The Culture of Housing
I’d have to look back through the old blog entries, but my memory is that I haven’t really talked much about what at this point is are big challenge. We are still looking for a place to call home. Since we moved to our site, we had been living in a very small room that was made acceptable by having access to the school’s cocina (kitchen) and classrooms, so at least we could cook for ourselves and had some space to study and work. With the start of school next week, we needed to change our living arrangements pronto. We had hoped that some more permanent arrangement could be made during that time, but at this point our best option was to move into a “hotel” for a month or two to give ourselves more time to find a good situation.
Currently we live in the Huespedes in Las Pilas. We have a large room, with just enough space to have a small cocina (think camp stove) that we can cook on, and a little table, ect… basically about the minimum space we think we need. It’s nice to finally have some space of our own, and Katie and I even get to sleep in the same bed now! It wouldn’t be the best for a long term situation, we’d still like to have a bit more space for working inside, and some outside space for a garden… overall it would work, except that it is in the wrong community. Las Pilas is only 3 kilometers away from our community, but it means that all of our nearest neighbors, interactions at the tiendas, ect… are with people that we aren’t planning on working with. These more casual interactions are frequently the best time to learn things about the community, what they might need or want, plus the local news, gossip… in short all of the things that we would like to know about our site! So, by being in Las Pilas we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage for being effective PC volunteers.
So, what’s up with El Centro? Why no housing there? Well the basic reason is that; any house that exists in that community is being used by a family, or several. So mostly what might be available to us are rooms. Herein lies our culture clash. The amount of space we think that we need is much greater than they would think we need. Reality is we think that we need a small house, and they really don’t understand why two people would need a house. Now we know that this has been overcome in many other communities because lots of PCVs have their own place. Over the last month though, we have come to realize that really there may not be any house type options here. So if that were really out of the options then we have to start considering rooms. This is where the size thing comes in…because even the smallest of houses space is not the problem, but with rooms it is a different matter.
Hmm, how to explain… some things are definitely cultural differences. There is no doubt that Salvadoreñans would be comfortable with much less space than the average American, and that a sense of privacy in the way we mean it is almost a completely foreign concept. Then you have to add to that concept the fact that we want to be autonomous, as in cook our own food, wash our own clothes, have our own bathroom, ect… Obviously, if we only have a room, we will likely have to share some of these things… at least a bathroom (think latrine, and a place for a bucket-bath), and likely the pila for washing clothes and dishes. So, say we accept that, then there is still the matter of cooking food. Sharing a kitchen is just much much harder, and they know that too. So, when we are trying to point out that a room is too small to cook in, they understand our need to cook, but they don’t really grasp how much space we need to cook. Partly this is because we have mostly men helping us find a place. They just don’t spend any time in the kitchen other than to eat and stay warm by a fire. When we say space, they think the size of a cook stove, they completely forget all of the space for cookware and foodstuff. Not to mention a much harder concept is that we would really like a refrigerator.
See, for the most part they don’t really use a refrigerator here the way we do. Food is mostly always fresh here, because some woman is always at home working on food. Because they don’t have much, they pretty much consume all they have during the day. The idea of making extra and eating it through the week is foreign. But for us volunteers, who will both be working through the day, we really need to think that way. We can’t afford to have one of us staying home and cooking all day every day. We need the refrigerator to help out with that. Plus keeping the veggies fresh, again, here the families are large enough that they just eat a whole head of broccoli in one day so storage is not an issue. Think beans, it takes all day to cook them, so you don’t really want to make just two servings worth.
The last thing I will talk about is work space. None of them (not the men anyway) work out of their house so the idea of having deskspace to write or prepare a charla on is strange. Not to mention that things like books for reference don’t exist, so the idea of having them out on a shelf and available doesn’t click. The need for that kind of space is hard to get across. An offshoot of the workspace idea is that when we were thinking about what kind of place we needed, and how our “jobs” factored into that, we had hoped we would have some outside (porch) space to have smaller meetings on. A place to read books to the kids, some private tutoring in English, ect… If all we have is a room, then we have to invite them into what amounts to our bedroom, and that’s not really acceptable in this culture, not to mention in our own minds.
So, a lot of this was driven by my own need to write some of this out. Still, there is a lot of info on the kinds of cultural differences we are dealing with. Folks here are really trying to be helpful, too helpful at times. If we didn’t like our community so much, we would probably be happy to be looking at living in a nearby community. A lot of our frustrations stem more from the communication difficulties. Being able to work through these conversations in a polite way requires fairly skillful use of the language sometimes, and we still fall well short of that. Poca a poca, is a saying that we use, and hear a lot down here, and it’s true, little by little things will get easier. Cheers for now!
