I hope I don’t disappoint anyone with this announcement; however, the last post marks an end to a pretty feeble run by yours truly. I cannot justify filling your well-groomed heads with any more overly dramatic stories about Gregory Allen Cormier. Its fun to write, don’t get me wrong, and writing is slowly becoming a passion, but for the love of Larry who wants to hear anything more about me, really?
Bear with me... (You can bare with me, too, if you’d like. I am not in the least morally opposed.)
I do not have the faintest idea when it started or why it started but for years I have had a monkey on my back whose influence on me seems only to snowball with each passing Tour de France. (Not a real monkey, mind you. That is a figure of speech, but we’ll cover ‘Figures of Speech’ in the next blog.)(1) This monkey has, without a shadow of a doubt, hindered me in the past with relationships, friendships, and in Catholic confession. It is entirely her fault (the monkey’s) that I am not going to Heaven. Well, at some point tengo que quitármela. This monkey has got to go. Here is the problem:
I tell people nothing. Or, more concisely put, I tell nobody anything. Wait, that’s not right either (write?...man, I am really starting to confuse myself). Or maybe I just don’t tell people things. That sounds better.
I don’t tell people anything.
When something has popped into my life I always, always keep it to myself. I hide secrets behind apparently unwarranted smiles and leave people so far out of my loop that my own grandmother didn’t know I wrestled until she found my name in Worcester Telegram Sports Section for being pinned in 7 seconds by one armed 15 year old girl back in 2004.(2)
Take the Peace Corps for instance. It has been my dream to be doing what I am doing for years. Since July 15th of 2007 I have thought of no future plans besides this. I spent so much time in my recruiter’s, Paul Frisolli’s, office, that our official Peace Corps interview in February 2009 started with him falling back into his chair and exhaustedly screaming ¨Christ almighty, what do you want this time?¨ For me it was Peace Corps or bust.(3)
When I read my acceptance letter on a cold Wednesday afternoon last November I almost put six holes in the walls from all my extremities. (Was that a little lewd?) To celebrate I attempted to do four straight back flips, slipped on a beer can trying to keep my balance, kicked myself in the eye with my heel, found a 41 cents under the piano after I fell hard to the floor, scrambled to my phone, and called three very, very important people to share the news. After speaking to them I picked Barber up from class, went to Amherst Brewing Company to play foosball, and hid all excitement behind said ostensibly unwarranted smiles. If you weren’t within eyesight of me, I probably didn’t tell you a thing. I have never been able to figure out why I hide these things from people, we know it’s not from overwhelming humility, but I do it religiously. It’s so bad that over Christmas I was lying to people I didn’t even know telling them ¨You know, I really don’t know what I am going to do with a History degree but my only plans for the future are to visit this fine lass down in Panama for a few weeks and hope something falls in my lap, ¨ as I reached for a crab cake and wished them the best on their upcoming Doctorate in Accounting at the University of Maine – Orono.
Upon further self-examination(4) I have decided that along with a litany of other not so desirable titles I also occupy the ¨Most Selfish Person in the World Whose Name Starts with G-r-e¨ Award for Literature and General Livelihood. Somewhere along the line I decided that my moments of accomplishment, my overwhelming excitement, my good times, and my flashes of humility are treasures to be kept as secret as your favorite hiding spot as a child; to be shared only with the people I trust the most, if at all. These moments are mine, and absolutely not yours. To me, sharing your excitement, accomplishments, or opportunities with casual company is like the Mitch Hedburg joke about waving at strangers; it can be seen as bragging if that stranger doesn’t have a hand.(5) Look what I got!
You still with me?
That said, this blog has been nothing but Prime Time Gregory and its time to put a stop to it.
Listen, I am not Sir Peace Corps. I am not the number one proponent of the program, I won’t tell you that it is saving the world (because it isn’t), I won’t tell you that you have to join, and I won’t tell you that volunteers have a god damn clue what we are even doing (at least I don’t). When I say this, please understand that I am not trying to be ‘Promotor del Cuerpo de Paz;’ I actually genuinely believe that this aspect is important.
