Tuesday I spent mostly doing Pasos class preparation; making
a review sheet, writing out a quiz, creating their first homework assignment,
writing up papelotes (big pieces of paper), grading their pre-tests. Something I had been avoiding doing for
days, was calling Don Juan. I
don’t know why I avoided it, but I finally sucked it up and gave him a
call. I asked if we could have a
meeting, the two of us, because I wanted to talk about the latrine project
going on, the Healthy Homes project that the municipality wants to do, setting
up a meeting with the authorities for me to give my presentation on my
community diagnostic, and so I could get a list of contact information for the
authorities. I was so nervous, I
always am, so I wrote out everything I wanted to cover on a piece of
paper. I had called him earlier,
and he had told me that at this RONDA meeting I should present my
diagnostic. After thinking about
it for a little while, I decided that was a horrible idea. These meetings got started at 10 and
usually lasted until 2 or 3 in the morning. I wasn’t about to give a presentation to a gigantic room
full of drunk people at midnight.
I finally gave him a call and he was cool about the whole thing. He told me to pick any night that week
and he’d come over after work around 5.
We picked Thursday. I got off the phone and just started laughing. WHY in the WORLD do I get so nervous
about calling him? It makes no
sense!! He’s super nice, always
obliging…why do I avoid calling him and put it off? It’s ridiculous!! Literally makes no sense. I laughed at my
ridiculousness.
That night, I went to the RONDA meeting all bundled up in my
NorthFace fleece and scarf and smartly brought my book. Ronda meetings are supposed to start at
8, no one shows up until 9:20, and then they don’t get going until 10pm. Celina and I showed up at 9:15ish, and
I got a call from another volunteer, who’s been here a year longer, and lives
near my friend Kate. His name is
Nate, and he is part of the Peer Support Network (PSN), and sweetly calls the
Cajamarca 18ers every once in a while to check in on us and see how we’re doing. The conversation sort of crumbled from
a “check-in” call to a really enthusiastic insistence that I bring two
adolescent boys to the Camp Valor we’re putting on at the end of the
month. Camp Valor is a four-day
camp for adolescent boys from all over Cajamarca. I am not completely clear on exactly what is going to happen
at this camp because I’m not in charge of it and I’ve never been to one before,
but I decided that I don’t know my Pasos boys quite well enough, and I was
worried about fundraising for their transportation to get them there. Also, as it turned out, Kate’s mom was
coming to visit from the States, and she’d asked us to come visit her site when
her mom comes for the morning when the elementary school puts on a big
celebration in honor of her mother.
I didn’t know what to do when Nate started saying things like “Camp
Valor was the giant turning point for us in our service, it’s when we felt like
we were really making a difference.”
What Peace Corps Volunteer doesn’t want that feeling? I didn’t know what to do.
My host mom called me down to the meeting and I told Nate I
had to go. Good lord do I hate
RONDA meetings. I have such a hard
time understanding anyone because they talk so fast, and by midnight, my eyes,
nose, and throat were aflame from breathing in cigarette smoke for 2 ½
hours. I didn’t want anyone to
think I was asleep like some of the other people in the room, so I didn’t want
to keep my eyes closed, but they were absolutely burning. The other part that makes them hard to
understand, aside from the fact that they talk so fast, is they all have giant
balls of coca leaves in their cheeks to keep them awake, and so I have to try
and understand Spanish at a million miles an hour, that someone is speaking out
of the corner of their full mouth.
I noticed throughout the night, that when they would occasionally take
out a little bottle of something and paint their lower back gums with
something. Have no idea what it
was. About an hour or two in, a
bunch of the guys were so drunk that I gave up trying to understand them, because
full mouth, super-speed, slurred Spanish is just hopeless.
At about
12:15am, they started talking about the town fiesta that is coming up on June 7th,
8th, and 9th.
We literally talked about guinea pigs for two hours. I wish I could say I was kidding, or
lying for dramatic effect, but we, no joke, talked about how we were going to
get enough cuyes for the fiesta for two hours. At one point, they went around to each person in the room
and asked if they could give a guinea pig. They stopped at me and asked me. I shrugged dramatically and said simply, “I don’t have any!”
which, for whatever reason, made everyone laugh. The guy who asked was a guy who had been privy to the joke
at the last meeting about how the town could have all Celina’s guinea pigs
because I didn’t like guinea pig.
He made a joke about Celina’s and I said, “yeah, you can have all of
her’s.” and everyone laughed again.
The weird thing about this, is Celina always laughs heartily, and then
looks worried, which always makes me nervous, but she laughs about it again
later when we’re home. The worried
look isn’t for dramatic effect either; she literally looks uncomfortable. I don’t know if I’m saying something
wrong, I don’t think I am, and she thinks it’s funny…I really haven’t figured
it out. Making people laugh is
always a nice feeling, because I miss making people laugh in the States, but
here, in some circumstances, there is an edge to it where I feel a little like
a puppet on a string, or like a dancing monkey. Sometimes I think people laugh just because I’ve said
something in Spanish. I try not to
over-think it.
At 1:30, nose running, eyes and throat burning, me generally
stinking of cigarette smoke, we were finally freed from the million hour-long
guinea pig conversation. I could
have driven to Boston from my house in New Hampshire in the time it took them
to have an inconclusive conversation about guinea pigs. I could have written a college paper,
watched 7 episodes of Modern Family, burned 2,000 calories, read a couple 100
pages, walked all the way down my mountain to Chota and then back in the time it took them to talk about guinea
pigs. It was one of those moments
where I realized just how badly I need to get my hands on some yarn and get
knitting so when I start to get irrevocably frustrated and
pissed off at the sheer inefficiency of everything here, I will have a
half-made scarf on which to work through the madness.
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