1969 Botijas, Orocovis, Puerto Rico

1969  Botijas # 1, Puerto Rico. Gloria busy and happy, Botijas # 1, Orocovis, Puerto Rico, voluntary service unit, learning Spanish, going native, the political season, Amalio Colón, Elba Colón, teaching in Bauta Arriba, fellow teacher Sr. Efraín Colón, two years of teaching English as a second language. 

Gloria was busy, wanted and happy at Botijas in Puerto Rico. She organized a junior girls club associated with the church and a community based 4-H club, strong into sewing. She was an excellent baker and she supplied the barrio with baking cakes for birthdays and anniversaries. She gave piano lessons and taught English classes. In addition to these community and church based activities, she taught English in an Orocovis elementary school for two years. And both of us were busy in the local Mennonite fellowship, generally teaching Sunday school which met at our house on Sunday mornings, and there were youth meetings and mid-week services at the various homes. Gloria was an excellent guitar player and often accompanied groups with music which she continued for the rest of her life. I don’t recall that she ever again suffered for a lack of meaningful activities. She simply found them or created them.

The one exception to this adaptability was learning to drive the manual shift on cars and Jeeps which all our vehicles had in Puerto Rico. After explaining to her how a clutch and gears work which seemed second nature to me from my farm tractor days, I took her out on a hill and told her to stop and start again. It was one of the few times in our marriage when she threatened to divorce me. However, some forty-five years later, I do note, we still drive manual shift vehicles, even if new ones are increasingly hard to find.

Botijas # 1 is a barrio of the municipality of Orocovis, about right in the center of Puerto Rico, both east and west and north and south of the rectangular island. A mountainous ridge of about 90 miles runs east and west through center of the island, and from October of 1968 until December of 1970, we lived in this rural part of Puerto Rico. We were about two hours from San Juan to the northeast and equal distant from Ponce, the largest city to the south. The heart of the barrio was a section called las parcelas (the little lots) which the government in a land distribution move had given to the landless Puerto Ricans. These little lots were government subsidized on which one could build a cement house and do a little gardening. Around las parcelas were steep mountains on which Puerto Rican jibaros ( peasants) could cultivate crops such as plantains, bananas, yuca, malanga, and yautía (the latter three tropical root crops). Botijas # 1 was so designated because in the next valley over was Botijas # 2, although I was not aware of any other meaning to the number. I described some of the earlier Puerto Rico developments and the arrival of the Mennonites (1946).

Carlos and Mabel Lugo had begun a voluntary service unit in the barrio in the early sixties, joined by Dean Falb of Orrville, Ohio, and Marjorie Shantz of Kitchener, Ontario, but she had lived in Puerto Rico since the 50s. I think the Mennonites had selected the barrio because it was poor and needed assistance and also because there was no church in the barrio, especially no protestant or evangelical church, even though most of the people were Roman Catholics. The Mennonites were looking to expand their church and service. Furthermore, Lugo helped develop a Lyndon Johnson Office of Economic Opportunity program in the barrio which provided an agricultural project and a clinic of medical services. The Mennonites provided a nurse (Marjorie Shantz) for the clinic and supported the agricultural project. They built a wooden one-story house on the edge of las parcelas for the unit house and activities. By the time we arrived Shantz, better known as Miss Shantz, was still in nursing, but Fred Kauffman was working in community recreation, music lessons, and teaching part-time at the Betania Mennonite School, an elementary school about an hour away near Aibonito. Gloria and I were to serve as unit hosts and directors and find whatever we could to do in community service.

If Gloria was busy and happy; I felt disabled, useless and disoriented because I could not communicate; I knew only English and German. Gloria had spent a summer in Colombia and had studied Spanish for several years, and both Marjorie Shantz and Fred Kauffman were bi-lingual. So I told Gloria and the rest of the unit that I was going cold turkey, total immersion in Spanish for the next two months. I would learn a basic Spanish or I was going home (not possible, of course) or ask for a transfer. Some VSers were in an all-English academy in San Juan and there was also a unit at the Mennonite hospital in Aibonito.

I studied a Puerto Rican Spanish vocabulary and grammar book and a Berlitz book during the day, and after school, evenings and weekends I had a half-dozen little teachers from las parceles. For the months of October to December of 1968 my Spanish teachers were named brothers Pedro (Papo) and Adalberto Rivera, Rubén Rodriguez, Jorge Luis Diaz (Picky Huye), Angel Rivera (Hito), Victoriano Rojas Pagán (Vitín) and the twins Julio and Daniel Cruz (Los Quatitos), all like Jesus, teaching me at the mature age of 12. We played ping pong, took hikes and shot basketball, all in Spanish. They explained names, taught me, and mocked me, but mainly they were good little friends, remaining such for the next two years. 

