The first week in site, welcome and instructions came in a shower of words from my host mom. Lots of words.
At dinner, she’d eat a bite, wipe her mouth and say more. Eat a bite, wipe mouth, say more. After her food finished, I’d wait for the words that came after dinner like verbal dessert.
I eat faster than her but I’ve learned I simply eat faster than most. But. especially. here.
No matter. I remember the first week in site and how I sat for an hour and listened after I finished eating. Like a long well-intentioned story from your Grandfather or the last five minutes of 9th grade English (Mythology with Mr. Lutz) right before lunch period, the words were not entirely spellbinding. But. This time around and also with Popi (not so much Perseus) the company was compelling. The content wasn’t nearly as compelling as the company, and for this reason the moments were precious.
You see, I live in a house with three ladies and a male cat. We are happy, we are comfortable, we have our various routines. But I imagine all of that was up in the air during the months that DoRo anxiously awaited the phone call from Cuerpo de Paz: “Your volunteer is coming. They will arrive on December 6th.” Keep in mind, I never asked “When did you find out I was going to live with you?” In all the times she told me the details, I never asked the question. As most conversations start between two non-native Spanish speakers, we discuss the price of tomatoes. But the cost of tomatoes often leads to how safe our town is to how long her daughter has lived in the capital to the first time she found out I was coming to live in her house. All in one stream of consciousness that I let flow at me without interjection.
This story was delivered just a few days before Christmas. The sun set and the one fluorescent crescent bulb overhead cast a feeble glow. I sit to the right of the fire on the wooden chair, she sits on the stool. Abuelita sits across from us on the other side of the fire. And Rosario talks, I listen. There’s something deeply embedded in this culture in the hospitality of language. When someone is in your home, you talk. And I don’t mean “visit” for 5 minutes with your dog leash in your hands and your shoulder leaning against the wall. Here you sit and you look at each other, maybe with coffee or maybe with nothing, and you talk. You listen. You nod. There are monologues here that you don’t interrupt. They are stories that you don’t prompt with questions. What you do is you listen. So I listened. And this is the story she told me in great detail.
She’d told me once before in cinematic preview, but now she tells me in cinematic chorus: “This is when I found out who would be coming” she says as she clears her throat. “In October the house was finished upstairs, and that man whats-his-name I can never remember, came to the house to see it. He looked around and he told us that he didn’t know who would be coming, boy or girl. But he said you would be coming in December. “Vaya” we said. And then we waited. We got the furniture, a bed and things for your apartment. And then one day we got a phone call and a lady came to our house from Xela. She sat at that table right there” she pointed. “And she asked us a lot of questions and she told us that we would be your family here, that we needed to call Cuerpo de Paz if something bad happened to you. If you get sick, we call. ‘Vaya’ we said.” The light of the fire dances across her skin as the crackle of the leña peters out. We’ve long since finished cooking and the flames dissipate without the right coaxing and attention. I say “Mhmm” and nod my head as I hear her story.
She continues “She sits at that table right there and she asks us questions. Then the week before you are supposed to come, they call us and they say “Your volunteer is coming…” She pauses for effect. “She’s ‘hembra.'” She said the word like she was whispering a magic spell that cannot be repeated. “Hembra.” Like there was inherent mystic wonder in learning that I was a she and that I was coming. I look at her warm brown pupils and smile as wide as I know how. I feel like she’s just told me the story of how I was born in Guatemala.
She might as well have said “It’s a girl!” in her inflection of the word ‘hembra.’ Female. It’s a word used to describe sex, like you’re talking about a street cat or a sonogram: “Es hombre o hembra?” But you don’t call your friends “hembra” or describe a group of girls as “hembra.” That would be weird.
You see, I could have left Peace Corps at any minute as far as they knew. From their perspective, it was probably a most uncertain wait akin to (but not nearly as difficult as) waiting to finally hold your adopted baby in your arms. There is a huge economic advantage to hosting a US volunteer, and, if your family is invested in hosting you, there is a tremendous familial bond you are about to crochet through the course of two years of dinners, “Buenas Dias’es” and the quiet moments in between accompanied by the soft flicker beneath the plancha. In most cases not only does it mean you will have a supportive source of income, you will have a wonderful new friendship.
So my host mom read me the bedtime story of how I was born in Guatemala with her memory and her eyes dancing as the warmth of the fire melded the bond of four women and a cat.
