The One Where Emilie Attempts to do an Icebreaker and Chaos Ensues

1-15-11

I went to a convivio this afternoon, a meeting of all the youth and women’s groups in eight of the nearby caseríos.  It was held in the casa comunal of La Ceiba, a town that’s just a short walk up the hill from Los Alas.  At this meeting, everyone was supposed to give a short presentation about what their group has been doing lately.  My women’s group is really a grupo del ahorro, a group whose main purpose is to help the women save money.  They have a savings account set up at a local bank, and each woman puts in whatever money she can each month.  For some of them, that’s about $1, although some can put in more.  Either way, their money earns interest, and they’re not spending it frivolously just because they have it. 

I was recruited to go along and take pictures, as one of my Christmas presents this year was a new camera.  (Thanks Dad!)  My trusty, seven-year-old camera just wasn’t cutting it anymore, as it was about the size of an early model cell phone, and had less megapixels than my blackberry. 

So, today’s midday sun saw me straggling up the hill behind several middle-aged Salvadoran women.  As usual, I was sweating off my makeup from the first step off my front porch, while everyone else managed to look cool as cucumbers.  (Could someone please explain to me why Salvadoran women don’t sweat??  It’s just not fair!)  Lucky for me, a pick-up truck stopped and offered to give us a lift when we were about halfway there.  We all hopped in the back (alright, they hopped, I clambered), and bounced off.  It was at this inopportune moment that my phone started to ring.  I probably shouldn’t have picked it up, but it was a stateside number, and I wanted to see who it was.  It turned out to be my Dad, who I wanted to talk to, so I braced myself against a rail in the bed of the truck, took a low, wide stance (kind of like I was trying to surf up the Salvadoran hillside), and trusted that God thought I had too much potential to allow me to die at such a young age.

Which apparently I do.  The landing was a bit bumpy though; the truck stopped suddenly, and with only one arm anchoring me and the other clutching a cell phone, I landed face first on Niña Maria’s back, thereby cleaning my face of any last vestiges of makeup the sun may have left untouched.  I tried to straighten myself up with a little bit of poise, but poise is surprisingly hard to maintain when you and everyone else around you is doubled over laughing.  Oh well.  I checked my dignity at the door when I came to El Salvador.  And even if I hadn’t, it would’ve disappeared with my first bout of traveler’s diarrhea, anyway.

We made it out of the truck, I got off the phone with my father, and we walked to the casa comunal.  I took out my camera and started looking for good shots.  Despite the fact that they all wanted me to come with them to take pictures, none of them seemed to want me to actually take pictures of them, just of other people.  Which led to a merry game of cat-and-mouse, with me trying to catch them in photos, while they in turn hid, ducked, or held small children in front of their faces.

At the end of the convivio, before they handed out sandwiches and horchata (a juice made of ground seeds that Salvadorans seem to be wild about, but reminds me of gulping down sand at the seashore), they decided that we should do a dinamica, a small game.  They couldn’t think of a good one, so Cruz took this opportunity to turn to me and say, “Emilie, you can do that kati flauti thing, can’t you?”  For those of you who don’t know (and I can’t imagine why you would), this is a goofy little song and dance whose main words are kati flauti, and whose main steps include vigorous hip thrusting. (Freud would have a field day with this one.)  The funny part – okay, the funniest part – is that, once you teach the group the steps, you have everyone stand in a circle, turn to their right, and do the dance with their hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them.  And then you do it again, with your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of the person in front of you.  And then you do it again, with your hands – alright, you get the idea.  Suffice to say, as the circle gets smaller, you get increasingly well-acquainted with the people you’re sandwiched between.

This is the game they wanted me to do with all the Salvadoran señoras, with a sprinkling of young men from the youth groups thrown in for good measure.  Never one to disappoint, I somehow managed to lead a group of one-hundred people in a rousing rendition of kati flauti.  Admittedly lacking in organization, our circle was more ovular than circular, and most of the women couldn’t say the words because they were laughing so hard.  Meanwhile, the young men, embarrassed by the hip-thrusting movements done in such close proximity to their mothers and grandmothers, attempted to flee.  At the same time, their friends grabbed them by the arms and tried to forcible restrain them in the circle.  And to add to the insanity, some of the town’s scruffiest dogs came in and started barking like maniacs.  A few of themore elderly señoras broke out of the circle and started kicking the dogs to make them go away.  It was nuts.  It was madness.  It was absolute chaos.

It was a hit.

People thought it was so clever, and while we ate our sandwiches and drank our horchata, all the señoras came up to me, asking if I’d come up with that game all by myself, and how sweet they thought it was that I tried to teach it to them in Spanish.  Bless my little heart.

Nothing packs a punch quite like kindly-meant Salvadoran condescension.