An Eternal and Endless Ocean

Dear Readers,

I apologize for my absence from writing. It has been a hectic month, this past November. There were a lot of people who were leaving, and family developments, and Thanksgiving traveling and things like that. Currently I’m in Lima for mid-service medchecks.

I’m going to see if I can keep this short since it’s late right now. I was just down looking at the ocean from a place called Larco Mar, which is an outdoor food and shopping mart, and I wanted to briefly write about some of what I reflected on out there. It was around 11 PM and the see was all dark and there was dark clouds stretching off to where the water and the clouds met. It just made me feel calm. I’ve been feeling swarms of doubts and negativity tugging at my insecurities, infecting me with their pollution and deceits. Yet tonight when I looked at the water there was a peace of things just being still, and that’s what I believe is in all of us. Often we can feel like we are caught in a storm, and that is perhaps very well the case. I think though that many of us (and definitely in my case) it’s easy to forget that storms don’t reach down to the depths. Even the worst ones can still be storms on the surface of our lives. This is not to downplay serious challenges or problems that people have to face from time to time: illness, family emergencies or crises, financial problems, and so forth. If there are problems, of course they should be dealt with if it’s possible. But they need not consume us of all our energy. We don’t have to dwell only on the surface of our life, when there is so much more underneath. Often things aren’t as major as we make them out to be. A comment or an action from someone that triggers insecurities or doubts may have been nothing at all: when you are on the surface of the ocean, waves can appear and feel huge and devastating. But in the whole of the sea, they are usually not much to get worked up about.

Most of this I say because I’ve found that in interacting with other people, I usually cannot tell how they feel, and reach the wrong conclusions. But sometimes you just have to let things wash over you, and not stop and analyze them.
I’ll have more to say next time, but right now I’m tired and off to bed.

Peace,
Tristan

A Meditation on Frustrations

Originally Written October 29, 2009

Dear Readers,

I’ve been trying to write something to this effect for a while, but have had a hard time forming it. However, while writing an email, a lot of thoughts came to me, and I’d like to share them.

For starters, right now I’m rather irritated, to be honest. Peace Corps isn’t a vacation, and I never thought it would be. In fact, despite talking to recruiters, reading about it, going to the website, I never really had a good idea what Peace Corps ultimately did. And actually, in some ways I like of still don’t. Peace Corps seems to be life condensed: there are just so many ways to interpret it. And you can have so many plans that seem to give meaning to it, only to have something fuck it to bits. So where is the meaning? Did you just get screwed out of it? Or do we place assign meaning too often to the wrong things? Don’t read the rest of this expecting answers. But I do think that we are putting life in a box too often when that’s kind of like trying to put sunshine in a box. It fills the box, but it also fills everything else outside of the box. The minute we put it in a box and seal it, it might not become the opposite of life the way darkness becomes the opposite of light, but it still isn’t the real thing. It’s just a misapplied label, this boxed definition. Quite honestly, I don’t really any longer expect all that much to get done in my town. I’ll go more into this later, but I think by just accepting where I am, both in life and geographically-speaking, would be much to my benefit. And I suspect this might be a good philosophy for me to follow through with for the rest of my blinking days. More than materialism, or finding the right woman, or getting the perfect job, a lot of stress would probably be alleviated if people just take things one thing at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time. For me that means, I have a library going, but since the people here work at their own pace, I need not necessarily be concerned and have an ulcer over my project right now.

That’s the good thing is coming out of this irritation and out of this service in general: just simple acceptance. I’m with a group that’s taking all the time I had planned for an English class or clean my room or whatever. So what? I get boiled potatoes for breakfast, a similar meal for lunch, and something else bland for dinner. Why fight it? I’m just getting too tired to fight it any longer.

I’m also losing interest in trying to get much done here, frankly. If I only give kids the chance to draw and do jigsaw puzzles, I’ll count that as a success. I don’t always enjoy it frankly, and it’s teaching me that I don’t think I want to be a parent, but it’s helping them be kids and use their brains and play with others. The people in this town have a good work ethic, but it doesn’t extend beyond their immediate survival. Of course that’s very important, but when trying to do a big project, such as a library, it’s hard to impress upon the town why they must all contribute to supplies so we can put in the cement floor. And so, things take forever. Add that to the vagueness of how long things will take, or when they will start, or other such predictions, and it just drains a person. I can feel myself losing motivation in my work, and even when I look at my French studies or painting, it is hard to get the motivation back up. This isn’t all the town’s fault of course, but the attitude of getting nothing done in a timely manner is rubbing off on me.
I’ve figured I can take only about a week or so of time in site before I decide I need to get out again. I usually try to go about two weeks (rounding up) before I head back out to my capital city to get good food and a hot shower and a use the internet to call home and read my email.

