What’s in my purse today?

Last summer when I was nannying in Switzerland, I noticed during my first few days that Kathrin’s backpack or purse could, at the sound of a sniffle, the tug of a sleeve, or the whine of “I’m hungry”, miraculously produce the exact item to meet the needs of either of the girls. We dubbed Kathrin’s pack the Magical Mommy bag, and my own tote/purse/backpack quickly converted into the same – the Magical Nanny Bag. It was my very own Mary Poppins satchel! It was a sad day indeed when my time came to leave Switzerland and I had to empty my pockets of pacifiers (or soothers, as Nina called them), water bottles, candies, granola bars and apples, band-aids and handi-wipes, little sweaters and swimsuits and shoes, sunscreen, my money and Swiss rail pass, pretty leaves we’d collected off the ground, notebooks and crayons for drawing … the list goes on.

I noticed happily when I got back to Colorado that a little acorn Nina had found, and a little stick Tanja had carved into a point, were still buried at the bottom of my purse, under my camera and journal. I’m not sure what customs would have said about transporting seed-like objects across the border, or what TSA would have said about the sharp stick, but that’s another story.

Here in Honduras, many of the objects in my purse are the same – the sweater, the camera, the notebook, the water bottle, the sunscreen, and the candies (many of Prisma clients make sweets, and sometimes I just can’t help myself:). I’ve learned also to always travel with a copy of my passport, after being stopped at one police check-point and told I was going to be detained until one of my coworkers went back to the office to get my identification. Thankfully they let me go after I explained what I was doing, and that I didn’t have my ID because we’d been visiting an area too risky to be carrying around cash and documents. Usually there’s also a bag-or-two of bananas (called “mínimos” here) and vegetables that I also bought from a client – they’re usually fresh-picked and much tastier than what I get in the supermarket. Some mornings when I’m in a hurry I buy a nactatamalé (a Honduran tamale, wrapped in plátano leaves which seem to hold in moisture much better than corn husks) from a woman who sells them on the street and tuck it hot-and-fresh into my purse to munch on later. When I’m out doing client interviews I’ve got a file folder with all their information; by the end of the day the folder’s usually covered with dust from the road and some sort of food stain (can you tell I’m eating a lot here?). This week I was visiting one of the branch offices in Danli, a town in the south near the Nicaraguan border, in fact, we stopped en-route in the middle of a banana plantation, and Octavio, the loan officer, told me to put my foot on the road – I was standing in Nicaragua! Though the offices are in Danli, the clients fan out as far as 100k in all directions, so we had a lot of motorcycle travel. The weight of two travelers got to be too much for the motorcycle at one point, so we sputtered to a stop and walked to the nearest store to buy a pint of oil. This bottle also made it into my purse. I’m feeling very cross-functional, considering that, stowed in the same pocket as the oil, I had hair clips and earrings (to spiff myself up once the helmet and dusty jacket came off and it comes time to interview clients).

When I look at the purse, it’s really quite incredible that I can fit in it all that I do. Admittedly, I robbed the purse from Alice, who has some sort of magical touch when it comes to fitting large amounts of things in little spaces, so I’m going to attribute the purse’s powers to her.

The newest addition to the contents of my purse is a bag of postcards, which I’ll soon be filling out, addressing, and sending to some of you!