Knock knock

I learned my first joke in Spanish this week when I took a note, mid-pass, from a student:

¿Que le dijo una chincha a otra chincha?

Chinchu amor, no puedo vivir.

Chincha, pronounced Cheen-cha, is a tiny bug, if I understood my host sister correctly, and there is a saying in Spanish, "sin su (pronounced seen-soo) amor, no puedo vivir," or, in English, "Without your love, I can´t live."

Get it? Sin su amor...chin chu amor...hahahahahahahahaha!

Nevermind.

Lie down in green pastures

This morning while I was waiting for the bus, I noticed a horse sleeping in the soccer field.

At least I hope it's sleeping.

Excuse me sir, your bag is hissing

One day I am going to write a blog about bus zen, about finding a way to relax amid the peeping chicks, puking children and bare bellies on the long, bumpy, public bus rides. Bare bellies you ask? Yes, or, as I like to call them, muffin tops. The women here have a tendency to wear super tight clothes, which often results in a fold of skin (or fat) that falls over the waist of the pants (I must admist I am working on one myself). Last week I rode for an hour with a muffin top resting gently on my shoulder.

This morning I was unlucky enough to not get a seat, so I planted one hip to the side of a seat back, locked one leg and drifted off in search of the bus zen. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the man sitting in the seat on which I was leaning had a little flour sack tied up and sitting on his lap. Every once in a while he would hold the bag up and examine it. I thought maybe there was food or something in it the way he was being so careful. But later I saw a pink nose and a pair of little eyes sticking out of a hole in the bag.

"What the hell is that," I asked myself. Because I couldn't really tell if the thing with the nose and eyes was a alive, I thought maybe the guy had killed an animal and planned to skin it and eat if for dinner. But then a furry little white paw sprang from the hole and five sharp claws slashed across the man's stomach. "Meow!!"

It was a kitty! I love kitties, so I asked the man if I could take a picture of it. I wasn't able to get a great shot of the cat's face in the hole, but I did manage to capture the man's double thumb.

This picture isn't all that great, but it shows the clothes-washing setup. The hole on the left of the machine is where the dirty cloths get swished around in cold, soapy water. The hole on the right is the wringer, where the soapy water gets sucked out and the clothes are left closer to dry than wet. The next step is to hand-rinse the clothes in the sink before spinning them again, but I never do that. I just squirt the water hose on the clothes and turn the wringer on again. Then, to save space on the line and to avoid the inconveniences of bird poop and afternoon rain showers, I hang my clothes to dry on a line strung across my bedroom. My clothes, I'm sure, are always filthy, but by skipping that rinsing step, they always smell soapy fresh.

Adrian

This is Adrian. He's another of the special-education kids and one of my buddies. I love this photo because even when he's just standing there posing for the camera, he looks full of intensity. His mom died and two years ago, and he lives with just his dad, who makes money cutting grass with a machete and working other odd jobs. As far as I can tell he's in the special-ed class only because of behavior problems. He's a ball of rage most of the time. He yells and runs and fights and huffs and puffs endlessly. He can put on this really mean face that looks all full of hate, but if I stare at him long enough without reacting to the face, he usually changes it to a smile. In this photo, he looks a little out of character, so stoic and serious. I like it.

The landslide brought it down

I read in an e-mail today that a fellow volunteer got to blow her nose with an actual Kleenex tissue yesterday, the soft kind that doesn't irritate the sensitive skin around the nose. Oh, what a treat. She and another volunteer are apparently staying the weekend at the guest house of a gringo who lives near their towns.

Rumor has spread through the chisme (gossip) chain that these two lucky girls are lounging on actual couches, not the straight-backed, wooden-armed things most houses in these rural parts have. They're eating baked chicken, too. My family doesn't even have an oven.

I bought some pirated movies from a guy in the street the other day, but ever since my computer stopped turning on a few weeks ago, I have no way to watch them. My family has a computer (no oven, but a computer, for god's sake), but my host sister sits in front of it all hours of the day and night listening to Eminen, the great white rapper, spurt profanities in English.

Still, things are getting easier here. I can sort of speak Spanish, and the kids are getting better. I made a paper-mache pinata for one class last week, and the kids nearly killed each other smacking it with a broomstick. It was fun.

