My issue with white people

So I have been getting into coffee. My strict no-coffee policy has been slipping recently, as I accept coffee if it's offered to me but I won't buy it. I still feel like I'm cheating with the sugar and milk. It should be straight or not at all, I argue. But I am gradually getting my feet wet. And this internet place has free coffee. It's pretty weak but hey, it's free.

I have found that in Antigua there are all these white people trying to learn Spanish. They are Europeans and Americans and Australians and Israelis and such. I should be glad. Peace Corps taught me that learning a second language is an experience that nothing can really equal. The process, humbling and frustrating and exciting, changes your whole perspective on the world. You begin to realize the differences in expression, in communication. Things like tone and cadence and rhythm all enter into language, so it's almost musical. The process is extremely enriching.

I want to send millions of Americans to other countries to learn a second language. I'd make them learn Spanish. We as a culture need to get ready for that fact. The fact that we are not the center of the universe and one day not all the world will kneel at our presence and kiss our holy feet with an English kiss. It just shows great arrogance and ignorance. "Learn some English" we hear disdainfully muttered to new immigrants to this country. My response? "Learn some Spanish." These people are guests in our country and we are showing them the ugly, mean, ancient face of American racism. I have been a foreigner in a different country and people treated me specially because they wanted me to leave Panama with a good impression of that country, that I would go home and tell my countrymen that Panamanians are kind and generous and patient, loving people. In the reverse case, in the mirrored case of a Mexican or Ecuadorian or Colombian who has moved to the U.S., who has given up the comfort of his own language and people and culture and family and history, to travel thousands of treacherous miles to a strange and often unwelcoming country fills me with a real disgust. I want to turn everything around: and when your Italian/Jewish/Polish/Swedish ancestors came to this country, when they sacrificed everything and left everything behind, were they not greeted with that same ugly disdain? When will we learn to treat each other like humans?

My rant will slowly drift toward some magnetic pole. Yes. So all these white people are learning Spanish, which is the real passport to an entire continent. From the Rio Grande to the Tierra De Fuego in Chile, a continent becomes accessible, a culture and history and people comes really, finally alive. Millions and millions of people can now have a conversation with you. But something in this annoys me. What is it, I cannot tell. I am impatient with these new learners of Spanish. I see their faltering, fumbling attempts to speak and I get annoyed. This says a lot about me, I suppose. I want everyone to learn Spanish but I want them all to skip that intermediate phase where they fumble around for words and make a lot of errors. I want them just to be fluent. I walked behind a guy with his Spanish teacher here in Antigua and the conversation clunked along until the Spanish teacher gave up and switched to English. I felt frustrated. Just learn it and really speak it, I want to yell. I need more patience in my life. Study it and speak it and practice it and get out there and just DO it. So many people here are just doing it in a kind of yuppie or hippie way, like they want to learn Spanish to be all fashionable or trendy or something. I don’t know people’s motivations to learn Spanish, so I don’t know if they want to use it to travel or to get a job or what. But they take these Spanish classes and live in Antigua and then go out to trendy bars with other Americans where the whole barstaff are English ex-pat’s or something and they all speak English with each other. It seems silly or sad. And it frustrates me because it’s not how I learned, perhaps. They aren’t out in the campo, living where you can’t speak English with anyone except when you see other volunteers. They are sort of sliding by, feeling they are all special or something, and they’ll go home and have this “great experience” of living in this foreign city and they’ll talk all like it’s so exotic and challenging and there was so much suffering involved in throwing your toilet paper into a trash can at the side of the toilet, or not having a car to go wherever you want, or having to eat different food. It will be Peace Corps Super Lite and they will think it so hard.

And I suppose it is. I am too hard on these people. I want everyone to do Peace Corps or some similar challenging experience or almost not do it at all. Do it or don’t do it. Don’t dick around with this in-between stuff.

And of course this argument is absurd. It’s all relative. To someone who really lived in the jungles of Africa for 25 years as a missionary, working in solitude and fear and danger, my little two years in too-developed, skyscrappered Panama was a pampered existence. We want to think we are all bad-ass and yet there will always be someone more bad-ass than us. Peace Corps Mali volunteers probably would laugh at the idea of a volunteer in Panama or Costa Rica. It all goes back perhaps to me taking this experience so seriously when for others it may mean very little.

I smiled to myself when the title of this entry popped into my head. It is perhaps a testament to how far I felt integrated into Panamanian culture. I now talk about “these white people” and yet forget I stand, at least epidermically, among them. Yet something has profoundly changed. I can step out of my body and my mind and my background and stand with another, in another body and time and place and language and culture. I think PC is making or has made me more empathetic, with the ability to see it from another’s perspective. And yet the diatribe above. It’s not complete. Seeing things from another’s point of view. Understanding that if I was living X person’s life with all the different forces and conditions and trials of that Other Existence, I would probably act the same way. I am trying not to judge so much. Understanding why people do things. That we’re all just people and we’ve all got our faults. And to this lost, broken, twisted people arrives God and stands among us not in American flesh or Jewish flesh or African flesh or Cambodian flesh or Panamanian flesh. He comes in human flesh. A human. Among us. To tell us what? That we are all just humans and that we should love each other, that we should see the piercing glory of God in the glint of another human eye, the radiating force of the divine life playing in this surging river of flesh and color and pain and love we call this life.

My prayer, continually, is “don’t give up on me.”