It was a Saturday, so that meant that the whole extended family would be coming over the plot to make maro, clean plantain trunks, and eat. This meant that if I opened the curtains of the single window in my cabin, I would be signaling my presence. I had woken up feeling off — intrusive yet wanted, unneeded yet expected, accepted yet disconcerting. I spent the morning clearing my self-made guilts by creating a very sweet video from the pictures, videos, and audio I had gathered at the funeral of Tío Marcos. I thought it was still the morning until I went outside to ask for his birthdate and realized that it was 4pm. I hadn't joined them for lunch, hadn't joined them for maro, for conversation, or drama, like I had done every other Saturday. I went in to the pae pae and nervously showed the video. They really liked it and told me that my pictures were wonderful and that I had a “good eye”. But then, unsurprisingly, Vai was upset and others were commenting on it, and surprisingly, one of the dogs seemed to have eaten poison and was being given milk and the other dogs were howling as everyone tried to figure out who the culprit was.
It was the usual amount of stimuli but too much for me that day, so I walked into the wifi of Jackeline’s house to finish and export the video. The internet was working well for the first time in weeks, so I found myself spending hours looking at undergraduate and graduate programs for engineering in Buenos Aires. This didn't make much sense but came out of the illusion that engineers “are presented with problems, solve them on their own, and then present their solutions”— the illusion of easy and clean social interactions (how naive!). I came back to my cabin at 7pm to find myself writing down every single topic in one of the classes of the first year of the undergraduate engineering program. I wanted to see if in a distant future when I lived in Buenos Aires and studied engineering I could possibly be excused from taking certain classes. I spent more than an hour doing that. I then found a 10 page document in my computer from my high school AP chemistry class, from 7 years ago, and I sat and read it until I had understood everything that it said. It felt fulfilling and challenging, the perfect remedy for too much social stimuli. Then I kept cleaning my computer and found my friend Austin Mueller’s thesis on the political unconscious in revolutionary Cuba from a Lacanian perspective, started reading it, caught sight of some of the absurdity in my life. Just another day, filled with funeral chants, explanations, discomforts, wifi hunting, chemistry learning, Lacan and Marx, drums, barking and dying dogs.
Closer to the Tapati, things got much more intense. One day I spent close to 7 hours doing varu varu kakaka, the cleaning of plantain tree trunks into thin sheets that can be later be used as fabric for clothes, carpets, hats, purses, and more. My wrist almost cracked. It is an exhausting task. The job was to cut and clean the plantain trunks, starting by doing a vertical slit on the outermost layer of the trunk. Successively, each layer of the trunk had to be cut and taken out to be later thinned and dried. The thinning process was done with a spoon, which we used to scrape (varu varu) the plantain (kakaka) trunk, so as to get rid of most of its fiber and water. The 1-cm thick material was, in this way, thinned down to the thickness of an onion slice. After thinning the meters-long trunk, we folded it in circles and tied it to ropes for it to dry. The result was perfect plantain sheets, kakaka. The next day, I thought I would rest but I was tasked with creating a 25-meter braid out of this kakaka for one of the competitions. It came out beautiful.
