The Worst People of the Year

Like Santa, all good-lists must have bad-lists; I suppose to keep harmony in the universe. Since we created “The nicest people of the year” list in a previous blog, we had to include “The worst people of the year” as well. We are of course saddened that such a list must even exist. We didn’t want to create one, nor did we want any of the people listed below to be on it. It was their choice. Circumstances could have been different had these folks been a little warmer, a little more kind-hearted, or even just slightly less lousy during our time together. We are just presenting the facts here.

Our first winner is Mercy. Mercy was a fellow teacher at Academia Europea, the language school in Matagalpa. Sweet and nice at first, this 60 year old Nicaraguan native, who was also a U.S. citizen and lived part-time in San Clemente, looked more European than Nicaraguan. She was one of Matagalpa’s wealthier citizens, and we learned also one of the most controlling. She displayed this need to run things by convincing the Academia Europea representative, Marcos, to make her the school director. Under her leadership, our schedule became confusing and disorganized, communication broke down between the office and teachers, poor decisions were made and their clean-up passed to others, and meetings were scheduled at inane times of the day (like when were weren’t at school teaching). Also, more than once while walking home in the rain from school, she drove right by us without offering a ride, even though we lived on the route she drove to her house. Mercy also consistently talked about herself and her “wonderful entrepreneurial skills” (she also was opening a restaurant out of her house in the middle of the city to add to these entrepreneurial dreams). A final contributor to her being placed on this list was her unsatisfactory job in preparing and teaching her lessons, but yet always telling others how they should be teaching theirs.

Next is Lisa. You may remember from her our La Marche farm-stay entries. She was the lavender lady, whose cold-shouldered personality during our second week of work left us feeling blue. The crux of the problem was her lack of communicating her expectations and her ever-changing personality. The worst of our time was when Trisha and I took a day-trip on a Sunday, came back early because of rain, ate lunch and then took the remainder of the day off since our day-trip was cut short. We were treated very poorly for the next day as Lisa obviously thought we should have been working once we returned (though she never told us to). It was also mind-numbing listening to her brag constantly about her life experiences and how great her son and daughter were (they lived in the U.S.) We were happy to leave Lisa and her lavender.

While in Paris in October, Trisha and I went to a lovely restaurant near an antique district for lunch. It felt unbelievably Parisian with its decorative table settings and red leather seats. The food was tremendous as well. We thought we had the perfect lunch in the perfect setting. Our waitress, whom was neither nice nor rude while doing her job, seemed to be fine too. When we first ordered we asked her for some tap water. We made our request in French (words not sentences) and in English. She complied and brought us a clay carafe filled with water. It looked like tap water, tasted like tap water, and we didn’t think of it again. Until she brought bill. The storm clouds of rage, despair, and confusion rained down on our perfect, Parisian lunch. 6 Euros for water!!! “Holy smokes”, I wanted to tell her in French. I frantically searched the extremely busy restaurant for her, trying to grab her attention. Five minutes, ten minutes….she must have gone out on break. Finally I stood up and found her, and as patiently as possible inquired about this charge. In her English, which became conspicuously broken during this conversation, she claimed that was what we ordered….water, 6 Euros. I told her we said tap water and that what we drank tasted like tap water. Obviously this problem wasn’t resolved in our favor, as this waitress makes the list.

“Buen Provencial Trisha!” These three words, muttered from the mouth of our Xela, Guatemala, host Estella, still give Trisha chills. These chills are the result of a week spent with a women who truly only cared for the money we were providing for our stay, rather than being a hospitable host. Arranged by our language school in Xela, we assumed Estella would be like many of our other Central American hosts - warm, gracious, and caring. We were wrong. First, she was only warm the first time we met her. All subsequent encounters rarely evoked a smile. Second, the things she was suppose to provide for our homestay, which were promised as part of our payment, were barely up to standard. There was not enough food, the bottled water was empty our first three days until we discovered that she had been hiding the refills, and the room we stayed in was not set up when we arrived. I believe that if Estella had given even an inkling of warmth throughout the week, we probably could have overlooked most to the promised provisions. But ultimately this bad cocktail prompted our early departure, back in March. By the way, “Buen Provencial” roughly means “I hope you are satisfied with your meal,” and Estella said it all the time after she passed us our meager portions.

