I live here
The view down the hill
and around the corner
can you say in*fra&stru%$ture?
Everyone, forgive me for what I now realize ever better will be intermittent posts here and especially for those who are sending me e-mail, will be long periods between return messages. I will try to read all your messages and will try to answer when I can.
It has been hectic and awkward, all of it. I have been living without a brain for a week and haven’t gotten it back, and don’t see it coming back soon.
I am the oldest volunteer (by far)…which I kind of expected and kind of didn’t. Everything is kind of did and didn’t. I wake up almost in tears, fix it, get over it, think it out, get up and get going for a day that, really, is not difficult, just moment to moment different.
It is Saturday, about 8 am and I’m trying to get this written and copied to my thumb drive to take to an internet café to post. I’ll also spend an hour with e-mail.
Of all of this, language is the hardest. No surprise there. I am, indeed, behind my fellow volunteers, again no surprise, and the competitive part of me despairs a little, then I catch it at it and chase it away for a while. Basically, I go from minute to minute, from activity to activity and focus closely leaving the rest (and there is a lot else going on) to Peace Corps staff. In all of this I find I put a lot of trust in the staff. I have to let go of my tendency to control my environment. And that’s not hard to do. Great people.
Gotta run. My Dona has breakfast ready and expected me up a while ago. This is “a day off” as is tomorrow. Really, it’s another immersion day in language. That’s tiring, especially as I am still hearing Spanish as a train wreck of syllables ending in “entiendes?” (do you understand?) I do not nod because I really do not understand, nor do I say, no. I look open-eyed as though since it didn’t come in through my ears, maybe I can get it with my eyes somehow. If skin might be a language receptor, I’d turn that up, too. I try to smile a lot…which isn’t all that hard to do, actually.
Remind me to tell you about the security situation here. As presented by PC staff, it’s a soft war zone here with uneasy, awkward, white guys like me, targets. I’ve traveled before, of course, by myself and usually without incident of theft (there’s always been a little and I have lost things) but here it’s especially intense. We did skits and a dance about spotting trouble. A lot of time is spent keeping us out of trouble. As a past traveler, I know that information is essential and I used to hunt it down aggressively, probing hostel staff for tidbits, treating them like the gold they are.
Can’t even type this morning. So it’s off to breakfast.
Later.
Back. It’s Sunday and this hasn’t been posted. The internet café immediately made me wish for the keyboard I’m not typing on…you know…a keyboard on which the backspace key doesn’t stick and I don’t have to press each key so hard I must be leaving impressions of the keys in the tabletop. There was no USB port and I have no other memory means…no CD or, if you remember these, no floppy disks. There’s a floppy drive in the machine I was using at the café. I found, as I was getting started, that I didn’t recognize the floppy drive face front for a while. Finally it clicked.
I did e-mail deleting whole pages of messages, sorting for those few (7) from JoAnne (3) and a few others, one about a letter that the Burlington Free Press had actually (perhaps a surprise to a few who suspect the BFP is not publishing letters from big-wind opponents) published. Well, we expect some of the letters to be published. Why they chose mine I don’t know, but I’m pleased they did. And so should end my involvement in the big-wind issue in Vermont. I just don’t have the bandwidth or time to entertain that issue, as important as it is, and do this, too.
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