I
did not actually have dengue, but I’ve been sick / exhausted for about
the last week with something that was probably just a flu sort of thing,
but resembled dengue with some of the symptoms. But I am finally on the
mend, poco a poco (bit by bit).
What a long, strange month it’s been. Too little work, too much time to think, but luckily plenty of stimulation to shake up my brain a bit. I’ve been a little vaga, out
of the place where I live quite a bit, more for work and Peace Corps
sanctioned reasons than not, but I still feel a bit weird about it.
Between school vacations, trainings for Peace Corps, teacher trainings,
national holiday, class cancelations that have logic in this country,
but not in my rational, orderly Anglo-Saxonized imaginings of what a
school schedule should be like, and illnesses, I’ve only taught about 5
days of class this month. Not to say that I haven’t been some sort of
busy, but I feel like my purpose has been shriveling up, bit by bit. I’m
waiting for a lluvia of ideas (brainstorm) that will revive it
again. Real storms have settled into a dreary rainy season routine in
one of the rainiest Julys on record, which has admittedly put a damper
on most everything, from my ability to think clearly, to mood and
movement.
The
reason I haven’t posted in nearly a month is that my computer was
stolen at some point during my travels. The thought of having to parse
my thoughts out in long hand and retype them seems to have dried up most
of my will to write. Hopefully, I’ll get the energy back for it again
soon.
I started this post wanting to recount where I’d been and what I’ve seen, but it doesn’t seem right somehow. For
one there is too much to tell, and secondly, a list of places seems
oddly divorced from what the experiences were actually like.
It’s a pity, because I feel like I have a lot to actually reflect on for once, but asi es. No tengo tiempo ni tintas para todos
(I don’t have time or ink for everyone.) Not to capture the adventures
with my fellow Peace Corps volunteers who’ve become like a family of
sorts, or the dedication and wisdom of our counterpart Nicaraguan
English teachers. I don’t have the time to tell fully of the colorful
figures of travel and daily life, like the fisherman on the beach in
Pochomil who tried to sell me crab, or for the guide at the Museum of
the Revolution in Leon who talked to me about every aspect of his life
for 3 hours, or the neighborhood children and our new reading routine or
about the time I got into a public argument with a counterpart about
the meanings of catcalling and machismo.
No
time to reflect on art and culture, tourism as colonization (albeit a
tasty and delightful one), about my growing frustrations with organized
religion, about how history is all too easy to erase from a landscape,
about resilience, about how patience is harder to cultivate than I
thought it would be, about how it is easy it is to understand less about
a place the more time you spend there, rather than more.
Maybe someday I’ll get the words out and tell the stories rightly, if I can even rightly lay claim to them as my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment