a poem scribbled in a cemetery in panama

Flood Tide

The flash

of light and dark fishes 

won't reach my feet.

They will flop

from the water flinging

droplets toward my lightfurred mammal

skin, spattering

eloquent reminders

of when I lived in salt water.

Up through

damaged banana leaves, across

the slatted floors of stilted houses,

the water

rises

tugging at my toenails.

It wants what I want: union.

Or so I say

until my legs can stretch

no further, and it

retracts its proffered hand.

treeeeeees

I've taken a nap, and now I'm in that submarine reflective mood that isn't a mood-- a state of mind with tentacles in melancholy and wonder, where the membranes between worlds seem impossibly thin. I'm in Costa Rica. The city of San Jose hadn't recieved my visit since I was eight, fleeing hom after the electric incident in Manuel Antonio. Really, given that association, it's a wonder I ever came back. The city's penchant for thwarting me continues, as upon my arrival I realized that the reason my card wasn't withdrawing money was because Union Bank was guarding my back a little too thoroughly. They had frozen my account, assuming that the online purchase of a plane ticket in Central America was highly suspect. The rigmarole I ran to get it sorted is a story for another time. Point is, I did get it sorted, and after a fairly minimum amount of navigational confusion I got to the Hostel Galileo, base of operations for my 24 hours in the city.

The city. It's big. It feels good around me, unwieldy and inexplicable like a too-long skirt or like a meadow that just pushed up mushrooms. Its denizens couldn't care lass what I do. There's none of the Antiguan tourist-fishing and none of the small town surprise at my presence, and this absence of any assumed right to notice me is blissful. I get to drift unmoored. Thus far this drifting has cast me toward the biggest huarache i've ever consumed (covered in peppery picante and salsa cruda), to the local AM/PM (sigh) to test the theory that Chikys get more unbearably delicious the closer you get to their Costa Rican Source (theory confirmed, though I might still prefer my Chocositas), to a small park with dark low tangled trees, dotted with a passed-out fellow or two, and with one hygiene-dedicated person bathing in the fountain (well, personal-hygiene-dedicated at least-- i doubt he was overly concerned with anyone else's).

This drifting finally parked me back at the hostel, at which point the nap took hold. When it relaxed its sticky fingers I thought to go in search of a new notebook, since I've finally filled the homemade flower-clad beauty Mom gave me before I left. Instead I found myself in a different park. On its outskirts was the Museo de Arte Costarricense, and though I had neither the funding nor the time-before-dark to enter, I roamed its outdoor sculpture. On the wall that contains these blocky carvings of kneeling men and women was strewn intricate graffiti, whorls of spray paint, faces showing signs of Picasso and Guayasamin and Mayan glyphs, clouds bearing eyes, fanged skulls, contextless words. I sat among them for a while, inviting those who would most appreciate them into my mind one at a time. When I finally stood, I followed their flow to the seemingly infinite stand of eucalyptus that spread behind them. Every hair on my arms tried its best to reach their stature as I floated among them (not as if in air but rather as though my feet were buoyant and supported by liquid instead of the tan bark path that actually held them up). It was love.

And here's the place for a flashback. This past Thursday, for the first time in the recorded history of GVI, the English teachers went to sports day in Santa Maria. It is always on Fridays, when we are teaching in Itzapa, but due to Christmas Party conflicts it was bumped forward to Thursday this week. I trailed a string of younglings into the campo, to a hillyish patch of grass near cornfields where they set up goals and play fierce football. In the morning I through a frisbee about with a series of the chiquititos, but by the afternoon I was tired enough to succumb to gender norms and sit with the girls making friendship bracelets. Soon 3 of my extremities were employed to anchor their creations, and we settled into the serious business of student teacher gossip. They'd pry, I'd tease (usually by turning their questions around on them), they'd protest or giggle, I'd crow, they'd return to prying. Finally the ever popular 'Do you have a boyfriend?' was trotted out. Being far from camp and the States' restrictions on kid-appropriate interactions, as evidenced by the full body hugs i'd been getting all day, I answered with a straight no. I'm not sure who suggested the alternative first. It could have been me, but if it was, they ran with it and soon, all the trees in Guatemala were my lovers.

