Hilarity, Rarity, and Liquid-arity

Good tidings from Belize! Summer has been welcomed with its absence of school bells and screaming uniformed students; life in the office and school library has been quiet and productive.

I have three things to share, which I hope will capture the essence of my “nearly-approaching-one-full-year-in-Belize” state of mind. They are, as the title of this entry gives away, pertaining to general Belizean hilarity, divine instances of rarity, and as I have so spoofed the JVI language of “solidarity,” my recent musings of “liquid-arity.”

Hilarity

American Idol has always represented nothing but ridiculousness to me. Whether it be the contrived stage scene, the endless Coca-Cola and Ford commercials, the promotion of good looks and bad talent, Ryan Seacrest (shudder), my mom calling in her toll-free vote—or worse, texting it—over and over again, the cruel and embarrassing set up of people like William Hung who will reap the benefits of a sympathetic but mocking crowd only until next season, this show has come to embody a lot of what really bothers me about our American culture. Perhaps the worst part is the fact that admittedly, I have watched and enjoyed it, all the while knowing how ridiculous it really is.

In Belize, however, the reality-TV meets talent-quest program is a horse of a different color. I recently had the opportunity to watch the premier of Duets, an hour of 3 minute auditions by self-proclaimed talented Belizean duos. It was set up much like the first rounds of American Idol except, of course, everything was done Belize-style, which is to say, not as, umm, professionally? Excessively? The host, William Neal, was outfitted much like the overly stylish American host Ryan Seacrest with chic glasses, a fashionable and rather fancy shirt, and—duh—jeans, and he even said such Seacresty things as, “You’re not sure what you’re going to have but you’re going to have something spectacular once the cameras are turned on … So let’s turn the cameras on!” He interviewed each pair, like Seacrest, before and after they performed, trying to get them to say how great they think they are and how well they’ll do in the rest of the competition.

The judges—oh boy the judges—were hilarious. They too were set up in a similar panel to the American version, with Ann, Santiago, and Jenny as the respective Randy, Simon, and Paula personas. They each played their part, except rather awkwardly—Ann usually commented first, but with a tremendous lack of insight; Santi would look over the notes he had scribbled down during the performance and report back to the pair rather strangely in the 3^rd person reading directly from his paper: “they had good extension on the lifts, but poor eye contact”; and Jenny—a true character and my personal favorite—who actually knows a lot about music and singing, would supply useful comments like “sing from your stomach, don’t shout from your throat” yet, at the same time, would always end with something that Paula Abdul would say: “I’m sure you’ll go on! Great job!” During the performances, the judge’s expressions especially got me as the camera would cut, mid-song, to their ogling looks of joyous astonishment to sickly embarrassment. Where the American version is manipulated in the audition stages by advanced TV editing and professional camera maneuvering, the Duets judges’ reactions were exposed at unexpected times during the acts as were the angles and shots of the performers. Not so much flattering …

These auditions were held in the lobby of the Bliss Performing Arts Center, a beautiful modern building overlooking the sea here in Belize City used for dance, art classes, and big performances. In just this first episode, the talents ranged from modern, hip-hop, and bolero dancing to singing and guitar-accompanying to expository drama. There were old folk and young, married couples and priests, kids and teenagers alike. Their performances induced the same embarrassed laughter as the initial stages of American Idol with similar crapshoot stints—you never know who will sign up for these things.

The best part is that because Belize is so small, Belize City being even smaller, even I, the American volunteer who has only been here for a year, recognized many of the faces on the screen. Santi, the judge, is the owner of an importation company whose name is perhaps more well known than the Prime Minister’s; Jenny is a counselor in real life, who I actually spoke with earlier this year when things were looking down; Maria knew one of the husbands of a husband/wife dance act saying, “Hah! I’ve talked to him on the phone before!”; Trey knew one of the teenage singers doing a female Streisand/Dion rendition from the youth group he works with at Calvary Chapel; and so on and so on. Between the ten of us watching the show (the JVs, the Panton family, and some randoms), every performer could be linked to, if not by direct blood relation then by work, friends, friends of friends, or some other type of pervasive Belizean gossip; the whole country is one big Kevin Bacon game. In my mind, you have to have a lot more cajones to put yourself and your sharp/flat/atonal voice or slippery dance moves or terrible acting ability out there what with all the commentary you know you’ll get from the peanut gallery—the whole country—the next day.

I don’t remember a time in the past year when I laughed so genuinely as I did while watching Duets. The reasons for which (the descriptions of the various abysmal or not-so-abysmal performances and their deserving or not-so-deserving judgments) are not even worth trying to re-create here; I would never cheat them of their cultural and contextual hilarity. The comedy of it all was so … Belize … that I found myself overcome with affection for this place and its people. I doubt that I’ll return with open arms to the overwhelming and rather annoying seasons of American Idol—like most things these days, I find the Belize version much more likable.

Rarity

Last weekend, Mrs. Marin and I took the youth group to Chetumal, Mexico. Chetumal, famous in Belize for its Sam’s club and McDonalds, is about a two and a half hour drive from Belize City and makes for a perfect Saturday shopping excursion. As shortages and monopoly race each other up the pole of price inflation here in Belize, many folks journey across the northern border to find refuge in the wholesale Mexican marketplaces.

