Stories from the Front

Well, I thought I would just share some interesting stories that I have had in these days. Hope you enjoy them.

I have to say, I have had a couple good moments that I can name off easily. The other day I got really, above normally smelly. I was making another compost pile with a family who had heard about the wonders of compost and wanted my services. So I went to the next village over with the daughter of the family leading me. I had asked them a week before what they had to use to make it; when they said they had cows, I got excited, which seems pretty strange to be excited about but to me, it means there’s a lot of good material to work with. Well, along with several corn sacks full of green leguminous leaves, banana leaves, and other dry leaves, to make the compost, we hauled tons of cow poop that was nice and fresh and goopy from all the rains. Of course, that goopy poop did not really stay in its holey containers and found itself all over my cloths. The awesome thing though was that no one, including me, was bothered by it. Afterward, I visited another family that I had visited before in the past to follow up on their how their chickens were doing. When I stopped outside the barbed wire fencing and yelled in saying “Buenas tardes” for permission to enter, the little kid of the family saw me and yelled out my name. He immediately came running up to me and gave me a big hug, the first time a little kid had done that to me! So pretty much, that made my day, not to mention that he did it even though I had cow poop all over my shirt and pants.

Another is kind of a weird cultural-barrier success. So I have been befriending a very friendly girl down here. I had just met her 4 weeks ago and really enjoyed being around her, but was trending the water very carefully because of all the assumptions and rules that play out here. Well a bit ago, she invited me to her house to see her town and meet her family (she only works and stays during the work week in the town where I live). Well, this and some other things rang a few bells in my head, namely because many people have told my straightforwardly that if you are invited to someone’s house by a girl, she wants to start going out with you. And considering the other beliefs down here that I have been told, like only a few weeks of dating takes place before getting married and that friends who are girls are not possible in Guatemala (told to me by my training officers), I got a little irked. So instead of being direct, I evaded giving an answer (aren’t I so good at not answering questions) hoping to find out what was going on and to save some embarrassment on both our parts. Well, a whole stew of events happened in a couple days when she brought her boyfriend here for a day and people thought she was cheating on me and that I was angry (It is really sad to think how quickly people came to those conclusions). With all this in the air, we sat down and had such a good talk. And what came out of it was awesome, because all the misconceptions were cleared, including the ones that I had such as that she wanted a boyfriend in me, I learned a lot about this person I had just met, and most of all, I gained a new friend, who is a girl. It probably seems like a strange moment, but it just felt good to do something that seemed culturally impossible to me and felt good thinking about having a new friendship and all the new possibilities that that would entail. It’s funny how difficult things can be made when crossing culture and language barriers, not to mention how complicated things are made when you add me to the mix.

Last Sunday, I started out the morning with a good laugh, thankfully, because it could have been a little different. So I where I am staying, recently the daughter-in-law and her 3-year-old son of the owner moved into the house where I am because the daughter-in-law had her appendix removed. The son is really timid and has been slowly warming up to me, to the point where when I wash my clothes or clean my room, he is right by my side helping me. That Sunday morning, I wanted to show him and his mom how I carried all my cousins back home. I put him on my shoulders and walked around a little bit within the house. I then started to walk toward the mirror to show him how tall he was, but on the way, I heard a big thud against the wall and was stopped from moving forward. Well, I had forgotten that there are parts of the house that still come down really low, sitting only some 5 inches above my head. I quickly looked up and saw the kid ducking covering his head and saying over and over “I got hit.” I felt bad, but luckily the kid wasn’t crying and the mom was laughing.

