A Large Evangelist, and Fluency Is Like Enlightenment

1/30/08

Yesterday around noon I heard some snippets of what sounded like English from the street outside my house.  It made me remember an experience from about halfway through training, which I related on the blog, when I woke up, heard the voices of my host family, and thought to myself, “They’re still speaking Spanish?  Will they never quit?”  At that point hearing English outside my house might not have surprised me so much (“Finally, someone talking normal”), but yesterday it immediately caught my attention.  Even more so when I heard the neighbors saying, “Yes, he’s called Gabriel” (in Spanish).

I went outside to see a very large gringo accompanied by a young Salvadoran man.  The gringo introduced himself as Mike and I tried to shake his hand, but mine could hardly fit all the way around it.  I invited them in and proffered them seats, Salvadoran style (which means saying “pase adelante, siéntese” ad nauseam).  It turns out he’s an evangelist from Front Royal, Virginia (or maybe just his brother’s from Front Royal) who’s helping a pastor set up a church in Corinto.  He’s visited El Salvador six times to help with construction of church buildings and that sort of thing.  His companion, Otto, translates.  Otto is a student of veterinary medicine at the University in San Miguel.  He was excited to meet me because he’s long held a great interest in the Peace Corps.  Unfortunately, his excitement faded fast when he learned that only U.S. citizens can join up.  Otto and I spoke in Spanish, although I had told Mike that I wasn’t fluent, and Otto’s official role was translator.  It was probably Otto’s way of deferring to me, which was kind, although I’m sure his English is at least as good as my Spanish.  Mike commented, “Sounds pretty dern fluent to me.”  I wish. 

I think fluency in a language is like enlightenment: “To encounter the absolute is not yet enlightenment” (from the Zen liturgy “The Identity of Relative and Absolute”).  I’ve had glimpses of fluency in certain conversations.  But that’s only under the best of conditions.  There are many factors that can hamper my Spanish, sometimes to the point that I feel like I can hardly function at all.  There are some people, particularly old men and young children, of whom I can hardly understand a word.  And there are others of whom I’m convinced I wouldn’t understand their meaning even if they were speaking in crystal clear English.  And, conversely, those to whom I say something in a variety of what seem to me to be clear ways and meet with an uncomprehending stare.  The words themselves are not the only thing necessary for mutually comprehensible conversation—I’ve known native English speakers with whom I have the same problem.  And of course the shouted repartee on the soccer field is often opaque to me, although I’ve learned that Spanish profanities can go just about anywhere in a sentence, and you don’t have to worry about suffixes like you do with English swearing.  So the path ahead is endless, but those few moments when the struggle of the language has fallen away have been delicious.

Don Teodulo

1/27/08

Don Teodulo is the person in my village I talk with and work with most.  He’s a short dynamo of a man, white skinned with a lined but youthful face.  I go to his little store, which sells sodas, chips, candles, soap, powdered milk, eggs, chicken, gum, sweet bread, batteries, and a few other necessities, to shoot the shit and say hi to the people who come in.  Teodulo’s house is just up the hill behind his store, surrounded by oranges, mangoes, and other trees he’s raised from the seed.  His wife is his polar opposite, a lumbering, sad-faced woman who never says a word.  He complains of her silence, saying, “She never talks!  She never says a word!  It bothers me.  I like it when people talk a lot, exchange ideas.  That’s what I do.”  He sometimes reminisces about the women he knew when he lived in the US, working in restaurants in Ft. Lauderdale.  One was a tall, beautiful Brazilian who liked to take him to the beach.  He told her he wasn’t married, despite the silent wife he’d left here.  I can just picture the Brazilian beauty towering over the small, pale Teodulo, guiding him around a south Florida beach.

