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Sandi Falconer

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

I sat and watched Mama (that’s what she told us to call her) make tortillas in her outdoor kitchen. She was industrious. While one tortilla cooked she began flattening the next. Pat, pat, pat. The gentle pounding of her hand against the dough was rhythmic and my thoughts drifted away. I was in Totogalpa, Nicaragua. I’d signed up as a volunteer in the Canada World Youth program. But it was different than what I’d imagined.

I’d envisioned the way my muscles would ache after a day of manual labour and I looked forward to the satisfying feeling I would have knowing that I was making a difference. In reality, I was spending a lot of days sitting and watching. I went to a farming co-operative to see honey being harvested, I met an artist who painted shells and one day, our group was taught how to build more efficient clay ovens for local families, but we only made two. I was learning a lot but I often wondered if I was not more a hindrance than help.

I had hoped that I would be speaking fluent Spanish within weeks. I wanted to be able to exchange stories with my host family. Yet after four weeks of immersion the only thing I could confidently say in Spanish was “Necesito llevar almuerzo manana por favor,” which roughly translated to: “Please make me lunch for tomorrow.”

An abrupt halt in noise brought my attention back to the outdoor kitchen. Mama had stopped patting the dough and was making a gesture. “You want me to come over there?” I asked, even though I knew that speaking to her in English was futile. As I stepped inside, I felt heat radiating from the fire and the smoke made me cough. Mama, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered by the smoke. She handed me a small clump of dough and, using her own piece, demonstrated how to manipulate it into a thick patty. She flattened the edges while simultaneously spinning the dough in a circle using her palm. I tried to imitate her but couldn’t get the motions right, and my patty sat on the counter disfigured and uneven. She looked at it and said something in Spanish. I replied in English that it might be faster for her to make them herself. And maybe that applied to more than tortillas, I thought.

When I arrived back in Canada, my skin was darker and my hair was fairer but otherwise I felt the same as I did when I had left. On the drive home my parents were eager to hear about my trip. I had stories of eating fresh mangoes, visiting coffee plantations and playing soccer on the street. They let me ramble on uninterrupted, but when I stopped talking they hesitantly asked about what we did in the way of volunteering, the presumed purpose of the pricey trip.

“We dug a garden for a school,” I said. I could see my own uncertainty reflected in my Dad's face through the rearview mirror. All we did in six weeks was dig a garden?

Before I left I had read online that I’d probably be spending between 21 to 28 hours per week volunteering with additional hours in the evenings and weekends to support community activities. We didn’t spend more than 10 hours total digging the garden and I felt like I was getting in the way of the community initiatives I was involved with more than working alongside them.

In Totogalpa, I remember being ready to give up on tortilla making but Mama took my hands in hers. She gently tapped my fingers against the edges of the dough, pushing it flat and spinning it in a circle. Pat, pat, pat. Once the dough was flattened, she peeled it off the counter and in one swift movement placed it over the fire. Then she took another piece of dough and put it in my hand. I was to try again. When we finished I proudly carried the basket full of tortillas into the house. Mama took out two plates from the cupboard, and spooned a heap of black beans on to each. “Buen provecho,” she said. I repeated the customary wishing of good health, and we ate in silence.

It took a while before I understood the real value of my trip. A few months after I arrived back in Canada, I saw a woman becoming visibly upset with a faulty ticket dispenser in Vancouver’s Greyhound station. She repeated the same sentence over and over in an unfamiliar tongue. She looked to the man standing closest but he shifted his gaze to the floor and shook his head.

At once, my time in Nicaragua came back to me – six weeks of hot sun and sticky fingers. As I watched that woman I thought of Mama, and I imagined it was Mama at the ticket booth. I took out my earphones and walked over to see if I could help with the machine. After the bus station incident, I started to see Mama more and more in the faces of strangers.

It is impossible to help someone you don’t understand, and this is often the problem when good-intentioned volunteers travel to developing countries. But you don’t need to travel outside of Canada to make a difference in someone else’s life. The most important thing you can do is build a relationship with someone different from yourself.

Kaitlyn Bailey lives in Victoria.

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