The mangos de leche are pinier in general, less sweet and more fibrous. Eating them is more like coaxing juice from a mass of threads than it is like taking a bite of fruit. No one cuts mangos here; you peel them from the stem down, leaving a little bit of skin for a handle at the bottom-- by the time you get there you're so sticky you don't mind grabbing the gnawed-upon other end and peeling the bit that remains. The little mangos dulces are yellow orange and sweeter, with more self-contained flesh-- they're more like champagne mangos at home. The big red-green ones I haven't tried yet. I don't think they're really in season. And then you have jocotes, the mango's scarlet siblings, similarly composed but juicier, and sourer, and tiny, about the size of a small plum.
And for a minute last weekend I actually believed I had grown tired of mangos.
This was part of a wider-reaching crisis. A series of frustrations (with teaching, where I feared I was burning out; with the administration, whose workings I've had too much time to study; with the social structure of temporariness and mandatory civility; with with the feeling that folks around here lose faith so quickly despite months of work to gain confidence, etc) and triumphs (extracurricularly, while traveling, meeting glorious people, having fuuun and realizing it was the first time I'd felt free and light in months) and sickness (three times in the last three weeks, after going nearly six months without missing a day of school) and thoughtfulness pushed me to the point where, on Friday, home with a fever, I was about ready to cut ties with the program and travel for the next two months. It was real; I was ready.
Over the course of the weekend I realized I needed to talk to Neil, to see if--well-- reform and not revolution was possible. There is a part of me that is wistful for the revolutionary outcome, but ultimately my sense of responsibility to my kids and to Elena's family and to Neil are more important than my disillusionment or my yearning for fully-fledged destinationless wandering. I shall sate my appetite for adventure on weekends, and over Semana Santa (when friend-and-fellow-intern Traci and I intend to summit Acatenango overnight) and on the as-yet-unspecified week I'll take off in May as a consolation prize, and when Catherine and Katie and Grace make my life all shiny by coming to visit toward the end of my stay. And regarding burn-out, Neil and I are looking at ways to ease the workload. At the moment we have nine classes, six of which meet twice a week, and eleven 1x1 or small group students a week. We desgined the schedule when we had 2 long-term volunteers and, more often than not, one short-termer. Now we're teaching them all among the two of us. So we're looking at combining two classes or letting the lowest-level class improve their Spanish literacy before coming into the English world, something they sorely need to do. More than any true prospect for hange, though, the realization that Neil wants me to stay and is willing to provide support to make it happen is the big factor here.
Meanwhile in the communities the daily melange of bizarre and tragic continues. Some things make you want to laugh until you realize what exactly you'd be laughing about. For instance. The emos are recruiting. Cars of kids from the capital city, with hair grown long to cover one eye, are making like missionaries and actually paying Itzapa kids to go emo. These smalltown kids (who've probably never heard Dashboard Confessional in their lives) are growing out their hair. They're cutting their wrists with safety razors and proudly displaying the wounds. They're advocating gay marriage, but not in a careful or culturally sensitive way, more because they know it will shock; they're managing to attach one more stigma to it by associating it with the rest of their borderline-religious dogma. And on Monday a local self-proclaimed emo 19-year-old boy kidnapped two girls, one 7 and one 9 years old, and tried to rape them. They were found in time, but he escaped, and hid in his aunt's backyard under a pile of sand. When people from town found him and were threatening to burn down the house to make an example of him, he pulled a dagger on his mother and said if he was dying she would die with him as punishment for having brought him into the world. And now all of this is muddled together in the minds of people who have no real base of comparison. I tried to talk to Elena about it today. She asked if there was anything like this in the States, and I talked about how emo is mostly an identity, somewhere between fashion/music taste and lifestyle choice. It tends to be exclusive in its way, I told her, with nothing of recruitment and really no established views on anything except general disillusionment with the world at large. I mentioned that cutting is a symptom of a psychological condition and an addiction; I didn't take on gay marriage with this very Catholic mother of six for obvious reasons. But I did stress that by recruiting for "emo" these kids were missing the point of having an individual identity, doing something totally counter-productive: by polarizing people into cultish followers of emo and those disgusted by the actions done in its name, they were causing the suppression of all departures from conventional roles. Now Elena is pressuring her heavy-metal-loving son Lester to cut his hair short. Anything abnormal is being linked to evil. And I can talk about it, encourage little bits of dialogue, but against a gasoline-wielding populace and centuries-old senses of self preservation that's about all I can do.
So. Mangos to drown my sorrows. Good thing I'm not sick of them.
