Aunt Trish, this one's for you

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.

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.