Sunday, December 31, 2006
More Christmas Cheer
Christmas Day I went to another Pase del Niños outside of Cuenca and then went with my friend Tere and her family to eat carne asado. Early the next morning I headed back down south and had lunch with Ashley and Selena in Machala. Then I spent another three hours on the bus to Zaruma, an old mining town a few hours inland from the coast, where I visited Benito and Sara. There are rolling green mountains and banana plants and old wooden architecture dating to the 1500´s and there is excellent coffee, which if all goes according to plan a few lucky family members of mine will receive in the States. We did a hike in the rain and then I lay in Benito´s hammock and read more John Dos Passos. Then it was back to Cuenca where I met up with Angie, a friend of Risa and Jordan from Quito. She talked me into going out to Cajas National Park to spend the night and I packed my sleeping bag and my heavy winter jacket (Cajas is really high up) , but after a long day of hiking with a lot of stuff on our back, Angie decided to my great relief that really all the time you needed in Cajas is one day and we went back to Cuenca and slept very soundly in my apartment. I thought that I was getting into better shape, but found that hiking at high altitude was really almost more than I could handle. Tonight we have a little dinner party with friends here and hopefully will get to see the New Years celebration in Cuenca.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
And the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day
Kirsty McCall and the Pogues have a song..."When you first took my hand on that cold Christmas Eve, you promised me Broadway was waiting for me..."
I don´t have that around here, but I did listen to 2000 miles by the Pretenders about 30 times yesterday.
Friday I had a party where 30 people came. We danced so much that light fixture in the bakery downstairs fell in and we had to pop it back into the ceiling. I´d hate to have to pay for repairs or so I hope it stays. A couple Peace Corps pals came and people from my organization came and mixed a respectable amount. I had guests who came from out of town in the house until this morning, and they were kind enough to relieve me of most of the leftover booze that everyone brought.
On Christmas Eve, they have a big children´s parade on Christmas Day here, people must come in from all over the province, because when I was walking to the parade I saw a family spreading out a big picnic on the grass, while their llamas rested peacefully by the river. You see men in short pants and the traditional hat, and lots of the brightly colored flowered skirts that traditional Ecuadorians in Azuay wear. I saw a lot of the parade, dodging in and out of the floats while I was walking to a Christmas party, there were lots of children dressed in traditional Ecuadorian costume, or dressed up like shepherds, like angels, riding in floats made from a pickup trucks draped in glistening satin. Many of the trucks are hung with crackers, bottles of liquor, packages of cookies, and the effect is dramatic, everything is colorful and abundant and glittery. I went to a Christmas party in a home for women and children in domestic violence situations where I am hoping to do some work in the the New Year. They had a mass and then gave out presents to the mothers and the children. I was pretty impressed by how nice party they had for them during what must be a terrible time, especially here in Ecuador where family is perhaps the most important thing.
I don´t have that around here, but I did listen to 2000 miles by the Pretenders about 30 times yesterday.
Friday I had a party where 30 people came. We danced so much that light fixture in the bakery downstairs fell in and we had to pop it back into the ceiling. I´d hate to have to pay for repairs or so I hope it stays. A couple Peace Corps pals came and people from my organization came and mixed a respectable amount. I had guests who came from out of town in the house until this morning, and they were kind enough to relieve me of most of the leftover booze that everyone brought.
