Heat and Houses

Heat and Houses

According to everyone I meet, March and April are the hottest months in Nicaragua.  Until a couple of days ago I wasn’t sure they had that quite right.  Through the first half of March, my site up here in the North has continued to be quite pleasant with cool nights and dry, warm, but not impossible days.  I’ve been dreading not so much the heat but the start of the rainy season in May, on the theory that the rains will bring humidity, not cooler temperatures as promised.  But whatever the reason for the delay in the onset of the heat, it’s here at last, at least during the day.  (The nights and early mornings remain blessedly cool if no longer cold.)

By 8 in the morning it starts, not so much heat as solar intensity.  The sun is very close here and very strong. There is nothing benign about it.  The sky is deep blue and there are fluffy white clouds, but the sun is a demon.  For a while I walked in it unprotected except for sun screen.  Then I tried wearing my baseball hat, but women here almost never wear a baseball hats (men do) or any other kind of hat for that matter.  Instead, they carry umbrellas and look at me as though I were a little crazy without one.  So I got over my resistance to being further encumbered than I already am with water bottles and bags of necessaries like notebooks, sunscreen, insect repellant, cell phone, etc. and gave in, raising my black umbrella over my head as I walk in the sun. The black umbrella isn’t optimum.  People tell me I need a lighter color to effectively deal with sun and heat.  I’m in the market for a nice pale blue one.

By noon even the umbrella doesn’t do the job.  When I get home after school at about 12:30, the brick house with a tin roof is throbbing. There’s a rapid ticking sound that comes off the roof as it heats up. What saves me is the wind that, cooled by the shade of the house, blows through. Lunch makes me sleepy.  But a nap in the heat makes for wild dreams.  I wake up disoriented and damp.

 It’s not a good idea to walk around between noon and 4 if you don’t have to.  I’ve changed my habits to do any afternoon errands as late in the day as I can.  By 4 it’s better, there’s more shade to walk in. And by 5 the sun is low in the sky and the cool evening begins, often with a fine sunset.  I love to stand in the door of my house and watch it in the breeze. So the moral of the story is that you just need to know how to adapt.  The sun teaches that lesson effectively.

Friday I move to a new house, my third and, I hope, last in my site.  My first home was a house I described in previous posts, a really nice middle class house with roosters, dogs, kids, etc.  I lived there two months.  The house had 2 problems.  First, although in the pueblo, it was isolated from neighbors.  This made for nice privacy but not my goal of being a part of the community.  In addition one person in the house made it pretty clear that having a stranger in the house was not an arrangement that suited. (Although this time was rough to live through, I must say I understand.  It’s not for everyone to have a barely articulate stranger haunting the rooms of one’s house.)  So I moved on to another house, the only one available on short notice, out in the barrio of about 15 families, a 20 minute walk into town.  This house is really basic, government housing (rough concrete floor, shower and washroom in the kitchen, cook top but no refrigerator).  I like the family and could spend the rest of my service here despite the lack of amenities, but its distance from town interferes with community integration and makes it impossible to, for instance, give community classes at night because there isn’t a safe way from the town to the barrio at night.

And so, with the kind help of a lady in town who for some reason likes volunteers, I found the third house. And what a house!   It has cool tile floors, upholstered furniture in the living room, indoor plumbing, a small refrigerator with a freezer on top (ice!!) and—get this—an island in the kitchen! (In the barrio I have been preparing food, chopping tomatoes for instance, in the sink, there being no other space.)   There is a small porch in front where I can sit and say hello to the people who walk by all day long. Best of all we have 2 puppies.  The lady from whom I’ll be renting a room is maybe a few years older than I, with 6 children, four of whom live in town.  She lives alone in all of this splendor.  I am hoping we will be friends. (That is not a cynical comment.  I really hope to makes friends here, like I have in the States, something more than cordial friendly relationships.)

Do I feel a little guilty about moving out of government housing and into fat city?  Of course.  The barrio house is very Peace Corps.  It’s what I signed up for.  I don’t need all the luxury of the town house.  But am I glad to move into town and to leave the latrine behind? Si.  I’ll just have to deal with the guilt, sucking it up “for the sake of the mission.”  Fingers crossed it’s my last move.

