details

A few details to make my life more real to you:

-my bed sheet is covered in tiny red dots. my blood. testiment to the flea bites I´ve gotten every night for the past few months.

-the school (my house) has little animals I call mice because i don´t want to admit that they are actually rats. Sometimes I open the door to my windowless room, turn on the light, and see a rat scurry away along one of the hanging water pipes.

-A group of neighborhood kids who live around the corner has taken to calling me "Chuck Norris". They see a white dude with a beard and must think of the only other white dude with a beard they know. The smallest one, little Heather ( or "Hedder" as they say here) can´t be more than 3 years old. She sees me from 50 feet and without fail screams "CHUCK NORRIS! VEN!" Chuck Norris! Come here! This is her favorite game, and when I do come, she runs away laughing like a little maniac.

-And while we´re on the subject I should mention my old host family: the one I lived with for a month before taking over as coordinator. At some point, my host-mother, who has a bizarre sense of humor, decided that my name was no longer Juan, but that I was, in fact, Juanito Malinche. When I asked her what "malinche" means she told me it means "cheap": Great. Cheap Juan. Fantastic name.

A few weeks later I went to a class on Mayan culture, something I set up for the students at my school. It came up in the class that "Malinche" not only means "cheap": it also refers to an indigenous woman who sleeps with Spanish conquistadors and is a traitor to her culture. And it gets worse because the whole host-family picked up on the nickname, including little Raquelita, the 2 year old who the family lets run wild in the street. Now everytime I go to buy vegetables in the outdoor market, I hear a tiny voice yelling "JUANITO MALINCHE!" from the top of the street so that all the vendors and people shopping stop to see whats going on.