So now, riding out this frustration, I just want to give up my resistance and say, “Hell, here I am, and something might get done, and something might not. I’m just gonna chill try to enjoy life today.” That’s not an easy philosophy, but it is an important one. Do I believe it? Maybe not completely. I want to, but it’s so radically different from how I’ve been raised in my environment. But I guess this is where I get to take responsibility for my life, even if I never really have control over it.
Most of what the Peace Corps offers I’m not sure I care about. At least not in terms of work. I enjoy more spending time just talking with the people, even though after a while I do need deep, witty, more educated conversation.

Before, I saw myself as a linguist, an anthropologist, an Indiana Jones figure, but those self-images have kind of been shaken as I realize how hard it has been to adapt to a much more basic style of living. This journey has made me look at myself in such a way that I feel I have a lot of metaphorical fleas or tumors and I feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I can’t pin down the problems, because there are simply too many flaws. I think the best method maybe to just acknowledge there are flaws, and then turn my attention away from them. They will continue to be there perhaps, but I don’t have to watch over them like a prison guard. Maybe our flaws are like the class clown: they intensify only when they have an audience.

I don’t want to go home, to ET to use the Peace Corps lingo. For one thing, I’m too damn proud. But for another, I always try to believe that I don’t have the bigger picture, and that things will get better. Also I have learned a lot. Mostly about myself, but since I will be living with myself for quite a while hopefully, that’s important. I just kinda want to be myself, though. Not be the flawed, impatient, insecure person I feel like a lot. Especially here.

There’s something I’ve learned. Improvement and love comes from within. You don’t always have to travel the world or try to leap tall buildings to find it. I heard that a lot of incoming volunteers want to be up here in the North rather than in the deserts of Lima-Ica. I did, too. The deserts weren’t how I pictured Latin America. But now that I’ve spent a year here, I believe that location is not the most critical factor. Everything that a person needs comes from within. Sometimes everything else in the world just happens to jive with you. I’m not saying people necessarily ought to settle, or that everything is equally easy or equally hard. But in the meantime, enjoy life wherever you are. I’ll be trying to take my own advice right along with anyone else who has been asking these same kinds of questions.
Tristan

Comfort Zones

Originally Written October 1, 2009

Dear Readers,

Last night I wrote a little about the importance of passion in life and used languages as an example of passions in mine. But as much as languages consume in my life, it is not the only thing that plays a role in me. There is another big factor, a darker one. I’m afraid of a lot of things in life. Traveling around, seeking knowledge and familiarity of other things in the world have not alleviated my anxieties. That tells me two possibilities: either I am not doing what is right for me, or regardless of whether I am acting true to myself or not, fear is a bottomless feeder that vexes until its host’s life is withered away. Unlike a parasite that dies when its host dies, fear is not a living entity that worries about its survival, at least not in a biological sense. And fear has its paws deeply entrenched in humanity everywhere.

I spoke about how sometimes I worry about losing my passion for languages. But it will either happen or it won’t. I can make choices in life, but beyond that, control is out of my hands. And again, this applies to everything, not just my interest in languages. So again, I see a connection.

It’s very easy for me to stick with what I know. I’ve tried to shake that instinct by traveling around, but it’s a lesson that isn’t learned easily. I’ve tried to take risks and do daring things to help encourage growth and courage like joining the Peace Corps. But once in a new environment, that battle is not even half over yet. It’s not good enough that a person moves into a new country where things are sometimes backwards from what they knew beforehand. They have to be willing to go with the flow, as they say. My town, let’s admit, is unstimulating. It is beautiful here. But to my Western “developed nation” mentality, there is not a hell of a lot to do here. It layman’s terms, it’s boooooring. And that, dear readers, is kind of depressing. Mix it with traditions and customs that even after a year, if they don’t seem bizarre, they at least still don’t feel natural, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for feeling a long ways from home.

Let me give an example to help me clarify. Rinconada is celebrating its town festival. It’s a two-day party with drinking, music, a band, groups performing separate acts, costumes, stands of food, Peruvian moonshine, and of course tons of rice. A couple of weeks after that Silahua will be having their big party. Patrick and I have been asked to participate in both. In fact, it was more or less assumed we’d act in the party anyways.

There’s a good side to this. I’ve been accepted as a local community member. So much so that I’ve been asked to help participate in a dance or skit or something. Sure, people still stare at me when I walk down the road, but beyond that, I think I’ve been accepted.

But then fear comes in and tells me I don’t want to participate because it’s new and different. You might think you can get used to new and different things. And maybe you can. I don’t yet know the difference. It’s easy to *pretend* that you are well-adjusted and wise, especially when talking to a nervous brand-new volunteer (employee, international student, etc) but I think that we all still have our insecurities.

