Sunday, September 12, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Just Killing It
*Note
The following blog entry is hardly updated. It is derived from the last 9 or so months.
Dig my music do you?
I had just got into my new house and I was unpacking all my stuff. My day thus far had been full of curious neighbors stopping by to see the American’s stuff, although they’d tell you there just being friendly neighbors. I finally got a minute to myself and unloaded my six string for a minute of personal rock stardom. Little did I know that my dream would unfold right there before my eyes.
I started to launch into one of my smash hits “sneezing on the truth” and a group of cows came dashing toward my house as if Will Farrell himself was calling them over with a cow bell. Delighted to have such tranquil company, I sang my little heart out with an almost cocky smile garnishing my face. “Right on, the cows dig my music” I thought to myself.
The truth is, not only was I excited to have a few listeners but it got me pondering about cow’s interest in music. I thought “Who knew cows can get down to some sweet tunes just like we can? This is just one more testament to the power of music”. I put my guitar down and decided I had to take advantage of such an attentive crowd by setting up my newly bought speakers and cranking my jam at the time. “Because” by The Beatles.
Moving over to my bed I laid there proudly. Still wearing that crooked yet pensive smile, I probably looked as though I’d just been kissed by a Kelly Kapowski in a beach episode of Saved by the Bell. And it stayed like that for quite some time, weeks even, “Cows dig music, it’s as simple as that”.
The next part of the story picks up with me at the Peace Corps office a few weeks later. While I was there taking advantage of the only air conditioning I’ve yet to come across in Paraguay, I stopped into the Agricultural Coordinator’s office to ask him for his advice on starting my vegetable garden. He gave me a bunch of tips, one of which included staying by my house all day to take note of where the sun hits my garden and for how long. He went on with his explanation and taught me how to plant my vegetables according to the angle of the sun.
So I went back to my house and got right on it, laying around all day in my hammock reading a book that just so happened to talk about how vegetable gardens negatively impact GDP figures. Go figure Paraguay is so ¨poor¨ and the US so “rich”.
I got to the point of my book where it was too depressing to go on and tried to take a nap. As I started to fade into a daydream about playing a sold out show for 20,000 mooing cows, the several vacas from a few weeks before come trotting on over to the fence and took a seat in the same spot as the last time. Maybe this is their way of asking me to rock out. Or was it?
An unnerving realization dawned on me like the avalanche of sun that was beating down at the time. Painstaking to admit, it seemed the cows had not come up to me the last time because Woodstock ’09 was happening right on their very own patch of grass; they had an ulterior motive.
That motive being, shade! “Shade, of course shade you idiot” I though. During a Paraguayan summer all living beings follow the shade with the kind of conviction I’d only previously seen in Paraguayan dogs.
It turns out that what I hadn’t realized before is that in the afternoon the sun gets behind the trees in my front yard to create the only shaded spot that exists in the grassy knoll in front of my house. Therefore, the cows snuggle up close every single afternoon, not just when I break into an unplugged version of “Guilty Man”.
Now, having lived here for many moons since the occurrence of this story, I must use this as a chance to emphasize something remarkable—the incredible awareness Paraguayans have for the shade and the need to always be in it. If I so much as put my book bag down in the sun I get such a puzzled look that I may as well have been unabashedly scratching my ass.
Sometimes I entertain myself by picturing how a Paraguayan would react if you asked them why they are constantly in the shade and I get this mental image of the stoner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High tilting his head and saying “Why be in the shade? The shade is your friend man”. It is simply so disgustingly hot here, and people are always outside. Therefore, shade awareness is so important to a Paraguayan that it reminds me of “opposite sex awareness” when it’s your first day at a new job; it is instinctive and tracked throughout the day.
This is truly one of the biggest differences between life here and in the states. Being a farming community, people here are so in tune with their environment and weather patterns. It is truly fascinating to witness. I’m actually writing a song about it called “Why the cows come a runnin”
I will survive
With one year of Paraguay under my belt, I finally got my first visit from my big bro Andy. We started his three week trip down here with a good 10 days in Paraguay. Nothing too special went down. He got to meet my friends, hung out with neighbors, and he followed me around as I continued with my projects like normal. The highlight for me was when he got a little boozy one Sunday afternoon. Three memorable events transpired. First he sang an outrageous acapella version of “Maria” from West Side Story to my neighbors, then proceeded to go on a cow hugging campaign, and ended the afternoon by picking endless mandarin oranges and hand feeding them to the cows.
I guess you could say the tone of the trip did a 180 the night before we were to leave Paraguay and make a move to Iguazu Falls, the massive waterfalls where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet. What lay ahead of us was 7 days in Argentina; two at Iguazu and five in Buenos Aires.
Considering the amount of good looking chicas we were about to find, we popped in our favorite inspirational movie, Swingers. For a couple of nice boys like ourselves the most crucial scene is when the two main characters are game planning for an upcoming rendezvous. Vince Vaughn tells his buddy “Don’t be the guy in the PG-13 movie everyone is reeeeaaly hoping makes it happen. Be the guy in the R-rated movie, the guy you’re not quite sure about.”
Later on in the flick the less confident Mikey, the character with whom I relate, says “But I have this thing where I want to be a gentleman and show respect…” And Vince’s response “Respect my ass Mike, what women respect is honesty. You see how they dress; they want you to notice them. You’re just letting them know that they’re money and you’re looking to party.”
If that isn’t genius I simply don’t know what is.
Anyway, by the time we got to Iguazu it was time to be R-rated and put all that fake confidence into play. So we walk up to this restaurant on a lovely day and take a seat next to two even lovelier girls. Being aware of the worldly draw that Iguazu has, we go in assuming these girls could be from anywhere. It just happens we sit down and hear a tongue that is definitely not Spanish. “I think its is Hebrew” my brother says. “I think you’re right.” I tell him. “But it may French, I’m not sure yet” We sat there pretending not to ease drop on this conversation we can’t understand and finally I heard it. “Shalom”. “You heard that right?”
