Papa Noel

As much as sometimes enjoy complaining about Paraguay (and do I ever), sometimes I can´t help but find an absolute, inexplicable, and innocent joy in it. Like the other day, sitting in the sand, toes in the (stream), grabbing chunks of juicy watermelon with my hands, while the boys throw each other in the water and the women wash clothes. I feel an incredible peace that is hard to find back home because there is always something else I could be doing. Right now, my job is to integrate into the community, so here goes.

I met a half-German man last week, and I spent the evening with him and his wife. They are a young, innovative couple, and, for the first time since I´ve been in site, I felt like I had someone I could have an intelligent, unguarded conversation with. I could speak my mind about sensitive topics and not be thinking about what I should be saying. There´s a big German mennonite population around here, so Juan Carlos said he would take me to visit his community. He showed me around his property, where he keeps bees and grafts citrus trees, and we talked about all sorts of things from birth control to religion.

When he asked me what my religion was (a frequent question), I felt comfortable telling him that spirituality was important to me, but that I didn´t adhere to one religion. I told him that religion can do good things for people, but I do not agree with the way it is frequently practiced, without thought and by merely copying the ways of parents.

It felt like a simplified answer to a question I hadn´t really thought about in a while, despite all the questioning. What is my religion? It´s been a while since someone has asked me that in English. It feels like a copout to just say that I´m spiritual, and the answer seems disappointing to some. The question sounds cliché, but it´s common enough that I feel like I should put more effort into my answer. First of all, what is religion? A belief in some things and a disbelief in others? Is it tradition, or ethics, or ritual? How do I explain myself to Catholics who only know other Catholics? I wonder some of them go to mass because they feel closer to the Divine, or if it is just what is done. Are they aware of a power greater than themselves that they call God? I´ve been to mass here, and I feel no such thing. I wonder if they will understand if I tell them that I feel God in any place at any given moment, in those inexplicable coincidences, and in myself. I never thought my ´religion´needed to be categorized or defined.

And the rollercoaster continues. It was hard to get used to the new family I´m staying with now, a few kilometers down the road from where I was previously. Even the wind blows differently. I´m living out of a backpack, moving to a new family every 15 or so days. It always feels like I´m camping, and I miss not having a home base. When I ask when the construction of my house will get started, I am told not to worry about it. They are still lacking the cement for the foundation, but, no problemo, there will be another meeting about it in a couple weeks. At least there´s talk.

The other night, I went to a resa, where everyone in the community prayed for and celebrated the life of a woman who died recently. They slaughtered a cow for the occassion, and the meat was hanging on awning when I got there, with everyone sitting around, drinking terere, as usual. The Señora had invited me over to eat dinner with them, and I had naively assumed that we would be eating cow meat (steak if I was lucky). But when she proudly brought me to the table, I was placed in front of a steaming bowl of blood soup with chunks of brain, heart, tongue and whatever other cow organs I had no intention of eating. Not wanting to disrespect my host, I dipped some mandioca into the broth and avoided making direct eye contact with the contents of my bowl. I wanted to cry and then vomit.

On a happier note, I´ve started working on my garden. With my sharpened machete, I went over to a neighbor´s house to cut some takuara (bamboo) to make my fence. I hauled it back to my garden site, and my host brother and brother-in-law helped me to strip and split it. After lunch, my host mom took me to the forest out back, where we were supposedly going to gather wood for my garden posts. She ended up giving me a tour of the property, bringing me to a neighbor´s house to terere (yes, it´s a verb, too) and help her carry melons back. On the way back through the woods, she told me that she actually already had fenceposts that I could use back at the house. Foiled again.

On Christmas Eve, I was feeling the absence of family, but I was comforted by the text messages I got from my Peace Corps friends about their experiences slaughtering cows and eating sheep´s brains. It´s nice to know I´m not alone in this. Most of the day was spent preparing the feast we would eat around midnight. We gathered ribbons and plant material from the yard to make an elaborate nativity scene, cooked (no Paraguayan meal is complete without mandioca, meat, and some sort of corn product), and drank clerico, a wine fruit punch. We got a tata (fire) going in the front yard to grill the meat, and we sat around for hours as visitors stopped by and we took our turns visiting neighbors. At the strike of midnight, we all kissed each other, like New Years, even the sleeping children and grandpa.

At that moment, I felt a surge of gratitude for this family who drives me crazy, but who has included me so completely into their family for the holidays, however different their customs may be. Sometimes I feel very far away, and those moments are precious, when I feel like I´m exactly where I should be. I try to keep in mind that it is, indeed, a blessing to have people and customs to miss.