At the time it was largely a convenient dodge of a question whose ramifications I didn't really want to explore, but sitting underneath a rough-barked beauty this afternoon, tucked into a fold of its trunk, I started thinking they had a point. Trees feel good. They are reliably there when you need someone to witness your sadness and they can be the apex of glorious playfulness. They have roots and patience and loveliness to spare. You never quite know what they're thinking, but they hold you and things improve. This is how I peeled back the shell that I'd been building around myself in Antigua. Hopefully each leg of the journey will slough away another layer, and I will return having shed the things I don't need, ready to re-engage with the place and the people and the work on new terms.

fill in the blanks

I wrote this list while dangling (listlessly?) in a hammock in El Salvador last weekend. I could say that everything has changed since then, or I could say that everything is the same. Both would have a reasonable corner on truth. If I am being too enigmatic, then let this be a bribe to you to write to me individually.

What I Would Write A Poem About If I Had the Presence of Mind to Write a Poem

The S-shape of a long-spined dog from above
A push and pull that has stopped being of me and started being with me
Seeing others through the eyes of other others
Aches
Priorities
Small potted plants overgrowing their alotted spaces
People who plant plants in places too small because they like the way they look when they overgrow their alotted spaces
Whether or not I am one of those people
Whether the plants mind
What it means to transform, whether it´s worth it, and whether we have a choice
Why distance matters
Why we resist spinning
Why I don´t (or can´t) seem to
Hotsprings
Words vs. Thoughts
Underwear
Squash and its growth (in my affections, in the ground)
Sounds
Doors
The significance of sounds and doors in El Salvador tonight
How the most important part of being here isn´t being here (people, places, work)
Why so serious?
What it means to be self-centered (esp. w/ regard to the fact that it is ´good´to be centered and ´good´ to be yourself)
Circulation
Poison (bug bites, food, mental poisoning)
Music as territory
Rebellion
Bombas
Startlement
Fear
Desensitization
Peanuts
Pigeons
Leaves shaped like recognizable things
Seeing the virgin Mary in places she probably isn´t
Seeing ourselves in places we probably aren´t
Eggs
Influence
Intestines
The ways we tire
Want (origin: lack)
Competence
Belonging
Bells
Whatever happened to that voice poem?
Portability/ traveling light
Prophets/ prophecy
A surfeit of the sweetest things
Not knowing
why we crave understanding
Reputations preceding one
Worldliness
Otherworldliness
Interworldliness?
Written records
Accents
What we tell who.

anecdotally yours

I've recently been accused of thinking too much. This isn't a new concept, nor is it one I'd make any studied attempt to deny-- especially because if I did I would doubtless come up with so many justifications for my level of brain activity that I'd prove my accusers right. Such is life.

Still, the most recent suggestion led me to realize that I've gotten so wrapped up in my theories and predictions that I've entirely neglected to tell you any actual anecdotes about my time here. My friend and fellow volunteer Becca always has an anecdote. Always. My personal favorite is the time when, on November 5th, she asked her 5-6 year old kids if they knew there was going to be a new president of the United States. They chorused "siiiiiiiiiii" as though she'd been foolish even to suggest they weren't intimately familiar with U.S. politics, so she thought a follow-up question was in order. She asked who this new leader might be, and received a unanimous response: "El Hombrecillo de Jengibre!"

So now you know. Our next commander in chief will be the Gingerbread Man.

But anecdotes like that have not been dropping into my lap. Maybe it's because I work with older kids, not as prone to sacrificing their adolescent dignity for my gratification, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that I just haven't been looking right. Because here: I'm going diving. I'm dredging the last seven weeks, sifting through the silt, tossing aside the nonlinear or the conceptual or the mundane, dodging the temptation for little flourishes of extended metaphor like this one.

Last week in Santa Maria, we were learning about weekends. That might be a cruel topic to introduce on a Tuesday. Tough. We talked about getting up, eating breakfast, playing football, going to church, doing the dishes-- the stuff of weekly routine. After an hour and a half of this sort of thing, reviewing the present simple or practicing speaking by interviewing partners about their average weekends, it seemed like time to give them a bit of a break. I asked them, then, to come up with an ideal weekend and ask me whatever vocabulary they wanted to fill in its blanks. The first suggestion came from Zonia, I think, but soon they all took up the cry: Pizza. How do you say Pizza in English? No frets, thought I. I even tossed in a quick explanation that the word is Italian, so it's the same in all languages. Lest I get cocky, though, they ask another: How do you say ooch in English? Ooch? I didn't think I'd ever heard that one before. I imagined it was a word in kaq'chikel (this region's indigenous language), the name of some local delicacy or spice. I asked them to spell it for me. H. Okay, the silent H, fair enough. I could have guessed there would be one of those. U. Once more, quite logical-- I'm constantly battling their urge to pronounce up oop, so it's natural I should struggle in the other direction. T. Those hide before Cs and Hs often enough, at least in English, and everyone's always saying kaq'chikel is more like English than Spanish, so why not? I'm poised for the next letter. Moira, fellow volunteer, catches my eye from the back of the class. "Leslie. Look at the board." I do. Hut. Pizza. Of course. Nothing like the Mayan deep dish special. Caught exoticizing a bit, I was. It happens to the best of us.

