The 2 Continents

¨You don´t feel weird wearing that dress¨. My counterpart´s daughter casually asked me as she swayed back and forth in the hammock. I looked down at what I was wearing. It goes to my ankles, it doesn´t seem inappropriate. Is a brownish-red a bad color on me? ¨No, why? You don´t like it?¨ I questioned.
¨Well you can see right through it.¨ I was pleased she waited until 4pm in the afternoon after I had paraded around town to inform me of this. In her defense, she thought that wearing see through clothes was normal in the US. In my defense, its very dark inside my room so I was unable to tell that I was essentially walking around naked.

¨Wow! Look how fat you are!¨ My other counterpart said to a lady approaching, selling tamales. This is literally how what she said translates. The sentiment translates a little different but I still can´t get over this part of the culture here. Imagine if you said that to a girl at home?

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This week began the first week of the classes I am teaching at 2 schools. At one school, I teach English to 4-6th grades on Mondays- 3 hours in the afternoon. At the other school I teach Art to 2-9th grades which involves 5 hours in the afternoon on Tuesdays and 5 hours in the morning on Wednesdays. I thought it would be nice to leave Thursday and Friday free…

However, since my counterpart is away, I also transformed myself into her position, teaching her Literacy class to adults from 4-6 in the evenings this week Wed-Fri. Throw in 2 town health meetings lasting over 2 hours, hand washing 2 weeks worth of clothes, grocery shopping in the nearest town, writing a grant proposal for resources for our Artesania group, longer that wanted unexpected house visits… and I successfully left myself 5 mins per day to relax.

One positive of the fact that I have passed out by 8pm the past 3 nights is that I easily woke up at 5am each day and had an hour or so to work out before the heat. Most importantly, less people were out at 5:20 to see me go running. If you didn’t know, people don’t just run here. Unless you’re a 7 year old bicho running after a passing bus (which they often can out run on a packed day) or are leaving your neighbor’s yard with an uprooted banana tree, there will be no running.

So while there were not many people out at 5:20am, there were enough to make me question several times whether I wanted to keep on running. Unfortunately, the people who ARE out at this time are mostly the men heading out to the fields to chop hemp plants for the 1,405 time in their lives. You can compare me running by for them to someone falling down the stairs in high school for you. There is just no better amusement to a monotonous day.

I’m not kidding, 4 out of the 5 men I passed were hysterically laughing and he who was not I assume began to after the utter confusion finally dissipated when I was out of sight. Throw in a handful of wandering (and equally as bored) dogs, women heading to grind the corn who know me, calling “Para onde va?” and a bus passing on a narrow curve and you have an interesting morning run. For the dogs, I learned to slow down when approaching, casually, but swiftly, grab a rock and telepathically send an amiable greeting. For the women, I stopped for those who beat me to asking where I was going before I could yell “adios!”. And for the bus…well I’m typing this write now…

When I returned to my house, I put on some instant coffee and got to work on the laundry. I was down to the last shirt, my knuckles raw from scraping against the cement, when the water stopped falling. I looked down into the pila, at the water that was life (half empty or half full?), and wiped the sweat from my forehead. I decided to move on to cooking breakfast and writing my Agenda for the Literacy class, in order to give the water some time to fall back into my life. The water never came back, but fortunately the pila was Half Full, and I had a bucket’s worth to just barely cool myself and get me “clean”.

As for my first 3 days for teaching, I am happy. It was exhausting, some games & lessons were more or less a failure, but kids laughed. I laughed. They learned. I learned. Well, kinda. It’s been a very long time since I have had a geography course, and I hadn’t intended on teaching one. However, I was trying to explain why I am here and using the school as an opportunity to explain myself, the Peace Corps and US culture to the kids.

We started out with a trivia question: How many departments are in El Salvador? 14! All the kids yelled. Correct! Wow this is great. We Continue. What I proceeded to find out was that there are 2 continents in the world, 1 being Charamo- the town Leslie lives in. I was happy to find out the kids know where I am from: New York……which is a pleasant little place located in La Union (the eastern most department of El Salvador). Canada and Los Angeles are 2 of the most popular states, with Honduras close behind.

I decided to confuse the kids even more: In the US, we don’t eat 4 tortillas at every meal; hardly ever actually = WTF? stares. Dogs live and sleep inside the house = jaws dropping. We don’t drink out of plastic bags = yells of MENTIRA! (translation: LIE!)

Eventually, we moved on. I think that little culture exchange session actually got their attention. Granted I may have scarred some for life by the tortilla comment and others now think New York is a far away land that inhabits aliens. But I think it was good. Hopefully they will be excited for next weeks classes when we begin practicing art…with no resources :/