I am 23 years old

Tuesday, my birthday I took the day off because it was my birthday and because I had worked Saturday and Sunday.
-I worked Saturday because now I am opening the library and computer lab on saturdays and trying to start a small reading program with some of the younger students, and Saturday might be about the only option... I think the reading could develop into a really good thing, but as seems usual hear, good ideas and plans just seem to constantly get swamped by other events. Sunday I had to prepare for a MCC team meeting that will be here-

anyways, I was sleeping soundly when suddenly I was startled by the brazen sound of an accordian. I jumped out of bed and looked out my window, but only saw a new fire wood stack. I ran to the door and what did I find, a small mariachi band serenading me! It was awesome. The sang a few songs, I stood there in just my shorts before grabbing a blanket unsure of what to do. It was great, 5 members from the church band, including the pastor came to my house at five in the morning to start off my birthday right. they sang, we ate tomales and cake, the pastor said a prayer and read some scriptire and we just generally had a good old time. I felt very special and am very greatful to my family and band members for doing that for me. Sorry that sentence is so dull, I am trying to write as fast as I can...

In the afternoon me and some friends went to missionaries Galan and Phillis Groff{s house and made bread. WHICH WE ATE WITH MY FAVORITE JAM FROM MAILED FROM REEDLEY, straight from the Paul and Ruth Buxman{s farm, "just fruit and sugar" or something like that. It was deliecious. On top of the plum and peach jam selections, we had a fruit salad of mango{s, pineapple, and watermelon... delicious.

then at around 11 30 pm I think, I received a call from my house. This was no normal call from my home however. It so happens that the BC concert choir sang in Reedley that night and my parents took in for the night Jenny, Kyle Unruh, and Evan Fast (the later two are former roomates and if you don{t know the first, well, peddle a little faster (as my dad would say)).

using parenthesis within parenthesis makes me happy. If you are alllowed to do it in Math, I think you should be able to in English also.

ok, that{s all.
Jordan

Word of Mouth, “If you haven´t come to the Lord yet, now is the time.”

Last Thursday evening there was a meeting between directors of schools in the Carchá area. On Friday our director had a special meeting with all the workers at Bezaleel and then a special meeting with all the students too. The theme, the stunning news from the day before: the sharp rise in recent crime was the result of a group of 600 well armed men who “do not respect property rights,” who forced people to strip down to make sure they didn´t have tattoos (to make sure they weren´t gang members), and who raped women. Most all of the teachers had heard about this group, and the details weren´t all too far apart. Nobody knew who they were, communists was the word thrown around the most, the old guerrilla, somebody even suggested they were from the government (and the director, though he thought that not true, seemed to think that would be a good thing). The director was making the proposal that the men and women change residencies because the entrance to the men´s side has a gate, and that way women would not need to cross the road much, he didn´t think his advice would be followed, but said that if they didn´t and something happened, his hands were washed. “What can we do against 600 men.?”

I could not believe all this and thought that it must have been extremely exaggerated. I was saying to a friend how the number could be way, way less… how could anybody know that they are 600? But he had heard from friends from the police. The group was from a few small towns up North of us and they knew the amount of men from the town or something like that.

In the morning with the students we prayed and one of the professors recited some Bible versus. The director said “If you haven´t come to the Lord yet, now is the time.” Anything remotely gang like needed to go, girls should not have ear rings and should all dress in the traditional clothing.

At church on Sunday, the pastor said that parents needed to watch over their kids even more and make sure they weren´t “getting into anything that they shouldn´t be getting into.”

On Monday the boys told me how they had cut their hair, and ho now, all about the outskirts of campus, amongst pines, banana trees, bushes, and the little birds that take up their song in the steep hills that surround campus, were buried chains and pants that were just a bit too big.

On Tuesday, I asked the teacher if he had heard anything more about the group. He had known a decent amount on Friday. “All lies” he said.

Jordan

analysis later

The Most Difficult (but most fun) language lessons, part 2.

I seriously suggest reading part 1 (below) before venturing into part 2.

“Were you scared”

As an American male, I am not scared.

