The following is a list—with
elaboration—of what’s gone right this week and what’s gone wrong. Or as we say
in the ever-positive Peace Corps, what were the successes and the challenges:
1.
One of the kids
who got into the Access program dropped by to tell me all about it, already
using double the English he could before, and so pleased with his opportunity
he practically floats.
2.
Candida bought
collars and leashes for the dogs, after they escaped one day this week while
she was in the shower. Help, she called to me as I walked in from a morning of
teaching. I asked some people in the
street who miss nothing of the little that is going on, including the direction
taken by run-away dogs. The dogs headed
for the highway which runs by the town, and by the time I got down there I
could see in the distance their tails on the OTHER side of the road. They were headed off into a barrio, but by
the time I got there they had disappeared into it. Disheartened I returned to tell Candida that
I had lost their trail, at which point a group of about 6 neighborhood boys ran
up, triumphantly carrying the 2 dogs. I
learned later that while I was running all over, Candida, much smarter, had
offered a small reward to the group of kids who just happened to be passing,
and they spread out all over town till they found the dogs. The dogs don’t much
like the collars and leashes Candida bought the same day as the great escape,
but she likes them a lot. She ties the
dogs up on the porch and, proudly, she takes them for a one or two block walk,
Dogi trotting along compliantly but Bobi refusing to move his legs so that the
“walk” is more like a “drag”. Dogi and Bobi don’t appreciate their good
fortune. They are pampered dogs. I can
count on one hand the number of dogs in this town that have collars, never mind
leashes.
3.
I didn’t teach
much this week. Usually I have a full
load, but PC has a rule that we don’t teach if we haven’t co-planned the
classes with our counterpart teachers.
Various and sundry circumstances intervened to scotch the co-planning
(my teachers and I are really good about this usually.) So I had time on my hands—and I enjoyed every
minute. This is an advance for me. For a while here I relied on work here to a
large degree to keep me kind of balanced and centered, along with other
techniques which would make an interesting blog paragraph sometime. This week I
had no trouble staying centered and happy without much work. I did some yoga, read a bit more, took a few
naps, did a fun presentation on 2 American holidays—Halloween and
Thanksgiving—for the Access class in Somoto, traveled to a town a half hour
away to pick up my medicine from another volunteer who brought it from Managua
and to have an altogether delicious ice cream cone (chocolate with almonds),
observed a few classes, ran into another volunteer in Somoto and had coffee
with her just like in the States. In
short, I enjoyed just living. Back to the grind next week.
4.
Every night at 6
o’clock the synthesizer at the evangelical church up the street and around the
corner starts up for two hours of musical renditions. There also may be drums and a guitar. There is always amplification and there is
always singing so that the whole town is treated to the religious expressions
of others. The singing, always by only
one person, is heartfelt but is amplified dissonance. The guitar is way out of tune. (I hesitate to
suggest that this might be an evangelical tradition, but in one house I lived
in there was a family of evangelicals with a horridly tuned guitar which was
played by and accompanied a man with an equally tuneless voice; and my Spanish
teacher of several months ago, also a guitar teacher, told me that he was so
offended by the sound of the guitars coming from an evangelical church that he
offered his services gratis to tune the guitars, an offer declined by the
church members. Draw your own conclusions.) Someone told me that this nightly
service is attended by only 4 or 5 people, but they obviously get a lot from
the amplification and the chance to sing.
I have grown accustomed to the 6 o’clock serenade, but nearly every
night I think that it would never be tolerated in the States. The police would be called. Petitions would be got up. An ordinance would be passed. But people here don’t complain at all. People don’t have the kind of ego that is readily
offended by the actions of others. They don’t take the actions of others as intentional
assaults on their own sensibilities. Or
maybe they eschew confrontation or the imposition of their own will on others.
There is a modest sweetness to the lack of indignation, to the live and let
live tolerance. The longer I’m here the more I admire it.
5.
I have been
bitten by bugs during the night for the last couple of weeks. They leave
painful welts. I know they are not
mosquitos. I tried to study the pattern
of the bites—often two close by, only on my torso, usually in front, only while
I’m sleeping. I didn’t think they were bed bugs, too big. Maybe spiders, but it slowly dawned that they
had to be in or on my bed. Or maybe in my nightgown. I started wearing a long sleeved shirt to
bed. No help. So I called a PC doctor who said to strip the
bed and wash the bed clothes. He said to
use bug spray on the bed and set it in the sun for a couple of hours. I told Candida about the problem and showed
her the bites. I followed doctor’s
orders except for the sun part. We don’t
get direct sun at my house, usually a great blessing. After taking all these
steps, I came home from school to find that Candida went one further. Although not two weeks ago I had thoroughly
cleaned my room, she cleaned it again and more thoroughly, moving the heavy bed
and the wardrobe to get every speck of dust—I’m embarrassed to say a dustpanful—which
she showed me as if to imply that my notion of thorough missed the mark by a
good bit. She’s right—I’ve always valued
tidy over clean. I was ashamed that she had had to clean my room, but grateful,
so that night I made a big batch of macaroni and cheese, a favorite of hers, to
share. No new bites have appeared. I
have my fingers crossed.
You can see that the
successes outnumber the challenges, but the just plain living is what it’s all
about.
No comments:
Post a Comment