Enfermedad II

Well, turns out, my previously unsurpassed method of ignore-it-and-it´ll-go-away doesn´t work on bacteria. After 4 days of no appetite and general malaise, my host mother finally made me go to the doctor. They ran a couple of tests and got a prescription and Q200 later (about $24US), looks like I´ll make it to next week. Which is great, since this coming week (starting tomorrow) is our free travel week. Our CASAS group has split into two smaller groups based on common interests and destinations. Roxanne and I and two boys will be taking a night bus to Flores, Guatemala, and then spend the day at Tikal, which are THE Mayan ruins. We´re super excited. We´ll have another day in Flores, and then we´ll take the bus to Belize and spend 2.5 days there. Then it´s another night bus home, and we should arrive at about 7 in the morning, with classes at 8:30. Should be a great trip!

Enfermedad

June 20, 2010

In my limited experience with awfully experiences, the worst has to be being sick and not being at home. It sucks hardcore. Add to that the fact that I’m in a foreign country and attempting to speak a different language, and it’s downright rotten.

My weekend started out great – our Spanish teacher wasn’t able to make it to class, so Roxanne and Ruthi and I had a free day. We hung out in the break room, watched the World Cup, and talked theology. It was wonderful. Then the Goshen boys started singing hymns for the Spanish teachers, and we all ended up joining in. There are a few things that my camera cannot capture, and that was one of them. The community of four-part, and the joy that they had in singing for us, and the joy that we all had in listening was just beautiful. I ended up going to bed SUPER early that night (6:00 – Sarah Unruh, Anna Voth, you are NOT allowed to laugh) because I was feeling a bit under the weather, and was just going to take a nap. It was a very long nap. Until the next morning.

The next day, most of us headed to the old capital city of Antigua. We took a bus up windy roads, with lots of slam-on-the-breaks stops and pedal-to-the-metal starts. My stomach decided that it didn’t take kindly to such maltreatment, but kept the grumbling to a minimum until we reached the city and started walking around. Then it decided to disgorge its contents in the gutter outside of an old convent. Gives a whole new meaning to “driven to your knees by the wretchedness of your situation.” I dragged myself through the rest of the day, taking lots of breaks and drinking lots and lots of water. Antigua is really pretty – all old buildings, and no new glass-and-steel ones. I also went to Roxanne’s brother’s soccer game. They make up 3/5 of a men’s team, and they won the game, barely. It was outstanding, 4 men against 5 in the first half because one of their guys didn’t show up. They were tied at the end, so they all took turns kicking goals while the opposing goalie did his level best to block them. I don’t know what that’s called. Sudden Death, maybe? It was very interesting – the field was TINY – about the size of a basketball floor.

Today (Sunday) was the worst, health-wise. Church (where I witnessed the casting out of an evil spirit, according to Jaime. Not sure what to think about that. I’ll probably go with the timeless words of Aquinas), and then off to celebrate Father’s Day and their son-in-law’s birthday at their daughter Sulemma’s house. They had steak and rice-and-beans and (my all-time favorite) tres leche cake, and I couldn’t eat any of it. I spent most of the four hours sitting on the living room couch, fielding questions as to my health and bowel movements, and trying to convince my mother, her daughter, her husband, my father, and the maid that NO I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO EAT OR DRINK, JUST LET ME SUFFER ALONE!!! But we finally left, and I feel like I crashed the party a bit. One the way home, I got super homesick. I have never gotten homesick in my whole entire life ever, so it was a new experience. I just wanted my mom and dad and my house and my bed. It was awful and I don’t want it to happen again. Definitely what one would call “a valley.” So I watched “Up!” and read some past quotes pages and now I feel much better, at least mentally.

Sorry, that was super long and kind of whiny. On the bright side, in Antigua, a few of us had a 20 minute, reasonably in-depth conversation with a super granola expatriate from the U.S. and his friend, a boy of maybe 10 who was selling bracelets. It was about the Cup of course. That’s nearly all anyone talks about. I also talked with Jaime for about 30 minutes about tornadoes. The conversation ended rather abruptly and awkwardly when I decided to try and be smart, rather than culturally sensitive, telilng him that tornadoes were caused by rising and falling columns of air and such, and were not actually “the will of God.” Oops.