There are three laughably vague goals to the Peace Corps mission. The third reads as such:
‘The mission of the Peace Corps is to promote world peace and friendship by: 3) Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.’
While down here I have received numerous facebook posts, text messages, e-mails, letters (Gee, ain’t I just so dang popular?!), et cetera about the dangers of El Salvador - gangs burning buses, landslides and hurricanes killing dozens, explosions in hospitals, the killing of gringos in the capital, and so on. Granted, this is the fourth most dangerous Peace Corps post in the world, and most of the messages were being facetious, but I have been doing an incredible injustice to the people I have met by not sharing with you the generosity that they have shown me daily and discrediting all the stereotypes that the world has of El Salvador.
(We’ve gone over this. This generosity, the beauty of these families, the laughs, the good times, and the developing of relationships are mine, not yours. Starting to get it? We’ve come full circle. I don’t write about them because I, for some reason or another, feel that I’ve earned the right to keep them to myself.)
I sit at the computer and write about pine trees, snakes, and the most recent trip I’ve made to the hospital because they are funny and I am not creative enough to think of anything genuinely insightful. This, at times, has left me feeling a little bit like Alfalfa hanging a “No Girls (or boys) Allowed” sign outside my house and hogging all the real fruits of El Salvador, la gente, to myself.
Well, it just ain’t right.
The truth is, ladies and gentlemen (that’s assuming that anyone is actually reading this thing), I have been showered, absolutely doused in generosity by people who have not much else to offer than corn, beans, and smiles beautifully riddled with metal dentistry.
One Saturday while pretending to help prepare pupusas (they are impossible) with Niña Chepa (Josephina), Niña Marta, y Niña Miriam, I started blabbing on about how coffee mugs cost a dollar in Metapán and how I told the woman selling them to eat her shoe and take a hike because that was just too expensive. They all thought that this was a riot, even if they knew I was making it all up just for the fun of it.(6) We shared a laugh, a few slapped knees, and a resounding ‘Ayyyee, Gregorio!’ and went on talking about the celebration in San Juan the next day.
That evening Niña Josephina returned to Don Santos’ house bearing a plastic bag bursting with volados: a yellow plastic cup, a tea cup and matching plate, a small glass, and a coffee mug depicting two little children surprised to see that Santa has fallen down the chimney.(7) I couldn’t thank her enough as she smiled and told me I couldn’t move into my house without something to drink coffee out of. Within an hour of that, Niña Miriam showed up at the entrance to my bedroom with a glass and matching glass bowl, wearing a humble smile and the kind of outstretched arms that universally say ‘this is for you and I hope you like it.’
Niña Josephina lives in an adobe house with her husband and six children. Their house is two rooms, one of which is a kitchen, without even one proper door. The floor of the house is uneven dirt, the same soil as outside, stomped until it was hard enough to pass as little more than a garden. None of the eight family members have paying jobs, but they’ve got land that, with a lot of hard work, feeds them corn and beans. They don’t have much, but apparently that is enough to share.
Niña Miriam has five children and lives without her husband in an adobe house, as well. If she is not at home cooking for the family you can, and often will, find her in the milpa working as hard as any man I’ve seen swing a machete, bringing home enough elote to put something different on their plates during the rainy season. She raises five children, works the corn fields to bring home the food, cooks the food, and still to this very day stops by my house at least once a week to bring food to me whether it be eggs, fried corn concoctions, or just ears of corn. She is a saint, seguramente.
Two Sundays ago after church(8) Don Santos, Carlos, Pedro, Alejandro, Santos, Alfredo, and Chamba all helped dig over 250 yards of trench to put poliducto from the nearest quebrada to my house so that I could have ‘running’ water. One by one people began to show up at Alfredo’s corral despite the threatening rain(9) and just got to it with nothing more than four pickaxes, a shovel, and eight machetes. With only 100 yards of tubing we didn’t even come close to reaching my house, so naturally(10) Santos disappeared to his house before anyone could notice his absence and brought 100 more yards of poliducto to try to finish the job. That’s $8 dollars worth of poliducto, at least. That is more than one person’s daily wage here. Imagine spending your day’s wage on something like 100 yards of tubing for a house that isn’t even yours. Seriously, go ahead and spend whatever your day’s wage is - $100, $200, $300 – on 100 yards of 1 inch tubing for a relative stranger. You know you wouldn’t, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have either before this. I still don’t know if I could even after the fact, really.
