My One True Love

Wednesday 4.7.10

It was a sunny, cheerful day in the early spring of 1994 when two young girls, ages 7 and 8, found themselves camping along a creek with their elementary school. Dressed in nothing but their bathing suits, bare feet, and the younger a blue cast on her left arm, the two adventurers set off on a journey without the knowledge of anyone else in the school to realize their one true love: picking blackberries. They journeyed across foot bridges, waded through rivers, ducked under barbed wire fences, and traversed thistle-thick cow pastures to arrive at the mother land: the longest line of blackberry bushes they had ever seen in their lives. They even came prepared with plastic bags to store all the blackberries they were going to pick - and we did pick a whole bunch of them, though more found themselves in our mouths than in our bags.

The years past, and still the Kate and Stephanie blackberry picking team grew stronger and stronger. We fashioned ourselves state-of-the-art blackberry picking tools, wire coat-hangers stretched out with a hook at one end to bring closer the farthest branches. We developed poison oak-proof clothing, long sleeves, gloves, and pants tucked into our socks. We had all the latest blackberry picking technology and all was good in the world. The team toured various places in California for the next 10 years to sample all the varieties the beautiful state had to offer, but lo and behold, when the duo set off to college in San Diego they found themselves without blackberries to pick and they became sad. They entertained themselves with other frivolous things: school, work, playing beach volleyball, and just generally being silly (what they are best known for after from their love for blackberries), but the itch for the blackberry never subsided.

Many years later, in January of 2010, half of the duo departed for Peace Corps Guatemala in the hopes of learning new and interesting things about a different place, culture, and work. Little did she know that three months later she would fulfill her heart’s greatest desire: all the blackberries she could ever want.

That’s right, I can’t walk 100 meters in any direction from my house without running into a blackberry bush. Some of them are in flower, some have green or red fruits, some of them even have immature black fruits, and others are even still in bud. And they really are all over the place. I’ve never seen vines climb so high into trees; it must be some mutant strain of Super Guatemalan Blackberry that we don’t have back in California. I don’t even know what to do with myself I’m so excited for blackberry season. As of now, I probably occupy about 4-8% of my days thinking about what I’m going to in a couple weeks when I will be able to acquire all the blackberries I want. I’m drooling. I’m going to have at least two months of gorging myself on all the blackberries I can fit into my stomach and my bags! So Stephanie, book your plane ticket for next year at this time so the greatest blackberry picking team in history can continue it’s legacy in a whole different country.

In case anyone was wondering, the girl with the cast in the story is me. I’m Kate, I break bones, that’s just what I do.

Antiderivative of a Candle

Saturday 4.3.10

Tonight I watched a white candle of about 8 inches, standing straight up and stuck to the ground of a church with hot wax and growing weaker from the heat, slowly bend to a curvy 90 degree angle. And as the wax continued dripping down its sides, instead of following the body of the candle all the way to the ground, the angle caused it to drop through the air to the floor forming a stalactite. It was beautiful. I watched three stalactites form and then fall. The mathematician in me however could not just see the geology of the candle; no, suddenly all I could see were area-under-the-curve diagrams and antiderivative equations. The candle formed a lovely inverse hyperbolic curve and the stalactite was a perfectly vertical slice. Every time the old stalactite fell and a new one formed, forming a slightly smaller slice each time because the candle was shrinking, there was a new limit to set and a new area formed between the curve and the slice.

The mathematician in me also cannot help calculating that I am just about 10% done with my service in Guatemala; 27 months in total and I have completed just shy of three of them. I’m not calculating this because I’m eager to get it done with and am just waiting for the rest of the 90% to pass by, I just can’t help noticing that statistic. 10% feels like a huge proportion considering how fast the past three months flew by, but 90% also feels like an enormous proportion. I could compare this feeling to how I feel in a volleyball match. In a game to 25, if I’m down 16-19 I almost always feel like I’m way too far behind to catch up and there’s no hope at all for me to win the match. If I’m up 19-16 I almost always feel nervous because all it takes from the other team is a small run and they could sweep the match out from under me. Situations that are exactly the same, or rather exactly the reciprocal, feel so different depending on what side I’m on or from what side I view them. I’m sure this sounds like the so very cliché glass-half-empty/glass-half-full stuff, but it’s different. One has to look at time in the past and time in the future in different ways. I’m not thinking about my next two years here as a glass half empty nor half full, rather, as something that’s so foreign and strange and frightening and exciting that I don’t even know how to look at it. I think because I don’t know what to expect that I try to put mathematics to it to try to make sense of it. Logic is the only language I understand.

Three Plastic Jesii

Friday 4.2.10

Today I went on a camionata, a little walk around town with the rest of the townsfolk. On this camionata we celebrated the 15 sacred somethings in the life of Jesus. We began at the Catholic Church and began walking, all about 150-200 of us with one gigantic speaker being carried by four men with two sticks and one smaller speaker who only needed one man to carry it, down the road to the first “station”. We arrived at the first station after about 100 meters where we stopped and listened to one of the youth read a few paragraphs, which lasted about 3-5 minutes, while we all knelt down on the rocky ground. When the reading was done we all stood up and began walking again, to the tune of a very very badly sung Christian song, another 100 meters where we repeated the exact same process. 15 times this happened. We walked up and down steep hills, all the while looking like frantic antelope being chased by bison on the African plains. We were shuffled so close together, as if to be near the front of the line actually meant one was closer to Jesus himself.

