The organization is frugal, if not downright stingy. There's no budget for anything like hotel rooms. The Oxfam house in Antigua, an hour out of the capital, is a surprise. It is especially so now, with the cracks in its walls and tile floors from the terremoto, and the gaping spaces where the red-clay tejas had come off the roof and through which you could see the sky. It is a wounded house, with walls that creak and groan every time a truck goes by, and will certainly fall if another terremoto comes.
Dust covers everything in the house.
May. Their pounding sends plaster dust showering on everything below. We wipe off the dining room table at breakfast, and by lunch, the dust on it is thick enough, and again, to write in. Mary Walsh sits across from me at dinner. She lived alone in the Don Quixote house for two weeks before the terremoto, and for almost a week afterward until the others arrived. Now she is playing Snow White to a revolving cast of dwarfs, trying to keep the steady flow of Oxfam specialists fed, housed, and laundered.