DAY THREE
Another day, another morning at the shelter. For some reason the other volunteers didn’t show up, so Journey and I handled the babies by ourselves for a few hours. I’m still not a fan of babies. Do they have their moments? Sure. Like one baby grabbed her mom’s comb off of the bed and started trying to brush her hair. That was cute. But, like, overall, no, not a fan.
It’s really hard for me to come to terms with what I’m seeing. All of these kids are incredibly needy and almost always need to be held, or else they’ll cry. And it’s heartbreaking to think that they’re so desperate for any sign of affection, that they’re not getting the attention they need from their moms. But it’s hard for me to think that in the moment, because all I’m hearing is crying and all I’m thinking is that I don’t have enough hands for this and I don’t know what to do to help them. It’s frustrating in the moment, but I’m doing my best to use some perspective and have a little more patience. I guess I just wish I knew more about babies. Or that there was someone working with us that did.
Spanish class this afternoon was great. My teacher, Salvador, and I talked politics and history for nearly three hours. Fresh from my viewing of the Kennedy v Nixon episode of Race for the White House, I told him about how people in the U.S. (especially the South) were against having a Catholic president and how the Kennedy campaign’s help in freeing MLK from jail won JFK the black vote, which had traditionally gone to the Republican party, since it was Lincoln, the first Republican president, that ended slavery. Salvador thinks it’s super shady that the files on the Kennedy assassination are sealed, and, like a fair number of other people from Latin America that I’ve met, think it’s possible that J. Edgar Hoover was behind it. (They’re very distrustful of the CIA here (said as one word instead of it’s initials in Latin America), and for good reason.) He hadn’t realized that Bobby Kennedy and MLK had been assassinated in the same year, and asked about why Malcom X is typically kind of omitted from the history of the Civil Rights movement.
We also talked about the scope and impacts of slavery in the U.S., and how bigotry and racism can still be seen today. He told me that even though he’s seeing a lot of progress, there’s still a lot of racism in Guatemala directed towards indigenous people; the affects of their civil war are still here. And even though the war officially ended in 1996, Salvador says that there is still a lot of violence in the rural and mountainous areas of Guatemala.
After that, we moved on to the U.S.’s involvement in the overthrows of democratic governments and installments of dictatorships in Latin America. He was really impressed that I knew what a golpe de estado (coup) was, that I had already learned about things like the Iran-Contra affair and Pinochet in Chile, and that I was aware that U.S. could be pretty immoral when it came to “protecting U.S. interests” in Latin America. (He's been pretty impressed with Lovett's Spanish department on the whole, and is really glad that we learn about cultural and social issues.) He told me this joke that was popular in Latin America in the 80s: “Why can’t you have a coup d’etat in the United States? Because there is no U.S. Embassy in the United States”. One of the things he found most interesting, and ironic, about our involvement was the role the Reagan administration had. They supported a lot of these dictatorships and sold arms to their militaries, but also offered aid to a lot of Latin American countries suffering because of the harm the military governments had caused.
He had me read aloud from El Príncipito (The Little Prince) next, which was a little embarrassing since I tend to stutter when I read out loud, but I can tell my pronunciation is getting better. We also went over some basic vocabulary that I’m pretty rusty on; I’m slowly relearning different names for clothing, fruits, vegetables, and body parts.
Today was really great, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
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