CLAP allotment, (which in our town’s case has become once-every-three-months). In reality, everyone knows that a sizable share of the sugar lies snugly in the cupboards of many National Guardsmen’s homes.

Fortunately for Mamari, her uncle’s partner’s sister’s boyfriend is a National Guard. Thus, she is optimistically counting on one kilo of sugar. Venezuelans may be corrupt, but they are loyal to family. Eggs are less of a problem, and I have promised six of my hen’s best as a gift, in addition to the superglue.

What might present as massive hurdles to others are mere minor challenges to Mamari. As the middle child of eight, she’s been jumping over them all here life, in magnificent style, just as she would jump over my fence at age five to procure as many mangoes as her nimble hands could fetch in five minutes. She would then distribute them to her dozens of cousins, calling them to line up, with the youngest at the front. Mamari makes a dashing Tropical Robin Hood.

A few weeks before she dropped out of school for good, at the end of fourth grade, Mamari decided to “borrow” a debit card from her teacher’s purse. Rather than hide her crime, she gallantly invited her three sisters out to the one diner in our town. There, they lavishly stuffed themselves with pepitos, enjoying with relish the delicacy of meat, not experienced in months. Mamari’s mom found the card on the kitchen table the next day, and brought it to the teacher, thinking her daughter had found a lost item. She suffered great humiliation upon learning the truth, but made sure that Mamari spent the next month planting caraotas in the Poleros’ field until she earned enough to pay the teacher back in full.

Mamari may not know how to read, but man can this girl harvest potatoes and steer a horse-driven plow with the strength and skill of any strapping man. Over the past month she has been showing up at 5 am at any field hiring day laborers, hoarding her her 10 cents/day wages for party goods. In the afternoons, she joins other kids from our group to scrounge for left-over small spuds in already-harvested fields to fill the large soup pot. In the evenings she tucks green onion roots into the ditches, happy that seasonal rains have helped them grow enough to give the soup some flavor.

This past Sunday our group of young farmers “Club Conuco Colibri” set forward the day’s tasks: plant a dozen banana trees, set 100 sweet potato slips into a barren hill, clear a field of weeds to make room for yucca and cook a lentil-squash-potato soup for the 30 participants over the open fire. As usual , we divided into teams to attack.

I can’t remember exactly which group Mamari was assigned to, but by the time lunch rolled around, I realized that Mamari had dug at least half of the banana holes, had single handedly cleared most of the brush with a machete, had instructed how to set the sweet potatoes to catch the rains, had chopped most of the firewood and many of the vegetables for the soup, and played the drums to entertain us all. Indifferent of whether she is on the weekly cook team or not, Mamari always is the one to dish out the soup and insist that everyone remain silent until someone please say grace. Then, she sits down, the last to eat. With gusto.

Over the past months the tidal wave of Venezuelans crossing over the borders into Colombia has swelled to 50,000 a day, according to relief organizations. At first I witnessed swarms of young professional friends racing for the exit, to a dozen or so countries. But now, friends and acquaintances that I never thought would leave have gone: waiters, teachers, plumbers, musicians, grandparents, children, electricians, day laborers of my town’s potato fields.

Somehow I think that Mamari will never go. I have no doubt that she could gallop to the border of Colombia bareback on a horse faster than Simon Bolivar. But tamunangue pulses through her blood. Waters of the Fumarola fill her gut. The crisp mountain air of Yacambu light her spirit. Her enormous family grounds her like a magnet. Mamari will stay behind to plant the potatoes, to make sure the smallest remaining has food

Sometimes when I glance at her from a distance as she plants, I think of that scene from Gone with the Wind, the one where a fierce and beautiful Scarlett O’Hara plunges her hands into her beloved land, swearing something about loving the land and never going hungry again. Other times I think of Venezuela’s goddess Maria Lionza, who culled the powers of the land, the indigenous, the African slaves and is still invoked with drums and chants as a powerful deity.

For the millions who have left, to wait out the crisis elsewhere, hoping to someday return to a new Venezuela, they may have Mamari to thank. Without Mamari - and the millions of Mamaris who choose to remain, to trudge to the potato fields, or schools or hospitals or offices at 5 am, there might not be a nation to which to return.

This Saturday, as Mamari and her glued sandals waltz in the moonlight over the dirt of her family patio, I will know that with each step she is blessing the land so that someday, perhaps, my grandchildren – all of them Venezuelan - may return to this heart-breakingly beautiful land and perhaps call it home.