On Christmas Eve, they have a big children´s parade on Christmas Day here, people must come in from all over the province, because when I was walking to the parade I saw a family spreading out a big picnic on the grass, while their llamas rested peacefully by the river. You see men in short pants and the traditional hat, and lots of the brightly colored flowered skirts that traditional Ecuadorians in Azuay wear. I saw a lot of the parade, dodging in and out of the floats while I was walking to a Christmas party, there were lots of children dressed in traditional Ecuadorian costume, or dressed up like shepherds, like angels, riding in floats made from a pickup trucks draped in glistening satin. Many of the trucks are hung with crackers, bottles of liquor, packages of cookies, and the effect is dramatic, everything is colorful and abundant and glittery. I went to a Christmas party in a home for women and children in domestic violence situations where I am hoping to do some work in the the New Year. They had a mass and then gave out presents to the mothers and the children. I was pretty impressed by how nice party they had for them during what must be a terrible time, especially here in Ecuador where family is perhaps the most important thing.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Ocean Drive
Sometime its holiday blues, and sometimes its PMS, and sometimes its the neverending roller coaster of living in a foreign country. But it seems important to me to give some airtime to to the darker moments. The time when my way of being awkward, ill-coordinated, impatient, loud, anxious, long-winded, seemingly snobby (although I almost never mean to be), or self destructive (although its never anything grave, mostly gratuitous eating) rear up to form a picture of someone for whom I have little patience or affection. In New York, these times could be attributed to situation, job stress, and press of living in the city. Here, speaking Spanish everyday, doing this thing I had in mind for years, often alleviates these demons. Everywhere is real, palpable evidence that I can extend beyond my boundaries, cultivate relationships across cultures, handle quotidian and existential challenges. And I can laugh at myself and say well this thing or that thing I am just going to fuck up and that will be fine. No harm done. But your brain follows you on your travels, carrying in its suitcase its same learned habits, and screens and filters and occasional downward spirals.
And living outside of your tierra aggravates it too. Just when everything is sublime and wonderful, the tide changes and you can´t communicate with someone when you think you should be able to, or you don´t understand why something works out the way it does, but decide its better not to ask. Today I found myself being extremely new yorkish, first at the cab stand in front of the Supermaxi, losing my patience with a man who tried to take my cab, and then unsuccessfully trying to antagonize my landlady for giving me my power bills at completely irregular intervals. Then I turned my antagonism on myself by going to my first salsa class since April, on the excuse that I am supposed to be going dancing in Guayaquil for my birthday, which opened the field for self-castigation along the lines above.
And I know from long experience that the respite is not hard to come by. Drinks with a friend, a new shirt, a distracting book, a good journal entry all usually do the trick. Sometimes just sleeping it off or letting my hormones readjust makes all the difference. The sun comes out or my period comes and I´m quirky, smart, provocative, and well-travelled again.
We all have little heartbreaks that we never recover from entirely, whether its a family member, or a lover, or a life circumstance that didn´t go the way we wanted it to. And embracing the sadness that sometimes comes from them is, I suppose, part of the fun of it all. Lucinda Williams says, If we live in a world without tears, how would scars find skin to etch themselves into?...How would broken find the bone?
PS. Fabulous Ecuadorian souvenir for the reader who correctly determines the musical reference in the title line!! Anyone can play!
And living outside of your tierra aggravates it too. Just when everything is sublime and wonderful, the tide changes and you can´t communicate with someone when you think you should be able to, or you don´t understand why something works out the way it does, but decide its better not to ask. Today I found myself being extremely new yorkish, first at the cab stand in front of the Supermaxi, losing my patience with a man who tried to take my cab, and then unsuccessfully trying to antagonize my landlady for giving me my power bills at completely irregular intervals. Then I turned my antagonism on myself by going to my first salsa class since April, on the excuse that I am supposed to be going dancing in Guayaquil for my birthday, which opened the field for self-castigation along the lines above.
And I know from long experience that the respite is not hard to come by. Drinks with a friend, a new shirt, a distracting book, a good journal entry all usually do the trick. Sometimes just sleeping it off or letting my hormones readjust makes all the difference. The sun comes out or my period comes and I´m quirky, smart, provocative, and well-travelled again.
We all have little heartbreaks that we never recover from entirely, whether its a family member, or a lover, or a life circumstance that didn´t go the way we wanted it to. And embracing the sadness that sometimes comes from them is, I suppose, part of the fun of it all. Lucinda Williams says, If we live in a world without tears, how would scars find skin to etch themselves into?...How would broken find the bone?
PS. Fabulous Ecuadorian souvenir for the reader who correctly determines the musical reference in the title line!! Anyone can play!