Unfortunately Xela, Guatemala has another of its residents on our list (our week there wasn’t our best of the year obviously). Linda was the high-pitched director of our Spanish language school, whose saccharine smile and artificial friendliness tried to convince us that everything in our homestay was fine. Explaining politely to her that our situation in Estella’s house was less than satisfactory (i.e. lack of food and bottled water – all of which we ended up going out and supplementing on our own), she in-turn made us feel as if we had the problem. I guess being that Estella was her sister-in-law, she wasn’t quite ready to admit that maybe she wasn’t being the best host. Outside of that, Linda was tolerable throughout our week at the Spanish school. It was apparent however that our Spanish teachers, both of whom we liked, were very intimidated by their boss. When Linda gave an order, everyone kowtowed to her demands. Not us though - we jumped ship early.

If we were to time travel to our first weeks in Velletri, Rome with Paul and Paula, there is no way we would have foreseen Paula being on this list. This mother of three lived a face-paced and frantic life, but was generally a good host to both of us. As with a few other experiences this year, true colors seem to fly on the second week and the relationship we had with Paula became increasingly strained from our point-of-view (Paul wasn’t part of this equation as he worked all day and at night was rather reclusive and not talkative). The big factor was her lack of feedback and involvement in what we were doing. Why were we there exactly? We did a job, but were never thanked for our work. In fact she never looked at our work when it was completed. We did their dishes every night without being asked and never heard anything in reply. At one point I did some ironing for her bed-and-breakfast bed sheets, but didn’t quite understand her direction on the amount she wanted completed. This led to her frustrated exasperation on my lack of progress, and her telling me, “Well I could have done those sheets that took you an hour in 3 minutes.” That really didn’t bother me too much because I don’t really care about my ironing prowess, but it pushed Trisha over the edge on what she viewed as an unfair comment to her husband. Toward the end of the second week we were feeling more and more anti-Paula, as we had spent much energy asking her questions and creating conversation, and she in return asked us nothing. Our departure was the most surreal. No “Thanks for your work”, or “Good luck.” Instead it was “Look Paul, I think there is a new crack in the train station from the earthquake” and off they went to look at it. We then had a brief goodbye and they departed. Was it something we did?

The final addition to the worst-list is of course Gerda, the camel farm lady. I’m not sure if she deserves this list, as I truly believe she had some unaddressed emotional issues that some therapy might help. But her actions and the way we felt during our week on her farm can only land her here, in our blog entry. I am not going to recall the erratic behaviors, early-morning phone calls, emotional pleadings in a parked car on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, and the boa constrictor. No, that was all covered in a few blogs ago. I’ll just say that I have never met anyone quit like this women, and I am hoping that God spares me from meeting another any time soon.

In conclusion, it is interesting to note that this list’s members all fall into the same category. Can you figure it out? Trisha and I have both wondered why it is so. All the members are female, and fall between the ages 40-60; roughly the same age categories as our mothers (Another woman you may recall from and earlier blog, Angela, was in this age-range too. She didn’t qualify for the list, but her reaction to spicy chili we made for her almost won her a spot). Do we have some aversion to middle-aged women? We both love our mother and mother-in law, and have no problems with either. Interestingly we identified this phenomenon around April, and even joked about its common occurrence for a while. As this pattern continued, our joking turned into fear. Does our next farm-stay have a middle-aged woman? What is she going to be like? We unfortunately did not get to break the pattern, as our last host was Gerda, and our best woman host was Lucy, age 38. Further research is not planned, but we’re hoping our moms are still nice when we return home.