Amazing Sights

I keep getting blown away by things I see.  I wonder how long it takes to be so acculturated that common sights lose their ability to astound.  Until that happens, I’m enjoying the constant surprises.  Here are a few:

Sunday, there was such a clamor on the patio of the house I live in.  The parrot in his cage was squawking wildly and there was other noise I quickly identified as a cock fight, but as it occurs in nature.  We have roosters and hens and chicks roaming around all the time.  Two cocks got into it and someone in the family had to intervene to stop it.  One cock was placed in the shower to segregate him from the other and life returned to peace.  I was reminded not to open the shower door.  This morning I walked around the house to the lavadero, the cement basin in which we wash clothes and dishes.  There stood the señora of the house with a dead rooster in the lavadero.  She was plucking it. I was taken aback first because the señora has a responsible job in the world and I’m always amazed that her status doesn’t insulate her from the hardest household work, including apparently, plucking roosters. Second, I wasn’t aware of this additional use for the lavadero.  A little later I went to take my shower.  The only sign of the deceased rooster was a fair amount of ñaña on the floor of the shower.  Por eso always wear flip flops in the shower.

Speaking of chickens, a week or so ago I was traveling into the country in a cab.  This sounds kind of posh, but it is a common form of transportation in my part of the world where busses pass by infrequently and nearly no one has a car.  When I take a taxi I expect to share it with at a minimum of three and a maximum, in my experience, of six extra people, not including the driver and children who sit on laps.  We all pack in somehow.  On this one trip, however, there were only two of us in the back seat until the cab stopped to pick up a woman who carried a large bag, the kind people buy rice in, plastic but reinforced with cross hatched string or thread. In the bag she cut two holes and out of each stuck the head of a chicken. I did the proverbial double take. On the way home, I caught the bus along with a lady who had two chickens tied together at the feet.  No bag.

One day my packed taxi stopped to pick up another passenger.  There being no room inside the taxi, he climbed into the trunk which was left open to accommodate him as we sped down the road.  I’m used to that one now as it happens fairly often.  I am hoping to find out how much the trunk riders pay.  I bet it’s the same as those of us who ride inside.  Everyone pays for the ride so the cab driver is motivated to shove in as many people as he can.  No one complains.  Everyone is glad to have the ride.

The father in the family where I live was taking down the dry laundry from the line.  As he took each piece he folded it into a neat square and put in on top of his head.  By the end of the line he was balancing a tidy stack. 

 His mom is a charming and unassuming señora, very warm, in her mid to late 70’s I’d guess.  She came to visit and was very interested in me and kind to me.  She asked about my children and I took her to my room where I have pictures of my family and friends.  She was much taken with a snap shot of Alex and Tina on their wedding day.  It’s the only wedding picture I brought with me.   The señora asked for the photo and when I handed it to her she left the room with it clutched tightly to her breast.  I wasn’t sure that I could get it back, but knew it was gone when I saw her a few minutes later.  The wedding picture was tucked inside her bodice, the edge peaking up over the neckline of her dress.  She left with it.  These are the kinds of misunderstandings that are impossible to negotiate with my level of Spanish.  Easier to ask Alex and Tina to send me another snapshot.

In the campo life is even more traditional than it is in my pueblo of 2400 people. I always see ancient ladies walking along the road with heavy loads on their heads.  I see men riding burros bareback.  I see women gathered at the one well in a village early in the morning with their barrels and pails talking as I imagine women have been doing for all time.   In the house where I give lessons, a very old señora naked but wrapped in a towel from the waist down makes her slow way over the packed dirt floor to shower. I love to watch the oxen walk in the road.  They are various and complex shades of cream and taupe.

