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It´s Hard to Explain The Universe

Last night was the night of the total lunar eclipse. My family and I had stayed up late to watch it together.

I was having hard time staying awake, as I was really tired from working alot during the day. Also, when I got home, I was very hungry, so I asked my family to make me some food-which turned out to be an enormous bowl of white rice, with chunks of yucca root. Yum. After I ate that, I was ready for a long nap.

However, I had promised to stay up and watch the eclipse, so I dragged myself outside to the lawn.

There were about ten family members visiting-and they were all sitting on scaffolding, made of the small branches of trees. The scaffolding was about one story high, and surprisingly stable, considering it was made of sticks and small branches-and no nails! A few days previously, several men in the family had built the scaffolding to begin repairing Catalina´s house. her house, which is made of cement cinderblocks, has alot of cracks in it at the moment (which means we have alot of scorpions crawling inside the walls of the house-and I do not like scorpions!).

We all sat on the scaffolding-the women in their long brightly coloed dresses; the kids, their clothes soaking wet, from just having bathed in the river; the men, all having just returned from working in the fields; a few dogs, chickens, and horses; and me, with a baby on my lap.

Although they knew that this was the night for the eclipse, interestingly enough, they did not know what an eclipse was. As we sat watching the entire eclipse for two hours(while every bug in the neighborhood made a beeline for my ankles), they bombarded me with questions about the universe, speaking in Ngobe and in Spanish.

Questions like: What is an eclipse? Is that the shadow of the moon? How often is there an eclipse? How long does it last? Does the whole world see the eclipse at the same time?

This led to more complex questions…such as: Why is the earth moving?Why do we have only one moon? Where is the sun right now? If the Earth is moving, why aren´t we flying off of it?

I did my best..but I am afraid my Spanish is more day to day-not suited to complex questions.

It really surprised me how little they knew about the universe. A few of the people there had had some secondary schooling-and so were informed about planets, the role of the sun and the moon, etcetra. But everyone else kept asking more and more questions.

For example, trying to explain gravity to them in a way they could understand wasn´t easy. But when I explained that there were people at the botttom of the Earth, right now, who weren´t going to fly off either-they couldn´t believe it. It was shocking. They could understand gravity for them-because they were experiencing it. But it was hard for them to believe that it existed somewhere else.

Also of particular interest to me last night was that we could actually see the milky way.
Normally, the milky way cannot be seen from this area of the world-but last night, it was there in all of it´s glory, trailing thru the universe. They had never heard of the milky way, and I explained it is called the ¨Camino de Leche¨-a trail of stars thru the sky.

I told them how lucky they were to live here in the Comarca-with no lights, no electricity, and no pollution, their view of the night sky is the most spectacular I have ever seen in my life. All the stars are crystal clear, cluttering the sky to the point that it is hard to see a distinct constellation.

The Ngobe have many names for constellations of stars. Among them are: The Eyes of the Cat; Maiz and the Machete; Woman with Child; Jaguar Stalking Animal; and Walking Dogs.

It is really interesting to see the universe thru another culture´s eyes. I have a whole new appreciation for it´s vastness and beauty.

gg



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