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.