October 30th, 2017:

Tonight I switched on National Geographic in the hotel.

The brownish tile floors, standard flat but not sinking mattresses and the thin blanket are all second nature. But the showers have hot water, and a lot of hot water, so I will never complain.

Hotel Mirador is the haunt of Peace Corps’ Volunteers who come to the office for medical appointments, the occasional work day or other administrivia. It was so beautiful to me when I first stayed there: sandwiched in mountains with a beautiful terrace and a winding stairwell dripping in green vines that takes you around to all the rooms. Now staying at Hotel Mirador is like using a bathroom at Home Depot: all business. Normally I don’t even bother with the TV. Why? It’s all in Spanish. Netflix is in English and, if (that’s a BIG if) there’s internet, I can pick exactly what I want to watch. If. But once I stayed with Melissa, who is fluent in Spanish, and watched a cooking competition show in Spanish. I wondered if I could find something to strike my fancy so I plugged in the TV and switched it on.

Spanish and I have reunited and come a long way in a year. My enthusiasm for speaking Spanish has remained the same even if my connection to the words broke like an old rope sustaining a cross bridge: too many thoughts have tramped across my mind to sustain the Spanish I learned ten years ago in Mableton, Georgia. I wonder how my younger, less-wandered mind would have soared in this linguistic challenge if I moved to Guatemala in my early 20s. But I didn’t, so no sense in wondering.

Peace Corps is not a common route for people in their 30s. The typical demographic of PCVs lies in the early to mid 20s, and after that is folks in their 50s and 60s who are zeroing in on their bucket lists. I’m zeroing in on my bucket list, but my bank account is zeroing in on zero. So I’m not the average age of a PCV, sometimes it causes concern but most of the time I don’t pay attention because there is too much goodness around me. What I lack in dollars I make up for in experience. But I do tend to feel my age when I look around at the other PCVs, and sometimes I worry about the whole “what-am-I-doing” question.

They say not to compare your service to other volunteers’ service. But with language skills the only thing you do around other volunteers is compare. I notice every word they say when they are speaking Spanish and I stack them against my own verbal sandcastle. “Oh I know that word.” Or “Oh I definitely do not know that word.” Or “Oh she talks super fast” or “Oh I talk way faster than him” and though it sounds childish it.. just happens. Even if I don’t want to, I pay attention to everyone else’s Spanish and get less confident and therefore more jumbled, when I speak in front of the other volunteers. Normally I am in Santa Clara dancing to the beat of my own shimmy-shakes and speaking Spanish and K’iche’ as the world turns. But it’s a weird culture shock and micro-competition when I get plucked from site and plopped in the presence of my paisano cohorts. I much prefer being in my own site doing my own thing, except to see a few friends.

When you first arrive to country, you go through an LPI: Language Proficiency Interview, which is a conversation with an LCF: a Language and Cultural Facilitator when you are a PCT: Peace Corps Trainee. You can see that Peace Corps also loves acronyms, which is like learning an additional language. You get your language level assigned to you, and then you get put into language groups based on your language level. It’s like a sorting ceremony that’s inherently competitive because the higher your level, the more power you have with your tongue. When I got to site, I was “Advanced Low” but I think that was a lie. I think that I was “Intermediate High,” because when I stepped into the classrooms of the middle schools and had to begin delivering charlas, I felt like a robot with faulty wiring. My brain stopped where there was still space to fill. It was in the presence and at the helm of a group of wily middle schoolers. I felt as ridiculous as it sounds. I felt Advanced at being Low.

The TV in the Hotel Mirador snapped on with instant clarity, unlike my host family’s tv which takes 10 minutes to ‘warm up’ as it comes into focus from red, blue and pink lines. The National Geographic icon stamped the lower righthand corner of the screen. I immediately distinguished the word ‘género’ and understood the conversation to be about gender roles. They even mentioned ‘the gingerbread person’ which is an activity I do with my jóvenes (youth) when we talk about the differences between gender, sexuality and sexual preference. It occurred to me that I understood everything that was being said. Even though I couldn’t recite some of the words from my own vocabulary, I understood their meaning in context. Success!