Santa Claus
So yesterday I got three slamming packages, two from my folks and one from Jenny, my childhood friend. The one from my folks had Ivory soap, the Pretenders greatest hits, Paul Mitchel hair product (no product placement here, folks) the Metropolitan Art Book and Desk Calender, which for the first time in fifteen years has something other than "Flowers" or "Impressionists" as its theme. Finally there were all three volumes of John Dos Passos´s U.S.A., which I asked for without realizing it is actually three separate books. I have already read a third of the first one, and its really cool. So much cooler than his rival and one-time friend Ernest Hemingway. OK, I have only actually read books about Hemingway, spedifically how much of a jerk Ernest Hemingway was, so take my commentary with a grain of salt. The point being, if you´re interested in American history or labor history so far this is a book for you.
The other package from Jenny was vintage Monopoly which the kids from downstairs have already discovered and taken full advantage of. Last night found me aggressively pitching to sell two railroads for Boardwalk, to Gabriela, who I think is like twelve, and later in the game I felt bad for taking advantage of her. And later in the game I just wondered when it was going to be over. These kids were way better sports than I ever was. Watching Jefferson, the older brother cheat so that his little sister wouldn´t lose brought back my faith in humanity, or at least kids.
The other package from Jenny was vintage Monopoly which the kids from downstairs have already discovered and taken full advantage of. Last night found me aggressively pitching to sell two railroads for Boardwalk, to Gabriela, who I think is like twelve, and later in the game I felt bad for taking advantage of her. And later in the game I just wondered when it was going to be over. These kids were way better sports than I ever was. Watching Jefferson, the older brother cheat so that his little sister wouldn´t lose brought back my faith in humanity, or at least kids.
Various
Assorted things I have been needing to blog about, worth mentioning:
- Following the bad haircut that made me cry, I had one completely free from the drama or overpaying, not getting what I wanted to, or having to summon the volition to get myself to a hair salon. The hairdresser that does HIV prevention with transvetite sex workers here in Cuenca was in the office for a meeting and afterwards I noticed he was unfurling an apron to give the secretary´s teenage daughter a haircut in the middle of the office. Dumbfounded, like it was almost too good to believe, I asked him if he could cut my hair too. Not only could he, it turned out he would do it for $2. That was about 4 weeks ago and I´m still savoring my good fortune and very happy with how its growing out.
- Going way back, the first week or so I was in my apartment, I half woke up in the middle of the night because there was a mariachi serenade going on, in what sounded like my guest room. It was basically under my guest room, for the house next door, and I would have thought that I dreamed it, except that I got up and looked out the window and saw them in the street. Mariachis are naturally not the least bit Ecuadorian, but they seem to turn up at festive events now and again.
- Helping the kid whose parent run the bakery downstairs translate three paragraphs on Simon Bolivar from English into Spanish. He has no idea how I cool I thought it was. I found out I know, um, less than your average seventh grader in Ecuador knows about Simon Bolivar. The next homework he needed help with was about water supply, which was nowhere near as interesting. A side note about the state of English teaching here, its absolutely wretched. I can´t think of a worse way to teach a language that to translate it from the intended into the one you already know, but no one is asking me.
- Except in my office, they kind of are. I have taught a couple English classes to them and find that my practice teaching workers in New York was good prep for Ecuadorian and Chilean professionals. The two classes I have come up with stuff that seemed to be surprisingly engaging and fun. The first class I taught Woody Guthrie´s Birds and Ships, set to music by Billy Bragg and performed by Natalie Merchant. For about three weeks the white board on the ground floor had my class notes up on it and said. "Leftist" and "This Guitar Kills Fascists" and then had the lyrics. My soul grows stormy/ and my heart grows wild/My love rides a ship on the sea.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
In the jungle the mighty jungle
So last weekend I took "vacation" from my office and took off for San Juan Bosco for Thanksgiving, a little town in Morona Santiago in el Oriente. I started the trip off inauspisciously by buying a ticket on the wrong bus to the wrong town, mainly because I failed to read the email of Dave, the volunteer who was organizing it. Of course I was not able to return the bad ticket and I now have an $8.50 ticket to Macas, which I think is about twelve hours away. I have to use by Saturday. Sad. I don´t think that is going to happen.
