With no water, electricity, or phone service, I finished a good book this evening.
I read almost the entire book Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen in about 2 days, and somehow didn’t get to the last 10 pages until tonight.
I think it is a marvelous account of Peace Corps service from a devoted volunteer. Reading his book has helped me relax a little. Destress from my lofty expectations and be at peace with what I am able to do.
Some quotes from the book that might as well have come from my mouth 40 years later…
“ Peace Corps volunteers enter their new country so well briefed by their doctors on the hazards of the local foods, that their first meals are terror stricken experiences, gastronomic tightrope performances balanced between starvation and revulsion.”
“the fifty cents a day I paid for my meals was feeding the whole family, and probably even paying off a few old bills.”
“You draw your lines, ‘I will go this far.’ But it ends up that you are always drawing new ones.”
“ We used to discuss in training how to be nice and gracious while refusing to drink what we know to have been preared with unboiled river water and was probably swarming with wriggly gringo-killers. Bt it never occurred to us to wonder what to do when, after several hours on the trail, you get so thirsty that you don’t give a damn what kinds of a wriggly animal you are swallowing as long as it is a wet one.”
Recent example: I know that the chocolate colored water that comes out of our faucet in the rainy season I should probably filter before drinking. But, the filter the peace corps provides volunteers is barely large enough to store water to cook for one person a day, let alone an entire host family (what, you are going to tell them they have to drink that crap water while you suck on crystal clear agua, I don’t think so). It takes the bucket about a day to filter itself as well. So, what do you do when you are hungry and thirsty and watching the filter drip drop one by one? Boil what you can from the faucet and swallow the dirt along with it.
“ I think anyone who has not lived the wholly public life of a foreigner in a small town, where every scratch and belch is noted with fascinated curiosity, cannot realize how essential it is to have a place to refuge where you can hide from time to time and reform yourself. “
“ As a newcomer to the town, I decided that drinking beer [wine] regularly, simply for the taste, would be ostentatious, and I gave it up, breaking my pledge at first only two or three time in moment of depression when I would sneak a quart of the lukewarm stuff into my house and sit in a dark corner living a private life.”
recent example: I just had a conversation last weekend with some other volunteers about how sometimes, when we feel really depressed, we sneak cigarettes in from the city to lock ourselves in our room and smoke in an attempt to relax. Even the non-smokers!
“ I couldn’t believe that the music was really gay, or that the laughter in the street was really happy, or that the people could so easily forget their poverty or invest their sucres in a few hours of forgetfulness, knowing that on Sunday there would be nothing to eat.”
“there was a big fiesta coming up, too, and for three days no one would work but simply weave around in the street.”
Recent anecdote: There is one family in town who’s kids appear to be on the lowest socio-economic status of the community. They are obviously malnourished and dirty, and one demonstrates attributes of an abused child in my opinion. Their parents are the padrino of the upcoming fiesta, which is extremely expensive, paying for the entire town’s festival. When I asked how this is possible, it was explained to me that they are very wealthy and save all year to pay for a party out of pride.
“I was a caricature of a Peace Corps Colunteer.”
Page 173:
“ Living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things. Some benevolent ignorance denies a poor man the ability to see the squalid sequence of his life, except very rarely, he views it rather as a disconnected string of unfortunate sadnesses. Never having paddled on a calm sea, he is unable to imagine one. I think if he could connect the chronic hunger, the sickness, the death of his children, the almost unrelieved physical and emotional tension into the pattern that his life inevitable takes he would kill himself.
In South America the poor man is an ignorant man, unaware of the forces that shape his destiny. The shattering truth- that he is kept poor and ignorant as the principal and unspoken component of national policy-escapes him. He cries for land reform, a system of farm loans that will carry him along between crops, unaware that the national economy in almost every country sustained by a one-crop export commodity depends for it success on an unlimited supply of cheap labor. Ecuador needs poor men to compete in the world banana market; brazil needs poverty to sell its coffee; chile, its tin; Colombia its cacao and coffee, and so on. The way United States pressure shapes the policies of south American governments can make a Peace Corps Volunteer who is involved and saddened by the poverty in his village tremble to his very roots.”
“I got in the habit of awakening every morning at 3am and lying in the darkness, frustrated and furious, cursing the lethargy of the people, the degradation of their poverty, and my own inability to do anything about it.”
“they were charming fellows, but lazy and dedicated to their poverty.”
“poor people steal. It is a trait in common with the rich, whose thefts vary only in the degree of the necessity and the quality of the theft.”
“ I was pushing the socios shamelessly, sulking when the promised to work and then didn’t show up, getting mad at them when the quit early, pleading the case, giving them long, boring talks on the necessity of suffering Now, sacrificing Now. I was like a one-man symphony orchestra; when the flutes and violins didn’t work, I was blaring trumpets and percussion. I tried to shame them, inspire them or obligate them in some way. As I think back on that time it occurs to me that they must all have thought I was quite mad.”
“ I could feel myself getting stupider.”
“ Poverty isn’t just hunger; it is many interlocking things- ignorance and exhaustion, underproduction, disease, and fear. It is glutted export markets, sharp, unscrupulous middlemen, a lack of knowledge about the fundamental aspects of agriculture. It is the witchcraft of your grandfather spreading it values on your life. It is a dozen irrational Latin qualities like your fear of making more of your life than you neighbor and thereby gaining his contempt for being overly ambitious.”
“They mentioned it on a new broadcast one night, sandwiched in between the stories of wars and riots, announcing that 60% of the world’s children were suffering from protein starvtion and that this deprivation in the first five years of life permanently and irrevocably destroyed up to 25 per cent of a man’s intelligence.
Twenty-five percent.
If 75 is the IQ of the town, what is the medical word that describes the poor, doomed people, this wasted human resource living out its unproductive destiny in the impregnable prison of a destroyed mind, in a twilight, idiot world where nothing really makes much sense?”
I know a lot of times that people here nod often even when they don’t’ understand, but sometimes it hits me harder than other times. Today, were were studying parts of the body. For this class I had translated pages and pages of definitions. There was one definition that a child read aloud, and I realized I had done a very lousy job translating what he was reading and what he was saying didn’t make any sense. But, he continued reading without pausing to clearify, and the class kept listening away. In any other classroom I have ever been in someone would have started making faces or whispering to other kids in an attempt to discern a meaning. How often do they not understand what I am saying to them but don’t ask. How often do their parents not understand my explainations about heigine or nutrition? Is that why they don’t change, they literally can’t understand the science behind why?
Somehow, reading that someone was doing something similar to what I am, and felt the same way I do is comforting.
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