true life planet

I´ve been meaning to take the time to write about funny language mishaps I have here. Unfortunately, I have had quite a few. Although my Spanish improves day by day, it´s still beginner Spanish. Combine this with the fact that the Spanish here is somewhat different than where I have traveled in the past, and it´s easy for language mishaps to happen. Additionally, cultural differences abound-sometimes people don´t talk about a certain subject directly-or when they do, it´s done in a certain way.

Here´s an example:

One day a dog followed me home. Not sure if he was there to stay, or simply there for a meal, I fed him and figured he would go back home. The next day, he was on the back patio, waiting to be fed again. This happened for several days, so I finally named him Captain Jack Sparrow(Jhonny Depp and pirate movies are very popular here.). Captain Jack made himself comfortable on the back patio, and seemed to have decided Catalina´s home was his new permanent home.

I became concerned that when I finally left to go back to the States, my family would stop feeding Captain Jack. This was a valid concern, as as I have mentioned before, people do not feed their animals here-at least not regularly. Very few people have pets, who are coddled over and well fed, as our animals are in the US. So I was worried about his fate, and trying to figure out if I should take him to a friend´s house who has pet dogs here.

So I asked my family if they would feed him when I was no longer here. But what I actually asked them was ¨Tu come mi perro?¨, which means, ¨Will you eat my dog?¨!!!
This left everyone quite shocked, their mouths open. Once we all realized my mistake, we all cracked up laughing. As a matter of fact, they tell this story over and over again, every single day.

Here´s another example:
The other night, I was attending church with my family. Half way thru the service, the woman next to me started speaking to me. I couldn´t hear all of what she had said-there was alot of chaotic activity going on at the time, and quite a lot of noise- but I did hear her say something about ¨….a person had died ….¨

. So, all I heard was that someone had died, in the church.
Right after she said that, I was looking around at all the people near me. Suddenly, I realized the woman who had been rather fervently dancing in the middle aisle was lying down on the cement. She was in the position of someone who had been laid out-and she wasn´t moving. Was she dead?, I wondered? She did not seem to be moving at all, and people began praying over her. She did not move.

Oh My God.

I am sitting 4 feet away from a dead body, I thought.

Everybody kept singing, praying, dancing, and jumping-it did not seem to matter to anyone that the poor dead woman was in their midst.

I was freaking out. I mean, I was trying to be calm, thinking to myself that this was just another cultural experience-but honestly-I was reeling.

Trying to remain composed, I was about to point out the dead woman to my hostess-she had been onstage and had just come back to her seat-when…

The dead woman suddenly leapt up and started dancing!

Oh my God, I almost had a heart attack! I fell backwards off my seat, and my hostess looked alarmed.

I explained that I had thought the woman was dead! I explained that another woman sitting near us had explained to me that someone had just died, and that I thought it was the (now) dancing and jumping woman, who had been lying on the ground and not moving moments before.
Great hilarity broke out in my family-and they began explaining in Ngobe why I was so shocked when the woman leapt up minutes before to the surrounding people on the benches. With everyone laughing, Catalina explained to me that no had just died-the story I had been particially told happened a year ago. A missionary had died building the church-no one had died that night.
gg

Last night was the night of the total lunar eclipse. My family and I had stayed up late to watch it together.

I was having hard time staying awake, as I was really tired from working alot during the day. Also, when I got home, I was very hungry, so I asked my family to make me some food-which turned out to be an enormous bowl of white rice, with chunks of yucca root. Yum. After I ate that, I was ready for a long nap.

However, I had promised to stay up and watch the eclipse, so I dragged myself outside to the lawn.

There were about ten family members visiting-and they were all sitting on scaffolding, made of the small branches of trees. The scaffolding was about one story high, and surprisingly stable, considering it was made of sticks and small branches-and no nails! A few days previously, several men in the family had built the scaffolding to begin repairing Catalina´s house. her house, which is made of cement cinderblocks, has alot of cracks in it at the moment (which means we have alot of scorpions crawling inside the walls of the house-and I do not like scorpions!).

We all sat on the scaffolding-the women in their long brightly coloed dresses; the kids, their clothes soaking wet, from just having bathed in the river; the men, all having just returned from working in the fields; a few dogs, chickens, and horses; and me, with a baby on my lap.

Although they knew that this was the night for the eclipse, interestingly enough, they did not know what an eclipse was. As we sat watching the entire eclipse for two hours(while every bug in the neighborhood made a beeline for my ankles), they bombarded me with questions about the universe, speaking in Ngobe and in Spanish.

Questions like: What is an eclipse? Is that the shadow of the moon? How often is there an eclipse? How long does it last? Does the whole world see the eclipse at the same time?

This led to more complex questions…such as: Why is the earth moving?Why do we have only one moon? Where is the sun right now? If the Earth is moving, why aren´t we flying off of it?

I did my best..but I am afraid my Spanish is more day to day-not suited to complex questions.

It really surprised me how little they knew about the universe. A few of the people there had had some secondary schooling-and so were informed about planets, the role of the sun and the moon, etcetra. But everyone else kept asking more and more questions.

For example, trying to explain gravity to them in a way they could understand wasn´t easy. But when I explained that there were people at the botttom of the Earth, right now, who weren´t going to fly off either-they couldn´t believe it. It was shocking. They could understand gravity for them-because they were experiencing it. But it was hard for them to believe that it existed somewhere else.

Also of particular interest to me last night was that we could actually see the milky way.
Normally, the milky way cannot be seen from this area of the world-but last night, it was there in all of it´s glory, trailing thru the universe. They had never heard of the milky way, and I explained it is called the ¨Camino de Leche¨-a trail of stars thru the sky.

I told them how lucky they were to live here in the Comarca-with no lights, no electricity, and no pollution, their view of the night sky is the most spectacular I have ever seen in my life. All the stars are crystal clear, cluttering the sky to the point that it is hard to see a distinct constellation.

The Ngobe have many names for constellations of stars. Among them are: The Eyes of the Cat; Maiz and the Machete; Woman with Child; Jaguar Stalking Animal; and Walking Dogs.

It is really interesting to see the universe thru another culture´s eyes. I have a whole new appreciation for it´s vastness and beauty.

gg

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