Today was our third day of conducting surveys in the town of Las Brisas de la Libertad (The Breeze of Liberty). As our fearless leader, El Boludo, likes to explain: " Estamos conduciendo encuestas." This translates to "we are driving surveys."
The first two days were pretty rough, partly because we were still experimenting with the format of the surveys, but mostly due my inability to hide my dry personality and awkwardness for the whole situation. It's not easy to walk in to a wooden shack and ask a work-hardened, middle-aged woman about her children's education, her financial status, and how familiar she is with computers. The humility and melancholy in the villager's eyes can be contagious. By the end of the day, my shame and frustration at being so ignorant to these people's situation was clearly evident and was begging to sink into a depressive mood.
Today, I knew I had to take a different approach or I wasn't going to make it through another day. Our group's goal became less going from 1 to question 2 but rather engaging the people in conversation. And it seemed to work: we were more friendly, we cracked jokes, we talked to the children and the people replied by being more open and sharing more of their personal lives. We actually got a couple of pretty cool stories.
One man was a US citizen on vacation staying with his wife. He is a metal worker in Baltimore and he explained to us the history behind the word "gringo." According to him, around the time of Cold War, the communist states bred distrust in Honduras of Americans out of fear of US control of Central America. Thus, when the Americans came down and handed the impoverished Hondurans dollars as a sign of charity the people disliked the green currency and said: "green, go!" From here rose the word "gringo."
Another woman asked us to examine a sheet of paper that she had been keeping since her retirement from one of the local sweatshops. It was in english, so she had no idea what it was but she knew it was important. After looking over it, Rob and I realized that it was a stock title for 2 shares of the Gildan Athletic Wear company, which we later found to have a value of about $34. In very simple terms, I tried to explain to the woman what she had in her hand (mostly because even I didn't know how talk about stocks in Spanish). As the newly appointed stock brokers for this community, we promised her that we would return with the price of that mysterious piece of paper.
As we continued our interviews, we began to be amazed by the number people still suffering from the effects of Hurrican Mitch in the late '90s. One group of 9 adults and 4 children were sharing a property consisting of mud and stick house with wood oven outside. One old man complained about how the flooding had forced them to sell everything and move to this infertile higher ground. "You find work where you can," he said, "it's too hard to farm here." Yet even in these words I found a hidden enthusiasm that encouraged me to keep going and find out more about the interesting stories behind the lives of these people.
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Well, well, well... let's discuss the etymology of the word "gringo." Of course this Baltimorian metal worker, who probably didn't know better, had to stick to the same old discourse of the so reputable American charity (sooo sweet) but notice that the word "gringo" appeared in the Spanish language even before the Spaniards discovered the New World. It was used to designate anyone who did not speak Spanish, most probably someone who sounded like Greek..."griego," therefore, "gringo." Even though, the word "gringo" has a slightly negative connotation, it is used to refer to non-Spanish speakers.
ReplyDeleteCome on, "A mama' mona con bananas verdes..." M. V. M.