And then there was church, what a good time to learn a language. I knew the scripture texts in English and German, so now I heard them by native speakers in Spanish. Cliché filled sermons and Christian greetings are wonderful for repetition in learning a language (Gloria a Dios, Amen). Then at evening dinner the native English speakers, Marjorie, Fred and Gloria, played along with the plan of all Spanish unless totally necessary to switch to English. And it was sometimes necessary because learning a language and adapting to a new culture and tropical climate is tiresome. Sometimes I was simply worn out in the evenings. But within a few months, I could get along, or as the Puerto Ricans would say about English, I could defend myself (me defiende).

The farm and rural culture also was language friendly as trucks regularly came by our house with unmistakable vocals announcing the sale of farm produce and livestock such as pigs, eggs, and chickens. Pigs (lechones), a voice would proclaim loudly from a loud speaker on top of the truck, beginning with a barrel-voiced leeeeeechooooon and then going into a high-toned falsetto of eeeees. Then another voice would come with eggs (huevos); unlike the pig man, egg man would say huevos in a low and soft voice as if to make sure he did not break any egg shells. Next came live chickens (pollos) being announced loudly and as they got closer we could see their chicken heads sticking out of the crates. This was the real chicken from the country, what we would today call free-range chickens; our neighbors liked this country meat (del pais) much better than the soft factory raised chicken of the mass chicken houses which were coming into Puerto Rico.

We went native. We soon went in the animal business having a garden, cats, chickens and a pig which eventually became a roast pig for Christmas. We tied the pig in the back lawn as many of the local people did. The pig had a special status in part because of the roast pig on an open spit was considered a delicacy, good for sandwiches and certainly for the Christmas dinner. I was interested in the farm operations, visiting with local farmers, and when we bought our pig, a little boar, I castrated him not thinking much of it. However, quickly word spread around the barrio that the Americano knew how to castrate pigs and I was asked to help out with a few jobs around the barrio. It gave me instant cultural caché and respect; I discovered that only one other person in the barrio was always called in to do the castrations. One more life-long result from our back-yard pig was vegetarianism. The pig became Gloria’s pet in the course of feeding and caring for it. The pig was a good-natured Wilbur type, and Gloria was scandalized by our eating him at Christmas. She became a vegetarian soon afterwards.  

We arrived during the election of governor season; it was participatory democracy with an intensity I had never experienced before. Every little house seemed to have a flag hanging from the porch, a little blue palm tree for the New Progressive (statehood) Party or a little red jíbaro straw-hatted peasant for the Popular Democratic (commonwealth) Party. Truck and car caravans wound around the hills with loud speakers playing party tunes and proclamations. One heard the virtues of the party or an announcement of a rally to be held at a nearby park or square. In addition to the loudspeakers, a band of young men rode on back of trucks, often hanging perilously outside the racks, shouting and whooping of land, bread and freedom or something related to statehood, security and progress.  The Popular Democratic Party had been in power since the first governor Luis Muñoz Marin ran the government in 1948, but it was badly divided for this election.

There were several smaller parties, the most visible was the Independence Party with its green and white flag. Its partisans wanted Puerto Rico to become a sovereign nation. In many ways, Puerto Rican politics have been defined by the debate on the status question of these three options. On Election Day, the voters were all locked into the local school buildings and halls for hours where they voted; apparently an attempt to avoid voter fraud of going from one site to another to vote. When it was over, a wealthy cement industrialist from Ponce of the New Progressive Party Luis A. Ferré won. Even though the statehood New Progressive Party was in power while we were in Puerto Rico, given the power and appeal of nationalism, I thought eventually the independence movement would win out. But fifty years later, I see that the three parties still have about the same relative strength among the electorate with the two large parties winning elections more or less on alternate cycles and the Independence movement having about five percent of the support of the people.

Among statehood supporters were our farmer neighbor Amalio Colón and his daughter Elba Colón both of whom kept on eye on us, sometimes in a self-appointed way. Amalio was a jibaro philosopher and a gentleman farmer who was quite sure that the State Department had sent us to Puerto Rico to prepare us for service later on in Latin America, if not as diplomats than in the CIA; he was proud to be associated with both. At times he raised my status, especially after a few drinks, noting that I was being groomed to become governor of Brazil. Okay, I may have the office and the country wrong, but that was also in the spirit of Colon's stories,   

Amalio Colón saw Puerto Rico with a vital role as the gateway between the United States and Latin America, especially in teaching the merits of a democratic liberal society. He would explain the three branches of government in the United States, how they functioned, and would name all the states and their capitols, hoping for the day when Puerto Rico would join Hawaii and Alaska as states. Ironically although he knew English quite well, he spoke only Spanish, unless he had a few drinks, and was quite traditional in his customs. He invited us to coffee picking on his farm and to typical meals at his home, noting that this cultural immersion will all be helpful for our later diplomatic careers. 

There was some truth to his notion of Puerto Rico as a gateway to Latin America. The Peace Corps occasionally dropped off new volunteers with a only a few dollars in our area for a kind survival orientation because we were such an isolated rural community. Inevitably one of the neighbors would send them up to Amalio Colón for a visit. The Peace Corp folks came back even more disoriented by Colón's generosity.  