And then I asked: wait why is this so easy? These words are easier to understand because they are being translated from English, from my own country in fact. But the Spanish I encounter, be it the news or on the sidewalk, stems from a different culture. What’s more, the Spanish on the news is a totally different Spanish than what I speak on the sidewalk, which is Spanish and K’iche’. Guatemala City Spanish and Santa Clara Spanish are massively different because they stem from different cultures. Is that why National Geographic in Spanish is easier to understand? Because it’s being translated from my own culture..? even though the language is Spanish, the thoughts are US American thoughts being translated word for word. And those are easier for me to translate because I grew up with US American thoughts. I have US American thoughts because that’s what I am: US American.

Talking about gender roles and homosexuality, transgenderism, transexuals is more of a political conversation in my country than it is here. That’s not to say that there is not work around this issue in Guatemala or that Guatemala does not generate movement on this topic, but my point is that the program is being translated from US American English. And maybe that’s why the Spanish was so easy to translate in my head. Or maybe it was the operator-like pace and fluidity of the narrator that allowed me to nibble at the words without choking.

I saw Katie Couric’s face overlaid with a generic female voice, very reporter-like albeit much deeper than Katie Couric’s. “Transgénero” flashed across the screen as they introduced faces of children who are transgender. I must admit that I was disappointed not to be able to hear their voices.. I didn’t realize what power the tone of someone’s voice has when it relates to being transgendered. I didn’t realize how much I paid attention to Bruce Jenner’s voice when she became Caitlyn. But hearing the dubbed over voices made it more difficult for me to ‘size’ these people up and the transformation that they underwent. I think it’s normal to do that with anything you’re not accustomed to. Sadly I am not progressive enough not to be fascinated by transgenderism and have a million questions.

I can relate to feeling ‘othered’ by the looks, repetitive questions and unabashed prying into who I am and why I am here and what the US is like and how much my flight costs home and how much a visa is (which I don’t know because I am not from here). I imagine being transgendered or transsexual starts to feel like you’re being an ambassador for who you are instead of just being who you are.*

But about the language and how accessible it was to me, I had an epiphany in that hotel room. It occurred to me that sometimes learning Spanish isn’t as hard as learning culture. Guatemala’s culture has a script, and it’s taken me almost a year to feel comfortable maneuvering it: making sure to say ‘con permiso’ whenever I enter or leave a room, ‘Fijese qué’ before I have to tell someone ‘no,’ ‘Muchas Gracias’ to everyone at the table and always starting any statement at any meeting, even if I’m not in charge of the meeting, with: “Pues, primeramente Muy Buenos Días a todos…”

Then I heard a word I did not recognize on National Geographic. A mother explained her concern for her daughter (who was originally treated as a son). She explained how empathetic she felt towards her daughter and that they went through with the physical changes as soon as they could, for her to feel like who she really was in her own body. She used the word ‘agallas’ and I stopped. I didn’t know it at all. Sounds like eagle, aguilas, but that’s as close as I could get to a definition. I whipped out my phone and typed into the SpanishDict app: “agallas.” Only the singular, agalla, appeared and I tapped the word: Feminine noun (animal anatomy) gill (botany) a. gall b. oak apple. I scroll down with my index finger: agallas PLURAL NOUN (colloquial) (courage) a. guts b. pluck (old-fashioned) (anatomy) tonsils.

In this case, referring to undergoing a hormonal sex change, I infer that agallas means guts. Agallas means: “what you’re made of.”

And with the TV remote pointed at the screen, wrapped in plastic to prevent dust, at the Hotel Mirador, I thought: yeah, guts. Guts.

*I’ve only experienced elected ‘otherness’ to the point that I can empathize with marginalized groups, but I know that I am not marginalized and I can’t imagine the struggle of the transgendered or transexual communities to which the TV program referred.