When I came to visit my site in November, the first thing Teodulo talked to me about was Alcoholics Anonymous.  He even gave me a little book called “Twelve Traditions, Twelve Steps.”  He used to drink 24 beers in a night, but on February 7^th he will mark his 12^th year without touching a drop.  It calls for a party, to which he’s invited me.  I’m curious whether the people attending the party will be the same friends who gave him a gift basket for Christmas with a bottle of local Salvadoran vodka in it.  Teodulo got so mad—“They know I don’t drink!  They could have easily taken it out!—that he almost smashed the bottle on a rock in his yard.  Realizing, though, that that would leave glass shards in his yard, he restrained himself and later gave the bottle to me.  I haven’t tasted it.  I don’t have the highest hopes for vodka made in El Salvador.

You may recall the post in which I related a frustrating conversation between me and “my counterpart” about raising rabbits and grafting trees.  That was a conversation with Teodulo, but it’s the only one that’s been like that.  As my Spanish gets better and I get used to Teodulo’s odd way of broaching topics and switching between them, our conversations become more coherent and interesting.  Lately he’s taken to telling me how much he enjoys our conversations, and then painstakingly reviewing every topic we’ve covered over the course of the hour or hour and a half.  “We talked about all that!  How great is that!” 

Last night was a doozy.  Here, in Teodulo’s voice, with my interjections and comments edited out, are some of the more interesting bits:

“There’s less and less reason to want to go to the US.  Now that we have the same currency [following “dollarization” in 2001], I can hardly buy anything with $20 here.  Before, when I was working in the US we had the colon, and with $3,000 from my restaurant job in Miami I could buy tons of stuff.  That was so much money here when we had the colon!  But not anymore.  I think fewer and fewer Salvadorans will be going to the US because of that and also because of the strict immigration laws.  Immigration is getting ridiculously strict.  I just saw on the TV last night that they turned down a high-ranking member of the Honduran government for a visa.  It might sound crazy, but I could see the US failing because it kicked out all the Hispanics.  It could be their undoing.  There’s no one else to do all the jobs they do!  Lawn care, landscaping, restaurants, cleaning, construction…all Hispanics.  It could sink their economy.

“The US should let in anyone that wants to go for a year.  Most of those people will realize that the cost of living there is so high that they won’t want to stay.  It’s so expensive.  I know that from living there, and there’s no way I want to go back.  There are so many more costs.  Here you don’t have to pay rent, you don’t have to pay insurance, you can hardly work and still survive.  It’s an easier life.  I think if the US gave one-year work visas the people who went would realize that and return.  It would be better for everyone.

“Every country should have its own currency.  We’re the only country to switch to another’s currency.  And [current president] Tony Saca and [another politician] did it without asking the people.  They just decided themselves and did it all of the sudden.  Now we’re Americans, according to the currency.  We’ve lost identity.  Honduras doesn’t want to change their currency.  We need to have our own once again.

“Here’s another thing.  Every day, 400-500 people go to the American embassy in San Salvador to request a visa.  Each one has to pay $130 just to talk with the immigration agent, and they only grant 2 or 3 visas for every 100 people.  And the thing is, all that money goes to Tony Saca!  It’s the Salvadoran government collecting that money!  Saca and the US have tight ties.  They have an agreement where we can charge that money of the people going to the American embassy.  He doesn’t have our interest, the Salvadoran people’s interest, in mind, just his own.  We need to get all the people, the whole damn country, to go and stand in front of the American embassy and demand that they stop charging so much just to get turned down for a visa.  Imagine that!  If we got thousands of people to go protest, to all go on strike together and stand outside the embassy.  How crazy is that?  That’s totally crazy!  But it needs to happen!

“Here’s an idea for another protest.  We should get a huge group of people to go up to the border with some coyotes [the well-paid guides that lead border-crossers to Texas and Southern California] and put on a show, with costumes and singing and dancing.  Imagine that, the gringo border guards with their helmets and guns, and a huge group of people putting on a ridiculous show.”

His idea that the US might “fail” (fracasar was the word he used—a great verb cognate of “fracas”) if the government kicks out all the undocumented Hispanics struck me.  What a perspective!  A US citizen like me would never even think of that possibility, but for a Latin American man who’s seen his own and nearby countries’ governments fail and be replaced in his lifetime, it’s a viable idea.

