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
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
posted by Tristan | 11:13 AM
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