Whew. That was harder than I expected. I'm going to take refuge in something truer, less convenient, and probably more familiar to those of you who've corresponded with me over the years.

Yesterday I finally went to my first barbecue. Barbecues are meant to be a Friday tradition, an initiation of new members and an opportunity to mingle with the whole crew, but due to various chaotic elements beyond GVI's control the last seven have been canceled. We've been meeting instead in various restaurants, taking over massive blocks of tables, welcoming newcomers and hearing speeches from those perched on the edge of departure, ossifying into the furniture where we sit and into the people we know. I was looking forward to the first real barbecue, largely because of the mingling element. I'd apparently entirely forgotten who I am. Do I like mingling? Is there any part of me that takes pleasure in a room full of half-strangers sniffing around, establishing the degree to which they will like or dislike one another, comparing ethics size or adventure girth like they were some more bodily sings of superiority? Fortunately, I had beautiful ingredients that let me bury my fingers and my social being in them. The barbecues become potlucks of sorts, so I'd managed to span Antigua in search of the components of tabbouleh. I actually found bulgur, in a little deli behind a chocolate shop called Chocotenango (cleverly named after Jocotenango, the next town over.) I sought green onions in the supermarket, and then headed over for the covered-ish market for the rest of my fresh goods. Tomatoes and limes were easy, as was parsley and a cucumber. I was getting a bit worried about spearmint, though. I'd asked at three stalls piled high, one with chiles and cilantro,  one with oranges, one with bell-like peppers that made me feel sheepish for having bought mine in the supermarket, and each woman overlooking her vegetables pointed me onward. Finally the woman who sold me the cucumber and five small oblong tomatoes suggested one particular corner. I rounded it to see a tangle of herbs over my head, deep and musty like the most aromatic of tumbleweeds, scored down the middle to create a niche for a woman. She was white-haired, had about five teeth, and spoke almost unintelligible Spanish. She seemed more a part of her plants than the world of the market, stabbed as it was with cascades of leather belts and chains of pirated DVDs and plastic detritus and shouts of recognition and teenagers multitasking, making out over the counters of their parents' stands, and reggaeton weaving through the whine of off-kilter musical Christmas lights. Her curtains of herbs warded off the tumult, and I recognized myself exoticizing again, and I didn't much mind. I was half waiting for her to mutter or murmur or muddle some cryptic key to my future, some incantation or riddle whose import would only be revealed months or years later, but I left charmless, with a simple Que le vaya bien. Her power came clear only when I installed myself in a corner of the kitchen where the barbecue bustled, evading conversation as I slivered onions and cubed cucumbers and constricted my fingers around limes, living through my nose and my nerves, banishing the people around me to the sphere of the random market and wriggling into the peculiar calm and order of cooking. The tabbouleh turned out pretty well, too.

Que les vaya bien.

A Second Set Of Roots

Things are settling into place, snuggling down into certain grooves and suggesting with their body language that they do not wish to be disturbed. I´m teaching more solidly-- the learning curve still curves, but I´m moving into that less steep section where I can predict pretty well which things will improve and which will be a challenge. I have an internship, officially now, and hence a sense of stability that promises to last until May. (Is it odd that I reveal this information buried amid other mundanities? It´s not that I´m not pleased, just that in retrospect it seems kind of inevitable, already knit into the shape of my days from the beginning.) I´m developing favorite places to eat or sleep or internet. While preparing a lesson for tomorrow about the vocabulary of daily routines, I realized I actually have one. I get up at six. I leave for school at seven and get there between eight and eight thirty. I eat lunch at twelve or one, depending on whether I´m in Santa Maria or Itzapa, and I leave for home at a little after four. I´ve joined a gum where I tend/intend to go after school three or four times a week. I eat dinner at seven. Bedtime fluctuates, but it´s the only total variable in the pattern of my days.