“Yeah I heard that” he responded.
“So what do we say?, I mean we have been to Eretz Israel. We’re part of the tribe.”
“I don’t know, just play it cool”
I looked at him as I rolled my eyes “What do you mean play it cool? Are we the guys in the R-rated movie or not?
“Just chill out a second” he practically whispered
“We could always bum a cigarette, that’s at least kind of R-Rated and doesn’t make us look like idiots.”
He gave me another one of his famous “just chill out for a second” ‘s and I knew that if we had brought the spirit of Vince Vaughn with us, he’d have left us long before we sat down at this table.
The “chilling of for a second” quickly turned into an hour and before we knew it we walked onto a Buenos Aires bound bus with PG-13 tattoos practically stamped to our foreheads.
“Listen”, I said “This whole R-rated mentality is good an all but if we meet more Israelis in BA and don’t have some sort of a plan, I don’t know if I’ll ever let myself watch Swingers again. It should be simple. We pretend we don’t know and ask where they’re from, they tell us “the land of milk and honey”, and then we let them know we speak your language, only not really, and the rest should be history.”
“Alright man”
We arrived in B.A. with our heads high and ready to conquer to world. Unfortunately, our trip would then came to a screeching halt. We were two days into our trip in BA, hadn’t met a single Israeli and were lying in our 6 person hostel room on a Sunday morning, sick as a pair of dogs. After miraculously finding the energy to get up and make it to a clinic, we spent the next few days being sick bums. I hopped a flight back to Paraguay a day early and my brother made his way back to The States.
Still feeling sick the day I left, I had emailed the Peace Corps doctor my flight information so he could pick me up at the airport and have a look at what was going on.
He picked me up and immediately told me to put a tapaboca over my mouth to prevent the spreading of whatever sickness I may have had. We went to his office, I had a blood and snot swab taken and then was dropped off at a hotel room where I was quarantined for the next five days. Two days in I got the all exciting call from the doctor saying that I have the flu and a sample was sent to the U.S. to see if is indeed (drum roll please) The Swine Flu.
After being healthy for a few weeks I just so happened to be in the Peace Corps office and ran into the doctor. “Hola Doctor, como te va?
“Very well Matthew. How are you feeling?”
“I’m good. You know I had a question, did you ever get those results back about whether or not I had swine flu?”
“O yeah, you did indeed have it” he said as calmly as a comment on the weather.
“Are you kidding me?! This is fantastic! I’m a survivor, I survived H1N1 Swine Flu!”
I walked out of his office and miraculously Eye of the Tiger seemed to rain down from all directions. I put a little hop in my step, ripped away my button up gym pants and ran up a 400 foot flight of stairs. A sick thought then came to my head “what a great conversation piece—I had and survived the swine flu.” If that doesn’t make me R-Rated then I don’t know what does.
Stress…What’s That?
I was with Gloria, my old host mom, and two of her friends in the pueblo drinking some t-ray and I entered the most surreal conversation of my life. Before I begin, I must give a bit of background on the characters.
The first character is Gloria; a 38 year old woman of 4, high school language teacher of Guarani and Spanish, owns a TV and motorcycle, reads the newspaper regularly.
The other two characters are middle aged men. One is an electrician whose wife has been working in Spain for 4 years and the other a single man who owns a little clothing store in town.
I only give those descriptions to establish the fact that these are part of a more globally conscious/cultured group of people when compared to some of the other families of the area.
Now we can move back to me sitting down to have t-ray. I proceed to ask Gloria how one of our mutual friends is doing in her attempt to finish college classes in Pharmacy. Gloria responded “She’s actually not doing too well right now, the college told her that she has to redo her thesis, one of her kids has the flu, and because of her new job in a town 45 minutes away she doesn’t have time to time for anything. It seems that she has a sickness called estrés, stress. Have you heard of that before?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I mean she called stress a sickness. “Um, I’m actually pretty sure that my country invented that word.”
The electrician put the guampa down and with the curiosity of a 5 year old child asked “Stress, what’s that?”
Gloria chimed in with an answer of “cansancia de la mente, tiredness or fatigue of the mind” Then the electrician turned to his buddy the shop owner and said “Do you know about this estrés?” His buddy responds “No, but it sounds terrible. So it’s like when your mind can’t chill out or something?”
By this time I’m pinching myself to make sure that I’m actually living through this conversation. Could this really be happening in the year 2009? People talking about what stress is. The absurd plainness of their language made me feel like I was in a 6th grade sex education movie.
“Dad, I woke up this morning and my bed is all wet. I don’t think its urine. What happened?”
“Don’t worry Johnny, that’s called a “wet dream”, it’s a completely normal thing to happen to a boy of your age. In fact, it’s one of many strange things that will occur in this new phase of your life called, puberty”
Anyway, as you can imagine, I was floored to have heard what just occurred. And believe me, I would love to tell you that I’m exaggerating this story but it’s every bit as real as those sex-ed videos.
Despite my effort to make this a happy story about people who don’t even know what stress is, I can’t help but mention the slippery slope that is the developing world. Surely as investments are made and education improved upon, pressures will enter the lives of more and more people and places like rural Paraguay will become more familiar with our stress overload culture.
Linguistics of Guarani 101
OK so 21 months! Holy Paraguayan Cow I’ve been down here for a while now no? In case you missed the boat on the whole language situation here, I’ll remind you that Paraguay is a bilingual country of Spanish and an indigenous language of Guarani; the latter being the dominant language of my community. Over the course of this time I’ve really been gettin after it to learn Guaraní and it’s probably been my greatest source of satisfaction.
Why you might ask? Primarily, because I noticed that by not understanding Guarani people will shamelessly talk about you in front of your face. During my first months I would be sitting with several people and a Paraguayan would ask another Paraguayan “So what is this guy doing down here?” His buddy would then respond in Guaraní about how I’m here to either teach English or observe their culture and take information back to the US government. Two years of dealing with such falsehoods was simply out of the question. If I was going to stay I had to learn this language. Secondly, I’ve come to realize that I actually love learning languages. I love studying them. I love analyzing them. I love speaking them. Suffice it to say that I’m a full blown language dork.
