Highly Motivated Fails

La Maestra waiting at the hosting center visit.

We usually try to be encouraging and write about the successes we’re seeing in people’s lives here or at least writing about the struggles that we hope people can have success in. But here are two blurbs that remind us that we aren’t always successful or able to push ourselves on through whatever is troubling.

Cultural Faux-Pas – We pride ourselves on being sensitive to our church partner’s advice and following their lead on how to do things. But we’ve had the chance to realize sometimes we too live dangerously when we assume one of our most natural attitudes, which I’d describe as a kind of mid-western, protestant work-ethic, we-don’t-want-to-be-treated-any-differently-than-people-here, so-we’ll-try-to-do-it-our-way-in-order-to-not-inconvenience-you sort of attitude. Recently we were traveling with four church leaders to visit a youth hosting center site so that we could help communicate with US supporters how this initiative is going. We thought we could more economically deal with having 6 passengers by suggesting we use our car, which has been modified to have an extra small seat in the trunk area. But our car then broke down half way to the village. When the president of the church eventually made it back to us with his car, the leaders wanted to give La Maestra the position of honor in the passenger seat, and the three large men would squeeze in the back seat with me. 

Our solution was for La Maestra to sit on my lap in the passenger seat. This seemed fine for us to squish together, but also no worse than what we see in every mini-bus or car carrying people with way too many people per seat. Our church companions thought it was a bad idea and warned us that the police wouldn’t like it, but we insisted to try it. Not 5 minutes later we were stopped by the police, had to hand over our documents and the documents of the car, and were made to switch the seating. After about 15 minutes of waiting, the police told us they needed to take our names and the vehicle numbers to ensure that we weren’t being smuggled through the area. Then they let us go to the village. We picked up the papers on the way back and proved that we were safe. It was a wild ride, but probably would have been smoother if we didn’t insist on trying to solve it in a way that let us take on the burden.

Hot Season Slow Down – I’ve heard people say that much less gets done here in the hot season. But now I am seeing the “cold, hard facts” for themselves. We’ve missed most of the brunt of the hot season in past years. But this year we are clearly here and the heat is starting earlier. Wednesday was typical of the pattern that we’ve experienced at the edge of the hot season, which only gets worse as it goes along. During the day we lost electricity three different times for an hour or more. It was 105 degrees outside and that felt nice in the shade with a little breeze compared to the stifling 97 degrees in my room without a fan. I was fortunate to be working from home because no one was going to be at the church office that day. So, I was able to find some other things to do while the power and internet was off. But the interruptions to these things at points when I needed them were distracting, and then the heat of being inside or out was really exhausting and discombobulating to any efforts to muster some solid work on the writing or emails I was supposed to be getting done. Living here, I’ve been hot and uncomfortable a lot, but this was on a different level! While it’s true that most people here don’t rely as much on electricity or internet, and they generally feel better in the heat than in the cold, still it is now easier for me to see how organizations can get very little productivity out of their workers for several months in this period.

-- El Padre