Snotty-Nosed Treasure Seekers

We were on our back porch busy shelling toasted cacao beans to prepare them to be passed through the hand grinder and come out a rich, creamy goo of pure cacao (will write about this process another time when we were visited by two dirty barefooted munchkins that had just returned from a two week visit at their Grandparents house in Medellin. One was straddling a stick that was really his cow, the other pulling a plastic truck on a yellow leash of 'cabouilla' (cabouilla is the campo equal to duct tape...it seems to be able to fix everything, it's plastic string)

They played with us for a bit, climbing all over us, but were mostly interested in tasting the raisins in my oatmeal. Once those were all gone, their attention veered to Aj and her bag of granola with dried fruit which she dropped in pinches into their eagerly awaiting little hands. When the bag was empty, and they were tired of helping us shell cacao, they developed an overwhelming interest to getting down on all fours and peering through the cracks of our planked floor. Our house sits above a gravel space big enough for little beings to crawl underneath. Because the boards don’t fit together perfectly, the cracks become a patient black hole to any fallen articles that are slim enough to fit through the cracks….and let me tell you we have lost many a things to our hungry underhouse. These floor spaces are also very convenient when we sweep because most of the dust we accumulate gets swept into the cracks before we can sweep it out the door.

Bums in the air and eyes pressed to the floor cracks, these two treasure seekers got more and more excited as they kept spotting things nesstled in the dust below the house. Faster than you can say ‘roasting plantanes’, they were down in our garden and beside our house to the place where they could squeeze through some rocks and crawl under our house. I’ve never been below the house, but with all the horse, cow, chicken poop and dried mud that people bring in stuck to their gumboots and sandals that fall between the cracks, it is not really the first place I would want to be crawling around in.

As they inched their little bodies between the earth and wood, they would scream our names as they discovered a treasure and push it up through the cracks. They found such treasures as colourful tacks, a water tap, a map of the Medellin metro, pens and pen lids.
Their little smiling faces peeked out from below the house, noses running with snot and a smile stretched ear to ear.