A few years ago I was at my Aunt Trish and Uncle Jeff’s house, cutting avocados, only slightly listening and not watching the hand motions to the story my Aunt Trish was telling about cutting her hand from jamming a dull knife into the pit of an avocado. I thought that was a great way to get the pit out, and a few seconds later, my hand was gushing blood onto their clean wooden floor. My ingenious Uncle Jeff butterflied up my hand with a bandaid rather than getting stitches and my thoughtful and caring Aunt Trish forbade me from ever cutting up vegetables, fruits, or any other food item that required sharp objects in their house again. I figured it was something that could happen to anyone and justified the cut on my hand as a common mistake. In my first couple months in site, I cut my hand on my host family’s dull knives. Again, I blamed the object, not the user.
Last Thursday I decided to be creative (aka copy something I saw in another volunteer’s home) and hang a piece of bamboo above my stove with clothesline, and attach wire hooks to hang up my pots and pans. The machete and bamboo were no problem for me with my adequate 8-year-old-Paraguayan-boy-machete-skills. I cut off a piece of wire with my scissors, hooked it onto the bamboo, now hanging above my stove and decided it was too long. Rather than unhook it and shorten it with a safe distance to my body, I instead stood on my chair, stretched my arms up, pinched the wire with one hand to keep it steady and cut with the other hand. When doubled, the wire is a little tough and it took a second for me to force the scissors through. In that second, the extra pieces of wire fell to the ground, my pinky finger felt like it was on fire, and I looked down with horror to find blood gushing out of my finger.
I soon realized an old washcloth was not sufficient to stop the bleeding. I panicked for a second and called a friend, which proved to be useless. “Hey, I need help,” I say.
“What’s happened? I’m working in the field right now.” In Paraguayan language, this means he is indisposed at the moment and will only leave his hoe and ox if I tell him I’m dying. I consider that option for a second but instead, I tell him the truth.
“I cut my finger and it’s bleeding. What’s that plant you guys chew up to stop the bleeding? I can’t get it to stop bleeding.” Now that I think about it, this is no cause for any kind of alarm here because stuff like this happens every day in the campo. Why would he leave the hot mandioca field to save my finger?
“You know where you throw all your vegetable scraps? There’s a lot of that plant right there.”
I look over in that direction and see lots of different plants and the pain in my finger and the growing red on my washcloth tell me it would be better not to try and figure out which one it is right now. “I don’t know which one it is,” I say.
“How can you not know?” he asks, obviously unaware of the pain I’m in.
“You’re not helping me, I’m going to my neighbors. Bye”
“Yah, that’s a good idea,” he says, still obviously unworried about my pain as I hang up the phone and all but run across the street.
I will not go through all the details of the ensuing events but will instead give you a summary. What may or may not have been clean cotton got put on my finger to stop the bleeding, got stuck, got pulled off again the afternoon and my finger became a fountain of blood again. I did what I should have done that morning and called my doctor while a friend found the right plant to chew up to stop the bleeding again. I was sent to the hospital, received 3 stitches, and prescribed the inadequate drug of ibuprofen to stop the pain. I demanded better drugs from my doctor, went home, and woke up that night with a fever. I spent the next two days in my bed, insufferably hot from the fever and rising summer temperatures, and quite miserable. Many well meaning, and others not-so-well meaning visitors came over to see how I was doing and was forced to stand on my porch and talk to people in my weak state. One of them had the gall to tell me I looked terrible, force me to stand for 10 minutes on my porch until I was almost dizzy, continue to stare at me, ask me if I could transfer her saldo (the equivalent of cell phone minutes) to her phone, and then comment on how much money I had. I also received from others orders to lie down and put a cold cloth on my forehead and received various gifts, including but not limited to: 2 liters of carrot juice, some medicine sworn to take away all and every kind of fever (I didn’t take it), a melon (to be cut up by me in my feverish and maimed hand state and liquefied in my blender), half a liter of milk, apples, and repeated/ insistent offers to make my way 10 minutes down the road to spend the night so that I wouldn’t be alone.
My doctor put my on antibiotics and told me to call if it got any worse than my already 100.6 degree temperature. I was thankfully not forced to repeat my trip to the hospital and instead the antibiotics began treating the infected pinky finger and my fever broke. The next day I found myself in Asuncion holding the hand of one Peace Corps doctor, leaning on her well-endowed chest, fighting tears that somehow leaked their way out, and all but screaming from the pain, while the other Peace Corps doctor ruthlessly attacked my finger with an iodine swab to remove the blood that had congealed over my stitches. As if he hadn’t done enough already, he made me pee in a cup and took my blood to run some tests to make sure the fever wasn’t anything other than a virus or infected, scissor-cut finger. I was again, allowed to stay in a hotel, courtesy of American tax dollars. (Don’t worry, my hotel only costs about 13 American dollars. You’re not wasting that much money on me.)
Ok, horror story over. The antibiotics are really working now, my finger no longer throbs in pain and I’m going home after stopping at the wonderfully stocked grocery store in Asuncion with an American aisle. Watch out, they have Pringles! I am beginning to wonder if perhaps the user of the scissors is to blame in her blind rush to complete her task rather than the object. They are after all very good and useful scissors. No, on second thought I prefer to be in self-denial. I prefer not to be at blame. And Aunt Trish, I promise never to use sharp, or dull objects ever again, in my house or yours… except when I’m cooking, or finishing my lovely hooks for my pots and pans. But I promise I will use them only when necessary and I promise that next time I will outsmart those tricky knives and scissors and get the best of them.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
the days i just want to be home
Yes, I admit, I have those days. They are frequent in fact, probably more than you think. I have a hard time writing about those days though, maybe partly because I don’t want tot think about it, but also, who wants to read a bitter, angry, and depressed blog? No one, probably, and I don’t feel like publishing that stuff anyway. But I have many days that don’t go so well emotionally, and I feel like my blog would somehow be incomplete if I didn’t at least share a part of that.
The longer I’m here, the easier it gets, but at the same time, the longer I’m here, the harder it gets. I have now been in country fro 10 months (that leaves 17 for those of you counting down) and the magic and newness has worn off and some of the initial charms are no longer there. It gets easier for me not to see my family and talk to my friends, but I miss them more specifically and more dearly and am trying to brace myself for a Christmas season without them. I get along quite well without access to many familiar and comforting American foods and products, but it has produced a strange, glutton-type of attitude that has caused me to do strange things like, eat a pound of dried mangoes in 4 days, make pancakes with peanut butter every day for a week, or eat an entire Pringle’s super stack in approximately 3 hours. I could have eaten it faster, but I was in fact restraining myself. I am used to my form of communication with almost everyone I care about being reduced to emails and am used to my internet not working, but that incredible gift of internet often makes me feel more alone and isolated when I sign online to have my gmail tell me, “your inbox is empty.” I have adapted very well to speaking Spanish every day, and don’t find Guarani quite as tiring, but I now struggle to know how to communicate in my own language, now knowing which vocabulary words to use or grammar rules to follow.
Is it obvious that the most trying things are not the physical challenges which are so easy to describe and write about, but the emotional challenges that are often bottled up, too confusing and painful to let out? I truly don’t mind my rickety, wooden house with holes in it, and I can take a cold shower or bucket bathe without complaints. I can live with the dozens of bug bites that itch so badly, I wake myself up in the middle of the night, scratching until I bleed. I can deal with walking to my neighbors well 8 times in a day so that I can wash my clothes when the water goes out. I can laugh at the red dirt that lodges itself in every crevice, staining my bug-bite-scarred legs, and barbed-wire-torn clothes. Those are the easy things.
But what is hard for me is that regardless of how much I have given up to be here, people still expect me to be an endless supply of money, able and willing to take on any expense they might have. I fight indignation when people walk into my house or yard uninvited (and sometimes unwanted), and have no qualms in touching my things, making commentary on what I have, asking how much my things cost, and asking whether I will give them my things when I leave. I have even been asked for the shirt off my back. I can not help but feel angry and insulted by the overwhelming amount of catcalls, sexual references, and general rude comments I get from ignorant machista men. I struggle to feel that I am worthy of something better than that. I don’t now how not to be offended and greatly hurt when people say one thing to me and I later discover they are talking behind my back, saying something different. I also don’t know how to keep from being angry when I hear gossip about me that is not only not true, but puts me in a negative light. It has become normal for me to feel like an idiot in front of large groups of people, but that doesn’t make me eel less uncomfortable or less hurt when they laugh at me. I don’t know how to describe to you the absolute frustration and hopelessness I often feel when I find myself wondering if there is even a point in me being here, if I am making even the smallest difference in these people’s lives. And maybe what hurts the most is wondering if people back home have forgotten about me, if they care anymore, if they will be able to understand me. Are they even reading this?
You see, my life is not all exciting and grand adventures. It is however, most often like the Peace Corps slogan, “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” emphasis on the tough. I do not know how to write well about those tough days, and instead typically get bogged down in my own bitterness and anger, not understanding how to communicate it clearly or without putting a negative light on my host country. I have come to love this country and the people in it, but when I face new challenges, I often find myself silently cursing Paraguay as if the entire country was the source of my personal problems. So I tell you these things not to make you think badly of this truly unique and beautiful country, but to hopefully communicate some of my own weaknesses and true frustrations.
So yes, I do have days when I just wish I was home and free from all my problems situated in the Southern Hemisphere. I often fight the ugly and unwanted feelings of depression, bitterness, loneliness, and anger. I am not always happy to be here, and don’t always have the positive attitude that I try to show on my blogs. But lest I emphasize my hopelessness and loneliness too much, let me end with this: true, there are days when I wish I could be at home, but in spite of that, I’m not ready to leave. I often have the desire to escape, but I am not ready to give up and the thought of packing my bags and catching the soonest flight for Los Angeles is not ever a serious thought or real temptation. I might sometimes be angry with the people here and the country in general, but I still see the good and beautiful things here. I am often lonely and feel friendless and misunderstood, but this experience has taught me invaluable lessons about myself and taught me to love people better, to value and treasure dearly the people that do care about me. So there you go, I give you the good, the bad, and the ugly; the parts of this experience that are the most undesirable, the most unspeakable, but also the parts that are the truest and most growing for me.
The longer I’m here, the easier it gets, but at the same time, the longer I’m here, the harder it gets. I have now been in country fro 10 months (that leaves 17 for those of you counting down) and the magic and newness has worn off and some of the initial charms are no longer there. It gets easier for me not to see my family and talk to my friends, but I miss them more specifically and more dearly and am trying to brace myself for a Christmas season without them. I get along quite well without access to many familiar and comforting American foods and products, but it has produced a strange, glutton-type of attitude that has caused me to do strange things like, eat a pound of dried mangoes in 4 days, make pancakes with peanut butter every day for a week, or eat an entire Pringle’s super stack in approximately 3 hours. I could have eaten it faster, but I was in fact restraining myself. I am used to my form of communication with almost everyone I care about being reduced to emails and am used to my internet not working, but that incredible gift of internet often makes me feel more alone and isolated when I sign online to have my gmail tell me, “your inbox is empty.” I have adapted very well to speaking Spanish every day, and don’t find Guarani quite as tiring, but I now struggle to know how to communicate in my own language, now knowing which vocabulary words to use or grammar rules to follow.
Is it obvious that the most trying things are not the physical challenges which are so easy to describe and write about, but the emotional challenges that are often bottled up, too confusing and painful to let out? I truly don’t mind my rickety, wooden house with holes in it, and I can take a cold shower or bucket bathe without complaints. I can live with the dozens of bug bites that itch so badly, I wake myself up in the middle of the night, scratching until I bleed. I can deal with walking to my neighbors well 8 times in a day so that I can wash my clothes when the water goes out. I can laugh at the red dirt that lodges itself in every crevice, staining my bug-bite-scarred legs, and barbed-wire-torn clothes. Those are the easy things.
But what is hard for me is that regardless of how much I have given up to be here, people still expect me to be an endless supply of money, able and willing to take on any expense they might have. I fight indignation when people walk into my house or yard uninvited (and sometimes unwanted), and have no qualms in touching my things, making commentary on what I have, asking how much my things cost, and asking whether I will give them my things when I leave. I have even been asked for the shirt off my back. I can not help but feel angry and insulted by the overwhelming amount of catcalls, sexual references, and general rude comments I get from ignorant machista men. I struggle to feel that I am worthy of something better than that. I don’t now how not to be offended and greatly hurt when people say one thing to me and I later discover they are talking behind my back, saying something different. I also don’t know how to keep from being angry when I hear gossip about me that is not only not true, but puts me in a negative light. It has become normal for me to feel like an idiot in front of large groups of people, but that doesn’t make me eel less uncomfortable or less hurt when they laugh at me. I don’t know how to describe to you the absolute frustration and hopelessness I often feel when I find myself wondering if there is even a point in me being here, if I am making even the smallest difference in these people’s lives. And maybe what hurts the most is wondering if people back home have forgotten about me, if they care anymore, if they will be able to understand me. Are they even reading this?
You see, my life is not all exciting and grand adventures. It is however, most often like the Peace Corps slogan, “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” emphasis on the tough. I do not know how to write well about those tough days, and instead typically get bogged down in my own bitterness and anger, not understanding how to communicate it clearly or without putting a negative light on my host country. I have come to love this country and the people in it, but when I face new challenges, I often find myself silently cursing Paraguay as if the entire country was the source of my personal problems. So I tell you these things not to make you think badly of this truly unique and beautiful country, but to hopefully communicate some of my own weaknesses and true frustrations.
So yes, I do have days when I just wish I was home and free from all my problems situated in the Southern Hemisphere. I often fight the ugly and unwanted feelings of depression, bitterness, loneliness, and anger. I am not always happy to be here, and don’t always have the positive attitude that I try to show on my blogs. But lest I emphasize my hopelessness and loneliness too much, let me end with this: true, there are days when I wish I could be at home, but in spite of that, I’m not ready to leave. I often have the desire to escape, but I am not ready to give up and the thought of packing my bags and catching the soonest flight for Los Angeles is not ever a serious thought or real temptation. I might sometimes be angry with the people here and the country in general, but I still see the good and beautiful things here. I am often lonely and feel friendless and misunderstood, but this experience has taught me invaluable lessons about myself and taught me to love people better, to value and treasure dearly the people that do care about me. So there you go, I give you the good, the bad, and the ugly; the parts of this experience that are the most undesirable, the most unspeakable, but also the parts that are the truest and most growing for me.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
hotels, doctors, and thanksgiving
I’ve always enjoyed hotels and traveling. There is something exciting about leaving what is normal for a little while to see and experience something different. I think that’s partly why I decided to join the Peace Corps. I also find an incredible amount of pleasure is staying in a hotel where someone else will make my bed for me, deliver me fresh towels, and give me a complimentary breakfast. But this is only pleasant for me if I know I get to go home soon. As much as I like feeling like I get pampered from staying in hotels (even if the one’s in Asuncion look like they were built in the 1950’s), after a while of living out of my backpack, I am more than ready to get back to my own bed, my own space, and feel organized and normal again.
I am now at that point again, ready to be back home with my dog and sleep in my own bed. I just spent the last 5 nights in a hotel in Asuncion. Normally, I think that might have been a great break for me, but the problem was, I couldn’t even really leave my room because if I walked further than a city block, I started hacking out one of my lungs. I left my site last Tuesday to come into Asuncion for a 2 and a half days of meetings, and the timing perfectly worked out to my advantage in that I got sick the first day there. Wednesday the doctor was called and came out to our training site and I was informed that I had both a viral and a bacterial infection. Four medications and a few hours later, I started feeling better. Then came the real problems. Luckily, I have not had problems with my asthma since I have been in Paraguay, but as my sinuses began draining out the infection into my lungs, I started finding it difficult to breath. Thanksgiving morning I was driven to the Peace Corps office by one of my bosses to meet up with my doctor who gave me a steroid shot in my butt (that by the way hurts A LOT), 2 nebulizer treatments, and 4 more medications. I took a taxi to a hotel and spent the rest of my afternoon trying to find TV channels in English and trying not to think about all the great, all-American food my family was consuming back in California. Had I had a choice by the way, this would not be how I would want to spend my Thanksgiving.
