• fútbol!

    None of my children are particularly athletic. They’re active, yes, but they’ve never shown a propensity for organized sports. Which is perfectly fine with me. Sports aren’t my thing either. I’d rather watch the children run around the back forty with machetes and zero-turn mowers and bikes from the comfort of my cozy kitchen, cup of strong, homemade coffee in hand, than watch them from a hard-as-stone bleacher bench while whistles shrill and buzzers blare and kids beg for please a cup, just one cup! of toxic orange soda.

    We did egg them on a little, back when they were wee-tots. My older son did one year of karate and my older daughter did a season of ballet. But neither of them wanted to continue, so I said pfttt and that was that.

    But then we entered the soccer-crazed land otherwise known as Guatemala. The older children shied away from the sport, clumsy big oafs that they are, but my younger son, the biggest clumsy big oaf of them all (or so we thought), became obsessed.

    We bought him a soccer ball for his February birthday, back before he knew what such a ball was for. Since then, he has developed an obsession for the sport. Actually, I’m not sure how much he understands the game—it’s the ball-and-foot action that he’s so in love with.

    He is always kicking something. If his soccer ball isn’t around, it’s a basketball (until it went flat) or one of the hard plastic balls that cost Q3 each (being hard and plastic and cheap, they don’t have a long shelf life) or his lunch box or his pillow or a random shoe. Anything that can be kicked will be kicked.

    We’ve made a no-kicking-balls-in-the-house rule, but it’s like he’s under some sort of compulsion: he. can. not. stop. Out of frustration, I’ve hurled the offending balls up into the farthest, rat-turd-ridden reaches of the ceiling corners. His father has booted them out of the house. We’ve sat the kid on time out. We’ve packed the balls up. We’ve confiscated them. We’ve explained and yelled and begged and reasoned. He’s doing a little better about carrying, not kicking, the balls through the house, but not much. Sigh.

    The neighbor kids have taken to playing rollicking games of soccer on our concrete patio. On the one end is a beautiful flowering bush that serves as a goal and that now looks rather beleaguered. On the other is the two-foot drop off. The playing field is small and hard, and the porch pillars get in the way, but no one seems to mind the limitations.

     

    For yesterday’s game, my older son and his friend Joaquín (and later my older daughter) made up one team. The other team was comprised of my younger son and Fernando, with the oldest neighbor boy Jorge (who is brothers with Joaquín) as their goalie.

    Of course, I cheered for the little boys. They held their own amazingly well. The big kids put the emphasis on power kicks while the littles thrilled in fancy footwork, passes, and team work.

    So all that stuff I said in the beginning of the post about not having athletic kids? Turns out, I may have one after all.

    ‘Course, we could get back to the states and he might forget all about his love affair with fútbol.

    the dirty results

    But if he doesn’t, there’s a small chance, just a teeny-tiny wee one, that I might be willing to endure those hard-as-rock bleacher benches … if it means getting to see this boy of mine have a good time.

  • on slaying boredom

    On Sunday evening the girls and I (mostly me) made two banana cakes. Monday morning (they didn’t have school), we stacked the pieces of cake between layers of wax paper and covered the pan with a towel. The girls dressed in their K’ekchi’ skirts and blouses (my younger son begged to wear a skirt, too), and Jovita showed them how to carry the container on their heads. The children took turns carrying the cake all the way to town.

    As we walked up the street to the market, my older daughter said, “I’m starting to feel nervous. Everyone is looking at me!”

    We waded into the market and I snatched up the first empty spot I came to.

    Suddenly stricken with bashfulness, the girls hung back, but my youngest stationed himself behind the cake and gamely called out, “Torta de banano! A dos quetzales!”

    It took a minute, but as soon as the surrounding vendors realized what was going on, they started grinning from ear to ear (except for the ones who were staring, their chins scraping the ground).

    And then a bit of magic happened: the locals took charge of my children and their cake-selling project.

    One woman brought the children a stool to set the cake on, and then a few minutes later she switched it for a sturdier, wooden one.

    Someone handed us plastic bags for packaging the bread. (We had brought napkins, but they were too awkward. When I asked, they pointed me in the direction of a store that sold bags—I bought a hundred.)

    The first customer approached. He wanted five pieces of cake. He handed the kids the money, and then explained, his eyes twinkling, that the person managing the money should not be the person touching the cake.

    For the next ten minutes, the children ran a brisk business.

    After the initial setting up and some basic pointers, I faded into the background and snapped pictures. Besides, I couldn’t have gotten close to them if I had wanted to—they were completely surrounded by their customers.

    I couldn’t stop grinning. The whole exchange was stunningly beautiful. The transformation from us as the onlookers (shoppers, takers, outsiders) to participants (included, welcomed, wanted) was astounding. It was like a switch had flipped. For that little bit of time, we weren’t just here visiting this culture, we were emulating it. Suddenly, instead of tolerating us, they were hosting us. It was delightful.

    My husband and older son had been running errands on the other side of town, and when they heard we were in the market, they came over to visit.

    When all the cake had been sold, we returned the stool.

    “You need to go home and make more cake,” the neighboring vendor said. “Come back this afternoon!”

    On the way out of the market, we paused to admire a basket of puppies.

