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!

Fuerza!

I was talking to my volunteer friend the other day about how different my friendships with Paraguayans are. I feel like I have people in my community that I consider my friends, but it is not the kind of relationship I have with my American friends, who understand my culture and (yes) my socio-economic background. It´s not that they are fake friendships with Paraguayans. I laugh all the time in my community, and I miss being there when I´m away for a few days. Yet, I cannot share myself completely with them, as I crave to do in my close relationships. I think it´s doing wonders for my communications skills, and I don´t just mean linguistically. Because of the language and culture barriers, I am forced into being extremely clear and direct in my wording, which I´m realizing I would not necessarily be in my own language. We tend to skirt around issues, say ¨you know¨ when we really don´t, and misinterpret tones and gestures. It´s harder to pretend in a different language.


There´s been another death. Eight months after my boyfriend, Jorge´s, mother died, his uncle was found dead in the river. He apparantly fell in while drunk, and wasn´t found until three weeks later. This meant another week of prayer vigil, another cow and many chickens slaughtered. I have so much admiration for the grandma, who´s lost two children, and is still such a positive, hard-working woman.

Speaking of rivers, we got a bunch of rain earlier, which washed away bridges, and sent the bus driver all over treacherous ground. We had to take the bus over tiny, wooden bridges it scares me to ride my bike over.


I can tell the progress I´ve made in my comunity because they finally let me work! During the final day of the week of prayer vigil, the family is responsible for hosting a lunch for all the friends and family--or the whole community. I remember the first reso I went to in December, sitting around, akwardly watchign people stare at each other. This time, I asked my 16-year-old friend, Griselda, and her grandmother (whom I only know as Aguela) what I could do, and, without hesitation, they put me to work clearing the table, doing dishes, reclearing the table, reclearing the table...

In order to feed everyone, three tables are pushed together, and about fifteen people at a time stand around eating out of dishes borrowed from neighbors. First, the children eat, then women, jovenes, and finally the men, who have been sitting under the shade of the mango tree, drinking caña, during this time. The Señoras prepare the food by building a fire in a large ditch, over which are placed large pots of pasta and grills of sizzling beef and chicken. It´s expensive to host this kind of event, but the community chipped in what they could, making empanadas and selling them door-to-door (a common fund-raising strategy), and by hosting loteria night, when we play Paraguayan bingo with kernals of corn.

Aside from teaching English and gardening classes, I´ve started going to the girls´soccer practice, so I´ve been getting to know the kids of the community. At the reso, a few of them asked me to play, and five minutes later, I was leading forty children in blob tag, hide-and-seek, and duck...duck...chicken (I couldn´t remember the word for ¨goose¨). It´s started getting hot again, so I was sweating by the time I walked back to my house to prepare for my cooking class. We´ve been switching up every other week, making something edible and something hygeinic. This week we made fabric softener, and next week: ravioli.


Last week, my compañera, a health volunteer, came out to help with give presentations on HIV/AIDS. We spent the morning at the high school, and then gave a more informal presentation to my womens´group, where I was asked to explain exactly what is oral sex...I had not prepared for that, but I think they understood. I did manage to get the point across, though, of the importance of having the respect for your body to get check ups, which are free now for women in Paraguay. Cervical/uterine cancers are one of the leading causes of death for woman here, so there´s been a push to educate and offer opportunities of prevention. It´s still a challenge, though, for women living in the middle of nowwhere. And most of them probably don´t want to know if they have something.

Two weeks ago, there was a race in Asuncion that I entered on a whim, not being a runner at all. I ran the whole 10k, and got hooked. So I started running in my community, with the motivation of my students, who run with me sometimes, or at least yell ¨Fuerza, Emilia, fuerza!!,¨ as I go by.