Five days, one medication, and 2 more nebulizer treatments later, I am well enough to travel back home. I spent the majority of my days taking naps, watching more TV than I have in the last 9 months combined (and in English!), and read half of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise to be so sick on Thanksgiving that I couldn’t truly concentrate and therefore couldn’t miss fully my favorite American holiday. I was too focused on getting enough oxygen into my lungs and trying not to worry about the fact that my arms and legs were tingly from all the chemicals that had been pumped into my bloodstream and airways. But either way, my first major American holiday that I have to spend in Paraguay has now passed and it has left me with an eagerness to return to my Paraguayan house and sleep in my own bed, and did I mention that I get to see my dog and that I miss her?
Oh, and to all of you dutiful taxpayers of the United States of America: not only are your hard-earned dollars paying my salary of approximately $250 a month, they also paid for a week of hotels and 9 medications for me. Thank you.
I am now at that point again, ready to be back home with my dog and sleep in my own bed. I just spent the last 5 nights in a hotel in Asuncion. Normally, I think that might have been a great break for me, but the problem was, I couldn’t even really leave my room because if I walked further than a city block, I started hacking out one of my lungs. I left my site last Tuesday to come into Asuncion for a 2 and a half days of meetings, and the timing perfectly worked out to my advantage in that I got sick the first day there. Wednesday the doctor was called and came out to our training site and I was informed that I had both a viral and a bacterial infection. Four medications and a few hours later, I started feeling better. Then came the real problems. Luckily, I have not had problems with my asthma since I have been in Paraguay, but as my sinuses began draining out the infection into my lungs, I started finding it difficult to breath. Thanksgiving morning I was driven to the Peace Corps office by one of my bosses to meet up with my doctor who gave me a steroid shot in my butt (that by the way hurts A LOT), 2 nebulizer treatments, and 4 more medications. I took a taxi to a hotel and spent the rest of my afternoon trying to find TV channels in English and trying not to think about all the great, all-American food my family was consuming back in California. Had I had a choice by the way, this would not be how I would want to spend my Thanksgiving.
Five days, one medication, and 2 more nebulizer treatments later, I am well enough to travel back home. I spent the majority of my days taking naps, watching more TV than I have in the last 9 months combined (and in English!), and read half of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise to be so sick on Thanksgiving that I couldn’t truly concentrate and therefore couldn’t miss fully my favorite American holiday. I was too focused on getting enough oxygen into my lungs and trying not to worry about the fact that my arms and legs were tingly from all the chemicals that had been pumped into my bloodstream and airways. But either way, my first major American holiday that I have to spend in Paraguay has now passed and it has left me with an eagerness to return to my Paraguayan house and sleep in my own bed, and did I mention that I get to see my dog and that I miss her?
Oh, and to all of you dutiful taxpayers of the United States of America: not only are your hard-earned dollars paying my salary of approximately $250 a month, they also paid for a week of hotels and 9 medications for me. Thank you.
Friday, November 12, 2010
my best friend
It was about 8 weeks into my training when I fell in love. It was actually during my preview site visit 4 weeks before swear-in when it happened. Dark-brown hair. Greenish-hazel eyes. She could fit into both of my hands and she was covered in fleas. Once I started calling her Pulgita (from the Spanish word for flea), I knew I didn’t really have an option anymore. I had to keep her. The family I was staying with amiably told me I could have her when I got back in a month. I later figured out that people typically give puppies away, or dump them on the side of the road, whichever is easier. Being a girl made her less appealing because the owner has to keep the dog from getting pregnant, so I was actually doing them a favor. But either way, she was there waiting for me with a brand new collar my first day I rolled into site on an ox cart with my host brother and sister. I whistled to her and she came running. She already knew she was my dog.
From that moment on, it was made clear to the community of Cariy Potrero that the American was clearly crazy in her devotion and in the attention she gave to her dog. Dogs here are typically viewed as an expendable commodity and I’m sure any animal rights activists would go on a rampage were they to visit the Paraguayan campo. Most dogs get fed only if there is leftover food, and even then it is often split between a couple of dogs and a cat and they viciously guard their portion from the others and from pecking chickens. The amount of leftover food available in a household is often apparent by the visibility of the ribs on their dog. It is unfathomable that I buy special food to feed my dog. Their method of training them is yelling and throwing rocks and sticks at them. The dogs quickly learn that when someone yells “fuera” (outside, or away), they should run away fast. When I tell my dog “eguapy” (“sit” in Guarani), and she listens, jaws drop in astonishment. Needless to say, dogs are not typically petted and it is strange to see anyone care too much about the wellbeing of their dog as I do. If something happens to one dog, you can always just get another one.
She and I became fast friends. I needed a friend, and she is an attention whore and an extremely friendly and playful dog. When I was living with my first host family, I would sneak her in my room so that she could sleep on my bed. I couldn’t bear listening to my puppy crying outside my door in the cold. She began to follow me everywhere and she leaves my side less and less as time goes on. When I go visit people, she comes with me. When I ride my bike or go for a run, she trots along beside me or in front of me and runs ahead to growl at the cows on the side of the road, jumping in excitement. She follows me when I walk to my latrine, sighs, and plops down on the cement floor, waiting for me to finish relieving myself. She follows me to the school and waits outside the principles office or runs around outside in the field until I am done talking. When I go into town or somewhere she can’t follow, I have to tie her up to a tree outside so she won’t follow me. When I come back, she has usually chewed threw her rope and runs up to me, wagging her tail so hard, it appears as if her hind legs and butt are a separate entity than her front legs and head, bobbing back and forth. And if I leave her for more than a couple hours, she will cry on my return. At night, she stretches out next to my torso or curls up by my feet and sleeps next to me. When I have a bad day and need to cry, she cries with me and starts chewing on my hands, trying to get me to play and chase away the sadness. She is a great companion.
Like her owner, she loves food, and will eat just about anything. Literally. No matter how much I feed her, she is always still hungry and searches around for more things to eat or chew. I have seen her eat cow poop, chicken poop, human feces, and diapers. Of this, I am not proud. If the neighbors have not stored away their chickens and eggs above ground level, she will search around until she finds the eggs and eat as many as she can until someone starts yelling at her. She will chew on sticks and pieces of plastic that have the smell of food on them until they are completely obliterated. Bones never last long when she has them. She even eats a variety of fruits including tangerines and blackberries. I have quite a few large moths and beetles that find their way into my house and night and she catches them, tortures them, and eats them. Some nights she will stand on my porch under the light waiting for the beetles to fly lower so she can have a snack. I do not know the variety of animals she has caught and eaten, I just know that it has included rats, and in the past, baby chickens. Once she ate the hide of some animal and kept throwing it up and eating it again until I put it in a plastic bag and buried it.
Because I am the white girl, I get special allowances and privileges for my dog and while I will argue with people to give me equal treatment as Paraguayans, I will not say a word if they want to give my dog special treatment. When I eat at people’s houses, they often give the best parts of the leftovers to my dog and let their dogs fight over the rest. Once someone even put leftovers in a plastic bag for me to bring back for her. One day at the school, she got in a little fight with another dog, and she was allowed in the principles office to protect her from another fight. This was a huge offer, as most dogs are not allowed in any type of building. People know better than to hit her in front of me and will let her take her place beside my chair rather than shooing her away like they do with the other dogs. On the rare occasion that people see me without her, they ask me, “And your Pulgita?” She is not just “Pulgita,” but she is “My Pulgita.” Most of the kids in my site know her by name and when they see her will call out, “Pulgita! Pulgita!” and try and play with her.
The phrase, “a dog is a man’s best friend,” is so true. Few days go by that she doesn’t do something that makes me laugh or puts a smile on my face. She needs me, and I need her. She is always happy to see me. Even though she doesn’t understand, I talk to her and tell her my problems and how crazy the world is. She is the one living to whom there is no need to give explanations and she never laughs at me. Perhaps better yet, she is always there, day in, and day out. I truly can not ask for a better friend.
From that moment on, it was made clear to the community of Cariy Potrero that the American was clearly crazy in her devotion and in the attention she gave to her dog. Dogs here are typically viewed as an expendable commodity and I’m sure any animal rights activists would go on a rampage were they to visit the Paraguayan campo. Most dogs get fed only if there is leftover food, and even then it is often split between a couple of dogs and a cat and they viciously guard their portion from the others and from pecking chickens. The amount of leftover food available in a household is often apparent by the visibility of the ribs on their dog. It is unfathomable that I buy special food to feed my dog. Their method of training them is yelling and throwing rocks and sticks at them. The dogs quickly learn that when someone yells “fuera” (outside, or away), they should run away fast. When I tell my dog “eguapy” (“sit” in Guarani), and she listens, jaws drop in astonishment. Needless to say, dogs are not typically petted and it is strange to see anyone care too much about the wellbeing of their dog as I do. If something happens to one dog, you can always just get another one.
She and I became fast friends. I needed a friend, and she is an attention whore and an extremely friendly and playful dog. When I was living with my first host family, I would sneak her in my room so that she could sleep on my bed. I couldn’t bear listening to my puppy crying outside my door in the cold. She began to follow me everywhere and she leaves my side less and less as time goes on. When I go visit people, she comes with me. When I ride my bike or go for a run, she trots along beside me or in front of me and runs ahead to growl at the cows on the side of the road, jumping in excitement. She follows me when I walk to my latrine, sighs, and plops down on the cement floor, waiting for me to finish relieving myself. She follows me to the school and waits outside the principles office or runs around outside in the field until I am done talking. When I go into town or somewhere she can’t follow, I have to tie her up to a tree outside so she won’t follow me. When I come back, she has usually chewed threw her rope and runs up to me, wagging her tail so hard, it appears as if her hind legs and butt are a separate entity than her front legs and head, bobbing back and forth. And if I leave her for more than a couple hours, she will cry on my return. At night, she stretches out next to my torso or curls up by my feet and sleeps next to me. When I have a bad day and need to cry, she cries with me and starts chewing on my hands, trying to get me to play and chase away the sadness. She is a great companion.
Like her owner, she loves food, and will eat just about anything. Literally. No matter how much I feed her, she is always still hungry and searches around for more things to eat or chew. I have seen her eat cow poop, chicken poop, human feces, and diapers. Of this, I am not proud. If the neighbors have not stored away their chickens and eggs above ground level, she will search around until she finds the eggs and eat as many as she can until someone starts yelling at her. She will chew on sticks and pieces of plastic that have the smell of food on them until they are completely obliterated. Bones never last long when she has them. She even eats a variety of fruits including tangerines and blackberries. I have quite a few large moths and beetles that find their way into my house and night and she catches them, tortures them, and eats them. Some nights she will stand on my porch under the light waiting for the beetles to fly lower so she can have a snack. I do not know the variety of animals she has caught and eaten, I just know that it has included rats, and in the past, baby chickens. Once she ate the hide of some animal and kept throwing it up and eating it again until I put it in a plastic bag and buried it.
Because I am the white girl, I get special allowances and privileges for my dog and while I will argue with people to give me equal treatment as Paraguayans, I will not say a word if they want to give my dog special treatment. When I eat at people’s houses, they often give the best parts of the leftovers to my dog and let their dogs fight over the rest. Once someone even put leftovers in a plastic bag for me to bring back for her. One day at the school, she got in a little fight with another dog, and she was allowed in the principles office to protect her from another fight. This was a huge offer, as most dogs are not allowed in any type of building. People know better than to hit her in front of me and will let her take her place beside my chair rather than shooing her away like they do with the other dogs. On the rare occasion that people see me without her, they ask me, “And your Pulgita?” She is not just “Pulgita,” but she is “My Pulgita.” Most of the kids in my site know her by name and when they see her will call out, “Pulgita! Pulgita!” and try and play with her.
The phrase, “a dog is a man’s best friend,” is so true. Few days go by that she doesn’t do something that makes me laugh or puts a smile on my face. She needs me, and I need her. She is always happy to see me. Even though she doesn’t understand, I talk to her and tell her my problems and how crazy the world is. She is the one living to whom there is no need to give explanations and she never laughs at me. Perhaps better yet, she is always there, day in, and day out. I truly can not ask for a better friend.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
I am Homer Simpson
Something very important happened to me this week: I was compared to Homer Simpson. Despite this sounding like an insult, this was a good thing. Let me explain.
Paraguay is influenced by American culture through the random movies and TV shows selected to be translated into Spanish and aired on Paraguayan television. The Simpsons happens to be one of them and all of my host families watched the show consistently. I have never been the biggest fan of the Simpsons, although I never actually watched it consistently until I got to this country. Somehow I found it funnier in Spanish, perhaps from the pop culture references that have no Paraguayan cultural translation and other badly translated parts that barely made my host families laugh but made me laugh loudly, and because as much as I thought Homer Simpson was an idiot, he gave me some type of connection to my much missed culture. Although my appreciation for the Simpsons grew enormously, Homer Simpson was far from the person I aspired to me and I still considered him a complete idiot.
Last week I was talking to a friend about my yard and the many plants that I have seeded, transplanted, and water every day without seeing much growth. It is often quite discouraging to feel like I am doing so much work on my house and at the same time feel like it’s not pretty yet. I have planted, but I see no flowers, and the seedling trees will not even be as tall as I am by the time I leave this country. “I just want to finally feel like my house is pretty,” I say, subconsciously hoping that I will be told that my house is pretty even though I don’t think so.
Instead, I get this response: Little smile. Laugh. Pause. “I was just thinking,” pause. “There is this Simpsons episode and Homer decides to plant tomatoes and he goes out to live in the country.” Pause. I start wondering if my thoughts were even heard or Homer Simpsons life is more interesting than mine.
And then the story continues, “He plants a whole bunch of tomatoes in one day and he goes to bed and goes out to his field the next day and doesn’t see anything. He gets angry because his tomatoes haven’t grown yet.”
Ok… This is apparently not a random story, and I begin have a feeling that Homer Simpson and I have something in common…
“And he goes to bed again,” the story continues, “and the next day he gets even angrier because his tomatoes still haven’t sprouted. So he goes to his work, you know the biochemical plant he works at, and he gets some chemical and puts them all over his tomatoes. The next day he wakes up and his tomatoes have sprouted, but they are huge, like trees. So he has all these tomatoes, but they are addictive. People will take one bite of them and think it’s gross, but the more they eat them, the more they want them.”
I am now feeling a little bit dumb and wondering if there was more of a tie in to the story and hoping it’s not just about getting angry that plants haven’t grown yet. But that’s it, story over. I look up, “So I’m like Homer Simpson?” I ask.
Smile that looks almost guilty. Little laugh. Pause. “Yes.”
“Ok, I get it,” I say, now feeling more than a little dumb. I just got compared to a cartoon character, and not just any cartoon character, one that lives on beer and doughnuts, is famous for doing and saying stupid things and who used bio-chemicals to grow tomatoes. But the lesson is not quite over and I am given a few words of encouragement.
“But really, be patient. Your flowers will grow, you just have to wait. It takes a long time for them to grow and you have not been in your house for that long. I left a plant in my backpack for almost a week before I planted it, and it grew fine.”
This is a very true statement, but one that I often forget. I all too often get caught up in the fact that I feel like I am working hard, but not yielding any fruit (or flowers in this case.) The fact is, change takes time and I can’t expect to have plants exploding with flowers right after I plant them. I just had to have my thoughts be compared to the thoughts of Homer to remind myself of that.
Paraguay is influenced by American culture through the random movies and TV shows selected to be translated into Spanish and aired on Paraguayan television. The Simpsons happens to be one of them and all of my host families watched the show consistently. I have never been the biggest fan of the Simpsons, although I never actually watched it consistently until I got to this country. Somehow I found it funnier in Spanish, perhaps from the pop culture references that have no Paraguayan cultural translation and other badly translated parts that barely made my host families laugh but made me laugh loudly, and because as much as I thought Homer Simpson was an idiot, he gave me some type of connection to my much missed culture. Although my appreciation for the Simpsons grew enormously, Homer Simpson was far from the person I aspired to me and I still considered him a complete idiot.
Last week I was talking to a friend about my yard and the many plants that I have seeded, transplanted, and water every day without seeing much growth. It is often quite discouraging to feel like I am doing so much work on my house and at the same time feel like it’s not pretty yet. I have planted, but I see no flowers, and the seedling trees will not even be as tall as I am by the time I leave this country. “I just want to finally feel like my house is pretty,” I say, subconsciously hoping that I will be told that my house is pretty even though I don’t think so.
Instead, I get this response: Little smile. Laugh. Pause. “I was just thinking,” pause. “There is this Simpsons episode and Homer decides to plant tomatoes and he goes out to live in the country.” Pause. I start wondering if my thoughts were even heard or Homer Simpsons life is more interesting than mine.
