One day last week, I was served bread for breakfast,
yuca at Clemente’s house, pifá (peach palm, a starchy potato-like fruit) at Dioselina
& Valentín’s house, returned to Clemente’s for a bowl of rice, and then
chicheme (kind of like an oatmeal drink, but made of corn). Five different
carbs/starches all before dinner! And then on October 3rd (hope you got the
reference in the post title) it was 6 pm and I had eaten nothing but two bowls
of plain rice all day. I was at Isaiah & Casilda’s house in a hungry, bad mood - and then they bring
out a bowl of rice with onions and a piece of chicken! It was the first
Gallinan chicken I had eaten in Cerro Gallina. Seeing my excitement, Isaiah
exclaimed “Your first
pollo de patio! A gift from
God!” And indeed, it was. It was exactly what I needed.
I’ve now been in site for a little over three weeks,
minus two days out for the Comarca regional meeting and a meeting with MINSA
(Ministerio de Salud, or Ministry of Health). Most days, I’ve been pasearing. There are 37 households in the
community, and I’ve visited each home at least once
so far. I’ve been trying to get everyone’s names down and do a rough census.
So far I’ve counted about 200 people, but I’m sure my estimate is on the low
end. Most houses are a mixture of parents, kids, grandkids, and random
relatives. There always seem to be visitors from afuera and neighbors over so
it’s hard to tell who lives where. At
one house, it was basically eight kids and a grandpa just staring at me while I
tried to make conversation. And then someone pulled out their cameraphone and
took a video of me sitting there struggling to talk to all of these blank
faces. That was kind of painful. But then there are other houses where I’ve stayed for several hours
chatting with the families! I’ve been read Bible passages. I’ve been given a Bible in Ngäbere and told
to read it out loud. I’ve given and
received a lot of impromptu English/Ngäbere lessons.
People have asked me to explain everything from the differences between North
and South Korea to why Jews keep Sabbath on Saturday. Countless people have
asked me if I want to be set up with a Ngäbe boyfriend,
upon hearing that I’m single. I’ve been fed yuca soup so delicious
I wanted to cry and gluey crema so bad that tears were
actually rolling down my face as I tried to gulp it down. I hiked with a family
to a high school in a neighboring community for a festival and ended up judging a cooking competition. I went to a soccer
tournament with my host brothers and got hit really hard in the face with a
ball, which then became the local bochinche. “We heard you
got hit in the face, Bei! Ha ha ha ha” I spent a
morning macheteing the church yard. I went to a work junta and harvested rice.
I helped a family take flow measurements for a potential ojo de agua. I’ve gotten helplessly lost in the
middle of a rice field during a thunderstorm trying to hike from one house to
another. I took a wrong path one day and wound up in another community on the
next ridgeline…
My life is so bizarre, you guys.
The Ngäbe people are blunt. They don’t give or take any shit. People have told me that I
have a huge head, that I would look much prettier if I had long hair, that my
pronunciation is really bad. Learning Ngäbere has been slow going, and I get scolded multiple
times a day for my lack of progress. Historically, it is an oral language. Only
when missionaries came to study the population was the written language
created. There’s not really any need to write Ngäbere because
all official writing is done in Spanish, and the kids only speak, read, and
write Spanish in schools. I am 100% a visual learner, so learning it orally has
been tricky for me. But Peace Corps gave us a dictionary and basic grammar
guide, which have been helpful.
Tonight I’m spending the night at the Peace Corps house in San
Felix. We don’t get vacation the first three
months, but we can take a couple of personal days a month to do whatever we
need to do out of site. I definitely needed today to recharge: my mind and
body, my electronics, my snack supply…:) Coming up,
I have scheduled and invited everyone to my first community-wide meeting (!!)
this Thursday, I’m going to visit the artesian group
in Cerro Mesa, going to help a family with some water-level land surveying next
week, hiking to my neighbor Michael’s site to help him with a handwashing charla later
this month, but mostly just continuing on the pasear grind!
No comments:
Post a Comment