Tuesday, December 25, 2012

What A Difference a Year Makes


In Catholic Nicaragua, the month of December belongs to the  Virgin.  We celebrated Nicaragua’s exclusive holiday, La Purisima, on December 7, and 5 days later Our Lady of Guadalupe had her day of parades attended by little Juan Diegos with corked mustaches. Now the Catholics are getting ready for La Navidad (I am told, by a Catholic, that the evangelicals don’t celebrate Christmas and I’ll watch to see if that’s true.) I’m in my pueblo for the holidays, as I was last year, unlike most volunteers who return home to the States. I worried about that decision, but now that it’s made I am content to be here, in part because this Christmas promises to be so happy and rich compared to the last one.
Candida is in full preparation mode.  The tree and assorted decorations went up two weeks ago, but now she is cleaning every square inch of this house and washing every washable item and painting faded walls and hitherto unpainted surfaces.  The old blue and yellow slip covers are gone.  Tomorrow or Friday the red slip covers will appear.  The Christmas food is bought. I have had the traditions recited to me and, bless her and her family, I am included in them all.  On the 24th the family will stop by our house bringing gifts for Candida and she will have been cooking since the early hours so she can feed all and sundry who drop by.  Then at 8 we go to church—a three hour mass!- which I will attend in the spirit of the season, while reserving the right to leave from time to time when the wooden pews get too much for my back as they assuredly will.  At 11 we open presents.  At midnight  there are fireworks—lots of loud fireworks—and then there is a dinner at the house of Candida’s sister Celia.  Not much happens on the 25 except recovery from the full Christmas Eve.
My contribution to the festivities will be Christmas cookies which I have been planning for some time.  I got recipes from the internet.  I searched out and bought big round pans which will serve for cookie sheets.  One of my friends from the States brought me decorations and real vanilla.  I hunted up baking powder and powdered sugar and real butter so I am ready to go. I have great plans to bake , ice and decorate three kinds of cookies, wrap them in cellophane and deliver them to my friends in town: Yamileth who taught me to make tortillas this week (while the kids in the family laughed their heads off at the sight of me and my misshapen tortillas); the family of Doña Dora who never charges me the customary 10% to  put more time on my phone; my directora and counterparts; the family of Doña Marisol which is always sharing food with me; Laydi, the lovely librarian and my co-teacher of the little kids; Isolina, the custodian and my friend at the high school; Hazel, the school secretary; Adriana, the owner of the ciber who gives me a discount and solves my computer problems; and the large extended family of my host mom.
I am filled with happiness these days, beginning with my return to the pueblo after a week’s absence and finding people so glad to see me back.  The place feels like home.  Grooving on this spirit for the past week (I’ve learned to groove while you can because something somewhere is going to change the mood—that’s the lesson of emotional life for volunteers here) , I couldn’t help but reflect on my last Christmas here.  I had been in my site for a month, with nothing to do but try to “integrate” into the community.  My Spanish wasn’t even passable by Peace Corps standards, I was living in a house where I felt like an unwelcome tenant, I knew no one (the teacher counterparts disappeared as soon as vacation started) and I was engaged in a daily struggle to lift up my heart and keep on going.  On Christmas Eve I lay awake in my bed listening to the family open gifts and prepare to set off fireworks, feeling as isolated as a plague victim. Nothing like that this year. I’m interested in why the shift, aside from the obvious answers—your Spanish is better and you have a good home to live in and you know more people.  Some of the change comes from a change in me.
Instead of assuming I’m a bother to the people of my town, they have taught me that I’m useful, interesting in a foreign kind of way, funny sometimes in a laugh- with as well as a laugh- at way, and, best of all, part of the landscape.  When I walk into a store I feel that I provide a vague sort of diversion, as though people would say over lunch, “That gringa was in today.  She bought tomatoes and rice.  She lives in Pensilbania.” Or “She likes Nicaragua.” And the listeners would say, “Ah, si.”
 I am certainly not a tourist.  I like to think that to the people in my pueblo, I am their gringa. I trust that in a crunch people would take care of me.  Fantasy?  Entirely possible.  Why should my impressions, so madly wrong in the past, be any more accurate about this?  No reason, but it’s my belief anyhow.
Mood soberer:  Not 10 minutes ago (it’s Christmas day now) 3 ragged children came to the door.  I took me a few tries to understand that they wanted me to be the “madrina” for one of the boys who looked to be 8  or 9. That’s “godmother” but implies someone who will provide financially for the child.  The boy was wearing the kind of rubber boots people use to work in wet fields.  He wanted shoes.  I explained that I cannot be a madrina because so many people would want my help and I can’t help them all. I told him where he might be able to get shoes (Tom’s operates in this part of Nicaragua). But he looked at me so steadily, the way people here who want something look, as if to say I am asking and hoping. When you say no, the look doesn’t change.  It says, “You can’t blame me for asking and I can’t blame you for saying no, although I want you to say yes.”  This look tears me up.  It also makes me defensive (What are you asking me for?)  In Ocotal one day recently a girl asked me to buy oranges with the same look.  When I said know, she said “Soy pobre.”  “I’m poor.” What do you say?  I’m sorry. There’s no getting around the request or the need to say no.
Merry Christmas to all.

No comments:

Post a Comment