With routine comes a sense of belonging so subtle it´s almost subconscious. The hint of recognition in the eyes of the ladies at the lavandería or the formula of each morning´s greeting ritual with my classes lull me into a timeless feeling, a feeling that my stay here is temporarily eternal. I´m rooting. As soon as I start realizing this, though, an old inspecific longing settles on my shoulders and slips between my ribs. It won´t be satisfied by going out with large groups of fellow volunteers, and it won´t be satisfied by sleeping more, and it won´t be satisfied by spending more time on lesson plans and preparation. It has been allayed by the presence of Celeste, my Portland-afiliated lovely friend with whom I´ve had the sort of generous-hearted and ample conversations filled with stories and tangents and self-analysis that haven´t proved possible yet in this community where every social event is open invitation and most information conveyed to one will reach anyone. Between buñuelos and music exchanges, among fountains and cobblestones and sweet potato burritos and wineglasses filled with living fluttering goldfish, we´ve guided our observations and impressions and deligthed in the exchange. She was the one to diagnose this pesky longing of mine. She told me what I wanted was a second set of roots.

It´s true, of course. When I think of the (dare I say) best periods of my life thus far, it seems I´ve always had at least two worlds, two pools of friends or sources of intellectual stimulation or projects or adventures on the horizon. It affords a kind of multidimensionality-- many levels and kinds of friendship, many ways of engaging the brain, many different channels for hope or frustration or pride. Being here, where so many people are transient and don´t need to forge lasting friendships, where the permanent ones view me as a passing thing, makes it a challenge to discover more outlets for the kinds of connection or effort or conversation I covet.

It does seem the urge to get away usually announces a need to commit more firmly to the place I am. So I´ve assembled a bit of a to-do list, which I will not write because that might jinx it. But it exists. This I guarantee.

the home-carrot dangles

Amid all this talk of teaching and life decisions, my more mundane daily living situation has been neglected. This is not because there is no story. In fact, it has been something of a saga already, and sagas merit chronological recounting (with lots of parentheticals). So I will start again at the beginning, four weeks ago.

The morning after arriving in Guatemala, I set out from the hotel, flanked by Neil and Sophie (intern) and Kavin (fellow English-teaching volunteer) and Rachel (non-English teaching volunteer), to walk to the neighborhood where we volunteer types live. We split off in twos or threes, one authority figure per group. Sophie brought me through the front gate of number 15, Colonia Candelaria, and into the saint-bedecked front room. Before I could absorb the sheer quantity of religious iconography, I was face to face with Cristina, a diminutive woman of sixty-some years, with expressive drooping eyes and a welcoming smile. She showed me my room, diagnosed my Spanish abilities as better than average, and sent me out the door again to get oriented over breakfast (which, incidentally, included plantains and was delicious). Not until that night did we get further acquainted. Over dinner (which was overseen by a doleful hairless Virgin and a devious angel more Cupid than Gabriel, who I later learned had been named after one of Cristina's ex-boyfriends) I learned that Cristina's third son, Jesus Alfredo, lived and worked at home restoring church saints when he wasn't studying interior design or vindicating his mother's wreck of an ex-marriage. She had discovered her husband was cheating while she was pregnant with Jesus. Definitely a faux pas. They divorced, and she relied on the state's questionable health care provisions to give birth to the son she decided to name after the one reliable man she had encountered in her life. Then she died in childbirth, according to the doctors, and returned to this mortal coil by some unspecified not-quite-miracle. I could tell this woman was going to be an experience in and of herself.

