Mango pits dusted the February pueblo streets: dotting my daily route with off-white pits decorated by stringy remains. One day in January there are no mangos and the next day there are mango pits everywhere to say: Hey, Mangos Are Here.

Last year I ate like two, in total, but this year I am fully sinking my teeth into the mango experience and it is full-body. You have to stand-up, or sit with a towel on your lap, peel off the tough exterior and release yourself on the meat or it will deshacer in drippy drops. It is not cute, not adorable, to eat a mango. But it’s the most filling fruit, a mango, and satisfying to the swallow.

The whimsical dollop of greenish orange fruit is a wavy exclamation point with no dot. They arrive in piles, stacked mangos in wide woven baskets and their aftermath: the pits thrown to the streets, decomposing if that’s the right word, like flat balding heads. Last year I did not know what these weird things were until it epiphanized after the first mango consumption of 2018. “THOSE THINGS ARE MANGO PITS” It was like the Santa Claus epiphany as a child, but an adult in Peace Corps.

Year Two feels a lot like eating a mango. You know what these weirds fruits are, their weird pits abandoned in the gutters, but it is still messy. There’s no unmessy way to eat a mango.

Tuesday February 20th:

I have not wanted to exist all day. Why is this? Not an I-can’t-take-this-anymore sort of feeling, nor a restless lack of accomplishment which I knew all too well last year.. Just a dull-ache that only progressed as the day wore on in which I’d rather be- well not- I’d rather not be. Sleep is not the solution: in service, sleep is the enemy. You think it’s the answer but when you sleep too late and get encamped in a nightmare about missing your flight, that Caprice Classic of dreams, or forgetting a kid you babysat in the Walmart or searching everywhere for your costume backstage to find it nowhere and you wake up to pass a Mayan nonagenarian (that means person in their 90s) carrying more firewood on her shoulders than you’ve carried in your lifetime, you see that you should have gotten up at 8 or, hell, 9.

The feeling is that I am about to start my period.

OK 10 months left. 10 months. How can 10 months be left when I’ve already lived here long enough to forget who I am, remember and forget again.

I ate the same lunch out of the same glass plate I always use and always wash and when my host mom said: “I wake up to urinate but I sometimes lay back down” in reference to her sleep schedule, I felt a falcon of disgust rise up inside of me.

Falcon: WHO SAYS URINATE WHEN A PERSON IS EATING

Falcon: WHO SAYS URINATE AT ALL

Me: Well, she’s speaking her second language.

Falcon: WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST SAY USE THE BATHROOM

Me: Maybe that’s not a saying in Spanish? Or maybe she just didn’t think.

Or maybe I’m about to start my period.

My first year I spent a lot of time sitting and leaving for work. I’d show up to school, not usually on time, wait to do my activity to find my slot was taken by someone else or class was cancelled in light of band practice or the school’s anniversary or an activity in town or exams. There are four weeks a year dedicated to testing. One thing I will never understand is how often class is cancelled. In Glengarry Glen Ross you should always be closing, here class should always be cancelling.

Yesterday I was talking to a school director and he said: “You never post pictures of our school online. You only post pictures of the other schools” He said it like I’d personally hurt him and I felt like he pierced me in the heart with a violin bow. First of all, the students there are encaged hyenas. Second of all, I shouldn’t get into it so suffice it to say that I struggle with that school. However, I try not to post pictures of any of my students close-up out of respect. I didn’t even realize a discrepancy..?

And then I remembered: I am about to start my period. That is why his words stuck in my craw like a sour mango.

Today (Tuesday) felt like a Thursday because Monday and Tuesday do that to me this year. They feel like the beginning of the week and end of the world. I give a charla in the morning, go to the muni (town hall), bug my co-worker about something that we need to get done, or run around getting authorizations for trainings or permiso for work leave or annual leave and hope to find the people I need in their offices, then I make lunch over a fire, run to the next school, yell my way through more charlas (it’s not yelling, but it hurts like yelling), buy a snack at recess and yell my way through more. I walk home, make dinner over another fire, pee a couple of times before I go to bed hoping it won’t be urgent in the morning, eat too much peanut butter… Then I wriggle around in my sleeping bag for about 20 minutes arranging the perfect quotient of blanket over face to sleeping bag wedged between feet.

What do movie theatre seats feel like? Do they make that leathery squishy sound when you shift your weight like when you’re in a fancy car? What’s it like to heat things up in 30 seconds? What’s it like to turn on the tap water and have hot water come out? What’s it like not to have flea bite scars on your upper thighs and all around your ankles and up to your knees? What’s it like to wear skirts or shorts?

The thing is, [my experience of] Peace Corps is not uncomfortable. It’s just not comfortable. I don’t live in a hut or even take bucket baths. And my host family does everything they can to make life easier for me. They boil my water so I don’t have to worry about that, they take my clean, dry clothes off of the clothesline to rescue them from the sun and sometimes fold them up for me. I have to make so many calls at work, not phone calls. Calls like: “Should I correct the teacher in front of the students that circumcision is not a result of some little boys feeling pain when they pee, that it’s totally aesthetic and has no health benefits?” Try to pronounce ejaculate in a second language in front of a gaggle of 15 year-old boys and hope the word comes out right (pun intended, if you like).

