Describing People

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.