Last spring, when I weighed over 200 pounds, if someone
asked you to describe me, what would you have said? Maybe you would have said
that I was tall, that I had long black hair and/or that I had hazel eyes. As
far as my weight, you might have said that I was “a little big”, or that I was
“a little on the heavy side”, but there’s almost certainly one word you would
never would have used: fat. In the States, fat
it a word people just don’t use to describe someone else, instead we have to
beat around the bush and be very indirect when talking about someone’s weight,
probably because calling someone fat
is seen as being derogatory (although people seem to have no problem with
calling someone skinny or too skinny). We do this because we don’t
want to offend someone, which is understandable, but honestly a little
ridiculous.
In Nicaragua this is not the case. At all. Here, calling
someone gordo is not seen as
derogatory or offensive, it’s just a descriptive term that’s used to describe
someone, just like alto or bajo (by the way, gordo means fat, alto
means tall, and bajo means short).
This was very weird to me at first, like when someone asked if my host mom in
my training town was gorda, but I’ve
slowly been getting used to it. There are virtually no descriptive terms here
that are faux pas. Asian-American volunteers (from what I’ve been told),
regardless of their ethnic background, are often called el chino or la china, not
in a derogatory way, simply as a way of describing their appearance. Black
American volunteers (again, from what I’ve been told) are often called el negro or la negra, again, not in a derogatory way, just as a legitimate way
of describing what they look like. People here usually call me chele (which means light-skinned person)
if they don’t know me, or profe if
they do know me at least vaguely.
