One of the biggest religious epiphanies in my time since entering the Peace Corps is that everything, even my understanding of age is based upon a U.S. norm. I noticed it at first shockingly as I saw 12-14 year old girls pregnant in a small town just outside of Tegucigalpa. The next shock was during a school enrollment census, while copying names and ID numbers of parents, I learned the ages of some of my community members (their birth year is part of their ID number). One gray-haired and almost hobbling man, I discovered, was born only a few years before my Dad. (Is my Dad that old?) And since then continually observing parents, who seem older than me, but have birth years later in the 1980's than mine. So I've realized that even age and our simplest views are constructed based upong where we live. Yesterday while walking back from planting a school garden a half hour or so up the mountain, I was not very surprised when the profesor (who always points out attractive girls asking, "how about her?") asked me if I noticed that beautiful, skinny babe (I don't really know an appropriate translation for the word he used, jodida). He was talking about Edina, a 17-year-old! I mentioned that dating such a young girl would pose legal problems for a U.S. citizen, but he dismissed this, "Who would ever know?" And for his credit, he's not a chauvanistic pig, it's just the local view on age. A marriage between a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl is a practical bond that happens here because by 30, a man has established himself with land, a house, and likely a car, and by 16, a girl has completed all the education she'll probalby complete, and is in her adult stage of life.
And while planting that garden, I also realized that the kids, though at education levels 3-4 years behind U.S. standards, already know how to construct plant beds for starting lettuce plants on the side of ridiculously steep slopes. They also knew the germination and production times for raddishes, green beans, lettuce, squash and mustard greens. Most of us in the U.S. don't learn to plant a garden until well into our 30's, or even later in more urban areas.
Life is different here. Boys graduate 6th grade when they're 12 years old (if their parents think school is worth the time), they begin working in the fields full time, they build your own shack and start to develop it into a house, and if they're lucky, they marry and move into it before turning 18. In the U.S. an 18-year-old is still in high school! In the U.S. we'd still have four years of college before we think about settling down. But the structure of our education system really affects our view of maturity. We consider a person not mature enough to drink until they're 21, but here, by 21 you can be president of the city council, father of 5 kids, owner of your own house and farmland, and by all means fully independent.
And I think people physically age differently too. By 50 years old, most men in my community look to be in their 70's. However, those who live to their 70's are agile old farts who still carry 100 lb. bags of coffee on their backs and walk a few miles a day to and from their farmlands. And certainly a 20-year old girl with two kids has physically matured faster.
Also, although I feel incredibly smart at meetings where everone, in order to read a handout outlining their budget, has to read slowly and outloud to make sense of the words on a page; I feel incredibly stupid when standing in the back of a truck trying to figure out how we're going to fasten 3 15-foot pvc pipes to a pickup without a rack and up comes Pedro with a short piece of rubber from a bike innertube, a wire flag and a few green palm branches and tightens things as if he had a ratchet strap. I may be resourceful with Google, but he's resourceful in his pickup box. And so, though a 13-year-old boy may have learned the vast majority of what he needs to know to produce a coffee crop, I find myself enlightening 75-year-olds by showing them that the U.S. and Canada share a border, or that plants 'inhale' carbon dioxide and 'exhale' oxygen.
As such, with so many interesting variations of correlations between age and types of intelligence, I have realized that perhaps, though still shocking and apalling to me, I can understand why it's not weird for so many 16-year-olds to be pregnant by a husband who's lived twice as long.