And then the story continues, “He plants a whole bunch of tomatoes in one day and he goes to bed and goes out to his field the next day and doesn’t see anything. He gets angry because his tomatoes haven’t grown yet.”
Ok… This is apparently not a random story, and I begin have a feeling that Homer Simpson and I have something in common…
“And he goes to bed again,” the story continues, “and the next day he gets even angrier because his tomatoes still haven’t sprouted. So he goes to his work, you know the biochemical plant he works at, and he gets some chemical and puts them all over his tomatoes. The next day he wakes up and his tomatoes have sprouted, but they are huge, like trees. So he has all these tomatoes, but they are addictive. People will take one bite of them and think it’s gross, but the more they eat them, the more they want them.”
I am now feeling a little bit dumb and wondering if there was more of a tie in to the story and hoping it’s not just about getting angry that plants haven’t grown yet. But that’s it, story over. I look up, “So I’m like Homer Simpson?” I ask.
Smile that looks almost guilty. Little laugh. Pause. “Yes.”
“Ok, I get it,” I say, now feeling more than a little dumb. I just got compared to a cartoon character, and not just any cartoon character, one that lives on beer and doughnuts, is famous for doing and saying stupid things and who used bio-chemicals to grow tomatoes. But the lesson is not quite over and I am given a few words of encouragement.
“But really, be patient. Your flowers will grow, you just have to wait. It takes a long time for them to grow and you have not been in your house for that long. I left a plant in my backpack for almost a week before I planted it, and it grew fine.”
This is a very true statement, but one that I often forget. I all too often get caught up in the fact that I feel like I am working hard, but not yielding any fruit (or flowers in this case.) The fact is, change takes time and I can’t expect to have plants exploding with flowers right after I plant them. I just had to have my thoughts be compared to the thoughts of Homer to remind myself of that.
Friday, October 22, 2010
the glass plants have sprouted again
The guy that was living in my house before me (aka used-the-bed-to-sleep-in-and-store-a-change-of-clothes-but-still-ate-at-his-mom’s-house-next-door) was a drunk. Actually, I shouldn’t say “was,” because technically he still is, he’s just not a drunk that sleeps in my house. anymore I’m pretty sure he half got kicked out of his parents house because of this problem, but probably partly because he wanted his own space to drink and smoke. Because he was really only using the house to sleep in and get drunk every night, he didn’t care about keeping the place up and dirt, trash, and the glass bottles from drinking gathered all over the place. While some Paraguayans are very clean about their trash and either burn or reuse it all, others don’t seem to mind letting trash (especially unburnable glass bottles) accumulate in their yard. Now I don’t know if this guy did this because he was drunk, or because he just didn’t care, or maybe both, but after he finished the alcohol in his bottle, he made a habit of throwing it into the backyard/forest area. This resulted in not only glass bottles all over the place, but shattered glass literally all over my property after many of them smashed up against a tree, completely destroying any practical future use for the glass. When I first moved into my house, I spent a few hours one morning picking up all the whole glass bottles and parts of glass that I could find and piled them up together next to a tree. I thought I had collected it all, but soon realized that these broken pieces of glass were lying around every few inches in my backyard and every time I walked to the latrine, I would pick up a piece or two as I discovered it in passing. A couple weeks later I was walking around my backyard and found at least 10 more whole bottles thrown in random spots bringing the total of undamaged bottles to about 35.
In cleaning up the outside of my house, I had to machete my way to the latrine (that was in the beginning not visible from my back porch), chopping down large bushes, parts of trees, and raking up excess leaves and sticks to make myself a path that I felt comfortable walking on in the middle of the night should the need to relieve myself arise. This unsurprisingly, uncovered hundreds more slivers and chunks of pointy, dangerous, glass. After a few weeks of picking up a couple pieces every day, I thought I had at least gotten the majority out of the way. I then turned to my trash pile. Now I’m not a huge fan of burning trash as some of you probably already know. A couple of you might even remember me yelling at someone when he threw my plastic bottle in our beach bonfire. I’m still not the biggest fan of releasing harmful chemicals in the air by burning and damaging the ozone layer (yes Jess, I know, I’m a hippie), but the amount of trash that I had piled up just from cleaning up around my house was so large that I didn’t know what else to do with it. I actually had two separate trash bonfires, and the second time, my trash pile was smoking for no less than 48 hours. When all was said and done, and I had done my part in damaging the ozone layer, I was left with a large pile of dirt, ash, and charcoal…. Or at least that’s all I thought it was. Unbeknownst to me, there were still plenty more shards of glass in my lindo path to my latrine and in my burnt-ozone-damaging trash pile. I found this out the first time it rained and the heavy, fat drops pounded away the first layer of dirt to reveal more shiny, pointy objects for me to collect. The first time it happened, I was amazed to find several more glittering objects, half-wedged in the dirt the day after it rained. The more it happened though, I began to associate the appearing of the glass with the rainfall and half felt as if the rain had been the cause of their appearance. Even more surprising was the size of some of the pieces of glass that magically appeared after the rain. I am used to little plants springing up and some growing twice their size the day after a rainfall, but larger pieces of glass made me feel as if the baby shards of glass were sprouting and growing into glass chunks in the fertile Paraguayan soil and life-giving rain. I am debating whether to accept the rain as an opportunity to find more of the millions of pieces of glass scattered about or to begin researching the possibility of actual glass plants in Paraguay.
In cleaning up the outside of my house, I had to machete my way to the latrine (that was in the beginning not visible from my back porch), chopping down large bushes, parts of trees, and raking up excess leaves and sticks to make myself a path that I felt comfortable walking on in the middle of the night should the need to relieve myself arise. This unsurprisingly, uncovered hundreds more slivers and chunks of pointy, dangerous, glass. After a few weeks of picking up a couple pieces every day, I thought I had at least gotten the majority out of the way. I then turned to my trash pile. Now I’m not a huge fan of burning trash as some of you probably already know. A couple of you might even remember me yelling at someone when he threw my plastic bottle in our beach bonfire. I’m still not the biggest fan of releasing harmful chemicals in the air by burning and damaging the ozone layer (yes Jess, I know, I’m a hippie), but the amount of trash that I had piled up just from cleaning up around my house was so large that I didn’t know what else to do with it. I actually had two separate trash bonfires, and the second time, my trash pile was smoking for no less than 48 hours. When all was said and done, and I had done my part in damaging the ozone layer, I was left with a large pile of dirt, ash, and charcoal…. Or at least that’s all I thought it was. Unbeknownst to me, there were still plenty more shards of glass in my lindo path to my latrine and in my burnt-ozone-damaging trash pile. I found this out the first time it rained and the heavy, fat drops pounded away the first layer of dirt to reveal more shiny, pointy objects for me to collect. The first time it happened, I was amazed to find several more glittering objects, half-wedged in the dirt the day after it rained. The more it happened though, I began to associate the appearing of the glass with the rainfall and half felt as if the rain had been the cause of their appearance. Even more surprising was the size of some of the pieces of glass that magically appeared after the rain. I am used to little plants springing up and some growing twice their size the day after a rainfall, but larger pieces of glass made me feel as if the baby shards of glass were sprouting and growing into glass chunks in the fertile Paraguayan soil and life-giving rain. I am debating whether to accept the rain as an opportunity to find more of the millions of pieces of glass scattered about or to begin researching the possibility of actual glass plants in Paraguay.
it ain't workin
It is 1:30pm and I am sitting on my bed sweating with my computer propped up on my feet to allow some good air-flow to the bottom of it to keep it from overheating. My legs form a diamond shape and my back is hunched over to see the computer screen well, which, oddly enough, is beginning to give me a back-ache. I have several times tried leaning back, but every time I do that and take the computer with me, my internet cuts out. I would love to go sit outside under my mango tree in the shade as I’m sure it is about 15 degrees Farenheight cooler than it is in my house, but I try not to flash my computer around and I only use it in the confines of my rickety, semi wind-proof wooden walls.
I think it has been close to a month since I have written my last blog, and since I have time right now, I’m determined to use the internet and the time it while it lasts. I have encountered a variety of problems in sitting down to write a blog and respond to long over due emails. I think soon after I posted my last blog, my computer charger, without warning, broke, and I was left with an uncharged computer for about a week as MacBook chargers are a little hard to come by in Paraguay. Luckily, my mom came to visit me and brought me a new charger for my foreign and strange Mac laptop. But, as she was the first person from home I have seen in over 8 months, I valued her company far much more than time I have to spend using my computer and I let it sit there for another week while I soaked up hours of English conversation. After she left however, my internet became as unpredictable as the weather, or rather, completely predictable in that it hasn’t been working. I have several times opened up my email only to be cut off as soon as my gmail opens, or it will trick me and work for about 5 minutes and then completely cut me off. But typically, it tends to just be completely non-compliant and refuse to connect, telling me there is no signal even though I see at least 2 bars in the left hand corner. This is, as you can imagine, quite frustrating, especially after it happens to several days in a row.
The concept of “not working” has already become a familiar and regular problem for me. Early on in training, I would often walk 30 minutes out to the ruta to use an internet café with some other trainees only to be told by the woman that the computers “weren’t working that day,” which translated into either, “I don’t know how to turn them on and neither my husband or my teenage daughter are here to turn them on either,” or “it’s going to rain soon and I don’t want to be using all that electricity when it starts thundering.” A few weeks ago I hopped on a bus to go to Caacupe, a nearby city, and we passed by a broken down bus that “wasn’t working” on the side of the road. Now the fact that the bus had broken down was of little surprise to me. I’m more surprised at how many busses in Paraguay fly down the ruta, looking like half the engine just might fall out any moment. This bus however, was from the same company as ours, so rather than giving everyone back their money, they packed in half of the passengers onto my bus, leaving the other half to wait for another bus. I’m still not sure how I actually got off that bus, but I know I rubbed up against too many butts and felt violated while at the same time feeling a little bit like I was violating other people as I manipulated the slivers of space I somehow managed to find.
My most recent “not working” experience has been my running water. The community water tank is in the process of breaking and we do not water for a good portion of the day until the plumber drives his moto out at night to make it continue working until the following afternoon. I have now been 2 days without running water and I hear it won’t be fixed for another 4 or 5 days. The other day it went out at 8:30 am and I had no extra supply of water in my house, I hadn’t washed my dishes, and I had a huge pile of laundry that I really needed to wash. When you use faucets, you really don’t realize how much water you are using because you get to just turn it on and off. The water magically appears, and conveniently disappears down the drain (if you are lucky enough to have a drain.) When you have to walk to your neighbors house with your one small bucket to supply all of your water from their well, you begin to realize how much water you really use and how much water you can conserve if you are careful. That day I went over to my neighbors at least 7 times just to get my dishes and clothes clean and to cook. I might have had to return later that night, but I think I blocked it out.
After a while, you get used to things not working or breaking down all the time and you just learn to live with the consequences of it, even if it’s squeezing up against stranger’s butts to get off the bus or walking over to your neighbors every 15 minutes to ask to use their well again. And, you become thankful for things like having a water source nearby even if it is convenient, or having some kind of connection to the outside world, even if it is irregular. So with my now functioning computer, and my semi-only-functioning-when-it-feels-like-it internet, I will continue to update as the internet servers allow. Sorry for the delay.
I think it has been close to a month since I have written my last blog, and since I have time right now, I’m determined to use the internet and the time it while it lasts. I have encountered a variety of problems in sitting down to write a blog and respond to long over due emails. I think soon after I posted my last blog, my computer charger, without warning, broke, and I was left with an uncharged computer for about a week as MacBook chargers are a little hard to come by in Paraguay. Luckily, my mom came to visit me and brought me a new charger for my foreign and strange Mac laptop. But, as she was the first person from home I have seen in over 8 months, I valued her company far much more than time I have to spend using my computer and I let it sit there for another week while I soaked up hours of English conversation. After she left however, my internet became as unpredictable as the weather, or rather, completely predictable in that it hasn’t been working. I have several times opened up my email only to be cut off as soon as my gmail opens, or it will trick me and work for about 5 minutes and then completely cut me off. But typically, it tends to just be completely non-compliant and refuse to connect, telling me there is no signal even though I see at least 2 bars in the left hand corner. This is, as you can imagine, quite frustrating, especially after it happens to several days in a row.
The concept of “not working” has already become a familiar and regular problem for me. Early on in training, I would often walk 30 minutes out to the ruta to use an internet café with some other trainees only to be told by the woman that the computers “weren’t working that day,” which translated into either, “I don’t know how to turn them on and neither my husband or my teenage daughter are here to turn them on either,” or “it’s going to rain soon and I don’t want to be using all that electricity when it starts thundering.” A few weeks ago I hopped on a bus to go to Caacupe, a nearby city, and we passed by a broken down bus that “wasn’t working” on the side of the road. Now the fact that the bus had broken down was of little surprise to me. I’m more surprised at how many busses in Paraguay fly down the ruta, looking like half the engine just might fall out any moment. This bus however, was from the same company as ours, so rather than giving everyone back their money, they packed in half of the passengers onto my bus, leaving the other half to wait for another bus. I’m still not sure how I actually got off that bus, but I know I rubbed up against too many butts and felt violated while at the same time feeling a little bit like I was violating other people as I manipulated the slivers of space I somehow managed to find.
My most recent “not working” experience has been my running water. The community water tank is in the process of breaking and we do not water for a good portion of the day until the plumber drives his moto out at night to make it continue working until the following afternoon. I have now been 2 days without running water and I hear it won’t be fixed for another 4 or 5 days. The other day it went out at 8:30 am and I had no extra supply of water in my house, I hadn’t washed my dishes, and I had a huge pile of laundry that I really needed to wash. When you use faucets, you really don’t realize how much water you are using because you get to just turn it on and off. The water magically appears, and conveniently disappears down the drain (if you are lucky enough to have a drain.) When you have to walk to your neighbors house with your one small bucket to supply all of your water from their well, you begin to realize how much water you really use and how much water you can conserve if you are careful. That day I went over to my neighbors at least 7 times just to get my dishes and clothes clean and to cook. I might have had to return later that night, but I think I blocked it out.
After a while, you get used to things not working or breaking down all the time and you just learn to live with the consequences of it, even if it’s squeezing up against stranger’s butts to get off the bus or walking over to your neighbors every 15 minutes to ask to use their well again. And, you become thankful for things like having a water source nearby even if it is convenient, or having some kind of connection to the outside world, even if it is irregular. So with my now functioning computer, and my semi-only-functioning-when-it-feels-like-it internet, I will continue to update as the internet servers allow. Sorry for the delay.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Raindrops keep falling on my head
This is not just a figure of speech or a mere song title, it is in fact a reality for me. My house is made of wood and I have a metal roof, which doesn’t give me as much protection from the elements as I would like. When it’s windy, the wind seems to enter on one side of my house and blow right through to the other side. I actually have some holes in my walls big enough to look outside and see stuff. When it rains, the noise of the rain is multiplied when it hits the metal roof.
Last night it rained and when it rains in Paraguay, it rains hard with full on lightning so bright it lights up your room and thunder so loud you feel like it’s cracking right outside your door… sometimes even inside your door. I spent half of the night awake, listening to the thunder and wondered how my dog could sleep so soundly through all the noise. The only time she even budged was when there was a crack of thunder so loud I could have sworn a bolt of lightning hit something in my front yard. She popped her head up as if there was a predator invading the house but then settled right back down when she realized the noise wasn’t continuous. I then dragged her across half the bed so that she could sleep closer to me. This wasn’t because the thunder and lightning scares me (although it definitely did my first month or so here) but I just felt like I could sleep more peacefully with her next to me in the midst of all the racket. That didn’t happen. Besides the constant noise of the rain and thunder that I had to block out, my dog insisted on taking up half of the bed, stretching herself out fully to sleep nice and relaxed while I was politely pushed to the side of the bed.
It was about that time when I felt a drop of water on my face. I figured this was a good time as any to get out of bed and figure out what was going on since I apparently wasn’t getting any sleep anyway. I turned on my light and got a good look around my room, surveying the damage. The leak above my bed wasn’t all that serious, I just had to deal with a drop of water or two falling about every 15 minutes or so when it’s raining really hard. There were however other problems that I became aware of with my light on. There were three small puddles on my floor from leaks in the roof, but fortunately, none of them were in problematic spots or large enough to be a real problem. I turned around again to get back in bed and I got a good look at my walls. For any of you who weren’t already aware, wood is not waterproof. This means that when there is rain and any kind of wind, the rain gets slammed into my walls… and then soaks through to the inside of my house. I now have water spots all over my walls, and in a few places, leaking down to the floor. This isn’t so problematic except that my bed is located right next to the wall, thus my blanket and sheet are susceptible to getting wet. I moved my bed a few inches away from the wall just to be safe. As there was nothing else I could do, I crawled back under the covers, shoved my dog over so that I could at least have half of the bed, and eventually fell back asleep listening to the rain and thunder with the occasional drop of rain on my face.