And finally for all of you who have read my whining about the slow progress of my Spanish, I finally tested into “intermediate mid” the base Peace Corps language requirement.  Not sure I’ll ever be “advanced” but I’m minimally competent.  And for those of you who talk about coming to visit, don’t be put off by the weather report above.  Everyone says the worst of it is right now.

Teaching Vocabulary

Teaching Vocabulary

Now that we are three weeks into the school year, some patterns have started to emerge.  One is that I have become the vocabulary maven.  The arrangement here is that my counterparts and I co-plan and co-teach classes.  This means that we need to agree on what we’ll do, how we’ll do it and who does what part, including who prepares material.  It’s not hard to understand that it takes some time to co-plan a good lesson, more than the counterparts are used to spending, or frankly than I would spend if I were teaching by myself.  Collaboration is time consuming.

 I have to be especially careful about dividing tasks more or less equally. After we plan a class I always ask who will do what part.  And invariably the answer is that I get the vocabulary part. This is because the teachers here have “pena” or embarrassment or shame at their pronunciation of English words.  At first I thought that this was a manifestation of a kind of vanity, but it’s not.  The truth is that English is a bitch to pronounce.  I’m really aware of this when I teach “straight’ or ‘’prefer”.  How is one to know by looking at them how to say those words?  In the university the would-be English teachers are taught phonetic symbols to help them with pronunciation.  I don’t need anything of the kind learning Spanish where each letter has its sound with a few exceptions.

Anyway, the challenge for me is how to find an interesting way to teach vocab.  A beginning principle is to teach without using Spanish vocab if you can.  And I try.  I make pictures (diagrammatic), I use actions, I use “realia” (real stuff).  I used photos from magazines my friend Pat and her mother cut out and sent to me. With concrete nouns it’s easy.  Abstractions like “hospitality” are hard, but luckily there a lot of cognates (like”hospitalidad”) that give the kids the meaning if they think about it and they do.  They often are interested to know.  Despite my efforts to make kids think a little re vocab, one of my counterparts insists on giving translations.  In one class I had pictures of a dozen barnyard animals.  After the students did their own identifying of the Spanish names of the animals, my counterpart put up a list of animals in Spanish and English.  When I ask her why, she says that the kids will just ask her for the translation if she doesn’t.  Maybe she’d right, but I think they learn the name better if they sort of have to figure it out.  But the culture of copying lists of vocab without thinking much continues.

My favorite technique so far, the one that has worked best, is to present some reading, like a dialog or short narrative, and to pull the vocabulary from the reading.  The trick is to get a reading that 1) the students care about and 2) that is on the cusp of being too hard, but is not too hard if they can learn a few words.

  For example, from the Peace Corps TEFL manual, I found a letter written from a cousin in Miami to a cousin he only just learned about in Nicaragua.  The letter recounts that the Miami cousin’s father had a fight with his Nica brother and they hadn’t spoken in years.  When the Miami cousin found out about his Nica relative he wrote asking the Nica to come to Miami to meet the family, all expenses paid.  This letter had my class rapt.  The hooks were the Nica story, the Miami connection which many Nica families have, and the word “fight” which they remembered from last year.  They were motivated to understand that story. The story was short enough – about 10 good-sized sentences--and we went though it sentence by sentence, the students identifying the words they didn’t know and me explaining meaning.  I used more Spanish than I like because there were a lot of adverbs (no cognates, no pix) but by the end the class was able—and interested –to answer questions about the meaning of the story.  I was jubilant because of the student motivation.  There is not much to motivate students to learn English, little to none tourist activity, no business to speak of where dual languages would be an employment asset. All we got here is learning for learning’s sake and that means, has to mean, excellent instruction.

Anyway, at first I didn’t like being the vocabulary maven, but now I do.  I figure I’m teaching the counterparts as they watch me get at vocab in various ways. But I think in a short time the counterparts and I should share the job so that they get past their pena and get the idea of teaching vocab without lists of translated words.

