Things I’ve Forgotten

I find it interesting how adaptable people can be. We’ve lived here for a year and a half now, just half a year left, and in that time we’ve developed numerous systems for personal higiene, water purification, washing dishes while polluting the river as little as possible, laundry, food preparation…everything. What I’ve recently realized is that we’ve become so adept at using the systems we’ve put in place that we’ve forgotten about how things worked before Peace Corps. Every time I think of something else it makes me laugh. Here are some of the things I’d forgotten:

While our friends Matt and Sarah were visiting us in August, we started talking some about how painful it can be to wash our dishes in the river. It’s painful because the water can get so cold that we start to lose feeling in our hands, so when we come inside they begin to sting as they regain feeling, like we’ve just built a snowman without wearing gloves. “Why don’t you use gloves?” Sarah asked. I thought about this for a second, and the idea seemed absolutely ridiculous. I can’t remember how we responded to this question exactly, but Sarah did seem taken aback, and decided she’d best drop the subject. I just kept thinking, “Why would wearing gloves help? Gloves would just get wet and cold like our hands get wet and cold, only they’d hold onto the soap and oil and stuff we were trying to get off the pots.” Yes, I decided, wearing knit gloves to do the dishes was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard in a while, and I let it go. A few minutes later Sarah reluctantly brought the subject up again, only this time, from something she said, I realized she wasn’t talking about knit gloves. She was talking about rubber gloves! I began to laugh hysterically at my own stupidity. Suddenly, I remembered that at home we could make the water so HOT it was equally uncomfortable to wash dishes, and for just such a time, someone somewhere along the lines had come up with rubber gloves. I’d completely forgotten about the existence of rubber gloves. Now if only I knew where to get some here in Guatemala, that might be a good idea…

When we go into the cities here in Guatemala, the bathrooms look pretty similar to the way they look in the US. The sink usually has two nozzles, one for hot water and one for cold. The catch is that here, the double-handle faucet is more about looks than function. Lots of them are even marked HOT and COLD as they are in the states, but one of two things happens. 1) Either one of the faucets doesn’t work at all or 2) both nozzles release cold water only. While I was in the states one evening, spending time with our friends, I went to the bathroom and followed it up by going to the sink to wash my hands. I saw that the nozzles were indeed marked HOT and COLD. I looked at the HOT nozzle and laughed to myself, “If only, I thought…” and then I realized where I was. Wait! Hot water really should come out of that faucet. Indeed, it did. It was thrilling, and oh so very nice. Another difference is that I wouldn’t put any water from a faucet here directly in my mouth without boiling it or purifying it with a few drops of bleach. I don’t even use water to brush my teeth anymore. [jaime note: in some cheapskate convenience stores in the US, they hook cold water up to both taps as well!]

The other day I was making toast for breakfast. Now, I’m a bread maker and was one well before coming to Peace Corps. As I was toasting the bread on our wood burning stove one chilly morning, I thought, “When we lived at home it was so nice to have a toaster that didn’t require such close monitoring to prevent turning the bread into charcoal. But how did I get the bread the right shape so that it would fit into the slots?” Then I remembered, I had bread pans! I think it’s amazing, if you really stop and think about it, how much we can live without. I think in the US, most of us have come to depend on so many small tools and conveniences quite unconsciously.

Conversely it’s also amazing the extent to which we Americans have gone to make all aspects of our lives as comfortable as possible. Take, for one, carpet. I’ve never been anywhere in Guatemala, in all my travels anywhere for that matter, that has wall-to-wall carpet like America. But it’s so comfortable! I love to run around barefoot and lounge on the floor with big pillows while hanging out at my parents house. It’s got some give and warmth to it. Sofas…also very comfortable and warm. Again it’s rare to see them so big and squishy outside of the US. I was the envy of my friends during training because my host family actually had a couch, and that’s when we were living in a more urban area. People here don’t have cars, and squeeze as many people as humanly possible into a vehicle. Not only do we usually have multiple cars per family, but everyone gets their own seat and seatbelt, and it’s more and more common that your car seat comes with a built in heater for those cold winter days. Let’s not even go into kitchens, what with companies like Tupperware and the Pampered Chef that come up with a special gadget for every individual task in the kitchen. One of my sisters actually owns a pair of wooden tongs from Pampered Chef to pull your toast out of the toaster slot. The summer I lived with her it usually made me mad because I’d see it sitting on the counter after I’d nearly burnt my fingers pulling the steaming toast the rest of the way out of the slots… I don’t know, it feels kind of humorously absurd, all the the stuff available to us.