Therefore, I’m going to touch on language down here in Paraguay and why I find it so fascinating.
This fascination of mine comes from an important realization— language is so much more than communication! Once fully understood, language becomes a mysterious crystal ball necessary for understanding a foreign culture. Indeed, language is so much more than just a means of relaying thoughts. This is because those very thoughts are very much based on the language and the corresponding culture.
As a result, I find myself thinking in Spanish or Guaraní on a daily basis now. This happens not because the words I think to myself don’t have English translations, it’s because there is this other aspect to language, and it can only be felt or experienced thinking in that particular language. And when you feel it, it’s a powerful thing. I think that’s why I’ve taken such an interest in it.
Consequently, I find myself constantly struggling to properly explain my life to my parents when we speak in English. They call and I get all flustered because I want to throw in a Spanish or Guarani word that properly completes my thought. (Something we PC volunteers do in all our conversations) Clearly, it’s not because English doesn’t have a broad enough vocabulary. It’s just that oftentimes a translation can’t do any justice to the picture I’m trying to paint.
I’ll give a few examples.
During the winter here it does get a bit chilly and therefore very normal to sit by the fire. Thus, when I walk by a neighbor’s house in winter they yell to me “Ejuke Mateo, jajepe’e! (ja=we) I would then proceed to take a seat with them around the fire and do some jepe’eing. Unlike many other cases, I didn’t have to look this word up in the dictionary. It was obvious they were sitting around the fire to beat the cold and that was the meaning of the word.
Since learning the word and going through two winters, I’ve done my fair share of jepe’eing and was then quite surprised when I recently saw the translation in the dictionary. It says “to warm oneself up”. When I read it I felt like I’d been cheated. “What a ludicrous definition!” The last time I’d jepe’eed I was under a straw roof with no walls, sitting on a tree stump and loading firewood into an old rusted car wheel rim to support the burning logs. We were speaking in Guarani about how it got so unusually cold this year that many neighbors lost tons of papaya plants. That’s my idea of jepe’eing. Which is something completely different than when I think in English about “warming myself up”?
For the next example I’ll switch up to a US setting. To paint the picture, let’s go to a high rise building in a big city like New York. The rural folk I live with have probably never seen, let alone, been in such a building. That means that they probably don’t have much of an idea of what it would be like to get into a metal box, press a button, and in the matter of a minute be 50 flights up. How could they possibly describe that experience to a family member using an indigenous language which was developed completely outside of the industrialized world? They could try, but one of two things would most likely happen. Either a switch of languages to Spanish, where there exists the word ascensor for elevator, or they’d simply give a description. But let’s be honest, could that ever take the place of feeling what it is to get in an elevator? To feel yourself going up, having you stomach drop when you reach your floor and then walk out to see a bird’s eye view of the entire city. Clearly not something you use words to understand, it’s something you feel.
Moving forward in this discussion of language, in this previous example I make reference to a language change of Guarani to the Spanish word of ascensor. This combination of the two languages is highly utilized and goes by the name Jopara or mix/mezcla.
It is this dual utilization of the two languages that I find so intriguing. I say this because the Jopara is so much more than combining two languages; it’s really the combination of two worlds. One is a world of Spanish sophistication and the other of simple Indian life.
There is a plethora of ways in which the Jopara functions.
The first occurs when two people are talking and the conversation literally interchanges full Spanish and Guarani phrases. This most frequently occurs when people are telling stories or relaying information. For example, two people may be speaking Guarani and say the following. “ A kokuehe ahenoi kuri upe kuña karai. Dice que hay que entregar los recibos antes de que se venzca nuestro convenio”
The part of ahenoi, I called, until kuña karai, woman, is all in Guarani. Then it can be deduced that the kuña karai spoke to her in Spanish and said “we have to turn in the receipts before our contract expires. As in the case of the women’s groups I work with, they deal with accountants on occasion who prefer speaking Spanish, especially about professional matters. So instead of the Guaraní speaker trying to translate what the accountant said, she just says it in Spanish. This is done because it not only seems easier on the brain when relaying spoken information but also because this formal sentence contains many words that don’t exist in Guarani.
Maybe my most memorable example of the two languages going back and forth was when I was at a neighbor’s during a big family gathering. One guest was a middle aged woman who had raised her two kids in downtown Asuncion, an almost all Spanish speaking area, but was originally from my community. As always, we passed our day speaking in Guaraní, except for these two kids ages 10 and 15. They understand every word of Guarani but don’t comfortably speak it. Therefore every time they spoke, which was often, it was in Spanish but the only language they heard in response was Guaraní. And the whole conversation went by like this without anybody acknowledging the fact that a fluid conversation was occurring, but in two different languages. This is just a normal part of life in Paraguay.
Our next example of the the jopara is by speaking either mostly Guarani or Spanish but randomly adding in words of the other language. This is already happening more and more in the US with Spanish. We say things like “I’m going to the store to get some cerveza.” If a friend of yours said that sentence you’d likely not even bat an eye thinking about what cerveza means. It’s just automatic, beer and cerveza are synonyms. This is precisely how the Jopara can work sometimes; only the frequency of adding words from the other language can be astoundingly high. This happens because some words just don’t exist in Guarani because it’s an indigenous language. Take for example the above sentence of “We have to turn in the receipts before our contract expires.” There simply is no word for receipts, contract, or expire. Even if there were, they could never do justice to the precision of those words when speaking with an accountant.
The Jopara’s third and most interesting form is used when a Spanish word takes on the Guarani conjugation and pronunciation. For example: Guarani works like English in the sense that the person doing the action is established before the root of the verb. An “a” before a verb means “I”. Vender(Spanish)= to sell. Because they don’t use a Guarani word for “to sell” they just convert “vender” to (a)vende. Consequently, the r must be taken off of vender because Guarani verbs must end in vowels. This is done with many different verbs and can sometimes make following a conversation a whole lot easier.
