Shattered

7-12-10

I was just reading Worldview, the official magazine of the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA).  It was filled with pictures of volunteers in different parts of the country – the majority of whom were average-looking, middle-class Americans – grinning widely, usually with their arms slung around a beautiful, native, exotic person.  The contrast is what is so appealing about the pictures – just your typical American, often wearing sunglasses, hat, and khakis, but standing in the middle of a coffee-field in Mexico.  Or a rice paddy in China.  Or a thatch hut in Africa.  The person with them is invariably in some kind of native dress – bright colors, simple cloths, bewildering yet beautiful head adornments.  They have skin tones in a variety of dark shades – everything from ebonies so dark they’re almost black, to rich, lovely teaks, to the color of café con leche.  They’re charming pictures – they’re exactly what you would expect on a Peace Corps recruiting poster.  And they all scream the same message, so loud that it’s almost like being beat over the head with it: “Look how different we are on the outside!  But we’re so happy living and working together…we’re just the same on the inside!”

It’s a good message, to be sure.  Definitely a valid one, and in my mind, an important part of the Peace Corps’ ultimate goals.  Cross-cultural exchange, learning from each other, reaching across land and ocean and ethnic barriers to discover the similarities that inevitably lie beneath…all that good stuff.  But do they have to be so obvious about it?  They couldn’t make it more glaringly readable if they had actually printed across every picture, “We look really different, but it’s cool, cause we like each other.”

I’m not sure why that bothers me.  No, wait, yes I do.  I think it’s because I don’t feel like those pictures represent my Peace Corps journey at all.  I mean, the message is the same, but – how do I explain this properly? – physically, my Peace Corps doesn’t look anything like their Peace Corps.  During the second round of training, we were watching a promotional video for the World Wise Schools Peace Corps Match program – a program that gives teachers and their students in the States volunteers to communicate with.  The video was really well done, and interviewed several volunteers – a couple in Africa, one in Mongolia, and even one who worked right here in El Salvador.  The volunteers shared a bit of their work and what they were doing in the interview, all of which was artfully interspersed with clips of them working in fields, teaching in classrooms, and conversing with grinning natives – all of whom talked about how much their particular volunteer has meant to them.  It was really nice.

But if you had asked any volunteer in that room what we were thinking, odds are we would’ve answered the same – are we in the same Peace Corps as these people?!  We all saw the contrast – the images of indigenous dress compared with the tight, American-inspired clothing and heels that Salvadoran women seem to favor – the thatch huts and remote villages compared to the Salvadoran teens who are more computer and cell phone savvy than half the Americans I know – the grateful, grinning locals compared with the attitudes of confusion, apathy, and sometimes downright hostility we’ve all tasted at least a tiny bit of in our communities.

 After the video was over, we were all quiet for a second, and then one of the others in my group said, “Geez…it makes me want to join the Peace Corps.”

Fast forward a few weeks.  I was in La Palma for a volunteer meeting and was talking to another girl from my group.  During the course of our conversation, it became apparent that she’s finding her service less satisfactory than she anticipated.  But you need to understand her background to understand – even a little – her reasons.  She’s is Mexican-American, and speaks pretty darn decent Spanish.  She studied Latin American culture in college.  I believe she even told me that she studied some of the indigenous languages of Latin America.  No doubt, like me, she was told by her recruiter that all volunteers in Central and South America have to come into the Peace Corps with an intermediate level of Spanish, because they need to learn an indigenous language during their service, as well. 

She actually told me that the source of her unhappiness was El Salvador itself, and its people – “they have no culture”.  That sounds harsh, but given her background and expectations, I understand what she means.  I can actually see the faces of the women she was expecting to work with – long dark hair, pure, coffee-colored complexions unsullied by the touch of makeup, and rich, chocolate eyes that seem to reflect the collected wisdom of a simple, strong, and ancient people.  They would have bright head coverings, but long, plain skirts and loose blouses conducive to working endless days.  They’d probably be carrying a hand-woven basket, filled with coffee or fruit or vegetables.

I can see this person in her head only because I carried a very similar picture with me when I found out I was going to rural Latin America.  And why wouldn’t I?  I’d seen this person a hundred times – in Peace Corps posters, in travel brochures, and on the side of my bag of Columbian-roast coffee.

