totally random sh*t

As any one of my students in Los Estados can attest to, there are Very Good Reasons I don't teach math. I mean, "break into groups of five," should not be like figuring out how to build the Eiffel Tower, but apparently, it is close for some of us. It is therefore with great irony and no small amount of pride that I can share my success in helping Lesvia, third grader extraordinaire (well, not when it comes to math. I know her pain. Intimately.), learn how to do long division. I think. We will see next week when she takes her midterm exams. Fingers crossed, candles lit, prayers up to heaven, and hopefully, Lesvia will not make us look bad. The thing is, here in Guatemala, teaching includes a lot of rote memorization. So we drill drill drill the multiplication tables and then repeat repeat repeat the steps in the process of doing long division. Stay tuned...

In Spanish, the word for "to hope," "to wait" and "to expect" is the same: "esperar." Every day, when I am waiting for the chicken bus, I am also hoping that I get on the right one, and at the same time expecting that eventually, one will show up and I will get to where I need to go. Right now, while I am waiting for Richard to get here, I am also hoping that he will like Guatemala, and I expect that we will have a good time together while I show off all that I know of this cool place. Of course, these two examples represent the Anglo understanding that the three activities (hoping, waiting, expecting) are exactly that--three different things, related but nonetheless distinguishable. I do not hope for the bus and wait to get on the right one, but I guess I do expect that I will get where I need to be, eventually. Yet every day when it is time to go to Ciudad Viaja--even though I have done so many times now over the past three years--that expectation is mingled with a bit of trepidation. I could, after all, end up somewhere else without a clear understanding of how to get back to where I started. It has happened before.

For many years, the people of the pueblos in Guatemala (and El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua) both hoped and waited for peace. If one lost hope, one no longer waited, I think. What is unclear to me is, while mothers watched their sons taken to be toy/boy soldiers, as children watched men fight kill rape burn destroy terrorize, as people fled from one unsafe place to another, I can't help believe that some of them must have continued to hope and wait for peace (why run, otherwise?). Yet did they also expect peace to come? When someone said, 'Epseramos la paz," did that mean they were at once waiting, hoping and expecting? Surely someone, if not everyone, was expecting and end to civil war. (As an aside, the one Quetzal coin of Guatemala has a beautiful relief of the national bird (the quetzal--a bird that does not survive captivity) with the word "paz" flowing from its wing). I especially like the "expect" part because it carries a sense of believe that the thing hoped and waited for will come to pass.

All of this musing brings to mind the Sapir-Wahorf hypothesis, which queried the relationship between culture and language: does language shape culture or does culture shape language? I think Sapir and Whorf thought they knew the answer and I can't remember what they said, but to me, it is more of a chicken and egg sort of question. Someday science will have that one figured out (maybe it is already figured out), but I am not sure what we get from that knowledge. I am just pondering a worldview, a mindset, that sees hoping, waiting, and expecting as one thing. It is just another reminder that we don't ever really cross over into another culture. I will never be a native speaker of Spanish, nor a native of a Spanish-speaking country, no matter how much time I spend studying the language and submerging myself in a culture I was not born into.

However, I can practice. Therefore, I can say that I espero that Lesvia does well on her math exam:).

A lot of the above is influenced by a great movie called Voces Inocentes, the real-life story of a family that struggled during the El Salvadoran civil war, which I saw for the second time this past weekend. You can find it with subtitles, and I cannot stress enough how powerful the movie is. If you are in the Western Washington gloom or the horrible heat of every where else, check it out for a little relief from the weather.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend comes tonight and we will take off for a place I have never been: Moterrico, a black sand beach on the Pacific Coast. Today is our 25th wedding anniversary:). !Yo espero!
Paz a todos.