San Juan Bosco is 36 miles from Cuenca, but the bus ride is 6 hours, and I couldn´t fathom how this could really be true until we hit a gravel road about an hour after leaving and started to wind through green hills. It was really beautiful and really slow. On hour number four, we came over the ridge of a mountain and a beautiful valley opened up to us, with a tiny shimmer of white in the bottom of it. That is San Juan Bosco, they told us, another two hours from where we were. Once we got to the town, being the the valley was just as stunning, the first morning after we arrived I found myself in blistering sun, surrounded by towering green ridges, one piled up behind the other, covered by clouds. Everything is topped off by the Pan de Azucar, or Sugarloaf, which is this Close Encounters like mountain that stands over everything. The volunteers who lived there had engaged pretty much the entire town in welcoming us, the first night the jovenes cooked dinner for us at the colegio or the high school.
Thanksgiving Day Dave and his family had set up ovens and gas ranges by this picnic site at the fairgrounds along this lovely green river and cooked turkey and comote, a purple root vegetable with marshmellows and lots of vegetables and stuffing. I got suckered into being responsible for making pumpkin pie, only everyone´s most basic and traditional comfort food. No pressure there. It turned out well although I had a couple bad moments carrying around two bags of pumpkin that I packed in from Cuenca. They were starting to turn in the jungle heat, and I don´t think I will ever forget the smell of rotting pumpkin. It was the smell of my social demise during the weekend. I had visions of being remembered as the girl who tried and failed to make that terrible pumpkin pie. Once I finally got the meat into a pan of boiling water, I calmed down and we sat at the picnic table and made pie crusts. It turned out that there was enough for everyone and it tasted really good. Really people made a bg show of how delicious it was, although I don´t think the Ecuadorians really understood the appeal of pastel de calabaza.
Friday Dave´s family roasted a pig for us by another river and we saw them clean entrails out in the river and I saw the creation of my arch enemy, morsilla, as they filled the intestines with cabbage and onions. I didn´t stick around for that though, but took off with some Sarah, who lives in a little city near Cuenca and Zoe to her site in Bomboiza, which is a Shuar community near Gualaquiza. I mean we tried to take off but, as my Zoe said, no one really ever seems to leave San Juan Bosco and it was more complicated than we thought. We had plans to catch the 4:30 bus and got to town plenty in advance only to find that we bus had come early, which of course almost never happens. We sat on the corner of the road to Gualaquiza and made friends with the neighborhood boys. (Digression: I´m reveling in the local color a little here, so bear with me. The whole weekend, I had this sense, this is the real Peace Corps experience, and my life in my pretty, modern, well organized, Cuenca is just a mere shadow of it. The grass is always greener, right?) Eventually we did catch a bus to Gualaquiza, and another bus out to my Zoe´s village, and I when we got off at the road that you walk out to where they live, we were completely floored by how dark it was. As we were falling asleep Zoe said reassuringly that she thought all the tarantullas had been killed when she fumigated, but despite that, I slept soundly and woke up to the light shining through the cracks of the cabin walls.
The Shuar are an indigenous group that live in the Oriente, and I think we had some ambitious plans to visit the cultural center, but we ended up lying around with the Zoe and the other volunteer, Ulla in their lovely homes, making spaghetti and hot chocolate and recovering from the accion de dar gracias. In the evening it was time to get into Gualaquiza to catch a night bus back to home, and we scored a ride with the principal of a school who immediately divined we were Peace Corps volunteers and talked non-stop for the entire ride about how he learned english in Ossining, which was a great relief to not have to make awkward conversation. Ulla gave us a muscle relaxer to split during the night bus, and Sarah and I agreed that we both could have stood to be a little more relaxed. At one point during the night the driver asked everyone to get off so that the bus could get up the hill, but we arrived safely and slept til noon.