“Why am I so tired today?” I just kept thinking. “Is it because I spend 80% of my job begging adolescents to listen to me and the other 20% hoping my Socios (counterparts) will meet me halfway?” Face it: I’m a pest. An additional carga. I’m not helping their jobs, I’m a hurdle to their jobs (at least it feels) complicating what they probably wish they could accomplish without me. I am disruptive. Change and disruption go together, I’m told.

March 8: I walked to Paquip, a village 50 minutes outside of my pueblo, and a man and his wife were standing at the edge of the field awaiting a tuk-tuk. He looked at me and said: “De donde viene?” and I said “I live here.” He said “But what country?” and I continued walking as I spurted “Los Estados” evenly from my lips. I did not want to be interviewed by a man I’ve never seen before but has most certainly seen, or heard of, me. One thing that you are supposed to do in Peace Corps is represent your country, put a face to the United States, but the United States is a fantasy land in Guatemala and hard to explain against the preconceived notions of wealth and opportunity. And people here don’t really want to know what the States are like, they just set you up: “Natalie- you can make a lot of money there, right?” and what they want to hear is “Yes.” They don’t want to hear: “Well, like with everywhere, there are socioeconomic classes..” What they want to hear is: “yes.”

They ask: “Is the Grass Green? Hell, is it emerald?”

That afternoon I got called gringa repeatedly by two separate groups of kids and this time, unlike most times, it wasn’t innocent. It was meant to provoke me by how they kept yelling it. And I didn’t respond to the last firing. From a three-year old: “Gringa gringa gringa gringa gringa gringa” tirelessly, pausing in between each word waiting for me to turn around. I didn’t. On Saturday I went to Panajachel and a man I didn’t recognize saw me from the bus stop, maybe 20 feet from where I sat and 30 minutes outside of my site, and motioned for me to take my headphones out. The first time I pretended not to see, the next time I reluctantly removed the headphones: “Sí?” I knew what it was for. He wanted to hear me respond in K’iche’. I picked the shortest response possible and put my headphone back in.

Last year being called at was endearing, not cat-calls but acknowledgements of my presence.

This year I feel like a parrot.

You see word’s gotten around that the gringa colocha speaks K’iche’ and it’s starting to feel like it has backfired. They think it’s so unusual and funny that they want to show their friends, they want to laugh. As people see my expressive persona: singing in the streets, joking with the people, dancing or just being a completely normal human being, people seem to think there is a blinking sign over my head or a quarter slot on my chest. I’ve become a game, not a human. And I understand that there is not a lot of live entertainment in Santa Clara and I understand that there are not a lot of foreigners roaming the streets, but somedays I want to be able to go about my business and not be called at, yelled to or asked to sing “cante!” “cante!” Just because I sing in the street doesn’t mean I sing on command, every day, every hour, whenever you see me.

Somedays I want to blend in, but I do not blend.

On Friday I drifted to the PACA piles, the sun bathing the unwanted US clothes that are still in more-than-usable condition, to buy for cheap. Sheets, bathing suits, purses, shoes, cotton shirts, jeans, you name it. As I aimlessly sifted through the pile I heard rapid Spanish from the mouths of young girls wearing jeans. They are not from here I thought immediately. I stayed close but said nothing, taking in the interlopers in my general proximity. I gave the PACA vendors a hard time for not lowering their prices, as usual, joking with them that we are not going to get married because they just want a visa (I promise they think it’s funny). Eventually one of the young ladies started talking to me. Her Spanish was like disco lights and my Spanish is like a lava lamp. “Oh God.” I’ve lived here for a semi-eternity and thought I was speaking Spanish the whole time. But what is this fancy footwork I can hardly absorb without breaking into a sweat. I try not to give off that I’m only 65% sure I understood what they just said.. as I respond as best I can. They seem nice. They’re here as university students, doing one year of service to finish their degrees. That’s cool. One has a nose piercing. They blend in about as much as me.

Maybe I am used to being the wind-up doll, but who are these people? Someone put a quarter in them so I know who they are.

They’re from this country and I am not, but I speak K’iche’ and the locals know me. These people just don’t belong. [Please understand that I am being facetious to explain the complexity of this moment].

After being a second-language learner for this long, I listen to myself speak English and I know I am speaking fast. Now I hear consonants dropped and confusing pronunciations and why English is such an impossible language to learn for English second-language learners. Watch the way the ‘ea’ sound changes with these words: Eat, Heather, Bear. Explain that. Or Foot and Food. Why the difference in the oo’s? Saber. No lo sé.

Being in Peace Corps is like eating a mango, rich and so filling but leaves you with strings stuck in between all your teeth sending you desperately running for floss. The messy enterprise is worth every second. Even the second year when you think you know a place and local-foreigners show up and you realize that you don’t know everything and there is no one-way to eat a mango.