Capital Letters and Murdered Animals

A few different people have asked what my mailing address, (Mom and Dad being the most vocal), and I wanted to pass it along. All mail for PC trainees and volunteers gets sent to the PC headquarters in the capital. Outgoing mail from here to the states apparently takes just a couple weeks. The time frame for the other direction is apparently much, much longer sometimes, and varies greatly between items. They also recommend not sending any packages over 2 kilos, because those get sent to customs, where a lot of fishy stuff seems to go down.

Jonathan Garro, PCT
Cuerpo de Paz, CHP
162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. Lopez
Asuncion 1580, Paraguay (South America)

I would stress again that the postal service here is somewhat more unreliable than in the states, so I would caution against sending any irreplaceable items. I believe that there will be no changes to the address following my group’s swearing in, except that the PCT next to my name becomes PCV for “Volunteer.”

Everyday continues to bring interesting new experiences, particularly with regard to life at home. The oddest stories at my house generally revolve around animals, and the last few weeks have been full of bizarre observations. My 9-year-old nephew has a slingshot type weapon that he kills rodents with, and he is an incredible shot. After I asked him how he made the slingshot, he made me one. I am still a bit too scared to try it, since there seems to be a good chance of breaking my hand.

One day last week, I came in through the gate and was told that the dog had killed two chickens. I had a hard time believing this, since the dog that they were referring to, named Ollie, is a old Beagle-mutt that is too dumb to figure out where his food is half the time. The roles that animals play here are quite different from what I am accustomed to seeing in the US. Generally, cats in the US are independent, come and go as they please, and they see their home as a place that has a steady source of food. Dogs require more attention and affection. These two roles are the complete opposite here. Dogs wander the streets all day, and come home at night for dinner. Some people use dogs for security, but as far as I can tell, security means barking rather than biting. They are all very timid, and we were even taught on day one that when you feel threatened by one, you can mime a throwing action, as if you were throwing a rock at it, and they will cower. Cats on the other hand, particularly at my house, do not leave. My family’s cat will beg for food at the table, and will only eat meat. She tries to hunt the chickens, but has yet to succeed. For this reason, I figured I had misheard my sister when she told me that the dog had killed a chicken. According to the story, the dog killed two, then backed away after being yelled at. The very next day, the cat killed a small bird, brought it up to the roof and tried to eat it. My brother explained that when they went up to get it from her, the cat growled like a dog and wouldn’t give it up.

This week, my host father asked me if I wanted to kill a chicken. I had expressed interest in seeing it, since he and my host mother love to debate the best way to do it. I guess some people believe in pulling the neck and breaking it, while others believe in cutting its neck. One morning I awoke to the sound of a knock on my door. I was greeted by my father, holding a machete in his hand. As I was still waking up, I found this image to be somewhat disconcerting. He said he was going to kill a rooster, and wanted to know if I wanted to see. I put on sandals and walked to the backyard. On the clothes line, right next to a few of my still-drying tee-shirts, was a rooster, hanging by one leg. It hung motionless, until we came closer. My nephew was there as well, who told me that he hated having to help kill animals. He was given the duty of holding the other leg, which was not tied up. Between the machete and metal bucket under the rooster, I deduced that my father was of the “cutting” ideology with regard to killing chickens, or in this case, roosters. He asked me if I wanted to do it, but I explained that I didn’t want to do it without seeing it done first, so as to avoid making the animal suffer because of my ineptitude – Of course, my explanation was far less eloquent in Spanish. He sat down, pulled the neck out, and clipped the artery in its neck. The death was far quicker than I had imagined, and with a lot less blood. My nephew held the leg, but didn’t look.

Lunch was delicious that day.

Things at school have been progressing well. Spanish gets better every day, but honestly, I learn more at home than I do in class. The hardest thing has been learning the different idioms and expressions that don’t translate well from English to Spanish. Although I did recently find that the “crying over split milk” expression does translate directly. I did get some strange looks when I said “speak of the devil” when my host sister walked in while we had been talking about her. Apparently that expression translates as “speaking of the King of Rome…” I’m still not sure where that came from, but I guess is as silly as making a reference to the devil.

We have been getting exposed to what life as a volunteer will be like by taking trips to visit various sites and practice working with them. Last weekend, we visited a volunteer in our Urban Youth Development sector, where we did a workshop on team work at a school. We had been told what the typical school experience is like here, and we got to see it with our own eyes at her site. School consists of four hours of copying down what the teacher writes on board, with very little interaction or participation. For that reason, the kids love seeing the volunteers, because they know that they will get to participate in an activity. We split into different groups and did different team-building exercises. I ran an activity that my UYD training group learned a few weeks ago, where you blind-fold one kid who will be the “listener,” assign another kid to be the “speaker,” then make the rest of the kids stand in a line. The rest of the kids are not allowed to speak, but may communicate with gestures like charades. They relay directions to the speaker through their visual cues, who then must give directions to the blinded listener. The listener must be directed to an object, which was a tennis ball in this case. It is hilarious to watch, because the kids that can see all act out different directions, and get anxious when the listener is approaching something like a tree. The speaker often gets a bit frustrated because he/she can’t see the object, and must rely on the line to give directions. It was the first time that I had the chance to work with kids on my own, and the experience went very well. I ran into a few roadblocks when describing the rules, since I realized that I didn’t know how to say blindfold, but the kids all understood when I showed them on myself.

The rest of our trip to the volunteer’s site consisted of enjoying luxuries that are not available in the training town of Guarambare. We ate pizza, which was pretty good by South American standards, visited the Paraguayan equivalent to a supermarket, and went on a little hike. There are not mountains here, but there are large hills. It only took about a half hour to get to the top, but it had a great view of the area.

Tagged as: Asados, Chickens, Contact Information, Pets, Schools, Slingshot, Teambuilding, Training