July 7, 2017 Buga, Colombia

July 7, 2017

You can't say no to salsa.

I have been in Colombia for only a week, and I have already danced on two separate occasions, once in Bogota and once here in Buga.  It has been eons since I last partner danced, and no alcohol had been involved in those days.  But the Colombian people seem to feel it's just as natural to dance with a stranger as it is to talk with one over a drink or two--their warmth has melted my cold northern blood a bit, I must say.

The courtyard at Hotel EcoBoutique in Bogota.

                                   A singer and a few dancers (Bogota).

Or maybe it's the weather.  As of now it's about 83, with a 55% chance of rain (typical for the jungle).  One of the 15 Colombian teacher's we're training told us that the weather report here is always inaccurate, and so far I think she's right; it has not rained once in Buga (at least not during my waking hours), and the humidity is not as bad as in Micronesia, in spite of what I'd read online.  (I honestly don't think any place is more humid than Micronesia, although Mississippi in July comes close.)

We did have a rather strange rain two days ago, however.  Shreds of blackened sugar cane leaves (burned to prevent the workers' hands from being sliced up) slowly floated down around the compound, floating like feathers onto our shoulders and clothing.  The IMCA hotel, where we are staying, has an small open courtyard in the center, and the floor was sprinkled with the ashes here, too.

A typical day here begins at about 6 am if I'm going walking around "the farm"; or 7 am if I sleep in.  I shower and apply bug repellent before walking to the kitchen/dining room.  Zika, dengue fever, and malaria have all been reported in the area.  I've had three mosquito bites so far (not bad for me, but being reminded of the burn of tropical mosquito bites was not pleasant the first time) and so far I don't seem to be dying of anything.

Our breakfasts are usually eggs and an arepa, a sort of fry bread made of corn.  Sometimes there is cereal or yogurt.  There is almost always fruit and fruit juice (mango, passion fruit, guava, pineapple, or papaya).  Today we had little croissants with the local queso inside (sort of the consistency of feta cheese, but with a milder flavor).  We have also had a fruit almost exactly like a Kosraean tangerine, with a green rind that is easy to peel and is filled with small orange fruit that tastes like lime and tangerines had a love affair.

 At El Parque de las Iguanas in Buga

Our morning training session begins at 8:30 and breaks at 10:30 for a snack (more fruit and/or fruit juice, and sometimes something fried, like plantains), and we continue for another hour until lunch.  At this time, more bug repellent follows, because the dining room is completely open-air--which is lovely with breezes but involves a lot of flies and mosquitoes.  Lunch has been beef, chicken, or fish, with white rice, some kind of small vegetable or salad (the beets were fantastic!), and something fried.  After lunch we have kind of a siesta from 1:00 - 3:30.  Sometimes people take a taxi to town to go shopping or sightseeing (the basilica and the iguana park are the only sights, really), or else stay behind to sleep, swim, or catch up on work or e-mails. 

                                                                                Things that will not make it through U.S. Customs.

The afternoon wakes up a bit with a snack, usually more fruit and fruit juice, although we've had jello and yesterday we had brownies with ice cream!  Our participants usually present their book club activities or lesson plans in the afternoon, with dinner from 6-7 (more of the same), and evening session from 7 until 8:30 or so.  My co-teacher and I usually help groups prepare for their presentations until 9:30 or so. 

It is after sunset that the geckos really take off their chirping—catching mosquitoes and cheering each other on, it seems.  They remind me so much of the lamwher on Pohnpei!  Same size, color (a kind of peachy-pinkish-grey), and sound!

After dinner and evening session, it's more bug spray and beer (the popular brand is Club, pronounced cloob, which is basically Bud Light with an Inca drawing on the can) and/or sleep.