She proved to be so, weighing down each meal with chicken (she could never cook without meat, she claimed, so this was our venn diagram pocket of overlap) and depressing stories about this relative with cancer or that near brush with sexual harassment and how nothing but her faith got her through. When she told me her coworkers used to call her la Mujer de Hierro, Iron Woman, I was not in the least surprised. But while the size of her personality and her meals threatened to overwhelm me on a twice-daily basis, I liked her. I have a thing for quirky independent women, and when I managed to break into her ample monologues we had some good conversations picking common ground out of two wildly different lifes. I was genuinely sad, then, when Doreen (one of the program director types) informed me that Cristina had been asked to leave her house by her landlord and would be moving 3 km across town in a week's time. Since it's GVI policy that all volunteers live in the same neighborhood, I would be relocating to a new house and a new family. I bade farewell to the gold-winged angel over my bed (a bit more grounded than the front room cherub, despite her lofty position) and stripped my pictures from the walls I could almost reach when standing in the middle of the room with both arms outstretched. I walked a half-block up the street, turned, turned again through a park studded with Greekish statuary and couples engaged in vigorous kisses, and wandered into Dina's sprawling family and house. I'm still not sure who's who here. I think that in this two-floor house with hivelike compartments there live Dina, her three kids, her aunt and uncle, her grandmother and her grandfather at least, but there is a steady stream of other family and friends visiting, and I can't tell who is supposed to be taking care of who, who is here to keep the widowed-young Dina company and who she's supporting with her generosity. WHen I got here the house was also home to Olivia, a short-term volunteer helping Neil and Kavin and me with English teaching, so I moved into a little downstairs room to while away the days until Liv moved out. Of course it didn't turn out feeling that way. Though the room was tiny and dark, with only one window that opened into the house and was constantly being peered into by Dina's daughters Karla and Diana, it was warm and quite cozy and nestlike, and Liv took to visiting me in the evenings so we could prep for lessons and listen to music aloud (a revelation after weeks of headphones) and have some brilliant rambling conversations of the sort that only happen when there are no time constraints and no atmosphere and no particular need to be anywhere else. It was luck that this housemate figure should be Liv, a spritely music-conscious eighteen year old from England with curly red hair, a mischeivous sense of humor, and artistic abilities we blatantly exploited for our lessons. So the week passed. Last night she moved out, though thank the powers that be she is in Antigua for another week and volunteered out of the infinite goodness of her heart to come in and support me during Neil's second wake of vacation, which I would have been tackling singlehandedly otherwise, since Kavin returned to London on Friday.

So last night I moved into my third room of the last four weeks (fifth if you count California and the hotel) and I am smitten. Yellow walls, four wide windows framing the dormant Volcan Agua, a tiered set of shelves from which I've draped earrings and throughout which I've stacked my clothes in bright piles, a glorious double bed, and a sense of enveloping privacy that makes me open and relax in a way I'd been missing like I miss the ocean. I stayed in to place my things last night, read some White Teeth, recreated a simpler version of an ofrenda for el Día de los Muertos (which was yesterday, involved a vibrant cemetery and giant kites, and will have to wait for another time story-wise), and woke up feeling like after weeks of hurtling nonstop through new adventure after new challenge, I finally had a chance to catch up with myself. My introverted heart is happy, and my instinct for a place that will feel like home is tingling warmly and steadily. What's more, it's probable that this is the very room my dear Stazh inhabited on her first foray to Guatemala, which gives the ballast of history and closing circles to the situation. I will tentatively suggest that this saga has a hopeful end.

The Affair As It Stands Today

I think I'm falling in love with teaching, not in the sweeping romantic at-first-sight way, but in the halting and uncomfortable way that more often actually happens. I am nervous thinking about it, and spend an enormous amount of time planning for it though I know half the equation is outside my control and no amount of preparation will take into account all the variables. Just before our encounters I feel a deep panic, a sense that if I just sprinted for the door I could be rootless, uncommitted and unafraid (conveninetly forgetting that when I was thus unattached I yearned for something to push against). In the first days only a sense of obligation to the people who brought us together-- my parents for instilling in me a huge value for education, Catherine and Grace and Katie for being my first comrades in independent travel and therefore my fellow in learning that it gets easier and proves to be worth the discomfort, the Mexico crew for teaching me ways of getting to know a place, my Whitman loves for constructing my first full home away from home and camp for letting me live in the strongest communities I've ever known, and of course Stazh for setting me up on a blind date with teaching in Guatemala. For these people I stayed, though I left my first lesson tearful and afraid on a level deeper than perfection or commitment. As I've recounted, the next lesson left me somewhere entirely different: exalted, full of hope and satisfaction, optimistic with that first giddy bloom that is physically incapable of sustaining itself. Now each lesson it is uncertain whether I will leave thrilled or crestfallen-- but I'm getting better at timing, at gauging my classes' needs and abilities and adjusting as I go, at gathering a ballast of understanding so each new development doesn't submit me to a fit of aimless spinning, and even when I spin I am reasonably confident of regaining my course. (I was in a river kayak on Lago Atitlan this weekend, ergo am physically very conscious of the disorienting effects of spinning).

