Viernes

I can’t figure out if Friday was a good day or a bad one. I got up early to prepare for my Espunpuja class. I cut about 400 little wires for practice, ate breakfast, and studied some verbs while I waited on Hilda. I also checked my email, and noticed Lupe STILL hadn’t emailed me back from last weekend when I told her what the remainder of the stuff we needed to order was. Not only that, I hadn’t gotten any shipping confirmations from the websites she should have been ordering from. So I shot her one more email asking if she’d done it, and that I’d call her when I got back from Espunpuja. Don Gonzalo was late coming to drive us out, we should have left around 8, wasn’t there by 8:30, and then Claudia ran out saying I had a phone call from Lupe. So Lupe forgot to buy my materials. And then we spent the next hour between the phone and the computer, trying to figure out what went where. For a second I thought we could get wholesale from this one website, and we signed up for it, and then realized they didn’t offer sterling silver, so we had to change plans again. I need earring wire, and I’m pretty sure Firemountaingems.com is doing their best to screw us over when we buy it. It costs $1.00 per pair! I need 100 pairs! They only offer them in packages of 5 and 500, so either I buy 20 packages of 5 (which is ridiculous and overpriced because it’s small) or 400 extra wires for twice as much money as I’m able to spend. The other ridiculous part is that Lupe is leaving on Wednesday, so we had to rush ship everything.

So after that we were something like an hour or an hour and a half late to Espunpuja. Hilda was supposed to have a cooking class at the same time as my class, but there didn’t end up being enough time for her to bother starting, so it was just me for a while.

I’m not sure if I will ever figure out how to deal with this place. I told Hilda I was buying 3 more sets of tools, so she told the women I could have 8 people in my class. Which is really not possible. It’s possible in other places or with my other groups, but not this one. First of all, our work space is on a porch with a table that’s against the wall. Half is covered in dried corn, and all of it is covered in that orange-brown dust that permeated my life one year ago. There aren’t any chairs, so we stand at the table, which is too low to be useful, and I basically have to sit on it to be able to see everyone. The next problem I have there is that the women are incredibly stubborn. There’s maybe one, Yolanda, that I made a dent with. They don’t wait for me to tell them exactly how to do something, they look at it and just do it-which is somewhat admirable, but the problem after that is that it’s wrong. It doesn’t look good. I went one by one to each girl, all the while the other ones are literally hitting me and shoving what they’ve already done in my face. I get them to do one perfect one with me, and I have to move on to the next. And then the next time that last girl shoves 5 beads in my face, they all look exactly like they did before. I’m fairly positive some don’t speak Spanish, only Mam. Plus I was dealing with one screaming baby in Cantel that made my life so hard, here almost every single woman has a child on their back at every point in time. And if she’s too big to fit on the woman’s back, she’s glued to the leg of her mother, poking at the tools. Don’t get me wrong; I completely understand that I am entering their lives in Espunpuja. I am trying to help them without changing the things that are normal and right and good for them. They’re mothers, they have babies, and a child is not something you can just throw out to a daycare here, nor do I think it would be a good idea even if one existed! Obviously I am just not very good with kids. It’s a trait I already knew I possessed. I like to treat them like they’re adults, or basically ignore them if they don’t take well to that. Luckily, Luie is smart enough to have won my respect, but I haven’t met many as cool as Luie. Granted, the children here tend to be much more well behaved than the most polite child in Richmond, not to mention they’re probably the most beautiful group of human beings that ever existed, but I still have problems working around them in jewelry classes. It’s just not my comfort zone. I’m also worried about materials here. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but the women here like to keep what they’ve made. In no way do I think that they are even close to the level of stealing, but they do tend to keep. I noticed last week I left with less beads than I came with, by a little. This week I think the women were under the impression that the more examples they made, and the quicker they did it the better. So I look over and all 5 women have giant piles of incorrectly completed examples, and the pile of unused beads is down to 3. I stopped to help one girl for a while, look up, and all the women are gone, and all the beads are gone. I use these beads in every single class I have. They’re some cheap things Kim brought with her to use for practice, and every single day I sit at the table here and cut off the wires from the class before so we can reuse them for the next class. I have to have these beads! I ended up being able to retrieve them. They all had them in the pockets of their aprons, and surrendered them willingly. One woman had wrapped them up and knotted them in a bag. I don’t know. So when it gets to the time that they might maaaybe be ready for silver, I can’t stay in this location. I can’t bring back earrings to the U.S. that are covered in dust and kid snot and expect them to sell. It sucks but this is a business and it’s true. That’s number one. I also can’t allow the materials to be so carelessly handled. Even the scrap from the silver needs to be saved so we can recycle it. I also need to nip this idea in the bud that it’s ok to take home materials or keep anything you’ve made. I figured they understood this class is to make things to sell in the US for money, not to make things to keep. I don’t know where that idea came from or what to say to change it. And 8 people at one table are too many!