I’m unconvinced that fewer and fewer people want to go to the US.  Even the unjust, dirt-poor wages there beat the pants off the price of unskilled labor here: $5 or $6 a day.  And when the man earning that $5 or $6 may need to pay $0.50 each way for a pickup ride to work and may have 5 kids at home, it’s way less than not enough.  If they can earn $5/hour in a field, or perhaps $7/hour in a restaurant, or even $10/hour for roofing work, that’s big incentive.  And in my personal experience, there are plenty of people perfectly willing to shell out the $6,000 or $7,000 to hire a coyote to cross the border.

It baffles me that the Salvadoran government apparently collects $130 from every Salvadoran who visits a US immigration agent in the US embassy.  Could I have understood correctly?  Crazy!

What I relate here is a distillation of only a part of last night’s conversation, of course.  We’re not always talking politics.  Much of what we talked about last night was dinámicas, the initiatives/group games that all Salvadorans looooove.  These are the things you might do at summer camp or in a church group to get to know each other, practice working as a team, re-energize, etc.  Think name games plus.  Teodulo’s description of the Spider Web, where you have to pass each member of the group through a web of strings strung between two trees, was hilarious.  I can’t wait to do that dinámica with Salvadorans, who are generally speaking not people you can imagine passing each other through the air.  I doubled over laughing just imagining it as Teodulo described his leadership seminar group’s efforts to pass a fat lady through the only remaining unused hole in the web, which was of course at the top.

The first time I met Teodulo he weirded me out with his unsettling conversational transitions.  But now we’re great friends.  I look forward to working with him for the next 22 months.

Books So Far

1/26/08

I entered Peace Corps expecting it to be a good couple of years for reading.  I’d heard a lot of testimonials that told me to expect to have lots of long stretches of idle time.  “If you weren’t a big reader before Peace Corps,” I was told, “you will be after.”  These reputed long stretches of idle time have not so far materialized, or at least not to the extent they were advertised.  Perhaps those other volunteers just had busier lives than I did in the States, which wouldn’t be hard to imagine.  I spent a lot of idle time in the famous couchboat as well as on the J’s’ famous fake leather couch, which is either black or blue. 

Anyway, there is some idle time, and I’ve gotten some reading done, but no more than I was accustomed to in the States.  For the enjoyment of you nerds out there, especially those of you who’ve been constantly requesting me to join Shelfari or GoodReads, which I don’t have time to do, sorry, here’s a list of what I’ve read so far.  The grades, of course, indicate about as much as SAT scores do about a kid’s intelligence (not much, that is).  But, much as the SAT is fun to take, the grades are fun to give, especially the one well-deserved D and the five well-deserved As, so there they are.

In Patagonia                                                                         Bruce Chatwin             A

To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever                           Will Blythe                   A-

Miguel Mármol                                                                     Roque Dalton              B+

God-Shaped Hole                                                                  Tiffany DeBartolo        D

The End of the Affair                                                            Graham Greene           A

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test                                           Tom Wolfe                  B+

If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Discontents            Gregory Rabassa         A-

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s                     Christopher Moore      B

Childhood Pal           

Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and               David G. Campbell      A

the Forest in Far Western Amazonia

The Kite Runner                                                                    Khaled Hosseini           A

Friday Night Lights                                                              H.G. Bissinger             B+

The Best American Science and Nature Writing  2005         ed. Jonathan Weiner    (I.P.)

The John McPhee Reader                                                     John McPhee               A

The Irresistible Revolution                                                    Shane Claiborne          A-

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman                                             Haruki Murakami         B-

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed                                                  John Irving                   (I.P.)

