DR Drama

Our host mom’s 32 year old daughter, Tarsis, and 10 year old granddaughter,Demi have been in town staying with us since we got here, and they just left this past Sunday. They came in to help our host mom because she got sick right afterwe got here. Demi was great and such a fun little girl to play with. She always had patience with our language barrier, and loved to play cards with us. We taught her “Spoons”, or “Cucharas”, and she absolutely loved it, which meant we played more spoons these past two weeks than we have in our whole life.

Tarsis was great too. She cooked every meal for us, had multiple conversations with us, and took us around town a little. Then over a period of a day or two, her attitude drastically changed. She stopped cooking for us, stopped talking to us, and most of all, completely ignored us. She would avoid making eyecontact with us at all costs, and would never respond to anything we asked her. It was weird. We knew something was going on and that it had to be somethingto do with us, but we had no idea what it was. We racked our brains of all the possibilities and still had no idea. So we walked around our house on eggshells for a week, feeling uncomfortable in our home, with each day only getting worse.

Finally, on Saturday, Justin had a conversation with her. The conversation went a little like this:
J: “Hiciste algo anoche?” (did you do anything last night?)
T: “No entiendo."
J: “Okay…fuiste a un lugar con amigas, que hiciste?” (basically just rephrased the question)
T: “Si, hice algo.” (Yes, I did something)
J: “Okay, que hiciste?”
T: Silence.
J: “Tarsis, estas enojada con nosotros?” (Are you mad at us?)
T: “Mas o menos.” (More or less)

I don’t want to relay the rest of the conversation to you word by word, but so far,you get a feel of her attitude towards Justin. So when he asked her why she was mad, her response was nowhere near what we expected.

Apparently, Tarsis thought that Justin had thrown out some spaghetti that she had cooked for him a week before. She said that was not okay and that if you don’t like something, then you tell them or you don’t eat it, but you never throwi t away. Justin was so confused. He loved that spaghetti and ate every bit of it. He actually went back to the kitchen to look for more but there wasn’t any.

When he asked why she thought that he threw it away, she answered “becauseyour fork was clean”. “Did you eat the spaghetti with your fingers?” Justin tried fervently to convince her how much he loved her spaghetti, but she wasn’t having any of it. She just kept saying “it’s fine, forget about it, don’t worry about it”, andwalking away, refusing to have any kind of conversation about it.

We have no idea where she got that idea from, and how it made her become a whole other person to us for the next week, but we were just glad that we knew why she was mad, and knew that it was absolutely not our fault. We're sad that we never really got the chance to work it out, but we've got to admit, the house is more peaceful now :)