Last night it rained and when it rains in Paraguay, it rains hard with full on lightning so bright it lights up your room and thunder so loud you feel like it’s cracking right outside your door… sometimes even inside your door. I spent half of the night awake, listening to the thunder and wondered how my dog could sleep so soundly through all the noise. The only time she even budged was when there was a crack of thunder so loud I could have sworn a bolt of lightning hit something in my front yard. She popped her head up as if there was a predator invading the house but then settled right back down when she realized the noise wasn’t continuous. I then dragged her across half the bed so that she could sleep closer to me. This wasn’t because the thunder and lightning scares me (although it definitely did my first month or so here) but I just felt like I could sleep more peacefully with her next to me in the midst of all the racket. That didn’t happen. Besides the constant noise of the rain and thunder that I had to block out, my dog insisted on taking up half of the bed, stretching herself out fully to sleep nice and relaxed while I was politely pushed to the side of the bed.
It was about that time when I felt a drop of water on my face. I figured this was a good time as any to get out of bed and figure out what was going on since I apparently wasn’t getting any sleep anyway. I turned on my light and got a good look around my room, surveying the damage. The leak above my bed wasn’t all that serious, I just had to deal with a drop of water or two falling about every 15 minutes or so when it’s raining really hard. There were however other problems that I became aware of with my light on. There were three small puddles on my floor from leaks in the roof, but fortunately, none of them were in problematic spots or large enough to be a real problem. I turned around again to get back in bed and I got a good look at my walls. For any of you who weren’t already aware, wood is not waterproof. This means that when there is rain and any kind of wind, the rain gets slammed into my walls… and then soaks through to the inside of my house. I now have water spots all over my walls, and in a few places, leaking down to the floor. This isn’t so problematic except that my bed is located right next to the wall, thus my blanket and sheet are susceptible to getting wet. I moved my bed a few inches away from the wall just to be safe. As there was nothing else I could do, I crawled back under the covers, shoved my dog over so that I could at least have half of the bed, and eventually fell back asleep listening to the rain and thunder with the occasional drop of rain on my face.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
When your no means yes and your yes means maybe
I often have trouble communicating with Paraguayans. Part of it is the whole language thing. I’m close enough to fluency in Spanish, but they mix their Spanish with Guarani, and when they speak to each other they typically only speak Guarani which I still haven’t quite got the hang of. Another aspect to this difficulty with communication is that they talk differently. They say funny things like, “veni un poco” (come a little) or announce what they are doing, “ja’u” (we eat… as if I didn’t already know that we were eating). They like to say redundant things as if they were informing you of something you weren’t aware of, like “okyhína” (it’s raining), or ask questions that we both know they already know the answer to. “Empa’apohína,” (you’re working?) they ask me, and I want to respond with something sarcastic like, “nope, I’m just standin’ in my front yard with my rake and machete trying to look like I’m doing something.” But instead, I respond with, “Hee, che guapa” (yes, I’m guapa).
Another problem I have with communication is that if they don’t like my answer to their question, they keep pushing until they get an answer they like better. “Do you want to play volleyball?” they ask me. “No, I’m tired,” I say, pleading silently with my eyes for them not to ask me again. I actually am tired and would really rather just go into my house and make myself dinner or sit and read, but since I live right next to the volley cancha, I feel rude ignoring everyone and being anti-social. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve discovered that I hate volleyball. It’s not because I don’t know how to play (which I don’t), because they don’t know how to play either. I just don’t find it entertaining to jump up and down trying to hit a ball over a net only to have it come right back at me. Put it on the ground and let me kick it and run into people accidentally in the name of futbol, and I’m good to go. But volleyball, no thanks. Apparently my feigned tiredness doesn’t convince them. “Oh come on, just a little bit,” they ask again. “No,” I say again, “I don’t know how to play.” This is also somewhat of a lie. I actually do know how to play, I’m just not all that good at it and being the prideful person that I am, I typically don’t enjoy anything that I’m not good at. They respond with, “but it’s just for fun, veni!” “Yah, fun for who?” I think. But I’m out of excuses, so I obediently go stand in front of the net, not moving for a full 5 minutes while I sleepily watch my teammates rush to wack the ball. The two times I actually did hit the ball in the entire game proved to everyone watching that I did know, mas o menos, what I was doing out there, but I’m not sure anyone caught on that I had been forced into playing.
Ok, so maybe I wasn’t really forced that time, but I really have been all but forced (sometimes literally) into several uncomfortable situations. It seems they don’t understand the word “no.” By using the word “no” several times followed by some lame excuses, I have gotten myself trapped into going to painfully terrible fiestas as well as other social engagements, dancing with drunk men, eating more food than my stomach can handle, eating greasy food and unidentifiable parts of meat, having awkward conversations with older men, drinking wine and coke when I preferred the whiskey, staying far later for a “visit” than I ever expected or wanted, accepting to take home more food than I know I can eat before it goes bad, as well as many other awkward, painful, or dreaded situations that I don’t care to remember. I don’t even know how to get myself out of these situations most of the time. There were times when I gave excuse after excuse of why I didn’t want to do something and it was like they didn’t hear any of it… even when I actually had valid excuses. They really just don’t listen, and once they have it in their mind that you should do something, that’s it whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, if I am agreeing to something in the future, whether it be tomorrow or next week, it is perfectly acceptable for me to say yes and then back out at the last minute. I’m still not sure why they think this is an acceptable way for society to function, but they think that saying no at the last minute (or just straight up not showing up) will hurt your feelings less that just saying no in the first place. A few weeks ago, I agreed to go to a high school event in a nearby pueblo to get to know the school a little better and meet a few of the teachers. This was also supposed to be followed up by me spending the night at one of the teachers houses so that I could teach his daughter English in the few hours I was there and take home one of their kittens that they didn’t want. I by the way got into this situation by saying “no,” but that didn’t work and I ended up promising all of the above. The day before the event, I found out that it was my recent host dad’s birthday and the whole family was getting together to celebrate. The celebration included killing their pig (I know love pig asado) and making sopa. Being that it was a family event, I said I would come and spend the day with them and eat some delicious pig asado. I now was double booked and of course preferred spending the day hanging out with my family than going to some awkward high school event and spending the night with people I didn’t know and then being forced into adopting a cat that I didn’t want. I didn’t have his number, so I text a friend so that she could text the teacher and inform him that I no longer could come. While this might seem a bit evasive, I felt absolutely no qualms in having someone else communicate for me at the last minute that I was bailing. Besides, I really did have a good excuse this time. That’s just the Paraguayan way and people expect you to act like that. I often find it frustrating trying to communicate this way and would really prefer straight up honesty. But, unfortunately, I often have to conform to Paraguayan ways in order to get by. So this is what I have figured out: when you say “no,” they won’t listen and will insist until you change your answer to “yes.” When you say “yes,” you have every right to back out up until the last minute even if you have a very lame excuse. “Yes,” means “maybe,” which often translates to “no.” Somehow I find this way of communication a bit backward.
Another problem I have with communication is that if they don’t like my answer to their question, they keep pushing until they get an answer they like better. “Do you want to play volleyball?” they ask me. “No, I’m tired,” I say, pleading silently with my eyes for them not to ask me again. I actually am tired and would really rather just go into my house and make myself dinner or sit and read, but since I live right next to the volley cancha, I feel rude ignoring everyone and being anti-social. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve discovered that I hate volleyball. It’s not because I don’t know how to play (which I don’t), because they don’t know how to play either. I just don’t find it entertaining to jump up and down trying to hit a ball over a net only to have it come right back at me. Put it on the ground and let me kick it and run into people accidentally in the name of futbol, and I’m good to go. But volleyball, no thanks. Apparently my feigned tiredness doesn’t convince them. “Oh come on, just a little bit,” they ask again. “No,” I say again, “I don’t know how to play.” This is also somewhat of a lie. I actually do know how to play, I’m just not all that good at it and being the prideful person that I am, I typically don’t enjoy anything that I’m not good at. They respond with, “but it’s just for fun, veni!” “Yah, fun for who?” I think. But I’m out of excuses, so I obediently go stand in front of the net, not moving for a full 5 minutes while I sleepily watch my teammates rush to wack the ball. The two times I actually did hit the ball in the entire game proved to everyone watching that I did know, mas o menos, what I was doing out there, but I’m not sure anyone caught on that I had been forced into playing.
Ok, so maybe I wasn’t really forced that time, but I really have been all but forced (sometimes literally) into several uncomfortable situations. It seems they don’t understand the word “no.” By using the word “no” several times followed by some lame excuses, I have gotten myself trapped into going to painfully terrible fiestas as well as other social engagements, dancing with drunk men, eating more food than my stomach can handle, eating greasy food and unidentifiable parts of meat, having awkward conversations with older men, drinking wine and coke when I preferred the whiskey, staying far later for a “visit” than I ever expected or wanted, accepting to take home more food than I know I can eat before it goes bad, as well as many other awkward, painful, or dreaded situations that I don’t care to remember. I don’t even know how to get myself out of these situations most of the time. There were times when I gave excuse after excuse of why I didn’t want to do something and it was like they didn’t hear any of it… even when I actually had valid excuses. They really just don’t listen, and once they have it in their mind that you should do something, that’s it whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, if I am agreeing to something in the future, whether it be tomorrow or next week, it is perfectly acceptable for me to say yes and then back out at the last minute. I’m still not sure why they think this is an acceptable way for society to function, but they think that saying no at the last minute (or just straight up not showing up) will hurt your feelings less that just saying no in the first place. A few weeks ago, I agreed to go to a high school event in a nearby pueblo to get to know the school a little better and meet a few of the teachers. This was also supposed to be followed up by me spending the night at one of the teachers houses so that I could teach his daughter English in the few hours I was there and take home one of their kittens that they didn’t want. I by the way got into this situation by saying “no,” but that didn’t work and I ended up promising all of the above. The day before the event, I found out that it was my recent host dad’s birthday and the whole family was getting together to celebrate. The celebration included killing their pig (I know love pig asado) and making sopa. Being that it was a family event, I said I would come and spend the day with them and eat some delicious pig asado. I now was double booked and of course preferred spending the day hanging out with my family than going to some awkward high school event and spending the night with people I didn’t know and then being forced into adopting a cat that I didn’t want. I didn’t have his number, so I text a friend so that she could text the teacher and inform him that I no longer could come. While this might seem a bit evasive, I felt absolutely no qualms in having someone else communicate for me at the last minute that I was bailing. Besides, I really did have a good excuse this time. That’s just the Paraguayan way and people expect you to act like that. I often find it frustrating trying to communicate this way and would really prefer straight up honesty. But, unfortunately, I often have to conform to Paraguayan ways in order to get by. So this is what I have figured out: when you say “no,” they won’t listen and will insist until you change your answer to “yes.” When you say “yes,” you have every right to back out up until the last minute even if you have a very lame excuse. “Yes,” means “maybe,” which often translates to “no.” Somehow I find this way of communication a bit backward.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
a few lessons i have learned
I have already been in site for over 4 months now and I have my tri-yearly meeting with my bosses in Asuncion this week. Two weeks prior to coming in, I had to fill out a report basically giving statistics on what I had done in the last few months and what I have learned. While writing down numbers and giving data sometimes makes me feel like I actually am doing something, I found myself more interested in reflecting on what I’ve learned these past several months. While this is not a complete list, nor is it all included in the report I sent to Asuncion, I thought I would share some of my reflections and lessons with you.
• Be purposeful in doing things to make you happy. While being depressed sometimes seems an easier choice, staying active and involved is much more fulfilling both for me and for other people.
• Dogs are capable of having separation anxiety issues (aka my dog).
• There are moths that exist that are bigger than my hand.
• While spiders might be frightening, they do not “get you,” and I don’t need to call for help every time I see one… except for the poisonous ones… those are dangerous.
• I am an introvert. I need my time and space to be alone… lots of it!
• Despite my aggressive and take-charge attitude, I am very often shy.
• Listening to people speak in another language can be exhausting even if I am not participating.
• Food and drink always make conversation go easier. They are universal topics and a great way to bond with people. If you want to be aquaintances with people, share a drink. If you want to be friends with people, cook with them and share food.
• Sitting in silence is not a bad thing.
• Old wooden houses have LOTS of cobwebs and just when you think you have cleared them all out, they magically reappear.
• Trust people less but love them more.
• In English when we want to get out of a commitment but don’t want to say no, we say “maybe.” In Paraguay when you want to get out of a commitment but don’t’ want to say no, you can say, “later,” “tomorrow,” “in between now and tomorrow,” or even “yes” as well as several other evasive phrases. Almost always, people know exactly what you mean.
• There are days when the last thing I want to do is leave my house and go talk to people. I have learned that on those days, that is exactly what I need to do to make myself feel better.
• Both rich people and poor people waste resources and money, they just do it in different ways.
• I can go without much more than I thought was possible.
• Banana peels on the floors of city busses are a very bad idea.
• When it is 5 degrees Celsius outside and your house has very little protection from the elements, bathing is a painful event that is very rarely worth the suffering.
• I can function without an addiction to coffee. I am however, a much more energetic and happy person when I do get my morning cup(s) of liquid happiness.
• Be purposeful in doing things to make you happy. While being depressed sometimes seems an easier choice, staying active and involved is much more fulfilling both for me and for other people.
• Dogs are capable of having separation anxiety issues (aka my dog).
• There are moths that exist that are bigger than my hand.
• While spiders might be frightening, they do not “get you,” and I don’t need to call for help every time I see one… except for the poisonous ones… those are dangerous.
• I am an introvert. I need my time and space to be alone… lots of it!
• Despite my aggressive and take-charge attitude, I am very often shy.
• Listening to people speak in another language can be exhausting even if I am not participating.
• Food and drink always make conversation go easier. They are universal topics and a great way to bond with people. If you want to be aquaintances with people, share a drink. If you want to be friends with people, cook with them and share food.
• Sitting in silence is not a bad thing.
• Old wooden houses have LOTS of cobwebs and just when you think you have cleared them all out, they magically reappear.
• Trust people less but love them more.
• In English when we want to get out of a commitment but don’t want to say no, we say “maybe.” In Paraguay when you want to get out of a commitment but don’t’ want to say no, you can say, “later,” “tomorrow,” “in between now and tomorrow,” or even “yes” as well as several other evasive phrases. Almost always, people know exactly what you mean.
• There are days when the last thing I want to do is leave my house and go talk to people. I have learned that on those days, that is exactly what I need to do to make myself feel better.
• Both rich people and poor people waste resources and money, they just do it in different ways.
• I can go without much more than I thought was possible.
• Banana peels on the floors of city busses are a very bad idea.
• When it is 5 degrees Celsius outside and your house has very little protection from the elements, bathing is a painful event that is very rarely worth the suffering.
• I can function without an addiction to coffee. I am however, a much more energetic and happy person when I do get my morning cup(s) of liquid happiness.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
mas fotos!
I have put up pictures of my house and a few others. I'm still in the process of trying to clean everything up and make it look lindo, so the "after" pictures are still on their way.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
21 and ready for retirement
Before I got to Paraguay and during training, I had a few people tell me that Peace Corps was kind of like retirement. I laughed with them and privately thought to myself that people were just lazy and lacked motivation to make things happening and silently promised myself that I would fill every day with work and never lack motivation. I seriously misjudged them. Peace Corps really does feel like retirement sometimes, and it’s not really for lack of motivation, but simply because that’s just the way the culture works. I have never in my life felt that I had so little to do and simultaneously felt like I had too much to do. I have also never in my life been so purposeful in keeping myself happy.
