According to one of my TSU professors, anyone living in a new place goes through five stages lasting anywhere from a week to a year: first the ¨honeymoon¨stage, then culture shock, and eventually adaptation (I don´t remember the other two stages). I think I can safely say I´m past the honeymoon stage and moving into culture shock. I am still perfectly happy here, don´t get me wrong, but lately a lot of things have been bothering me that I know SHOULDN´T bother me that much. So I´m going to devote much of this blog to sharing some of those bothers, simply because I know any Americans will at least understand where I´m coming from and I will feel better about these little issues afterwards.
First, I am still appalled by most womens´attitudes here to cook, care for their family hand and foot--and nothing else. While there is certainly nothing wrong with those noble actions, I can´t help but wonder sometimes if there is really anything going through their heads other than what they´re going to prepare for the next meal or when they´re going to sleep. I am reading Gone With the Wind right now, and the women here remind me so much of the women in the Confederate, Civil War south. On Saturday night José Luis and I went to a reunión en la casa de una hermana (they get together at a different person´s house every sabado to have a worship service and eat). When it came time to eat, José Luis handed me two empty plates, told me to just give him whatever I got, and then went to sit down without saying another word. I gave him a funny look, until I realized that ONLY women were around the table fixing plates, no men. At many of the gatherings, many of the women (except for me) also spend the majority of their time pouring drink refills, making the coffee (which takes a lot longer here because they hardly ever have coffee makers), and washing dishes; rarely do they actually get to sit down and eat and enjoy their meal, poor things. (By the way, on this particular night there were only two choices of drinks--tea or coffee, yuck!--and I had no choice but to drink the yucky, unflavored hot tea because there was no water (1. ¡Qué lastima!))
Another custom here is that la gente almost always takes any food that is leftover. Whereas we Americans are begging to give away our leftovers at the end of a potluck or fellowship meal, Mexicans generally take away bowls and plates brimming with whatever food they can get, thinking it rude to refuse. So when someone came around with the extra tamales to give away, José Luis took one...and then put it on my plate. I said ¨Oh that´s okay, I don´t need anymore¨and gave it back to him. He gave it back to me, I gave it back to him. Finally he explained that ¨the women always take the food.¨ So he felt compelled to take a tamale he didn´t need so that he wouldn´t be rude, but he felt too embarrassed to carry it out himself. Ha ha ha!
This sign literally means not to go to the bathroom on the sidewalk:
The next day, Sunday, the preacher´s family shared with our class some of the snacks that didn´t get eaten el sabado. Normally by the time our class ends the other members have already started singing, so we have to hurry up and get downstairs as soon as possible. (There is no break between the class and the worship service here, and they start singing whenever the class ends--sometimes at 10:50, other times at 11:20.) Anytime we have snacks, some of the girls always want to stay and clean everything up first, and I always tell them not to worry about it, I will do everything afterwards, because we need to get downstairs. So I went on down and told them to come down too...but none of them did. I went back upstairs to see what the hold up was, and sure enough, they were still trying to throw away all the leftover popcorn and wash all the plates and dishes. (Oh, and another thing: they evidently can´t stand the thought of eating food right off of a napkin. Anytime I bring snacks I take napkins for them to pass around, but instead of passing the napkins, they run to the kitchen to get plates and serving platters. Tonight we had another little get together and since there were no plates, I started putting a handful of popcorn on a napkin just like I would do at home. One of the girls from my class just looked at me and said, ¨What are you doing? You´re supposed to use a cup!¨ Well, ha ha ha again.) I agree completely that anytime a group of people eat something they should clean up after themselves--but not to the point that they would miss the Lord´s Supper because they couldn´t wait just one to two more hours to do it afterwards.
After church, I started eating some candy and offered some to José Luis. He said, in all seriousness, ¨NO! After the meal!¨Well I felt like chucking one of the candies at his face and told him that he is ¨very traditional.¨ Then his family started to eat some spaghetti and chicken salad that Chantel and I had given them, and they wanted to eat the spaghetti cold and warm up the chicken salad. I told them they could if they wanted, but that we never eat it that way. Nevertheless, by the time we ate the spaghetti it was more or less cold and everyone gulped it up except for me, yet no one touched my yummy chicken salad.
I invited the girls from our Sunday morning class over to the house last Thursday, and none of them wanted to eat any of the food I had fixed either--save the brownies and cornbread. It really bothers me sometimes that Mexicans turn themselves off to other foods so much. I know there are lots of americanos who are picky eaters, but I do think that, as a whole, we are not afraid to try new foods. But they act like they won´t eat anything unless it has hot sauce and tortillas with it--or anything that looks remotely strange or foreign. If I had the same attitude as them, I would have starved myself to death living here a long time ago.
But enough about food! (Isn´t it funny that someting I like so much has been the source of so much of my frustration?) So nine girls came on Thursday, which is a really good turnout for the first time considering that about 15 muchachas come to church regularly. We played some games, laughed a lot, and really enjoyed ourselves. Most of the girls are really interested in getting together more often, so Chantel and I have considered inviting them over every two or three weeks--provided we can serve them food they´ll actually eat.
Well I´ve been so caught up talking about food and the women that I haven´t even begun to talk about my frustrations with my English classes yet--ay! The biggest problem I´m having right now is that many of the students are evidently losing interest in the class and aren´t coming as much. One of the ladies told me she hasn´t been coming because she needs new glasses and can´t see anything right now. I asked her to come anyway and told her she can at least listen and participate a little, but she has yet to return. She brings her daughter and three of her nieces to the class as well, so when she can´t come, they can´t come--and that´s a third of the class! Then when the other students see that a lot of the other students are absent, they, too, start to miss, thinking that it´s not such a big deal. I really wish they thought the class IS a big deal, but since we´re not at a regular ¨school,¨they don´t care anything about grades, and they´re busy with many other activities, they seem to view learning English more as something ¨extra¨than as a necessity. I think the attitude most of them have is that they really want to learn and go to the classes...until something better comes along. I´m really going to encourage them to stick with it until December (not much longer) and also give them a questionnaire to fill out to see what they really think of me and of the class, but the hard part is finding a day when all or most of them show up instead of just a handful. I want so badly to help them, but I feel like before I can really be effective, they first need to learn to help themselves (i.e. by coming to class, studying on their own, participating, finishing all the activities we do together, etc.)
