Am I really a Grey Leech?

For some reason, the people here have a really hard time with my name…
So Chris becomes Cris (which in español sounds like ‘crease’), and that’s how I’ve been called in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, etc. (even in Africa, where Cris became Driss… easy enough).
Now, Christopher translates to Cristóbal (ie, Cristóbal Colón = Christopher Columbus). However, a past FOR volunteer took on Cristóbal, so in order to avoid confusion, the team thought it best to not go that route, and that I should stick with Cris.
But for the people here in the PC, they just couldn’t grab hold of this name, even though it is the first syllable of Cristóbal or Cristian, both common names. Maybe it’s because one-syllable names are very rare here, I don’t know.
In any case, one of the young boys in La Unión was over at our house, and my teammate Sofía asked him if he knew my name. He responded proudly “Leech!” We couldn’t help but laugh… Okay, he’s still learning how to speak well and leech does kind of rhyme with Cris…
So then we were at the burial of a man who recently died in La Unión. (His name was Escobar and he was one of the PC’s musicians. In fact, just a few days before he passed away, he was showing me how to play guitar ‘a la colombiana’… I was sorry to see him go and am really bummed I didn’t get to learn more from him…) Anyway, they were burying him in the Cemetery and that same child saw me across the way and yelled out “Leech!” So rad. Leech has no meaning in español (leech is sanguijuela), so no one here bats an eye, but for someone with a huge smile on their face to call you a blood sucking creature, is pretty funny…
In the meantime, a bunch of relatives of residents of the PC began arriving to La Unión in order to spend the Semana Santa (Holy Week). Sofía started introducing me as ‘Gris,’ which is the color grey in Spanish, and people picked it up right away. She said, “See? People remember it easily. You might just have to live with Gris.” I thought, yeah, it’s my nickname (which almost everyone in the PC has; very few are called by their real name). But, why does Cris have to rhyme with an ugly color? Well, I guess, that’s what I’ve come to be here in the tropical Colombian countryside… nothing more than a Leech Gris!!!