Day 6

6/13/13

Yesterday will be interesting to try to explain; it's almost elegant how the good parts and bad parts of the day fit together to make a perfect mess. So here's the story. The day began quite benignly; I went with Andrea to drop her sister off at the shopping mall, where she could more easily catch a bus to her school. When we got back, she made a delicious breakfast of boiled verdes (plantains), mashed with scrambled egg, vegetables, and cheese (this is definitely something I want to bring back with me!), while I did a decent if messy job with making an Ecuadorian 'jugo' (juice), which is basically a thin smoothie-- it's made by putting fruit and milk and a blender and then straining out the solids. Before she left for school, she called the pastor, Santi, who said he'd be at the church in about 2 hours, so I headed up the road around 12:00. It was a sunny day, a big hill, and a high altitude, so I felt like a fat old lady trying to make it up the hill. As I passed the little booth of the village security guard on the other side of the road, he said something to me, but all I caught was “guapa” (attractive)-- I thought about putting my shapeless jacket back on, but I was already overheating, so I put my eyes on the ground and kept walking as he continued to make gross noises at me-- whistling, kissing, etc, and saying other not-just-friendly-flirtatious things-- I caught the phrase 'tu cuerpo' (your body), to give you an idea. When I got to the church, the gates were closed, and my cell phone didn't want to work to call the pastor, so I'm sitting outside the gates when guess who comes round the corner-- creepy security guard. He was freaking following me. I was shocked. This guy was effectively undermining the entire purpose of his job-- to make people in the neighborhood feel safe. I decided in that moment that I wasn't going to walk to church anymore. Fortunately, the church van appeared and the gates opened. I quickly ducked onto the property, trying not to look back at the creep on the street. When the unfamiliar church worker got out, I asked him if he could help me call Santi (Santiago, the pastor), and he brought me up to the office where he was working. I told him what happened with the guard. I know it's not such a big deal here for guys to act that way, but I wanted it on the record that he wasn't doing his job and was making me feel intensely uncomfortable. (I later realized that Spanish doesn't have a good word for 'creepy'. The closest translates to 'horrifying', but I didn't feel like this guy was going to hurt me so much as show up outside my window and watch me sleep.) The two pastors talked jovially about beating him up, and though this part was a joke, I have good reason to hope that he got a talking-to. 