But he did, and although even that amount didn’t quite reach my house and we had to find about 50 more yards, he has never once made mention of it.
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the Earth
“You owe me”
Look what happens with a love like that…
It lights up the whole sky
- Hafiz
Because of their giving of time and materials I now have river water running into my bathroom that I built about a month ago and no longer have to lug water from another river in order to bathe. That may not sound like much, but living without water is much more of a pain than you can imagine.
This is becoming a rant and I know that I must sound like a certifiable lunatic, but it doesn’t end there.
There was a woman that lives here in La Peña that had always baffled me. She’s relatively young at 34, never dressed down, has two kids, and always seems like she’s waiting very patiently for the internet to get back up and running so she can watch Real Housewives of Orange County.(11) She has the air about her that she’s either really shy or that she’s better than everyone around her. Her best friend seems to be her daughter, and my history with fine dames has left me loathing the type – both the daughter and the mother. In the scope of La Peña, described as the equivalent of “backwoods Kentucky” to me by a Salvadoran friend named Carlos(12) who lives outside of Metapán, she seems guarded and right plum out of place.
During the census, Niña Reina (that’s her name, by the way) sent me for a damn loop. My theories about her being shy were blown away almost as soon as I sat down. She, and I applaud her infinitely for this, began asking me questions! Qué brava élla! She didn’t just lie to me about how she brushes her teeth three times a day and then send me on my merry gringo way. She pretty much asked me ¨What the hell are you doing here?¨ Without ever looking me in the eye. During the entire census she avoided eye contact and stomped out any confidence I equipped with this little dandy of a look she seems to have patented. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this look, but she’s a master at it: while you’re talking trying to get your feet under you and shake out the nerves she is looking somewhere around your feet. Midway through a fragmented sentence she raises both eyebrows in seemingly fake surprise, still looking at your feet, and lets out a seriously unconvincing, poorly acted “Vaaaya” as if you had just told her that she can’t stop you from crowning half a pancake Duke of her underwear drawer, or something of that oddity. Like the look you give when the Professor calls you out in front of the entire lecture hall and says that he would like to speak with you after Communications 101. That look. Okaaaaaay, Don Gregorio. I get it. Now leave me alone.
Shy? Not quite. Disinterested in anything I had to say even though she just asked me the question…that’s the one. Every time that I saw her from then on I was convinced that she hated me.
Then English classes started and she, the only real adult who attends, goes every time! She is the ONLY adult who goes. I am not afraid to admit my own shortcomings. I wouldn’t even go to a party at my own house if I didn’t know for sure that all the coolest people from UMass were going. I am an incessant follower. One time in 5th grade I told a Forest Avenue Elementary School survey that French Fries were my favorite style of potato to eat just because everyone else said it.(13) This woman attends the same class as her 16 and 15 year old children and it blows me away. She has a really hard time with it, but she comes every time and pays absolutely perfect attention to some really goofy white guy who acts like an idiot. What I am saying is in a culture of pena it takes some serious brass to attend classes with teenagers your childrens age.
After that I started a Women’s Group. She hasn’t missed a meeting and has been very, very adamant about hearing charlas on women’s health from yours truly. Imagine that, she actually wants to hear about the Regla, the woman’s period, from some guy who learned all about it in a book somewhere and never once had a cramp in his life. She’s so damn on top of things that she has twice been to meetings before I even get there! Well, long story short, she has started to grow on me and apparently I on her, as well, because she sends her son Dimas to my house with warm meals for absolutely no reason at all. Pure generosity. And although she still doesn’t meet my eyes, we’ve become compañeros to the fullest. When Niña Reina started to go out of her way to work with me in my projects, accepted a nomination as Treasurer of the Women’s Group, work her fingers to the bone taking notes in English, and brought me sopa de crema con pollo I started to realize that these people are, as a whole, simply the nicest people I’ve ever had the privilege to spend time with. If even she is incredibly generous to me, there can’t e a bad seed in the bunch. To be honest, we´ve become really good friends, her and I, and we work together almost daily.