As I’ve stated before, I don’t like dancing. But if I’m going to dance, I like good music to dance to. Well, if you are in Peru, you are pretty much expected to dance, and the concept of someone who doesn’t like to dance seems about as unimaginable to the Peruvians as a talking can of peas. And as far as the music in my town goes… Well, let’s just say it’s not what I think about when I think about dancing. It’s easy to say, “That’s not for me, that’s not my thing, I want to do something I like.” And lots of times that might be right. I can say that about going to law school or med school, or being in a band, or reading Shakespeare, or hiking for weeks straight in the dark oppressive undergrounds with a team of geologists. Valuable yes, but not for me, not something I want to do.

That doesn’t really apply to participating in a town festival though. So what if a person doesn’t like dancing or the music. There are lots of things here that I am not interested in, or at least I don’t think I’m interested in. For example I don’t think I’ll ever need to learn how to be a farmer here, or how to plant banana trees. But what I’m trying to say is that for all the limitations I find here that frustrate me, I’m starting to see that I can be pretty limited, too. It’s easy to miss what is right in front of you. It can be irritating to have no one to talk to about things that I want to talk about. When the majority of folks have very basic education and knowledge of the world and are only interested in their crops, cows, donkeys, and fields, that just doesn’t leave a lot to talk about. But why should I think that I really know more than they do, at least if you don’t measure life in terms of places seen or languages learned or books read? If the folks here “don’t know any different” but are still happy with the simple pleasures of just getting together at a local party, aren’t they in an important way still going along pretty well?

I guess I’m saying it’s fine to not dig dancing or the music or the food. Everyone’s got personal tastes. Probably nothing will ever make me like their music (Lord knows I’ve had plenty of chances to give it a good listening-to), but it’s not fine to say you want to learn about different cultures and then hide behind “but they have to fit into my comfort zones.” In life, maybe taking part is better than hiding from something behind an excuse. Even if it’s scary and new and in your heart of hearts you suspect you’ll probably never do it again. I guess for now that’s the best I can articulate what I’m thinking about.

Sincerely,

Tristan

Callings in Life

Originally Written September 30, 2009

Dear Readers,

Sometimes it’s hard to know your calling in life. For me, I passion for languages. Just the act of acquainting myself with another language gives me a sense of joy that few other things do. It’s hard work, it takes a long time, and it can become painful or dull at times. But I love it. At the moment I’m learning French by working my way through a translation of “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown and a French course to help me with the pronunciation. I’ve been seeking out resources for several languages recently, and look forward to seeing what else I’ll have the chance to learn in my life. Sometimes people ask me what I plan on doing with all the languages I learn. I suppose it might be foolish of me, but I don’t always think ahead of learning them. They give flavor to my life even if I am just getting to know the grammar and idiomatic uniqueness. I don’t know how many of them I’ll actually ever use in my life. Ideally, I’d love to use all of them, but I don’t know how. I don’t know if I will.

It seems to me that I’ve been given a gift with languages. I may have something of a talent for learning them, and I do believe in such a thing. But I think that the passion is more important, and the hard work you put into learning something is still more important. The love I feel for languages is the gift I’m referring to.
A few times in my life I’ve wondered if I’ll ever lose my passion for languages. I can remember three times in life, all of them thankfully relatively short-lived. Once was in Germany. I don’t recall exactly what happened, although I know wrote about it on my blog at the time. Eventually it passed, this lull. And then again when I had just graduated from college. I remember this more clearly. I was also trying to learn French, and I think the method and literature I was using were serious factors in wearing me out, because they just weren’t interesting methods for me to learn with. I ended up taking the summer off from study, rebooting my interest and instead flirting with a Navajo dictionary and course book, without making any real attempt to absorb new words. Even in that phase though I started to theorize different methods I could use to learn.

