Thursday, August 18, 2011

my stab at permanence

This month marks me living in my house for a full year, the longest I have lived in one place since I moved out of my mom’s house when I was 17. From then on, I was packing up and moving ever few months always with different people. The longest I settled down I think was in an apartment for nine months. Except for one summer when I moved to my mom’s house and shared a room with my sister, I had a total of 11 roommates, five housemates, and a few more suite-mates. I can't really explain why I was always moving and changing everything, it was just that way. I had a brief month of solitude with my own room at my mom’s house before I left for Peace Corps. Over the next seven months, I lived with four different families and shared a room with a host sister (sometimes host brothers and occasionally a grandma) at the last house. I was months past being ready to live by myself. The day finally came when I had a place I could call my own.

Since then, I have gotten various reactions at the site of my house. “You live HERE?” “It’s so… cute!” “How much did you pay for the terciada on your roof? Will you give me your oven when you leave?” “Why is your shower in your kitchen?” My mom said when she came to visit me, she figured she was going on an expensive camping trip and I guess she was right. In fact, if you consider an RV camping, then camping is nicer than my house.

When I first moved in my roof leaked. I have no sink, so I use a palingana (large shallow bucket) or the ground. The water pressure often doesn’t work so the shower literally drips or just doesn’t emit any water at all. The electricity that heats my sometimes dripping showerhead will fluctuate quickly, so that the water will go from a comfortable scalding hot to a shocking freezing cold without warning. There are many places that I can see outside by peeking through my wood paneling and in fact, you could easily get a peep show if while I took a shower if you stood on my porch and peeked through the crack by my window. The corrugated metal roofing makes my house an oven in the summer and a refrigerator in the winter; it will literally be cooler outside in the sun on a summer day or warmer in the shade on a winter day than in my house. The metal roof also makes for very loud rainstorms and hailstorms sound like my house is being torn apart. I’m not sure if it’s because of the constantly fluctuating electricity or just because my refrigerator is old, but it functions like the weather. In the summer it hardly stays cold enough to freeze ice and in the winter if freezes everything including my eggs. I don’t own a modern toilet and instead have my pozo ciego (latrine) about 20 meters behind my house. At night, it gets too dark to see inside the latrine so I have to use a flashlight. If I have to pee in the middle of the night, I just pee on my lawn. I seem to have constant ant invasion problems as if my entire foundation became a giant ant next. I also have more spiders living in my house than I care to count but I assume it’s in the three digits. I generally have electricity and running water, but it will go out sometimes (mostly when there is a storm but sometimes for no reason at all) and it will be out for an hour or a few hours, a day or a few days. I love my house.

Maybe it’s because it’s all my own and after having an absurd amount of roommates in a four year span, I finally have my own space with peace and quiet. And maybe it’s because outside of my precious shack I have over 100 trees on my property, tons of cool fruit trees, beautiful flowers, strange plants I have come to love, and fresh oregano, basil, and mint. But I think I love it mostly because of the amount of sweat, and tears, and blisters, and sadly blood and stitches into this house. If it’s a shack now then it was a weed-overgrown, trash pile of rubble before. Yes, I will curse when my feet touch the cement floor on winter days, wonder why God hates me when the electricity is out for three days and I can’t cook, and pray I don’t have heat stroke when I am in my house in the middle of the afternoon in the summer, but I still love every drafty, cobwebby, musty inch of this house.

I now only have eight more months left here. I guess one year and eight months, one house and zero roommates (other than the dog) is a good stab at permanence for me.

Friday, August 5, 2011

winter in july

It’s winter again in Paraguay. I know this comes as a surprise to many of your northern-hemisphere-ers, but summer up there equals winter down here. Winter in Paraguay means four things: cold, tangerines, tajy flowers, and sugar cane. Ok, so winter means a whole lot more than that, but these are four unique things to this season that stand out to me.

