A report by Mirjam Nausner about her voluntary service with the voluntaris association
I spent six months of my educational leave in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, in the south of Mexico, working as a volunteer in a children's aid project.
WHO AM I WITHOUT MY LANGUAGE?
We are inevitably confronted with this question when we leave our comfort zone as tourists in a foreign country. I've been here in Mexico for four months now. I can now find my way around the language quite well in everyday life. Thanks to my smartphone, I can quickly look things up if I'm missing an important word or want to translate a word into German. But learning goes its own way. There are days when nothing works at all, seemingly at a complete standstill and I stumble from one grammatical error to the next with the feeling of "I'm starting from scratch again!" The lesson to be learned then is to practise patience and trust in the process of learning, which is not linear.
Especially when working with children, quick action is often required and boundaries need to be set. Who am I, with all my experience and knowledge, if I suddenly have to operate at a very basic linguistic level? While I'm still working on the correct formation of the imperative, the situation has already changed completely.... But there are also curious situations: I'm playing Scrabble with a group of children. And it quickly becomes clear that a lack of spelling skills meets a lack of vocabulary. I had to laugh out loud!
WHEN THE EARTH SHAKES...
I have been here in San Cris for almost 3 months now and during this time I have twice felt the earth shake for a moment and my bed make a very gentle rocking motion. Each time I wasn't quite sure whether this unusual sensation was real.
I have only ever experienced one earthquake in my entire life. But the memory of this moment in my childhood is still very vivid. My siblings and I had already gone to bed when all of a sudden the bunk bed began to sway with a squeak. We were taken out of the room by our worried parents and all hurried to the hallway of our multi-storey house. There we met anxious neighbors and everyone discussed what to do next.
Here in San Cris, small earthquakes are nothing special, too commonplace to talk about. A linguistic distinction is also made between severe earthquakes, which cause damage and are called terremoto, and smaller earth tremors, known as temblores.
But on March 31, in the early hours of the morning, there was an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.3, which is quite remarkable. All the more surprising that I didn't wake up, as my flatmate Keekee told me that her bed must have shaken for a minute. I, on the other hand, dreamed the earthquake at the same time. In my dream, the earth shook so hard that we fled the house. I woke up in the early hours of the morning, puzzled by this dream. On my way to the toilet I met Keekee, who told me that she couldn't sleep because the earth had shaken earlier...
I'm really glad that I only experienced the earthquake in my dream consciousness. I was spared the horror of my neighbors.
POWER FAILURE
Two days ago, when I came home at dusk around 7.30 p.m., I found the house lit by candles. No one seemed to be at home. There was no light, I realized. A strange man came out of the dark living room and told me that there was no electricity. I now know that my landlords are always accommodating people from the comunidades of the jungle who have traveled many hours to consult a doctor here in San Cris. There is no electricity in many villages in the jungle. When it is dark, people use candles and battery lamps. So there is no television either. A man once spent the night here and watched television until the early hours of the morning. He was so impressed that he would have liked to stay another night.
I only had to spend one evening and one night without electricity and internet. That wasn't really too difficult and yet I realized how much we had geared our lives towards it.
Fortunately, the problem was solved the next day. An opossum nibbled on the power cable and died in the process.
(Many thanks to Mirjam Nausner for the great report and the photos and to voluntaris for the opportunity to publish it here).
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Another experience report from voluntaris: As a physiotherapist in Ecuador