Can this possibly be interesting to anyone who isn’t doing it? I have to say that there isn’t an original idea here—ESL teachers have been doing this stuff for years.  I always taught literature and thought this language teaching dull, but it’s not and the real thrill is watching the students trying, their minds working.  What a kick.

Erata: In my last post I used the term ropas americanas.  Bad Spanish.  Ropa means clothing.  It’s already plural.  So the phrase is ropa americana.

Clothes

Clothes

I have been wanting to write about clothes ever since I got here.   Before I left the States,  I was alerted to clothes as a Nica issue by Peace Corps which made a very big thing about a Nicaraguan dress code, which, we were told, required professional dress—pressed shirts, business shoes, khakis or dress pants.  Clean, neat.  Otherwise face possible ostracism and the failure of your mission.  Nicas have no respect, we heard, for back-packers with their slovenly dirty ways, their unkempt appearance.  Some of this is true.   Some isn’t true in my experience or only with qualifications.

It is true that Nicaraguans, all but the poorest, place importance on how they dress when they are outside of their houses. Older women (over 40, say) wear a kind of uniform which consists of a straight skirt, like a pencil skirt, a clean and, if necessary, pressed shirt, and dressier shoes like flats or heels or sandals. It took me some time to figure out where these ubiquitous skirts come from because they are not sold in the shops as far as I can see.  The clue comes when you look at them drying inside out on the line—the zippers tell you the skirt was handmade.  And the maker is a professional, a costurera, and there are some in every community.  They don’t hang out signs, but people tell you who is good.  You buy fabric and bring it to the costurera and tell her what you want and she makes it to order.

 For younger women the uniform is tight, tight, tight jeans almost as tight as leggings, so tight the flesh above the waist bulges over.  With this they wear tight, tight, tight tops.  (Nicaragua is a god-send for the lycra manufacturers of the world and a good place to go if you want to learn to accept your body type.  The word “fat” here is a description of fact, not an insult. )   That these  tight shirts accentuate the bulges matters not at all.  The tops most prized have some color and some bling, but t-shirts are common and especially American t-shirts, as long as they are tight.  More on that later. Shoes matter whether flats or high heels, but excruciatingly high heels are prized even by people who have to walk on impossible dirt roads or down precipitous declines.

Please note that the dress code applies outside the house.  In the house is a different story.  I lived in one house where the senora did all her household tasks in the morning dressed in yesterday’s shirt and a thigh length kind of shaper/girdle. People would come to the house to meet with her and she would receive them as described.  But when the time came to go out, she was showered, hair neatly combed and parted, dressed in the usual over-forty skirt and top.  In another house the senora ran a pulperia from her living room.  It opened at 7 in the morning and she ran it dressed in her nightgown.

Thank God I’m American because that excuses my abuse of the rules.  While I am appropriately dressed for school or other more formal occasions, on my time off,  I do go out of the house in casual hiking pants with a cool cotton roomy shirt. In the beginning, when it was so terribly hot and humid, I tried to walk in the morning in shorts.  It did not take more than 2 outings to figure out that was too much.  I was in damaging-my-mission territory, although the younger volunteers get away with running in shorts.  The embarrassment on the faces I passed while wearing shorts probably had something to do with my age and wrinkles.

What about men and children?  The rules apply to them, too, but in slightly different ways.  Men, as distinct from boys and teenagers, outside the house wear jeans or dress pants, leather (-like) shoes and clean neat shirts.  Polos are a favorite.  Teenage boys aren’t dressed up very often.  They wear baggy pants and t-shirts  and sports shoes sort of like in the States.  But hair matters to them a bundle.  Many, many men and boys look like they just stepped out of a barber shop. (Another aspect of the public appearance value.) Hair is trimmed and for teenagers worn often in a style unique to the boy and held in place by a ton of pomade.  Spikes predominate (”spikey” was one of the vocabulary words this week). Teenage girls are a little more casual than older women but tight jeans are their uniform, too. Of course the rule applies to teenage boys and girls at school where they wear a uniform of a clean white shirt and blue bottoms, dress pants for boys (not jeans) and a whit blouse, kilt and knee socks for girls.  Both wear leather(-like) shoes.