Every day I have quiet time to myself that I usually spend reading or writing. I also try everyday to do something to “fix up the house” whether that’s spending a couple hours raking the ever abundant supply of leaves, starting a compost pile machete down some overgrown weeds, or buying a table. I tell myself that even if I can do something simple like that, I have accomplishes something that day. I go to community events partly because I feel like that’s part of my job, and partly because it’s something to do. I spend many afternoons visiting with neighbors, complaining about the weather, gossiping about what the other neighbors are doing, and sometimes just sitting in silence. I have a dog partly to make me feel safe at night, but mostly for the company. Every few days I like to find a new recipe and try something new, or just experiment with something I already know how to do. I always have either one or two books that I’m in the middle or reading and every time I go into Asuncion/Peace Corps library, I pick up a few more to supply myself for the next month. I typically go to bed between 9:30 and 10 and usually get up at 6. If I sleep in until 7, I feel like I’m being lazy. On extremely cold days I typically sleep in later than normal and read more than normal because it’s “too cold to do anything.” My work consists of working in the schools and organizing and motivating community groups and events which means that my personal and professional life are basically the same thing and there is little separation between the two.
I keep pictures on my fridge to remind me of the people I love. Every couple of days I pick wildflowers while walking back to my house because they make me happy. I do everything I can to keep my house clean, organized, and a comfortable environment and have many plans on improvements. There are many days when I don’t feel like leaving the house and on those days I know that’s exactly what I need to do to make myself feel better. I go for a walk or go visit someone that I like (I don’t like everyone in my community) and I always leave feeling happier and more connected. I stay as connected to my friend and family back in the states without making myself feel like I should be there instead of here and I continually keep myself plugged in to my community here. When I have a really bad day, I call a Peace Corps friend because they are really the only people can fully understand what I’m going through or I text my mom to call me because somehow mom always makes it better… even thousands of miles away. Even though some of it is involuntary, I always have plenty of exercise, usually averaging over an hour of walking ever day.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when I finally go back home and have a “9 to 5” with an actual schedule. I find it quite relaxing and pleasant living like this even though sometimes I feel like what I’m doing is more normal for a 60 year old than a 21 year old. I will enjoy my “pre-tirement” while it lasts and read as many books, pick as many flowers, make as many new friends, try as many new recipes, and attend as many community events as possible.
Every day I have quiet time to myself that I usually spend reading or writing. I also try everyday to do something to “fix up the house” whether that’s spending a couple hours raking the ever abundant supply of leaves, starting a compost pile machete down some overgrown weeds, or buying a table. I tell myself that even if I can do something simple like that, I have accomplishes something that day. I go to community events partly because I feel like that’s part of my job, and partly because it’s something to do. I spend many afternoons visiting with neighbors, complaining about the weather, gossiping about what the other neighbors are doing, and sometimes just sitting in silence. I have a dog partly to make me feel safe at night, but mostly for the company. Every few days I like to find a new recipe and try something new, or just experiment with something I already know how to do. I always have either one or two books that I’m in the middle or reading and every time I go into Asuncion/Peace Corps library, I pick up a few more to supply myself for the next month. I typically go to bed between 9:30 and 10 and usually get up at 6. If I sleep in until 7, I feel like I’m being lazy. On extremely cold days I typically sleep in later than normal and read more than normal because it’s “too cold to do anything.” My work consists of working in the schools and organizing and motivating community groups and events which means that my personal and professional life are basically the same thing and there is little separation between the two.
I keep pictures on my fridge to remind me of the people I love. Every couple of days I pick wildflowers while walking back to my house because they make me happy. I do everything I can to keep my house clean, organized, and a comfortable environment and have many plans on improvements. There are many days when I don’t feel like leaving the house and on those days I know that’s exactly what I need to do to make myself feel better. I go for a walk or go visit someone that I like (I don’t like everyone in my community) and I always leave feeling happier and more connected. I stay as connected to my friend and family back in the states without making myself feel like I should be there instead of here and I continually keep myself plugged in to my community here. When I have a really bad day, I call a Peace Corps friend because they are really the only people can fully understand what I’m going through or I text my mom to call me because somehow mom always makes it better… even thousands of miles away. Even though some of it is involuntary, I always have plenty of exercise, usually averaging over an hour of walking ever day.
I’m not sure what I’ll do when I finally go back home and have a “9 to 5” with an actual schedule. I find it quite relaxing and pleasant living like this even though sometimes I feel like what I’m doing is more normal for a 60 year old than a 21 year old. I will enjoy my “pre-tirement” while it lasts and read as many books, pick as many flowers, make as many new friends, try as many new recipes, and attend as many community events as possible.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
I think I went back in time...
For about the last month, the electric company has been changing all of the electricity posts and cables in my site. This means that the electricity gets shut off at about 8 o’clock in the morning (sometimes earlier) and doesn’t come back on again until abut 5 in the evening. It’s been quite frustrating only being able to use electricity at night. I have more than once forgotten to charge my cell phone and went on a low battery all day hoping no one would call me. When I was living with a family, the lack of electricity didn’t affect too much in terms of cooking because we were cooking with fire. Now that I’m by myself, I cook with an electric stove/oven so when the electricity goes out, I can’t cook and I can’t heat up water to wash my dishes. While it is theoretically possible to wash dishes with cold water like every Paraguayan does, I prefer to use at least warm water to cut the grease to ensure that I have actual clean dishes and not halfway clean ones like most Paraguayans use. I also have to make sure that I keep my refrigerator closed as much as possible to keep as much cold air in there as possible.
To complete the problem, after a few hours without electricity, the community water tank goes out and everyone is without water as well. The plumber is out of town a lot, so we usually don’t get water again until nighttime as well when he gets back home and then drives out to the tank to fix it. A few times he was gone for 2 or 3 days and the entire community went without running water the whole time. In the last 5 years that most of my community has had running water, most people have neglected or gotten rid of the wells that they do have so access to water is difficult. The people who do not have wells have to walk to a neighbors house or down the street to fill up buckets to do their laundry, wash their dishes, cook, drink terere, and bathe. And if they have livestock, they have to lug even more water to their house to care for their animals. I am one of those people who’s well is too dirty to use. I also have no good way to transport water since I am still trying to get settled in my house and only have 2 palinganas which are not suitable to transport water, and one small bucket that I use for my latrine.
I knew water and electricity were precious resources, but I never realized how precious they really are until I had to go without. After I eat breakfast and wash those dishes, I fill up my palinganas with water so that if the water does go out, I at least have something to bathe in or wash dishes in and my dog has access to water as well. If I don’t do that, I have to wait all day, sometimes until 8 o’clock at night, maybe even the following morning to be able to wash my dishes or bathe. I also keep pitchers and bottles of water in the fridge to ensure I have water to stay hydrated or cook if/when the electricity comes back on. Sometimes I feel like I've gone back in time.
It’s rather difficult to make sure you use all the needed electricity/water you need for the day in the morning, especially when everything shuts off unexpectedly before 7:30 am like it did this morning, which by the way, is a Sunday. My old host family had asked me to bake a cake and bring it over for lunch. I wasn’t expecting the electricity to go out on a Sunday, and even if it did, I wasn’t expecting it to go off that early. I had my cake all ready to go and the moment I plugged in my oven, everything shut down. I have no idea if/when it will come back on today and have no way of finding out. I also had a pile of dishes loaded with grease from getting the cake ready and had really been hoping to heat up water to get them all clean. I figured I would just get them all clean with cold water as best I could so I didn’t have a pile of dirty dishes. I loaded my palingana with soap and turned on the water. After about a minute of water dribbling out of the spout, the water just stopped all together. I had also really been hoping to wash my hair this morning since I’ve been saying that for the last few days but have not had enough water to actually do that. I’m not really sure what to do with this predicament. I have cake batter ready to be put in the oven, a pile of dirty dishes, a cup and a half of really soapy water with no water to rinse, and dirty hair. I feel like things like this happen all the time in Paraguay and while it used to surprise and frustrate me, it doesn’t really phase me anymore. I’ll get to the dirty dishes and dirty hair when I get to them and have water. Maybe I’ll go find someone with a gas oven to bake my cake, or maybe the electricity will come back on. Thank goodness Paraguay doesn’t function on deadlines and promises and thank goodness my hair looks good dirty.
To complete the problem, after a few hours without electricity, the community water tank goes out and everyone is without water as well. The plumber is out of town a lot, so we usually don’t get water again until nighttime as well when he gets back home and then drives out to the tank to fix it. A few times he was gone for 2 or 3 days and the entire community went without running water the whole time. In the last 5 years that most of my community has had running water, most people have neglected or gotten rid of the wells that they do have so access to water is difficult. The people who do not have wells have to walk to a neighbors house or down the street to fill up buckets to do their laundry, wash their dishes, cook, drink terere, and bathe. And if they have livestock, they have to lug even more water to their house to care for their animals. I am one of those people who’s well is too dirty to use. I also have no good way to transport water since I am still trying to get settled in my house and only have 2 palinganas which are not suitable to transport water, and one small bucket that I use for my latrine.
I knew water and electricity were precious resources, but I never realized how precious they really are until I had to go without. After I eat breakfast and wash those dishes, I fill up my palinganas with water so that if the water does go out, I at least have something to bathe in or wash dishes in and my dog has access to water as well. If I don’t do that, I have to wait all day, sometimes until 8 o’clock at night, maybe even the following morning to be able to wash my dishes or bathe. I also keep pitchers and bottles of water in the fridge to ensure I have water to stay hydrated or cook if/when the electricity comes back on. Sometimes I feel like I've gone back in time.
It’s rather difficult to make sure you use all the needed electricity/water you need for the day in the morning, especially when everything shuts off unexpectedly before 7:30 am like it did this morning, which by the way, is a Sunday. My old host family had asked me to bake a cake and bring it over for lunch. I wasn’t expecting the electricity to go out on a Sunday, and even if it did, I wasn’t expecting it to go off that early. I had my cake all ready to go and the moment I plugged in my oven, everything shut down. I have no idea if/when it will come back on today and have no way of finding out. I also had a pile of dishes loaded with grease from getting the cake ready and had really been hoping to heat up water to get them all clean. I figured I would just get them all clean with cold water as best I could so I didn’t have a pile of dirty dishes. I loaded my palingana with soap and turned on the water. After about a minute of water dribbling out of the spout, the water just stopped all together. I had also really been hoping to wash my hair this morning since I’ve been saying that for the last few days but have not had enough water to actually do that. I’m not really sure what to do with this predicament. I have cake batter ready to be put in the oven, a pile of dirty dishes, a cup and a half of really soapy water with no water to rinse, and dirty hair. I feel like things like this happen all the time in Paraguay and while it used to surprise and frustrate me, it doesn’t really phase me anymore. I’ll get to the dirty dishes and dirty hair when I get to them and have water. Maybe I’ll go find someone with a gas oven to bake my cake, or maybe the electricity will come back on. Thank goodness Paraguay doesn’t function on deadlines and promises and thank goodness my hair looks good dirty.
che aiko che rogape. i'm living in my house!
First off, I want to apologize for my infrequent updates this last month and a half. I was sharing a room with my host sister this last month, and I don’t like bringing my computer out in front of Paraguayans. When one person gets a glimpse of my shiny American laptop, their eyes widen a bit, they tell me it’s pretty, and then they leave to go tell the rest of the family that Ali has her computer out. Then the entire family tromps in my room to get a glimpse of the pretty computer that the American has and proceed to stare at me as I try to type. As you can imagine, not only does that make it hard for me to concentrate, but it also makes me feel extremely uncomfortable and confirms more solidly in their minds that I am incredibly rich. So my computer has pretty much been sitting in my backpack the last month or so, only brought out when most of the family is gone. I fake taking a nap and close the door and window to get an hour or so to type up some emails.
I am extremely happy to announce that I am no longer subject to sharing a room or hiding my laptop. After 6 and a half months living with Paraguayan families, I am finally living by myself! It has only been a week that I have been in my own house, but it’s incredible what it has already done for my sanity. As if I wasn’t already aware of the fact that I’m an introvert, living with 4 different Paraguayan families (and sharing a room with someone) brought out my introvertness (yes, that is now a word) more that ever. I now live in a very small, old, wooden house, that even after hours and hours of work is still lacking. I love it. I can now cook by myself and cook whatever I feel like cooking and not feel like an idiot. As I am typing now, I have bread baking in the oven and it smells amazing. I now have some peace in the morning when I wake up and at night before I go to bed without having to worry about screaming children running in my room.
To make my house as homey as possible, I completed it with decorations. I have wildflowers in a glass on my fridge next to a beanie baby that a friend sent me, pictures on my fridge, a world map on the wall, and a princess like mosquito net over my bed. I live very near a creek/woods and every night I have a ridiculous amount of mosquitoes in my house. The fact that I also have very large gaps in between the walls and the ceiling might contribute to the number of mosquitoes I have as well. I also have my dog living with me again which makes me so happy. She follows me absolutely every where I go whether it’s the patio, the latrine, or down the street. She probably would follow me onto the bus if I let her. On my property I have somewhere between 10 to 15 tangerine trees (some of them different types), a sweet orange tree, two sour orange trees, a lemon tree, 2 guava trees, a peach tree, a nispero tree (tastes like a kiwi), two mango trees, and a few pomelo (white grapefruit) trees. Oh, and my neighbors have passion fruit vines as well. I probably have some other kind of fruit trees that I haven’t discovered yet or have already forgotten about.
While the space is somewhat small, that fact that I’m by myself makes me feel like I have more than enough space. I have a latrine that is located about 25 meters away from my house (it makes going to the bathroom in the dark an adventure), but it has a cement seat with a real toilet seat on it so it almost feels like a real bathroom. You just have to pour water down after you go poop. I am also planning on putting in a shower but don’t have that done yet so I’m bathing out of a bucket again. My roof is metal so it gets pretty warm around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Winter hasn’t even officially ended yet, so I think I need to do something to remedy that before the hot months come. I also have hours of work ahead of me with my machete and a rake and probably a few matches. The outside needs more than a little bit of fixing up. All that said, I can’t find reason to complain. Pictures are coming soon… or at least when I have time to upload them all online… I’m sorry if this blog is confusing. I feel like it’s about at disorganized as all of the thoughts in my head right now.
I am extremely happy to announce that I am no longer subject to sharing a room or hiding my laptop. After 6 and a half months living with Paraguayan families, I am finally living by myself! It has only been a week that I have been in my own house, but it’s incredible what it has already done for my sanity. As if I wasn’t already aware of the fact that I’m an introvert, living with 4 different Paraguayan families (and sharing a room with someone) brought out my introvertness (yes, that is now a word) more that ever. I now live in a very small, old, wooden house, that even after hours and hours of work is still lacking. I love it. I can now cook by myself and cook whatever I feel like cooking and not feel like an idiot. As I am typing now, I have bread baking in the oven and it smells amazing. I now have some peace in the morning when I wake up and at night before I go to bed without having to worry about screaming children running in my room.
To make my house as homey as possible, I completed it with decorations. I have wildflowers in a glass on my fridge next to a beanie baby that a friend sent me, pictures on my fridge, a world map on the wall, and a princess like mosquito net over my bed. I live very near a creek/woods and every night I have a ridiculous amount of mosquitoes in my house. The fact that I also have very large gaps in between the walls and the ceiling might contribute to the number of mosquitoes I have as well. I also have my dog living with me again which makes me so happy. She follows me absolutely every where I go whether it’s the patio, the latrine, or down the street. She probably would follow me onto the bus if I let her. On my property I have somewhere between 10 to 15 tangerine trees (some of them different types), a sweet orange tree, two sour orange trees, a lemon tree, 2 guava trees, a peach tree, a nispero tree (tastes like a kiwi), two mango trees, and a few pomelo (white grapefruit) trees. Oh, and my neighbors have passion fruit vines as well. I probably have some other kind of fruit trees that I haven’t discovered yet or have already forgotten about.
While the space is somewhat small, that fact that I’m by myself makes me feel like I have more than enough space. I have a latrine that is located about 25 meters away from my house (it makes going to the bathroom in the dark an adventure), but it has a cement seat with a real toilet seat on it so it almost feels like a real bathroom. You just have to pour water down after you go poop. I am also planning on putting in a shower but don’t have that done yet so I’m bathing out of a bucket again. My roof is metal so it gets pretty warm around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Winter hasn’t even officially ended yet, so I think I need to do something to remedy that before the hot months come. I also have hours of work ahead of me with my machete and a rake and probably a few matches. The outside needs more than a little bit of fixing up. All that said, I can’t find reason to complain. Pictures are coming soon… or at least when I have time to upload them all online… I’m sorry if this blog is confusing. I feel like it’s about at disorganized as all of the thoughts in my head right now.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
my grace is sufficient
more photos coming soon of the broken down house i've been fixing up/moving into.
and sorry it's been so long since i've posted! more coming soon!
got the runs?
