Feeling Productive

I wake up around 6:30 to crisp air and almost silence.  The roosters still crow, but the motorcycles aren’t out yet, and the few voices to be heard are just whispers beyond my window.  Some days I run down to the highway and back, enjoying the closed doors and empty streets.  This is the only moment of absolute peace that I’ll have all day, before the rest of the world has risen. 

I tip-toe past the clutter of furniture that fills the house (like most, this one is small and overstuffed), squeeze past Papo’s motorcycle, parked between the couch and a side table, past the curtain that separates the kitchen area from the living room, and outside to the rocking chairs, where chickens hop between yards, wandering under barbed wire fences.  The five other family members still sleep quietly in the room they all share, and for a moment I just sit and rock.  Soon the neighbor will herd his goats up this road, and they’ll stop and scatter to eat what they can of the weedy lot between this house and the next, until his dog urges them along.  Boys will start to ride by on their horses and donkeys, sitting on colorful saddle blankets handmade from scraps of old fabric.  With machetes at their wastes and empty saddlebags beneath their legs, they head for a day of work on the loma.  I watch them pass, and they call out to me when they see me. 

After three months spent sitting on this porch, walking the streets of Tabara daily, introducing myself to everyone, and generally trying to infiltrate all areas of life, I have more or less succeeded.  They know who I am.  They call out my name. Children I’ve never met, people from neighboring communities, friends, acquaintances… I often don’t know their names, but I’m pretty easy to spot and they know mine. 

I walk down to the colmado to buy bread and café for breakfast, and the man behind the counter smiles when he sees me coming, holds out his hand to me.  “Como te sientes?”  he asks.  How do you feel?  As he puts some bread in a small plastic bag and looks for my change, someone comes up behind me and touches my hair.  I turn to find a neighbor smiling at me, “Tu estabas perdida!” she says.  You were lost!  This is what people say when you don’t come around for a while.  I like the way it sounds, as though you’ve been lost and now you’re found again, back where you belong.  I smile and chat and apologize for not visiting her yesterday, I was too busy running to the neighboring communities, I’ll visit later today, I promise.  I have this conversation several times a day.  “Pero Laura, tu estabas perdida!”  The more relationships I create, the more often I am apologizing to someone for not visiting.  Even though I sometimes feel like I am not doing anything at all, I was reminded yesterday just how hard I have worked over the last three months to create all these relationships…

A truck shows up at my house in the afternoon, carrying three people from the foundation that I kind of work with.  I only “kind of work with” them because they hardly communicate with me, don’t pay their facilitators as promised, and generally are a disorganized mess.   So this visit is a complete surprise after over a month of zero communication.  They show up and declare that we must meet with all the literacy facilitators today, as in, now.  They want to “motivate the people.”  26 facilitators from 5 different communities, who absolutely don’t trust this foundation, are pretty fed up with the whole situation, and definitely do not want to drop everything right now to meet with them.  I let them know what I think about this idea.  With that in mind, we decide that we’ll visit everyone and schedule a meeting for tomorrow (today) instead.

I hop in the truck and we drive over the pot-holed dirt road to the neighboring community, where I guide them to the houses of all of the people involved in the literacy program.  We stop at cinderblock homes and wooden homes, I jump out of the truck and find the facilitators, who are eating lunch or napping or sitting with family members in the shade.  They smile when they see me, “Pero Laura, tu estabas perdida!”  And I apologize, ask about their families, greet whoever is around, and then tell them about the meeting.  They hesitantly agree to go, but promise that they aren’t happy about it and that these people better have some explanations. 

We make it through that community, drive to the next, then the next after that.  For two hours we search for all the people who have been involved in this project from the beginning, and I tell them about the meeting, feeling like I am apologizing for this foundation as though their mess is somehow my fault.  To the communities that I’ve only visited once or twice, I can only hope that they don’t see me in the same light that they see the program as a whole.  They don’t know what the Peace Corps is, that I am different from this big foundation that offered them something and then walked away.   At the very least, Tabara knows. 

They turn the truck back towards Tabara to drop me off, saying what a pleasure it was to see me again.  I smile and nod, despite my frustration.  I am afterthought to this organization, though that ride through the communities made it clear just how much work I have done in these last months, how many relationships I have formed, how many times I have looked for a bola to another community and searched for people that I’d met once or twice, to interview them, to ask them how everything is and try to offer what help I can, though with so many people and so little power, there’s not much that I can really offer. 

But even as this literacy program falls apart, and I look into starting other projects (including a better literacy program), all is not lost.  All this running around and interviewing and checking in has allowed me to meet so many people and integrate not only into my own community, but the surrounding ones as well.  There's lots of potential for the future...

I guess we’ll see how the meeting goes.