August 28, 2010: Mother's Day.

NOTE: we're a little behind the curve on this post - it was written a week ago, but with the week of training we just finished, we hadn't had a chance to polish it up. And now, with all the thoughts inspired by IST (in-service training for the non-volunteer and/or acronym impaired), we want to write another post. So you get this one in all of it's unpolished glory. And also a beautiful picture Lena took that has almost nothing to do with the post, except that it has some mothers in it.

A modern invention of the nationalist age and the card-flower industrial complex, Mother’s Day is not celebrated on the same day everywhere. Although May is a big favorite around the world, in Costa Rica (and apparently a small part of Belgium) August 15th is the day. And it is a big day—bigger than in the US. It is a national holiday with a day off granted to state workers and some schools are closed. Sales for presents are high, as in the US, and many businesses consider Mother’s Day as their way to stay in the black until Christmas arrives. Flowers, clothes, perfumes and home appliances are all hyped in advertisements for months ahead of the day – not too different from American tastes, except for the large number of ads attempting to entice you to buy hotpants and short shorts for your sainted mother.

When we were in church on Sunday the 15th, we learned why Costa Rica chose this date. Costa Rica is the longest-lasting democracy in Latin America, yet it does not have church-state separation. The Catholic Church is the official state Church, and the 15th is the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven, where she is crowned the Queen of Heaven by Jesus.

According to some of the teachers we know, there is a tradition of local schools holding big parties for their communities on Mother’s Day. Many schools, overburdened with other, more academic, tasks no longer commit the time and resources required, but my town is an exception. We were asked to help set up and then invited to attend the festivities, and, not realizing what a big deal Mother’s Day is, we did not know what we were getting into.

The first clue that we had no idea how intense this celebration was going to be was that there was a theme: Hawaiian luau. This evening, the town hall was filled with streamers, balloons, and a gigantic welcome sign featuring two large-eyed waifs in grass skirts dancing on an island and wishing the reader a happy Mother’s Day (as a side note: if the creators of Precious Moments were ever to sue for back royalties due to the unauthorized use of their work, just in the province of Puntarenas alone, they would be entitled to billions of dollars in damages). Enough tables and chairs were set up for 100 people, and in the centerpiece was a pineapple, covered with candy that had been speared with toothpicks and then jabbed into the fruit, making an already bizarre-looking fruit that much more surreal. At the front of the room, two large tables were stacked high with ribboned and sparkled loot to be handed out to parents that night through the raffle, because it is written in the constitution of Costa Rica that raffles must be held every three to 15 days.

We were given the task of greeting people, which consisted of a polite buenas tardes, making the person sign in on the appropriate sheet (one for men and one for women), and then giving them a raffle number, a piece of candy, and, finally, draping a plastic lei over their head. We ended up with over 100 people – probably 120 – but at least a quarter of the population of Portalón.

Then the madness began.

Actually, that’s a lie: the madness began while we were signing people in. The LCD projector, sound system, and a computer had been brought over from the school for use as the evening’s AV system. At some point during sign-in, everyone in the room was suddenly startled by a horrible, repetitive car crash sound effect, played at what seemed to be 5000 decibels. One of the teachers had put together a slide show, complete with sound effects and music, of what started out as a series of pictures of unusual car crashes, but which quickly devolved into a series of pictures of morbidly obese people in bikinis and cats in zany situations. This was to set the tone for the rest of the evening.

Next was the first dinámica of the night, which is just the Costa Rica way of saying “embarrassing party game,” in which we were all asked to stand up and dance. Everyone seemed fine with the standing up part, but, when it came to dancing, there weren’t many takers. At this point, the MC began haranguing the crowd over the mic, at great length and at great volume. “COME ON! DANCE! THIS IS FUN! THIS IS A NIGHT TO HAVE FUN! DANCE!” Unmoved, the crowd continued to, for the most part, watch the teachers dance. Then the threats began: “IF YOU DON’T DANCE, YOU WILL HAVE TO COME UP HERE IN FRONT OF EVERYONE AND DO THE CHICKEN DANCE!” Guards were posted throughout the room to identify the non-dancing scofflaws and drag them to the front of the room.