Finally, when I thought I had finished telling some of the interesting stories, something else happened just today.
Sunday mornings here are similar for here as they are back home in the sense they are usually slower paced and relaxing. I usually go to mass, and then eat some breakfast with something special like a pineapple to really bring out the tiredness you get after eating a good meal. Today was no exception, and I left from where I ate feeling content. As soon as I walked out to the street where the outdoor market was, I saw some people running up between some tin buildings. I thought that was pretty weird what they were doing, especially since there were adults among them. Well I soon found out why within 2 seconds. As I put my focus back on the street and the market sellers ahead of me, I found some very angry toros (bulls) charging through the market right at me. Astonished at the sight at first and unable to move for maybe a second, I managed to quickly jump toward a building away from the street. I watched as the 10 or so bulls went raging on at full force down the street toward the river and then saw the owners running after them a minute later. I soon found out that the bulls were the bucking bulls that were brought in for the rodeo that we would have today. I just could not believe that the owners allowed those bulls to rage at full force (really, they were some angry bulls) through a street made very narrow because of all the vendors that put up their stands to sell things (2 hours later, as I was walking up a mountain, I saw them still trying to wrangle the bulls into the stadium but with little luck since the bulls were still running away up a bank). With as many people as there are in the town where I live on Sundays, which is the day that the market is here as well as the day that people travel to town to go to mass, it is surprising that no one was injured. This is just one of the millions of reminders I get that I am not in Grand Rapids anymore. I guess I don’t need to go to Pamplona, Spain anymore.

Happiness

I have not written in a while as maybe some of you have noticed, so sorry. My goal is to write every 2 weeks. I’ll see if I can pick up the pace in the coming weeks. The sad part is is that I had this written for a while, but could not post it because of the slow internet.

Work has been the same good old stuff I talked about in the last entry. The one new big thing that occurred down here recently was the 4^th of July, for which all the volunteers got together and had a big celebration with dancing, American food and beer, and even a talent show. It’s not the same as going down to South Haven or staying at Aunt Carol’s at White Fish Lake, but I have to say I still had a lot of fun. When the party was over, we celebrated even more in Antigua, where places had more 4^th of July celebrations with some even having cakes and a piñata of Uncle Sam.

So besides that and my new battle with hopefully just a few fleas in my room, (I just recently found 3 while reading in my chair; I am pretty sure I am bringing them with me from Sabanetas. I was hoping cleaning and mopping weekly would be sufficient, but I guess not. Either way, I am waging an entire campaign now to stop them while they are just starting. After a long day of cleaning, last night, I had no fleas bother me… I slept in just my sleeping bag, but still, I had no fleas bother me.) the only other thing I wanted to write about was something that I think I am starting to learn more about, what it means to be happy. It is nothing new, but just something refreshed and more firmly founded. We all say that happiness cannot be bought, and I think I and many other believe it or think we believe it. I know though, that there are many actions of mine that correspond to something else, something that says, “You can buy something to improve your conditions by gaining more comfort, extra time, more pleasure or whatever, and that these gains will bring you happiness.” For instance, when I have a hard day, I look for my trail mix and dried cranberries to cheer me up. While it might cheer me up, eating them certainly will not cheer up everyone and the cranberries and trail mix are not actually causing happiness in themselves; there are other underlying reasons. When I moved to San Carlos, I became excited to just have a door to my room, to bathe in cold water that came from a shower spigot, and to be able to eat 4 eggs a day. Coming from my aldea, it was certainly an improvement and would seem to follow the old rule I wrote that happiness can be bought. Probably at first this was my natural programmed reaction that having something better corresponds to being happier, but soon after I began to think, “Why am I happy to have 4 eggs a day or a door or a shower spigot?” If I were in the US, would these things give me some happiness? The answer would most likely be no, especially in the case of the eggs which would probably make me grouch at what I were eating. So I asked then, “What is the difference?” Well the obvious difference is that here I am ‘moving up’ and from the US, it would be a move downward. The more subtle difference though is that my perspective has changed. I learned be more happy with fewer things; I was more grateful for the tiny things that I had so easily just taken for granted. So basically, I feel like happiness can be obtained through practice and a conscious effort. If I train myself or learn to be happy when I get something new, why can’t I train myself or learn to be happy with what I have, both concrete things and things like friendship, family, etc. If I make an effort to be more conscious of these seemingly little things I get each day, I will be over flooded. Ordinary days become good days and hard days become something not so hard to bear.