Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande

Living on an island the size of Flores is both a blessing and a curse. There is a saying, “Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande” meaning “Small town, big hell” which is something I experienced today, and unfortunately it was an ugly American (not this one here, a different one) who caused it. When I arrived here, I found out I was not the only gringo in the area with a taste for conservation. There is a young fella from the States named Joseph, locally known as José, who is looking to do a one year professional master’s degree in international development and conservation at Cornell in a few year’s time. One of the requirements for applying for this program is having two years of experience abroad in international development, and through the contacts he made with The Nature Conservancy in the US he landed a spot tagging along with the technicians on community development programs for Defensores de la Naturaleza, the NGO that co-administers the Sierra del Lacandón National Park. From what I understand, he goes with them to communities and sometimes helps with the labor of their various development projects and sometimes lounges in a hammock and reads while the technicians work. As it happens, these technicians of Defensores are also my primary gateway into the communities living and farming in the park, the communities where I am doing my research. Currently, however, I am also actively cultivating other contacts with sway in those communities, such as with the Pastoral Society of the Catholic Church in the area, which behaves as the good cop to Defensores’ bad cop in dealings with the communities and generally serves as a buffer between the two. So the blessing of the small island is that as I was strolling around on Sunday I happened to run into a gentleman from the Pastoral Society as he walked with his lady friend and he invited me to have a beer with them. We ended up having a good discussion of development projects in the area, and the great behemoth that threatens the small-scale subsistence agriculturalists and thus conservation areas, foreign-investor backed land consolidation. In this particular instance, city people with international backers come into what had been primarily a subsistence farming community and with their big money and dirty bargaining methods (apparently a useful phrase when pressuring a reluctant seller is “Sell to me today or I’ll negotiate with your widow tomorrow”), acquire all the land in a community and plant African palm for biodiesel production in place of what had been subsistence corn production. The now landless peasants, with a couple of bucks in their pockets, then go to the places where there is land for the grabbing, conservation reserves. So goes the story. Anyway, this was our topic when José, the ugly American, came into the restaurant by himself and, drunk as a skunk, started hollering “Laurel!” at me and offering to translate. I admit, I probably only understand about 90% of a complex conversation, but I don’t think his Drunklish to Spanish translation would have been a big improvement, and as I was only newly acquainted with these folks myself I wasn’t in a big rush to align myself with José in their eyes. So I told him that we were doing okay and he drifted off. Later, when he thought we were talking about corn fields, he asked if he could join us and I said that if it was okay with him, we’d like to continue our conversation about export-agriculture without him. He drifted off again, but caught our attention when he accidentally stepped on the resident dog’s tail, causing the dog to growl and nip at him and causing him to kick back at the dog in defense/offense. The waitress of the restaurant ran up to José, scolding him with, “That’s not your dog, you can’t kick at him like that!” and José and the dog continued to menace one another around her legs. Apparently José does not have a way with the dogs, as I’d already heard a story about a dog biting José in the leg as he and a field technician were walking by in one of the park communities. He eventually did join our conversation for a while, and said he was a man of corn, which is what Mayans say of themselves, and that he was Nicaraguan, which isn’t true, he’s from New Jersey and not of Nicaraguan origin, though he did learn his Spanish in Nicaragua. Eventually he drifted off again, and when it was time for him to pay his bar tab there was an additional conflict and my colleague from the Pastoral Society said he expected the police to show up at any minute. Anyway, the long and the short of it was because of the small island I had the happy event of running into the gentleman from the Pastoral Society, and he invited me to attend a meeting about water resources with him today, which turned out to be very interesting. And because of the small island I came close to being shamed by a fellow countryman, though in the end my new acquaintances and I just laughed the whole thing off. But something tells me that this is not the last instance of the small island leading to misadventure, whether it involves José or any other of the several hundred people who walk it daily.

Update! I saw José about a week later and he apologized for his behavior and asked me to apologize to my companions for him. Apparently he'd been having a frustrating time. Well...