I am so much busier here than I ever was in Micronesia, and three or four of the students are quite fluent in English, so we are always laughing and talking.  I love being in the jungle again--for the most part the air is comfortably humid, and I hardly need lotion at all.  I love seeing all of the green plants—lime trees, banana trees, mango trees, papaya trees, sugar cane—and the brilliantly colored birds (yellow canarios and a few others I don’t know the names of yet) and flowers (birds of paradise and bromeliads that look like pink pineapples).  I love seeing how well the dogs and cats are treated (even though there are only a couple of each and they are quite shy, they don't seem to have fleas or ticks and have all of their limbs and no mange).  

Huŏguō 21 December 2013 Mingyue (bright moon) Charcoal Hotpot (huoguo)

I'd been put in charge of organizing the staff Christmas dinner/Secret Santa gift exchange.  We had a generous budget of 2000 RMB.  My Chinese still isn't good enough to make reservations over the phone, so I had to ask one of my awesome coworkers to do it for me.  Only two of my coworkers couldn't attend--one was ill, the other was on annual leave.  I have to admit the Secret Santa thing was kind of exciting.  I'd drawn my boss, a lovely Filipina lady who is Catholic like myself, so I grinned as I tied a red "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" ribbon onto her gift bag.  I'd gotten her a lovely tropical plant and a seaweed mask, which I thought was fitting for an islander.

Saturdays tend to be a bit rough for me sometimes.  I usually start at 10:40 am with three classes in a row.  The good thing is that I'm usually done one or two hours before most of the other teachers.  Two of my American coworkers joined me down at Mingyue for a quick "pre-game" beer while the staff took their time prepping the table for two large hotpots.

There were these big ceramic bowls with sort of metal chimneys sticking up in the middle--like a volcano or something.  Full of charcoal, the chimneys had waves of heat and tiny trails of smoke coming out the top; the water in the ceramic bowls was at full seething boil.  One bowl was the spicy one, and the other one was flavored with milder stuff.

We trooped out to make our own dipping sauces; there was a buffet of ingredients:  chili sauce, vinegar, scallions, Chinese parsley, chopped nuts, sesame seeds, sesame oil, sesame paste, garlic, etc.  Literally 30 small salad bowls full of different things to create your own potion.  I'm a fan of sesame oil, so I loaded up on that, among other things.

I know it sounds obvious, but the hotpots were REALLY hot by the time we returned to the room.  They made our faces turn red.  In broken Chinese, I asked my coworkers to name many of the ingredients, cold and/or raw on their plates waiting to be cooked.  It was fun to throw in thinly sliced beef or pork, prawns, lotus root, yam, winter melon, pre-cooked quail eggs, and lots of other stuff--and then fish it out!  It was like camping, in a way, which I adore.  Just trying to get the eggs, for example, out of the boiling, oily water with chopsticks took more skill than eating should have to take.  We giggled or groaned, trying to help each other.  Eventually, we all had to get plastic Chinese soup spoons, and even my Chinese coworkers used them. 

I begged forgiveness for peeling the shells off my prawns with my fingers--after two years in Micronesia, the idea of eating seafood with a utensil was impossible, but I didn't want to offend my coworkers--who somehow managed to neatly nibble the prawns out of their shells with delicately-held chopsticks.  Every 20 or 30 minutes, a restaurant staffer would enter the room with a huge steaming kettle of water and add some to the bowls, making clouds of steam that evaporated quickly. 

I may have been on my second or third Budweiser (which I usually can't afford) when it was present time.  None of my Chinese coworkers celebrated Christmas, but they'd sure gotten into the spirit.  And they'd gotten some great deals.  Our Secret Santa budget had been 50-60 RMB per gift, and some of my coworkers showed up with huge tote bags full of stuff.  I really don't know how they'd done it--other than the fact that they were locals, of course. 

Another of my coworkers had made a silly paper crown for an American guy who sits next to me in the office.  It had come down to Thai food or hotpot, and he'd successfully pushed the vote for hotpot.  "We have an announcement--the King of Hotpot, everyone!"  We laughed, and the coworker who'd made the crown videoed the King's speech with her smart phone.