And then a couple of weeks ago marks the most recent downtime. My interest mostly all back at the time of writing, if it was ever gone. But it bothers me every time this feeling rolls around. As if I might grow out of something. It’s not like growing out of playing with toy cars or a type of music, though. A passion isn’t just a phase. It’s a way of life. Lives of course can change. Relationships are always in change, in growth. I used to want to go into filmmaking. I had real dreams about that, and that changed for me into languages. I turned out fine. But this is something I don’t want to lose. I don’t know if I ever will, but the idea of it is so profoundly disturbing to me, to even think about it would make me wonder what I had left. If a person loses something they love, it’s not like just having your house burn down or your car stolen or something else that’s devastating. Both of those can be awful events in a person’s life, and I thankfully have not had to endure either of those. But when a person loses a passion, that must be like losing part of your soul. I’ve told people how I love to write. But it doesn’t compare to how I love the sounds and grammar and symbols of other languages. It helps fuel my imagination. I guess, though, what relationship doesn’t have its hard times, right?
It’s silly really, but I read about a Greek fellow who completely absorbs a different culture and through that he learns the language. He’s learned over thirty languages in his life, I believe. The silly part is that when I read about him, I started to question my own devotion to my hobby. He said that he found vocabulary and grammar boring. Instead he loved the culture. For me, the main thing I look about in a different culture *is* the language, and if I find their language enticing, I have much higher chances of wanting to learn about them more. And usually to see if there is some I can learn how to speak like them. And although I find highly technical grammar written in linguistic jargon nearly unreadable and vocabulary lists to sometimes be dry, I still love grammar and vocabulary. So in other words, I started to feel very self-conscious about what I look for in languages, and presto, lull number three in my life.

Frankly, I compare myself too much with other people. This is probably a common problem with people, though. Maybe we’d all feel reassured if we compared with each other how often we compare ourselves to one another, although since that almost never works, we might end up feeling more miserable. And that would suck, wouldn’t it? Maybe we ought to stop giving a damn about what other people think. I don’t advocate being self-absorbed jerks, but hopefully a person doesn’t need to be a jerk just to be themselves. It’s scary though because no one can really do it for you. You have to be you.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these questions. About these questions with languages and how they tie into even bigger issues, more universally human issues, one could perhaps say. But I think finding a passion is a key move to being yourself. Maybe a passion is a calling, even if that calling isn’t a job. I don’t know what I am called to do in life. I figure I have such a love for languages, but I don’t know how to incorporate that. I don’t think teaching or linguistics is for me. I’m almost certain on that, actually. Nor am I sold on interpreting or translating, at least full time. But languages are about communicating with folks. I said that I get most of my joy out of learning a language, and constantly adding to it, the way I add details to pictures or added Lego models when I still played with Legos. But beyond that is communication. Maybe somehow that’s what my calling is.
Or maybe I’m wrong about it. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a wonderful hobby and I’m actually meant to be a fisherman off the coast of Canada. It was the first job that came to my mind. But even if I were in Canada, I’d still be looking for chances to use my French, not to mention look for grammars and dictionaries and texts for Ojibwa, Stoney, Inupiaq, Wampanoag, and other such colorful tongues…It’d be one of the foremost things on my mind.

Hope all is well.

Tristan

Some More Thoughts...

Originally Written September 15, 2009

Dear Readers,

Yesterday the local pastor of the Protestant church engaged me in a conversation about religion. A note: in Spanish (and in German, but I don’t know what other languages) the word for “Protestant” is strikingly close to the English “Evangelical” even though it doesn’t exactly mean the same thing. In Peru there are Catholics and there are Protestants, translated as evangelicos. Whether Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other more specific groups are considered evangelicos or not is not clear to me, but from what I sense, they are distinct “religiones” although I am not sure if this means, in the view here, that they are different religions, or just different religious groups.

Anyways, I am really digressing. As I was saying, the local pastor engaged me in a discussion about God and the Bible as he believed it to be. He became interested in talking to me a few Sundays ago. Sitting with some men watching them swig a vile mixture of cañaso and milk while waiting around fix a broken water pipe with some fellows from my JASS, I saw a large group of people walking out of town down to the river. I asked the fellows I was sitting with what was going on and they told me and they told me a baptism in the river. I chewed that over, balancing the merits of fixing a pipe or watching a full-immersion baptism, something I’d never seen before, and decided to go to the river with the group and take pictures. On the way there the pastor spotted me, tapped me on the shoulder, gave me a limp handshake and asked me if I believed in God and what His name was, which, according to the pastor aptly named “Cristián”, is Jehovah.

Ever since then he has been braver about talking to me about religion. I have to admit, I’m not exactly sorry about it because it means something a little more philosophical to talk about than I get when I speak with most people in town. However, it’s also very conservative religious views, which I’ve heard before and personally don’t agree with. However, I let Cristián talk with me if he wants. He doesn’t do it too often, anyways.

I don’t agree with this fellow’s views for the most part, some of them for theological reasons, and some for humanistic reasons. I feel that a person’s belief system is a personal thing, and therefore I won’t go into mine here. I try not to be too specific in my discussions with the pastors, but sometimes his questions basically require answers that I can’t easily sidestep around. So far I haven’t minded it, though.