(I.P. means in progress.)  The Kite Runner is the most recent book to make me cry.  John McPhee is peerless, as always.  Haruki Murakami is the most frustrating short story writer I’ve ever read.  His sentences are good, but I can’t manage to get a thing out of his stories as a whole.  The Irresistible Revolution is an inspiring account of a Christian activist who takes seriously the things Jesus says about living among the poor and redistributive economics.  The End of the Affair is the most elegantly written and emotionally torturous book I’ve ever read.  Friday Night Lights was good, but the T.V. show is better.  I don’t think I’ve ever made that choice between the two media before.  To Hate Like This… is great if you like college basketball, but it also does a fair job at transcending the sports book pigeonhole.

I have a bunch more good books waiting in my hanging cardboard box bookshelves, so I’ll give another update after another dozen or so.

A List of Common Things Demanded of a Gringo

1/26/08

There are many persistent peculiarities about being a gringo in rural El Salvador.  There are the young men showing up at my door, sometimes arriving from other villages several kilometers away where they heard tell of me, asking me to teach them English in anticipation of their journeys “up north.”  I can’t offer them much, for I really have no time or interest to tutor them.  The English tutoring I’m willing to do, because it will have a more sustainable impact, is for the schoolteachers, who have to give English classes despite practically no knowledge of the language and extremely poor materials from the Ministry of Education.  The MinEd curriculum booklet is no more than a list of subjects; it includes no lesson plans, lists of vocabulary, or activities.  The available texts from non-MinEd sources are purely in English, and too advanced for the teachers to read.  The system makes no sense.  It also amazes me how few people know English in a country with a quarter of its population living in the U.S.  People who lived “up north” for over a decade often hardly know the most basic words.  To the plaintive young man who showed up at my door this morning I gave a copy of the English curriculum I was using in the school over the summer break and a speech about how it will be much easier to learn the language once he’s immersed in it.  I felt bad, but there’s nothing more I can do.

There are also the marriage proposals, which I fend off with jokes.  These either come from mischievous old men in regards to whatever young lady—often a very young lady—happens to be around, or, more sincerely, from young ladies’ mothers.  The former usually lead to well-received jokes and much guffawing.  The latter often lead to jokes that sound a little lame and (hopefully) a rapid change in subject matter. 

Then there are the questions about how much my possessions cost, like knives or shoes or my cell phone.  Little kids often ask these, but adults don’t feel awkward about it either.  There is no stigma about prying into someone’s financial matters, as there is in the States.  I usually answer these honestly, except when it comes to my MacBook.  Nothing else I own cost that much, and families here often have nicer stuff, despite the fact that many of them live in extreme poverty.  I’m uncertain about what the questioners get from my answers, because they rarely react at all.  Only when it comes to my cell phone do I get anything beyond a blank stare.  It’s a flip phone, a coveted rarity here, and when I tell them it was “free from the company” (which it was, with the plan), I get a mildly skeptical face.  On bad days, Salvadorans’ lack of reaction in conversation—on any subject matter—drives me crazy inside.  On good days I have the patience to keep circling round and round until I figure out what they’re driving at.

Finally there are the translation requests.  Later today I’m expecting the visit of a man who has a letter from U.S. Immigration he wants me to interpret.  And yesterday I met a man in the park in town who dictated me a letter to put down in English.  He sat down next to me as I was reading and digesting my lunch, preparing to visit the mayor after the lunch hour.  After some polite conversation he asked me if I knew German.  Failing that, English?  It turns out he had met a German priest to whom he wanted to write a letter, and English would do.  I was game, burning with curiosity about what the letter might be like.  So he gratefully hurried off to buy a couple of sheets of notebook paper.  I’m transcribing from memory a rough copy of the letter he dictated to me because I found it so fascinating.  This is a slight invasion of privacy, but I feel that the readership of this blog is far enough removed from the worlds of the Salvadoran man and the German priest that it will not be harmful.  Rather, I believe this man’s words (as I remember them) can convey an immediate sense of a situation not atypical among Salvadorans, and in that way do some good.