Esperanza

June 15, 2010

Today I discovered that my Spanish teacher Marta is quite possibly one of the most amazing women that I have ever met. We managed to get off on some tangent or other in our literature class (it happens a lot – we’ve found that it is an effective tactic to keep from reading about some boring literature theme) that eventually lead to her talking about her personal life for at least an hour. She grew up in a house that reeked of “machismo,” the oldest child, with three younger brothers. By the time she was 12, she realized that she was treated different than they, obliged to do housework AND work in her father’s carpentry shop. She called her father out on it, beginning an argument that lasted until she left the house 7 or 8 years later. When Marta told him that she wanted to study literature in college, her father said “No, you’ll do something useful. Be a secretary.” She complied, because at that time and in this culture, there isn’t much else to do. At this point, I’m not exactly sure what else happened in her life. She finished secretarial school, was a secretary for awhile in the governor’s office (I believe), and then decided that she had done what her father wanted her to do, and now it was time for her to do what she wanted to do. So she went back to school to specialize in literature, and it was there that she met her husband – a Mennonite from Georgia who taught U.S. history in a school for children of ambassadors and diplomats and such. They are now married and have two boys, 6 and 9. In her house, there is not a trace of machismo – her husband cooks and helps care for their children.

Marta’s story is the polar opposite of most Guatemalan women’s. Young girls are raised in strongly masochistic households, are taught the status quo from their similarly dominated (and quite possibly abused) mothers. They haven’t a trace of self-esteem or sense of worth. Eventually, they find a guy who has money, a nice car, nice clothes, who may be a total douche, but hey, he’s got money and that’s all that matters. They think that he’s a nice guy, wouldn’t abuse her like her father did her mother, and for awhile, that might be true. But then he might hit her once. Once is permissible, she thinks. He was angry, it was my fault, he didn’t mean it, he’ll never do it again, he was sorry afterwards, he said that he loved me, the excuses are endless. But it happens again. And again. And again. And eventually, without a thread of self-respect left, she becomes her mother, raising her daughter in a similar atmosphere as she was raised, submitting to her husband’s abuse, ill-educated, completely devoid of hope. Thousands of women are killed each year in “passion-related murders.” Murdered by their own husbands, in other words. The cycle of violence, hopelessness, and machismo is very nearly endless. Women like Marta, who are able to break out, are few and far between.

Iximche y Chichicastenango

We visited the Iximche ruins and Chichicastenango this weekend. Iximche (ish-imm-chee) is a site which was still inhabited when the Spanish showed up in the 1500s, 700 years after Tikal was abandoned for whatever reason. The ruins were really interesting – there was a ball field, three or four temples, and several streets and low walls scattered around. I had lots of fun taking pictures, as always. We then moved on to Chichi, an indigenous village of the Q’iche people. Q’iche is one of the four largest indigenous groups, with its own language, style of dress, and customs. About 25 years ago, there was a genocide initiated by the government against the Mayans, resulting in a large amount of widows and orphaned children, as well as loads of emotional and psychological damage. On Saturday morning, we visited the Chontola widow’s cooperative, run by women whose husbands were killed by the Army and who had lacked means to care for their families. We spoke with the president of the cooperative, dona Maria, about her experience. She spoke only in Q’iche, so the founder of the organization translated her story from Q’iche to Spanish, and then our professor translated from Spanish to English. It was a lengthy process. Dona Maria’s husband was killed by the PAC, which was a group of village men who ended up being informants for the army. He was killed by men who were once friends or at least acquaintances. The other women had similar stories – husbands killed by the Army, killed simply because they were Mayan, simply because they were different. The government tried to justify the actions, telling the public that the Mayas were in cahoots with the guerilla forces that were against the government. But in reality, at least according to everything I have been told and have read, is that the government really just wanted to exterminate the Maya and needed an excuse. They could have brought the guerilla fighters under control very easily, they greatly outnumbered them. But they didn’t, simply because it gave them an excuse to kill more of the Maya. It is one thing to hear about genocide from afar, but quite another to sit 10 feet away from a woman who was directly affected by it less than 30 years ago. We also met a handful of adorable little Q’iche children who had been displaced by the flooding two weeks ago. They taught us a few phrases in their language, all of which we have forgotten. Q’iche is a more guttural language than Spanish, with very few similarities. It sounds a lot like a cross between German and the “click” languages of Africa – very different than anything I have heard before.