My gift was a solid cube of soap from L'Occitane that smelled like linden.  It was from the lone Brit in our office, who would be leaving the next day.  So far, two foreign teachers had left and two had replaced them; the local turnover was higher, with four out and four in.  That's just in the six months I've been working.

I still haven't made any solid decisions about my future here.  My contract is up in July 2014.  I hate the pollution, and there is a painful awareness of just how many people 20 million is when you must push your way through them on a daily basis.  But I've met and/or seen Chinese, American, Irish, Italian, Kiwi, Canadian, Indian, and German ex-pats, just to name a few.  I love the diversity.  There's a Chinese man I met who's been teaching English to Maori children in New Zealand.  I've seen a beautiful Chinese woman speaking German on her cell phone.  I've listened to Johnny Cash and Enya while eating lunch at a restaurant named Southern Belle with an Aussie and a Brit from my Chinese class.  I love knowing THE WORLD EXISITS--something that we don't really KNOW in Spokane, I'm sorry to say.

At the same time, I long for crisp blue skies; for an all-day chat with my sister over a cinnamon roll from the Rocket; for the purr of my cat next to my ear as he sleeps; and for the absence of constant construction noise.  Everywhere I've been, everything I've seen--nothing compares to the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, it's mountains and its trees, its clear streams and quiet hiking trails.  I can't imagine living in Shanghai forever, that's for darn sure!

Updates, part 2

Anonymous

If I had to choose one single complaint about living on the tiny Micronesian island of Pohnpei, it was my lack of privacy.  The roaches, the constant steam-room climate, the constant diarrhea...after a while, your body stops fighting all that.  You can't keep up a struggle against an unrelenting environment, no matter what American folklore says.  Eventually you accept what you can, deal with the rest, and move on.

On Pohnpei, there was no anonymity.  The homogeneous culture, the small population--if you are not 5'5" and brown, you are NOTICED.  In the absence of entertainment, gossip is king, and as an outsider, I was the most obvious target, as well as the safest (no blood family to seek retribution for loose lips).

The lack of privacy nearly drove me crazy.  It never stopped.  My actions were discussed unceasingly.  Five times a day people asked me where I was going, undoubtedly so they could share with a friend.

In Shanghai, as in most large cities, no one cares who you are.  This anonymity can be refreshing at times.  I was one of the hundreds (thousands?) of ex-pats living in the city, and yes, being white may have earned me a few glances, but no one asked where I was going--or cared. 

They cared even less about personal space--if I had to choose a single complaint about living here, that would be it. 

As an American from the western US (and of northern European descent), I care about personal space--a lot.  Even with close friends, I usually like an arm's length in all directions--my own bubble, if you will. 

However, leaving 12", then 6", between me and the person ahead of me in any queue did nothing to deter the "cutters".  Frustrated, and unwilling to lose my spot in a long line at the grocery store at the end of work, I once put my toes right up against the heels of the customer in front of me--who did not flinch.  And a Chinese lady still hovered at the "gap", eyeing each of us in turn, waiting for someone to twitch or show some sign of weakness.  I kept my elbows out, shifting my weight subtly back and forth, not making eye contact.

No way, lady, I thought.  No way.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Names

Here are some English names my students have chosen.

Males                                                    Females

Scalpel                                                  Stanley (yes, a female with a male's name)

Whale                                                   Decade

Ocean                                                   Silence

Invoker                                                 Yummy

                                                               Icy

                                                         Nolan

                                                         Dan (yet another female with a male's name)

                                                         Orange Tang (her real surname)

                                                         Bubu

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Teacher Day

From my company I got this present:  a pen-sized device that would turn the slides in my PowerPoint lesson presentations, with a built-in laser pointer.  When it works, it's my favorite thing ever!  I feel slick and in charge, like a suit-wearing corporate type.

The sliding glass door to the teachers office was plastered with notes from the students, some signed, some not.  One of them said:  "I hope the female teachers more more sex."  A female Chinese co-worker and I laughed over it and then pulled it down.

