As I sit in just take in the view. I’m struck by the roughness of the area. The lots for each house appear to be approximately 40 feet wide and maybe 120 feet long. Yes, you read that correctly. There are no front yards to speak of; just front stoop and street. The children play in the street. The rooms are multi-functional. The family room is also the dining room and sometimes the pantry. The bathroom is always out back and can be either a toilet “plummed” to a hole in the ground or just a hole in the back corner of the lot. There’s no running water and no sewage for most houses; water and sewage is just making its way into the community. The decorative light in the family room is one bare light bulb hanging from a nail roughly in the middle of the room. The home may have a gas stove but more likely to have a gas burner resembling what we fry fish in on the patio. The view up the street is notably bland; lot after lot as far as I can see. Most of the houses are unpainted. Actually they remain the brown or tan color of adobe brick. The streets are unpaved but have piles of dirt, rock, and garbage piled on each side creating a zig-zag effect as you drive. The streets are very narrow; two vehicles can pass but not without a little created effort. There is practically no grass growing but you can smell the aroma of cannibus burning in the community; close enough to get a real whiff! The dust is so thick it’s sometimes hard to breathe without a mask to filter the air. The sky is over cast most of the day but the sun makes an appearance in mid-afternoon and it is relentless for the short time it’s up. The over-cast sky also makes the air quality that much worse since the smog has nowhere to go. You see some activity in the streets; people walking to the market or walking to the community store or catching a moto-cab or just getting close enough to see what the gringo’s are doing!
We’re on the last day of construction in Milagro. I just finished carrying eight bags of concrete (I didn’t sign up for this, I work in an office) into the work site were our team is mixing concrete by hand. I just let the tailgate of the truck down and took a seat. Where’s the redneck, there’s a tailgate and where there is a tailgate, there’s a place to sit! Jerry & Boyd are playing ball with one of the neighbor children. Jim just gave the prettiest little girl, maybe 18 to 24 months old, a frilly red dress. She looked like a little princess. The thought struck me that my Mom belongs to a sewing group in Troy and they could make a lot of little dresses for us to give away next year. Every little girl deserves a new dress!