But on a broader view, not just in terms of religion, but in terms of what I believe and how I feel about various issues in the world, I find myself more confused than anything. I guess that’s part of life. That’s not to say I don’t have my own opinions, but I’ve found there are so many ways to live life that it’s probably better to keep your opinions to yourself 90% of the time. It’s not as if you are any more wrong or right than the next person. I’ve found it’s usually the case where wrong or right is not the issue so much as where a person is in their life. Or even how they are wired, so to speak. I used to think that the way a person acted had mostly to do with how they were brought up. Not to make this a blog about religion, but just as an example, some people just seem to have no desire to believe in a God of any kind. I used to not know what to make of it. Atheistic upbringing, religion is too stifling, choral music sucks, I didn’t know. I guess I still don’t actually. But then I look at myself. I was not raised by sports fanatics, but most people aren’t raised by religious fanatics. However, I was immersed in sports culture: most of my family enjoys sports; I was encouraged to play sports; my parents and most of my family is from Colorado, yet I was raised in rural Nebraska, so I got my pick of college teams. But despite all of the exposure and ample opportunities, not to mention the physical abilities (read: not talent) to play any of the sports I was around, I don’t give a flying flip about sports. In T-ball I would get bored in the outfield and sit down in the grass. It never really got any better for me. I enjoy running, and swimming as well if the water isn’t freezing, but I don’t really count those as sports. With the exception of a few fast paced games like badminton or dodge ball, I would conclude I am not wired for sports, much how some people are wired to be or not be something. I even consider myself a sports-agnostic, in that can accept that others find sports to be exciting, and believe in the possibility that they can be fun and exciting, but I have yet to see any proof that they are. If one were to look at what sports (rituals especially) and religion have in common, I think one would see they have a heck of a lot more in common than most folks realize.

What I’m trying to say today is not that based just in religion, nor in sports. What I am saying is that the more I try to live my life, the less clear it is where I am going, wires or cultural conditioning or not. Or sometimes it’s is that it is clearer, but it’s in a direction I don’t understand, which immediately muddies the waters again. I don’t really think though that life is about finding specific answers. Trying to get specific answers out of life is like reaching into a lake to hold the water in your hand. Sometimes you might catch a fish, but mostly I think it’s the process of fishing that counts. And that’s a good thing. It’s not a waste of time, it’s a time to make yourself open to new things that you wouldn’t have seen if you were so busy hooking fish into your boat.

Life is just confusing and unpredictable. But that’s what adventures are. The last two days were perfect examples of that. Nearly nothing turned out that I had planned. On Sunday I was planning on coordinating the JASSes of Rinconada and two other caserios, El Faique and Las Mishcas to all come to Rinconada so I could instruct them how to clean disinfect the reservoir in their towns, using my town as an example. We were set to meet at 10.00 AM. I thought we were just going to meet at my counterpart Pedro’s house. Instead, a group of people went up to start the cleaning, never going to Pedro’s house at all. Pedro and I waited for the other JASSes to arrive from the neighboring towns, but by the time we realized they were no-shows, it was too late, so we had to reschedule the cleaning, much to my chagrin because I wasn’t really jumping with joy to do this demonstration in the first place. However, these things seem to happen. A lot. I even described it to Patrick as “normal” and watched him laugh his ass off. It was more frustrating than discouraging. Indeed, it is rather typical that you schedule a meeting and then an important town authority that was aware of it is suddenly unavailable because he is out of town on business or at a social event, and consequently the meeting having to be rescheduled. It’s just the way the ball rolls here.

The next day I was looking forward restoring order to my bedroom while listening to podcasts and then Patrick called me up saying he needed help with is worm bin, which is fine, because as I have said before, we have to support one another. I went to his house and helped him with what I could but I had to be back at 3.00 to help with my art class with the primaria students. I was back at the appointed hour, but the principal to the school had left to go to his field. I was willing to put class off for some other day, but to both my exasperation and happiness the kids really wanted to have it on the same day – these afternoon activities have been a big hit with them – so I waited until 4.00 for the teacher to get back. Once he did, I divided the kids up in two groups to do two different puzzles my parents had sent me. None of the kids have ever done a puzzle before, to my knowledge. I was happy to see how the boys worked together with very minimal instruction from me. I was actually surprised how smoothly they worked.

I was also surprised to see in the other group the girls fight over the box to look at the picture of the Disney fairies, have a piece ripped in half, listen to the girls argue and watch them stake pieces off for themselves, somehow managing to create three different sections of the puzzle but unwilling to join them together to make the big picture. I even watched one kid (a boy who had briefly defected from the other group) accurately construct a portion of the puzzle and then destroy it so he could build it again. Not to mention the one girl who destroyed another girls section in retaliation to having her own section destroyed, she claimed. More than once I threatened to take away the puzzle if they couldn’t get along. I also threatened to throw kids out of the classroom if they mettled with the stuff in the teacher’s desk one more time, which they had never done before.

