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.

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.

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.