San Juan Bosco is 36 miles from Cuenca, but the bus ride is 6 hours, and I couldn´t fathom how this could really be true until we hit a gravel road about an hour after leaving and started to wind through green hills. It was really beautiful and really slow. On hour number four, we came over the ridge of a mountain and a beautiful valley opened up to us, with a tiny shimmer of white in the bottom of it. That is San Juan Bosco, they told us, another two hours from where we were. Once we got to the town, being the the valley was just as stunning, the first morning after we arrived I found myself in blistering sun, surrounded by towering green ridges, one piled up behind the other, covered by clouds. Everything is topped off by the Pan de Azucar, or Sugarloaf, which is this Close Encounters like mountain that stands over everything. The volunteers who lived there had engaged pretty much the entire town in welcoming us, the first night the jovenes cooked dinner for us at the colegio or the high school.
Thanksgiving Day Dave and his family had set up ovens and gas ranges by this picnic site at the fairgrounds along this lovely green river and cooked turkey and comote, a purple root vegetable with marshmellows and lots of vegetables and stuffing. I got suckered into being responsible for making pumpkin pie, only everyone´s most basic and traditional comfort food. No pressure there. It turned out well although I had a couple bad moments carrying around two bags of pumpkin that I packed in from Cuenca. They were starting to turn in the jungle heat, and I don´t think I will ever forget the smell of rotting pumpkin. It was the smell of my social demise during the weekend. I had visions of being remembered as the girl who tried and failed to make that terrible pumpkin pie. Once I finally got the meat into a pan of boiling water, I calmed down and we sat at the picnic table and made pie crusts. It turned out that there was enough for everyone and it tasted really good. Really people made a bg show of how delicious it was, although I don´t think the Ecuadorians really understood the appeal of pastel de calabaza.
Friday Dave´s family roasted a pig for us by another river and we saw them clean entrails out in the river and I saw the creation of my arch enemy, morsilla, as they filled the intestines with cabbage and onions. I didn´t stick around for that though, but took off with some Sarah, who lives in a little city near Cuenca and Zoe to her site in Bomboiza, which is a Shuar community near Gualaquiza. I mean we tried to take off but, as my Zoe said, no one really ever seems to leave San Juan Bosco and it was more complicated than we thought. We had plans to catch the 4:30 bus and got to town plenty in advance only to find that we bus had come early, which of course almost never happens. We sat on the corner of the road to Gualaquiza and made friends with the neighborhood boys. (Digression: I´m reveling in the local color a little here, so bear with me. The whole weekend, I had this sense, this is the real Peace Corps experience, and my life in my pretty, modern, well organized, Cuenca is just a mere shadow of it. The grass is always greener, right?) Eventually we did catch a bus to Gualaquiza, and another bus out to my Zoe´s village, and I when we got off at the road that you walk out to where they live, we were completely floored by how dark it was. As we were falling asleep Zoe said reassuringly that she thought all the tarantullas had been killed when she fumigated, but despite that, I slept soundly and woke up to the light shining through the cracks of the cabin walls.
The Shuar are an indigenous group that live in the Oriente, and I think we had some ambitious plans to visit the cultural center, but we ended up lying around with the Zoe and the other volunteer, Ulla in their lovely homes, making spaghetti and hot chocolate and recovering from the accion de dar gracias. In the evening it was time to get into Gualaquiza to catch a night bus back to home, and we scored a ride with the principal of a school who immediately divined we were Peace Corps volunteers and talked non-stop for the entire ride about how he learned english in Ossining, which was a great relief to not have to make awkward conversation. Ulla gave us a muscle relaxer to split during the night bus, and Sarah and I agreed that we both could have stood to be a little more relaxed. At one point during the night the driver asked everyone to get off so that the bus could get up the hill, but we arrived safely and slept til noon.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Fruitastic
So when we started in the Peace Corps they gave us little tips about shopping in the market, how to bargain, how to ask for the yappa or the extra. I went with my host mother in Cayambe to the market in Ibarra and watched the way she mildly refused to buy anything until it was approximately a third of the quoted price. This is this stuff that Peace Corps does really well, how to go and do all the things in your community that every else does, and not look like a tourist doing it. The advantage of living a ten minute walk from a huge market, is that you can buy things there, and its way cheaper than at the Supermaxi, so off I went yesterday with my little basket willed to me by another volunteer who was leaving. "Use it well" she said to me, "take it to the market."
