Time, Place, and Rodrigo

"From that day on...I was running." -Forrest Gump

Monday morning was the beginning of my ESL teaching career. The night before school began the principal of the school gave me my schedule - a whopping 29 classes per week, amounting to four more than when I taught full-time in the states. I only had two on Monday, but had the full load the rest of the week. Of course there are highs and lows when teaching kids in a language they're mostly unfamiliar with, but the most stressful part of teaching has not been the students (unlike high school algebra in the intercity, Salvadoran kids actually want to learn English!). What gets under my skin is the lack of attention to time that the people of the developing world hold. If you've been to the Third World, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

My most recent favorite author, David James Duncan, writes about what a "non sense of place" can teach a person. This short little phrase of his went into my head about a week ago, bounced around for a time, and came out slightly altered to describe the Salvadoran situation as a non sense of time. "So what then," I keep asking myself, "is non sense of time teaching me?"

Lesson One: In a timeless world, we control the length and purpose of our actions more fully. Time isn't out there telling us to start, stop, go faster, slow down; it doesn't control us, we control it. The freedom of time-less-ness is like being naked. There's a vulnerability in it which leads to fear, and while the fear is unnecessary, the vulnerability can open us to new depths of comfort within ourselves. When time isn't out there giving orders, we're freed to take orders from something more essential to the human form, our own desires.

Lesson Two: When you're super poor and there's no future in front of you, time has little sway. You start to take orders from more fundamental things: first, your stomach; second, the rest of your body; third, your heart/spirit/emotions/soul/whatever-you-call-it-thing-inside that needs filled with love. The only time worth worrying about is the amount of time you have each day to meet these needs of survival.

Duncan says - and I totally agree with - the following:

I sense two things here. Both sound silly to the rationalistic half of my head. But I feel in my native heart and bones, first of all, that most of us drastically underestimates - with tragic results for our...greater selves - just how primitive we still are: how basic we are, despite our modernity. And the second thing I feel we underestimate - again with tragic results - is how spiritually alive and capable we are.

Freedom from time allows us to engage with no worry of our engagement's end; instead, we can give ourselves for as long as needed, as wholly and completely as needed, as the lovely gifts of grace that we were created to be.

* * * * *

"That's where you went wrong," said the prophet. "You looked at the scriptures. You should have also looked into his eyes."

Freedom from the grip of time let's us do just that - look into a person's eyes long enough to see something more than irises and pupils. When you look, truly look, into someone's eyes you meet them somewhere which place and time disappear, where we are totally vulnerable, but not afraid. The afraid person never makes eye contact, it's too much of a risk. When you look someone in the eye and really see them, it's impossible not to fall in love. I've fallen in love many times in El Salvador; it's why I keep coming back. Something about this place allows me to love so easily.

My latest love's name is Rodrigo. He and I shouldn't know each other. Rationality says that we should have never met. The poorest of the poor, only six years old, from the most remote area of a mostly forgotten war-torn nation, with no father, barely a mother, and almost as little going for him as possible in this world, should not be best friends with a rich (certainly by Salvadoran standards), twenty-six year old gringo from the most powerful (read: reckless) country in the world who barely speaks his language, let alone understands his life situation. The only thing mi amigo Rodrigo and I have in common is the light which pours forth from our eyes - but of course this is the only thing that matters.

Rodrigo and I sing, read lots of books, eat most meals, play cards-frisbee-basketball-soccer-anything we can come up with, sleep in hammocks, search for turtles, walk home from school hand-in-hand, make dinner, console crying infants - all together. When we don't see each other in the evening there is a void. His host mother verifies this daily. My heart echos his. As illogical as love usually is, as far from expected, as far from rational, as far from home as one could get - but yet somehow totally at home - this is Rodrigo for me.

Why is this possible? Simply because what is written - the rational reasons for us to never meet, communicate, enjoy each other - are the diction of time and place, but both are walls easily torn down by looking directly into the eyes of the people around you and letting them do the same.