I am reading a very good set of short stories, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber (thank you to whomever recommended this one) and in one story a character thinks back on his years as a tourist when he would look at amazing sights as if his seeing them somehow validated them, as though in a way they weren’t  real until he saw them.  Not sure I explained this right but I think I recognize the idea.  I’m still a tourist here and these sights make me want to turn to a companion to say, “Did you see that!!” as though the sight was placed there to blow me away.  In time the sights, and maybe I, will just be a part of the landscape. Not sure I’m looking forward to that time.  My life now is very vivid.   The visuals are a part of the sensory overload that makes me sleep a solid 9 hours every night.

Amazing Sights

Peace Corps is really good at training.  Part of training for us was preparing for the emotional ups and downs of service.  We were warned that there would be times when we’d question the usefulness of what we were doing or feel overwhelmed by the foreignness of the place.  At such times we were advised to hold off on the blog and turn to the journal.  But a friend emailed an inquiry as to what I’m actually doing now and I was struck by the two ways in which the question, “What am I doing here?” can be understood.

So, apropos of one way of interpreting the question, I’ve been in my permanent site for 3 weeks.  My job is to help Nica English teachers develop better teaching strategies toward the end of more ‘communicative” learning.  I am also charged with helping to develop materials for classroom use in this country where the only existing material is a whiteboard.  Finally, I’m supposed to find ways to teach English to interested people in the community.  I am permitted to develop other projects secondary to my main English-teaching obligations. But there’s a hold on all this work. School is out for the year.  This is summer vacation.  Classes resume in early February.  Peace Corps schedules us into the new site with 2 months during which I am supposed to “integrate” into the community, not actually work. 

Theoretically, some time for getting settled is a good idea, but as you can imagine, this integration part is hard.  For the first time we are on our own, some of us with limited language skills, living with people we don’t know who may or may not be excited to have us here.  I can tell you what I’ve done by way of integration: introduce myself to neighbors, visit and chat at various small businesses in town like corner markets, tortilla and rosquilla sellers, hang out at the park hoping someone is interested enough to stop for a chat (this actually works often), go to church for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, go to the high school graduation, visit the local Department of Education office, meet the police, try to figure out who are local leaders so I can talk with them about community needs, etc.  I have tried, but the truth is there’s still a lot of down time every day.  So I use that to reread training material and, especially, study Spanish maybe 3 hours a day. I have to feed myself so I shop and cook. There’s still time left so I’ve been reading a lot of very good novels and enjoying that. At night I listen to music, write in Spanish in my journal and read one thing or another.  I admit to playing solitaire.   I also have done a little traveling.  I have a PC site mate, Jenny, who has showed me how to get around the closest large town for food, cyber and banking needs.  She also took me to a bigger city, Esteli.  I’ve met some other volunteers from the area.

So, in short, this is a hard time for me with some up sides.  But I recently had a project that really excites me fall into my lap. Another volunteer in the small business sector let me know he’d meet a Nica guy who operates a tour service for the only real tourist attraction in Madriz, the Somoto Canyon. The owner employs 6 guides who need to learn English so they can better do their jobs. I agreed to meet with the owner. Lacking his name or phone number, but with a general idea of where his business was supposed to be in the nearby town, I headed out to find him. When the business wasn’t where I was told it was, I started to ask around in local shops.  In one, a lady didn’t know, but got her employee to put me in a car (yes, I was a little worried) and drive me to the local tourist office.  The folks there listened and knew who the guy was, phoned him and he came to find me at the office and brought me to his place. (This was an amazingly successful negotiation.  It could have as easily ended up that no one knew who I was looking for or that the guy wasn’t around or nobody understood my Spanish, but this is how business is done in Nicaragua—in person, at your house or shop, face to face.)

Long story short, I am thrilled that I am going to try to help these guides so maybe they do a better job with tourists who maybe will tip them more so they can live better in this poor part of the world. I suggested and the operator agreed that I don’t have time to teach them a lot of English, but we can do basics and maybe I can translate the things they say on the tour and help them learn how to say those thing in English. I hope this will be my project in the month and a half before school starts and maybe a little after.  So, that’s what I’m doing.