From a great student, I got this message:  "To Heather:  Thank you for being such a wonderful teacher.  You are my favourite teacher, Heather.  :)  Wishing you a HAPPY TEACHER'S DAY!"  She signed it with her English name--the same as one of my cousins.

Yuyuan Gardens 25 July 2013

Misters?  Really?  We need MORE humidity in the air?!

I was at Yu Gardens (a.k.a. Yuyuan Gardens), and I had just approached the algae-green pond.  It was absolutely gorgeous:  The lotus leaves were bigger than dinner plates.  The pond was full of carp--deep orange, silver, white, orange and white.  There were even turtles.  Just seeing all the greenery--a couple of kinds of magnolia trees, quince (reminding me of home), and of course bamboo--made me feel refreshed.  I swear the air was cleaner here.

However, I'd just walked two miles in 100-degree-heat.  I'd thought, ridiculously, that the middle of the day was a great time for a trek like this.  It's easy to think things like that when your A/C unit is pumping away at 25 degrees Celsius!  I was sweating so much that sweat was stinging my eyes.  I'd learned to carry an umbrella, though--many Shanghai girls and even some men do this, and it's the smartest thing ever, as a small bottle of sunscreen costs $10!

Under the zig-zagging bridge across the pond to the teahouse was a series of misters, spraying away, adding an air of mystery to the place.  I wanted to laugh or shake my head, but I didn't.  Instead, I proceeded over the bridge, pausing among groups of Korean, Chinese, French, American, and Brazilian tourists to take pictures and wait for others doing the same.

When I got to the Huxinting ("Mid-lake Pavilion") Teahouse, I saw a glass case with a three blue and white porcelain jars of tea inside.  A cash register rested on top.  There were a few tables here, but I didn't see anyone drinking tea.  Then an employee made eye contact with me.  "Tea upstairs," she said.  She was not smiling.

I'd caught onto this.  Americans smile too much.  At least, I do.  I'd found myself smiling like a monkey on more than one occasion--it wasn't necessary.  I nodded and made my way up the red lacquer stairs--there were quite a few of them, narrow and high, so I proceeded with caution and held the handrail. 

The owner shouted at his son (texting madly) to get a menu (probably) and show me to my seat.  The menu was the cleanest, most beautiful menu I'd held since arriving in Shanghai, with names of tea in a light blue script (in both Chinese and English).  I momentarily felt bad for all the non-English speaking tourists down below. 

I asked him what kind of tea he liked.

"Dragonwell." 

I ordered that. 

There were ashtrays on each table in the tea house (yes, smoking inside public spaces was still permitted in China); thankfully, no one was smoking here.

There were two older Chinese women sitting at a table to my right, and a Chinese lady at the table behind me.  There was another foreigner I'd seen prattling on her cell phone about her students--she was about 50 and didn't notice me.  There were no men up here, other than the owner and the waiter.  One of the Chinese women on the right kept taking photos; the woman behind me kept coughing and mumbling--I didn't want to turn around, and I assumed she was on her cell phone.

Tea was over $10, but it arrived with a big thermos of kai shui (boiled water) to add as I wished to the already steaming cup full of leaves; three small eggs (quail?) hard boiled in soy sauce; three pieces of plain, warm tofu (the firm kind), and two pre-packaged sweets--one like a Japanese mochi, and a tart, candied fruit no bigger than my thumb with a rather large seed inside.  It was an interesting snack.  Along with the treats was a sealed packet containing a fresh-smelling moist towelette, with which I gratefully scrubbed my hands and sweaty face.

At one point I'd noticed that the woman behind me wasn't on her cell phone--she was mumbling to herself.  It was as if she were having a conversation with someone I couldn't see; once in a while she'd look at a tourist down below, giggle, comment, and then cough and hawk and nearly spit. 

I pushed the tea leaves out of the way with the tea cup's lid the way the waiter had shown me--I'd seen people strain their tea this way in Golmud, too, back in 1988--and sipped.  Really hot, but a great green tea flavor.  Not sweet, not bitter or grassy.