It made me not want to have kids.

Ultimately, it turned out to be a success because the kids all completed their puzzles and told me they wanted to do another one. Lucky for them I have a final, more complicated jigsaw puzzle. Lucky for me it will be the deciding factor if I seek out more puzzle activities for them. Maybe we’ll stick with drawing. Everyone loves to draw, right? (By the way, if anyone is willing to donate crayons or colored pencils or even notepads that you can easily tear the pages out of, or similar inexpensive, simple art supplies, let me know, and I promise you they will have the hell used out of them because colored pencils have been a smashing success in my class and not everyone has paper to spare).

But the fact that the youth group is going well and is actually the most fun I’m having with the town is another good example of something I didn’t expect. I’ve never been a kid-person and I initially had no plans to work with youth. But they are my most eager co-workers, so to speak. And as one of my fellow volunteers told me on the phone that evening, I very well might be the only positive male influence they have in their lives right now. And heck, it’s actually fun.

Who woulda thunk it?

Hope all is well.

Tristan

Some Observations about Customs and Critters

Originally Written September 2, 2009

Dear Readers,

I look forward to the second year of my service. This first year is not yet finished yet (that happens at the end of November) but I think that the second year will be far more productive, if that’s the right word. Things in Rinconada have already started to pick up. That’s not to say of course that there still aren’t difficulties or challenges that leave me shaken or completely baffled.

Little by little projects are going. However, in Peace Corps-speak, the idea of a “project going” is a very vague one, and one that has caused me a lot of grief. Just to succeed in arranging a meeting is a success. It’s a given that the meetings will start at least an hour late, and the lack of punctuality is usually a small joy for me because it gives me time to read while I have the feeling of “accomplishing” something, namely waiting for people to show up at seven for the meeting that scheduled for five. For me, the frustrating thing I’ve noticed is how unbelievably clunky the meetings are. Every meeting I’ve been to has at least forty-five minutes of uncoordinated discussion or people filling out papers that is begging to be streamlined. Often in crowds I succumb to doodling in my agenda or notebook. It doesn’t help that most of the gatherings are done in buildings with awful echoing acoustics and nothing can be heard anyways.

One has to take things with a grain of salt in Peace Corps life. I used to be driven insane by the things people would talk about on the road. “Are you going uphill/downhill?” “Ah yes, going up/down.” Of course I’m doing that. That’s like asking Waldo to his face if he’s wearing a striped shirt. Nowadays, however, I’ve come to be more at peace with it. You just accept it in the same way that Americans will ask you “How are you doing?” and then not even wait for a response. In other words, it’s just another form of acknowledgment.

Allow me to recount a typical story of hospitality. The simple matter of dropping a message off at a neighbor’s become quite an affair if you were not planning to spend much time with them. Every time I’ve had to pass along a notice to someone they have invited me to sit down and take a rest for a while. It’s a nice gesture and one that I’ve come to expect, although not one I’ve really come to always enjoy yet. Yesterday I was passing along notes to town authorities about a meeting I have coming up next week. I entered the front room of a house where several men were passing the time. Hanging from the rafters were fresh carved off slabs of beef and the smell of blood wafted around the room. I gave my note to the local authority who was slicing up oozing beef on the table and then told them I’d be on my way, as I had a whole stack of notes to give out. But everyone insisted that I stay for a moment and have a bowl of beef soup. I was unable to politely refuse and offering a guest food is something that has happened to me often out of generosity and respect, so there I sat. Now, I really love beef. But for a reason I can’t quite figure out, the local beef I’m not too crazy about at all. I guess it’s the taste, basically. Also, I can be very squeamish. Eating a bowl of beef soup in a room smelling of blood with red raw meet all around me and being chopped up on the table inches from my bowl made it difficult for me to enjoy my impromptu meal. So after eating mostly just the noodles and plantains in the soup I told them I was full, which they seemed to accept and that I had to continue passing out notices. I hope that wasn’t culturally insensitive of me.

