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.

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.

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...

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.

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.