So I know I’m a health volunteer and my job here is to teach people how to lead more healthy lives, but sometimes I’m surprised at what people here don’t know or what they think they know. Somehow I managed to get through 5 full months without getting sick and I was a little bit proud of myself considering how many other volunteers had gotten sick within the first few months. I attributed it to the fact that I thought I had a good immune system. The month of July proved that my immune system was not quite strong enough to combat all the germs in this county. After a trip to Asuncion, I came back to a sick house. Everyone had a cold, and when I say cold, I mean hacking up your lungs type of cough. Within about 48 hours I joined the bandwagon and started sniffing and coughing too.
It really shouldn’t be any surprise that when one person in the family gets sick, everyone in the family gets sick. Their standards of cleanliness are not always exactly what I would call up to par and their understanding of how germs pass from one person to another is frighteningly appalling. Part of it I’m sure has to do with how they wash their dishes, aka, using a sponge that looks about a year old to scrub the dishes, they sometimes use soap, and half the time with already dirty and cold water. Then they stack the wet dishes in the cupboard without drying them, leaving any germs that live in water free to thrive on the plate until the next use. While drinking terere and mate while you’re sick is supposed to be a no-no, that rule never really is applied, and you see people hacking away as they pass you the guampa, or cough on their hand and then adjust the bombilla (straw) with the same hand. I had a really hard time convincing them that I really didn’t want to share dishes/terere until I no longer had a cold because I didn’t want to get worse. They just thought I was crazy. But like I said, they don’t really understand the concept of passing germs. I was making a cake with my host sister and my 5 year old brother came up to look at the cake and started severely coughing with his face about 5 inches from the batter. I winced and then tried to push him back a little, telling him it was better to cough “over there” instead of on top of the cake. My sister raised her eyebrows and asked me what I was doing and even when I explained you aren’t supposed to cough on food you are sharing, she just kept looking at me funny.
So considering the lack of general education here on germs and bacteria, and the standards of cleanliness they have for their bathrooms/latrines, I shouldn’t have been surprised to get giardia during my stay in Paraguay (or at least I think it was giardia, I’m not really sure). I’m actually surprised it took me so long to actually get sick. If you feel so inclined, go look up giardia on the internet. I’ll just tell you that I had diarrhea, vomiting, and headache for three days. It was not fun. Surprisingly, while my host mom was not quite so worried about the vomiting and diarrhea, she started getting really concerned when I refused food. I went over 24 hours without eating anything and the next two days I ate very little. During that time I also used an absurd amount of pepto bismal tablets. Between cleaning out my system and taking that many anti-diarrheal pills, I stopped up my system for a good few days after that.
I spent the next few weeks blissfully “germ free.” This week I suffered a migraine that lasted for over 48 hours. My neighbor laughed at me when I told her I was taking anti-inflammatory and drinking a coke with caffeine to help get rid of the headache. And as I’m sitting here writing, my stomach is making some quite absurd noises. I should have believed them in training when they told me I couldn’t go two years without getting sick.
It really shouldn’t be any surprise that when one person in the family gets sick, everyone in the family gets sick. Their standards of cleanliness are not always exactly what I would call up to par and their understanding of how germs pass from one person to another is frighteningly appalling. Part of it I’m sure has to do with how they wash their dishes, aka, using a sponge that looks about a year old to scrub the dishes, they sometimes use soap, and half the time with already dirty and cold water. Then they stack the wet dishes in the cupboard without drying them, leaving any germs that live in water free to thrive on the plate until the next use. While drinking terere and mate while you’re sick is supposed to be a no-no, that rule never really is applied, and you see people hacking away as they pass you the guampa, or cough on their hand and then adjust the bombilla (straw) with the same hand. I had a really hard time convincing them that I really didn’t want to share dishes/terere until I no longer had a cold because I didn’t want to get worse. They just thought I was crazy. But like I said, they don’t really understand the concept of passing germs. I was making a cake with my host sister and my 5 year old brother came up to look at the cake and started severely coughing with his face about 5 inches from the batter. I winced and then tried to push him back a little, telling him it was better to cough “over there” instead of on top of the cake. My sister raised her eyebrows and asked me what I was doing and even when I explained you aren’t supposed to cough on food you are sharing, she just kept looking at me funny.
So considering the lack of general education here on germs and bacteria, and the standards of cleanliness they have for their bathrooms/latrines, I shouldn’t have been surprised to get giardia during my stay in Paraguay (or at least I think it was giardia, I’m not really sure). I’m actually surprised it took me so long to actually get sick. If you feel so inclined, go look up giardia on the internet. I’ll just tell you that I had diarrhea, vomiting, and headache for three days. It was not fun. Surprisingly, while my host mom was not quite so worried about the vomiting and diarrhea, she started getting really concerned when I refused food. I went over 24 hours without eating anything and the next two days I ate very little. During that time I also used an absurd amount of pepto bismal tablets. Between cleaning out my system and taking that many anti-diarrheal pills, I stopped up my system for a good few days after that.
I spent the next few weeks blissfully “germ free.” This week I suffered a migraine that lasted for over 48 hours. My neighbor laughed at me when I told her I was taking anti-inflammatory and drinking a coke with caffeine to help get rid of the headache. And as I’m sitting here writing, my stomach is making some quite absurd noises. I should have believed them in training when they told me I couldn’t go two years without getting sick.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
but what do you DOOOO??
Probably the most frequent question people asked me both in preparing to come to Paraguay and since I have been here is, “so what do you do?” Before I left I really had no idea what I was going to be doing here except for some very vague ideas from an introduction pamphlet sent to me in my invitation packet. So when people asked me what my job would be in Paraguay, I either parroted the pamphlet or I just made something up. “You know, I’ll be building brick ovens, building latrines for people, and educating them on stuff like hygiene, you know, like washing your hands and stuff.” I really had no clue how that was supposed to happen especially considering I probably wouldn’t know what to do with a brick oven, much less know how to build one. Nonetheless, I had high hopes of moving into a community and building brick ovens and latrines for every family and leaving two years later with the knowledge that every child in my community washed their hands after using the bathroom and before eating. Ok, maybe my ambitions weren’t that over the top, but that was mostly because my hopes had been dashed by that same pamphlet in my invitation packet that had this huge section on patience and not going in expecting to be able to change everything. It talked about suffering from boredom and depression and feeling like you aren’t actually accomplishing anything. I tried to take this into account considering it was probably written by former volunteers, but I still kept thinking, “but I still will be able to build those brick ovens for these people right?”
Over training some of that was cleared up, starting with me learning how to build a structurally sound and functional brick oven and a sanitary latrine. They also spent hours of horribly boring medical sessions talking about how there would be days we were depressed and every session we had enforced the idea that we might not feel like we are making a difference. Most people here want a brick oven because that is of course preferable to cooking on the floor, but you don’t just get to waltz into their homes, build it, and walk away. The whole idea behind Peace Corps is self-sustainability, so we don’t get any extra funding. To get the money for materials for the fogons, you either have to raise the money as a community or petition the local government which sometimes feels like giving money and sometimes doesn’t. So our trainers taught us how to do all this stuff, showed us the resources we have within Peace Corps Paraguay, told us we wouldn’t get it all done and might not feel like we’re doing anything, encouraged us against depression, and sent us off to our sites hoping we had retained everything.
I arrived in site with high hopes determined to not get bored or depressed and determined to at least start every project that was needed. Now I’m not writing this to say that I’m bored and depressed and not getting anything done… but sometimes I feel that way. I moved into this community knowing my two contacts and their families and also knowing that part of my job is to meet everyone here and explain who I am and why I’m here and figure out what it is they really need. My idea of what work is has changed a lot and some days if I spend a good few hours visiting with people, I consider that work, even if most of the time I sit in silence listening to other people talk (which is usually the case). Ok, so back to the question, what do I actually do? When people back home ask me that I usually laugh and then say, “um, hang out??” because sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing. I usually get up between 6 and 7, depending on how long I feel like sleeping in and typically spend the morning drinking mate (hot terere), helping out with preparing breakfast and lunch and cleaning up a little bit, do some laundry, and sometimes I do a little reading or go for a run. Then there is more terere, lunch, and usually a “rest” because my family is always telling me I should “rest a while.” In the afternoon I usually bake something, go visit someone, get something done for the preparation of my house, or complete a few censuses (short interview with families to get to know the main heath problems). The evening consists of more mate and dinner, sometimes a shower, watching the popular telanovela “Victorino,” and then an hour or two of listening to music, reading, or writing before I go to bed at the late hours of 9 or 10. I feel like my life has become quite simple.
The thing about my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it usually sounds more exciting on paper than it really is and people telling you that you will have hard days or be bored is a lot different than the actual experience. Last time a group of volunteers were in Asuncion, one of the guys told us he had spent about 45 minutes just thinking about whether flies compete with each other to see who can be the most annoying. We all just laughed in understanding, all knowing that we had all spent hours contemplating equally useless topics. Since coming to Paraguay I have read 16 books (that is if you count the entire series of Narnia as 7 separate books) and I know many other volunteers have read much more than I have in the 6 months we’ve been here. I’m not even sure now that I really understand what being bored is. There were a few rainy/sick days this month when I literally spend hours just lying in bed with the covers over my face. I can’t tell you what I thought about except maybe the music I was listening to on my ipod, but I don’t think the thought, “I’m bored,” crossed my mind. I just was how I was and was perfectly happy to just be without having to think in Spanish or Guarani or think cross-culturally. Yes, in my two years I hopefully will build fogons for all the people in my community who need them and I will be doing a lot of work in the schools. I’ve actually already visited quite a few times and have done a dental charla with every class. But I don’t log my “work hours” in time spent in construction or in the classroom, my work mainly consists in building relationships and sharing cultures. Yah, sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it sucks, and I have the feeling many days that I’m not doing anything here. Sometimes I think that these people are teaching me more than I am teaching them. So for now, for all of you who are wondering what the heck I actually do here... that is about it...
Over training some of that was cleared up, starting with me learning how to build a structurally sound and functional brick oven and a sanitary latrine. They also spent hours of horribly boring medical sessions talking about how there would be days we were depressed and every session we had enforced the idea that we might not feel like we are making a difference. Most people here want a brick oven because that is of course preferable to cooking on the floor, but you don’t just get to waltz into their homes, build it, and walk away. The whole idea behind Peace Corps is self-sustainability, so we don’t get any extra funding. To get the money for materials for the fogons, you either have to raise the money as a community or petition the local government which sometimes feels like giving money and sometimes doesn’t. So our trainers taught us how to do all this stuff, showed us the resources we have within Peace Corps Paraguay, told us we wouldn’t get it all done and might not feel like we’re doing anything, encouraged us against depression, and sent us off to our sites hoping we had retained everything.
I arrived in site with high hopes determined to not get bored or depressed and determined to at least start every project that was needed. Now I’m not writing this to say that I’m bored and depressed and not getting anything done… but sometimes I feel that way. I moved into this community knowing my two contacts and their families and also knowing that part of my job is to meet everyone here and explain who I am and why I’m here and figure out what it is they really need. My idea of what work is has changed a lot and some days if I spend a good few hours visiting with people, I consider that work, even if most of the time I sit in silence listening to other people talk (which is usually the case). Ok, so back to the question, what do I actually do? When people back home ask me that I usually laugh and then say, “um, hang out??” because sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing. I usually get up between 6 and 7, depending on how long I feel like sleeping in and typically spend the morning drinking mate (hot terere), helping out with preparing breakfast and lunch and cleaning up a little bit, do some laundry, and sometimes I do a little reading or go for a run. Then there is more terere, lunch, and usually a “rest” because my family is always telling me I should “rest a while.” In the afternoon I usually bake something, go visit someone, get something done for the preparation of my house, or complete a few censuses (short interview with families to get to know the main heath problems). The evening consists of more mate and dinner, sometimes a shower, watching the popular telanovela “Victorino,” and then an hour or two of listening to music, reading, or writing before I go to bed at the late hours of 9 or 10. I feel like my life has become quite simple.
The thing about my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it usually sounds more exciting on paper than it really is and people telling you that you will have hard days or be bored is a lot different than the actual experience. Last time a group of volunteers were in Asuncion, one of the guys told us he had spent about 45 minutes just thinking about whether flies compete with each other to see who can be the most annoying. We all just laughed in understanding, all knowing that we had all spent hours contemplating equally useless topics. Since coming to Paraguay I have read 16 books (that is if you count the entire series of Narnia as 7 separate books) and I know many other volunteers have read much more than I have in the 6 months we’ve been here. I’m not even sure now that I really understand what being bored is. There were a few rainy/sick days this month when I literally spend hours just lying in bed with the covers over my face. I can’t tell you what I thought about except maybe the music I was listening to on my ipod, but I don’t think the thought, “I’m bored,” crossed my mind. I just was how I was and was perfectly happy to just be without having to think in Spanish or Guarani or think cross-culturally. Yes, in my two years I hopefully will build fogons for all the people in my community who need them and I will be doing a lot of work in the schools. I’ve actually already visited quite a few times and have done a dental charla with every class. But I don’t log my “work hours” in time spent in construction or in the classroom, my work mainly consists in building relationships and sharing cultures. Yah, sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it sucks, and I have the feeling many days that I’m not doing anything here. Sometimes I think that these people are teaching me more than I am teaching them. So for now, for all of you who are wondering what the heck I actually do here... that is about it...
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
cooking lessons
I'm not really sure what I thought cooking on a wood burning, brick oven would be like, but in my mind it seemed like a kind of cool idea. I even entertained the idea of building my own fogon in my house until I realized that meant I would also have to go search for firewood everday. The whole thing sounded easy enough: you light some sticks on fire and you just throw your pot there instead of on the normal stove. I guess somewhere along the way in my imagining the exciting experience of cooking with "real fire" I overlooked a few things. First and foremost is the constant smoke inhilation. Sometimes I can't even stand in the kitchen while my host mom is cooking because the smoke makes tears pour out of my eyes and I begin severly coughing as my body is rejecting the ash attempting to line my airways. It's painful. Plus, your clothes and hair are stained with the smell of smoke until you use large amounts of soap to remove the smell. Second of all, the whole getting-the-fire-going part isn't always as easy as my host mom makes it look and you have to continually feed more firewood into the fire and make sure that the fire is actually under the pot and not next to it.
I cooked for my family yesterday because my mom and sister were washing clothes (yes, by hand)and I thought I'd help out a little bit. When I got to Paraguay, I was both facinated and appalled at how finely Paraguayans insist on cutting up their vegetables. They somehow dice green peppers into green slivers and I stand there in amazement watching them work. Not only can I not chop as finely as they can, but the smaller I try and cut the vegetables, the slower I chop. I will get through cutting up half an onion while my sister has peeled and cut the other onion as well as two tomatoes and as I put the finishing touches to my onion half, she stands there staring at my sloth-like actions with the knife and tear-giving vegetable. I tried yesterday to work my way through those vegetables as quickly as I could, all the time thinking that my sister would walk in and wonder why the food wasn't already halfway cooked. About halfway through the vegetable cutting process, my 5 year old brother came in to stare at my and was ambiable enough to point out that I should have peeled the carrot before cutting it up. I sent him outside to go get me water to cook the noodles. Finally I got to the meat. I'm not even sure how to describe this process, but let me begin by saying I don't really cook that much meat and I still have issues actually touching raw meat. And if you have ever seen me cut up a chicken breast, you know how anal I am about cutting off every single peice of fat off the meat. I'm pretty sure this peice of meat was about 46% fat and 54% meat, and the whole thing was so tough I didn't know how to begin sawing my way through it. I would never have thought to cook this meat back home, much less serve it to anyone I liked. I probably spent a good 15 to 20 minutes cutting it up, swearing and talking to myself the whole time and thinking how it would have taken my host sister approxiamately 2.5 minutes to do the work that I was doing. I don't know how they do it, but they do. I even picked up a few peices and pulled it apart with my hands becasue it was easier separating the fat with my hands than with the knife. Oh, and by the way, this whole time I had my head right next to a window to ensure I had a steady semi-clean oxygen supply rather than coating my nostrils and lungs with ash. However long it took me to cut up all of the ingredients apparently didn't matter and the food turned out tasty enough.