It is cold here, close to freezing actually. I was told that this morning bottomed out at two degrees celcius and I saw frosted grass as I battled my way through the cold to the ruta this morning. I find it extremely difficult not to feel sorry for myself on mornings like this when I have to drag myself out of bed. Showers become optional… or actually, I’ll admit it, they become almost non-existent. My house is wood with several see-through cracks which allow the wind to enter one side and exit the other. My roof is metal which means my house acts like a large refrigerator. Paraguayans go to bed earlier when it is this cold, get up later, and cram people into the same bed in the same way they manage to cram people onto the same motorcycle. I have seen four siblings, ages ranging five to eighteen sharing one full-sized bed. I however, bundle up in as many layers as I can, get in my sleeping bag, and spoon my dog. I think my record for clothing worn durning the day is three pairs of pants, and five layers of shirts/jackets, not including socks, shoes, scarf, and beanie/hood. No really, that is no joke. It hasn’t been as consistently cold this year as it was last year, but still, it’s cold.

One positive thing to the winter is the tangerines. The tangerine season actually starts in fall and ends in spring, but I still think of it as a winter fruit. It is I believe my favorite fruit and my dog Pulgita’s favorite fruit as well. I have been known to eat seven tangerines in a sitting multiple times a day. When I walk to my tangerine trees, Pulgita comes bounding after me, knowing that she gets a treat too. For every couple slices that I eat, she gets one. She chews quickly with her mouth open, tail wagging, and then looks at me expectantly for another one. My new favorite thing this year is tangerine juice. It takes about 35 tangerines and 45 minutes to make two liters of juice. Since I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer with ample time on my hands, this has been happening every couple days and carefully rationed so that it lasts longer than one day.

About the same time that the tangerines are ripe, the sugar cane is ready to cut down as well. My site is a big exporter of sugar cane, so every couple of fields is full of the tall, thick, green, itchy, grass-like, caña dulce (sugar cane) waving in the wind. As the field is cut, the tall green landscape changes into a flat tan one and camionetas (large trucks) precariously stacked with caña dulce pass by my house at all hours of the day and night. I often wonder that they have not taken out the electricity with their caña dulce while passing under the dangerously low electricity lines. Miel de caña (sugar cane honey or molasses becomes available and people go door to door on their motos selling the miel de caña in reused two liter soda bottles. And the other thing sugar cane season means is large groups of men working together in the fields and this is something I don’t enjoy at all. Some of them know me and some of them don’t, but for whatever reason, these boys who call themselves men feel that in addition to machete-ing the caña dulce, it is also thier job to whistle and yell at me as I pass. My walks and runs Turing this time of year almost always are slightly less enjoyable.

And here is my final thing about winter. One of Paraguay’s national flowers is the tajy flower, which comes from the tajy (lapacho) tree. This is a hard wood tree indigenous to Paraguay and in danger of extinction. In the winter after all the leaves have fallen off, hundreds and hundreds of flowers bloom on each tajy in either pink, yellow, or white. You can easily spot a tajy tree in bloom from the air because among all the green, there is a tree bursting with color, impossible to miss. During this time of year, the green countryside is spotted with pink, yellow, and the occasional white; the rest of the normally gorgeous scenery pales in comparison. I wish I had the words, the poetry, to describe the beauty and majesty of these trees., but like many things, neither words nor pictures will do justice. It is something you need to see for yourself. There is a reason it is one of Paraguay’s national flowers and there is a reason that it is special, perhaps spoken of with more respect than the other trees by Paraguayans.

Maybe I find this changing of seasons special because I come from Southern California where there are seasons but they are not dramatic, leading people to claim that Southern California has no seasons. True, LA has no snow, but neither is it 75 degrees every day of the year. Or the changing seasons could be a novelty to me because not only are the changes of seasons so extreme here, but there is little protection from the elements, making both mid-summer and mid-winter miserable. But I think what I like most about the changing seasons is the way that it forces people to connect more with nature. There are different fruits, flowers, and crops for every season and any Paraguayan can list all of them for you. Peoples habits change out of necessity due to the changes in temperature. So while I am miserable in this freezing cold, I know it will warm up and come mid-summer when I am immobile because of the intense heat and humidity I will begin to curse the heat and wish for winter back… well, almost. The bright orange tangerines decorating the trees will disappear but other fruits will be in season even if they aren’t quite as good. The ca;a dulce will all be cut down, other crops planted, the molasses will be replaced with bee honey and my walks will become more peaceful. And sadly, the tajy flowers will fall, painting the ground with color, the last remnant of their beauty for this season.