So all this means I'm readying myself to commit, to settle down with teaching, to acknowledge our awkwardnesses and our imperfections and to proclaim that it's worth working through. I spoke to Neil on Friday about the possibility of an internship. It's only talk at this point, but he sounded tentatively excited and said he'd speak with Doreen, one of the director-type figures, this weekend. I've yet to find out the result. I suppose I'm in the waiting-by-the-telephone phase in a way. I feel fairly peaceful about it at the moment. Though our relationship is tumultuous, teaching and I are doing okay. I don't think it's a heartbrteaker. I haven't much of an idea where we're going, but I'm shyly looking forward to finding out.

Some logistics, for those among us who like that sort of thing: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I teach in San Andres Itzapa, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm in Santa Maria de Jesus. The English teaching load is distributed (in ever-changing configurations) among Neil (the program coordinator, to assign a title that may or may not be official, and most constant figure in our constellation), me, Kavin, and Liv. The latter two will be leaving soon, alas, but before they do Neil's grasping some much-needed vacation, so we're to be on our own for the next two weeks. I'm looking forward to the opportunity of flinging myself full-bodiedly into teaching, leaving behind any opportunity of second-guessing for at least this two-week period because I don't imagine I'll have time. Each class we teach is a bit different. There are morning and afternoon groups with different kids, so each kid attends a half-day with us and the other half either in government school or working at home, depending on the day. In Itzapa, we have the same two groups on Mondays and Fridays, and then two groups on Wednesdays that take Spanish literacy and other subjects with other volunteers on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. In Santa Maria we have the same two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our smallest group is eight; the biggest could be more than twenty if everyone showed up on the same day, but when attendance is almost entirely self-motivated and kids are needed for work in their families' fields and homes, it's harder to enforce and the bigger classes rarely have more than fourteen or sixteen kids. They range in age from 12 to 20, and are grouped more by ability than age. Some lesson plans can be used in more than one class, but when one class is reviewing the alphabet and "Hello, my name is Sulmi. What is your name?" and another is learning about expressing opinions about their classes (with all the vocab of subjects and tastes that implies), more planning is definitely in order. Neil works his derriere off to keep us prepared, suggesting activities around which we can structure whole lessons, forming the syllabus, and training us during lunch hours. His experience and his attention to the needs of our classes have done a lot to orient me inthis world, and while I quietly kill the hidden hopes I had of teaching poetry or incorporating creative writing elements into my lessons, I fill the space they leave with more practical goals of creating a base of understanding, of motviating these bright and curious kids to keep coming to a school that is both entirely superfluous to their basic survival and invaluable in terms of exposing them to playfulness, to classrooms that don't revolve around copying off a board, to lateral thinking (maybe, hopefully, please) and a freedom to try things-- speaking, writing-- even when the result isn't perfect that I am learning along with them.

I still have reservations about teaching English. I've read a bit too much postcolonial theory not to recognize the trouble with teaching the language of a world power to a community who will probably only ever come in contact with it in the service sector, pampering its tourists, or emigrating to its cities and farms and laboring to maintain its standard of living. I got my first teenager trying to sell me pot in the center the other day, claiming in broken English that by not buying I was insulting the country he loved, and I almost started crying at the thought that this bitter boy might be an example of how my kids end up applying what I teach them. U.S. language textbooks and their focus on the vocabulary of toursim, of exchange rates and ordering in restaurants and asking for directions, would be almost entirely useless here-- unless you invert all the dialogues and train your students to wait tables and answer guests' complaints, and even that assumes that these kids will leave subsistence farming, and maybe implies that they should. Ultimately I have to fall back on the realization that they choose to come to us, that I'm offering something they decide if they want or not. The subject is only part of the bargain. The difference between our casual, multi-approach classrooms and the strict copy culture of the government schools, the chance we emphasize to learn that the teacher is not the ultimate authority and that your peers make excellent resources, the time to play football (soccer, whatever-- I'm getting used to it) or jacks or to arm wrestle with your teachers (I took on and beat two wiry fourteen year olds the other day, one arm after the other, and am still rather proud) are the side benefits of the program that might ultimately be more important than the subject matter we convey. Yeah. Because despite my theoretical doubts, I feel pretty good doing what I'm doing. Teaching is sor of like flashing the possibility of other worlds at your students, murmuring that the knowledge we offer can change the way they look at the world or live their lives, giving them a sense that there's a lot in the world to know, and if it seems cruel to plant the seed of a longing that might never be fulfilled, what else has education ever really done for any of us, at least the ones who like it? I don't think ignorance of what we're missing has ever made us happier, really. I dunno. I am sure there is plenty more where these ramblings come from, and I'll probably scribble more of them down eventually. Til then....