Elba Colón his daughter was an English teacher in the local school and soon co-opted us into the programs there. She had a lot of energy, was quite well versed in education and English, and in the early 70s was named teacher of the year for the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Aside from her outstanding classroom teaching, she was also the main director of all pageants at the Botijas school. These often had some Puerto Rican heritage theme such as Puerto Rico’s adaptation of Columbus Day, day of the race, with indigenous Indians, Spanish conquerors, and African Blacks. 

She wrote songs and pageants for special events at Christmas, national holidays, or Holy Week. These were all quite educational, but the main feature which everyone expected and talked about weeks later was how an actor’s pants fell down or an actress’ skirt flew up high. Even though the actors professed an innocent outrage, this facade all seemed to be a part of the joke, with the audience whooping and clapping. It was never clear to me that Elba may not have set up these costume malfunctions as a part of the staging.

One day, Elba told me that the Orocovis school district had an opening for an English teacher in the new year and wondered if I was interested. I visited the superintendent’s office in Orocovis, an elderly man, and soon learned that he was a Baptist because he was quite concerned that I as a Mennonite would be able to affirm the oath, even if I could not swear it. I don’t recall whether it was the pledge of allegiance or a specific Puerto Rican oath, but I assured him that I thought I could affirm it. By January I was teaching teaching at Bauta Arriba, a barrio on a mountain on the other side of Orocovis, about a 40-minute drive from Botijas # 1 where we lived. Arriba means high, and Bauta Arriba was high up the mountains, cool and I thought even cold so that I wore a sweater or jacket.

The kids wore bare arms. I’ll never forget on chilly and often foggy January and February mornings, the school children came running out of their homes and up and down the mountain trails in short sleeves, seemingly well acclimated to the cold. The community was quite isolated and the students were pure country, reserved, but good natured and open to whatever the teacher wished to do. All the buildings were located on a small compound with about two classrooms under one roof, and a separate building for kitchen and dining room.  The school principal was very supportive to what he considered my modern educational philosophy of wanting to motivate the students. Basically he left me alone, with one exception. The principal was gay and out of control sexually, reaching for my legs and groping me whenever we were sitting at a table or behind the desk. I had been around hot animals long enough to know that little could be done and the best strategy was simply to avoid him or to meet him standing in the open in public places. He left after one semester, and I never heard of him again.

The second teacher in my building across the thin wall was Sr. Efraín Colón. He was double my age and approaching retirement, seasoned and patient, and an excellent mentor. He also lived in Botijas # 1, so we rode to school together and had good discussions on every subject from family to religion to politics. He had a large family and was not strongly ideological and personified the meaning of patience, and loved indirect speech. He once commented about our gay principal, wondering if he would find a wife. His classes were mainly quiet and his students listened to him and respected him. Mine were loud and participatory, with the students talking often and listening sparingly.

Sr. Colón seemed to have a generous view of multi-culturalism, and associated our different teaching styles as simply the difference between an American and a Puerto Rican. He had the same live and let live approach regarding religion, I a Mennonite and he a Catholic. When one of his granddaughters had first communion, he invited Gloria and me to their house for a party, and they had roasted a goat, the highest meat entrée in his menu. He was very much at home with his identity and at home with mine. On Friday afternoons, we would get our checks, and then we stopped at a little store, and he had a beer, and I had a malta corona. Looking at his photo today, I see a lean, thin and short man, but I always thought of him as being taller than I was. All the teachers were mister and miss; it did not matter if you taught Spanish or English or math, apparently a legacy of the colonial American schools. But Sr. Colón was, well, Señor Colón.

At the end of the semester, I transferred to the local junior high school at Botijas No. 1 where I taught the rest of my two years. In broad strokes, the educational philosophies in Puerto Rico had many similarities to those I had learned at Malone University and Hoover High School, with some variation depending on the age of the teacher. The biggest local difference was in the communal nature of the rural Hispanic culture; there was considerable encouragement and tolerance for sharing and helping each other on lessons, what would have been considered copying or even cheating in an American context. If Adalberto, the smartest boy in the class, knew the answers it was considered appropriate to copy what Adalberto had written into his notebook, sometimes this even applied to tests.

Whatever my training in positive motivation, discipline was still needed, and the preferred classroom order  was simply my friend Sr. Colon’s status of respect. But for the rest of us mortals, there were options such as writing on the chalkboard whatever infractions it was at least ten times, shaming the person. For more serious infractions, there was the cocotaso, a hard rap on the head with the teacher’s finger or fist; a milder form was a tap on the head with a wooden pencil. I know of no spankings such as were used in the American system during the fifties. During my two years there, I was thinking I was quite a lenient teacher but when I visited the island several decades later, one of my former students remembered me mainly getting some cocotassos from me. I’d like to think that was because I gave so few, but anyway, after two years of teaching in Puerto Rico, my classroom experiences ended.     

Much of this chapter comes from my personal files of photos and letters from our Puerto Rico days of 1968 to 1970.  I wrote an article on our life in Botijas “Who’s Helping Whom?” in Agape (July-August, 1969), a publication of the Mennonite Board of Missions (now Mennonite Mission Network) voluntary service program.