    One nipped at my daughter’s hand, causing her to jump back and making the women laugh.

    I gave the children each two quetzales to spend on whatever they wanted. They loaded up on chips and soda and lollypops and then complained about feeling sick.

    And thus ends the tale of how I nipped boredom in the bud by making my children sell cake.

    The end.

  • my ethical scapegoat

    Sunday evening, this is what I posted on Facebook:

    All the thoughtful comments on my “What to do about Jovita” post are wonderful….but now I’m more tied up in knots than ever! It’s really not that big a deal, but as with any dilemma, there’s a whole lot of garbage/history/truth to either side of the issue. For some reason, this is the conundrum on which I am dumping all my angst. My ethical scapegoat, maaaa-aaaaa.

    I never came to a solid, this-is-the-answer solution. Instead, I decided on a two-pronged approach: pay Jovita half of Friday’s wages and inform her that I wouldn’t be paying for any more days off.

    “But here it’s the custom for workers to be given a paid holiday,” she said.

    “Actually,” I corrected, “that’s only in the case of salary workers, not part-time hourly workers.”

    I went on to explain that she was welcome to take off for holidays, or to take a day off if she wanted to rest, but from here on out if she didn’t work she didn’t get paid. And then I pointed out the banana cake and sweet roll intended for her break, rounded up the kids, and headed to town.

    I felt okay about the exchange. Not completely okay, but okay enough.

    I loved getting all your responses. There was such a range of approaches and beliefs, and as I pondered each suggestion, I began to get a clearer sense of why this is such a sticking point for me.

    These are the two voices I had warring in my head:

    1. generosity is Jesus mandated so JUST DO IT.
    2. there is more to the picture; be cautious, be careful, because exploitation, both being exploited and exploiting, does no one any good.

    All my life, the importance of generously helping the less fortunate was drilled into me. But then I came to Central America and began to understand that “giving freely,” as we in North America think of doing so, isn’t always all that helpful. In fact, it can be harmful, dangerous, and flat-out irresponsible. Erring on the side of generosity can actually be an error. Using words like “kindness” and “generosity” as cover-ups doesn’t make that error any righter, nor do they make us less responsible for committing that mistake. With the power to give comes the responsibility to act wisely. This requires that we be informed, that we really, truly, deeply know who we are helping and why and what the goal is. It requires accountability on both sides, time together, and lots of listening. It requires research and contemplation and hard thinking. It’s work.

    So I was struggling to reconcile these two voices in my head and then all YOUR voices chimed in and intensified the battle. It felt like both sides were equally right. It felt either/or. I was stumped.

    I believe that the two sides can be, need to be, reconciled—but it means that my understanding of both truths has to be expanded and deepened. Being generous might not always feel very generous. Being kind doesn’t necessarily feel rosy and sweet all the time. And on the flip side, it’s a given that I’ll be exploited at times. Plus, I could benefit from learning to let things go and ease up on my justice-oriented soapboxing. The idea is that somehow, with lots of sweat and wrangling, the two sides will eventually arrive at a clumsy sort of peace. Just maybe.

    If I’m lucky.

    Take, for instance, the concept of parenting—

    (Which is a really bad analogy because the notion of parent/child nations is taboo since we’re all supposed to be equals. However, we haven’t exactly treated Guatemala as our equal, and now they tend to think of the US as The Milk Cow, The Money Tree, The Sugar Daddy. So maybe it is a good analogy after all?)

    Good parenting doesn’t mean smiley children (or parents) all the time. It means looking at the big picture and helping the kids to do the same. It means towing the line and not always being adored. It means teaching and loving and working your butt off and demanding that they work their butts off, too, sometimes.

    It does not mean doling out candy and plastic toys to keep the peace.

    Any halfway competent parent knows this, and yet when we think of helping poor people, our gut reaction is to do just that.

    The more I spend time in Guatemala (or Nicaragua, or working in the foster care system, or involving myself in church politics or soup kitchens), the more I start to understand the complexity of the issues. The lines blur and I lose my footing. I start to understand more than just my side of the picture. Stuff gets messy. However, only then, when the lines blur and the complexities abound, can true helpfulness take place. Funny thing is, true helpfulness often ends up looking a lot different from what I imagined it would look like when I started out.

    Which leads me to wonder: how much of a right do I have to involve myself in situations on the other side of the globe? The other side of the country? The other side of my town? Unless I am willing to go there, to be inconvenienced, to pour my time and energy (let’s forget about money for awhile), then maybe I have no business trying to help?

    ***

    All this talk of helping reminds me of a children’s poem I memorized when I was little. That three out of the four children’s names in the poem corresponded to me and my brothers (we don’t have an Agatha, thank you Mom and Dad), tickled my fancy to no end. It’s the last stanza that keeps running through my head.

    Agatha Fry, she made a pie
    And Christopher John helped bake it
    Christopher John, he mowed the lawn
    And Agatha Fry helped rake it

    Now, Zachary Zugg took out the rug
    And Jennifer Joy helped shake it
    Jennifer Joy, she made a toy
    And Zachary Zugg helped break it

    Some kind of help is the kind of help
    That helping’s all about
    And some kind of help is the kind of help
    We all can do without
                      

    -Shel Silverstein