Seño Leslie Strikes Again

Teaching is frightening. Standing in front of a room full of people who have no particular obligation to listen to you or to need what you offer, holding forth on topics whose importance you believe in but acknowledge is subject to debate, prodding and snuffling about to find the most palatable way of presenting a language so that it seems useful, rewarding, and worthy of effort, all the while listening to your own internal monologue and realizing intimately how underqualified you are... It is humbling, to say the least. That said, this week had a decidedly upward trend. On Wednesday I had my first observed teaching session, in which Neil, my mentor (and the brilliant inducer of Scottish-Guatemalan accents in all our students), watched to give me some feedback. I was terrified. I had little or no appetite, I obsessively checked and rechecked my lesson plan in every spare moment of the day, and as I began I sunk my teeth into the tears that approached and instructed them firmly to STAY PUT until the lesson was over. They did, but barely. It was raining, which is dreadful in any class but worse in a wall-less classroom with a tin roof, as it sounds a bit like falling through a steel drum being flicked with rubber balls. And of course my lesson plan was largely speaking-based, involving a lot of drilling and some conversation, and I could hardly hear the kids in the front row, let alone the back. I stumbled through, rotating from table to table and doing essentially minilessons with each group, thanking the teacherly powers that be that I had two assistants to try some dialogues with the tables I couldn't reach. When they left I hunkered down in the corner and ushered out the tears that had so considerately waited til then. I spent the night wondering what I was doing here, whether every day would inspire such deep panic, whether I could even maintain two months worth of such frustration and uncertainty. Neil had reassured me, told me I'd handled the rain well and, when he saw how shaken I was, said my nerves hadn't shown, but I couldn't argue with the adrenaline crash that sent me to sleep at nine that night.

Then Thursday came. I was to teach another afternoon class, this one on telling the time. Now, telling the time and I are not traditionally friends. Telling the time gave me more trouble in elementary school than multiplication tables and the difference between right and left combined. Telling the time still eludes me despite three years of wearing an analog watch. And yet. This lesson was a dream. I could see problems as they come, I could joke with the kids and still regain their attention, I could give instructions they more or less understood, and even when I made mistakes (which I did, amply) I didn't freeze or melt but stayed more or less in my usual demisolid state of matter and came up with solutions. I was GIDDY afterwards.

And now I'm cutting myself painfully short, without telling you about climbing the volcano Pacaya and touching lava with a stick yesterday, or talking for two hours with a friendly gentleman in a cafe this morning, or about seventeen other stories well worth telling. I must scurry off to join the day's adventure (the nature of which is still a mystery), thereby perpetuating my writable experiences. Secretly, my dearly beloved friends, I do these things for you.

Ish.

chapter three: in which things take shape

There are seven spidery plants in pots in front of me, sticking out tendrils to explore the thick stone windowsill. It seems odd to have a computer with internet between me and the plants-- I'm already getting used to life incommunicado, and all these avenues for communication are quite overwhelming. This last week... was a week. 

On Monday I made my first appearance in Itzapa, one of two towns where I'm teaching. I climbed up on the roof where the laundry and the corn dry out with Neil, my mentor-figure and near-twelve-hour-a-day companion during the week, so he could smoke a cigarette and get me oriented. I greeted the cows to the left of our classroom, the volcanoes dominating the horizon, the other part of the school across the street swarming with kids in a mix of traditional woven skirts and t-shirts, jeans and embroidered blouses, rain boots and leather sandals. Our first class was (is) a group of moody teenagers, Lester (the death-metal son of Doña Elena, whose house hosts a bit less than half the school) and his friends and a trio of almost silent girls. And now this is tempting me to give you a profile of each of my classes, which would be a truly daunting undertaking, since we teach different kids in the mornings and the afternoons and from day to day-- ultimately we have about eight classes worth, six of which meet twice a week and two of which meet once a week. They're grouped by ability rather than age-- one class varies from 14-20.  The most basic class is starting with 'Good afternoon. My name's Leslie. What's your name?' 'My name's Mayra. Nice to meet you.' 'Nice to meet you too.' The most difficult class is currently circling, since it might be receiving new members soon. We've talked about sentences, about housework, about colors and birthdays and clothing and classroom supplies, and all my concerns about the imperialism of teaching English to an already-impressively-bilingual population melt before the double blast of the practical concerns of passing school and getting a job and the instant affection and enthusiasm these kids show me. Half the girls in my afternoon class in Santa Maria were giving me hugs before they knew my name. The littler kids, the ones taking math and spanish literacy and learning that verbs are to be conjugated, will lean on me and coerce me into playing sharks and minnows and ask me to read them stories and offer me maracas for wee musical interludes.

