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.