White Woman's Guilt
Ah, lazy mornings. I awoke at dawn to the sounds of two tribes of Howler monkeys competing to provide me with my morning wake up call. Callie crawled onto my chest for her morning cuddles until Richmond, my Maine coon cat, pushed her away and demanded I share the love. The young ones (Nicky ad Isabelle) spent the morning playing with a cardboard box.
Not wanting to get up just yet, I pick up the latest Vanity Fair and settled back under the covers. Bill Clinton's comeback, Angelina Jolie's relief work, and the founders of internet commerce take me far away from the jungles of Nicaragua. Though I delve into the articles, each time my eye drifts from the pages, I am reminded of my geography - the cane ceilings, the wild parrots screeching from the tree, the rolling green hills, and the blaring of the horn for the 6:10 bus to San Juan del Sur. Outside, the blue spotted butterflies make a rat-a-tat sound (similar to static electricity) as they chase each other in all directions. Occasionally an interloper will join in on the butterfly version of Three Card Monty, rattling off their passionate clicks until one suitor is chased away. I steal a pillow from Rob and try to focus on the articles about pretty and important people. I cannot remember the last time I was this lazy. Normally by 6 a.m. I am brewing my chai latte, feeding the cats and Not My Dog and Nobody's Dog, serving myself a bowl of granola and yogurt, and assembling all the things I will need in town - trash and recycled materials, compost bin, laptop, camera, cell phone and charger, keys, yoga mat, money, and all the things needed for the store. Invariably I forget something each day.
It felt so good to lie in bed until 6:30 that I decided to play hooky, which I can do because I am the boss. Having worked every day for the past few weeks, I can justify staying in bed. My presence might be missed, but isn't necessary for the day.
As I get ready for the maid (I wash the previous evening's dishes, pick up my clothes and make the bed so as not to appear too lazy), I feel fortunate and guilty. I can sing my own self-worth, but had I been born into an impoverished culture with parents who had little or no education, I might be the one sweeping the floors and scrubbing the showers. Poverty is a requirement of capitalism. I don't know what Arelia thinks of me or extranjeros in general. We pay her 150 cordobas for 4 hours of labor; the average wage for a maid in the campo is 80 cordobas for 8 hours of work. We also provide for her medical care. We have given her stacks of nice clothing, linens, shoes, toiletries, and household items.
Many people underpay their maids. Many maids steal to make up for their crappy wages. It's more complicated than the "pay them more" solution for reasons that I will not cover in this post.
The second day Arelia worked for me, she found a garish plastic belt in the bathroom trash can. She asked if she could have it. The belt had come with a pair of shorts. Just before I tossed it away, I thought that I should offer it to Arelia when she came to work the next day, but it was so ugly, so tacky that I thought she might be insulted by the offer. She picked it out of the trash and asked Rob if she could keep it. I was mortified by my wasteful actions when he told me she liked it and needed a belt. It's not trash to me, she said, although worded slightly differently.
I don't usually toss things like that away, or if I do, they go into a "gratis" box that I leave on a corner, not too far from the garbage dumpsters. Of all the things I have given away, only one item had a dearth of takers. In fact, this one item sat on the stoop to our store for three days before someone finally picked it out of the free box. That item would be Kato Kaelin's autobiography. Rob and I joked about the old drunks rummaging through our free book pile, fighting over who got to keep the French cookbook written in German. "I don't want Kato, you take him!" we imagined them screaming at each other while grabbing the second to last item to go, the French cookbook written in German. Kato's ghost-written autobiography had "graced" the shelves of the Iguana book exchange for several years and became my property when Dee donated her picked over collection to me. A month later I relayed our imaginary story of the drunks rejecting the autobiography of O.J. Simpson's houseguest when one of my unidentified friends said, "I have that book." At first I thought he meant he had read the book in the past, though he couldn't have been older than 13 when the trial occurred. No, he said, he picked it out of the free box and had the book in his office! I didn't know whether to be insulted or amused. The drunks picked up copies of my old Cold War text books and guides to Soviet missile production, but not Kato. If anyone from Kato's publishing house is reading this blog entry, I suggest you find the person who gave O.J.'s buddy a cash advance for his memoirs and put him in rehab where he belongs.
But I digress, as I am prone to do.
Compared to an American, I live a very modest life. Compared to a Nicaraguan…well, I am not in the league of the uber rich Managuans who show up in their helicopters and make their maids tend to their children on the beach - in full uniform, including pantyhose, but I live in a nice house, own two (cough, cough) vehicles money pits (because the first one is lacking mobility caused by a non-functioning differential), and have a nice business. I have a really nice life. I am suffering from White Woman's Guilt. Reading Vanity Fair almost seems a cliché. Almost.
You are still the best photographer in the world. Loved this post too!
Thanks, Kelly Ann.
Take care,
Jim
Posted by: jim goulding | August 28, 2008 at 11:57 AM