Finding Martha

Driving into Tena was surreal.  I had heard about this town for years and years, but it wasn't any more real than a fairy tale.  Now here we were!  There was the restaurant they used to eat at, and the bridge.  Even though it had been 18 years, William's memory of town was clear: the park, where their apartment was by the river, even the road their dad( Don Michael) bought salt blocks on for the cows and horses.  We found a beautiful hotel, determined to find Martha the next day.

The next day dawned bright and hot.  We knew where to start looking for Martha, but had no idea where she might be.  We knew very little of her life since Robert and William left Ecuador and had no idea if she would still be living in her tiny community.  The trip, which took hours in 1998, took barely 20 minutes.  We crossed a skinny bridge and turned off the pavement.  We hadn't gone 100 yards down the dirt road before Robert suddenly stopped the car and he and William jumped out.
"A termite nest!!"
"I haven't poked one of those forever!!"
"Lets go poke it!"
Leaving their very confused wives in the dust they were across the road, over the ditch, and at the fence in no time at all.  They did, indeed, poke the nest.  The termites swarmed out at the intrusion.  I thought "What a fun memory!  Of course a ten year old boy would get a kick out of that."  But as it turns out, the fun of the swarm wasn't the purpose of the poking.  About the time Natalie(William's wife) and I(Robert's wife) caught up to them William took his finger out of the nest and LICKED IT!!

On the way back to the car we stopped to look at a fainting fern "Dormilona," and then we stopped to climb a guava tree and taste it's cotton candy fruit.  We passed elephant grass, cacao trees, heleconia flowers, banana groves, crazy hanging bird nests.  To say the boys were giddy would be an understatement.  They wanted us to taste, touch, smell, and see everything.  This place had been their whole world and they had been waiting to share it with us for a long time.

guava tree

Just as I was wondering if we would ever make it to the little community we were looking for, William announced "Uncle Raymond's Hedge!"  This hedge marked the edge of the community and as we passed it we saw a soccer game going on at the packed-earth field.  We stopped to ask some spectators if Martha Pauchi still lived there and where her house was.  We got a lot of stares, and then someone pointed us down the road.  We started driving, but the road was filling with people behind us.  Pretty soon, William saw Martha's brother and we decided to get out of the car and start asking around. By the time I got out of the back seat and around the back of the car William was already crying on the head of a short woman lost in his bear hug.  This must be Martha!

She cried and kissed on William, and then she cried and kissed on Robert, then she cried and kissed on Natalie and I.  I thought I'd better get the baby out of the car and then she got cried and kissed on, and then she disappeared into a sea of sun-toasted faces who had never seen a white baby.

What we didn't know was that getting out of the car at the soccer game had started a ripple of excitement that spread faster than we were driving.  Exclamations of "Don Michael!" turned every head.(William looks like his dad, Don Michael, and wears a beard)  Martha, who was inside her sister's house, had been crying that very morning about how much better her life would have been if she had been able to come back to the States with the Porter's.  She thought her sister was teasing her about it when she said Don Michael was here.  The sister had to shove Martha out of the house and sure enough, she saw us drive by and stop and ran up right as William opened the door.

We spent the day with Martha; telling her about the family, showing her pictures.  We met her grandson, her nephews, her daughter.  We crossed the river in a canoe and sat with her on the beach watching her daughter and nephews play.  Her life has been hard.  She told the boys how sad she had been. "We said goodbye like you were going into town and you never came back!" She felt abandoned, forgotten.  Of course, these two never did forget.  Then one day, they dropped out of the sky just as unexpectedly as if they had come back from the dead.