The one beautiful and amazing thing that came out of my time there today though is that Hilda set up weaving classes for me! The women in Espunpuja are going to teach me how to weave with a backstrap loom after I’m done with school and have more time! Next week, I’m bringing money so they can buy me what I need for equipment, and later Hilda will take me to San Juan to pick out thread colors that I like. That is something that I’m just so excited about I can’t handle it. I can’t wait until I’m done with Rosario anyway, now I’m squirming! I think it might help to have a teacher-student, student-teacher relationship with them, too. They tend to not pay attention to me ever. Maybe it will help to have more time with them doing things they already know how to do.

After that I had a shower and a grilled cheese sandwich and it was already time to go to school. I dream about skipping class now. It feels so good in my mind to just not have to talk to Rosario for one afternoon.. How did this happen? I went from Spanish class being the highlight of my day, to something that I dread and have bad dreams about. I wake up early every morning, putting together phrases in Spanish to describe to Olga, or Carlos, or someone as to why Rosario is a terrible teacher and I want to change, and I know I’ll never get the chance to say it. It’s just too mean. She’s a kind person, but she’s a hampster. She likes shiny things and has no depth of character or cleverness. She’s always making jokes at my expense in front of others. She knows I can’t understand much Spanish, and then she comes at me with this fast phrase that I can’t put together, and everyone else laughs and I stand there and am like “what? Can someone please explain why everyone is laughing?” “It’s a joke, Caitie, a joke!” “I get that because everyone is laughing, but what did you say?” “Oh, it was just a little joke!”

So class, and we had one of those school dinners where everyone makes a dish with their teacher. Carlos doesn’t have a student this week, he’s busy with his volunteer organization, so he wasn’t there. We left halfway through class to go to the market to buy vegetables, and on the way stopped at Parque Central where there was some sort of massive celebration going on. In the road was a big open air stage, more or less. There were two platforms on either side of something like a 30 yard wide space. And in the space was a temporary “rug” made out of colored sawdust. There were 20 or so actors, who danced and spoke and wore amazing costumes. One platform on one side was decorated in Purple feathers, and had this guy dressed up as some sort of demon, which I took to be Xibalba-the Maya’s version of hell, and on the other side, the platform was all orange and yellow, and had a old man dressed in white and blindfolded, which I took to be heaven. In between on the rug the actors seemed to depict life and death, battles between hell and heaven, battles between these amazing demons on stilts, all kinds of actions and narrations that I couldn’t understand. We couldn’t watch the whole thing, I think it was something like 2 hours long and we only got maybe 20 minutes. Dinner was good. We made a salad that was really tasty that I’m sure I’ll make again, and there are a lot of students at the school right now so there were a lot of people to talk to. There was a French couple there for only one week that’s 2 months through a 7 month long trip through central and south America. We talked to them for a while, and tried to find a coffee shop or bar to sit and talk in, but we don’t know anywhere since we’re lame homebodies, and the places they knew of were too packed to get in. We ended up going to La Rumba, the club Carlos likes to dance at. I would have been a lot happier if I’d been able to go home between dinner and the club, because I had a bookbag and flip flops, and therefore could definitely not dance. Also, it’s a salsa joint, and it was packed with the most amazing dancers I’ve ever seen. Turning and flipping and steps that I couldn’t work out ever. It was really loud and kind of awkward with two people you don’t really know, would like to know, but can’t hear, so we left, and right as we left Carlos was coming in. He convinced us to stay for a bit longer, but he walked straight through the door and onto the dance floor, no in between. It’s true. He is an impressive dancer and clearly has a lot of fun. He apparently doesn’t take breaks, and though he kept gesturing at us to join him, not only are we not dressed appropriately for salsa dancing, but we are also terrible, so we left.

And then I went to sleep.