Week 18 - The Success of Banality

It’s amazing how your standards change based on linguistic and cultural fluency. In the US it would hardly register to simply talking to someone, understanding them, and then move on. Here, however, it’s far different. As I become more entrenched in my host site, I find myself beaming from even the most banal interactions. Did I recognize that person correctly and casually insert their name into the greeting so they know I know it? Did I understand 90% or more of what they said without having to go “eh?” every other sentence as if I were hard-of-hearing? Did I properly switch from using buenos dias to buenas tardes at noon, or did I just wish that nice woman a good morning at 4pm?

A large part of my contentment these days stems from small exchanges like these. Even though school—and thus work—has officially restarted after the strike, I still find myself with exorbitant amounts of time on my hands. Paseando (strolling) has become a meaningful method by which to work on my secondary objective: Community integration. As trite as it sounds, I actually feel myself swell with pride every time I walk away from a two minute conversation that I navigated correctly and without agenda. My facial muscles contort into a self-satisfied grin. I feel lighter, cooler, sexier.

The really unexpected thing is that while the positive sensation is still felt during chats with a purpose—discussing vegetable prices at the market, introducing myself to teachers and principals at my schools, etc.—it’s greatly diminished. You’d think that the positive feelings from doing my job competently would supersede the more extraneous stuff. I suppose in a way it does; I feel like an idiot when I screw up a presentation to parents or teachers, where it’s more a hope of not failing than it is of succeeding, but it’s almost as if the banality of a dialogue is what makes it so successful. Anyone can walk up to the woman in the San Se post office and say “do you have a package for me?” It’s only when she says “of course not, this is San Se” and we continue to talk about the people sending me things from home that I start to get that rich, warm, slightly bloated sense of self-competence.

Community integration, and its much-loved offspring, confianza (roughly, “mutual trust”), are terms that Peace Corps tossed around daily during training. Despite the slightly magnanimous way it was always presented to us, it really is an important goal, especially in a country that runs on back scratching and backroom agreements between friends. As almost every volunteer has told me who’s been in country long enough to know, “everything is a whole lot easier when you have confianza.” Need a person to give you a lift back from one of your more distant schools? Need a reservation for the community conference room on short notice? Need a fair quote for those new hand washing stations you’re building?

Confianza, confianza, confianza.

Of course, not all of this is hypothetical. The confianza I built with the principal of one of the schools that will almost surely be mine when Lauren and I split them got us invited to their Mother’s Day celebration last week. I ran into her at the market, where we exchanged pleasantries and gabbed over the price of onions (two quetzales per pound. That’s highway robbery!) After a few minutes she suggested that we head over on Friday morning and see what one of the many major school celebrations is like. Of course I accepted, and Friday morning I hopped on a bus and found her in one of the school’s three classrooms.

“Hey Beatrice, how’s it going?” The standard introduction to some fantastically ordinary conversation.

For most of the celebration I was sitting in a corner, simply watching what the 40 or so mothers and their toddler-aged children were doing. I was mildly surprised—though perhaps I shouldn’t have been—when Beatrice asked me to stand up and say a few words about me, the Peace Corps, and Healthy Schools.

“I, um, am Joe. From the US. I’m from the state Minnesota, which is way to the north, so it’s always cold.” Not succeeding, trying not to fail too badly.

Despite my bumbling, Lauren and I were able to get across the majority of what we needed to say, and then it was back again to watching the celebrations, laughing with the teachers, and smiling at the shy children hiding behind their mothers’ corte (traditional skirt).

When it was over, a grandfatherly old man offered to give the two of us a ride back into town so we wouldn’t have to wait and pay for a bus. His stooped stature and the way his overly-large pants were cinched around his bellybutton endeared him to me immediately. Truthfully, I’m not sure quite how that confianza was forged, but it may have had something to do with the fact that we were the only two men in the room over three years of age. I’ll take it where I can find it. I had seen him, slightly embarrassed, trying to explain to the group why he was there at Mother’s Day and not a female figure, but there was nothing embarrassing about the love he showered upon his tiny charge.

“So you’re José, huh?” He asked me as we were walking to his pickup. “I’m also José. We’re José and José!”

I assume it won’t always be like this. I can’t always be so easily satisfied with myself, right? Eventually, my standards will have to rise. Until then, however, I’m going to keep plodding forward; each word becoming a sentence, each sentence a conversation, each conversation a brick by which to build confianza.

I look over at him and smile. “Hey José, how’s it going?”

There are a few pictures from the Mother’s Day celebration, but the majority are from my school visits that are continuing to occur. It can be pretty thrilling to roll over the spines of a mountain range in a pickup bed with an unencumbered view for what feels like thousands of miles. Enjoy! https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week18?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiiltf_ue2CRw#