“Were you scared on 9-11?” “no, not really, I was scared for other people, but I wasn´t scared” “Oh, I was scared by 9-11.” Why was my host dad scared on 9-11, while I was not? I had far more reason to be scared. The simple answer is that the Spanish word for scared asustado also kind of means surprised. I guess I can admit to being surprised, but rarely that I was scared. I wasn´t even scared when robbed at gunpoint, seriously I took it quite calmly, maybe it was scary, but I wasn´t exactly scared.

This is not about weather some third party impartial judge would rule me scared or asustado by any one event, this is about trying to figure what the heck is the difference between what I think when I say that I was asustado, and when they here that I was.

Once again, let´s start with me the fairly typical American male (I think), when I say I was scared by something I was so scared that there is no plausible way that someone would believe me if I said I wasn´t, I am half joking, or I am trying to get a better hold of the way Guatemalans use the word. For me, being and admitting to being scarred has little consequence other than in the moment and whatever blow my pride will face from people believing that I was scared.

In my short experience here, Q´eqchi´ Guatemalans seem way more preoccupied with weather one was scared or not. It does not have to do with pride. If one was, in fact scared, it can have serious repercussions. There are two basic reasons I think: ancient beliefs and recent traumatic events.

I made the early mistake of admitting that I had had a bad dream one night. I did not understand why my family took it so seriously. My host mom reminded me a couple times to say my prayers before going to bed. I am a fairly vivid dreamer and I had problems as a kid getting over a spate of bad dreams (some of which I still remember), but it has been a long time since they deserved such worry. Recently I said how I had a dream (I think it was a dream) where I was in bed and I couldn´t move any of my limbs, I said it smiling because I thought it had been kind of neat and because I was purposefully trying to put off their worry. My host dad and brother looked at me very seriously and asked if it had been pesadilla (something pretty bad), but were visibly relieved that I hadn´t been asustado.

I recently heart my fellow librarian trying to diagnose a student who was saying he was having problems studying, he gets bored, can´t focus, and overall is just tired. There were lots of interesting things brought up in this conversation, but I´ll keep it short and simply recall a small part of the conversation “Did you have a scare somewhere?” “no” “are you sure, did you have a scare somewhere” “I don´t think so,” “I don´t believe you. You got scared somewhere. You were scared. You might not even remember it now, but you got scared. That´s what happened to me” According to the Mayan beliefs he says, you have to do something with a doll (I forget exactly what you are supposed to do.).

In another conversation between my fellow librarian and another teacher which was full of magical tales that they themselves had lived or heard about there was a particular preoccupation with being scared. I hope to write more about this subject later, but this will do for this entry.

My host father has admitted to me of not being able to sleep because of bad dreams, and I think he might have an actually fairly real problem of dealing with some sort of post trauma disorder. He spend of a lot of his life in a country going through a terrible civil war. So when I say I didn´t sleep well because of a bad dream, they associate that with the actually serious bad dreams of my host father, not with my easily dismissible soul stealing monsters or whatever new invention of my mind.

Some peoples bad dreams here could be serious trauma inducing events I can´t admit to being scared (even to myself) despite the fact that I am sometimes very jumpy when people come jogging up behind me (I was robbed once and punched once by people running up behind me in foreign countries). I am pretty easily asustado by people joking around and jumping out of shadows at me, but if you do that to me and ask me if I was scared, no I will say, you surprised me, you did not scare me.

Here, being scared can call up both recent memory and current afflictions with post traumatic events problems and can recall ages long ideas about a spiritual world totally separate from our western faith in science, progress, and a one true God which we can get to know personally.

Jordan

part 1: The Hardest (but most fun) language lessons

The language lessons one can never learn. One of the funnest, but perhaps one of the most difficult, parts of learning a new language occurs at the busy intersection between cultural values and language. Because of this confusing mangle of words that carry alternative meanings, words that mean one thing but might imply another, and words that have simple English translation that fail to capture the true sense of the word in Spanish, even the fluent foreign language speaker can be left rather confused, or even angry. There are words that I knew before I took my first Spanish class that I am still trying to figure out.