So there I was in the middle of El Arenal, like any Ecuadorian housewife, with a list of things to get, prepared to bargain for the best price. The trick though is, nobody sells anyone two avocados in the market, so when I asked how much they were, I heard four for a dollar. Not wanting to be cheated I made this face like I was thinking it was "demaciado caro" and couldn´t she give me five? The señora was happy to comply. And I walked off to the next stall feeling very good about myself. You can probably see where this is going. There were mangoes, where a similar negotiation was successfully executed and I found myself with enough of them to feed several families for a week. The thing is though that I got a blender last week and so I have a monton of time on my hands, so every morning I make myself a smoothie. Theoretically most of the fruit I got can be put in a blender with yoghurt, so the plan is to eat it all, but when I got home and cleaned everything and put it away, it became clear I got an extraordinary amount of fruits and veggies for one person.
Here´s a an inventory of everything. I figured when I got home that I spent $5.60.
6 Mangoes
1 bag of blackberries
1 bunch (8) carrots
5 avocados
15 tomatoes
1 bag (20) mandarin oranges
1 bag (20) apples, small
cilantro
1/2 a bunch of bananas
I´m eating.
So there I was in the middle of El Arenal, like any Ecuadorian housewife, with a list of things to get, prepared to bargain for the best price. The trick though is, nobody sells anyone two avocados in the market, so when I asked how much they were, I heard four for a dollar. Not wanting to be cheated I made this face like I was thinking it was "demaciado caro" and couldn´t she give me five? The señora was happy to comply. And I walked off to the next stall feeling very good about myself. You can probably see where this is going. There were mangoes, where a similar negotiation was successfully executed and I found myself with enough of them to feed several families for a week. The thing is though that I got a blender last week and so I have a monton of time on my hands, so every morning I make myself a smoothie. Theoretically most of the fruit I got can be put in a blender with yoghurt, so the plan is to eat it all, but when I got home and cleaned everything and put it away, it became clear I got an extraordinary amount of fruits and veggies for one person.
Here´s a an inventory of everything. I figured when I got home that I spent $5.60.
6 Mangoes
1 bag of blackberries
1 bunch (8) carrots
5 avocados
15 tomatoes
1 bag (20) mandarin oranges
1 bag (20) apples, small
cilantro
1/2 a bunch of bananas
I´m eating.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Homo-sapiens
So, when I found out I was going to Ecuador, my mom ventured most delicately, wouldn´t it end up being hard for me living in a Catholic country? Wouldn´t it be kind of homophobic there? I sort of discounted the concern though, I figured that it would be fine, and really it has been. Because I work with a bunch of people who do sexual health and HIV prevention it hasn´t ever been difficult to find the sexual diversity here. So although everyone in Ecuador thinks of Cuenca as a conservative and rigid place, I managed to find and make friends in the gay community without any difficulty. Maybe its the extranjera or foreigner dynamic or that fact that Cuence is really very small, but its been easier to make gay and lesbian friends here than it was in New York.
All this is leading up to the fact that on Friday, I found myself in a training with a group of wealthy women who are going to be volunteers with new mothers from this hospital for low-income women. And we did the homophobia section of the training. And some of the stuff that the women said was pretty intense. Now, I always catch myself when I find myself marveling at how racist or homophobic people are here, because I know in all honesty that for everyone open-minded forward thinking person in the US, there is someone making the very same jokes about black people or gay people at home that they make here. The difference being that folks from the US, even if they are racist, have a self consciousness or shame about it that I have yet to encounter here. The most racist jokes that I have ever heard, I have heard here, and people never preface them with the evasive disclaimer, "well I´m not racist, but..."
So whatever might have heard from some of las señoras, I know I could probably just as well have heard in Greensboro, North Carolina where I grew up, but leaving that aside, I do have to say that it was striking how ignorant a portion of these women were. Most of them were only a few years older than me, aggressively skinny, with exhaustively straightened hair, and all wearing one incarnation or another of the same black stiletto dress boots and designer jeans. What was interesting was that they were dying to talk about gay people. They had stuff they wanted to get off their chest. The comments ran along the line of: It´s a disease. Anal sex is what caused AIDS. If its not genetic and its not an illness, then what is it? Gay men and lesbians are half men or half women.
