Saturday, July 2, 2011

Oh, Great. Expectations…

Arrival at the Valle de Tetero

Campfire-light the first night

The kitchen, Valle de Tetero

Not a smoke house...but, then again, it is a smoke house: kitchen at the Valle de Tetero

No kidding...not a set up shot. Found these discarded (or drying out) after everyone arrived at Valle de Tetero. They were just there with all the other stuff drying after the hike...so I photographed them.

Futures

On my way into my community

A bit of a sobering sight found as I walked through my community.
And you'll note that I haven't yet posted pictures of all the SUVs, Hummers, ATVs at breakneck speeds etc. that folks drive around here in what is actually a touristic and sought after area...not my community, but just outside it where a I live for the moment. Everytime I see a really nice house here I'm told it belongs to a general. Truth.

                I haven’t written lately because I feel as though I’ve nothing to say. Part of this is frustration and that, I find, has most to do with my own expectations. They aren’t great expectations. I never thought I was here to save either the world or the DR or any part of it. Towards an understanding of that, a friend of a friend said to the two of us as we three sat upon a cool cement wall late one night in the park (they with their soda and rum and I with my soda,) ‘I don’t want  you to tell me how to improve my life, but if you’re here to say that you’ve found that answers you’ve been searching for in your life are bound up in answers I have been searching for in mine, take my hand and we'll walk together a while.’ …Well, something like that, anyway. It was late and some weeks ago, which, in this time altering place is some part of a different life ago, and my memory these days….
                I’m told that my new project partner would meet me (at 8:00 AM) so we could put together the class we’re teaching tomorrow at 11:00. There’s plenty of time, except there really isn’t. What was three months is now one and little has been accomplished (as near as I can tell) in these critical first three. It’s 9:00 and he’s not shown up. Now it’s closer to 10:00. He comes in, sits down, his cell phone rings, he apologizes and leaves with a promise to meet me the next day, the day of the class, same place at 8:00. Okay. Actually, it’s not okay. NO it’s NOT, DAMN IT. Because this is week 4 of this kind of thing and I am not getting my work done. I am not getting anywhere. The class is a hodgepodge of little hedgehog diversions that, okay, have something to do with our subject, appropriate technology (tecnologia apropriada...amazing how similar Spanish is to English and it'd be easy if only I knew which words were the similar ones...,) little place holders, busy work for them which, though imaginative, leave me oddly empty. I’m not used to failing and I’m not used to failing so often for so long at a stretch…and, frankly, not being fired by now.
                And that is the problem. It distills out to be a problem with expectations. Something in me wants things to go along. I don’t mind surprises but something in me seems to need more…to want more, to expect more…or differently, but I think, more…stability. Something of routine. But routine has lead to boredom…which I want always to avoid. Boredom is another funny thing, the kind of thing we’re told is also a failure of imagination, as if to say (or to be told, but I can’t quite see by whom) I can’t find a way to keep myself busy, just a knack, a technique one uses to stay on top of the ball. What ball? The ball we balance on and call life, our life, familiar, manageable and managed life. That ball.
                I’ve put this much together: the trick about Peace Corps seems to be figuring out how to hang in there. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Try it. Like the kitten on the greeting card hanging on the branch. “I’m still here” means that I’m standing and waiting for the next screwball pitch. Things [s**t] happen[s], of course. It’s so much like the weather. Sometimes it’s so regular you think you can make plans by it. I was going to write, “set your watch” but that’s not what we do, we make our plans. And, yes, I know, and repeat to myself, that the way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans. Despite these helpful sayings I still get knocked off balance. That phrase brings to mind an image of a martial arts student being knocked around in always surprising ways by the master. Maybe it’s a little like that.
                So I have this class but don’t have this class. It was canceled yesterday (replaced by English class…it has been made it a priority that the students learn English in their two years at the school…and, trust me, it's not going to happen at the rate they’re going or the way they’re going at it) and I was promised that today’s would meet, then to be told on the appointed time of its meeting that, indeed, and sorry, today’s, too, has been canceled so the students can do more English. (Deer in the Headlights School of English.) I’ve put hours into the class preparation but more than that, I’ve been nursing this anxiety about the class, the anxiety I have before each class…because, frankly, at this pace, and in this way—with my fellow teacher not showing up for planning meetings--my class is a work of imagination itself, a punt job, I’d even go so far as to call it a bit of a joke, in Spanish, una broma, chistoso. Made a joke by I am not sure whom. Myself? A product of expectation?