This type of cooking experience is a typical 2 or 3 times a day activity in Paraguayan homes. They really do cook with meat like that, some families every day, and they really do cut up their vegetables fine enough so that you can barely see them. Some families are more generous with the vegetables than others and with others you might be lucky enough to get two baby onions and a small green onion cooked to oblivion in the mixture. After the vegetables and meat are chopped up, they throw it in about 3/4 cup of oil over the fire and cook all the vitamins out of the vegetables and fry the meat so that it's barely chewable. Then they throw in a ton of water (never measured) and after it's boiling, they either put in rice or noodles and then cook them so that they are just over-cooked and squishy. Finally once everything is overcooked and the vegetables have been obliterated into food coloring for the ample amount of broth that has a layer of oil for a topping, the family sits down with a spoon in one hand and a peice of mandioca in the other. My first host family typicially ate like this 3 times a day.
I will conclude by saying that this whole experience really isn't all that traumatizing once you get used to it and the whole broth mixture is actually quite tastey sometimes. That said, I'm planning on buying and using a gas stove in my house rather than a fogon and I plan on using many vegetables that are not cut up finely and meat that is not tough and fatty.
I cooked for my family yesterday because my mom and sister were washing clothes (yes, by hand)and I thought I'd help out a little bit. When I got to Paraguay, I was both facinated and appalled at how finely Paraguayans insist on cutting up their vegetables. They somehow dice green peppers into green slivers and I stand there in amazement watching them work. Not only can I not chop as finely as they can, but the smaller I try and cut the vegetables, the slower I chop. I will get through cutting up half an onion while my sister has peeled and cut the other onion as well as two tomatoes and as I put the finishing touches to my onion half, she stands there staring at my sloth-like actions with the knife and tear-giving vegetable. I tried yesterday to work my way through those vegetables as quickly as I could, all the time thinking that my sister would walk in and wonder why the food wasn't already halfway cooked. About halfway through the vegetable cutting process, my 5 year old brother came in to stare at my and was ambiable enough to point out that I should have peeled the carrot before cutting it up. I sent him outside to go get me water to cook the noodles. Finally I got to the meat. I'm not even sure how to describe this process, but let me begin by saying I don't really cook that much meat and I still have issues actually touching raw meat. And if you have ever seen me cut up a chicken breast, you know how anal I am about cutting off every single peice of fat off the meat. I'm pretty sure this peice of meat was about 46% fat and 54% meat, and the whole thing was so tough I didn't know how to begin sawing my way through it. I would never have thought to cook this meat back home, much less serve it to anyone I liked. I probably spent a good 15 to 20 minutes cutting it up, swearing and talking to myself the whole time and thinking how it would have taken my host sister approxiamately 2.5 minutes to do the work that I was doing. I don't know how they do it, but they do. I even picked up a few peices and pulled it apart with my hands becasue it was easier separating the fat with my hands than with the knife. Oh, and by the way, this whole time I had my head right next to a window to ensure I had a steady semi-clean oxygen supply rather than coating my nostrils and lungs with ash. However long it took me to cut up all of the ingredients apparently didn't matter and the food turned out tasty enough.
This type of cooking experience is a typical 2 or 3 times a day activity in Paraguayan homes. They really do cook with meat like that, some families every day, and they really do cut up their vegetables fine enough so that you can barely see them. Some families are more generous with the vegetables than others and with others you might be lucky enough to get two baby onions and a small green onion cooked to oblivion in the mixture. After the vegetables and meat are chopped up, they throw it in about 3/4 cup of oil over the fire and cook all the vitamins out of the vegetables and fry the meat so that it's barely chewable. Then they throw in a ton of water (never measured) and after it's boiling, they either put in rice or noodles and then cook them so that they are just over-cooked and squishy. Finally once everything is overcooked and the vegetables have been obliterated into food coloring for the ample amount of broth that has a layer of oil for a topping, the family sits down with a spoon in one hand and a peice of mandioca in the other. My first host family typicially ate like this 3 times a day.
I will conclude by saying that this whole experience really isn't all that traumatizing once you get used to it and the whole broth mixture is actually quite tastey sometimes. That said, I'm planning on buying and using a gas stove in my house rather than a fogon and I plan on using many vegetables that are not cut up finely and meat that is not tough and fatty.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
tales of cariy neighborhood kids
I’m not really sure why, but I’ve always found it easy to hang out with kids. Maybe it’s because they have so much energy and joy, or maybe it’s because I’m still kind of a kid myself. But either or, I think the neighborhood kids here have become some of my favorite people in Paraguay. Many times I find it easier to hang out with them than to hang out with the adults. First of all, they all look up to me, but they don’t ask as many annoying questions as the adults, nor do I feel like they pass as much judgment on me as the adults. Second of all, they don’t laugh at me when I try and say something in Guarani and most of them take in on as their personal job to teach me their language. It’s funny how sometimes children understand and see so much more than their parents.
Alberto lives across the street from me with his parents and 6 brothers and sisters in a house that I think has 2 or 3 rooms. He’s 8 years old and like most Paraguayan boys, he is pretty much obsessed with soccer. I think every time I’ve seen him, he has been running around barefoot with shorts and a t-shirt that are dirty, and sometimes his face matches his dirty shirt. It’s not like he’s too poor to bathe, because his mom and his 14 year old sister always look clean, he just runs around too much in the dirty, dusty Paraguayan campo. About every other day he’s in my front yard kicking around a soccer ball and as soon as he sees me, he asks me in Guarani if I want to play soccer with him and the couple of times I have said no because I was busy, he was highly disappointed. When he found out that I wanted to learn how to speak Guarani, he decided to only speak to me in Guarani because he wanted to help teach me. Luckily I can keep up with most 8 year old level conversations about soccer and when I don’t understand, he usually starts shouting louder (his “talking” voice is typically a shout) and waving his hands in the air while his eyes widen as if he is willing me to understand his words. One time he said something to me and another boy, Gustavo, overheard and the following conversation commenced in Guarani:
“You have to speak to her in Spanish only! She doesn’t understand Guarani.”
“No! She understands Guarani!” Alberto’s eyes are getting wider, his voice is getting louder, and his hands are starting to wave around in the air.
“Well she understands some things, but only a little, she hasn’t learned everything yet. We have to speak to her in Spanish!”
“But we HAVE to speak only Guarani to her so she can LEARN! And she understands!!” Alberto now turns to me, “Right Ali, you understand?”
While my apprehension is consistently getting better, I still have trouble responding in Guarani, so I just spoke in Spanish. “Yes, I understand. No Gustavo, I haven’t learned everything yet, but I understood everything you guys just said.” At this response, Gustavo’s eyes just widened about the same size as Alberto’s and he didn’t say anything. Alberto just stood there smiling with an I-told-you-so look on his face. I really like that kid.
Another boy, Ariel, about the same age as Alberto has also decided not to speak a word of Spanish to me. Even when I don’t understand a word he’s saying, he just keeps going on in Guarani. He also usually sports dirty shorts and a t-shirt, even when it’s cold outside, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen shoes on his feet. When I go for my runs, I pass his house and when he’s standing outside, I’ll yell at him, “jaha!” (let’s go!) and I jerk my head forward as if inviting him to run with me. “Moopiko” (Where?) he asks as he starts trailing behind still trying to figure out if he wants to tag along. And I just keep running and say, “jaháma!” (let’s go already!). After this, sometimes he falls in step with me asks again, “Moopa jahata” (where are we going?) and then repeats the question about every 2 minutes. I just respond with “allí” (over there) and then listen to his monologue in Guarani, trying to understand at least the main idea. The only thing is he kind of sucks as a running partner and every 5 minutes or so, he sighs and says, “che kaneo” (I’m tired) and we have to walk for a few minutes. While I usually prefer interrupted runs, I always enjoy his company, and I know that at least someone is happy to see me.
And then there is Monsuerat, a 5 year old girl with a button nose and one of the cutest kids I’ve met in my life. Every time there is a social event that we are both at, she will sidle up next to me and sometimes grab my arm, and smile, squinting her large brown eyes just a little bit and showing off her dimples and long eyelashes. She likes to sit next to me and help me name objects in Guarani. “Mba’e pe’a” (what’s this) she says pointing to a chair. “Apyka” I say, “ha pe’a mesá” (and this is a table) I add pointing to the table. Then she giggles and searches the room for something else to name. I think it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. She gets undivided attention from someone who is willing to talk to her and play with her, I get to practice my Guarani and not feel like a complete idiot.
While most people here are usually excited to see me and expect me to hang out with them for the next 5 hours, even if I’m just passing by their house, these kids probably express the most enthusiasm at spending time with me. Their faces light up, their eyes get bigger (if it’s Alberto, his hands start waving in the air) and they start speaking to me in Guarani. Even if I don’t understand, they speak to me in their language because they know that even if I don’t understand today, one day I will understand and they want to be a part of helping me learn.
Alberto lives across the street from me with his parents and 6 brothers and sisters in a house that I think has 2 or 3 rooms. He’s 8 years old and like most Paraguayan boys, he is pretty much obsessed with soccer. I think every time I’ve seen him, he has been running around barefoot with shorts and a t-shirt that are dirty, and sometimes his face matches his dirty shirt. It’s not like he’s too poor to bathe, because his mom and his 14 year old sister always look clean, he just runs around too much in the dirty, dusty Paraguayan campo. About every other day he’s in my front yard kicking around a soccer ball and as soon as he sees me, he asks me in Guarani if I want to play soccer with him and the couple of times I have said no because I was busy, he was highly disappointed. When he found out that I wanted to learn how to speak Guarani, he decided to only speak to me in Guarani because he wanted to help teach me. Luckily I can keep up with most 8 year old level conversations about soccer and when I don’t understand, he usually starts shouting louder (his “talking” voice is typically a shout) and waving his hands in the air while his eyes widen as if he is willing me to understand his words. One time he said something to me and another boy, Gustavo, overheard and the following conversation commenced in Guarani:
“You have to speak to her in Spanish only! She doesn’t understand Guarani.”
“No! She understands Guarani!” Alberto’s eyes are getting wider, his voice is getting louder, and his hands are starting to wave around in the air.
“Well she understands some things, but only a little, she hasn’t learned everything yet. We have to speak to her in Spanish!”
“But we HAVE to speak only Guarani to her so she can LEARN! And she understands!!” Alberto now turns to me, “Right Ali, you understand?”
While my apprehension is consistently getting better, I still have trouble responding in Guarani, so I just spoke in Spanish. “Yes, I understand. No Gustavo, I haven’t learned everything yet, but I understood everything you guys just said.” At this response, Gustavo’s eyes just widened about the same size as Alberto’s and he didn’t say anything. Alberto just stood there smiling with an I-told-you-so look on his face. I really like that kid.
Another boy, Ariel, about the same age as Alberto has also decided not to speak a word of Spanish to me. Even when I don’t understand a word he’s saying, he just keeps going on in Guarani. He also usually sports dirty shorts and a t-shirt, even when it’s cold outside, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen shoes on his feet. When I go for my runs, I pass his house and when he’s standing outside, I’ll yell at him, “jaha!” (let’s go!) and I jerk my head forward as if inviting him to run with me. “Moopiko” (Where?) he asks as he starts trailing behind still trying to figure out if he wants to tag along. And I just keep running and say, “jaháma!” (let’s go already!). After this, sometimes he falls in step with me asks again, “Moopa jahata” (where are we going?) and then repeats the question about every 2 minutes. I just respond with “allí” (over there) and then listen to his monologue in Guarani, trying to understand at least the main idea. The only thing is he kind of sucks as a running partner and every 5 minutes or so, he sighs and says, “che kaneo” (I’m tired) and we have to walk for a few minutes. While I usually prefer interrupted runs, I always enjoy his company, and I know that at least someone is happy to see me.
And then there is Monsuerat, a 5 year old girl with a button nose and one of the cutest kids I’ve met in my life. Every time there is a social event that we are both at, she will sidle up next to me and sometimes grab my arm, and smile, squinting her large brown eyes just a little bit and showing off her dimples and long eyelashes. She likes to sit next to me and help me name objects in Guarani. “Mba’e pe’a” (what’s this) she says pointing to a chair. “Apyka” I say, “ha pe’a mesá” (and this is a table) I add pointing to the table. Then she giggles and searches the room for something else to name. I think it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. She gets undivided attention from someone who is willing to talk to her and play with her, I get to practice my Guarani and not feel like a complete idiot.
While most people here are usually excited to see me and expect me to hang out with them for the next 5 hours, even if I’m just passing by their house, these kids probably express the most enthusiasm at spending time with me. Their faces light up, their eyes get bigger (if it’s Alberto, his hands start waving in the air) and they start speaking to me in Guarani. Even if I don’t understand, they speak to me in their language because they know that even if I don’t understand today, one day I will understand and they want to be a part of helping me learn.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
can you tell me how to get, how to get to seasame street?
Directions in Paraguay are a funny thing and in fact, most directions are rather relative. Of course pre-Paraguay, I quite enjoyed and used rather often both Map Quest and Google Maps, two wonderful websites that will tell you approximately how long it will take you to get from point A to point B, how many miles you will be on every street, and the fastest way to get there. They give you precise information and always gave me a sense of comfort because I felt like I knew exactly where I was. You’d be hard pressed to find that kind of information anywhere in Paraguay. If you are in Asuncion, you usually have to ask anywhere from 3 to 5 people directions to the same place to ensure you are actually getting correct directions. I will admit sometimes it’s my own stupidity in not understanding the directions I’ve been given, but the majority of times I get about three to 4 different answers when I ask 5 people the same thing. (And for those of you who have spent a lot of time with me getting lost and know that side of me, yes I have gotten over the whole lets-stop-and-ask-for-directions thing. I kind of had to.) Apparently the different answers stem from a couple of different things, the first being that people don’t know the city that well and sometimes they think they know where something is and so they tell you where they think it is. Other times, people just want to feel nice and don’t like telling you that they have no clue where that restaurant is, or where the post office is located, so they just make something up in the direction they think it could be located. I have backtracked so many times in that city it’s not even funny. The strange thing is, Asuncion is neither large, nor complicated. I could probably walk from one end of the city to the other in less than 4 hours and every single street runs either north-south or east-west. So when I get one person telling me to walk two blocks to my destination, another person telling me 5 more blocks and then turn left for 2 more blocks, and a third person telling me I need to walk about 6 blocks and then turn left and I’m there, I start wondering if my final destination is imaginary. By the way, I should also mention that 85% of the time, the estimation on number of blocks I have to walk is off by about 2 or 3 blocks so even if you do get 2 people to tell you the same thing, you still can’t be completely sure those directions are 100% accurate.
And then there are directions in the campo which are about as vague as they come. Maybe this is partly because everybody knows everybody and their families have usually lived in the area for a few generations so they never really have to give directions. I told a girl that I would come over to her house the next day to help her with her homework and I asked where she lived. She said, “you know where Fulana’s house is?”
“Yes.”
“Well I live right by there.”
Um… ok… “So your house is next to her house?”
“No, that’s not my house, but I live right near there.”
Well that was helpful. “So your house is in front of her house?”
“No, I don’t live there, but my house is like right there.” Ok, well that just cleared up my confusion. I still don’t even understand if it’s on the left or right side of the street.
I’ve also been told things like, “Oh you know where so and so lives? Well just pass their house a little bit and you’re there.” Well tell me, how long is “a little bit?” For someone who likes facts, exact directions, and an estimated time of arrival, responses like this are not something I like to hear. The other day I went to go visit the Heath Center in the nearby pueblo to ask for fluoride pills for my school. I had been told by several people that the it was “just down that road a little” by the plaza. When I left that morning I asked my host mom directions just be sure I knew where I was going. She told me, “Oh ya, just go down that street, you’ll see a big sign and it’s on your right.” I got off the bus confident and feeling good about myself that I knew exactly where I was going. I walked all the way down the street until I hit a dead end and no Health Center. While the walk wasn’t all that long, it was uphill and a cobble stone like quality that really hurts if you’re walking in rubber flip-flops. Now feeling a little foolish, partly for not knowing where I was, and partly for thinking it could really be that easy to get somewhere, I turned around and headed downhill while the people sitting out in their front yard watched the white girl retrace her steps. Half way down the street, I asked a lady if she knew where the Health Center was. She pointed down the street she had just been walking down, “Yes, just walk that way and it’s right there.” A few minutes later, I came up to a semi-official building that looked like it had a waiting room in the front. There was no big sign indicating my stop, but there was a nice little sign on the lawn that had a whole bunch of information about the Department of Cordillera and it said somewhere on there, “hospital.” Ladies and Gentlemen, I have arrived. The Health Center was on the right side of the street, but I’m still mystified why no one ever told me you have to turn left on to a side street to get there. Maybe when my host mom told be “big sign” she meant there is a big sign on the street where you want to turn left to get to the health center which is on the right side of the street approximately 5 buildings down and it has a small sign on the front lawn and is located across from a park. Yes, now that I think about it, she must have meant that.