And now I'm realizing I really should have selected some sort of organizing principle before I started writing today, because the flurry of things I want to record will not take turns. I think I'll have to leave it sketchy for the moment. 

As for the ten million dollar question (How long will Leslie stay in Guatemala?) the answer is a minutely changing thing. Teaching scares me still. There's a constant lining of anxiety in my belly, a thin uncertain sense that I'm a fraud sliding by on Spanish speaking and some degree of rapport with kids that will vanish when they realize I have no idea what I'm doing. There are also moments when I feel like I'm doing the perfect thing, that I love these kids instinctively and fiercely, that I could, if teaching comes to fit, stay here for a long long time. We shall see.

someday i'll have to stop using ocean images, since i'm inland now...

chorus:

brújula pa ya

brújula no va

brújula no guia

por rumbo perdido voy

compass that way

compass doesn't go

compass doesn't guide

i travel a lost path

soñando por el camino

ay con la tierra de mi destino

viajando en mi submarino voy

a mas de 1600 pies

buscando entre los mares

puerto seguro yo llegaré

dreaming along the road

oh, with the land of my destiny

i go traveling in my submarine

at more than 1600 feet

looking between the seas

i'll arrive in a safe port

chorus

guardandome en la memoria

palabras de mi querer

viajando en mi submarino voy

20,000 leguas yo andaré

hilando cada pasito

un sueño, oye, yo bailaré

guarding in my memory

words of my loves

i go traveling in my submarine

i will walk 20,000 leagues

spinning in each step

a dream, listen, i will dance

oye yo te digo

cada sueño tiene su camino

oye yo te digo

que si to lo sueñe te viene en seguido

listen to what i tell you

each dream has its path

listen to what i tell you

that if you dream it, it will come soon enough

chorus

Against the Tide I'll Rise

Well, I am here. Thus far I have watched wide-eyed and yawnily as Marvin, my impressive driver, navigated capital city traffic, eaten pie and tiramisu with Celeste (the lovely sly friend who just happened to be traveling in Guate when I was to come) while chatting vigorously about the last bundle of months of our lives, conversed heatedly about U.S. politics and wood engraving tools and Jarabe de Palo with Kenny, a local musician sort and friend of Celeste's, gotten gently lost on my way back to the Casa de Maco (my home of one night before I meet my host family tomorrow), and now I'm plopped in my room plotting dinner. I have no sweeping conclusions yet, only sly pleasure in the center fountain who spouts water from her breasts and reverence for a sunset as varied and bright as any Walla Walla had to offer and gratitide that my instinct for walking with my eyes satellite-sensing treacherous sidewalk drops and low-hanging balconies and absorbing as much loveliness as possible all at once and an exhaustion held at bay by the scramble of traffic and the nori-wrapped rice crackers that my mom sent as part of my picnic lunch. 

During the layover in Houston, I tackled a very rough translation of the song that grants this blog its title. Seeing as how not everyone I want to read this darn thing speaks Spanish, I'll pass the translation along, hopefully at the bottom of this page. Its relevance is clear: I don't know what exactly I'm doing here (though I know I will start teaching on Monday, which is dizzyingly soon), I don't know how long I'm staying, and I don't really know where I'm going next. Good places, I trust. The optimism of arrival has set in.

Maiden Voyage

Thus it begins. In twelve hours and twenty nine minutes, my flight will lose contact with Californian soil, and the rather hazy next phase of my life will start to do its thing. Am I ready? Ish. And six minutes ago, I started a blog. Am I ready? Ish. Hopefully both will turn out to be worthy endeavors.