Blog 18-Here we are, dos Señoras Serias living a la intemperie

I asked her if we could see the Camp inside the base from anyplace in Palenque and she laughed. “You mean the prison camp that doesn't exist, on the Ventura side of the Base, where revolutionaries who don't exist, from a movement that doesn't exist are not renditioned?” We were both laughing loud. “I didn't remember you being funny from the old days.” I didn't tell her I barely remembered her at all. “That Camp we can't even see has taken over our whole lives. Que absurdo, two elder Señoras Serias like you and I living in a makeshift encampment, a mushrooming tent city....”
I interrupted her (although she'd never interrupted me). “...and the encampment exists only because one half of this strange Caribbean Island is a colony of the City and the other half is an independent revolutionary country where the City somehow still manages to keep a base.”
She smiled, “Yes. And the City base straddles both countries, leftover from before the Venturans made their revolution.”
My friend Julia shushed us from where she slept in the lean-to. Trying to stifle our laughter made us laugh more. I said, “So in the part of the Camp in Ventura outside its own national borders, the City breaks it's own illusory protections of human rights, renditions rebels, and tortures them...”
Patria said, “And on the colonized side on Karaya, this mushrooming gathering of protesters can still avail itself of some of those vanishing garantias and occupy, create an encampment, set up a permanent political demonstration right by the border, which here is literally a line in the sand.”
Julia got up to pee in the outhouse a few yards away, leftover from when our spot was part of the now occupied Cayo Karaya EcoPreserve. She shook her fist at us and smiled. “Just don't wake up Taina, o las mato.” Patria motioned to Taina asleep in the lean-to. “Tomorrow tell your friend to bring her granddaughter to La Escuelita, in the casita next door to the Comedor. I'd tell her now but she might kill me if I wake her up.”
She laughed, “Here we are, dos Señoras Serias living a la intemperie. Tres señoras if we count your friend. Dozens of señoras if we count all of us Señoras de los Frijoles...If you had told me when we knew each other twelve years ago that one day I would be living outdoors on the beach by the Caribbean Sea....” She paused. She watched me finish the last drops of cafe con leche in my tin mug. “Although for me living a la intemperie is now a figure of speech. Lagarto just got us into one of the abandoned casitas. It was almost destroyed but the frame was intact and he and los muchachos fixed it up, furnished it. I even have a fridge. You have to come visit. We're not far from the school, and three doors Hillside from the casita we converted to a communal kitchen. That's where we Señoras de los Frijoles cook the food we sell.”