(If you work for the Peace Corps, this story is not true and I made it all up to entertain my friends and family back home. This blog is the work of fiction as well as fact and does not necessarily reflect any semblance of truth or honesty. But since it didn’t actually happen it was not in any way a security risk.)
(If you do not work for the Peace Corps, please enjoy the intentionally vague ‘story’ about something that may or may not have happened.)
One day I had a dream…a really vivid dream. The kind of dream that you are convinced was real. It was so real that you actually are 100% sure that it all actually transpired in real life exactly as you remember it. That kind of dream.
This was my dream:
One weekend I was going to stay at my friend’s site just outside the pueblo and was running late from San Salvador. My bus arrived to its destination much later than it should have and I was stuck in the pueblo without a ride in the rain at night. I had a backpack full of stuff, two full hands, and had to pedir for a ride. (Remember, this is all a dream and probably didn’t really happen) Long story made extremely short, I was standing in the rain getting soaked and for about 10 -15 minutes and not one person showed any interest in picking me up. In fact, more than half sped up going past me.
All of a sudden a man going in the opposite direction rolled down his window and asked where I was going. I told him where I intended to end up and he leaned into the passenger seat to discuss it.
“Really, really shady,” I thought as all the street lamps went out. “And that guy talking to his passenger about this is pretty out of place, too.”
He didn’t actually know the name of the spot in particular so I told him a more general location. He nodded his head with a “Ya, lo conozco” and said he could help me out. As the man did the awkward reach from the driver’s seat to the back to unlock the door I took a peak into the passenger seat and saw a woman about his age bouncing a shiny new baby boy on her lap.
“If I’m going down, the baby’s comin’ with me,” I mused as I slipped into the backseat. The driver pulled a U-turn that even Jeff Gordan would have envied and we were off.
(Please remember this is all a dream and did not actually happen.)
It was pitch black and raining leaving both the driver and myself very unable to see exactly what we were looking for, so we drove extremely slowly for about 15-20 minutes debating whether we had passed it or not. I spoke with them both about their 3 month old baby, discovered that they lived in the pueblo, listened to their reggaeton, and thanked them endlessly for their incredible generosity. He lived in the exact pueblo we were just in and now driving away from.
Finally I recognized where it was exactly that I needed to get out, and he politely pulled over. I asked him how much for the ride and his response was “Nada. Ya sé lo que se siente cuándo se pide un ride y nadie ayuda.” Nothing. This man, Daniel was his name, with his wife and newborn child, was going in the opposite direction, literally minutes from his house, pulled over on the opposite side of the road and offered to help me out for absolutely no reason. He was going the other way and nearly home!
I broke the record for amount of times “Muchísimas Gracias” can be said in a departure from a 4-door coup, left three dollars in his back seat, and counted my blessings as I walked toward my friend’s house.
The next morning I was telling a Salvadoran friend, the president of his local ADESCO, about this incredibly real dream and he, in all his brass, made an extremely generalized statement: “I mean you’re white, and I am sure that you’ve run into some people here, some drunk people, who say rude things because you’re American, but we, as Salvadorans, we take care of our foreigners.”
He’s right.
This generosity has me reeling. Whether it’s pineapples from Niña Antolina, a drunk guy gifting me a jersey at the Metapán championship game, the endless gifts brought to my house, or a dream about someone going extraordinarily out of his way to help me out when I needed it most, I have been consistently blown away by the altruism and kindheartedness of Salvadorans. I will try my hardest to keep from getting too political or too deep on you but I think that it goes without saying that this is such an incredible contrast to the way that foreigners are treated in the United States. Legal or illegal, people who are different from ourselves are treated like garbage on the surface and subconsciously.
