Don't call me Aesop

The Ngäbe sense of humor takes some getting used to, but I think I have part of it figured out. Child falling down and crying=funny. Child throwing a stick at a chicken=really funny. It seems to be part of the culture to laugh at the small misfortunes of others in a way that would certainly be considered cruel in the good ole U. S. and A. For the minor travails of others, we seem to instinctively say ‘ooooh, you okay?’ when we know they really are. Not here. You won’t find any cooing sympathy unless you really merit it, and if you fall you’ll be able to tell if anyone saw because you’d hear them laugh. It’s like the crowd at a professional wrestling match or something.

Well, everything on the Ngäbe humor scale involving me is multiplied by my gringohood. To everyone here to some extent, especially to strangers, and especially to strange children, I am a zoo animal. Completely foreign and, even when merely reading a book, completely facinating. Being stared at is why I use the term ‘zoo animal,’ because staring back has no affect. A child stares at me, enthralled with the nothing I am doing. I smile and wave back. Still staring. I stare back. Still staring, and then beckoning his friend, ‘look, he’s just sitting there and he was staring at me a second ago.’ Much how we would interact with the primates at the San Diego Zoo. Among people I don’t know well, I feel like those monkeys dressed up like humans. The orangatang looks nothing like us, but here he is wearing clothes and acting like a human, and that is hilarious and facinating. What makes these chimps such comic gold is not only their similarities to our actions but also their differences. Sure, the chef’s hat and apron makes the monkey look like a cook - and that’s genius - but it’s equally fun to laugh at the mess he makes when his primate fingers try to crack an egg. I’ve gone pretty far afield with this analogy, but the point is that people I know laugh at me too, and this is more often for things I try to do and fail, such as wield a machete, which remind them that I am different and strange.

I thought of this right after I finished my last blog entry. I had mentioned that my day’s plans had fallen through, so I had nothing to do. I decided to help Jessica’s community haul rock for the springbox they are reconstructing. I’ve realized throughout the house-building process that I enjoy physical work but really dislike carrying materials. (As a fellow volunteer pointed out, this is like saying ‘I like working, but not when it involves work.’ Touché.) If I am digging a trench or clearing land, I at least have those products to show for the work I’ve done. When I haul things, which in itself isn’t fun, all I can point to is that what was here is now there. So I’m getting ready to load up my bag with rocks, and wouldn’t you know it, dozens of people have lined the streets, in town to register for next school year. I can feel eyes on me as I grossly overestimate my own strength with the first rock I pick up. It’s almost too big to lift and certainly too big to fit in my bag, but I’m determined not to fail in front of all of the now-entertained onlookers. So I roll it over to my bag like a caveman and try to wrap my bag around it like a woman trying to squeeze into tight pants. This would be a trying and frustrating task even if I could do it well and no one was watching, but I can’t, and they are. The rock is not fitting and I can hear the laughter, so I pause to glance behind me before resuming my doomed attempt. The expression I try to convey contains more than one choice expletive and clearly doesn’t translate because the laughter is unfazed. At this point, if this is the only rock I carry today and I break my backpacking backpack in the process, I will. Just as my last ounce of self restraint is evaporating under the midday sun, an old woman whose family I know well steps from the crowd and tells me without a hint of irony or sarcasm that that rock is too big and I should go for the medium-sized ones. ‘Oh,’ I say, and calmly nod. ‘Thank you.’ She helped me pick out some good medium rocks.

I got laughed at more that day, and the next, and the next. And I will continue to. And some days it will piss me right off. That’s okay though, because this is an anecdote not a fable. If it were a fable, I’d end with some line about the valuable lesson I learned: ‘and after that day, everytime I thought about getting mad, I thought of that woman...’ But then I’d have to actually do that, and that would be hard.

Note: I usually write these blog entries up in Cerro Iglesias and add the pictures when I'm at the internet later in David, so the two are completely unrelated. Sorry. Last time, the pictures were of my house (one of the roof from inside the house) and my host family. The two pictures this time are of me and Carlos' horse hauling wood for my doors (horse:6, me:1) and of the completed front door to my nearly finished house.