Some things never change

A year and a half into my service, I thought I was finally done complaining about the something-for-nothing handout mentality my villagers seem to have, especially when it comes to me. They had learned how I feel, I supposed -- the requests for money and pretty much any material possession they see me with had long since stopped.

There are two big exceptions. One is the schoolteachers, who should know better since I have repeatedly told them I make exactly as much money as they do. But whenever we try to do a school project, they insist I donate all the necessary materials (construction paper for every child, costumes for class skits, many large sheets of poster paper) even though those are things the school or the children can easily provide for themselves. They have actually called me stingy to my face when I refuse to spend my personal monthly stipend on materials for the school.

The other exception, which I am currently living daily, is with the stove project (Suzanne, if you are reading this, I bet some of these stories will sound familiar!) Ever since the materials to build the stoves arrived, and especially since the meeting Tuesday where I started giving them out, people have been dropping by my house in droves asking me for a stove, even though they never came to any of the multiple meetings we had to sign up for the project. When I tell them we only have enough materials for the people who actually came to one of four meetings we had (not too much to ask!), they sometimes get upset. One woman actually yelled at me while I was in the middle of giving out materials to families who were actually responsible enough to attend one meeting. I was talking to the responsible families, and this angry old woman kept interrupting, screaming and grabbing my arm, saying, "I thought I was going to be able to get something out of you while you were here!" and insisting she deserved a stove because more than a year ago she loaned me a document which I immediately copied and returned to her (??) I literally had to fight back the urge to slap her in the face.

I have actually told people: these stoves are not giveaways. They are going to people who actually collaborated by attending meetings and providing some materials. But these people seem to think, even as my service ends and I have spent nearly two years trying to teach them otherwise, that my role here is to just show up and start handing crap out to everyone who comes to my house.

It's weeks like this that I'm actually happy I only have 5 months left.

Paz y amor.