You may have thought me insane to be drinking hot tea on a day like this, but according to NPR, it actually makes some scientific sense.  Here's a link to the article:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/07/11/156378713/cool-down-with-a-hot-drink-its-not-as-crazy-as-you-think.  I'd actually had my share of hot tea in the Peace Corps, and I have to admit, it did cool me down somewhat. 

The tea was making me sweat, but in a way that felt purifying.  As I took in the corners of the tiled rooftops swooping up like bird wings, I could imagine the essence of a dragon being released from the leaves by the hot water.  I felt it move into my body like Gatorade--dragonwell.  I honestly felt healed.

The Bridge of Nine Turnings must've worked--it supposedly deflected evil spirits--because it felt very peaceful in the middle of the pond.  The air wasn't arctic, but there must've been A/C somewhere, because I was no longer sweating profusely, and the windows were closed.

Mumble, mumble.  Cough, hack!  Giggle.  The lady behind me flapped her towel for the umpteenth time at an invisible fly or spirit or whatever.

I made my decision.  My tea was finished, and the gardens closed at 5 pm.  I couldn't take The Mumbler any longer.  There are crazies no matter where you go.

Feeling recharged after my tea, I wandered through the maze-like gardens.  After picking up a packet of post cards, I paid the entrance fee (30 yuan, or about 5 bucks).  After fighting through masses of tourists and gift shops with overpriced knick-knacks (wood carvings, fans, chopsticks, "silk" clothing, jade jewelry), I was finally seeing roped-off rooms where people had done calligraphy or performed on stage, There were high-end shops with fabulous paintings by local artists.  And of course, there were the trees.

Everywhere were ecstatically healthy-looking trees:  a towering gingko, Korean boxwood, Siberian elm, lacebark pine, Japanese camellia, and Kaido crabapple.  (No, I am not a botanist:  the Latin names had been on display, and I'd had to Google them). 

After seeing so much "green gold" (trees providing shade), I was more than a little saddened to see a few scrawny banana trees clinging to life with their yellow leaves, looking like a Micronesian version of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.  It may have felt like Micronesia today, in terms of weather, but these banana trees weren't half as lush as the ones I'd seen as a Peace Corps Volunteer on the isle of Pohnpei.

The patterns on the ground were intricate puzzles, bricks and stones shoved up by tree roots and buckling with humidity.  Some of the larger, older stones that made stairs were worn shiny and smooth by millions of touristy feet, reminding me of the Great Wall--it would not be safe to walk here after a rainstorm.

The carp in the various ponds and streams were quite fat and used to being fed.  You'd think that fact and the heat would've made them lazy, but it didn't.  Some young adult tourists were sprinkling what looked like gray-green fish flakes onto the water's surface, and a hundred carp were suddenly sitting/floating on top of one another--begging.  They begged like baby birds, open carp mouths gulping air and water and sometimes food.  There was a lot of thrashing about, and the feeders--probably college students, the girls in skirts and holding umbrellas--laughed along with me.

One of my concerns about living in a big city was noise.  For the last six years, I'd been living in quiet old Spokane, Washington; before that, I'd spent three years in New York City, and no place was ever totally quiet there.  Would there be anywhere in Shanghai I could escape to, even for a few minutes, to hear twittering birds, falling water, and God's breath sighing in the trees? 

The answer was yes, as long as I added babbling tourists to the list!  Here at Yu Gardens there was peace, even amid the racket and chaos that is Shanghai.

 

Check out more of my photos on my Facebook page!

I have an ISBN!!!!!

Yes, you read that right--I have an ISBN!  Keep your eyes peeled on Amazon for "I Was a Peace Corps Volunteer" by yours truly.  The number?  978-1477572290.

The surreal environment of Reno, NV is the setting for my reunion with my host mother after 8 years.  There is so much to hear from her--so many marriages, deaths, successes, and secrets.  I can't wait to learn more, get the distance to write, and add it all into the ending of my memoir.  Keep your eyes peeled for the announcement!

Spokane Public Radio

Hello, all!