For us volunteers, the classic example of this is the use of “no entiende= he doesn’t understand”. The ironic part about this is that Paraguayans struggle to discretely say “he doesn’t understand” while in our presence. It’s “nontendei”. (the “no” at the beginning in this case is just a coincidence…Guarani doesn’t use “no”) No entiende vs. nontendei. The two are ridiculously similar no? This used to happen to me almost every day when with a group of Paraguayans speaking Guarani and someone thought I didn’t understand, which may or may not have been true. After determining that I didn’t understand this someone would usually say with no shame at all “noentendei”. Clearly this person was trying to be secretive about telling his friends that I don’t understand but really it’s just as obvious as if he approached me like a drill sergeant and screamed in my face “You don’t understand, you American idiot!”.
Before moving on to how Spanish further plays into this language equation, I must highlight some of my other favorite Jopara examples. The first involves throwing question words of Guarani onto a question word of Spanish; for example, Dondepiko (donde=where). You see, in Guaraní there are suffixes like piko to make things questions. Like rehota vs rehotapiko. The rehota means “You will go” but rehotapiko asks “Will you go?”. In English we sometimes would put an “Are or Do etc. to ask a question but many times it is simply picked up by the intonation, something also done in Guaraní. Now back to my example of Dondepiko. Donde means “where” in Spanish and is inherently a question but all the same Paraguayans sometimes throw a piko on there out of habit or to emphasize.
Another favorite of mine is when Paraguayans use the Guarani prefix of “mo/mbo” before a Spanish word. The “mo/mbo” means “to make, to have or to give” depending on the context. The example that always makes me laugh is when I hear Ombo’ok. The O is “he” and the ok is literally OK. Therefore, it translates to “he gives the OK, or he approves” with the mbo meaning “to give”. This is such an in interesting example to me because it seems to me that OK is of English origin and something that Spanish speakers have adapted due to media. Thus, we actually have a mixture of three languages being utilized here in a matter of six little letters.
So you may be asking yourself; to what extent do people speak Spanish? As you may expect, there are so many different answers to that very basic question. To begin, one must recognize that an understanding of Spanish is almost unavoidable by a Paraguayan. Media and education’s far reaching influences provide an abundance of this all important tongue.
The news on both the radio and television is usually in Spanish. All written materials like newspapers and books are written in Spanish. High school classes are primarily taught in Spanish. (Primary school is much more Guarani) All road signs, technological devices, laws, and really anything written is conducted in Spanish. Its influence is just so broad that people naturally pick it up.
That explains why many of my neighbors have a perfect understanding of Spanish and almost no ability to utter a correct sentence. In my first few months here my Spanish was far superior to my Guarani and when addressing me many would whip out their Spanish. It would become immediately obvious those people who probably hadn’t ever had to speak a lick of Spanish. At the very least all my neighbors manage the present tense and basic speech without a problem but other tenses become difficult quite quickly. I imagine that the only reason that this basic dominance of Spanish even exists into adulthood is due to the way people speak to babies, which is surprisingly in Spanish.
Since people in my community only speak Guarani, they make a concerted effort to speak in Spanish when speaking directly to their little ones. As mentioned previously, there is this huge use of Spanish for media and education and therefore most parents realize the benefits of giving their toddlers this necessary educational building block.
Additionally, if upon growing up that child decided to move just 45 miles down the road from this world of Guarani, they’d find themselves in the capital, Asuncion, where only in specific pockets are people speaking Guarani. It’s primarily Spanish! I find this difference nothing short of astonishing considering the proximity of my community to the capital. And to reiterate, these aren’t just two languages. Each one has its own underlying feeling behind the words.
As one of my friends once said “If you’re a lawyer walking into the hood, you don’t go in with a suit, a briefcase, and you’re country club lingo, you had better tone it down if you lookin to kick it old school with some brothers.” The same thing applies here.
But it’s not just language that makes Asuncion life so contrary; it’s really all aspects of life. Asuncion is a world full of shopping malls, huge grocery stores, wide-spread internet, cable television, universities, and multinational banks. Any of that sound familiar?
It is the same idea of why I needed to use Guarani when sitting around that fire. When you walk into the City Bank in Asuncion, you don’t speak Spanish because you are in Asuncion, you speak Spanish because you’re in a big fancy bank which happens to be in Asuncion. And the feeling you get in this type of environment is practically screaming Spanish.
The last thing I want to suggest here is that someone who only speaks Guarani can’t be highly intelligent, that would be nonsensical. Only that languages have their time and place, just like not using Guarani when talking to accountant about expiring contracts.
In synthesis, the two languages of Guarani and Spanish make up a fascinating dynamic and have made my time in Paraguay a truly unique and special experience. Both languages have their appropriate settings and fit directly into the culture described in my other blog entries. Opa! Jajotopata
The following blog entry is hardly updated. It is derived from the last 9 or so months.
Dig my music do you?
I had just got into my new house and I was unpacking all my stuff. My day thus far had been full of curious neighbors stopping by to see the American’s stuff, although they’d tell you there just being friendly neighbors. I finally got a minute to myself and unloaded my six string for a minute of personal rock stardom. Little did I know that my dream would unfold right there before my eyes.
I started to launch into one of my smash hits “sneezing on the truth” and a group of cows came dashing toward my house as if Will Farrell himself was calling them over with a cow bell. Delighted to have such tranquil company, I sang my little heart out with an almost cocky smile garnishing my face. “Right on, the cows dig my music” I thought to myself.
The truth is, not only was I excited to have a few listeners but it got me pondering about cow’s interest in music. I thought “Who knew cows can get down to some sweet tunes just like we can? This is just one more testament to the power of music”. I put my guitar down and decided I had to take advantage of such an attentive crowd by setting up my newly bought speakers and cranking my jam at the time. “Because” by The Beatles.