A well known example of this frustrating (but fun) part of language learning is Gordo(a). A good friend of mine, Jake Harder, came back from Guatemala when I was young and started calling me Gordo (instead of Jordo). Gordo means ¨fat.¨ It was ok because we were good friends, I was just a kid and not worried about physical appearance, and I was defiantly not fat. He explained however, as I am sure many of you know, that in much of the Latino culture calling someone Gordo or Gorda isn´t really taken as a insult like in the states. I am sure there are a lot of very weight conscious people in the Latino world who would be up set to be called Gorda, but the word is just not applied or received with the same manacing intentions or with the same sensitivity as in the US. Sometimes it is a simple statement of acceptable fact, and sometimes it is just used in a more friendly manner.

In the United States we are taught that being fat, or just a little chubby, is horrible. Admitting that one was fat or chubby would be like admitting to oneself that they were justly looked down upon by the rest of society, that there was something that everyone (including themselves) knew that they should do in order to make his or herself more acceptable to the rest of society. Allowing oneself to be identified as ¨fat¨ in Latino culture does not carry with it the same social death wish that popular culture in the states suggests that it is.

But that ´s an easy one.

“Are you sad?” “huh?.. no I am not SAD, I just want to sit alone for a bit.” How many times have I been asked if I am sad here? Triste means sad in Spanish, and it is such an easy, perfect translation, that is easy to forget that triste might encompass a far wider range of emotions than sad does. It seems to, at least where I am in the Q´ekchi´ culture in which I live. After being asked so many times whether I am triste, I have finally begun to realize that maybe those around be could be right. Maybe I can be triste and not be sad.

How could that be?

Let´s look at myself first. A general part of US culture is that we do not admit to what we think of as negative emotions. If I were back at school I would site some article by a sociologist that we read once in a history class about this aspect of American culture. We are always, “fine, thank you “ (as all the English learners at Bezaleel learn to say). If you would argue that this is not true of US culture, I can at least say that it is true for me. Sort of. I am not going to get into weather sometimes I think maybe I am sad or angry without admitting it to myself, if I am sad, but don´t realize it, am I actually sad? The end result is, anyhow, that when I am sitting on my own reading (something few Q´ekchi´do) while others are playing soccer and my host father asks me if I am triste, I invariable heartily deny this proposition.

On the other hand, however, Q´ekchi´are much more ready to admit that they are ra sa´ lin ch´ol “sad in my heart.¨ Ra also means pain.

Many Q´ekchi´ children grow up sleeping in the same bed as their siblings. My host brother of 26 years has never had his own room. Latino families are known for cuddling up, the whole family, on one big bed to watch the TV. People don´t leave their parents until they are married, sometimes not even then. The US is well known to be the opposite. The individualism that arose from single male pioneers going out to conquer the wilderness, or individual immigrants in whatever stage of history going out to make a name for themselves has made us into a culture that values striking out by oneself. The grandiose picture of individual hardiness, whether true or not, is a centerpiece to our societies self image. Catholicism (dominant religion in Latin America, if not where I live) stresses society salvation through the mediating Unniversal Church, while Protestantism (as in the states) stresses an individual relationship with God.
So when I openly sequester myself a little bit, my behavior is quite abnormal. And at least in the limited vocabulary of Q´ekchi´ Spanish speakers (using the easy and direct translation between ra and triste) I seem rather triste.

Am I right then, to deny this?

My actions, according to their cultural definitions of normal human behavior, most defiantly mark me as being triste. In the states, I would say that I am not sad, I just want to be alone for a little bit. And this is the point where the seemingly perfect translation between triste and sad fails. Where I am living, the emotion of “wanting to be alone” can be conveniently shortened and jammed in with the other meanings of triste. I am not sad because in English we do not like taking an emotional state and applying a negative label like sad. More importantly, wanting to be alone is extremely respected. Here, this is weird, possibly disrespectful, and certainly indicates an unhealthy state of being.

hopefully there will be more to come.

Jordan

Wow,

who lets me put stuff like that (previous post) on the internet... what is wrong with me?

I guess posts like the previous post are a result of a weekend where nothign happened. Idle hands....

well, I did run the most gruelling 11 kilometers of my life, so that was something.

hope all of you are doing well

Jordan