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.
