Day 3: Fun (and burning) in the Sun

Monday August 31, 2009

Vocabulary:

sipotes: kids

la anda: tag (literally "s/he walks (with) it," more like "s/he has it")

Photos: 

La Montanita
Lis' House

I was planning to start introducing people along with their pictures in the first post, but then I couldn't figure out how to embed a photo in a blog post.  I have now discovered how to do so, so I will introduce you today to the people that came to pick me up from the airport.  They're the ones I've spent the most time with.

Manuel's father, Jose Alfredo Guzman Ramos.  Technically he is Manuel's stepfather (thus the different last name), but he raised him from a baby and Manuel considers him his father.  He's 55 years old (same as my dad).

Manuel's mother, Fransisca Hilda Guzman Perdomo.  She is 57 years old, though she'll be turning 58 while I'm here.  She says Manuel is always the first to call on her birthday, which is funny because he has told me on multiple occasions that he has trouble remembering the exact date (it's September 2nd).

Alfredo and Hilda have six children.  Manuel is the oldest and this is the youngest, Ester.  The others all live in New York, and I've meet them all.  Ester is 24.  She always makes a face whenever I take a picture of her, so this is the best photo I have.

Luis is the fourth person in the house.  He just turned 13, and we actually celebrated his birthday (a few days late) today.  He is the son of Manuel's sister Ismenia.

Daisy (above) and Carolina (right) are the daughters of Manuel's brother Atilio.  They live with their mom a few blocks away from Manuel's parents, but they've been around all day everyday so far.  Daisy is 9 and Carolina 7.  They are even more darling than they look in the photos.

And finally, my stepdaughter!  (Yes, she is beautiful).  This is Manuel's daughter, Lisbeth Carolina.  He calls her Carolina, but everyone here calls her Lisbeth, mostly to avoid confusion with her cousin who is also Carolina.  That caused some confusion at first since I was calling her Carolina, but I've gotten used to calling her Lisbeth, or Lis or Li for short.  She lives with her mother's parents in a nearby village, but she's been staying with us since I got here and will be back next weekend.


Everybody around here has four names (two first and two last, the second last name being the mother's name), though I think I'm doing pretty well if I can remember just one per person.  It can get kind of confusing, though, and not just about Lisbeth Carolina.  Adults will sometimes call kids by their middle names only.  Ester was saying something about "Nando," and I wasn't even sure whether that was a person or maybe just a Spanish noun I didn't know.  I asked her, and it turns out she was talking about Luis, whose middle name is Fernando.  Same thing happened with "Janet" (which I didn't recognize as the name since it's pronounced differently)--it's Carolina's middle name.  It seems the middle name is used more when the kid is in trouble, which may explain why I don't know Daisy's and am quite familiar with Carolina's (Daisy is much more subdued).  Of course, the biggest confusion about names arrises from mine.  "R'el" is very hard for people to say and remember, and I'm getting all sorts of variations.

Today the big activity, involving everyone you've just met plus a few more, was going to a water park called "La Montanita" (the little mountain).  It's a pretty low-tech water park, but I had a lot of fun splashing around with "los sipotes" and taking lots of pictures.  I am especially pleased with some of the action shots (like the one where Luis is tossing the ball up, and the one where he's shooting out of the water slide); my old camera couldn't do those.

I was very careful to bring my swimming suit and even my snorkel and mask since I hoped to spend lots of time in the water here.  I'm glad I have the suit (haven't used the snorkel stuff yet), but I'm certainly an outlier.  No one here wears bathing suits, just regular clothes.  One of the girls even went swimming in an ankle length jean skirt.  We played a lot of tag, or "la anda" (I thought it was one word, "landa," until people started asking, "Quien la anda?" ("Who has it?") and I realized the correct structure.

I'm not a big daredevil, but I did ride the green spiral water slide (the others were closed)--twice.  The first time I put my arms out to the sides to slow myself down a lot, and by the end I was going pretty slow (the girl in the jean skirt had it even worse).  So the second time I kept my arms straight against myself, and I was going VERY fast by the end.  It was over pretty quick, and I didn't get a good sense for what was happening, but apparently I went way up to one side and then the other, and everyone thought I was going to fly right off, which would have been pretty bad.  As it was, I just banged my elbow ("codo"--that's a word I learned when I first started doing medical interviews in Spanish) a little.  Everyone who saw it was all concerned about my well-being, and also that Manuel not be told anything about it.

Being concerned for my well-being is a common theme here.  I feel like I'm constantly assuring people that everything is fine, I don't need anything, and that, yes, I can actually do that myself.  It kind of makes me want to prove I can take care of myself, but of course I've already managed to do some things that make it seem like I do indeed need to watched over carefully, including getting a very bad sunburn today.  I put sunscreen on but didn't reapply it often enough, and I forgot about my legs and apparently spent more time sitting on the side of the pool than I realized (the tops of my thighs are quite burned).  Oops.

Lisbeth has to go back to school tomorrow (she, along with everyone else, skipped today...), so after leaving the water park we dropped her off at her house (see photo album).  She's fairly soft-spoken, and I couldn't entirely tell whether she was happy to meet me, but her grandparents told me that she'd been asking everyday when I was coming and was very excited to meet me.  It's a somewhat delicate situation, but I'm just trying to get to know her a little and hopefully let her get to know me as well.  So far I think it's going well.

On the way back from dropping off Lisbeth, Don Alfredo offered to let me drive.  I was somewhat reluctant, but I did it, and I'm glad I at least got the experience (though it was just on a dirt road with no other traffic).  I think he was impressed that I drive stick as well as I do.