This was the first workshop I had been to with this group, so fortunately I was in the role of the observer and I kept my mouth studiously shut through the whole thing. The woman who was facilitating the group was remarkable, and did a great job of responding to and debunking a whole host of myths that would have rendered me speechless in english, much less in spanish. After I awhile I came to the uncomfortable realization that I was deriving a perverse pleasure from the situation. I had the unsettling sense that listening to these women, who by all accounts might feel superior to me given that I am not married, not skinny, without kids, living by myself in a foreign country on a shoestring budget, I was enjoying the feeling of moral superiority over them a little too much. I caught myself eagerly craning my neck to hear the next comment of the most backwards of the bunch. I´m not proud of that, but that´s what happened sitting there in that room, walking through that parking lot and realizing that the fifteen monstrous SUV´s filling the parking lot belonged to these women. I was better than them. I´m a volunteer after all. I´m here to do something good.
And of course I have to admit that they are as well, giving up time with their families to learn how to be volunteers. They all sat in the room through the whole thing, they listened to the facilitator when she tried to challenge them. I can hardly fault them for being products of their culture. I still have the typical New York reaction when someone asks me for money, I freeze and mumble how I´m sorry and walk on by. And when I do give someone food or change, it´s more for me, to soothe my angst about how things are in the world, than for them. It´s all part and parcel of the same thing, more or less.
All this is leading up to the fact that on Friday, I found myself in a training with a group of wealthy women who are going to be volunteers with new mothers from this hospital for low-income women. And we did the homophobia section of the training. And some of the stuff that the women said was pretty intense. Now, I always catch myself when I find myself marveling at how racist or homophobic people are here, because I know in all honesty that for everyone open-minded forward thinking person in the US, there is someone making the very same jokes about black people or gay people at home that they make here. The difference being that folks from the US, even if they are racist, have a self consciousness or shame about it that I have yet to encounter here. The most racist jokes that I have ever heard, I have heard here, and people never preface them with the evasive disclaimer, "well I´m not racist, but..."
So whatever might have heard from some of las señoras, I know I could probably just as well have heard in Greensboro, North Carolina where I grew up, but leaving that aside, I do have to say that it was striking how ignorant a portion of these women were. Most of them were only a few years older than me, aggressively skinny, with exhaustively straightened hair, and all wearing one incarnation or another of the same black stiletto dress boots and designer jeans. What was interesting was that they were dying to talk about gay people. They had stuff they wanted to get off their chest. The comments ran along the line of: It´s a disease. Anal sex is what caused AIDS. If its not genetic and its not an illness, then what is it? Gay men and lesbians are half men or half women.
This was the first workshop I had been to with this group, so fortunately I was in the role of the observer and I kept my mouth studiously shut through the whole thing. The woman who was facilitating the group was remarkable, and did a great job of responding to and debunking a whole host of myths that would have rendered me speechless in english, much less in spanish. After I awhile I came to the uncomfortable realization that I was deriving a perverse pleasure from the situation. I had the unsettling sense that listening to these women, who by all accounts might feel superior to me given that I am not married, not skinny, without kids, living by myself in a foreign country on a shoestring budget, I was enjoying the feeling of moral superiority over them a little too much. I caught myself eagerly craning my neck to hear the next comment of the most backwards of the bunch. I´m not proud of that, but that´s what happened sitting there in that room, walking through that parking lot and realizing that the fifteen monstrous SUV´s filling the parking lot belonged to these women. I was better than them. I´m a volunteer after all. I´m here to do something good.
And of course I have to admit that they are as well, giving up time with their families to learn how to be volunteers. They all sat in the room through the whole thing, they listened to the facilitator when she tried to challenge them. I can hardly fault them for being products of their culture. I still have the typical New York reaction when someone asks me for money, I freeze and mumble how I´m sorry and walk on by. And when I do give someone food or change, it´s more for me, to soothe my angst about how things are in the world, than for them. It´s all part and parcel of the same thing, more or less.