Update: Since I wrote this, it seems that the house that we had hoped for originally is going to have work starting up this next week... so if all goes well we will get a more than ample house, too nice actually, by around March. Things just change around daily, but we are getting used to that.
Currently we live in the Huespedes in Las Pilas. We have a large room, with just enough space to have a small cocina (think camp stove) that we can cook on, and a little table, ect… basically about the minimum space we think we need. It’s nice to finally have some space of our own, and Katie and I even get to sleep in the same bed now! It wouldn’t be the best for a long term situation, we’d still like to have a bit more space for working inside, and some outside space for a garden… overall it would work, except that it is in the wrong community. Las Pilas is only 3 kilometers away from our community, but it means that all of our nearest neighbors, interactions at the tiendas, ect… are with people that we aren’t planning on working with. These more casual interactions are frequently the best time to learn things about the community, what they might need or want, plus the local news, gossip… in short all of the things that we would like to know about our site! So, by being in Las Pilas we are putting ourselves at a disadvantage for being effective PC volunteers.
So, what’s up with El Centro? Why no housing there? Well the basic reason is that; any house that exists in that community is being used by a family, or several. So mostly what might be available to us are rooms. Herein lies our culture clash. The amount of space we think that we need is much greater than they would think we need. Reality is we think that we need a small house, and they really don’t understand why two people would need a house. Now we know that this has been overcome in many other communities because lots of PCVs have their own place. Over the last month though, we have come to realize that really there may not be any house type options here. So if that were really out of the options then we have to start considering rooms. This is where the size thing comes in…because even the smallest of houses space is not the problem, but with rooms it is a different matter.
Hmm, how to explain… some things are definitely cultural differences. There is no doubt that Salvadoreñans would be comfortable with much less space than the average American, and that a sense of privacy in the way we mean it is almost a completely foreign concept. Then you have to add to that concept the fact that we want to be autonomous, as in cook our own food, wash our own clothes, have our own bathroom, ect… Obviously, if we only have a room, we will likely have to share some of these things… at least a bathroom (think latrine, and a place for a bucket-bath), and likely the pila for washing clothes and dishes. So, say we accept that, then there is still the matter of cooking food. Sharing a kitchen is just much much harder, and they know that too. So, when we are trying to point out that a room is too small to cook in, they understand our need to cook, but they don’t really grasp how much space we need to cook. Partly this is because we have mostly men helping us find a place. They just don’t spend any time in the kitchen other than to eat and stay warm by a fire. When we say space, they think the size of a cook stove, they completely forget all of the space for cookware and foodstuff. Not to mention a much harder concept is that we would really like a refrigerator.
See, for the most part they don’t really use a refrigerator here the way we do. Food is mostly always fresh here, because some woman is always at home working on food. Because they don’t have much, they pretty much consume all they have during the day. The idea of making extra and eating it through the week is foreign. But for us volunteers, who will both be working through the day, we really need to think that way. We can’t afford to have one of us staying home and cooking all day every day. We need the refrigerator to help out with that. Plus keeping the veggies fresh, again, here the families are large enough that they just eat a whole head of broccoli in one day so storage is not an issue. Think beans, it takes all day to cook them, so you don’t really want to make just two servings worth.
The last thing I will talk about is work space. None of them (not the men anyway) work out of their house so the idea of having deskspace to write or prepare a charla on is strange. Not to mention that things like books for reference don’t exist, so the idea of having them out on a shelf and available doesn’t click. The need for that kind of space is hard to get across. An offshoot of the workspace idea is that when we were thinking about what kind of place we needed, and how our “jobs” factored into that, we had hoped we would have some outside (porch) space to have smaller meetings on. A place to read books to the kids, some private tutoring in English, ect… If all we have is a room, then we have to invite them into what amounts to our bedroom, and that’s not really acceptable in this culture, not to mention in our own minds.
So, a lot of this was driven by my own need to write some of this out. Still, there is a lot of info on the kinds of cultural differences we are dealing with. Folks here are really trying to be helpful, too helpful at times. If we didn’t like our community so much, we would probably be happy to be looking at living in a nearby community. A lot of our frustrations stem more from the communication difficulties. Being able to work through these conversations in a polite way requires fairly skillful use of the language sometimes, and we still fall well short of that. Poca a poca, is a saying that we use, and hear a lot down here, and it’s true, little by little things will get easier. Cheers for now!
Update: Since I wrote this, it seems that the house that we had hoped for originally is going to have work starting up this next week... so if all goes well we will get a more than ample house, too nice actually, by around March. Things just change around daily, but we are getting used to that.
posted by Jon & Katie | 8:03 AM
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