I am now blogging about my experiences as a marketing/P.R./production intern at Spokane Public Radio at http://kpbxmakingnoise.blogspot.com/2012_04_01_archive.html.  Please check it out, and support the station during their upcoming pledge drive!

Doggy Bag

One of the first stories we heard when we arrived in China was about a rich foreign couple who went out to eat in China, poodle in tow.  As their food was being prepared, they asked the wait staff if there were some scraps or other things Poodles could much on while she waited for her humans to finish dinner.  Much gesturing followed, with words flying in English and Chinese.  Finally, the maitre d’ seemed to understand.  “You want dog food?”  “Yes!”  the couple exclaimed in relief.  The wait staff happily took Poodles to the kitchen, and 30 minutes later, presented the couple with a platter of steaming meat.  “Has our dog eaten?”  the owners asked.  The wait staff exchanged glances as the couple dug in.  “You eat,” they said.  “Did you give our dog food?”  “Yes, this your dog—dog is food for you!” 

What the beach REALLY smells like

Here's something else I started today:

First, you’ve got the broken-down coral.  It’s not really sand.  It’s been finely grained, rubbed and broken and rubbed some more—over other coral, over rocks, rolled and rolled like laundry on the surface of land.  This is the strong stuff.  Ground into a powder, it’s pwet—white—otherwise known as lime.  You sprinkle it onto a beetelnut before you chew.  That’s the stuff that cuts into your mouth.  No matter how far you ground it down, it’s still sharp.  Sharp to the smell, to the taste, and it allows the drug of the beetelnut to find immediate access to your bloodstream.

It's been too long since I've blogged--9 months now.

I'm hoping to publish some of my writing, maybe even a book about my Peace Corps adventures.  Any advice would be much appreciated.

Here's an excerpt from something I've been working on about sakau (this passage is about the singing on one particular night):

Imagine a black Baptist choir doing a rousing rendition of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” on a beautiful Sunday morning.  Then change it.  Remove all of the congregation, all of the women, and most of the choir.  Make all of the men over 40, shirtless, and only partially employed.  Imagine they’d imbibed a bottle of whiskey and were in that mellow, quiet, bluesy stage of drunkenness.  Make it dark outside, with starlight, moonlight, and a single fluorescent bulb the only illuminations.  The men are sitting at a table under a guava tree.  The linoleum-covered wooden table has been chewed by termites and mold.  It is crawling with tiny sugar ants.  The men’s 88-cent flip-flops are all that’s between the dirt and their gnarled toes.  One of the men is strumming a guitar with long dirty fingernails.  A couple are chewing beetelnut; one is smoking a cigarette.  All have plastic cups of sakau in front of them.  The beauty of the notes, the soulfulness of a Baptist choir is still there… but quieter, subdued. 

Hailing all Micro 68s, 69s, and 70s!

I applied to be a Peace Corps Volunteer back in March of 2001, I think.  A fat stack of paper work and several medical exams later, September 11^th happened.  I had been nominated for a position in Africa, but my recruiter and everyone else was freaking out.  PCVs were pulled out of countries deemed unstable, including Africa, and shuffled around.  It was Christmas Eve when I got the letter.  Micro-what, now?  I had to bust out the world map.  Oh, the former Caroline Islands.  I remember looking at them on the globe in like second grade, thinking, they’re so small, people really live there?  I remember standing on the bridge on Dartford Drive with Mom, the letter in my hand.  It was snowy.  A local artist had recently welded beautiful salmon-shaped pieces of metal to the bars on the bridge, and they seemed to be leaping and twisting in the sunlight.  The Little Spokane was running under our feet.  The evergreens were bent under the weight of the snow, some branches sighing and casting off the white stuff into the river.  I could hear the wind through the pine needles, and I’ve never felt as strongly as I did then that there were, indeed, voices on the wind and spirits in the trees (kind of anti-Catholic, I know, but it’s true).  Go.  Go.  Go.  They were all telling me what I already knew in my heart.  I would go.