Fallen-tree Tadpoles

It's tadpole season.  A delight of Alia's since we returned to Monteverde has been visiting the tadpoles in their puddles.  Fallen strangler fig trees are a perfect tadpole habitat: crevices among the entwined cords of the tree's body, tipped sideways, hold families of newborns.  After school, the kids rush from the classroom into the forest and suddenly the tree is crawling with them, children moving across branches like beetles but larger and noisier.  They set to work naming the tadpoles, as if each puddle were a basket of abandoned babies entrusted just to them.

I step away, let their imaginations lead them further into this tree-trunk haven, and remember these children marching last weekend for justicia climática, waving signs decorated with colorful drawings of earth.  The five hundred of us who walked through the fog, from one school to another across this town of six thousand, were mostly young people.  The messages the children carried were for themselves, for the whole big world, and for the little creatures they take care of.

I think kids growing up here cannot feel a separation between themselves and the earth they step on.  Every day they are woken by birds, held by clouds or pounded by rain, bitten by bugs, called to the forest to play, fed by the berries on the trees, tripped by vines, covered with mud, lulled to sleep by the chorus of insects. They are part of this web of life, indistinct from its messiness and its beauty.  If it breathes easily, so do they.  What if it gasps for cooler air, or thirsts for rain, or drowns in a downpour? These are their childhood worries.

Alia brings home tadpoles and welcomes them to our household.  I question whether the tub of murky water she confines them in is an improvement over their wild puddle homes.  But I respect her caring way with these delicate froglets. They are wondrous, and their miniature tree-ponds constructed of dewdrops appear vulnerable. When the day comes that they hop from their tub into our inhospitable house, Alia will return them to a place where they can touch the damp, green earth and navigate it on their own.  Then she'll tread lightly in that vastness, remembering the frogs and other precious things.

Here is a beautiful little movie made at the Escuela de los Amigos, inviting Greta to come for a visit.  You can imagine those fallen tree tadpole habitats in the forest behind where the children stand.

We're glad to be back here and able to share some thoughts and photos with you via this blog once again!