As to the other meaning of the question, “What am I doing here?” I ponder that sometimes.  I think about my kids and the lovely women in their lives, my friends, my family, my dog, my garden. I think of the odds against making any real difference.  I think of the  difficulty of knowing well another culture, or another person in that culture.  T

What Am I Doing Here?

La Purisima

In the last post I mentioned the Feast of the Immaculate Conception which apparently has two faces.  The religious holiday is December 8, but on December 7, and for a week before in large cities, there is the more pop-religious version of La Purisima.  I have only a single experience with it, and my experience is in a small town, but it was something.  To begin, I gather that La Purisima is something like Halloween.  There are no costumes but people go around to houses for treats.  But not all houses.  The house I live in, however, has a Purisima event every year.  I am not sure how many other houses in the pueblo do this, but I think not many.  I’ve never seen anything like it. 

It started at 4 p.m.  I walked out to the patio of the house which is surrounded by a chain link fence on the other side of which is a dirt road.   I was taken aback to see in the road outside the fence maybe 40 or 50 people.  Many were milling around, pulling down large palm leaves so they could sit in the dirt.  Others, including teens and children were pressed up against the gate in the fence maybe 5 rows deep and I mean really pressed against the fence and each other.  Inside the fence on the patio were a dozen plastic chairs facing a homemade shrine to Mary with lots of lights and glitter and artificial flowers.  I sat in one of the chairs and made small talk with a nine year old sitting next to me. (I am so odd to them.)  After 40 minutes or so an older señora stood and the rest of us followed as she and another woman recited readings and led us in songs.  The songs are traditional (I heard them on the radio for days in advance) and are sung mostly by women in a distinctive tone—hard to describe—a bit nasally, very loud, a combination of song and chant.  In the house the family had accumulated a vast of hand number of handouts, enough to fill two very big cardboard boxes.  The treats consisted of sections of cane, candy and fruit.  Some were packed in large plastic containers; there were smaller containers, plates and finally a huge number of bags, maybe the size of small lunch bags in the states, all with the aforesaid treats. There were also some plastic balls for children.

After the readings and songs, the family passed out the medium containers to the folks on the patio who then left via the gate, but with great difficulty because the people on the road were so packed against the gate it was hard to get through.  We then waited, maybe for a half hour.  Musicians showed up with a crew of singers and, once again, had a horrible time making it through the crowd.  When they got in and settled on the patio,  the Purisima songs started anew,  this time with marimba, and guitars and I think a mandolin.   There was another señora in this group who spoke at length about the Virgin.  When these people, musicians from an outlying campo comunidad, were done—about 7:00—they had to leave by the back entrance, the crowd outside the fence was so deep.  The musicians and singers took with them the largest plastic containers of treats.

The time had apparently come for the people in the streets to get treats, too.  But the family said that they wouldn’t open the gate until there was some order.  The deal is that a few people at a time are let in, maybe 10 or so, and they sing a Purisima song and get a bag of treats.  But the people outside, all pushing and shoving, looked like a mob and the family wasn’t letting anyone in until somehow the people better behaved.  The stalemate commenced and I must say I felt pretty awkward sitting there on the patio with one or two family members, while outsiders, obviously poor and incredibly determined to get their treats, stood, listening to Purisima songs, without moving from the fence  for 3 ½ hours.  It was a standoff and I was struck that no one on the outside took charge, said to others, “OK you guys, these people aren’t opening up until we make a line so, you people at the gate, you can go first but get in line so we can get our treats and go home”.  Rather everyone stood there without moving.  And the family didn’t move either.

I didn’t quite understand what was going on.  At first I wondered why the family wanted to provide this treat for the community when it carried such difficulty and great expense. A few days later, someone explained that the person who holds the Purisima celebration does so because s/he promised the Virgin s/he would do so if the Virgin granted a request.  So it’s an obligation owed to arrange for the songs and prayers and to give gifts to the people.  This helps to explain the attitudes on all sides: the family’s need to give is by way of paying a debt, not necessarily a display of concern for the poor.  And the poor are a part of the dynamic; their role is to accept the benevolence.  This doesn’t explain the jam up at the fence, though. 