I’m not trying to bash on all of these thing. Ok, maybe I am bashing on the toaster tongs, but the rest of it just makes life so comfortable! Our big dream is to have a house with radiant floor heating, and I will run around in socks or barefoot all the time. It’s not as though we plan to be ascetics for the rest of our lives. The thing is, if you want to know what our lives are like here, what they are really like, imagine pretty much everything that makes your life comfortable and convenient, then mentally throw those things out the window. Now, we’re Americans through and through, so little by little we’ve come up with things that make us sort of comfortable again. Here are the domestic things we value most in our Peace Corps lives:

1. Oven–it’s not well insulated, so in addition to making it possible to bake breads, cookies, cakes, pizzas, and roasted vegetables it also heats the house some.

2. Wood burning stove–one of us comments almost every day about how this stove has changed the quality of our lives here in fighting against the drafts and cold.

3. Internet modem–we don’t have to travel 40 minutes to town and 40 minutes home to use a junky, virus-ridden public computers with the “@” and “ñ” in the wrong place, all while a pack of little kids gawk at us.

4. Down sleeping bags–nuff said

5. iPods–we use them to drown out the blasting marimba music when we just can’t take it anymore

Things we miss the most:

1. A refrigerator/freezer so we don’t have to cook every single meal right before we eat it. I never realized how truly amazing modern refrigeration is until I moved here.

2. A washing machine

3. A shower so we that we can exercise any time we like and then be clean afterwards. We’d also save time not having to haul buckets of water to the house and heat them to wash up.

4. Being able to stay inside when we have to go the bathroom

5. OUR TRUCKO so we can travel where we want, when we want, with nobody crowding up in our business.

We try not to dwell on these things too much because it would get weird and depressing. Though, it’s true: there have been a few days in the last year and a half where we’ve laid on the bed for a little rest and just dreamed out loud about the things we miss. They aren’t things you can send us in care packages, but rather things we must come home to enjoy again. Most days we just live here; this is just what are lives are for the time being. We’ve figured out how to do it to the best of our abilities and that’s that. It feels like anybody could do this. Other times we remember that things are really quite challenging and difficult in ways we never would’ve experienced if we hadn’t come. What we miss, look at the list–comfort, convenience, and personal freedom–are all things we have willingly given up for our 27 months here. I think when RPCV’s (returned volunteers) talk about how Peace Corps has changed them, a lot of what’s changed them is the change in their perspectives on the world and themselves precisely because we’ve had to give up these things in order to do this job. This doesn’t make us saints or martyrs of anti-materialism. But if this blog is meant to try and explain our lives to you all at home, it would be a great omission to pretend we didn’t miss these things or to ignore what they mean to us and who we are. Honestly, I find it crazy that my brain feels like it works differently here, on a different level than it did before. It makes me wonder what more I’ve yet to remember I’ve forgotten.

This entry has taken a strange turn. Initially I just wanted to share the things I’d forgotten, and now I’m talking from the part of me that realizes in a few days we will officially be into the year 2010, not just a new decade, but the year we finish up here– the year we go home. In a way, as thrilling as going home sometimes sounds, it also very definitely scares me. There will be so much to love, yet so much to which we’ll have to readjust. Ah well, here’s to another year of adventures, everyone, wherever and whatever they may be. Cheers, and Happy New Year to you all.