 What is notable is the way children, particularly little girls, are dressed. People seem to take a special pride in their little children’s clothes.  Nearly all little girls have long black hair which is arranged in pigtails or ponytails with nice straight parts and hair ornaments color- coordinated to outfit. .  A mom in her straight skirt and t-shirt walks next to the princess in a dress perfectly pressed with matching socks and polished shoes.  Some parents express this urge to glorify their girls by dressing them in the most fancy party dresses, often hot pink, loaded with frills and rosettes and bling.  I can’t say this is every day or all the time but little girls have and wear these dresses.  The feeling I get is that the little girls reflect back on the family, their status, their values, their hopes maybe.

A good question would be how all the emphasis on a consumer item like clothes is possible in a country reputed to be the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere. One answer lies in the example of a person I know who barely makes  enough to cover the expenses of the three people she supports.  She lives in a two room house with no furniture except for 2 beds and a kind of wardrobe.  Her family lives on rice and beans, but she doesn’t think of herself as poor (she doesn’t think she makes enough money, but that’s different from poor).  After all she has enough jeans and t-shirts and high heels to fit in with everyone.

How could that be?  A pair of new jeans costs $10-15.  And they are cheaply made.  To the rescue comes ropas americanas, used clothes from the States.  They come in giant tightly wrapped bales which can be bought, sight unseen, for $25-50. The purchaser opens the bale and with any luck there are enough clothes there he can actually sell that the investment was a good one.  The clothes are shaken out, hung up or stacked and sold in little shops in any sizable town.   The clothes come from the contributions of folks in the States.  Some of them have already been for sale by a charity like Good Will because sometimes you can see the charity price tag still on them. The good thing about ropas americanas is the generally pretty good quality of the clothes. Also, like everyone else in the world Nicas like name brands.  And ropas amiericanas are cheaper than new, e.g. a pair of jeans for $5.

At first I had a pretty big head of steam about this situation.  You mean the clothes I donated to charity are for sale in a poor, poor country.  I had in mind people getting them for free! Ok, OK it costs something to ship them here.  But everyone along the distribution chain makes a little (or a big) profit from my charitable donation (even me, now that I think about the tax deduction). But ropas americanas provide livelihoods here, another way to make a few bucks in the informal labor sector on which so many depend for survival in a country with a 50% under/unemployment rate. I bet someone has written about this trade in donated clothes.  Might be worth a google.

The presence of so much American clothing here makes for some good reads—of t-shirts. People don’t understand what they put on their bodies.  So a poor old woman with sagging breasts wears a shirt that says, in two strategically placed circles, “hot” “spot”. Or it might say “Hands off!”  My favorite t-shirt story, though is this:  I was jammed into the back seat of a microbus on the way back to my site.  A guy got on with a T-shirt with the logo and name North Hanover Grill, a small restaurant in my small town.  How many of these shirts could have been printed? How many could have gotten to Nicaragua as used clothing? And on my microbus?!  While I was on it?!! I was going to try to get to the guy to explain what he was wearing and then I thought 1) would he understand my impaired Spanish explanation and 2) would he care.  I sat back down I my seat.  But it was an amazing moment.

P.S. I don’t want to leave a false impression.  While the emphasis on how you look and clothes is important to –I’m guessing—middle class and lower middle class people, there are still many really poor people who haven’t the luxury of such a concern.  But it’s also true, as in the example above, that you can gave the concern even when you actually have very little.  There is nothing new about trying to look better off than you are.

P.P.S. Sometimes Nicaragua reminds me of the States 50 years ago.  My mom wore house dresses which never saw the light of day outside the house.  My aunt had a dog who knew the smell of her lipstick, a sure sign she was leaving the house.  So the in the house/outside the house divide isn’t unique to Nicaragua.