This, of course, is the point in which Nate was dragged up to the front of the room and instructed to do the chicken dance. Not that he hadn’t been dancing before, mind you, but let’s consider the logic: just say you’re running an event. The crowd isn’t really responding, but you feel compelled by some intense, uncontrollable, pathological urge to make them dance. After threatening them with public embarrassment if they don’t dance, you obviously have to follow through, otherwise you lose face and all control over the evening. On the other hand, if you actually force someone to embarrass themselves, you may very well scare everyone away, as they flee your terrifying totalitarian dance party. The answer? Make the gringo dance. Gringos dancing is universally considered to be funny is Latin America. Luckily, Nate has been conditioned by years of high school drama and working with children and is not easily given to embarrassment, and he was a good sport in sating the appetites and curiosity of the party-goers.

The night continued on, sometimes interminably so: at least 4 more dinámicas were done, dinner was served, raffles numbers read until every single adult ticket holder received a present (somewhat defeating the purpose of having a raffle, now that we think about it), and the teachers and hosts for the evening did an amateur dancer number in spandex and luau flowers which involved a lot of booty-shaking at the audience. Some of these women were over 40, and several were not in peak condition, making even Lena look like a swimsuit model. It was one of those situations in which you would be embarrassed for the lot, but since the party was now well into hour 4, all you could do was look on with mild perplexity, hope vaguely that you would not be pulled to the front of the room to shake your white ass, and remind yourself that later you should look into the armchair sociologist theory that one culture’s shame is another culture’s entertainment. And then smile wanly, knowing it was important for the guest gringo to seem to be having a good time.

But the real high point of the evening was yet to come. It involved the enactment of a skit claiming, as stated in the introduction, to represent a “typical Costa Rican family situation.” The plot was simple: a busty and booty-heavy Costa Rican housewife works hard to do the housework and feed her family. Her wayward and shallow husband goes out drinking at the local cantina, picks up slutty women, and comes home drunk. The wife kicks him out but he returns to repent. Harmony is restored when she, and her two daughters, forgive all. Now, we actually found this particular celebration of motherhood to be entirely depressing, but it was probably the most popular event of the night (other than the free stuff from the raffle). It relied on that well-worn trope of community theatre everywhere: put the most well-known town leaders into wigs, use pillows for potbellies and balloons for boobs, and watch the audience erupt in laughter. Despite the light-heartedness of this skit, Lena had a hard time seeing anything other than an almost entirely negative depiction of a rural woman’s life. They say good comedy tells the truth, and maybe that’s why so many women, as well as men, were laughing.

June 23, 2010: let the weirdness wash over you.

We’ve been here four weeks, and they haven’t exactly been the seamless transition of happy, eager volunteers walking into the welcoming arms of a community eagerly anticipating the presence of a new stranger to know and love that we had pictured. We’ve both had days where we can’t walk out the door. There’s too much unknown, too much unplanned, we miss too many people, too many expectations. We've also had days where we get giddy and excited and fidgety and make huge plans and eat too many cookies. Those are the good ones.

Part of this is us: we don’t make friends easily. We’re kind of grumpy, tend to be a bit opinionated, need a lot of alone time, and generally hate talking to strangers. To answer the question which undoubtedly just sprang to your mind: sometimes we’re not sure why we’re in the Peace Corps, either.

