As far as I can see

It´s clear now why they call it the rainy season. Even without a hurricane nearby, it rains everyday. The sky gets cloudy and the wind picks up during my last class, from 2 p.m. to 2:40 p.m., and the rain comes just as I´m walking home from school. I usually walk around the corner of the house to find some member of the family frantically pulling clothes from the line. I don´t mind the rain so much except that it´s ruined my daily routine of running up and down the hill to the river. Instead, the cooler air, the sound of the rain, and the brrr, brrr, brrr, brrr of the washing-machine-like washing machine usually puts me right to sleep.

Remember that time I was walking down the road and saw two women struggling to carry a bucket of pig slop down the hill? Well, the one woman said she worked on the Del Monte pineapple farm and that there was a gringa like me that worked there, too, and the gringa’s name was Sherry. Then the women kept calling me Sherry all afternoon. She told me her husband was dead and she was raising their four children alone. And remember how I didn’t recognize the children until she made too circles around her eyes with her fingers, and I said, probably in English, “Oh, the boy in first grade with glasses!”? And she said, yes, yes, Antonio was her son, and that it was very expensive to pay for his glasses, especially with a dead husband.

Well, guess whose glasses broke? That´s right. Antonio´s. It’s been two weeks and he’s still without specs, and I wonder if he’s ever going to get more. He did get a new haircut this week, though. His entire head is shaved close except for a rectangular patch of bangs right up front. He looks much less cute without glasses and with the new weird haircut. I bet if he could see, he wouldn’t be coming to school with his hair like that.

My host mom told me other day that the kids’ dad was killed when a tree fell on him. I thought is was just a case of bad luck, but a fellow volunteer told me that once she watched her host dad hold a ladder – hold it upright, not against a wall or tree or anything – while another man stood on the second-to-top wrung and hacked away at tree branches with a machete. So maybe in the case of the dead husband it was bad luck, or maybe it was as a direct result of poor decision-making. Who knows, but I´m not here to judge.

Anyway, I want to get that kids some glasses, but it seems impossible without his prescription. I could just try to raise some money, but I hate to do that. I wish I could just get my hands, at least, on a pair of frames. Then the mom could get the lenses. It would help a little, I guess. So, if any of you happen to have a pair of eyeglasses frames for a six-year-old just lying around the house, please let me know. I really want to help this family if I can.