Here’s a story I hope y’all like. One late night a couple of weeks ago I was stung by a scorpion while trying to smash it with my sandal. In order to keep from passing out from the sensation of having my toe chewed off with a blow torch I tried to make it back to my bed. I pushed through my bedroom door and stumbled over my chair and collapsed on my bed where waited for my vision to return while I consoled myself that I probably wouldn’t die because my host mother told me she had been stung three times in the course of her life. After blood returned to my head I got up and walked out to wake her up. I didn’t want to climb the hill to get to the door of the house, so I stood in the street and shined my flashlight into her window on the second story and called her name. She asked me what was wrong and I told her a “firetrucking” scorpion stung my “firetrucking” foot. She just replied “Ohhhh” and then giggled. A few moments later she came down to my room and poured some rubbing alcohol onto the wound and said something about a candle and my toe. A bit to my dismay I thought she wanted me to stick my toe in a candle flame, which didn’t seem very healthy, but I also wondered if the burning flame would really register much above the burning venom. Thankfully she was only suggesting I drip hot candle wax on the wound, which I did. It did sting, but as I had thought, I could barely feel it. Afterwards, I went back to stomping on the scorpion, which had been crippled and rendered nearly motionless but had stayed alive through the whole ordeal. Orfelinda finally killed it with a stick.

I’m sure her treatments did any good, but the next day my stinging had gone down to where I could walk without a limp, and by day three I couldn’t tell anything at all had ever occurred. Truth is, I don’t blame the scorpion, and actually I think they are really cool and beautiful bugs. I’ve found a few in my room and have always had to kill them, which is a real shame, I think. If I knew of a way of safely getting rid of them without getting stung, I would do that instead. I try not to kill the animals I find, even if the Peruvians in the area don’t like them. I’ve spared every tarantula and snake I’ve come across, and every time I find a snake dead on the road I feel bad for it.

Orfelinda has also acquired a new puppy, a dirty grey-brown campo dog who still piddles on floor and then sits in it. I think he’s cute in his own helpless way; he’s got floppy ears and is slightly larger than my size 11.5 shoe and he once fell off a rock and into a bowl of dirty water. He waddles crookedly along and likes to antagonize the sleeping pig who shakes water off on me after I’ve poured it on him with the watering can to cool him down in the sun.

And finally, my last observation about animals:

Chickens can fly, if only for short distances. For example, I’ve learned that a chicken can fly faster than a bucket’s worth of water I’ve flung at it. I did not know they could move that fast.

I think I’m running out of animal stories. I’m aware that this blog has not really had any linear patterns from beginning to end, but the truth is I wanted to put something light out there. Peace Corps is like life in a lot of ways: confusing as hell and full of chances for you to second guess yourself. This last month has overall been good, but has had its emotional lows too and I wanted to write something that would be cheery and convey some of the lighter or more amusing moments I’ve had here. Even the scorpion sting was funnier than hell I thought. I don’t know why I thought that. It’s a laugh I’d rather not relive, though.

Hope all is well.

Tristan

To Teach or To Learn?

Originally written on August 5, 2009
Dear Readers,

After my one post in July I decided it was high time to update my blog again. I spent a lot of time last month traveling and didn’t have time to write as much as I thought I would, either in my blog or anything else that I am writing. I read Stephen King’s memoir “On Writing” and it among many things it inspired in me, it inspired me to take another stab at a story I’ve been working on for months and I’m making progress in it, yet I didn’t even have much of a chance to work on that this past month. But that’s not meant to be a complaint; for the most part July passed very well.

I spent a few days with some other friends from my Peace Corps group in Ancash, a region in Peru that is famous for its Andean landscapes, including the mountain Huascaran. It’s also one of the places in Peru where the ancient language Quechua is still spoken. Some of my fellow volunteers have told me that the Spanish they’ve learned before swearing in has gotten worse because they are surrounded by people who either speak no Spanish or speak broken Spanish. I don’t necessarily envy them anymore, though. I still am interested in learning Quechua if I can, but I’m no longer in a rush to devour languages as fast as I can. I want to enjoy them because I have learned something about myself. It was actually something I already knew but was never able to explain until I heard someone explain the same feeling. Although I enjoy using the languages I learn – for years I wanted to be an interpreter – it is in the actual learning of languages that I find real fun. Sometimes people ask me why I want to learn such and such a language, from Finnish to Norwegian to Klingon, and it is because each language is unique and presents new challenges and new adventures, new constructions, new grammar that I haven’t seen before. A story might be the same story over and over, but each new language finds a new way to tell it through its unique grammar and the way its vocabulary is put together: Are the words self-standing, or are they compound constructions that give an insight to how the culture that uses that language sees the world. And what are the roots of those words? How can they take back into time to when the language was being formed out of mixtures of other tongues? Anyways, I owe thanks to the Hungarian polyglot Kató Lomb, who expressed in her book Így tanulok nyelveket (Polyglot: How I Learn Languages) the same passion about not just using languages, but actually *learning* them. I would probably do good not to forget that language was a huge reason why I joined the Peace Corps in the first place.