Feliz Navidad y Nuevo Año!

The Long Way Home

After much adventuring, I finally made it to my site. It seemed like everything was going askew somehow, and all I could do was laugh (and sometimes cry) at God´s cruel joke on me. On Tuesday, Jason, Christina, and I took a bus from Asunción together to Villarrica. By the time we pulled into the station, I had missed my connecting bus, the only one that goes to my site per day. Because my phone was still not working, we started making calls on Christina´s phone and got the number of a volunteer, Brennan, who lives in Villarrica. He had the day off and gave us directions to his house. Christina decided to stay the night with me, so we saw Jason off and made our sweaty way on foot with our packs.

Brennan made us fresh mburukuja (passionfruit) juice, which we drank under the avacado trees while his neighbors serenaded us. He showed us around town and even had a spare bedroom for us. The next morning, when Christina and I returned to the bus station, I found out that my bus would arrive two hours later than I had been told. No problem. After killing some time at the internet cafe, I asked someone why my bus still had not arrived, and I was told that it would not come at all because it rained the night before. As soon as she said that, I started laughing hysterically. I just couldn´t stop. Everyone started staring at the crazy American who just lost it.

After talking to my contact on the phone, I decided to take a bus to Paso Yobai, about an hour from my site and where another volunteer lives. I naively sat in the back of the bus, and by the time I arrived I was covered in a layer of red dirt. As it turns out, there was a change of plans, and there was no vehicle that could take me and my stuff the rest of the way to Arroyo Moroti. Andrea and I walked to the police station and to the military barracks outside of town, but no one had a car. We did find a neighbor who aggred to take my pack to Arroyo Morroti for me on his moto, and then I would walk. For compensation, I went over to the gas station and filled an empty 2-litre soda bottle with nafta, then watched my pack bump haphazardly away from me. I started walking around 6, enjoying the sun as it made its decent into the hills to the west. On a side note, the verb they use for the sunset is ¨enter¨ and the verb for sunset is ¨leave.¨ I like that. There was still a hint of pink left in the sky when I realized that I didn´t know where I was. This was the same road I had biked a few weeks ago, but I suddenly didn´t recognize the fork in the road, and there were no houses in site.

I took a left and picked up the pace, spotting a power line in the distance and thinking it might follow a main road. It didn´t. There was only a footpath, but I did see a house, so I cut through a mandioca field to get there. When no one was home, I returned to the raod I had been on, but not liking the look of the jungle path ahead of me, turned back. When I heard the sound of an engine, I ran toward it. It was a farmer, Giraldo, returning home on his tractor. He stopped and gave me directions to Arroyo Moroti, and then, taking pity, offered to take me part of the way on his tractor. I hopped on the back and we proceeded, full speed, down the jungle trail. It didn´t seem like it was frequently-travelled road because we were falling branched the whole way, and by the time he let me off at the crossroads, I was covered in leaves and brush like a regualar jungle bum. From there, I only had to walk another fifteen minutes to get to my contact´s house.

But I made it. The best part of the story, however, is that just before I started my walk, Andrea informed me that a 16-meter long, pregnant anaconda had just escaped out of someone´s basement in a nearby town. What?! I can´t even imagine what that would look like. So, I survived getting lost in the Paraguayan campo and a potential encounter with a very large snake.

As my contact put a steaming plate of pig fat in front of me, I kept thinking, anytime now, things will get easier. The next day, I washed most of my clothes, which had suffered from a run-in with an open bottle of shampoo, and then hopped on the bus, which would take me a few kilometers down the road to the family´s house where I was to stay for the next week and a half. The Women´s Comite was meeting when I got there, so I joined in. I had been looking forward to staying in one place, but they thought it would be a good idea if I moved houses every three days to get to know everyone. I was so flustered, I said ok and tearfully hauled my pack down the road to another house. On top of that, I found that I don´t get cell phone coverage here, except for in certain spots between primera and segunda linea and only when the wind blows the right way.

Things did begin to improve, though. I broke gender boundaries on Friday and went out to the woods to work with the men. I helped them haul logs onto an oxcart, then balanced on top of the oxcart and then unloaded it in the big brick oven they use to make charcoal. I asked if they planned to plant new trees to replace the ones they cut down. They should their heads. ¨Opa!¨ This means ¨over¨ or ¨done¨. What´s done? I wondered. The forest? They need wood to make carbón to make fire to eat, and I´m not sure if it was an outside-the-box idea to say that if they keep cutting down the trees, there won´t be any left someday. I think there´s a lot I have to learn about the language and culture before I can go down that road.

