Never Say Never (second try at this post)

Who hasn’t heard that phrase? Well, they are words well spoken. We all have stories about people sighing, shaking their heads and saying, “Never say ‘never’.” And to top it off, they turn out to be right.

“I have never had a dog bite me. They sometimes bark when I walk by certain houses, but I have never had a problem with the dogs here.” This morning, bright and early, on a road that I have walked three times a week for almost a year and a half, a dog came barreling down the road and tried to take a chunk out of my calf…luckily, between my determination to live and a neighbor’s timely hurling of a large rock at the dog, he only managed to break through the skin a little and leave a big bruise. After washing up at the neighbor’s house, I continued on my day, not much put out. After returning to town, a good friend and her husband drove me back to the house to see if the dog had been vaccinated against rabies (he had been), and to put him under supervision for 15 days (just in case).

“Street food has never made me sick.” Everyone who has ever traveled to a developing country has a story about this one. You can fill in the blanks.

“People never stop to pick me up on Thursdays when I am walking out to visit the schools.” Today alone I got to know the baker that lives up on the mountain, the Pepsi truck drivers, the cousin of one of my favorite teachers, and owner of a school supplies store in town…all offering free transportation – on a Thursday, no less.

“There has never been a major natural disaster in our county.” …And then Agatha bared her ugly teeth. In our county alone, fifteen people died in landslides, more than thirty-five families lost their homes, more families had their crops swept away, and there are still electrical and water problems all over. I have discovered that emergency disaster relief is not a good career choice for me, even though it was truly inspiring to see how quickly community leaders banded together to help.

“I will never speak Spanglish.” At first, I said this because I was supplementing my knowledge of Spanish with English words. Now, I find myself supplementing my English with Spanish (especially verbs, for some reason). Two words explain this: Language Poisoning. An acute illness similar to food poisoning, the symptoms are as follows:

1. You have two or more languages simmering in your brain, but you open your mouth and no words come out. In this first stage, you feel as if your thoughts are incommunicable.

2. When you open your mouth to speak, you find yourself vomitously spewing an incomprehensible jumble of words from different languages that not even your mother can understand. In this second stage, you know your thoughts are incommunicable.

3. After a while, you notice that this primarily affects your native tongue. Your other (physical) tongue seems to have lost it’s limber efficiency, and feels like that boiled cow tongue you ate last week: swollen, dry, tough, and in the way of anything nice coming out of your mouth.

4. Suddenly, you find yourself moaning, groaning, and clutching your head, hoping desperately for recovery, but knowing that you must let the ailment run its course and hope that your brain will somehow acquire immunity to language poisoning for the future.

Here are the “never statements” that I dread may have repercussions for the future:

“There has never been Dengue, Typhoid or Malaria in this area of the country.”

“I have never been robbed here.”

“We have never had a big earthquake here. All the big ones are more south.”

Agatha
Above (at the beginning of the post) are pictures of one of the schools that was affected by landslides locally. Behind this building there used to be three more classrooms, but they are so entirely destroyed that you can't tell they used to be there. Classes still need to be given to the students, and now their only choice is to do so outside, and run home anytime it starts to rain (given the continued state of risk for more landslides)