Questions from home

These are questions that I am fielding at the very moment on our beloved (damn near Holy) Facebook chat. This installment is kinda from the horse´s mouth. Please understand that these questions are a far cry from verbatim and that I may have embelished more than my fair share of silly ass interpretations of your (rather surprisingly) valid questions.

Disclaimer: I do not often use Facebook chat, in fact I think that I frequented the circus more often, but it was, in fact, a phenomenal tool to catch up with you weirdos.

So, Greg, what are you doing in La Peña?
Well, little Jimmy, I am just hanging out. For these next few months I guess all that is really asked of me is to not only get to know my community but to let them get to know me. In this culture its all about confianza - people here have a lot of pena - and without them trusting you it is almost impossible to get anything worthwhile accomplished. So for the moment I am living with a family in a back room of the house. I´ve got a bed, my maleta, and a dog...not much else. For these few months I do exactly as the people of La Peña do. When they milk cows, I learn as quickly as I possibly can to milk cows. When they go to the Rio Lempa for some bañando, me baño, tambien, when they are playing futbol, I run my lily white ass all around that soccer field with as much zeal as I can possibly muster. My job at this moment is to gain the trust of my community. I want to share an extraorinarily corny quote, but priceless and invaluably true nonetheless, from a former volunteer: ¨Your community will not want to know what you know until they know that you know what they know.¨ My job right now is to work my ass off trying to learn what it is that they know so that when it comes time for me to share whatever knowledge or skills I can with my community they will be receptive y, tal vez, van a venir con gusto y ganas.

Why the hell can´t you spell anything correctly?
Oh, Suzy, you little jerk face. I can´t spell things correctly because for one, I am not as smart as I let on. Number two, these keyboards are just different enough from the ones in the states that I can make mistakes and not even notice. So maybe I am a little too careless on facebook chat, but give me a break, won´t you? Why don´t you try pushing ¨AltGr¨ and then the 2 button to get your fancy little @ sign, or having your ? be next to the zero and see how easy that is to grow accustomed to! I hate you!

Tell me some food things, Gregory.
Well, Cassina (as if it´d be anyone else), I eat beans. Every meal of everyday there are bowls of beans. To compliment the beans they give me tortillas. To compliment tortillas they give me rice. Those three make up my overly health concious diet. I get cheese, too, which is really nice because its made from the milk that we get in the mornings so its always really, really fresh. I do not eat beef. I eat chicken once a week. I eat fish once a month. Where is the BJ´s or Sam´s Club when you need ten dozen eggs?!
On top of that, Cassina, cooking here is very difficult because every single meal (desayuno, refrigerio, almuerzo, cena) is all cooked over open flame with real wood. Cooking in the woods is just as simple as cooking in the kitchen. Nothing is easy in the kitchen and everything takes forever.
On that note, I´ve tried making tortillas and pupusas. They are the closest things to impossible since Dan Jenks saying nice things.

So, Corm on the Cob, what do you mean by projects?
Well if it isn´t the Barnacle, doing all sorts of barnacling on the World Wide Web. AJ, projects can be anything from building a new Casa Comunal, to teaching people to wash their hands after they use the loo. I could start the worlds first backflip team and bring in Witzie as the special guest, international superstar, to hold a camp for a week if I thought that it would, in any way, help the community members of La Peña. Ultimately, my job is to find out what my people need, get them to actually say it out loud, then see who is actually interested in helping me accomplish it. I will hold meetings to feel out what are some large projects (like training and hiring a health promotor for La Peña), and will have other smaller projects as well such as teaching English and holding sanitation charlas.
If they want a backflip team, I got Witzie on speed dial, if he can´t make it I´ll settle for a handspring team and I´m bringing in the big guns for that one: Kid Cement as head coach and the Worm and Jack Barber for examples of what not to do.

I guess that´s really it as far as question fielding goes. Got bored of it really quickly.

Eventually, once I learned how to remember things, I wasn´t bored at all.
-Albert Camus The Stranger (The Outsider)

Last week my counterpart, a man by the name of Alfredo, asked me if I wanted to help him retrieve his cow from the mountains so that he could bring it to a place with better water. ¨Hell ya!¨ I said, immediately regretting saying that (because he doesn´t speak English and all my excitement was lost in the lack of translation) and followed quickly and rather sullenly with a ¨Sí, hombre.¨

At about 7 AM we set off for the mountains, he with his machete, me with a terribly goofy smile. By about 8 AM Alfredo was pointing to some trees that seemed like just a few meters up the mountain (in reality was an hour later) explaining to me that the clima was much more fresca allí and that there were a lot of pine trees. ¨Wow,¨ I thought in my immediate excitement ¨pine trees! Holy shit, I know what he just said to me!¨ (I embellish my lack of understanding of this language for you, the readers.)

I mean, let´s face it, most of you who are reading this have grown up your whole lives around pine trees. You spend literally a dozen hours of every day year round with the smell, the aura of pine trees encumbering every one of your five senses. From home there are a few things I miss besides great company and they are: Celtics, mashed potatos, memory foam mattress pad, and the last slice of pizza. Now I understand that I have not been gone for long, barely over two months, but I cannot explain the feeling of nostalgia that coursed through every vein in my body, firing every nerve in the system, pulling what some call dimples (I call wrinkles) into their rightful place to the right and left of the largest smile I´ve ever employed when the scent of pine trees swept over me. There wasn´t one single memory that I was thinking of, and yet there wasn´t one single memory that escaped me. Alfredo, if even for a second, disappeared, lost in the midst of Amherst, cold winters, Meme´s cooking, the Nut House, growing up slowly, family, friendships and relationships cultivated over the past 22 years in the presence of easily one of the most underrated yet distinct ambiences I´ve ever chanced upon. For a moment I was eating at the Bar Lunch, riding bikes around the rotary, jumping into Puffer´s Pond, and walking into Boyden as the sun set at 4 PM. Home.

Slowly but surely Alfredo, the personification of my new home, pulled me from my reverie, took strong note of my elation and flightiness, and without saying a word took two ambitous and altruistic hacks at the nearest of my stimulants with his machete and gifted me a piece Hudson, a piece of Fitchburg, of Amherst, a smell that reminds me of every person who ran through my head for what felt like hours that day. It seemed like forever, and to be honest was probably less than a second. I didn´t faint, I didn´t cry, I didn´t lose my lunch, but I did put together a few moments of clarity, a few moments of genuine comfort, and let myself get lost in whatever it was that ran rampant in my mind that day.

There are very few ´things´ I sincerely miss back home, but you can add pine trees to the list.