I thought that Paraguayans had exhausted their uses for flour, salt, and oil, but Magdalena (the señora I´m staying with) served me a new breakfast concoction. It even has a name--hervido--or something like that. It was served in a bowl with a spoon and sort of resembled oatmeal, which got me excited. To be so, the first ten or so bites did taste good, washed down with rot-your-teeth sweet cocido, but after a while, it started to taste, and feel, like what it was: crumbles of flour and salt, fried and held together by oil.

Lastnight, though, I showed them something else you can do with flour. I made pizza. Magdalena runs an almacen (little store) out of the house and the delivery guy (who brings bags of whatever in the back of his pick-up from Villarrica) brought some yeast on request. Heladio, the señor, had been asking me if we eat the same food in America as they eat here, and he threw out what he knew about American cuisine--pizza. It´s hard to explain, or at least to get across the idea to Paraguayans, the concept of America, the melting pot. We have food and people and culture from all over the world, and it´s all sort of American. Heladio also asked me if all Americans have blue eyes, like me. Where do I start with the explanations? My own sister doesn´t even have blue eyes like me.

While the pizza was baking, they gave me some win and coke. I told them that wine was perfect to drink with pizza--very Italian. They scoffed at the idea of wine and cheese together. Apparantly, the wine and cheese combination is on the same scale as mixing watermelon and terere--they´re not accustomed to such lethal nonsense. But wine and cheese, I protested, is a classic combination. It´s as basic as peas and carrots, salt and pepper, peanut butter and jelly. But I realized that my examples provide absolutely no clarification.

I´m enjoying staying with the family, and they agreed to let me stay longer. I really don´t want to move every three days. I think I might go even crazier than I´ve already become. But it is hard not to have a home. I try to think of it like a travelling adventure, like I´m hitchhiking around Paraguay and whereever I land, I am. But it´s different because I´m landing in someone else´s home on a different planet. There´s no time that I´m off-duty, no clock to punch out on and go take a shower, have a drink and talk about all the crazy shit that happened that day, sharing my leftovers with the dogs, chickens, and piglets that wait under the table. And each day is epic.

This morning I woke up at 4am to catch the bus back to Villarrica to meet the governor. Well, the bus didn´t come. Determined to get into town to see friends and reconnect with the world, I caught a ride with a passing truck, who brought me to a crossroads a half hour away. From there, I started walking through the morning fog and caught another ride to a a bus stop with more frequent service. And just like that, I have a computer and a phone at my fingertips. With everything that has happened during the past week, I can´t imagine what the next two years will be like. Jahechata. (We shall see.)

America...Reagan Country

The last couple weeks of training were a whirlwind of completing projects and visiting families in the community I had formed relationships with. We tilled the green manures we had planted at the beginning of training back into the earth and we grabbed the chickens we had raised from wittle bitty chicks by their legs and carried them home to our respective families for dinner.

My host sisters who live in Buenas Aires came home for the holidays, so I got to meet them. The house was full of jabbering women, trying on new clothes from Argentina and doing their hair--kind of a shock after hanging out with mostly guys for so long. All the guys in my group have been growing their facial hair out, and the for the occassion of swearing in as Peace Corps volunteers, created some fine mustache art.

I am a full-fledged Volunteer with a capital "V." I was sworn in at the U.S. Embassy, amidst green, manicured grounds and pools, protected by six marines, countless security gurads, and a token deer, who grazes the property. My own little America away from America. Signs at the entrance prohibit guns. Ya think? I never got used to coming home at night to see my host dad smoking a cigarette in the dark with a pistola at his side "for protection."

These few days I have in Asuncion are the antithesis of my regular campo lifestyle. I have AC, a TV with English movie channels, and my first hot shower in months. In this summer heat, a cold shower suffices, but there's just something about hot water that gives me that so-fresh-and-so-clean-clean feeling.

The other night we has sunset g+ts on the rooftop terrace and watched the hazy, pink skyline and the Rio Paraguaya behind it. And beyond that, Argentina. There are some beautiful, old Colonial buildings, which is a nice change fromt he hastily thrown up structures I've been inhabiting. And the food! Paraguayan food has definately grown on me, though it's a love-hate relationship. (I spent my last night with my host family throwing up into a cardboard box). It is nice to eat something besides greasy tortillas and grissly meat. We went out for Korean food, and I gorged myself on seaweed salad and grilled tofu and veggies.

Now all of us are picking up last-minute items in the city and enjoying each other's company before we go our separate ways, which is exciting and intimidating. My visits to the internet cafe will probably become less frequent, until I can get a bike or a horse to transport me on those hilly, dirt roads. Until then, peace.