I feel really good after this weekend. I had a friend come
stay with me for a couple of days, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Her
name is Maggie and she was in town visiting so she could renew her visa because
she’s currently living in Mexico. While I don’t actually know her very well (we
have mutual friends from Madison, but had only met a couple of times,) it was
nice having someone around who also really wants to learn and experience things
in a new culture—rather than just the expat culture, which is kind of its own
little world around here. She was really fun to have around to go exploring
with me for the weekend, because she’s a lot more outgoing than I am, which
helped me to realize that it’s okay to get out of my shell a little bit and
stop being so fearful of talking to people.
For the past few weeks, as much as
I have been enjoying Guatemala so far, I’ve felt kind of in a funk because I’ve
been trying and failing to establish connections and acquaintances in the area
here who are from Guatemala—not just
fellow foreigners. It’s been kind of hard for me. For those of you who know me
really well, you know that I can be really shy and I really have trouble taking
initiative in social situations and being the first one to reach out and make a
connection. Since I’ve been here, this has definitely been a hindrance to me as
far as meeting local people because not only are they strangers, but there’s
also the chance that they might judge me for my Spanish skills. It was nice
having Maggie around because she’s been living in Mexico for a few months now,
and seems almost fearless and very willing to embrace the culture of whatever
place she finds herself in—more so than some of the Americans that I know here.
I share that same desire to just dive in, but sometimes I get so caught up in
my head worrying about how I’m perceived by Guatemalans, that it’s easy for me
to forget that despite the difference in culture, in many ways, people are
really the same everywhere, and all you have to do to make connections with
people is to say hello and ask them a question. About anything, really. And as
much as I get hung up on my language skills, I’m really trying to let go of the
fact that my Spanish isn’t perfect. Of course, if I don’t practice, I’ll never
get better. And if I put myself in their shoes, I can realize that if a
foreigner in the US was trying to talk to me in broken English and said
something incorrectly, I would never judge them for it because they’re trying
their best. All I can do is hope that people are patient with me, and if that’s
not the case, then I have to let it go and forget about it.
So anyway,
Maggie and I spent the weekend just hanging out around Pana, mostly just eating
and people-watching and exploring. On Saturday, we went across the lake to
Santiago. It’s another town about the size of Pana, and it was pretty cool.
There was this statue to a Mayan deity called Maximón there, and when you first
get off the boat in Santiago, a bunch of kids and teenagers kind of swarm
around you wanting to take you there for 5 quetzales, and we wanted to go
looking for it on our own so we wouldn’t have to pay, but after a while we gave
up and found a little kid who we paid to take us. It was kind of awesome,
because it’s a saint that drinks hard liquor and smokes cigars, and while they
were performing a ceremony, they were lighting cigars in its mouth and drinking
beer and jack daniel’s. Pretty sure all of the Shamans there were drunk. But it
was a pretty cool little ceremony to watch.
The rest of
the day we just wandered around and hung out in Santiago, eating things like
patín, which is like meat smothered in tomato salsa wrapped in a banana leaf,
and ice cream that tasted like horchata, and whatever else we could find. Then
we went back to Pana and walked around near the lake, sort of near my
neighborhood. We found a family playing basketball and soccer and they invited
us to join, so we did and it was really fun! The only time I ever enjoy sports
is if I’m playing with people who aren’t competitive and either don’t care if
you suck, or are also not that good at sports. It was just like their family
fun day, and it was really nice of them to let us join. We made friends with
them, and have been seeing them around town since then. Actually, a couple of
hours after we played basketball with them, we walked into an empanada shop and
saw one of them there—turns out his mother owns it. The empanadas were amazing,
and now that I sort of know the people that own it, I will probably soon be a
regular there.
And that’s
what I’m talking about when I say it's easier to meet new people and make
connections when you’re not all by yourself. For me, it takes the pressure off
when talking to people for the first time. By myself, I maybe wouldn’t have
accepted an invitation to play sports with a bunch of strangers. But now that
Maggie left to go back to Mexico, I’m going to try to keep up the momentum from
the weekend and keep trying to get out there and keep talking to the people we
met and talked to for a while—like Maria and Maria, the two ladies who make
tortillas across the street from my house every day. I might just go buy
tortillas every day even if I don’t need them. It’s just nice to have
acquaintances around town, so that you can start to feel some sense of
belonging, and some sense of feeling at home. Even though I’m not going to be
here all that long, it’s important to me to have that feeling so that I don’t
get as upset when I have those experiences that remind me that I’m a foreigner.
Anyway, so
there’s kind of the run-down on my emotional state since I’ve been here. Long
story short, I’m going to try to get past the fear of people judging me as I’m trying
to live in a new place. I went through this same process when I was in Ghana,
and I guess I mistakenly thought because I went through it once, I could bypass
it this time. Or maybe I just forgot what it feels like. But I’m learning that
it’s always going to be a new process because I’m in a completely new and
different place. But it helped to have someone here for the weekend to hang out
with me and also serve as an example of how to break out of one’s shell in a
new culture. If I try a little harder, I think that things will start to get a
little better from here on out.
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