Moving over to my bed I laid there proudly. Still wearing that crooked yet pensive smile, I probably looked as though I’d just been kissed by a Kelly Kapowski in a beach episode of Saved by the Bell. And it stayed like that for quite some time, weeks even, “Cows dig music, it’s as simple as that”.
The next part of the story picks up with me at the Peace Corps office a few weeks later. While I was there taking advantage of the only air conditioning I’ve yet to come across in Paraguay, I stopped into the Agricultural Coordinator’s office to ask him for his advice on starting my vegetable garden. He gave me a bunch of tips, one of which included staying by my house all day to take note of where the sun hits my garden and for how long. He went on with his explanation and taught me how to plant my vegetables according to the angle of the sun.
So I went back to my house and got right on it, laying around all day in my hammock reading a book that just so happened to talk about how vegetable gardens negatively impact GDP figures. Go figure Paraguay is so ¨poor¨ and the US so “rich”.
I got to the point of my book where it was too depressing to go on and tried to take a nap. As I started to fade into a daydream about playing a sold out show for 20,000 mooing cows, the several vacas from a few weeks before come trotting on over to the fence and took a seat in the same spot as the last time. Maybe this is their way of asking me to rock out. Or was it?
An unnerving realization dawned on me like the avalanche of sun that was beating down at the time. Painstaking to admit, it seemed the cows had not come up to me the last time because Woodstock ’09 was happening right on their very own patch of grass; they had an ulterior motive.
That motive being, shade! “Shade, of course shade you idiot” I though. During a Paraguayan summer all living beings follow the shade with the kind of conviction I’d only previously seen in Paraguayan dogs.
It turns out that what I hadn’t realized before is that in the afternoon the sun gets behind the trees in my front yard to create the only shaded spot that exists in the grassy knoll in front of my house. Therefore, the cows snuggle up close every single afternoon, not just when I break into an unplugged version of “Guilty Man”.
Now, having lived here for many moons since the occurrence of this story, I must use this as a chance to emphasize something remarkable—the incredible awareness Paraguayans have for the shade and the need to always be in it. If I so much as put my book bag down in the sun I get such a puzzled look that I may as well have been unabashedly scratching my ass.
Sometimes I entertain myself by picturing how a Paraguayan would react if you asked them why they are constantly in the shade and I get this mental image of the stoner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High tilting his head and saying “Why be in the shade? The shade is your friend man”. It is simply so disgustingly hot here, and people are always outside. Therefore, shade awareness is so important to a Paraguayan that it reminds me of “opposite sex awareness” when it’s your first day at a new job; it is instinctive and tracked throughout the day.
This is truly one of the biggest differences between life here and in the states. Being a farming community, people here are so in tune with their environment and weather patterns. It is truly fascinating to witness. I’m actually writing a song about it called “Why the cows come a runnin”
I will survive
With one year of Paraguay under my belt, I finally got my first visit from my big bro Andy. We started his three week trip down here with a good 10 days in Paraguay. Nothing too special went down. He got to meet my friends, hung out with neighbors, and he followed me around as I continued with my projects like normal. The highlight for me was when he got a little boozy one Sunday afternoon. Three memorable events transpired. First he sang an outrageous acapella version of “Maria” from West Side Story to my neighbors, then proceeded to go on a cow hugging campaign, and ended the afternoon by picking endless mandarin oranges and hand feeding them to the cows.
I guess you could say the tone of the trip did a 180 the night before we were to leave Paraguay and make a move to Iguazu Falls, the massive waterfalls where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet. What lay ahead of us was 7 days in Argentina; two at Iguazu and five in Buenos Aires.
Considering the amount of good looking chicas we were about to find, we popped in our favorite inspirational movie, Swingers. For a couple of nice boys like ourselves the most crucial scene is when the two main characters are game planning for an upcoming rendezvous. Vince Vaughn tells his buddy “Don’t be the guy in the PG-13 movie everyone is reeeeaaly hoping makes it happen. Be the guy in the R-rated movie, the guy you’re not quite sure about.”
Later on in the flick the less confident Mikey, the character with whom I relate, says “But I have this thing where I want to be a gentleman and show respect…” And Vince’s response “Respect my ass Mike, what women respect is honesty. You see how they dress; they want you to notice them. You’re just letting them know that they’re money and you’re looking to party.”
If that isn’t genius I simply don’t know what is.
Anyway, by the time we got to Iguazu it was time to be R-rated and put all that fake confidence into play. So we walk up to this restaurant on a lovely day and take a seat next to two even lovelier girls. Being aware of the worldly draw that Iguazu has, we go in assuming these girls could be from anywhere. It just happens we sit down and hear a tongue that is definitely not Spanish. “I think its is Hebrew” my brother says. “I think you’re right.” I tell him. “But it may French, I’m not sure yet” We sat there pretending not to ease drop on this conversation we can’t understand and finally I heard it. “Shalom”. “You heard that right?”
“Yeah I heard that” he responded.
“So what do we say?, I mean we have been to Eretz Israel. We’re part of the tribe.”
“I don’t know, just play it cool”
I looked at him as I rolled my eyes “What do you mean play it cool? Are we the guys in the R-rated movie or not?
“Just chill out a second” he practically whispered
“We could always bum a cigarette, that’s at least kind of R-Rated and doesn’t make us look like idiots.”
He gave me another one of his famous “just chill out for a second” ‘s and I knew that if we had brought the spirit of Vince Vaughn with us, he’d have left us long before we sat down at this table.
The “chilling of for a second” quickly turned into an hour and before we knew it we walked onto a Buenos Aires bound bus with PG-13 tattoos practically stamped to our foreheads.
“Listen”, I said “This whole R-rated mentality is good an all but if we meet more Israelis in BA and don’t have some sort of a plan, I don’t know if I’ll ever let myself watch Swingers again. It should be simple. We pretend we don’t know and ask where they’re from, they tell us “the land of milk and honey”, and then we let them know we speak your language, only not really, and the rest should be history.”
