When preparing to come to Nicaragua and then enter into service, all Peace Corps Volunteers inevitably do a lot of reading up on its culture, and one of the things that all this literature stresses is how Nicaragua, like many latin cultures, is one that is based on subtleties in interpersonal relations. Instead of coming out and declaring a grievance with you, nicas will instead grow cold, leaving you to "read between the lines," if you will, to figure out what it was that you did wrong. While this is certainly true in most social and work interactions (there was a day when one of the women I work with refused to talk to me, because I chose to use my own poster papers for a project instead of her torn and stained ones) it is also paradoxically not so with certain topics, especially physical appearance.
In the U.S. we are often sensitive when it comes to this topic, especially in regards to weight and race, so much that we can become very circuitous in our descriptions of people. Not so in Nicaragua, where people will call it as they see it, describing people by the color of their skin without blinking, and telling you to your face if they believe you have gained or lost weight. This is often painful for many female volunteers especially since the Nica diet of excessive oil and sugar tends to pack on the pounds, and we come from a culture that prizes thinness as the pinnacle of beauty. It hurts when someone tells us, after gaining just one or two pounds, that we are fatter than we were last week. Oh, and they notice. There was a time that I went up probably just three pounds, but a community health worker thought it enough to tell me, "Teresita, when you came to Nicaragua you were thin, now you're fat! You're so fat!" It stung, especially because, seriously?! Three pounds. Three pounds! That's not enough to go from thin to fat in my book, but in a culture that deals with subtleties all the time, it was at least enough for comment.
Thankfully I have since learned that these remarks are rarely made maliciously, and are often meant as a complement, since women are considered more attractive when they are rocking more curves. Like I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the word, "hermosa," which means beautiful, is often used to describe big women. Since being here, I have become much more comfortable with my body, so now when people say I'm a little fatter, I don't take offense, in fact I tend to enjoy it. My favorite example was when a few medical students from Holland were doing a week of practicals in my town. In the U.S. they would have been models probably, they were pretty, and had the ideal height and body size for the job, but the women in the casa materna kept on commenting on how they were too tall, and too skinny. To emphasize this point, one of the women said, "yeah, they don't have what Teresita has," as she patted my thigh, right below my butt affectionately. After everything I have learned, it made me feel pretty loved. Thanks ladies.
