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.)