Eventually we arrived back at the Church about 1 hour and a half later where we listened to a review of the 15 stations we had just listened to. We listened to some more really bad music, then everybody stood up and got in a line to do something at the front of the Church. I didn’t know what this was, but I was sure not going to miss out on whatever fun everybody else was having! I got to the front of the church to find three people holding three plastic statues of Jesus, the same statues that led the camionata earlier that day, and people were lining up to kiss them. At this point I didn’t really have much of a choice, so I kissed three plastic Jesuses. Or Jesii. I’m not quite sure anybody has ever used the word Jesus in the plural form before.

Body of Christ

Thursday 4.1.10

I have the Body of Christ in my pocket. Just writing that I feel like singing to the melody of “I’ve got the whole world in my hands” but I’m not going to. Maybe I will. I went to Catholic Mass today, “Misa”, and I was glad it only lasted about 1 ½ hours instead of the 2 ½ to 3 hours I was quoted. I tried so so hard not to fall asleep. I tried the David technique “cross and pinch” where you cross your arms and secretly pinch your sides to keep you awake. Didn’t work, but now I do have two lovely bruises on the sides of my ribcage. I didn’t know what I was doing for most of the service; I just followed along. Stand up, kneel down, sit down, stand up again, get in a line for the Body and Blood of Christ. I know enough to know what this is, so I knew to get in a line and I watched carefully the people in front of me and copied them to receive the cracker. The only thing is, I never actually saw anybody eat it. It was so secretive I doubted myself if that was actually how it was done. I took the cracker and palmed it, scanning the room for clues or somebody to show me what I was supposed to do. I didn’t want to ask and embarrass myself so I just secretly slid it into my pocket when nobody was looking. And there it remains.

I can’t throw it away, people would see it and know what it is. No, I have to be much more discreet in how I dispose of this Body. I could bury it. I could dissolve it in water and flush it down the drain. I suppose I could just eat it; but it looks like cardboard. If Cathy Tan were here she’d eat it. She loves things that look and/or taste like cardboard. No, it’s not quite cardboard, more like Styrofoam. It looks like the Styrofoam tab you peel off of the gallon of Minute Maid orange juice that ensures it’s okay to drink. Yes, that’s what it looks like; exactly the same size, thickness, color, and texture. I just don’t feel okay eating a Styrofoam Minute Maid Body of Christ sterile tab.

The reason for all this Church-going is Easter. Today is the day that nobody is supposed to work, use water after 3pm for anything but drinking, and do a bunch of other traditional stuff. They all ask me what my traditions are for Easter - and I really can’t say anything because I never even know when Easter falls. The only way I used to know was because Spring Break fell over Easter. I tried to explain Easter egg decorating and hunting, but I’m sure that must sound really weird to them. Then I tell them that Easter in the US is usually just celebrated on Sunday and maybe the Friday before too, with a big family dinner and Church, but they think that’s weird too. Here they celebrate Semana Santa the whole week. This morning I woke up to a table full of pan (bread) with honey that we all ate. Then other people, aunts and cousins, came over to share more pan. Then we went over to a grandparent’s house with more aunts and uncles and cousins to share more pan. That’s all they do Thursday morning: eat pan and share pan and visit with each other. I am so full of pan, but at least it’s a tasty kind and I get to put honey on it.

Water Conservation Appreciation

Wednesday 3.31.10

This morning I woke up at 2:30 and I knew it was bad. Without getting into the gruesome details I’ll just say that neither end of my body was happy with something I ate or drank yesterday. Like Sunday, I spent about 6 hours of that day awake, either using the bathroom or trying to fall back asleep.

Around 5pm I started to feel back to normal, and I needed more water to flush the toilet, so I volunteered to help carry water. Water is only available here in the house between around 10pm and 4-5am, so during the day if there’s not enough stored up from the night before we take pitchers down to lower ground where it runs more frequently or is stored and carry it up to the house. I thought I volunteered for one pitcher. That wasn’t even enough to fill the tank of the toilet for one flush. I carried 5 pitchers (all on my head, thank you, just like a normal Guatemalan mujer) and the whole time had that song from the end of The Jungle Book stuck in my head. You know, the song where the woman goes down to the river to fetch the water and then the young girls starts singing about how that will someday be her, then Mogali follows her into civilization. Though I could only remember one line so kept singing it over and over in my head until I was done carrying water. I was so tired by the end of it, that’s what happens when you lose all your body fluids in a day and have only have had two bananas to eat.

I have a new appreciation for the concept of water conservation. Every time I flush a toilet for the rest of my life I will always think about the 7 minute trip it took to carry that one pitcher of water and how the top of my head feels now after doing that a few times. Now, I understand very well the importance of flushing toilets, but I also know better now the difference between understanding a water crisis, like we say we do in the US, and actually feeling a water crisis every day like the people do here. I’ve only lived here for a total of about 6 full days so of course there’s no way to describe what it’s like for the people who have lived here their whole lives under these conditions, but I can describe the difference between people who understand what a drought is but never actually have to live through the hardship of one and the people who only have running water for 7 hours a day, the hours when most people are asleep.