The smell of smoke creeps up my nose and I roll over, ignoring chickens crowing, a neighbor hammering and the set of speakers blasting the same bachata song for the 9th straight day. My phone is in the other room but I'm guessing it to be about 6:45 a.m. The smoke, like the hour, has its particular flavor, unique to life here in the campo. Plastic bags, leaves, branches, and a piece of paper here and there, all blending together for a particularly pungent and carcinogen-full cloud of smoke that wafts through the neighborhood a few times a day. Mix in a hearty portion of the dry season's endemic dust and you've got a sneeze or sinus infection around the corner with every breath.
The familiarity of the sounds and smells, along with the white noise of the fan buzzing back and forth and a bit of extra dreariness due to mixing Guatemalan rum in with my Pineapple/Coconut soda after dinner last night, and I fall back asleep for a few more minutes. A bassline thumping through the air wakes me again and I roll over and and reach out to wrap my arms around Krysia, but she went home yesterday afternoon and all I find is a lumpy, lightweight pillow.
Indifference is hard to cure. The discarded plastic bags and bottles have been piling up for years. Some are plain, black bags. Others once contained chips, pastries, or other junk food. Most of the bottles are from soda, anywhere from 12 oz to 3 liters, but there are also bottles that once held medicine and a million other things. In a world without a trash truck, people are used to the sight. Even in just a year I've already gotten accustomed. The partially buried bags stuck in the dry, cracked earth still look ugly to me, but they don't stick out to me like they used to. A barbed-wire fence is certain to have at least a few plastic bags stuck to it. People who grew up surrounded by litter aren't as bothered by it.
It's not easy to make people care. Getting people to show up is still the biggest challenge I face with my work here. Whether it is an English class, a soccer tournament, or a youth group meeting, I remind everyone as many times as I can and consider it a success if half of the people show up. In the first 6 weeks, my English class went from 15 students to 12, then to 8, 7, 5 and now down to 2. I'll admit I'm not an expert at teaching English, but you can't say you gave it much of a shot if you only showed up twice in an attempt to learn a foreign language. And a lot of the people who quit after a week were the ones who pestered me for a year to teach them English. Maybe they thought I was going to teach them the whole language in the first class.
It is frustrating always wondering how many people will show up, how late they will be if they do show up, and whether they come next time. Punctuality is important to me, and it's a habit. Just like being at least a half hour late to everything is a habit for Salvadorans. The two students who have kept at it with English classes are making decent progress, and they are usually no more than 15 minutes late; a good sign that they care. It's not worth dwelling on who isn't there or what time we finally get started, but sometimes I do anyways. I've learned to adjust my expectations and work with what I have, but I don't want to lower them too far for fear of ending up indifferent.