By 8 p.m. I was pretty hungry and nothing was happening so I went to the kitchen to make some dinner.  When I looked out about 15 minutes later the gate had been opened and some people were singing their song on the patio.  I assume they got their treats.  It must have taken the family an hour or two to get through all the people who had been waiting.

La Purisima

It Comes with the Territory

I haven’t been in site very long and the real work won’t start until school resumes in early February, but I’m already registering the difficult parts of service.  The prediction is that the first six months of service are really hard. Here are some stressors:

1.     I used to worry about wearing sunglasses.  I’d think that nothing made me more gringa, but the truth is that everything about me screams gringa, from my clothes, to my skin, to the way I walk—silly to worry about sunglasses, as if by avoiding them I could fit in better.  I so stick out.  And that will never change, although people will get used to seeing me in the streets.  People are nice.  They smile and say “adiós” (Nica greeting, pronounced “adio”), but I am the “other” in spades.

2.     I can’t rely on my well-honed ability to size up situations.  I was really good at this in the States.  I prided myself on being able to read people well and to intuit what was going on interpersonally.  Here, in this other culture, I don’t know the rules and so can’t make predictions and judgments. It’s a strange feeling, because Nicaraguans are Western, they watch TV and wear clothes I recognize, so it’s easy to think they think like I do.  Not true.  In many small ways I miscalculate and that undermines confidence. 

3.     Time hangs heavy.  Perhaps this will change when the school year starts or maybe I’ll figure out what to do with the time I now have.  This is a big one—I really do hope that I can learn the “in-the-moment” thing, or, put another way, a way of being content not doing too much that’s “productive”. But aside from taking care of buying daily food to cook, there’s nothing much to do for entertainment, no one to go visit, no casual shopping, although I can get to a bigger town and plan to do that at least once a week if just for the scene change.  I asked for a small town and I got it.  I saw a little boy yesterday in the street kicking an empty plastic bottle around.  Maybe I should give that a try.  Joke.  But this is an opportunity to do things I always said I wanted to do and never had time for, like walk for an hour a day, do yoga daily, get out my calligraphy stuff and read, read, read.

4.     There are many moments about which we were warned, moments when the disconnect between life as we knew it and life as it is here becomes acute.  This morning I had one.  I was drinking coffee on the porch appreciating the view when I looked up the dirt road to see two little kids playing on the side of the road.  One was about 7 and the other about 5.  The seven year old was hacking at a tree with a machete.  No adult in sight.

I can get euphoric about not much.  Today, by asking questions, I found the home of a lady who sells tortillas.  I was invited in while one señora went for the tortillas.  Two other señoras were talking.  I introduced myself, said who I was, what I was doing in their town and shook hands.  I got such a positive response.  The two year part impressed them.  When I get bored I can go sit at the park and hope someone wants to chat.  Today I got two high school girls.  They were giggly, one more bold than the other who tagged along when her more confident friend.   Both sat down to talk.  But that was fun for me and I might have one of the girls as a student when class starts in February.

Wednesday  is the day before the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a big holiday here.  In the big cities it’s celebrated for a week with candy for kids and gatherings at people’s houses, but here it’s a one day holiday.  My family has a gathering at the house.  Should be interesting.  Today the family broke out the Christmas decorations.  (Yes, we are decorated for Christmas and Immaculate Conception).  When I got back to the house the tree was already up.  Now there is more glitter and light around than you can imagine, two crèches with a giant baby Jesus, and you know what, it’s just like home, down to the big cardboard box that holds the decorations wrapped in plastic bags from year to year.  Fireworks are sold in the streets.  It’s going to be a big holiday season.

I think I’m going to be fine here.  I am prepared, though, for 6 hard months.

It Comes with the Territory