But I actually didn’t want to write just about languages in this entry. Although the truth is I’ve been wondering for the past few days what exactly I *should* write about. Yesterday I helped my family and my two counterparts put some of the major touches to my garden. The idea to do a garden was mine, but I know very little about what goes into gardening. I know a little bit about composting, to even there I’m still a novice. I have ended up learning far more about this project than I feel I’ve contributed. I’m ok with that because the next time I can help more actively. But I believe this will probably be a theme throughout my Peace Corps career, and I would be wise to keep a healthy degree of humility about myself. I think that I will probably more often than not be learning more than I will be actually contributing. I’m sometimes baffled by how the Peace Corps expects people to come in and introduce something to a community. Even after training I don’t really feel like an expert in water systems or environment matters. We may have more technical knowledge about why or how often a person should boil water or wash their hands, but in lots of things the people who have lived in the community for generations have a wealth of knowledge they could give us if we wanted. I’m reminded of an exercise we did during Staging in Washington DC where we divided the group into anthropologists and natives. The “natives” were instructed to react to the anthropologists in a very consistent manner that was supposedly the way they would react to each other in their own tribe. The “anthropologists” were told that the natives have a problem that the anthropologists and to identify. The natives had no idea that they were being diagnosed with a problem at all; indeed they were simply acting what to them was normal. We can’t always approach a group of people with the belief we know better than them and have more to offer.

I’m not saying we should just leave the people alone. If a person can help someone, I think they should, and there are plenty of opportunities to help in the Peace Corps, in terms of education and literacy, health, and environmental matters. My town alone, a small little isolated village of some 400 people or less has all of these. And also, I think the volunteers, or at least some of them, have the idea that we can’t really change a group of people, we can only offer suggestions and try to persuade the people in our communities to adopt them (digging dumps instead of littering or burning garbage, for example). It’s easy to see littering as a problem and nothing but a problem. I actually can’t think of how it cannot be a problem, as a matter of fact, but getting down to the cultural level is where the real work is. It’s easy to say that to cross a river you need to build a bridge. But it won’t be a usable or practical bridge unless you first familiarize yourself with the river bottom so you know the foundation you’ll be working with.

I guess that’s all I have for now.

Take care of yourselves.

Tristan

PS – Some people have been asking me what I would like to have from the states in care packages. If you are one of those folks, let me give you a short list here. It’s basically food I cannot get here or food that is too expensive for a poor lowly volunteer like myself.

Salted, unshelled sunflower seeds (like David or some brand like that….I like salted better than BBQ or Ranch)
Salted pumpkin seeds (see above)
Crunchy peanut butter
Candies like Snickers, Butterfinger, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (or other products by them, like Reese’s Pieces), Almond Joy
Beef Jerky, like the smoked, original or teriyaki flavors are my favorites, not so much the spicy flavors.

I’m also very interested in certain pops (or sodas, if you prefer) like Cherry or Vanilla Coke, Root Beer, and Dr. Pepper. However, sending liquids is a quick and easy way to make a package heavy and there might be rules about sending liquids, so I’m mostly writing these down to complete the list I have in my American food-starved brain at the moment, not because I really expect pop to be sent. However, if you feel the need…

To those of you who have been asking and are thinking of sending me care packages, my heartfelt thanks to you. A little piece of home is always nice out here.

Ben and Charles Will Be Proud

Dear Readers,

21K. 2 hours, 12 minutes, 49 seconds. For my buddies mentioned in the title, that information suffices. But for those who aren't familiar with running, I ran 13 miles in a half marathon last week. I am still sore in the knee from it. But I am proud of my results. I didn't walk one step of those hills, rocks, sand, or paves paths. I was quite out of shape for running, but I was still in shape enough from all the walking I did up in the foothills of the Andes. Also, entering the race with no pressure was a great help as well, since I had no illusions that I would win. In fact I was surprised that I was able to finish as strongly as I could.

But the highlight was not the running, it was being with the people, the other volunteers from other parts of Peru. I also got to meet several other returned volunteers from Bulgaria, Madagascar, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and I'm not sure from where else.

No real crazy stories to tell. Everyone was safe and things went fairly smoothly. Afterwards I had to get to a meeting in another volunteer's site where we learned about gardening. Unfortunately I was a little ill during this but still managed to attend.

Afterwards it was back to my site to try to coordinate something, but July is proving hectic. Once again I am out of town for more meetings this week. And coordination on top of that is difficult with the townspeople after a local meeting failed to come together.

Oh well. It was a bit embarrassing but if you don't learn to roll with the punches, you had best scadaddle over. I step back and a sense of humor is what a person needs. I'm kind of at a point where I surrender control to this life I'm in. Might as well try to sit back and enjoy the ride.

I have more to say, and I didn't plan this to be so bare-bones, but I didn't have a chance to write this out before posting and I need to get going, so I'll try to write more next time.

Wish you all the best!
Tristan