Anytime I have a good honest laugh here in the campo - which is rarer than one might think as I really hardly know these people - it warrants writing about, and this was definitely one of those times. I had a unique bonding experience today with one of the young men/boys (what do you call them when they're 17?) who participates regularly in my environmental youth group. He's quite the artist and was helping me put the finishing touches on the river rocks we painted as dominos when our conversation turned in the direction of language, as it often does with young Dominicans who are eager to learn English. After he cleared up the confusion I had with the Spanish words for some basic bodily functions (sneeze, yawn, hiccup, whistle, blow, etc.), I decided to step boldly forward and ask for his help with curse words. I figure I need to be able to recognize them in case they're ever used around me, but can guarantee that none will ever fly from my own mouth in the household of my über-religious host family. He laughingly told me the basics, but got so embarrassed and choked up when it came to the really bad ones that we both had a few good laughs - in between his long deep breaths that were an attempt to calm and prepare himself but really only made us laugh more. I told him he didn't have to say them if it made him that uncomfortable, but that they weren't at all offensive to me because I'd never heard them! I promised not to tell his mom (and again we laughed) and in the end, he settled for whispering them with a hand over his mouth or writing them on a piece of paper. He really is a nice boy, and I feel this experience definitely brought me closer to making a real friend out of a casual acquaintance.
There was absolutely no laughing, however, when I entered my room this evening and found what was waiting for me outside my mosquito net. So far I've been pretty lucky with things not getting inside (except two incidents with cockroaches that I'd rather not talk about), and the spiders here, although huge, are very timid and generally stay on the walls. Until tonight. Dun dun dun.
When I walked in my room, I saw a fat brown spider on the outside of my mosquito net, clearly a different species than the timid wall-dwellers, and decided immediately to swat it with a bandana. Upon doing so, there was a small explosion of tiny brown dots that immediately scattered in all directions, inside and outside the net, on the sheets, pillow, etc. That arachnid had laid her eggs on my net and the babies were fleeing for their lives! More angry that grossed out, I immediately set to exterminating the litter, but won't be surprised if I get that creepy crawly feeling (the same one I get when there aren't actually insects in my sheets) when I lay down to sleep tonight.
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