“Alright man”
We arrived in B.A. with our heads high and ready to conquer to world. Unfortunately, our trip would then came to a screeching halt. We were two days into our trip in BA, hadn’t met a single Israeli and were lying in our 6 person hostel room on a Sunday morning, sick as a pair of dogs. After miraculously finding the energy to get up and make it to a clinic, we spent the next few days being sick bums. I hopped a flight back to Paraguay a day early and my brother made his way back to The States.
Still feeling sick the day I left, I had emailed the Peace Corps doctor my flight information so he could pick me up at the airport and have a look at what was going on.
He picked me up and immediately told me to put a tapaboca over my mouth to prevent the spreading of whatever sickness I may have had. We went to his office, I had a blood and snot swab taken and then was dropped off at a hotel room where I was quarantined for the next five days. Two days in I got the all exciting call from the doctor saying that I have the flu and a sample was sent to the U.S. to see if is indeed (drum roll please) The Swine Flu.
After being healthy for a few weeks I just so happened to be in the Peace Corps office and ran into the doctor. “Hola Doctor, como te va?
“Very well Matthew. How are you feeling?”
“I’m good. You know I had a question, did you ever get those results back about whether or not I had swine flu?”
“O yeah, you did indeed have it” he said as calmly as a comment on the weather.
“Are you kidding me?! This is fantastic! I’m a survivor, I survived H1N1 Swine Flu!”
I walked out of his office and miraculously Eye of the Tiger seemed to rain down from all directions. I put a little hop in my step, ripped away my button up gym pants and ran up a 400 foot flight of stairs. A sick thought then came to my head “what a great conversation piece—I had and survived the swine flu.” If that doesn’t make me R-Rated then I don’t know what does.
Stress…What’s That?
I was with Gloria, my old host mom, and two of her friends in the pueblo drinking some t-ray and I entered the most surreal conversation of my life. Before I begin, I must give a bit of background on the characters.
The first character is Gloria; a 38 year old woman of 4, high school language teacher of Guarani and Spanish, owns a TV and motorcycle, reads the newspaper regularly.
The other two characters are middle aged men. One is an electrician whose wife has been working in Spain for 4 years and the other a single man who owns a little clothing store in town.
I only give those descriptions to establish the fact that these are part of a more globally conscious/cultured group of people when compared to some of the other families of the area.
Now we can move back to me sitting down to have t-ray. I proceed to ask Gloria how one of our mutual friends is doing in her attempt to finish college classes in Pharmacy. Gloria responded “She’s actually not doing too well right now, the college told her that she has to redo her thesis, one of her kids has the flu, and because of her new job in a town 45 minutes away she doesn’t have time to time for anything. It seems that she has a sickness called estrés, stress. Have you heard of that before?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I mean she called stress a sickness. “Um, I’m actually pretty sure that my country invented that word.”
The electrician put the guampa down and with the curiosity of a 5 year old child asked “Stress, what’s that?”
Gloria chimed in with an answer of “cansancia de la mente, tiredness or fatigue of the mind” Then the electrician turned to his buddy the shop owner and said “Do you know about this estrés?” His buddy responds “No, but it sounds terrible. So it’s like when your mind can’t chill out or something?”
By this time I’m pinching myself to make sure that I’m actually living through this conversation. Could this really be happening in the year 2009? People talking about what stress is. The absurd plainness of their language made me feel like I was in a 6th grade sex education movie.
“Dad, I woke up this morning and my bed is all wet. I don’t think its urine. What happened?”
“Don’t worry Johnny, that’s called a “wet dream”, it’s a completely normal thing to happen to a boy of your age. In fact, it’s one of many strange things that will occur in this new phase of your life called, puberty”
Anyway, as you can imagine, I was floored to have heard what just occurred. And believe me, I would love to tell you that I’m exaggerating this story but it’s every bit as real as those sex-ed videos.
Despite my effort to make this a happy story about people who don’t even know what stress is, I can’t help but mention the slippery slope that is the developing world. Surely as investments are made and education improved upon, pressures will enter the lives of more and more people and places like rural Paraguay will become more familiar with our stress overload culture.
Linguistics of Guarani 101
OK so 21 months! Holy Paraguayan Cow I’ve been down here for a while now no? In case you missed the boat on the whole language situation here, I’ll remind you that Paraguay is a bilingual country of Spanish and an indigenous language of Guarani; the latter being the dominant language of my community. Over the course of this time I’ve really been gettin after it to learn Guaraní and it’s probably been my greatest source of satisfaction.
Why you might ask? Primarily, because I noticed that by not understanding Guarani people will shamelessly talk about you in front of your face. During my first months I would be sitting with several people and a Paraguayan would ask another Paraguayan “So what is this guy doing down here?” His buddy would then respond in Guaraní about how I’m here to either teach English or observe their culture and take information back to the US government. Two years of dealing with such falsehoods was simply out of the question. If I was going to stay I had to learn this language. Secondly, I’ve come to realize that I actually love learning languages. I love studying them. I love analyzing them. I love speaking them. Suffice it to say that I’m a full blown language dork.
Therefore, I’m going to touch on language down here in Paraguay and why I find it so fascinating.
This fascination of mine comes from an important realization— language is so much more than communication! Once fully understood, language becomes a mysterious crystal ball necessary for understanding a foreign culture. Indeed, language is so much more than just a means of relaying thoughts. This is because those very thoughts are very much based on the language and the corresponding culture.
As a result, I find myself thinking in Spanish or Guaraní on a daily basis now. This happens not because the words I think to myself don’t have English translations, it’s because there is this other aspect to language, and it can only be felt or experienced thinking in that particular language. And when you feel it, it’s a powerful thing. I think that’s why I’ve taken such an interest in it.
Consequently, I find myself constantly struggling to properly explain my life to my parents when we speak in English. They call and I get all flustered because I want to throw in a Spanish or Guarani word that properly completes my thought. (Something we PC volunteers do in all our conversations) Clearly, it’s not because English doesn’t have a broad enough vocabulary. It’s just that oftentimes a translation can’t do any justice to the picture I’m trying to paint.
