You guessed it! Rice and beans!
Hey everyone. It's been a long month, sorry for not writing. Some time at the end of May I got kicked out of la casa de los maestros. It's kind of a long story. I was initially told that someone in Aguas Claras had complained to the Ministry of Education, and for that reason I couldn't give classes anymore and had to move. Then my former roommate told me that surely I was looking for someone to blame and she hoped I wouldn't blame her. Then, last week, I found out that nobody at the high schools in Colonia Blanca or Aguas Claras knew anything about a complaint at the level of the Ministry of Education. I'm chalking it up to a married mother's desire to not have a male roommate and the general desire in this part of the world to avoid direct confrontation.
So, after pounding the gravel (there's no pavement) a little, I have managed to organize new English classes with the support of the Development Association, which is more or less the governing body of Colonia Libertad. I am staying in the guest room of the house of two benevolent and wonderful people, Changuelo and Magdalena. Changuelo is a subsistence farmer who worked for years at the nearby ranch but is now retired. Magdalena is a housewife and the mother of nine children, some of whom still live here in the community. There are less mosquitoes (zancudos) here than there were by la casa de los maestros, but every once in a while those and other bugs still come around to nibble. I pay less attention to their nibbling now, although I am still having minor allergic reactions so some of the bites. I have a plug from Raid that has little exchangeable tabs that are "lightly toxic" and have the pleasant effect of killing all the mosquitoes in the room. I also have a fan, which seems to scare them off for some reason. I don't think I'll be dying of hemorrhagic dengue, but if I do, I'll be sure to blog it.
I am now giving free intensive English classes to the community for three hours a day each day. Between lesson plans and correcting homework, this takes a good chunk out of the day, but I am still finding time to play guitar and argue with film producers and Environmental Justice professors. If there's anything that can change a state-eschewing Marxist's mind about the world, it's coming to live in a backwoods, roughneck Christian community in the middle of Central America. I've learned to accept my nationality with stride, to identify with the materialist desires of the youth here (to do otherwise would make me a total hypocrite), and to be thankful for whatever guiding force is driving my interactions with the community. My attitude about Christianity is still the same: The bible sucks, but Jesus was pretty cool. But my appreciation for the love of human beings acting within the context of a community has grown immensely. The only thing that kind of bothers me is the way people treat their pets here. But you know what they say, never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Rice and beans form the centerpiece of any meal here. You can expect a couple of plantains (they may not be ripe) and rice and beans no matter what the other ingredients are. As much as I love rice and beans, I have to admit that every once in a while I crave a big ol' pizza or some fettuccine alfredo. The really interesting thing is that even though we live in the middle of a farming community, food is often brought in from well outside the community. At the house where I live, ants are a big problem and have been eating the crops; other farmers in the area are involved mostly in cattle ranching. There are relatively few farms that grow the area's staples. Changuelo just supervised the planting of a huerta escolar at the school, so soon the school will be growing their own corn and yucca. The students are expected to take part in this process, but I don't know to what extent they will.
The smell of burning plastic really bothers me. It's not just that I know that the dioxins can give us all cancer, it's that I don't understand why so much plastic is allowed into a community that can't process the resulting waste. I suppose it's like that in the whole world and that's why we've got all that plastic floating in the ocean:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plastic-decomposes-oceans-seas.html
Still, I have to admit that I do use products with plastic even though I try to avoid it. I'm trying to take a proactive role in educating the community about the dangers of plastic, and recently the Asociación said they might be interested in getting a truck to haul recyclables out of the community once a week or so. More on this later.
Mostly I am grappling with the same concepts as the Asociación; how to give this community the economic resources that it wants and needs without destroying its knowledge of subsistence farming and its sense of autonomy. When I came here, my biggest concern was teaching English; now, I see languages as a tool and I think the real problems are much more complex than any one set of theories would suggest. For instance, one major threat to the community is the breakdown of families within the last generation. The conservative bloc in my mind swears that this is because liberalism has eschewed family values, and part of me knows that this is true. Our individualism and our careers have become more important to us as a people than maintaining our family relations, and this phenomenon is spreading across cultures. You can blame capitalism or you can say that the state should stay out of family affairs, or you can start a debate if you like about whether clans or families came first, but I think it is noteworthy that our sense of community has become so diluted that many of us prefer corporate responsibilities and solitary lifestyles to communal living. People here think I'm friendly, but emotionally distant, and honestly I find it a little hard to imagine living as they do, i.e. in constant contact with one another, all the time!
Speaking of which, I am going to finish this blog post off and try to post again soon. I really want to go through my recent facebook discussions and apply the arguments there to what I am learning here. At some point I also want to do an in-depth discussion of the differences between living in Ecuador, among the Shuar, and the lifestyle of the Colonia here. I will be working on those posts, but in the mean time I am going to think about what might be for dinner.
See you next time,
Chaim Eliyah
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