A lot of the kids in our youth group had never been, and I was taken aback by their exuberance towards things like highway overpasses and the lines of grocery carts in the parking lot of the mall. I unexpectedly suffered a bit of reverse culture shock; I haven’t stepped foot in anything remotely resembling a mall in over a year and was surprised with the disgust that flooded my mind regarding consumerism and advertising. I hadn’t thought much about these things in a realistic way in just about twelve months.

Belize is certainly modern in its own turn, but because it is so small and because it has absorbed more of the Caribbean culture rather than the Latin style of its neighbors (oh yes, and because it was an English colony until 1981), it has nothing like the developments of the Mexican city and suburb, shopping plazas, and price competition. And there I was, in the middle of a strangely familiar but strangely foreign scene of traffic lights, nicely paved streets, and mannequins in shop windows in downtown Chetumal, Mexico.

The real gem of my trip was our experience at Sam’s club. The first half of the day was dedicated to gazing through the windows and shops of the mall and eating greasy fast food in food courts. The second half of the day, however, was per orders made from the students’ mothers—every single one of them had been given money to buy the Chetumal staples from Sam’s Club: huge bales of toilet paper and 5 gallon containers of laundry detergent.

The kids were adorable in their shopping. They wound up and down the aisles all together—15 of them—and fit their necessities into two shopping carts. They stopped every few feet to admire the goods lining the shelves in their ridiculous bundles; I thought we would never get through the candy aisle. Most of them brought little calculators, which they didn’t know how to use, to calculate the currency differences. When they couldn’t figure it out, they asked me, and marveled at the way that something labeled $600 in Pesos turned out to be only $120 Belize. When finally everyone had collected what they—their mothers—needed, we headed to the check-out line.

I stood, surrounded by 15 loud and joyful black kids, a mountain of about 500 rolls of toilet paper, and a young Mexican cashier who was trying to yell to me—in Spanish—that only three people were allowed to buy on the one membership card we had. After finally quieting the students enough to mentally translate what this speedy Spanish speaker was trying to tell me, I panicked—like the stereotypical American, most likely—and immediately decided that all but three of the kids should return what they had grabbed to the shelves. Defeated, I started to explain this to the kids. They had none of it. “Miss, we can all pay together! Isn’t that the same as just one paying?” Good point.

In words and broken sentences that would shame the 10 years of Spanish teachers and professors I had, I bargained with the teller to let us pool our money together and make the purchase as one with the lone card in our possession. He agreed reluctantly, as we both understood that doing this simply rearranged the fact that what we were doing was against the store’s rules. In any case, there I found myself with thousands of pesos pouring into my hands from all directions—Kriol yelling in one year, Spanish in the other—and with adorable and lively black faces bumping all around me, contrasting the light-skinned and elegant features of the employees curiously gathering around our register. And of course, the acoustics of the warehouse were such that our raucous was amplified throughout, rendering stares and glares from the Mexican patrons.

In those fleeting moments, I felt freer than perhaps I ever have before; it was a rarity I truly appreciated—being the only white person in a Sam’s Club, counting money bilingually, and being anonymous, in a way, to my former life in the States where nothing like that would/could/did ever happen to me. Not unlike watching Duets, that experience in Sam’s Club instilled in me a pride for being associated in this skewed way with Belizeans, vibrant and energetic, and it washed me with a deep gratitude for the happenstance circumstances that this country has offered to me.

Liquid-arity

A few short words on my philosophical musings of late . . .

Solidarity, as the guiding principle of countless organizations and missions around the world, is a concept that I am wary of. Aiming, I suppose, for unity and fellowship most prominently with the economically oppressed, solidarity has become rather cliché, I think. It’s one of those terms that are thrown around quite a bit, but I think it’s more loaded than the university service-trip colloquialism it has become. I was interested in JVI specifically to learn more about what solidarity means by “living” it, yet after one year of supposedly doing so, I am further than ever before from a grounded understanding of its manifestation in the world. So much of our lives exist in our mind, even when we try to extend ourselves, that I don’t know if attempting to unify my reality with anyone else’s—my sister’s, my community mates’, or my Belizean friend Angie’s—is the most appropriate goal.

Liquid-arity, solidarity in its liquid form of course, is at least a better descriptor, for me, of the intentions and relationships I have developed throughout my experience of life thus far (a mere 23 years, I know). In Belize specifically, I have experienced union and fellowship, community and friendship, that has transcended economic means, I guess, but I still don’t know if that “solidifies” my reality with that of those around me as there are things about my life—past and future—that will forever separate me from the people I work and live among here. My relationships, as I have come to understand them, seem more fluid; I share what my perceptions are, and in return, must try to understand the perceptions of everyone else. It’s not easy, and I’m not very good at it, but by at least admitting off the bat that the best we can do as human beings is mix together the juices of our spirits, stories, beliefs, pains, joys, and love, I have been relieved of trying to understand what it means to live side by side in solidarity. Like any good high school chemistry student knows, a solution must be composed of a solute dissolved into a solvent; my relationships with my housemates and with my Belizean community have changed me in that same way.

Ultimately, perhaps a solid is produced through this alchemy of life. Until then though, I’ll stick with my liquid experiments and hope that what I pour out from my heart is filled up again with the liquid-arity of others.