Blog 3/30/11
Things are getting easier…which makes me wonder why things seemed so much harder before. One answer might be culture shock. And that makes me wonder why I didn’t seem to feel culture shock on my other trips. It might be that I was running way from something scarier than what I was confronting in, for good example, South Africa when I landed in Johannesburg to stay a short while with the Quilleys in Kempton Park in ’82. We were speaking English so I I didn’t have a language problem, that is, language requirements. This has made a big difference. Later, in South America, I my Spanish was a serious hindrance and I had to simply become content with being mostly alone because I couldn’t speak much to anyone. It’s the same here with my host family. Their accent is so thick that I’ve been told by my Spanish instructor that it would take two years before I’d be able to understand them. It makes me wonder why I was paired with these folks.
Things are progressing however; I think they’ve understood that amplitude--my dona has taken to shouting over my left shoulder as though to a deaf parrot eyeing her from there--is not the key to getting me to understand their Spanish. Look at it from my perspective. I hear unfamiliar syllables and try to pair them up with those that I know. My Spanish is limited but basic Spanish communication should be possible. Often, though, I understand just 5 or 10% of what I am hearing, perhaps less. So I find I lose confidence that I might understand. I expect that I will not and part of my mind seems to shut off and I find I am not paying as close attention, not making as much effort to match sounds with those I know…so some of this seems to have to do with confidence that I’ll understand what I am hearing. I haven’t yet managed to tell them that if they want to play the “talk to the gringo” game, I am willing but that it will take patience on their part. For now it seems that this family is content to treat me like a valuable glass object that needs to use the bathroom and to be fed three meals a day.
I want to write about Dave. As I am cut off from Bobbie for a while (no Internet here therefore no Internet for the next 5 weeks) I am left to process this myself. JoAnne told me Dave ended his life in Bobbie's driveway and that he was discovered, too late, by the UPS guy and that when Bobbie got home the police, etc. were there. I can’t quite imagine what that was like for her. The day before yesterday, I had a small melt-down over it during my (solitary, as usual…and, in this case, fortunately so) lunch.
That might be the end of my emotional processing but there’s more, of course, that I want to think about. It seems only fair to Dave to spend the time thinking about him. I don’t know much about his life, actually. An artist with a problem with depression, probably different than my problem so I don’t really know what he was going through. Still, as perhaps arrogant as it might seem, one might say that it’s hard to imagine the suicide getting what he desires. What, then, might Dave have desired? To be understood? “Saved?” Heard? This he did having more recently been visiting my sister of late. I don’t know what that really means. Bobbie will have to tell me and that will have to wait. Surely I will have moved on by then. I’ve been in this community a week and it feels like at least a month. The newness will wear off but the emotional cycles will continue and, so, the distance in time will continue to expand beyond what I have come to understand as normal back home.
I’m not “happy” here and I am not “doing what I want to do” or what I would “like” to do but I am busy and each day is full. It’s not thrilling me. I am not ending each day feeling fulfilled or even happily anticipating the next but I am sticking it out a day at a time and find the company good and the work do-able. I can do it, so far.
Back to Dave. I imagined a conversation. I am 62 and Bobbie 59 at this time. We’re older but in this kind of thing I feel that that makes no difference. I am not “prepared” for this kind of event…even though I have suffered from depression myself and been to the edge…or some edge that might fit the description and, so, qualify me as having some special knowledge about the thing, but, really, I do not. In this, we’re all the same. And for Bobbie…it must be a little like it is for me. He was there, in my mind. I had invested in him. I cared what happened to him. And suddenly there is an emptiness that cracks the world with its finality. There is no talking this out with him. I would have but was not given the chance. We’re simply left with the final decision and everything after that is silence. Sounds happen. The air is full of them: cars, children’s prattle and shouts, the cock’s crowing (we have several…every neighbor seems to…and they announce themselves starting at 3 AM) the music from the colmado, yet there is another kind of sound that is now absent and loud in its absence. Every sad sounding song can fill my eyes with tears. It’s a surprise. I am one way, thinking of something fully else and a wave breaks over me and takes me away to an empty place of quiet, a place Dave filled that is now collapsing upon itself, a process that will never complete.
I have a bat. For as long as it wishes to stay. That it’s here is our secret, a secret I will honor and keep. There was a familiar flutter of wings last night in the room, louder then softer as it roams the room the way they do, to this wall, then that. It settled near the foot of my bed and I head some paper scratching and couldn’t imagine what it had found of mine to examine. I turned on my headlamp to try to see it but could not. My mosquito net (mosquitero) obscured it and, anyway, it was out of sight, not even a shape to finally identify it or let me know it was or had been really here. Still, I quickly shut off the lamp because I didn’t want to scare it off. It was, after all, eating mosquitos. I liked its company, knowing it was here. In the morning I peered behind the larger-than-life-sized, thinly framed picture/poster of a little, blue-eyed, blonde girl in a red dress holding a black and white puppy. There it was and there it is now. I’ve figured out how to see it without moving the picture to disturb it. Bats (muscielagos,) it turns out, flutter the same in Spanish as they do in English. I understood it immediately, my recognition instantaneous, without effort, even without my wishing it understood. Its flutter was not simple but filled the air with all that a bat has ever been to me: soft, dark grey, small, sharp teeth, stretched-skin delicate wings, hardly any weight, mosquito snap, bright eyes.
One of our trainers is a woman of about 27. She’s a good and enthusiastic trainer. In other ways she seems young. She was talking about how her emotional orientation to her PC service evolved and it turns out it’s much like mine. She was here figuring she’d get through 3 months (the training) and see how things sat with her and Peace Corps at that time. She seemed to go by 3 month increments. I feel much the same. What, I wonder, will I learn about myself in 3 months? I can’t imagine being this ambivalent about the work I am doing here in three months and staying on. Why do that. This is not what one would call fun. What keeps me here is wondering what comes next. I have some adjusting to do. Can I adjust? I want to answer that question. I also want to learn Spanish. That’s not coming by itself…at least not in a way I can recognize. Sure, I’m learning some words. Anybody can do that. I’ve done that in other languages and it’s never lead to competency in a language, just a pile of unrelated words I can string together to get by…call them surface coasting tools. With them I can coast across a surface of a country or culture. Actual communication of meaning eludes me…but I’ve only been at this for a month. That’s not enough to tell me I can’t ever do this. So we coast onward. I do, anyway.
Peace Corps has told us in a number of ways now that the women here (and the men for the women PCVs) are unavailable to us…or should be considered so. They’ve never actually said this this way but that’s what they’ve said…no matter what one might have thought about having that itch scratched while “living and working abroad.” It makes perfect sense. For now, especially with our limited communication skills, any interest a woman, for example, might show in one of us will likely be only a financial interest. Later, some of us might discover a real love here. Every year, so go the statistics, a few of us will marry a local and after a while it’ll be discovered that half of those will survive the first 5 years. Some urges will have to be subdued. Period. But that’s no different than back home. In other words, so what’s new? But the jokes persist and it’s difficult to take part in that, seen from one perspective, sad and pointless joking. My damaged ankle keeps me from getting the exercise I used to use to keep those urges submerged and out of the way. I sure do miss access to my recreations. It just makes things a little harder, a little more like work, just in a foreign place.
The other day, on the hike, I looked at the homes along the road and had to ask why the people who live here haven’t made for themselves better homes and a prettier personal environment. Beauty, they say, is in the eyes of the beholder. I don’t think this is entirely true. Sure, money’s a part of it but there’s more, a kind of an awareness and desire, perhaps a permission to experiment and express, missing.
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