¡Bichos!

It’s a Spanish word that if you look up in the dictionary will mean, bug, insect, small animal. But here, if you are out in the street with a bunch of kids around, you will soon learn that it is used in a different way. Here, and by here, I mean El Salvador…not sure how far it spreads beyond the borders…haven’t heard it in Mexico anyway… it means “kid” or maybe “brat”. It is yet another of many words that doesn’t really have the best direct translation into English. It can, like so many words in Spanish, be either bichos, or bichas, depending on the sex of the kid or kids you are commenting on. It is used by; parents to talk about their own kids, between the kids themselves, and sometimes, from an adult that knows the kids or kids parents very well. If used by a relative unknown it would be insulting.

This being the case, we very rarely use it. Katie has found it an effective way to gain control of an out of control classroom full of kids, ¡Bichos! Not sure it doesn’t shock them a bit…but at that point, who cares? You hear it a lot though, frequently in a commanding voice, ¡Bichos, vengan aca! Or ¡Bichos escuchenme!, sometimes more like a whiney Bichas…vamanos… It just never ceases to entertain though.

The other major use of bichos, the kids themselves, not the word, is to get stuff for you. It’s a staple of the community that if you need something from the store you just “Mande un bicho”, send or order a kid. It goes beyond the all too frequent trips to the tienda though. In an agricultural community like ours, need some carrots, just send a bicho out to look for them, ask around, buy and bring back. The kids make the most of it. Gets them out and about and they often don’t take the most direct route stopping for other fun things along the way.

It’s taken about a year, but we are starting to use bichos too. Just today we wanted some cabbage for a soup I am making, and for some coleslaw…well eventually two of my counterparts kids came over, bringing down the ballcap I left at their house last night (typical bicho mission), and after we’d talked to them for awhile, we mentioned the need for cabbage, and they immediately offered their services. We aren’t quite to the “Manda” stage yet, we wait for an offer, or if it’s our neighbors they’ll tell us to send their kid out. Still by the end of another year who knows! It might turn out to be one of the things we miss once we get home…no bichos to go get us stuff!

What Do We Bring?

A question that all of us volunteers frequently ask ourselves as we sit around our communities is: what do we bring to these people that they don’t already know, or have? It can be a tough thing to ponder because it questions all of our reasons for coming and doing this whole thing in the first place. None the less, most of us shortly after arriving notice that pretty much everything they do, they know more about than some college educated yahoo from the States.

Who am I to tell them how to grow their corn? They have been doing this a lot longer than I have, and most of the things that we see as a bit strange or different about the process, usually turns out to have very good reasons for existence.

So, today I had an epiphany. I now understand what I have to offer. It’s video games! Yep, that’s what I know, that they don’t…and they want to. Growing up through the ages, I lived from the start of Pong, through to the days of Halo 2 (currently missing out on Halo 3!). It’s amazing what sorts of things are virtually innate to my consciousness having matured during our technological decades. Things like “Start” buttons, audio video cables, and even more important, turning your TV to the AV channel (you know, that thing before channel 2…oh, mostly older TVs here, so no video input button). These are all things that any directions mostly fail to mention, but for someone trying to get some cheap Chinese electronics to work, they can be incredibly frustrating. Oh, and not to forget that most of these folks couldn’t read the directions even if they came out of the box in Spanish.

The other day I was over at the greenhouse I use, when Juancito came in with a strange box that was a promotional “gift” for getting a new cell phone. It turned out to be a very cheap Chinese video game set up. He hadn’t the slightest idea how to set it up, and so…where do you go for help with things like this? To the gringo of course! It was a bit confusing even to me, and the directions were useless. Still, I managed to get the cables sorted out, and took a look at the controllers…all in English…and not at all intuitive. Still, I got the whole thing going in no time, and soon I was showing them how to play Pac Man, Loderunner, even Space Invaders! Good fun, and really pushed my Spanish vocabulary in to new regions. Damn hard to explain not just how to use the device, but then each game has it’s own confusing way to operate. For me it was fairly easy to figure out the controls, and make things work…for them it was a whole other matter.
How do you explain that all car racing games have high and low gears so that you can shift? Left on their own, they would play forever, never knowing there was a high gear, and not doing too well as a result of that… there are a ton of examples like that, second nature to me, but completely mysterious to them. It was a bit scary to me how much I understood. I mean I really wouldn’t normally think of myself as a game geek growing up. I did have an Atari, but kind of stopped with the console gaming world after that…no Nintendo, Playstation, PS2….nothing until the Xbox that I only bought to play Halo. So how did I have all of this innate knowledge? I just absorbed from our “culture”, commercials, visiting friends, reading papers and magazines, ect… It is a huge “strength” of US culture, that we PC volunteers can help with out in these developing countries! Finally! Something useful to do here!!!