Earning Respect

It’s easy to get comfortable with someone new when they are always around, every day, 24/7. In a site as small as mine, there are only so many places you can really go. By simply existing in my site, my peeps have managed to become more and more comfortable with me being in their community. Trying to earn the respect of my peeps is a different story. Respect is not something that can be accomplished by simply existing, it needs to be earned.

Last week I was hand-gifted the opportunity to earn the respect of my fellow male counterparts. There are really only three ways to earn the respect of the average man 1) Carry heavy stuff/ work hard 2) Talk about women and/or sex 3) Talk about women and/or sex while carrying heavy stuff. I was able to accomplish all three because last week the material for our aqueduct tank arrived. This included 46 250lb pieces of steel and 3 325lb pieces of steel that needed carried from the river bank up to the top of the loma (hill) where the tank would be located. I shouldn’t have to tell you how much this sucked but I will…it sucked a lot. And it wasn’t just the weight we had to deal with. There are two types of weather patterns at my site, scorching hot and downpour rain. The first two days were scorching hot, to the point where you are sweating so much that your skin starts to wrinkle as if you have been sitting in a swimming pool too long. You try to drink as much water to stave of exhaustion and dehydration but as quickly as the water goes in it get’s sweated out, somehow twice as fast it seems. You pray for some relief…and that relief comes in the form of downpour rain. Oh sweet Jesus it’s raining! Hallelujah, right? Wrong. Now our once sure-footed trail has turned into a slick, death path of mud with 250lbs of steel precariously propped up on the shoulders of four dudes. Not only are you worried about your footing, but now you’re thinking about the footing of the entire group because if one guy goes down we all go down. Despite all this, we had managed to get everything up to the top of the loma in three days. It was quite the feat and I was really impressed with the attitudes of most of the guys. Nobody wanted to carry any of this stuff up the hill, it simply had to be done.

Let’s go back to the list of earning the respect of the average man 1) Carry heavy stuff/ work hard…check. 2) Talk about women and/ or sex…check. We carried stuff in three groups of four, meaning while two groups were carrying stuff one group was resting. While resting I was able to learn some of the “más importante” phrases about women in the Emberá language. 3) Talk about women and/ or sex while carrying heavy stuff…half-check. I tried my best to use my newly acquired vocabulary, but the fact that I was carrying heavy stuff severely limited my ability to speak anything other than grunts and gasps for breath. Plus the fact that making someone laugh, which is what they would do every time I would say a new word or phrase I had just learned, while carrying heavy stuff isn’t the safest of ideas, but I’ll still give myself a half-check on that one. So that’s two and one-half checks out of three. Enough to get me into the “good ol’ boys club” in my community. Now I know all the nicknames they use for each other and I am armed with words and phrases that will make them bust out laughing on the spot. The integration continues…