Anyway, the next part was awesome-- Santi and I talked about a mural for the walls of the youth room, and we wrestled out a pretty awesome design. By then it was around two, so he was nice enough to take me over to Magaly's house for Mateo's English lesson. He didn't have much homework, so we actually got to have an English lesson-- we made sentences, I told him about my life and then he told me about a local legend in English, and we played Boggle-- though we were both on one team, looking for words together. It was around 4:30 when Mom got home, and she asked the kids if they wanted to go catch the end of a kid's club at the church, to which they responded happily, but took so long to get ready that by the time we got there, everything was finished and no one was there. Since we were so close to Andrea's house, she dropped me off at home. I put down all my things and prepared to start drawing for the mural when Santi knocked on the door-- evidently he had crossed paths with Magali and learned that I was home, so he dropped by with the van full of kids that he was about to take home to introduce me. After he left to take the kids home, I was shocked and horrified to find that the door was locked, and I was stuck outside without keys or jacket or cell phone or anything productive to do to make me look not-lost to the people on the street. Andrea doesn't live in the most dangerous of all neighborhoods, but I still felt indescribably vulnerable, and I knew from Santi that the small group that was happening that night didn't start til 6:30ish-- and it was around 5 at the moment. I thought about that creepy guard and knew that I could neither walk up to the church or risk meeting any more strangers so ill-equipped for shenanigans (the only thing I had that vaguely characatured any kind of self-defense tool was the caribeener on my water bottle, which was clipped to my jeans), so I tucked myself away behind a little wall between the driveway and the house so that I couldn't be seen from the street and waited and waited. Of course, someone that had seen me walking in the yard appeared above the wall at that moment and scared the crap out of me, but my nerves were relieved when he asked for Andrea, and it soon became apparent that he was just a neighborhood employee (gardener?) trying to make sure that I wasn't a bad guy. He told me just to wait, and when he left I resumed the fetal. I was cold and scared out of my mind, and  though I tried to console myself and pass time by reciting poetry, it was starting to get dark and every noise from the street sounded like a predator. By the time Santi showed up in his van an hour and a half later, both my emotions and my Asperger's had gone absolutely haywire, and I spent the rest of the evening trying not to cry. I think it made it worse that when he pulled up and I appeared from my hiding place, I assumed he would have figured out what happened, so when he asked me how I was, I just kind of made a little noise, and he said, “aburrido?” (bored?) and I was like, 'chaa', kind of ironically; thinking that for him, it wasn't a big deal and boredom was the worst of my problems. Though I didn't know exactly how to explain, I mumbled something about the door closing automatically and not being able to go back, and he kind of laughed, which kind of made me feel like shit. I'm not sure why I assumed he knew what was going on. It was only after we had picked up Santi's whole family from his mom's house and were on the way to drop off about half of them at another place that he asked me if I was overheated. I laughed no (as I had been quite cold since 5 o'clock), and he asked me why I took off my jacket. “Porque no tengo!” he kind of laughed again, and then it slowly occurred to me that he had no idea I'd been locked out. I said that I hoped everything was ok at the house, since I hadn't been able to go back in to turn the alarm on. Then it clicked with him. “From the time I was there?!” he asked in Spanish. “Si,” I responded, “Oh, pobrecita!” (poor little thing), he said, which, when you are trying not to cry, is about the worst thing someone can say to you, so I looked out the window and tried to distract myself until we arrived at the house. When Andrea and Angelica came, I told them what had happened, forcing myself to laugh to keep from crying. They thought I was in a good mood about it for that reason, which just made everything worse. 

I was full-force autistic introvert at this point, and though I hoped people didn't think I was rude, I couldn't engage. I 'porfa'-d my way out of praying, 'no-puedo'-d my way out of gargle-singing Spanish worship songs for my team to try to recognized, 'no-entiendo'-d my way out of movie charades (at this point, realizing I was exaggerating my ignorance to get out of something, I thought, 'this must be what it's like to be a man', which made me smile on the inside), and 'no puedo recordar en Ingles'-d my way out of repeating a bible verse. Somewhere in there a dream I had the night before suddenly came back to me-- I had been able to fly, just by moving my arms a certain way. It was (as most of my dreams) so physically, tactilly vivid-- I could feel the air, feel my legs move and throwing my head back, and, most sublimely, feel that going-up feeling in my stomach. In the weird emotional place that I was in, this made me really sad, like I was mourning a lost superpower. Anyway, in this ridiculous state, any question people directed at me had to be repeated and was probably left unanswered or one-word-answered, and I felt so bad and so rude and so frustrated with myself, so broken. On the way home I finally 'broke the news' to the sisters that I have 'un poco de Autismo' that is made worse by stress. As much as having a word to give substance to my weird perspective on life is infinitely helpful to me, I hate telling other people, as it quickly becomes a box. But it's better than them thinking that I'm just a bitch, I've decided. When we came home, on the way in the door, I pointed to the little place behind the wall and said, “That's where I was. I was so afraid.” to Andrea. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you, Ely.” she responded.

 I redeemed myself a little by helping Angelica with a required interview with a 'gringa' (apparently the actual requirement-- I tried to explain the stir that such parameters would cause in the US, but I'm not sure it worked) before going to sleep to thoughts of autism, self-identity, and other deep philosophicals that will have to wait to be shared until they're more fully formed. Today I plan to call the church after I do some drawings to see if Santi can pick me up to keep working there-- and to talk to him about yesterday, to apologize and try to explain. This is a starting place. I have to keep moving forward.