All said, it was a very interesting and beautiful cultural experience.

The World Cup has also started. I watched the opening ceremonies with Jaime on Friday, and the CASAS students and some of the teachers continued watching the game when we arrived at the seminary. We also saw the game between the U.S. and England while we were at the widow’s cooperative, including England’s goal in the first 10 minutes of the game. How embarrassing.

La Maldición de la Remolacha

I thought I had escaped the curse of the beets. Nearly every day, my fellow students regale each other with stories of how they had to choke down cold beets or cold beets in cold beet juice or cold beet soup or warm beet soup or beets with eggs. And I privately snickered at their misfortune, because beets are so gross looking, with their vile, red, gelatinous, congealed-blood appearance, and I had not been forced to choke them down. And Victoria almost always serves really good food for supper – frijoles, “chapín” food with unpronounceable names, grilled cheese sandwiches, Mexican food, rice, soup… But it was not meant to be. This evening, Victoria asked me if I would like a boiled egg. I love boiled eggs. So I said yes. Thank goodness I only said I would like three. Because in a few minutes, there appeared on my plate three tostadas drowning in beet juice, topped with beets mixed with lettuce stained red by beet juice, and the finish it all off, a bit of a boiled egg, sadly marked with that malevolent liquid that is beet juice. Ugh. And those awful beets stared up at me with their spiteful little eyes, daring me to choke them down, knowing that I had to, because Victoria was in the kitchen with me. Ugh. I hate beets. It’s the texture. I can eat anything, so long as it’s not slippery, slimy, or with that weird texture that is peculiar to squash. Beets are just gross. But I ate the darn things, rewarding myself with a bit of boiled egg for each laden tostada that disappeared from my plate.

On the bright side, we visited a museum with my literature today. It was very interesting – lots of pottery and replicas and Mayan carved stones – everything one expects in a museum. The other classes went to the zoo, and it was packed with thousands of little Guatemalan boys and girls on field trips. I was jealous of the other CASAS students, because zoos are just AWESOME. Jealous until I heard that they had essentially been the walking, talking gringo exhibit, openly gawked at by all of the children. Then I was thankful for my nice, quiet museum trip. We are quite a novelty here, with our light hair, light skin, blue eyes, and strange clothes. Add to that the fact that we obviously do not speak Spanish with any degree of fluidity, and we may as well hang a giant flashing sandwich board around our necks, proclaiming “WE ARE FOREIGNERS!!!” Oh well. I don’t really mind the turn-and-stares or the point-and-laughs. It’s all part of the experience, along with the beets and the impenetrable literature and the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute language barriers and blunders. I love it.

La Hojarasca

June 8, 2010

My Literature of Latin America class (Ruthi, Roxanne, myself) finished our first book today. “La Hojarasca,” written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was pretty abstract, suffered from a discontinuous narrative, and of course was written entirely in Spanish. That mixture of factors didn’t really enhance anyone’s comprehension. If anyone read “The Dew Breaker” in Bethel’s CIC class, it was very similar. Reading it was so frustrating – we often spent 2 or 3 or even 4 hours on it each night, just to read eight or ten pages! Nearly every other word had to be looked up in a dictionary and the sentence phrasing was very different from what I was used to. In addition, turns out it was an extensive commentary on the human condition, an allegory of Colombia, and contained huge amounts of symbolism. I hate symbolism. I’m sorry, all you English majors, I’m sure you’re all collectively writhing on the floor and gnashing your teeth, but that’s how it goes. Give me a lab write-up, a research paper, a straight-up novel, theology, anything but symbolic literature. But now we’re reading Isabel Allende, a Chilean author, and she is so much easier to comprehend.

We visited a cemetery and the city landfill today. The cemetery was VERY interesting, so much different from those in the U.S. It was almost completely full of crypts, very elaborate, too. There were also long walls of vertically stacked tombs, kind of like a chest of drawers. Those were for the poorer people, the ones who didn’t have oodles of cash to drop on a private plot in the cemetery. There were also separate areas for different cultures, such as Chinese, Americans, Germans, and Jews, many of which came during the last 100 years, and were invited by the government to help build infrastructure or business.

The landfill was in a large ravine right next to the landfill. It was full of people, trucks, and buzzards. Quite a few people make their living there, digging out recyclables from the trash and reselling them to the different companies. As of only a year ago, only adults may work in the landfill – the government outlawed children, on the grounds that it was too dangerous, which is definitely a step in the right direction.

