A Roof Over My Head

Yesterday morning I learned how to peal the mandi´o, a task every girl knows how to do soon after she can walk and hold a knife. My host parents went into the city, leaving my seventeen-year-old host brother and the nine-year-old girl who lives with them (her mother works in Spain) in charge of household tasks, like taking care of the Americana. I´m not sure if I´ve yet desribed mandi´o, the stable crop of Paraguay, what humans and animals alike survive on. It is to Paraguay what the potato is (or was) to Ireland. It grows underground, much like a potato, can be left in the ground for two years, and doesn´t take many nutrients from the soil. Granted, it doesn´t supply many nutrients to the consumer either; just calories. No meal is complete without it. Suprizingly thought, as much as Paraguayans love their salt and sugar, mandi´o is served sans condiment. It´s tasty, though. It´s starchier than a potato and gives us that full full feeling that is so loved here, and is what I´ve sadly become accustomed to.

Anyhow, yesterday morning, the nine-year-old, Lorena, taught me how to take a knife to the big, brown root, liberally cutting off the ends and bad parts, which are fed to the pigs, and then peeling the touch skin. Instead of cutting towards myself, however, I took a different approach, cutting away from my body. I found a new way of doing a very Paraguayan task, which is kind of what´s it´s all about--my job, I mean.

And, hurray, my house has been started!! When I arrived on Monday, five guys were standing around where my house was supposed to be, talking about who knows how to build a house. I thought you guys knew how to build houses? We just don´t know the process is all, they reply. Luckily, the guy who does know showed up. To give them credit, I was impressed by how quickly they were able to put up the frame and roof in one day, though, granted, my house is pretty small. About an hour into building, half of it just fell down, and we all laughed and put it up again, hopefully stronger. Kai Felipe, the man with the plan, is seventy-something-years-old and always works with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was working on the roof frame, when the makeshift ladder he was standing on fell out from under him. He was left hanging onto the roof frame, from where he safely landed on the ground. It was a Three Stooges moment.

While we were on a terere break, the guys asked me if I was going to kill them some chickens as reward for their labor. I promised them that when my house was done, I would have a party and kill a few chickens. In the meantime, I bought a couple bottles of local wine, which we polished off at the end of the day.