As I chatted with an old woman on the second of my day’s three flights, I realized just how long it had been since I was in the States. She and her husband were on the way home from a trip to Peru, where they were doing an amateur archaeology expedition. They told me about their trip, and were curious about my life as a Peace Corps volunteer in a country where not a single guidebook they came across recommended visiting. I was suddenly having my longest pure-English conversation in 18 months. It exposed the gaps that have formed in my English, and the tenuously-constructed substitutes of my second and third languages that have come to fill them in. There are some words in Spanish and Guarani that describe things that English simply can’t. Amongst volunteers there exists a shared vocabulary, known in Guarani as “Jopara,” which strictly speaking, refers to a mix of Spanish and Guarani. But for PCVs, that mix has English thrown in. Rather than make the resulting mix better, it just dilutes it. As I sat there next to the lady whose name I didn’t catch, I felt my face turn a surprisingly bright shade of red as I became increasingly aware of the hum of the engines and nearby conversations as I searched for how to translate a very basic word in English in the middle of what should have been an easily communicable sentence. I hadn’t realized until that moment how rusty my native language was, and how long it had been since I was home.
Overall, the trip felt as brief as a bungie-jumper’s split-second contact with the water below the bridge from which he jumped. I saw that river coming at me fast, and didn’t realize what had happened until the cord tensed up and shot me back from where I came, leaving me nothing but a pair of wet shoes as proof that I actually made contact, (or in my case, a slightly larger gut after eating delicious organ-free meals for two weeks).
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Ever since Peace Corps unexpectedly pulled me out of site like a mean little brother pulling the Band-Aid off the wound of a sleeping sibling, I have wandered Paraguay with little more than a small backpack. My belongings were fetched by a PC driver after my evacuation and placed into storage. My life since that unfortunate departure has been a series of hostels, hotels, floors, sleeping bags, and couches. Living out of a backpack has become slightly more challenging than my typical lean-travel style to which I have become accustomed because of the recent change in seasons. While New Yorkers are complaining of 100+ degree temperatures, it’s been hovering just above freezing point here. Anything north of 0 degrees is shorts and tee-shirt weather for people from Canada, but it is just frozen-hell here since homes are not even remotely insulated. Taking a shower with unheated water becomes a debate with yourself about how bad you actually smell. Sometimes if your smelliness factor is only at a five out of ten, you forgo this icy-cold process of making yourself look like a member of The Blue Man Group without the use of any paint; Stinky and warm is sometime preferable to clean and frostbitten.
Now the time has come to hang up my stick and bindle, put away my sleeping bag and make the very-welcome transition from homelessness back to having my own home. I was given several options to choose from for my new site, all of which had some appealing aspects. After finishing the slow review process, I decided to move to a site just outside of the capital. I’ll be living in a city called San Lorenzo for the remainder of my service, where I’ll be working with children in a small hospital, as well as continuing some of my work that I had been doing in schools up in my former site of Concepcion.
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The government tried everything. They sent more cops, but I’m pretty sure the cops here haven’t made an arrest since 1987, so sending more chefs into the kitchen spoiled an already nasty soup. They sent in the special forces, but the special forces might as well have been a traveling circus; All they did was set up camp and freak out little kids. The government even tried to hire Scooby Doo’s gang, but sadly, they only specialize in de-masking angry old men in supposedly-haunted amusement parks. In the end, nothing could defeat the rag-tag group of ruckus-raising rebels known as the Paraguayan Peoples’ Army (EPP). Peace Corps got tired of nothing being done to secure the region, so the life support finally got pulled on the Concepcion VAC. What was a 15 person group of volunteers in the region at this time last year shrank to just four last December. Now, the four of us remaining volunteers are evacuated out too.
For those who don’t remember or are just tuning in, this story all begins last year when a rich Paraguayan rancher was kidnapped by a fledgling terrorist group based in the rural region outside my (now former) site of Concepcion. They held him for a couple of months and made a few demands, including a sizable ransom. The family paid, but no one acquiesced to the other, broader demands. Eventually he was released, unharmed but sporting a rather scraggly beard. The group seemed to be fading into obscurity for the first few months of this year, but when a confrontation with police left a few officers dead, the government declared what basically amounted to a “State of Emergency.” You may recall that I was pulled out of my site while the military moved into the region. I returned to site when the military ran out of gas money (seriously), but the EPP remained at large.
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Phrenology was a science based upon the idea that the shape of the human brain could indicate certain character traits or mental abilities. For example, if you had a large section for music, that meant you were likely to be a good musician. I say this “was” a science because its foundation was debunked long ago, like Alchemy or Geocentricity (or Evolution, if you happen to be a member of the Texas Board of Education).
Despite not being based on science, I still like the idea of such a clear delineation of our brains for specific things. In my own brain, somewhere between the area for storing obscure baseball statistics and the more recently-formed area for Guarani expressions, there exists what I imagine is the one of the larger parts of my Phrenology grid: “Lego engineering.” A big chunk of my childhood was spent using Legos to build vehicles, buildings, and on one occasion, a maze for an experiment involving short-term memory of worms, (my parents were just so happy to have me play with worms inside the house for a change). While this section of my brain is a bit bloated (and using up space that could be put to better use today), I credit it with nurturing what became a far more important section, labeled “creativity.” I always enjoyed following the directions and building that pirate ship that was pictured on the box, but that ship was always deconstructed as soon as I was done and recognized that the piece used for the mast would be perfect for the new design I had been brewing in my mind for an airplane. I’ve been thinking a lot about this geeky pastime of my childhood because of my biggest challenge: Expanding the creative section of kids’ brains here in my site, and trying to get them to build stuff that is not pictured on the outside of the box, so to speak.
