Can you see my freckles? I´ve got ´em on my nose:
So now I will begin with my real blog post…
Living with host families can be awkward. And by awkward I also mean draining, uncomfortable, humorous, challenging, unfamiliar, confining, tricky, precarious, entertaining, wacky, and sometimes just downright ridiculous.
This past week, I spent time in the southern part of Costa Rica on a site visit visiting two different current volunteers. The purpose of the visit is to get us into the field to see the ins and outs of being an official Peace Corps Volunteer. During these visits, we stay with host families. So, I left behind the comforts of my own home and family near San Jose that I have been living with since March to go be a stranger in the house of two new families for a few days each.
The first site visit was a small indigenous community of about 700 people near the larger city of Buenos Aires. Here the roads were made of stones and dirt….rich, crimson-colored dirt that was contrasted with the lush rolling emerald Costa Rican countryside, the two complimentary colors unknowingly bringing out the beauty in the other. The houses were spread far apart, cars were few and far between, the soccer field was the town’s hang out, there was one small school, one high school, lots of roosters and chickens, and no grocery store. But since this is about host families, back to that…my host mother and father were a married couple 4 years younger than myself…23, married one year, and with a 4-month-old baby who didn’t cry once during the night of the three nights I was there. Their house was simple. Made of cement. The walls inside were more like partitions made of wooden planks. They didn’t reach the ceiling, but rather left space so that the tin roof that covered the entire structure could be seen throughout the whole house. Not to mention any noise could be heard throughout the whole house as well. My room had a mattress on the floor and an old wooden closet. It was simple, basic, and extremely different that where I live right now during training. The couple was young, seemingly educated, and more than willing to go out of their way to make me feel comfortable.
Mid week, we moved 30 minutes down the road to a neighborhood of Buenos Aires called Santa Cruz. Here you had many more than 700 inhabitants, more like 5,000-ish. Pineapple and sugar cane fields surrounded the city, and high numbers of people, including my host father, worked at Pindeco, the company that packs and ships Del Monte pineapples to the US. Because of this, every meal not only came with rice and beans, but also with pineapple. And if you didn’t get pineapple in slices, you got it in a juice form. And if you didn’t get rice (wait, that never happened)…correction, in addition to rice on the plate, you also got it in juice form mixed with the pineapple – fresco de piña con arroz, a delicious, refreshing drink. My host mother was a generous, older, caring woman of short stature with a hint of eccentricism. She willingly offered to wash my nearly completely dirty weeks’ worth of sweaty clothes. The awkward part came when she came to me after lunch two different times once day holding two of my shirts up to her commenting how much she liked them, asking me if I like them, and continuing to stand there with a questioning look on her face. Now, in a culture of indirectness this was to be interpreted as “won’t you please gift these shirts to me?” At the time, I knew what she wanted with this seemingly innocent compliment, so with my American ways, I played ignorant and just thanked her profusely for the compliment and for washing my clothes. Phew, crisis diverted (all in Spanish, not to forget). Well, not so fast. Later that week, one of those two shirts mysteriously disappeared from my clothes pile. Again, I played ignorant, of course to not accuse her of stealing my shirt, and simply asked if she had taken it to iron. When I did, she quickly said yes and grabbed the shirt from her bedroom and handed it back to me. Upon my departure, after 20 questions of how I liked living in her house, she gifted me a small trinket of Mary and Jesus on a wooden base…something that she obviously pulled off her shelf and handed to me with all its nicks and bangs and dust. She gave me well wishes for Mary and Jesus to protect me always and sent me on my way, not without her phone number and a promise from me to call her.
Here is a comparison of my two rooms during my site visit:
The point is, these two experiences couldn’t have been more interesting…and awkward. From the quieter young couple to the eccentric woman in her 50s, I have had a lot of awkward moments…just in the past week (too many to even retell). I can’t explain how good it felt to get ‘home’ to my training community and be back in the comforts of my own bed, my own family, my usual food, my room with walls that reach the ceiling, and the thought that things are starting to feel comfortable. But just when they are really starting to feel that way, we up and move to another host family. In just one week, I find out where I will be placed for the next two years. And in four weeks I will move yet again to go start over with that new host family in my new site.When you think about it, it really is interesting how so many families let complete strangers (Peace Corps volunteers) into their house in countries all around the world. Inevitably, when two different cultures collide, there is bound to be some tiredness (always trying to speak Spanish); some uncomfortableness (indirect, culturally different questions); some humor (figuring out how to open a Costa Rican lock at 11 pm when all the people are already all in bed); some challenge (figuring out how to not eat the 4 pounds of rice they give you); some tricky situations (figuring out how to get your clothes back); some entertainment (the mountain of people in the house at all times); and sometimes things that are just downright ridiculous (all of it). But the biggest lesson I learned this week is to laugh and embrace this awkwardness, because with time, things will change. Besides, by the time I make it to my fifth host family at the end of this month, I should be an old pro.
A few pictures from the site visit.
Those fields are fields of Del Monte pineapple. If you´ve ever eaten one of those, chances are it came from here! Eat up:
Government housing in Costa Rica:
We did a group project of painting recycling bins and shared the importance of recycling:
This was my and my friend Josh´s group of girls whom we helped....they had the best bin by far:
And finally, did our fair share of goofing off:
The end.
Friday, I find out the fate of the next two years! Hope it´s somewhere good!
1 comment:
Goal: not to be awkward. You're courageous girl! Ha, I've pretty much given up on trying not to be awkward, think I probably always will be here :) Talk to you soon!
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