Casa de Dios

June 6, 2010

My first visit to a megachurch occurred today. Our group visited Casa de Dios, which offers four or five services, each with two to three thousand attendees. Having never visited a megachurch before, I have very little to compare it to. I would hazard a guess that it was less of a foreign experience for me (having regularly attended “contemporary” evangelical churches with congregations between 400-800) than for others, but it was still very different, for reasons other than it being entirely in Spanish. To begin with, though the worship style (clapping, contemporary music, worship leader, etc) was fairly mainstream for me, there was a fairly jazzy lights show and a fog machine, which I felt changed the whole experience from a legitimate time of worship to a highly stylized production. Evidently it was quite effective, for by the end of the worship time, there were quite a few people crying and/or shaking uncontrollably. Whether this was a result of the “production” or stemmed more from the Latin American penchant for greater religious expression than North America, I do not know.

The way in which the congregation gave back to God was also different from any previous experiences, though several of the CASAS students said that it was fairly normal in their home churches. At Casa de Dios, ushers stood in each section with a bushel-sized basket and first the women, then the men were invited to come and deposit their tithes or offerings into the basket, all the while accompanied by upbeat praise-and-worship music. I really think I almost prefer this method – it is more of a public thanksgiving than quietly passing the plate.

The biggest difference that I observed was in the content of the sermon, which today was on the Good Samaritan. Fairly innocuous text, right? The pastor started by giving a general overview of the story and by delving into the original Greek of several words, which I have always appreciated. Then he somehow managed to segue into an extensive discourse on the Health and Wealth gospel (I must’ve been spacing out a bit on the transition). The Health and Wealth gospel, touted by such successful North American evangelists as Joel Osteen, essentially states that one can “force” God to bless them with health and wealth, if they uphold a certain series of expectations. For those who have taken Patty Shelly’s course, it would be similar to an individualistic Mosaic Covenant or Deuteronomist Theory of History, in that blessings are manifest when the individual obeys God, and judgment/illness/loss of prosperity occur when a person fails to follow God’s commandments. In my view, the pastor taught that we are to bless others so that God will bless us, that we are to offer our tithe so that God will in turn grant us more money, and that we are to serve others so that God will shower us with blessings. While there is certainly scriptural backing to each of these concepts, it is not the dominant reason that one ought to bless, give, and serve. The way it was presented, blessing, giving, and serving seemed more of a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves, which I feel like they ought to be. I strongly disagree with this point of view. To me, service is an act of worship, more so anyway than a way to garner more of God’s blessings. However, the congregation seemed to be a big fan of the message, and I guess sometimes that’s all that really matters.

I would not argue that what I have written is an overly simplistic and possibly somewhat inaccurate view of all that transpired this morning. However, it is the best I can do at this particular juncture, with my current knowledge of Latin American religious expression.

La Lenguage

June 1, 2010

As a whole, Spanish is a largely masochistic language. The default for many words is masculine, and when referring to a group of mixed gender, one will always use “nosotros” (we – masculine). Even if there are 100 women and only one man, it will still be masculine. Women are essentially invisible unless one expressly states that they are present, which is usually not done, simply for the sake of being concise. I have noticed however, that the staff at the seminary will differentiate between men and women by using “nosotros y nosotras,” or “amigos y amigas” or “hermanos y hermanas,” deliberately using both the masculine and feminine manifestations of “we,” “friends,” or “brothers and sisters,” something which my host parents do not do.

Thus far in my experience, I have also observed that Spanish-speaking Christians address and refer to God with the informal. For those unfamiliar with the Spanish concept of different forms of verbs, the language has two different ways of saying “you” – one (formal) is for addressing parents, grandparents, or others in higher authority; while the other (informal) is between friends, coworkers, or others at or near the same level or age. Up to this point, I had always assumed that God would be referred to in the formal tense, since by conventional wisdom, he is at a higher level of authority than we. This new way of referring to God forces one to necessarily redefine his or her view of God and his relationship to him or her.

Spanish is an eloquent language, both in its sentence structure and in the way in which ideas are expressed. There are ideas conveyed in Spanish that simply do not translate accurately into English or which lose some of their meaning. The above are just a couple of observations from the past week, and I’m sure that there will be more to follow.