Cultural dances like these are very common in el centro. Performers sometimes stand right in the middle of the sidewalk so that passerbys will have to stop and watch, thus allowing them to earn more money. I´m pretty sure that using the two young girl dancers was also a ploy to get more money. San Cristobal is known to have lots of hippies, as well.
By the way, I really don´t know much about the quality of education here--the same could probably be said of many students in the U.S.--but I´m discovering more and more that kids just don´t know how to think for themselves. I have four students age 12 or under, and anytime we do an activity that does not involve them copying something word for word from the board (which is pretty much constantly) they get a deer-in-the-headlights look and start asking all kinds of questions to the people sitting around them, then take twice as long to start as the other students and still try to copy my own examples word for word. Sometimes I specifically try to make it really easy for them, i.e. by writing a paragraph on the board and leaving blanks only in the parts to describe themselves, but even then they copy every letter I write and don´t write a thing on their own, even after I explain it to them several times. Then sometimes when I write something that they don´t need to copy, they automatically take out their pencils and start writing it down anyway. If I wrote ¨(The person´s name) is stupid,¨ they would probably copy that too, without reading or understanding a word of it. I know it´s not their age because I am accustomed to teaching students that age who can complete these same activities without any problems.
Tonight I went to David and Ani´s house to celebrate their son´s 3rd birthday. I was really looking forward to seeing my first Mexican birthday party but must admit that it was kind of a let down. Lots of people from church were there, but I´m pretty sure I´m the only one who took a gift--and the only one who didn´t take a Bible and hymn book. (How should I know they were going to have a worship service in the middle of the birthday party?) Like every time they meet together, they had three songs, a prayer, a sermon, three more songs, and another prayer. Please don´t get me wrong; I´m not trying to suggest that they should not worship when they celebrate someone´s birthday or that they should change the order of their worship; in fact, I like that they have so much zeal to meet so frequently throughout the week. I just think that at times it would be better for them to have classes, singing, prayers, or something other than a long sermon. But, who am I to judge? Anyway, after the worship service the women began serving food...but there were so many people and everyone was so crowded into the living room that we could not even move around to talk to other people. We ate tamales (like always), and if you´ve never had a tamale, they come with a giant papery material wrapped around them that you first have to unroll to get to the food. So while trying to unwrap the tamale and stick my fork in it on the tiny little desk I was already sharing with one other person, my whole plate fell right onto the floor. Now normally anytime that happens in the states, people laugh and joke, saying things like ¨Way to go!¨or ¨Smooth move, butterfingers!¨ But here, no one laughed and no one joked; they all just looked at me like, ¨I can´t believe she did that!¨ To make matters worse, I accidently caused a piece of cake to fall as well, as I was climbing onto the couch to take a picture of the entire group (I´m more or less the official church photographer now since I have a digital camera--ooohhhhh!) So naturally, I felt very embarrassed. I´ve heard that a tradition in Mexico is for the birthday person to stick his/her entire face in the cake before anyone else eats it, but Davicito cried and refused to do it, so I didn´t get to see that either. Oh well, the next time I guess.
I also became quite irate with a taxista yesterday. I told him as soon as I got in the car that I was going to ¨Mr. Taco, San Diego¨and he said ¨Está bien.¨ Then when we came to the first part of San Diego, he started asking me where it was. Well I really didn´t know how to tell him from where we were because he took a different route than I was used to. So I told him I really didn´t know for sure because I haven´t lived here for very long, but that I would let him know when I started to recognize it. Well he kept asking me ¨¿Donde está? ¿Donde está?¨anyway. I named some monuments it was close to, but he was supposedly not familiar with any of them either (and I don´t know how any taxista, new or experienced, could not be). Then about a minute later he said, ¨You can just get out here and walk.¨ I told him no way, becuase it was still pretty far away, and the whole reason I went in a taxi was to get there faster. Well I finally started to recognize the area and was able to lead him to Mr. Taco. I gave him 20 pesos like normal and started to get out, when he told me he was charging 25, ¨because he had to drive around a lot.¨ I told him that if he didn´t know where it was, he should have told me that when I first got in the car so that I could find a different taxista. Besides, he only went one block out of the way, at the most. So I refused to pay the extra 5 pesos and left in a huff. I hate it when people try to take advantage of Americans like that! 
I haven´t been so busy that I haven´t been able to enjoy myself some, as well. This is a picture of José Luis and I in a little town called Chiapa Chorizo. We went to take a boat ride in a canyon but got there too late...so we decided to go to this little town instead, and a man offered to take us on a short boat ride, just the two of us...and then took our picture for us.
I´m going to forego the Spanish this time because it´s late and I need to get up early...but I promise to include more words the next time!
(2.)¡Que Dios les bendiga!
Elizabeth
Title: I still don´t understand the women...
1. What a shame
2. May God bless you all
¨Market day¨ at the Guatemala border (hence the super crowded streets). See the cool mountains in the background? El día del mercado a la frontera de Guatemala (la razón por mucha gente en las calles).
Common Expressions:
Sari (from church), Chantel and I at the Guatemala border--I told you I crossed the border on foot! Sari (de la iglesia), Chantel y yo a la frontera de Guatemala