I’ll give a few examples.
During the winter here it does get a bit chilly and therefore very normal to sit by the fire. Thus, when I walk by a neighbor’s house in winter they yell to me “Ejuke Mateo, jajepe’e! (ja=we) I would then proceed to take a seat with them around the fire and do some jepe’eing. Unlike many other cases, I didn’t have to look this word up in the dictionary. It was obvious they were sitting around the fire to beat the cold and that was the meaning of the word.
Since learning the word and going through two winters, I’ve done my fair share of jepe’eing and was then quite surprised when I recently saw the translation in the dictionary. It says “to warm oneself up”. When I read it I felt like I’d been cheated. “What a ludicrous definition!” The last time I’d jepe’eed I was under a straw roof with no walls, sitting on a tree stump and loading firewood into an old rusted car wheel rim to support the burning logs. We were speaking in Guarani about how it got so unusually cold this year that many neighbors lost tons of papaya plants. That’s my idea of jepe’eing. Which is something completely different than when I think in English about “warming myself up”?
For the next example I’ll switch up to a US setting. To paint the picture, let’s go to a high rise building in a big city like New York. The rural folk I live with have probably never seen, let alone, been in such a building. That means that they probably don’t have much of an idea of what it would be like to get into a metal box, press a button, and in the matter of a minute be 50 flights up. How could they possibly describe that experience to a family member using an indigenous language which was developed completely outside of the industrialized world? They could try, but one of two things would most likely happen. Either a switch of languages to Spanish, where there exists the word ascensor for elevator, or they’d simply give a description. But let’s be honest, could that ever take the place of feeling what it is to get in an elevator? To feel yourself going up, having you stomach drop when you reach your floor and then walk out to see a bird’s eye view of the entire city. Clearly not something you use words to understand, it’s something you feel.
Moving forward in this discussion of language, in this previous example I make reference to a language change of Guarani to the Spanish word of ascensor. This combination of the two languages is highly utilized and goes by the name Jopara or mix/mezcla.
It is this dual utilization of the two languages that I find so intriguing. I say this because the Jopara is so much more than combining two languages; it’s really the combination of two worlds. One is a world of Spanish sophistication and the other of simple Indian life.
There is a plethora of ways in which the Jopara functions.
The first occurs when two people are talking and the conversation literally interchanges full Spanish and Guarani phrases. This most frequently occurs when people are telling stories or relaying information. For example, two people may be speaking Guarani and say the following. “ A kokuehe ahenoi kuri upe kuña karai. Dice que hay que entregar los recibos antes de que se venzca nuestro convenio”
The part of ahenoi, I called, until kuña karai, woman, is all in Guarani. Then it can be deduced that the kuña karai spoke to her in Spanish and said “we have to turn in the receipts before our contract expires. As in the case of the women’s groups I work with, they deal with accountants on occasion who prefer speaking Spanish, especially about professional matters. So instead of the Guaraní speaker trying to translate what the accountant said, she just says it in Spanish. This is done because it not only seems easier on the brain when relaying spoken information but also because this formal sentence contains many words that don’t exist in Guarani.
Maybe my most memorable example of the two languages going back and forth was when I was at a neighbor’s during a big family gathering. One guest was a middle aged woman who had raised her two kids in downtown Asuncion, an almost all Spanish speaking area, but was originally from my community. As always, we passed our day speaking in Guaraní, except for these two kids ages 10 and 15. They understand every word of Guarani but don’t comfortably speak it. Therefore every time they spoke, which was often, it was in Spanish but the only language they heard in response was Guaraní. And the whole conversation went by like this without anybody acknowledging the fact that a fluid conversation was occurring, but in two different languages. This is just a normal part of life in Paraguay.
Our next example of the the jopara is by speaking either mostly Guarani or Spanish but randomly adding in words of the other language. This is already happening more and more in the US with Spanish. We say things like “I’m going to the store to get some cerveza.” If a friend of yours said that sentence you’d likely not even bat an eye thinking about what cerveza means. It’s just automatic, beer and cerveza are synonyms. This is precisely how the Jopara can work sometimes; only the frequency of adding words from the other language can be astoundingly high. This happens because some words just don’t exist in Guarani because it’s an indigenous language. Take for example the above sentence of “We have to turn in the receipts before our contract expires.” There simply is no word for receipts, contract, or expire. Even if there were, they could never do justice to the precision of those words when speaking with an accountant.
The Jopara’s third and most interesting form is used when a Spanish word takes on the Guarani conjugation and pronunciation. For example: Guarani works like English in the sense that the person doing the action is established before the root of the verb. An “a” before a verb means “I”. Vender(Spanish)= to sell. Because they don’t use a Guarani word for “to sell” they just convert “vender” to (a)vende. Consequently, the r must be taken off of vender because Guarani verbs must end in vowels. This is done with many different verbs and can sometimes make following a conversation a whole lot easier.
For us volunteers, the classic example of this is the use of “no entiende= he doesn’t understand”. The ironic part about this is that Paraguayans struggle to discretely say “he doesn’t understand” while in our presence. It’s “nontendei”. (the “no” at the beginning in this case is just a coincidence…Guarani doesn’t use “no”) No entiende vs. nontendei. The two are ridiculously similar no? This used to happen to me almost every day when with a group of Paraguayans speaking Guarani and someone thought I didn’t understand, which may or may not have been true. After determining that I didn’t understand this someone would usually say with no shame at all “noentendei”. Clearly this person was trying to be secretive about telling his friends that I don’t understand but really it’s just as obvious as if he approached me like a drill sergeant and screamed in my face “You don’t understand, you American idiot!”.
Before moving on to how Spanish further plays into this language equation, I must highlight some of my other favorite Jopara examples. The first involves throwing question words of Guarani onto a question word of Spanish; for example, Dondepiko (donde=where). You see, in Guaraní there are suffixes like piko to make things questions. Like rehota vs rehotapiko. The rehota means “You will go” but rehotapiko asks “Will you go?”. In English we sometimes would put an “Are or Do etc. to ask a question but many times it is simply picked up by the intonation, something also done in Guaraní. Now back to my example of Dondepiko. Donde means “where” in Spanish and is inherently a question but all the same Paraguayans sometimes throw a piko on there out of habit or to emphasize.