I'm not hungry anymore, either, although I could always go for a tuna sandwich. I cured the hunger problem by supplementing my diet with one liter of milk per day. The supplier brings an extra case for me every week. The milk here, by the way, doesn't have to be refrigerated before it's opened, and it lasts forever in the refrigerator after it's opened. It seems unnatural, but I try not to think about it too much.

So now that I can speak Spanish and my belly is always full of ultra-pasteurized milk, my mind is left to ponder the little things I so dearly miss, like curling up on a real couch to eat baked chicken and watch movies with my cat sleeping in the crook of my arm.

I am also thinking with secret envy of my friend, Lisa, whose bedroom got hit by a landslide a few weeks ago.

Here's most of the story, straight from Lisa's mass e-mail (she even has access to Internet now):

Lisa's Landslide FAQ

Q: Oh my god, are you OK?!
A: Yes, I'm fine.

Q: Were you in your room?
A: No, we had left the house about 5 minutes earlier due to a
threatening flood. I was huddled in the chicken coop at the time.

Q: Did you lose everything?
A: We were able to rescue a surprising amount of stuff, including all
my clothes and shoes, my suitcase and backpack, and a lot of other
misc. stuff. I also saved my shampoo and soap because I thought my
host family was mooching it before, so I had it secretly squirreled
away in a thankfully high location.

One day Lisa, too, was daydreaming of lotion-infused tissues and tuna salad, when the next thing she new, she was living in San Jose right across the street from the supermarket that sells Miracle Whip.

Some people have all the luck.

Added later:

After I left the Internet cafe, I went to the supermarket, where I saw row after row of boxes of Kleenex. So, in the interest of honesty and accuracy, I want you to understand that there are plenty of Kleenexes here, but not in the poor, rural homes in which we WT volunteers reside. And if you think I'm going to spend my hard-earned nothing on a box of perfumed papers, you're crazy.

Sad eyes

Remember Heral/Geraldo?

Pre-gaming

I meant to post this photo last week, when it would have been more timely, but I didn't get a chance, what with the slow Internet access.

It's my gringo friends and I before heading out in the rain for our first soccer game. Boy that was fun.

Rafael, Arley and Berny

As far as I can see

It´s clear now why they call it the rainy season. Even without a hurricane nearby, it rains everyday. The sky gets cloudy and the wind picks up during my last class, from 2 p.m. to 2:40 p.m., and the rain comes just as I´m walking home from school. I usually walk around the corner of the house to find some member of the family frantically pulling clothes from the line. I don´t mind the rain so much except that it´s ruined my daily routine of running up and down the hill to the river. Instead, the cooler air, the sound of the rain, and the brrr, brrr, brrr, brrr of the washing-machine-like washing machine usually puts me right to sleep.

Remember that time I was walking down the road and saw two women struggling to carry a bucket of pig slop down the hill? Well, the one woman said she worked on the Del Monte pineapple farm and that there was a gringa like me that worked there, too, and the gringa’s name was Sherry. Then the women kept calling me Sherry all afternoon. She told me her husband was dead and she was raising their four children alone. And remember how I didn’t recognize the children until she made too circles around her eyes with her fingers, and I said, probably in English, “Oh, the boy in first grade with glasses!”? And she said, yes, yes, Antonio was her son, and that it was very expensive to pay for his glasses, especially with a dead husband.

Well, guess whose glasses broke? That´s right. Antonio´s. It’s been two weeks and he’s still without specs, and I wonder if he’s ever going to get more. He did get a new haircut this week, though. His entire head is shaved close except for a rectangular patch of bangs right up front. He looks much less cute without glasses and with the new weird haircut. I bet if he could see, he wouldn’t be coming to school with his hair like that.

My host mom told me other day that the kids’ dad was killed when a tree fell on him. I thought is was just a case of bad luck, but a fellow volunteer told me that once she watched her host dad hold a ladder – hold it upright, not against a wall or tree or anything – while another man stood on the second-to-top wrung and hacked away at tree branches with a machete. So maybe in the case of the dead husband it was bad luck, or maybe it was as a direct result of poor decision-making. Who knows, but I´m not here to judge.

Anyway, I want to get that kids some glasses, but it seems impossible without his prescription. I could just try to raise some money, but I hate to do that. I wish I could just get my hands, at least, on a pair of frames. Then the mom could get the lenses. It would help a little, I guess. So, if any of you happen to have a pair of eyeglasses frames for a six-year-old just lying around the house, please let me know. I really want to help this family if I can.