Shoe on the Other Foot

Shoe on the Other Foot

Another volunteer pointed out that sometimes Nicaraguan kids make a strange set of noises when she walks by.  They are “talking English,” as it sounds to them.  I said I had never had the experience but that changed last Sunday when, leaving my counterpart’s house, I passed three boys in front of a house on a corner and they shouted after me a gibberish which, as soon as I heard it, I could identify as Englishy though there was not a recognizable word.  They then started to laugh at me.   I admit I was not prepared for the reaction I had. 

I felt outrage—and for good reason—I, or my origins, were being mocked, subject to laughter by ignorant little kids who thought that anyone or anything not like themselves deserved mockery, kids whose parents had not trained them that it was at the least bad form and probably immoral to make fun of other people because of some basic attribute such as nationality or skin color.  I admit to being surprised by the strength of my reaction—how dare the little bastards?  But then I had two thoughts: First, this would not happen in my town.  Or it never has.  I like to think that where I’m known I am respected,. Second, I thought, “So this is what it feels like to be a victim of discrimination?”  I, who have been safely white, middle class, educated, privileged, was being treated like a devalued minority. It was a first for me.  And an experience for which I am thankful. Annoyed as I was, it’s instructive to know how it feels to be an “other”.

And then I remembered myself as a kid, in less enlightened times, when my friends and I would run around the school playground, our fingers pulling up the ends of our eyes, yelling “Ching, ching Chinaman.” In those darker days, people referred to others as wops or pollacks.  Just the other day, Candida and I watched a Spanish language version of Lady and the Tramp, a movie I watched as a child maybe 58 years ago, in which are featured a couple of stereotypical Italians with black mustaches, Tony (of course) and his buddy, who make spaghetti and sing with a concertina. Everybody thought it was a good joke back then.

And this experience, both the insult and the memory of similar behavior 50 years ago, is like ones I risk boring other volunteers with every chance I get.  Most of our volunteers are in their 20’s, often their early twenties.  They are rightfully outraged by all kinds of conditions here.  But many of those conditions were the same in the States in my lifetime.  For instance, piropos, the proposition/sexual taunts that young female volunteers suffer from men are not unlike the situation in American cities until well after the 60’s when as a young woman I could not walk down the street without hearing whistles and cat calls and rude propositions. They emitted from the “hard hats”, working guys who felt privileged to say whatever they wanted to a woman, or from male employers who made propositions with impunity.

Or there’s the matter of trash.  Yes, it’s a problem here.  It’s pretty much everywhere.  It is the norm to throw away on the street whatever you don’t want to carry—plastic bags, bottles, paper.  Trash is thrown out of bus and taxi windows, thrown on the floor in classrooms by students, tossed without a thought. Volunteers are pretty outraged.  But I remember my family doing the same as we traveled the new national highways in the 50’s.  The countryside was littered with refuse. Sometimes people threw newspapers out the window and the only protest came if they hit your windshield and made it hard to see. My folks emptied ashtrays out in the parking lots when they stopped at restaurants.  Consciousness as yet had not been raised; people just tossed what they didn’t want.

Then there is the sexism and its ugly brother domestic violence.  Big problem here, but so was it in the United States.  It wasn’t till after the woman’s movement revived in the early seventies that the problem even began to be spotlighted and new legislation passed.   Courts penalized the police when they failed to take a domestic violence situation seriously. Even now in the States we have domestic violence shelters and caseworkers, domestic violence courts and lawyers.

So what does all this mean?  Only that things can get better here in Nicaragua.  The country has been held back for so many years.  There are problems of all kinds to address, but the good news is that change can happen.  It won’t be like this for ever—or doesn’t have to be.  People can be re-educated.  It won’t be easy here.  Economic issues are paramount.  Nicaragua isn’t the booming economy the U.S. was in the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when the problems began to be addressed.  But maybe by tying social progress to economic progress, as in the case of tourism where the economic advantage of more tourists is linked to a cleaner, less macho society, faster progress can be made.

As far as the three little creeps, when I go back to that town I’m watching for them.  I’m trying to think of  a response a little snappier than ignoring them: maybe I’ll comment that the pobrecitos can’t speak Spanish—how sad!  Nah, won’t work—they’ll just laugh and say, “shmashana litush.”