“Hello, it gives me great pleasure to write to you.  I remember you well, Father from Germany.  I remember with great fondness meeting you in San Salvador.  I am happy to be able to write to you.  I could not write before because my health was bad.  I greatly enjoyed the postcards of the Cathedral of Saint Barbara.  It is a beautiful church, inside and out.  It is in a beautiful location.  I would appreciate also receiving a photo of you.  There is also something else I want to say to you.  If there is any way you can help me immigrate to Germany so that I can find work to help my family here survive, I would be eternally grateful.  I am also sending you a picture of me so that you can remember who I am.  I hope to receive your photo as well.  I hope everything is well with you and your parishioners.  Perhaps you can write to me and tell me something about your country and what life is like there.  I am also enclosing a CD of Salvadoran music.  It is in Spanish, but I hope you enjoy it anyways.  I don’t speak any German, but I hope to learn.  I would like to learn what your life is like there.  I am an orphan.  My father was killed in the civil war during the 1980s.  Your church is very beautiful.  I live alone with my mother.  She is 40.  My father was 26 when he died and I was seven.  I would like to learn what your life is like there in Germany.  I suffered much during the war.  My family is very poor.  I hope you can write me with some way to help me immigrate to Germany.  There is a German embassy in our country.  I very much enjoyed meeting you in the capital.  I look forward to your response, and to having a photo of you.

Sincerely,

____________”

The way the man embeds an important—even desperate—request amid idle, polite words is quite typical of Salvadoran conversation, as is the sense of jarring back-and-forth.  It’s as if there’s a need to recharge with innocuous comments before every serious statement.  I’m glad I could help this man, although I doubt there’s much the priest can do for him besides send him a picture.  He was extremely grateful to me when I declined payment.

The Fair Came to Town

January 15, 2008

My pueblo’s feria, or yearly festival, took place last week. It’s difficult to overstate how big a deal the feria is. Many people return from the U.S. to visit their families and party, and many others who have fled to the cities of San Miguel and San Salvador also return, often in shiny SUVs that look out of place among the rusty pickups I’m used to seeing. It is the week to see and be seen, to strut your stuff for the hometown crowd.

Each neighborhood in town had its own day, plus one for good measure, bringing the length of the festival to 6 days. Each day began at 4:30 AM with a “serenade” of the neighborhood’s or the entire feria’s princess, consisting of a brass band blaring away. I’m so glad I don’t live in town. Throughout the day were events—piñatas, races, I don’t know what all; the only one I attended was a soccer game between a team from the highest level league and a bunch of Salvadorans from Washington, D.C. The sidelines and endlines were formed by solid walls of people. The players displayed classic Salvadoran soccer: quick and brutally physical with lots of turnovers. The homebodies won 2-1.

The centerpieces of the feria occurred at night: dances, rodeos, and rides. They had a full-size Ferris wheel in operation. As they always do, it was running at about 10x the RPM of the average gringo Ferris wheel, making for a much more adrenaline-rich ride. In front of me and the two volunteers I was with (when we were at the top, behind us when we were at the bottom) were four delighted little girls who teased us by insisting that the operator make it go even faster. Our horrified protests amused them. It seems the operator humored them—right before we got off he gave one round of extra-super-mega speed, causing our seat to rock crazily. I was glad to get off. There were four other rides whirling away, all without fences around them. In order to squeeze past people it was sometimes necessary to duck under people’s feet whipping by at 5 ½ feet off the ground.

The rodeos I’ve already described (see the post “Jaripeo”). Ours was just larger than the ones I attended before. (Appropriately, it turns out: Corinto is the 2^nd or 3^rd largest municipality in Morazán, next to San Francisco Gotera and perhaps Osicala. This surprised me, because I feel so isolated here. But when I think about it, Corinto does seem bigger, and also richer, than many of the pueblos I pass through.) But I hadn’t been to a concert quite like the one I attended on the night of the 5^th. A ska band from San Salvador was in effect, dressed in hip duds and full-on rock star personas. It was extremely strange to see this happening in my isolated town where all men wear cowboy hats and go through the same four polite phrases every time they see each other. Living in El Salvador is often full of strange juxtapositions, and I’ve learned to just roll with them. Everyone else seems to. The ska band traded sets with a traditional Cumbia band until 3:30 AM. Just in time for everyone to get an hour of sleep before the next day’s “serenade.”

