challenges

I thought today I'd write about the harder things about being here. I probably am in the state of mind for this today more than usual, having been struggling all day with an intense wave of homesickness. So. Homesickness is a challenge. I especially struggle with missing Maggie and Mike, feeling particularly like I should be home for Maggie, want to be home for her. I miss her funny ways and her messiness, I miss her laughter and her hair. I miss hearing about her daily life. And Mike, well, I have to say that living apart from him for the first time in more than 20 years proves to be difficult in ways I couldn't have imagined. Partly, though, that was the point of this adventure!

Other challenges:
today I sat by the pool and wrote while a very nice woman, whose name I still don't know, cleaned my apartment for 8 dollars. I find that uncomfortable in so many ways: I am in fact the rich white American in those moments. I could explain why I have hired her (I have no cleaning supplies and don't want to buy them for these nine weeks, for example) but that's not the whole story. The fact is the cost is so low that I'd rather she do it than do it myself. But then, by the pool, I felt guilty and lazy.

Today the taxi driver snapped at me when I asked him to turn on the meter ("Ponga la maria, por favor") and then proceeded to drive about 60 miles an hour down a local street while reading his newspaper.

My Spanish, if it can be called that, continues to plague not just me but anyone who comes in contact with it. Where do my verbs go? How can I not remember anything? When I'm in bed at night, beautiful Spanish sentences float through my head, but come morning, come any mild necessity to communicate, and I am nodding my head and saying, "it's ok" over and over in English.

When I call for the taxi that takes my colleagues and me to school in the morning, I had trouble at first remembering "trece" or 13, my apartment number. After one particularly mortifying morning where I kept counting, under my breath, "uno, dos, tres, quatro...etc" to get to 13, which I never managed to do, I decided to just make up a number when I called, as we always meet the taxi at the gate anyway. I settled on dos. Then yesterday when I called, the woman at the taxi place recognized my voice (and terrible Spanish, probably) and said, when I asked for a taxi at Apartamentos Palme Real, "apartamento dos?" Sigh.

I am very tired of being blonde, of signifying all the time. Blue eyes. The men here are pretty harmless though they honk a lot and call out "rico" which means, approximately, rich or delicious. As often as I get that, though, I get the anger, the frustration, from average people who do not like what I represent. I understand their frustration (see above) and know why they feel it (see above) and yet I also hate what I represent sometimes. Last week, for the first time, a woman in barrio San Jose looked up at me, smiled broadly and said "Hola !" I was so pleased to have a stranger be so kind, but then I realized she was in fact the woman who cleaned my apartment. Sigh.

Bugs. Lots of bugs. I am not afraid of them but covered in their bites.

Fear. People here live in intense security. Fences, gates, barbed wire, locks. I don't understand yet why or how afraid, exactly, I should be. My own experiences have been pleasant, entirely. But there must be some reason for this fear, mustn't there?

Systems. Sometimes the phone just doesn't work. Sometimes the bus doesn't come. For a whole week I couldn't get money out of the ATMs because they had none.

Ok. These are the challenges. But they do not outweigh the glories. Let that be clear. And I am learning and learning and learning everyday.

At Manuel Antonio I watched a perfect sunset over the Pacific--all red and gold over that vast blue. And I said my best wishes for Mike, for Maggie and for Rose. You were all in my heart then.

Love to all.