And then there are directions in the campo which are about as vague as they come. Maybe this is partly because everybody knows everybody and their families have usually lived in the area for a few generations so they never really have to give directions. I told a girl that I would come over to her house the next day to help her with her homework and I asked where she lived. She said, “you know where Fulana’s house is?”
“Yes.”
“Well I live right by there.”
Um… ok… “So your house is next to her house?”
“No, that’s not my house, but I live right near there.”
Well that was helpful. “So your house is in front of her house?”
“No, I don’t live there, but my house is like right there.” Ok, well that just cleared up my confusion. I still don’t even understand if it’s on the left or right side of the street.
I’ve also been told things like, “Oh you know where so and so lives? Well just pass their house a little bit and you’re there.” Well tell me, how long is “a little bit?” For someone who likes facts, exact directions, and an estimated time of arrival, responses like this are not something I like to hear. The other day I went to go visit the Heath Center in the nearby pueblo to ask for fluoride pills for my school. I had been told by several people that the it was “just down that road a little” by the plaza. When I left that morning I asked my host mom directions just be sure I knew where I was going. She told me, “Oh ya, just go down that street, you’ll see a big sign and it’s on your right.” I got off the bus confident and feeling good about myself that I knew exactly where I was going. I walked all the way down the street until I hit a dead end and no Health Center. While the walk wasn’t all that long, it was uphill and a cobble stone like quality that really hurts if you’re walking in rubber flip-flops. Now feeling a little foolish, partly for not knowing where I was, and partly for thinking it could really be that easy to get somewhere, I turned around and headed downhill while the people sitting out in their front yard watched the white girl retrace her steps. Half way down the street, I asked a lady if she knew where the Health Center was. She pointed down the street she had just been walking down, “Yes, just walk that way and it’s right there.” A few minutes later, I came up to a semi-official building that looked like it had a waiting room in the front. There was no big sign indicating my stop, but there was a nice little sign on the lawn that had a whole bunch of information about the Department of Cordillera and it said somewhere on there, “hospital.” Ladies and Gentlemen, I have arrived. The Health Center was on the right side of the street, but I’m still mystified why no one ever told me you have to turn left on to a side street to get there. Maybe when my host mom told be “big sign” she meant there is a big sign on the street where you want to turn left to get to the health center which is on the right side of the street approximately 5 buildings down and it has a small sign on the front lawn and is located across from a park. Yes, now that I think about it, she must have meant that.
la cupa mundial
I have a couple updates on the whole futbol front. First of all, let me correct myself in saying that Paraguay has qualified for the world cup before, but you can probably find better facts on the internet than I can asking people in my site. My current host dad told me they have qualified the last 4 World Cups, but I’ve also been told by more than one Paraguayan they’ve never qualified before, so I really don’t know what’s happened.
Second, the closest thing I can compare watching Paraguay’s opening game is watching the Super Bowl. Unless you had to work, you were watching the game, even if you never follow futbol. I went over to my neighbors house and watched it with them, laughing at them freaking out every time Paraguay almost made a goal or someone stole the ball from Paraguay. When they made the one goal of the game, almost everyone jumped out of their seats screaming because they were so excited. The 6 year old started running around the room doing a victory dance that had some resemblance to Michael Jackson style dancing. We made popcorn for the second half and one of them started throwing popcorn at the TV every time something happened in the game that she didn’t like. The whole thing was quite the event, and quite exciting.
Lastly, I would like to tell you how being in the World Cup has suddenly made the neighborhood boys much more serious about our front lawn pick up games. We usually spend an hour or two playing two on two or three on three and I spend approximately half of that time listening to them yell at each other in Guarani about whether or not it’s a corner shot, whether or not they have 3 goals or 4, or whether or not they get a penalty shot. The games usually spontaneously start and people join in and leave in the middle of the game. On Friday we played 4 on 4 and not only did we have an official start to the game, but we had everything from line up and the national anthem, to shaking hands, and warm up exercises. They decided one team would be Paraguay and the other would be the United States in honor of me. We also had to choose which famous soccer player we wanted to be for the game. They asked me who the most famous soccer player in the United States was. Um, I don’t know… David Beckam? I don’t even think he’s in South Africa right now but he’s honestly the only soccer name I know. Luckily they were satisfied with only one name and I got to be David Beckam while they all fought over which Paraguayan soccer player they would be. We all stood in two lines and then they told me that I had to sing the national anthem of the United States because that was our team. I made it through two lines before bursting into laughter. Apparently just singing, “Oh say can you see, by the dawns early light,” was good enough for them and they all put their hands over their hearts to sing the Paraguayan national anthem. I don’t even think the game actually lasted for 5 minutes before the ball got stuck in the tree, or one of the boys ended up on the ground fake crying because he got kicked… I don’t remember which happened first, but after that happened, I just sat around listening to them yell at each other in Guarani and chase each other around to beat up the kid who kicked the boy lying on the ground. I guess the ceremonies were more important than the actual game.
Second, the closest thing I can compare watching Paraguay’s opening game is watching the Super Bowl. Unless you had to work, you were watching the game, even if you never follow futbol. I went over to my neighbors house and watched it with them, laughing at them freaking out every time Paraguay almost made a goal or someone stole the ball from Paraguay. When they made the one goal of the game, almost everyone jumped out of their seats screaming because they were so excited. The 6 year old started running around the room doing a victory dance that had some resemblance to Michael Jackson style dancing. We made popcorn for the second half and one of them started throwing popcorn at the TV every time something happened in the game that she didn’t like. The whole thing was quite the event, and quite exciting.
Lastly, I would like to tell you how being in the World Cup has suddenly made the neighborhood boys much more serious about our front lawn pick up games. We usually spend an hour or two playing two on two or three on three and I spend approximately half of that time listening to them yell at each other in Guarani about whether or not it’s a corner shot, whether or not they have 3 goals or 4, or whether or not they get a penalty shot. The games usually spontaneously start and people join in and leave in the middle of the game. On Friday we played 4 on 4 and not only did we have an official start to the game, but we had everything from line up and the national anthem, to shaking hands, and warm up exercises. They decided one team would be Paraguay and the other would be the United States in honor of me. We also had to choose which famous soccer player we wanted to be for the game. They asked me who the most famous soccer player in the United States was. Um, I don’t know… David Beckam? I don’t even think he’s in South Africa right now but he’s honestly the only soccer name I know. Luckily they were satisfied with only one name and I got to be David Beckam while they all fought over which Paraguayan soccer player they would be. We all stood in two lines and then they told me that I had to sing the national anthem of the United States because that was our team. I made it through two lines before bursting into laughter. Apparently just singing, “Oh say can you see, by the dawns early light,” was good enough for them and they all put their hands over their hearts to sing the Paraguayan national anthem. I don’t even think the game actually lasted for 5 minutes before the ball got stuck in the tree, or one of the boys ended up on the ground fake crying because he got kicked… I don’t remember which happened first, but after that happened, I just sat around listening to them yell at each other in Guarani and chase each other around to beat up the kid who kicked the boy lying on the ground. I guess the ceremonies were more important than the actual game.
Monday, June 14, 2010
fuerza paraguaya!!!!
For those of you who follow soccer, and possibly some of you who don’t follow soccer, you probably know that the world cup has started in South Africa. I think I’ve said before that Paraguayans get really excited when it comes to futbol. Let me make myself clear: Paraguayans are serious about their futbol. It is about as hard to imagine Paraguayans without futbol as it is to imagine them without terere every day or without chipa on Semana Santa. Maybe qualifying for the World Cup doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but for a country who lives and breaths futbol but has never qualified for the World Cup, it’s the most exciting thing that has happened here for a very long time. Because of this, for the last month or so, about two thirds of the commercials on TV and every few billboards or so in Asuncion have had something to do with the upcoming World Cup. “Fuerza Paraguay” has become a very popular phrase recently. My host mom told me that if the United States, who has also qualified for the World Cup, plays Paraguay, I have to cheer for Paraguay. My neighbor asked me what I was going to do if the US plays Paraguay as if I was obligated to cheer for Paraguay because I was here. “I don’t know,” I said feeling a bit conflicted about cheering for my home country while everyone here almost expects me to turn against my roots. “I don’t know.”
There was an opening concert Thursday night and my family stayed up late to watch Black Eyed Peas and Shakira perform even though they didn’t understand a word of it except for the line in “Hips don’t lie” that says, “Como se llama, bonita. Mi casa, su casa.” They got all excited for this part and said, “Listen! She’s singing in Spanish!” Friday was the inauguration and neither my 6 year old brother or my 14 year old brother went to school so they could watch the opening games. By the time I had woken up my 6 year old brother had drawn a mini soccer field in the dirt and spent the next few hours kicking around a mini soccer ball and yelling, “Gooooooooooooalllll!!!!!!! Ole Paraguay! Ole ole!” My 14 year old brother devoted his morning to gawking at the TV for the inauguration and the opening game between South Africa and Mexico. After the end of every game played (I think there have been 7 so far) my brother dutifully tells me the score of each team and then makes sure to inform me which countries will be playing next and at what time. Paraguay hasn’t even stepped foot onto the field and he’s already keeping track of every single goal. My 20 year old neighbor and host mom are a little disappointed that the World Cup lasts for a month because that means a month devoted to watching soccer games instead of their favorite TV series. Paraguay will be making their way onto the field this afternoon to play against Italy. I have been told that there will be no school that afternoon because everyone will be at home to watch the game. Since when did school get cancelled for a sports game? In honor of the upcoming game, my dad (and several other Paraguayans) put up a Paraguayan flag in his front lawn. I can`t wait to see how this whole event goes and I am secretly praying I the United States will not be playing against Paraguay in the nearby future. But for today, FUERZA PARAGUAYA!!
There was an opening concert Thursday night and my family stayed up late to watch Black Eyed Peas and Shakira perform even though they didn’t understand a word of it except for the line in “Hips don’t lie” that says, “Como se llama, bonita. Mi casa, su casa.” They got all excited for this part and said, “Listen! She’s singing in Spanish!” Friday was the inauguration and neither my 6 year old brother or my 14 year old brother went to school so they could watch the opening games. By the time I had woken up my 6 year old brother had drawn a mini soccer field in the dirt and spent the next few hours kicking around a mini soccer ball and yelling, “Gooooooooooooalllll!!!!!!! Ole Paraguay! Ole ole!” My 14 year old brother devoted his morning to gawking at the TV for the inauguration and the opening game between South Africa and Mexico. After the end of every game played (I think there have been 7 so far) my brother dutifully tells me the score of each team and then makes sure to inform me which countries will be playing next and at what time. Paraguay hasn’t even stepped foot onto the field and he’s already keeping track of every single goal. My 20 year old neighbor and host mom are a little disappointed that the World Cup lasts for a month because that means a month devoted to watching soccer games instead of their favorite TV series. Paraguay will be making their way onto the field this afternoon to play against Italy. I have been told that there will be no school that afternoon because everyone will be at home to watch the game. Since when did school get cancelled for a sports game? In honor of the upcoming game, my dad (and several other Paraguayans) put up a Paraguayan flag in his front lawn. I can`t wait to see how this whole event goes and I am secretly praying I the United States will not be playing against Paraguay in the nearby future. But for today, FUERZA PARAGUAYA!!
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
some random thoughts
Has it really been over a month that I’ve been in site or is the calendar lying to me? I thought when I moved to site time would slow down and I would have to start making a paper chain to help count the days. Granted, many of those days have been long and seemed endless, but as a whole it seems like the month flew by. I finally feel like I’m actually settled and belong (mas o menos) in my community. These are some random stories and thoughts about my first month in site.
I am in a constant state of changing emotions and have possibly never felt so conflicted in my life. It seems that with every step along the way, Peace Corps has managed to bring me joy, anger, frustration, a sense of accomplishment, confusion, and peace. I didn’t know it was possible to feel all of that at once… for days on end. It’s truly amazing how quickly my feelings can change about the exact same thing within minutes and sometimes seconds. I will have days when my feelings swing from extreme opposites and back about every 5 minutes. This type of experience is a common occurrence for me and is proving to be an extremely growing experience. My emotions bounce back and forth between being lonely to feeling like I’m accepted in the community, feeling like me being here is pointless to feeling like I’ve accomplished something and made a difference, and feeling like learning Guarani is impossible and pointless to feeling like I’ve actually made headway and understand something. The only comforting thing in this confusing mish mash of feelings is that I’m not alone in strange experience and most volunteers feel like that. I have the expectation that the following 23 months will be a similar experience.
I built a fogon with only the help of my host brother and my training manual. I didn’t expect to do something like that for at least another 9 months or so, but someone bought the materials and two days later we got to work. I wasn’t completely sure that I knew what I was doing and was afraid that once we got to the oven and chimney I would have to call a friend to come help finish it. After two days of hard labor (aka a break every hour or two for terere and or food) the fogon was completed. What do you know, training actually did teach me something!
I’m changing. Maybe that all started the day I got on the plane to Miami but I haven’t felt that change too strongly up until now. I think a piece of me is becoming Paraguayan and that’s funny and scary at the same time. I can actually sit down with my family and chow down on the tallerin (greasy noodles and typically fatty meat) with a fork in one hand and a piece of mandioca (the closest thing I can compare this to is a potato) in the other. This might not mean that much to you, but if any of you ever come to visit the campo in rural Paraguay, you will know exactly what that means. I have also been known to mimic my family and pick up a bone off my plate to try and gnaw the rest of the meat off. I feel like it’s a treat when I get warm water for a shower. And sometimes I find it easier to think in Spanish than in English. There are things that I do or accomplish almost every day that I didn’t think was possible. I am finding a strength I never knew existed and sometimes I have to search long and hard for that strength, but I always find it.
Four months down, 23 to go! I don’t have any inkling that these next 2 years will be easy by any means, but I’m home.
I am in a constant state of changing emotions and have possibly never felt so conflicted in my life. It seems that with every step along the way, Peace Corps has managed to bring me joy, anger, frustration, a sense of accomplishment, confusion, and peace. I didn’t know it was possible to feel all of that at once… for days on end. It’s truly amazing how quickly my feelings can change about the exact same thing within minutes and sometimes seconds. I will have days when my feelings swing from extreme opposites and back about every 5 minutes. This type of experience is a common occurrence for me and is proving to be an extremely growing experience. My emotions bounce back and forth between being lonely to feeling like I’m accepted in the community, feeling like me being here is pointless to feeling like I’ve accomplished something and made a difference, and feeling like learning Guarani is impossible and pointless to feeling like I’ve actually made headway and understand something. The only comforting thing in this confusing mish mash of feelings is that I’m not alone in strange experience and most volunteers feel like that. I have the expectation that the following 23 months will be a similar experience.
I built a fogon with only the help of my host brother and my training manual. I didn’t expect to do something like that for at least another 9 months or so, but someone bought the materials and two days later we got to work. I wasn’t completely sure that I knew what I was doing and was afraid that once we got to the oven and chimney I would have to call a friend to come help finish it. After two days of hard labor (aka a break every hour or two for terere and or food) the fogon was completed. What do you know, training actually did teach me something!
I’m changing. Maybe that all started the day I got on the plane to Miami but I haven’t felt that change too strongly up until now. I think a piece of me is becoming Paraguayan and that’s funny and scary at the same time. I can actually sit down with my family and chow down on the tallerin (greasy noodles and typically fatty meat) with a fork in one hand and a piece of mandioca (the closest thing I can compare this to is a potato) in the other. This might not mean that much to you, but if any of you ever come to visit the campo in rural Paraguay, you will know exactly what that means. I have also been known to mimic my family and pick up a bone off my plate to try and gnaw the rest of the meat off. I feel like it’s a treat when I get warm water for a shower. And sometimes I find it easier to think in Spanish than in English. There are things that I do or accomplish almost every day that I didn’t think was possible. I am finding a strength I never knew existed and sometimes I have to search long and hard for that strength, but I always find it.
Four months down, 23 to go! I don’t have any inkling that these next 2 years will be easy by any means, but I’m home.
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