¡Feliz Año!

January 14, 2008

I spent New Year’s in Suchitoto, the original colonial capital. The town overlooks a pretty lake, making one think that the conquistadors chose the spot for its breezes and lake views, until one realizes that the lake is a reservoir created by the Cerrón Grande dam. Then one is left feeling off-kilter, wondering what the valley looked like before the dam, whether the water level fluctuates throughout the year, and how fast silt is accumulating at the head of the lake. Or at least that’s what I wondered. But I soon turned my attention to the New Year’s goings-on, which I expected to include live music and lots of people. No dice. There were very few people in Suchitoto’s incredibly clean streets, but many enormous firecrackers filling the town with smoke and making it feel like a first person shoot-‘em-up war game. The largest of these firecrackers looked just like M-80s, but were of forearm length and were being tossed (two-handed, of necessity) by enthusiastic cops. They flung shredded newspaper all over the clean streets. Suchitoto being the tourist center that it is, all was swept up before mid-morning on the first.

School Attendance, Mental Maps, Chainsaws, and Oranges

January 14, 2008

First day of the school year in El Salvador! I was not involved, except to ask two teachers how the day went. Their responses were: “Lots of kids” from the one, and “Not many kids” from the other. They compromised by agreeing there were lots of kids in the morning and not many in the afternoon. My friend Candy’s (the name comes from Candelaria) eighth-grade class had 6 out of 24 in attendance; she was not in the least put out, nor does she think this poor showing presages anything in particular for the rest of the school year. Something Candy told me some days ago epitomizes for me the Salvadoran attitude toward attendance at school: when asked when the teachers arrive in the morning, she said, “Oh, different times. You know, no one’s watch is ever set quite the same.” My impression is that you can set your watch according to the time zone of your preference in this country.

Instead of going to school today, I went with some guys to the highest mountain around to build a barbed-wire fence around the spring that my community’s water comes from. I was excited to see Altos de Aguacate (Avocado Heights), as the mountain is called, having long imagined what its view of Corinto’s high rolling plateau must be like. We met up at 7, picked a bazillion oranges, loaded up fence posts, tools, and ourselves in a pickup (a borrowed word in Salvadoran Spanish whose pronunciation continually eludes me despite the fact that its an English word), and jounced off towards the mountain. The views turned out to be as spectacular and informative as I’d hoped. Wherever I go I create aerial mental maps—something I discovered only a few years ago that not everyone does—and it brings me great satisfaction to increase their detail and comprehensiveness. I have a much better picture now of the context of my community. That was the view to the south. I also trudged up to the ridge of Avocado Heights, through an open, fragrant pine forest, to get the view to the north. An ominous mountain rises into Honduras and just keeps rising.

The day had several highlights. The other men were delighted to hear my claim that I have “15 or 20 girlfriends—too many to count,” my method of responding to their frequent heckles that I sleep with my neighbor’s 15-year-old daughter. I’ve gotten used to marriage proposals, lewd innuendo, and everything in between from men at every level of interaction—casual or professional. The best distraction has turned out to be claiming I have lots of girlfriends already, whether or not it actually makes sense in the situation.

I watched a scrawny teenager manhandle an enormous chainsaw while slipping around on a steep, leafy slope. He was somehow the designated operator—perhaps it’s his father’s tool. The blade seemed to be 26 inches long, and dull, and he primarily used the last 8 inches or so at the tip. I was told in Vermont, where in my house there was a diagram of the most common locations on the body for chainsaw injuries, to avoid using the tip unless you’re a professional carver of wooden bears and eagles. So I spent some time with my heart in my throat.

And the most amazing part of the day: we somehow managed to finish all of the oranges we picked, carving the peel off each one with our hook-shaped cumas. The others sucked them dry and left the pulp on the ground, deeming it too bitter. I thought the whole thing was just fine and ate more than my fair share, pulp and all.