My whole life I have been surrounded by foreigners being stigmatized. Mexicans are lazy. Brazilians haven’t brought anything to the table since that brilliant idea of what we can accomplish with hot wax. Salvadorans are all gang members. Who wants a doctor whose last name cannot be pronounced and has a Punjabi accent? We’re in America, god damn it, speak English.
Here in El Salvador people want to help me because I am a foreigner. They help me because I am different. Or maybe they just help me because I look like I need a hand everyonce in a while. They know nothing about me except that I was not born here. They do not know if I am here legally or just looking for drugs. They don’t know I am a volunteer. They don’t know if I am a backpacker. They don’t know if I am rich or poor. They don’t know whether I speak Spanish or not. Furthermore, when I speak English in public no one, absolutely no one gets angry about it. They don’t know where I am from, but I am sure they can guess. They make no assumptions. When offered money, not once has a man or woman (who was not a taxi-driver) taken it in exchange for their efforts or gifts. Help without pretense.
This country is so giving that the phrase “you’re welcome” is not even in the lexicon any longer. “De nada” has been replaced by “Vaya” or “Va” and good deeds are nodded off without need for exaltation. You are simply expected to help and to give to every person who comes your way, regardless of circumstance. A culture that simply expects kindness rather than putting kindness on a pedestal seems like a fantastic idea to me, but leaves me very conscious of yet another one of my cultural shortcomings.
You don’t have to believe a word I have written, you really don’t, but it would be a shame if I didn’t start being more forward with why I am so in love with being here. It’s not the snakes, it’s not the pine trees, it’s not fresh coffee or large bowls of beans, and it’s not the hammocks or Niña Bonita. La gente have enchanted me at every single turn; strangers and virtual family alike. People may not show up to meetings on time, people may doubt my ability to swing a machete, but if you’ll allow me to be your witness, I can attest that Salvadorans will drop everything, even pull a U-turn in their own driveway, to help out someone in need, even if he is a complete stranger.
So that’s my bit about Other Peoples on the part of Americans. I’ve shared with you my secret, my good times, and hopefully one of these days I can serve Salvadorans some justice in better describing the relentless kindness of this country. Just be sure that I am being taken care of in every way possible down here in Other People’s country.
Can Other People say the same about where I come from?
“I’ve never had a time like that since, when what I wanted to be doing with my life and the life I was living were so utterly intertwined. And I’m old enough now to understand that most people never get anything close to that in the course of their lives. Nor have I ever cared so much about what I was doing.”
- Aidan Hartley The Zanzibar Chest
Endnotes:
1) We will not be talking about figures of speech next blog.
2) The 15 year old girl was a fraud. She actually did have two arms and no one ever picked up on it.
3) By bust I mean that I’d be living on Latzka’s couch trying to do the Will Hunting thing and become absolutely brilliant reading his medical school books without paying either the tuition fees or the $1.50 in late fees at the public library. In other words, my fall back to the Peace Corps was becoming a doctor.
4) I am going to be a doctor, remember?
5) Replace ‘hand’ with ‘accomplishment’ or ‘opportunity’ and you’ll be right back on track with the rest of us.
6) Well the mugs really did cost a dollar and it really was just too expensive.
7) Every mug in this country has either a picture of Old Saint Nick on it or something in Spanish declaring the mugs adoration for a mother.
8) I still do not attend church. Their acceptance of that alone is enough to write a book.
9) Even the threat of rain is enough to stop Congress in El Salvador. They say it was the reason for the end of the Salvadoran Civil War…people are petrified of rain in this country.
10) This isn’t really natural. This is what I like to call altruism. This, at least where I come from, is not in the least bit natural.
11) There is neither internet nor Orange Counties here in La Peña.
12) Carlos has lived in the States and can speak extraordinarily mediocre English.
13) My favorite way to eat potatoes is Mashed, in case you were wondering. With entirely too much butter and even more gravy. I can’t believe I lied about that shit, haha.
