There. I said it. Whew! Feels good to get that off my
chest.
When you join Peace Corps, you are signing on to live
in a foreign country for over two years. You are agreeing to adapt to a new
culture; to respect the customs and traditions of your assigned community; and
to remain, at the very least, open-minded when encountering local norms that
vary from your own. Living in your assigned community, you may start to worry
that, in order to properly integrate, you will need to give up who you are –
cast aside or hide that which makes you you
– in order to be accepted by your neighbors, coworkers, and host family.
You may question when to conform, when to reject, and when to tread the line by
maintaining your own values while incorporating aspects of the host culture
(becoming “bicultural,” so to speak).
After fifteen months of living in Nicaragua, I’ve made
some adjustments – picked up some mannerisms, altered some speech patterns,
radically changed my diet (to the detriment of my waistline), found new
interests and hobbies, developed a taste for country music and reggae. I’ve
become a little more patient. A little more willing to sacrifice privacy and
personal space. A little more tolerant of noise, dirt, bugs, and chaos. And I
think that the people of Pearl Lagoon are coming to know me, accept me, and
trust me.
But there are some things I just can’t adjust to. One
of them is mondongo: a traditional soup made with the intestines, stomach, and
feet of pigs. At its best, I find the soup to be greasy and uninteresting. At
its worst, even the smell makes me queasy. The problem is, nearly all of the
members of my host family love mondongo, and we eat our meals together. As it
is in many other cultures, a woman’s self-worth is, in part, based on her
ability to cook and to feed her loved ones. Refusing an offering of food can be
seen as a rejection of the cook herself. So, in order to avoid insulting or
hurting any feelings, I would eat small amounts of the mondongo each time it
was made, begging off a larger portion due to lack of appetite.
That is, until yesterday, when I walked into the house
for lunch and was olfactorily assaulted by the smell of boiling pork intestine.
I decided then and there: I couldn’t keep living a lie. I needed to tell my
family of my mondongo aversion. Sheepishly, I confessed. And you know what? It went
well. My relationships with my host family members are strong enough now that
there was no offense taken (especially because they know how much I enjoy all
the other food they cook). They were only sorry they hadn’t known sooner. So,
while everyone else dined on mondongo yesterday, I had a big bowl of beans and
plantain.
This is just a small illustration of what I’ve been
realizing of late: though I may adopt elements of the local culture, it will
never truly be my culture. I will never be a full-fledged Laguneña, because I
will always be American, for better or for worse. But that’s okay. No one here wishes
me to be something other than myself. Their only true expectation is that I
remain respectful of their way of life, regardless of whether or not I
personally choose to embrace it.
And, truth be told, there are plenty of native
Nicaraguans that don’t like mondongo either.
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