I wasn’t in El Salvador for more than a day before every image and pre-conceived notion I had along these lines were shattered into a million pieces too small to fit back together.  It’s sad to say, but the culture of the Native Americans who lived in El Salvador has been almost completely destroyed – by Europeans, by rich planters, by civil war, and lastly and most significantly, by Americans* themselves.  I won’t go into the history too much – it’s long and heart-breaking.  But the lifestyle and culture of the campesinos was beaten and broken and devastated during the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  First, by the rich planters who distrusted the native workers, and second by a military dictatorship that lasted through the 1980’s.  After this, a civil war further ravaged this tiny country, and left scars of incredible magnitude on the Salvadoran people. 

During and after the war, a surprising proportion of the Salvadoran people made their way to the United States, seeking either a new home, or at the least, a temporary shelter.  These expatriates shipped home western culture along with their remesas – payments made to their families to help them survive in an economically devastated society.  They sent home clothes and knick-knacks and letters about their lives.  They sent home slang, English words and phrases.  They sent home fashions and values and American idiosyncrasies, which Salvadorans took and changed and melded into their lives.  They sent home so much, in fact, that some enterprising people here decided that there was some money to be made in this craze for everything American, and started selling peanut butter and wonderbread and macaroni and cheese, right along with the pan dulce and pupusas and chorizo.  Homemade clothing was exchanged for polyester and spandex and other cloths not found in nature, and matching high heels and earrings and purses became the norm for Salvadoran women, young and old.  Additionally, (and I can only make an educated guess at the reason for this one), American movies and television taught them that with clothing, tighter is better and size 6 is the same thing as “one-size-fits-all”, no matter what the physical volume of the wearer. 

Today, all this sending and shipping and buying has had its affect.  Every day, my host brother comes home from school and sits down to play video games on his computer.  My host mother cooks with Mazola oil from a yellow plastic carton, and pulls her ingredients from a refrigerator.  My host sister accessorizes better than I ever did even in my best fashion days in the States, with gladiator heels, chunky bohemian necklaces, and big hoop earrings.  She leaves every Sunday night to go to the university in San Salvador, and comes home every Thursday night.  My host grandmother makes and receives phone calls on her cell phone, probably with more ease than my own grandmother.  My family sits down each night to watch movies like Twilight and Avatar and Saw on their DVD player.

With all these Western imports – what do I say about the culture of El Salvador?  My host father’s father still goes to the milpa every day on his horse, carrying his machete, to work in the fields.  My host mother and grandmother still do all their laundry and wash all their dishes by hand in the pila.  Niña Nicha still carries a basket of fresh-baked pan dulce on her head every morning to sell to her neighbors and friends.  The women in my community still make tamales wrapped in banana leaves, pupusas filled with beans and guajada, and pasteles full of potatoes and cheese – even if they ARE fried in Mazola oil bought in a grocery store. 

I think I disagree with my friend.

It’s crazy to say that El Salvador doesn’t have a culture – of course it does.  It’s just nothing like any of us ever expected.  Western ideas and products have become inextricably blended and melded with Salvadoran ideas and products, creating a society vastly different than what it was even just 15 years ago.  I know that there are people who would hiss and boo at these changes, and mourn for lost traditions and customs – and maybe they’d even be right.  But culture is a living, changing concept, not a stagnant one.  If it stayed the same, many of us in the States would still be living the Puritanical mores of our New England forefathers.  It’s hard to let go of the past.  It’s hard to let go of customs that are slipping rapidly through our fingers.

And it’s harder still to let go of our pre-conceived notions of what a people and a culture and country should look and feel and act like.  But that is what we have to do.  That is why I am here.  More than any good I could ever do for anyone here, they are doing me good.  They are shattering everything I thought I knew – everything I knew I knew – about the world.

It hurts less than I thought it would.

(*I use the term “Americans” to refer to people who live in the United States, not from a lack of political sensitivity or cultural awareness, but because the Spanish term – estadosunidenses – is a mouthful.  I’m very aware that we can rightfully term all inhabitants of North, Central, and South America as “Americans”.)