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It wasn’t the Nazis’ faces melting off or that huge Nazi guy that gets chopped up by an airplane’s propeller that made Indiana Jones an inappropriate movie for the 5 year-old version of myself. It was the damn snakes. Fellow volunteers and local Paraguayans are aware of this fear I have and think it’s hilarious. However, everyone here is deathly afraid of frogs – animals which I have no problem with. When it rains, frogs invade your house like locusts during one of God’s fits of apocalyptic rage. As I have no interest in seeing frogs get killed, I take it upon myself to catch and release them using my patented system which involves an empty imitation-Pringles can. (Yeah, they’re called Mr. Crisp – say it with your Spanish accent though. Practice with me at home: “Meester Creesp.” They’re not bad, actually). It can be difficult to catch the jumpy ones when the locals are hiding in the closet, wrapped in biohazard suits, screaming at you in Guarani that “IT’S IN THE CORNER! GET IT! WE’RE GOING TO DIE!” Yet my fear of poisonous reptiles earns me some variation of the moniker “Little Girl.” Jerks.
During training, fellow volunteer Kat gave me what was perhaps the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given in the history of gift-giving or of snakes. She wrote out a charm from India which is meant to ward off snakes. Actually, she later informed me that its true purpose is to prevent a snakebite from killing you, not prevent it from biting you in the first place. I just pretend not to know that part.
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I apologize for my absence from the world of blogs, (also known as “blahgs” for those from Minnesota). I have been busier than a BP Public Relations employee recently, and have been without my trusty old laptop for a little while as it gets cleaned up. I lived near the beach for a few years in college and was always amazed at how much sand managed to find its way into my stuff. Sand, it turns out, doesn’t have anything on Paraguay’s red dirt, which infiltrates your every possession. My computer was apparently hoarding this dirt in its innards, and from what the tech guy explained, it sounds like it looked like the inside of a smoker’s lungs.
I’m in Asuncion at the moment, despite my pledge to avoid this town after an unwelcome two-week stay here early last month. You may recall that I was marooned here after a state of emergency was declared in my site. That was lifted, though not because they caught the guys they went up there to fight. Not because local police pledged to actually do their job and relieve the national soldiers. Not because the terrorists gave up. No, the state of emergency ended because the army ran out of gas. Literally, not metaphorically. They didn’t have enough gas to do their patrols. Cue the slow, sarcastic applause.
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It was either a fellow volunteer or Confucius who once said, “In Paraguay, the days are long but the months are short.” That is to say, one’s life here day to day can feel like its moving slowly, but when you step back and consider it all, everything goes by very quickly. That feels more true every day, as my time here seems to be speeding up. If this trend continues, I fully expect peoples’ voices to jump up a few octaves to Alvin and the Chipmunks levels and see trails of dust behind them as they move.
While I was in the capital, other volunteers from my ole’ training group, G-29 (”The Fightin’ 29th!”), and I had technical meetings to review our work in-site, as well as our annual medical/dental checkups. After getting poked, prodded, inspected and x-rayed, I am happy to announce that I am in good health. The doc didn’t have such good news for my service, though. Looking at the calendar, he lowered his head and told me in a grave tone that it doesn’t look good. It probably has less than a year left.
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Some things are just impossible to get rid of: A box of slightly-used New Kids on the Block cassettes; that fishy smell in your kitchen after seafood night; a head-shrinking gypsy curse; second-hand glitter from your middle school dance partner; and of course, obnoxious South American terrorists.
Remember those guys pretending to be a terrorist group in my site? They still have some beef with the government. They had a little disagreement with some police officers last week which ended with a bit more damage than had it been a tickle fight, so the government sent some soldiers up north to give anger management classes to kill the EPP. Not that there’s a lot of red tape with regard to any aspect of life here, the government nevertheless decided that some rules needed to take a hiatus, so they suspended standard law and authorized “special powers” for the military. From what I understand, that means they have free reign to arrest people, interrogate them, and even go to their homes and put drinks down on tables without coasters. Out of concern for our safety and the safety of our tables, PC deemed it necessary to move me and a couple other people near my site out of that region of the country for a little while.
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April means a few things every year. You need to start figuring out a good way to lie to the IRS about how much you made in tips last year. You need to call animal control to come fix that April Fools joke that went awry, (I was sure that prank with the squirrels was going to finally work this year). And of course, we celebrate this guy’s completion of yet another year here on earth.
Last year I got a tour of my site and a big bag of fruit on my birthday, (which was actually way more fun than it sounds now that I see it written down). This year my birthday fell on Easter, and like Michael Jackson stealing Farrah Fawcett’s thunder, Jesus had to one-up yours truly. The week that leads up to Easter is known as Semana Santa, which, disappointingly enough, does not have anything to do with Santa Claus. There is no work for most of the week, so I headed into Asuncion to spend some time with my old Guarambare family. You may recall from last year’s post that Semana Santa is chock-full of Chipa. We made it, we ate it, then our bodies slowed down to process what essentially becomes mortar in your stomach.
Sadly, you can’t call “Trademark!” the same way you call “Shotgun!” If you could, I would already have a trademark on my favorite alternate name for barbecues: Meatings. What better way to celebrate another year of my existence than by killing some animals! (Sorry vegetarians). My birthday was spent out in Asuncion with some fellow volunteers, one of whom shares my birthday to the year. We had our first meating at a Brazilian restaurant, where fellow PCV Brian decided to put on an organ-eating exhibition by eating, count ‘em, 48 chicken hearts. I’m not sure he likes chicken organs so much as just hates chickens. Or maybe he is absorbing the spirit-energy like some sort of ancient warrior.
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