There´s no why (but why don´t chickens have arms?)

Sometimes I lay in bed early in the morning, listening to the sounds of Arroyo Moroti waking up. The roosters, the chickens pecking at the crumbs I´ve thrown out the window and swept out the door, moms yelling at their kids in Guarani as they get ready for school or the field. These sounds are familiar to me now, comforting even, especially when I think about when i first arrived in Paraguay--how these sounds were foreign and strange, and I would wake up feeling lonely and unsure. I know that I will miss these sounds when I leave.

And I love that there is no shame in public nose-picking! One thing (of many) that still gets me, though is watching chickens run. I always feel like they should have arms, that they´re somehow propelled forward, but things would be a lot easier if hthey had arms to swing and create equilibrium and momentum. But who am I to judge?

I was gifted another hen yesterday, so now I have a brood of two in my little bamboo henhouse. I´m keeping them closed in there for a little while until they know their new home. How are you going to eat eggs without a rooster?, they ask. Because, I´ve told them, don´t want a noisy gallo around causing trouble with my ladies. I explain that, just like women, chickens don´t need males to produce eggs, just to produce babies.

Yesterday morning I had a breakfast date with one of my host moms. I´ve been asking her to teach me how to make mbeju--a typical Paraguayan pancake made out of fresh corn flour, cassava flour, salt (of course), cheese, and some sort of oil (though pig fat is the most delicious)--because she makes the best I´ve had. Her 98-year-old husband claimed that mine was Ndahei (not tasty), though he ate it and sucked his gums contentedly afterwards.

I met with the agriculture comittee in the afternoon, and i explained the capacitation I´m planning, hopefully, with the financial support of local government and NG organizations. I´m planning a 1/2-day workshop on soil recuperation and crop diversification with the presenging assistance of soem fellow crop, ag-forestry, and beekeeping volunteers. Following that, there will be an excursion to a nearby ag-forestry institute, where they can see first-hand all the practices and principles I´ll be teaching. I feel like it´s time for me to do some of the work I´ve been trained to do and for what the community requested a volunteer. Each site placement is different, and I´ve figured out that my community is impressed and influenced by things like formal workshops, complete with fancy invitations and certificates. And if that´s what it takes to improve soil fertility, so be it.



After the meeting, I went for a run, joined by my quickly-growing puppy, Shambo, who´s now five months old. I passed Jorge´s house, where I was joined by his barefoot 8-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother, and two dogs. They followed me the entire half-hour (about 5k). I listen to music while I run (amusicahina--they turn music into a verb, which I find quite appropriate), but I enjoy having companions for motivation.

Is it ironic for a childless woman to be giving parenting classes to women with 8+ children, or is it rather appropriate? Spurred my by encounters with child abuse and with the encouragement of some fo the female leaders (the loud onces, gossipy ones, the ones with influential husbands, or who are active in the church...), I prepared a presentation with a neighboring volunteer for Dia del Niño (Day of the Child). We wanted the day to be all about the kids, so we organized games, I brought my kite, hula hoop, and waterbaloons, and the Señoras prepared chocolate milk and cookies. There must have been about 70 kids there, and while the teenage girls managed the masses outside, we gave a presentation to the mamas in the church. We went over children´s rights and divided them into groups, giving each group a hypothetical situation of a misbehaving child, and had them come up with possible solutions that did not result in violence. The whole thing went really well, and I got the kids excited for World Hoop Day. I´m organizing a festival on September 9th for the kids to make their own hula-hoops.

It´s both invigorating and exhausting to work with large groups of children, but my day was far from over. I spent the next few hours helping my agriculture committee create a document about its history, vision, and project proposals to solicit to the governor the following morning. It´s been so long since I´ve written a paper like that, so it was enjoyable, expect that, being the grammar freak that I am, it was hard to do so in Spanish.

As soon as I was done, my neighbors had a wine waiting for me and were ready to pull a steaming cow head out of a hole in the ground, where it had been cooking the past few hours. This being my second time having cow head for dinner, I had fun with it. I also knew to bypass the tongue and cheeks (no pun intended), and go straight for the creamy, garlic-infused brains, spread like cream cheese on cassava root. It´s supposed to make me smarter...

I´ve taught a few garden classes to the sixth graders. They´re a really good group, and they invited me to school last week, so they could cook kamby arroz for me (a Paraguayan version of rice pudding). As it was cooking over the open fire, they taught me a song in Guarani.

I´ve been attending the girls´ barefoot soccer practices, and on Saturday, I went to the field to watch them play. First were the boys teams--the 9yr olds, then the 10yr olds, and so on. Finally all the girls aged 11-17 got to play. It was frustrating to see how little attention is given to the girls´team in comparison to the boys. The girls play two 10-minute halves (as opposed to 20-minute halves), and I waatached them scrambling aroundthe boys team just coming off the field to borrow cleats. But it´s a start. As much as Paraguay is developing and very much in a state of flux (everyone over the age of 16 has lived under a dictatorship), they are trapped between this new life brought to them on TV, via cell phone, and on quick, efficient motos, and the very traditional, Catholic, chauvenistic life.

Recently I realized that the verb they use for ¨to turn,¨ as in to turn a certain number of years of age, is Amboty, the word for ¨to close.¨ So they´re asking, how many years will you close? It makes sense to me, as do some of the other words they use, which, when directly translated into English, sound strange. Such as, when the sun sets, it ¨enters,¨ and when it rises, it ¨leaves,¨ as if the sun lives in the unknown place out there and visits us for a while during the day. Or ¨you´re welcome,¨ is really ¨there´s no why.¨

The thought patterns are different here, too. Sometimes people think I don´t understand what they´re saying. It´s not the words that I don´t understand (well, sometimes it is), but it´s the why I don´t understand. There are some things, however, that keep us on the same page. I was sitting around shelling peanuts with some friends the other day, and Romina noticed that I could change my quickdry pants into shorts. ¨So when it´s hot, you can just unzip them,¨ she commented. In Guarani, hot and horny are used interchangeably, so I said, ¨When I´m horny, I take it all off.¨ They all laughed at my cleverness. They think I´m funny, but it´s not so much that I´m funny as much as I just like words.



By the way, the two cute girls in the picture are my Paraguayan nieces!