                I surprised myself yesterday by telling my project partner—upon his yet again too late arrival at our class/course planning meeting...yes, it's the entire course we're supposed to be constructing in these meetings, these meetings that don't happen— in surprisingly passable Spanish for me, suddenly, that when things like that happen I feel (siento) I have no (que no tengo) purpose (proposito) at the school. It was—because it was real and true—a satisfying sentence to speak, like an expression of freedom. With that declaration I had freed myself from some trap-like thing that had been winding around me. I said I thought we had no class, that it was a bust. That, too, felt like putting nails into a coffin wanting the warm earth. We’ll see what happens. Vamos a ver. We are going to see. Veremos. We will see...we'll see. I like the second one, it's simpler. Surely it's what's really said. Veremos. The one word expressing the one, concise, smooth emotion...or expectation.
                So what’s the take away here? Am I failing? I said as much a week or so ago to a fellow volunteer. I told him I woke up that morning with a panic in my gut and heard either my father, a college professor I once had or a boss, stopping me in the hall to tell me, “Buddy, you’re not making it here.” I felt sick to my stomach, that gut-punch feeling when a realization like that hits. (And I have to add, I mean, does this every STOP? I'm over sixty for Pete's sake! Surely at some point fathers and college professors and bosses stop haunting one's sleep...and leave one to live in peace.)
                Now, part of this I’ve actually got figured out; my job is to imagine a college curriculum with no guidance. I’m to dream it up and we’re to see if it flies, or what part of it does. So I’m forever out on a limb with someone behind me carrying a saw. It’s dreamland and I get nervous when I’m off the ground so long. The other part is that in order to do this well—for it to have a chance of being a good class leading to a good curriculum—I have to put my heart into it and that is dangerous anytime and anyplace let alone here in the DR where things are warned and famously unpredictable.
                I remind myself: I’m a volunteer, just a volunteer. And, you know what? Somewhere in this mess are a couple of keys I’ve been looking for for a long time. It’s just a bit confused and I can’t quite pick them out. The other day—just the other day—a girl on some rocks near me—deep in the mountains of the DR at a place called Valle de Tetero, a tourist destination from which some of the photos for this entry come—dropped her hand mirror (“¡O! ¡Mi espejo!,”she cried…she’d been combing her long black hair and making cow eyes over the top of it at someone…not me, she’s 20 going on 13 and looking for someone to make come true her mother’s promise that she can be kept in the style into which she was born if she plays her cards right and it’s pretty clear I’m not going to live long enough to do that for her) (the mirror is the size and shape of a small calculator; it has a blue frame and back) and it slid down the rocks and into the river some 10 feet below. It slid into the frothy, turbulent outflow of a waterfall and couldn’t be seen...think: blue frame and back, mirror, water. Nobody knows the rocks down there but there’s a big one waste deep down about where it went in I have, with some effort owing to the current, stood on. It’d be down the side of it, maybe...or swept downstream. I peered over the edge. Good luck. But, you know, someone dove and found it. Almost immediately. Food for thought.
                Called one of our trainers this afternoon…part business and part to see how she’s doing trying to get her contract renewed and stay in the country and have a life here…and that pretty much sorted out my perspective. I have small problems, She’s got big problems. She called back…hadn’t before because she didn’t have minutes and her phone quit on her…and part way through the call her phone just went dead. I’m suspecting the minutes thing. She was smiling, spoke to me with a smile in her voice. There was something in that. I can’t say what. It didn’t fix anything but it did do something. It was like we were two people hanging in there, practicing “chill,” It was easy to smile about that with her. We did so without saying what it was we were sharing. And I do wonder how she feels other times, when she’s not coming up for a talk with me. But it works. We should do more of that. I need more of that and am guilty of not asking often enough. Friends: find ‘em, use ‘em. Partly, I think, the need comes as a surprise. I’m doing fine (or am not, whatever, qué lo qué) busy and then, surprised, find the train’s off the track. And I haven’t the sense to tell anyone. I just hang out there without oxygen wondering if the sensation is something I’m supposed to get used to.