The other part is our community and our new life here. It’s weird, as we’re just beginning to understand. Its home to an intercontinental lucha libre champion who went by the name of the Costa Rican Gentleman. It’s small enough to be dominated by three families, who make up huge percentages of any given commission or committee. There’s so many people on bikes you get asked where your bike is when you walk to the corner store. There are extranjeros with tasers chasing crackheads. There are kids wearing school uniforms and playing soccer in 95 degree heat at a school with a principal who just came down with dengue. There’s a regional high school which has its own junkyard, cow pasture, experimental emu farm, and carefully recreated hotel kitchen (otherwise known as the laboratorio gastronómico). There’s an annual wave of young volunteer tourists who flood the beaches, saving turtle eggs by night and partying…well, also by night. Women wash their underwear by hand even if they own a washing machine, and you have to change your clothes a minimum of twice a day, simply because you stink of sweat by 1 PM. Here, we are constantly worried that we’re being perceived as lazy because we get up at 7 AM. It is four times muggier than Colorado and yet you will inevitably be served a steaming bowl of soup on the hottest day of the week. All public buildings are not, by any United States building code of which we are aware, actual buildings, being as they are completely open to the air and made of cinder blocks, chicken wire, and zinc plates. Last but not least, we live with a lovely, generous family, in a house surrounded by lemon and cas trees, climbing orchids, flowering bushes that waft perfume at sundown, and is home to a hideous, 3-foot-tall dog-beast that will eat us if we step out of the house after dark. It is named Cucho. Like Cujo. Like the dog in the horror movie that ate people who left their houses at night.

Also, Lena saw a dead crocodile on the side of the road yesterday.

What really throws you off is the fact that there’s just enough familiarity to make you drop your guard: I have a shower and a flush toilet, you think, sometimes I can check the internet and kids are trying to dress like Lil’ Wayne, you think, there is a TV in the living room and there is a movie starring Will Smith on it every Sunday, and, even though he’s speaking in Spanish, it seems just familiar enough that when you are walking down the street and there’s a skeletal, sweating, shirtless crack addict in a tree, 40 feet in the air above you waving a machete and wildly chopping off huge, heavy tree limbs which are dropping onto the squatter’s tin-roofed shack below him, it hits you a little bit harder.

Or maybe that was a bad example.

The other day, I was visiting with a family. We had previously made an appointment, which I missed because I was in Quepos and there are only three buses back to our town a day and I missed one, so we had rescheduled after a great deal of apologizing and self-mocking in reference to my inability to read a bus schedule. However, when I showed up at their house, they acted a bit surprised, as if we either hadn’t made an appointment or they had just expected me to flake out. (Mostly) unfazed, I attempted to put on my brave and happy face and asked if it was okay if we still did the interview. They informed me that they had to go catch a cow. It had made a run for it, but a neighbor had trapped it in his pasture across town.

Never having been blown off for a cow before, I was unsure how to negotiate this situation. Maybe they saw the lost, desperate look on my face and felt sorry for me, because Marielos immediately proposed that her husband could stay and talk with me while she went and got the cow. Fernando’s counter-proposal was that she stay and he gets the cow, but she insisted she had already talked to me at church. Eventually it was decided the cow could wait and they both could stay, it being only 3 in the afternoon.

We finished our interview, which was pleasant enough, and I walked to the school, where there was a meeting of the Patronato Escolar (think PTA). I was tired and made an amazingly embarrassing speech to the Patronato, which, in translation, sounded something like:

“Hello, good day. Name is Nate and happy I am to be here. Maybe you too? I am volunteer and sometimes will be here. We will do thing! Together!”

Needless to say, they were somewhat underwhelmed.

I managed to save some face by walking back and chatting with one of the members, Ana, and was in the middle of particularly badly-conjugated semi-witticism when she yelled, “watch out!” I looked up, and, 10 yards in front of me, was a gigantic bull – our shoulders about the same height – turning the corner, running at full speed with frantic eyes and a twitching haunch. At the same moment, a motorcycle came from the opposite corner, turning the same direction. The driver attempted to avert the collision by shooting his feet out, dancing in the gravel and sliding his bike sideways, but they were both going too fast.

And that is how I saw a motorcycle run into a cow. And it was awesome.

I guess this Peace Corps thing can be okay, sometimes.