Peace Corps tells us not to
start new projects in the last 3 months of service, but I paid no attention and
I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve been wanting to
do a world map since I got to site. The
world map is a signature PC project. It
was started by a PC volunteer in the Dominican Republic about 30 years
ago. There’s a manual that tells you
just what to do and provides 18 pages of the world, all laid out in nice little
grids which you copy onto an enlarged grid wherever you can find space. I am painting mine on the outside wall of the
little library in town. The upside of
this location is that kids pass by the library, the de facto youth center in my
town, all day long. It sits behind a
fence which I hope will give my map some protection from random acts of
vandalism which we sometimes see here in Nicaragua just as we see in other
parts of the world.
Originally, I thought kids
would want to help draw and paint the map. I was wrong. I’m not alone. World maps appeal to volunteers, not
necessarily to kids and so after trying my best to acquire a crew, I resigned
myself to drawing the map and painting it myself. This has turned out to be a
long contemplative job for which I am grateful. I have to paint in the mornings
because the afternoon sun bakes the wall.
I also teach in the mornings, so I’ve been pouring it on weekends and a
few stolen morning hours before class.
The work is slow and
meticulous, made more difficult by a bumpy stucco surface. But the paint is good. It is thick and doesn’t run or drip. I paint
one color at a time, for example all the red countries at once. So far I’m through the red, yellow, blue and
orange countries. Still to go are the
pink and purple countries and white Antarctica. It’s coming along. When I’m done, I’ll paint a border, touch up
the ocean blue I laid down under everything and proudly paint the Peace Corps
symbol in the upper right hand corner and the Nicaraguan flag in the upper
left.
Sometimes I have company
while I paint. People stop by to watch.
Once in a while they ask a question.
Nicaraguans appreciate an artistic effort. Drawing is popular,
decorating more so , (anything—buildings, notebooks, fingernails, hair, walls).
So people admire what I’m doing. I get the usual complement, “Es bonito.” It’s nice. I tell kids the name of the
country I’m painting. Adults sometimes
give me advice. One guy helps me move my chair so I can reach a new map
section.
Painting for hours at a time
frees the mind to reflect. I reflect on
the countries I’m painting. Niger.
Wasn’t that where uranium was allegedly being exported from before the
Iraq War? Benin. A family from Benin rented my house for a
year while I was in Nicaragua. Indonesia. Isn’t that where Barrack Obama’s mom worked? Ruwanda.
The genocide, of course.
Somalia. The pirates. I’m struck
by how little I know about the world beyond a single association or factoid,
even about the places I’ve visited. Happily there’s still time to remedy some
of that.
I also—inevitably,
constantly-- think about my service here for the last two years. For some reason I’m kinder to myself while I
am filling in the countries with color than when I’m when I’m stewing in my
room. I wasn’t the most brilliant or
effective volunteer Nicaragua has ever known but I was a good enough volunteer
and will leave content with my service—and I say that having done my best to
filter all judgments for all those self serving glosses humans are prone to. I
did a hard, hard job more or less well. And from my own perspective, I had the
best, best time—the time of my life. Thank you, Nicaragua, and thank you, USA.
About 11:30 this morning, the sun was making me
sweat lots and fatigue was cramping my right hand, when two of the kids I asked
to help with the map stopped by to see how I was doing. They are brothers, both acknowledged artists
in town. They watched for a while and then asked to help. My first response was
proprietary. Are you guys careful enough
not to mess up my map, I thought. But I gave
each a jar of paint and a brush and they did a great job for the half hour
before the sun became impossible. I
minded sharing only a little. Maybe they will come back another day. If not, I’m easy. I’ll be back in solitary map-painting,
ruminating, summing up mode, a happy place to be.
I
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