Another favorite of mine is when Paraguayans use the Guarani prefix of “mo/mbo” before a Spanish word. The “mo/mbo” means “to make, to have or to give” depending on the context. The example that always makes me laugh is when I hear Ombo’ok. The O is “he” and the ok is literally OK. Therefore, it translates to “he gives the OK, or he approves” with the mbo meaning “to give”. This is such an in interesting example to me because it seems to me that OK is of English origin and something that Spanish speakers have adapted due to media. Thus, we actually have a mixture of three languages being utilized here in a matter of six little letters.
So you may be asking yourself; to what extent do people speak Spanish? As you may expect, there are so many different answers to that very basic question. To begin, one must recognize that an understanding of Spanish is almost unavoidable by a Paraguayan. Media and education’s far reaching influences provide an abundance of this all important tongue.
The news on both the radio and television is usually in Spanish. All written materials like newspapers and books are written in Spanish. High school classes are primarily taught in Spanish. (Primary school is much more Guarani) All road signs, technological devices, laws, and really anything written is conducted in Spanish. Its influence is just so broad that people naturally pick it up.
That explains why many of my neighbors have a perfect understanding of Spanish and almost no ability to utter a correct sentence. In my first few months here my Spanish was far superior to my Guarani and when addressing me many would whip out their Spanish. It would become immediately obvious those people who probably hadn’t ever had to speak a lick of Spanish. At the very least all my neighbors manage the present tense and basic speech without a problem but other tenses become difficult quite quickly. I imagine that the only reason that this basic dominance of Spanish even exists into adulthood is due to the way people speak to babies, which is surprisingly in Spanish.
Since people in my community only speak Guarani, they make a concerted effort to speak in Spanish when speaking directly to their little ones. As mentioned previously, there is this huge use of Spanish for media and education and therefore most parents realize the benefits of giving their toddlers this necessary educational building block.
Additionally, if upon growing up that child decided to move just 45 miles down the road from this world of Guarani, they’d find themselves in the capital, Asuncion, where only in specific pockets are people speaking Guarani. It’s primarily Spanish! I find this difference nothing short of astonishing considering the proximity of my community to the capital. And to reiterate, these aren’t just two languages. Each one has its own underlying feeling behind the words.
As one of my friends once said “If you’re a lawyer walking into the hood, you don’t go in with a suit, a briefcase, and you’re country club lingo, you had better tone it down if you lookin to kick it old school with some brothers.” The same thing applies here.
But it’s not just language that makes Asuncion life so contrary; it’s really all aspects of life. Asuncion is a world full of shopping malls, huge grocery stores, wide-spread internet, cable television, universities, and multinational banks. Any of that sound familiar?
It is the same idea of why I needed to use Guarani when sitting around that fire. When you walk into the City Bank in Asuncion, you don’t speak Spanish because you are in Asuncion, you speak Spanish because you’re in a big fancy bank which happens to be in Asuncion. And the feeling you get in this type of environment is practically screaming Spanish.
The last thing I want to suggest here is that someone who only speaks Guarani can’t be highly intelligent, that would be nonsensical. Only that languages have their time and place, just like not using Guarani when talking to accountant about expiring contracts.
In synthesis, the two languages of Guarani and Spanish make up a fascinating dynamic and have made my time in Paraguay a truly unique and special experience. Both languages have their appropriate settings and fit directly into the culture described in my other blog entries. Opa! Jajotopata
Thursday, April 23, 2009
I make story
Bull Eggs
It’s a normal day at around 4:30 and its t-ray, or terere time. I’ve just been working on the farm of my neighbor all morning harvesting beans and I’m super jolly to be quenching my thirst on top of a hill full of grazing cows and a view that overlooks a sea of green and yellow sugar cane. We’re sitting next to a newly sprouting grape vine and under a giant mango tree that has been sending mangos on suicidal face dives for months on end now. I find the mangos to be nothing short of the 8th wonder of the world but to my neighbors their abundance is so overwhelming that they’ve become apathetic toward them. But in general, nothing out the usual, just sitting there having a standard conversation about nothing; the lack of rain, the fact it was recently discovered the President of Paraguay had 2 love children while he was priest, the upcoming quinceanera birthday party on Saturday and a whole mixed bag of other goodies. From that mixed bag I with old time classic “what did you have for lunch?” The very common response of empanadas was given and I should have sufficed, but it didn’t. I followed up. “What kind of empanadas?” I asked. He finished sucking the ‘remaining drops out of the guampa and pointed to a brown bull out in the distance. “You see that bull out there? We stuffed the empanadas with his eggs.” Haha very funny I said, I know that bulls don’t lay eggs. No no he assured me—we ate his eggs. I quickly tried to picture the flashcard I’d made for egg in guarani. There’s no way bulls lay eggs is there? Could that really be what he said? I kept on asking him the question, each time a little slower and louder —as if talking into a cell phone that’s getting really bad reception “you ate the eggs of a bull?” He not only assured me that I had spoken correctly but also did this whole Italian thing whereby he brought his hand to his mouth and made a kissing sound in order to signify the deliciousness of the eggs. In the midst of my confusion I asked “So where do these eggs come from, out of its ass?” No no no he told me. Not those eggs but HIS EGGS. As he said this he made a motion with his hands in front of him as if he was weighing one object in each hand to see which was heavier—left hand or right hand. And it dawned on me, like a child who finally understands the dilemma of the birds and bees, he ate bull testicle empanadas for lunch. My stomach threw itself into a pretzel. It was like that time I was drunkenly walking around a party looking for a sobering cup up water. Shining like the sorcerer’s stone on the table, there it was, a freezing cup of water. I picked it up and as I took a gulp I realize I’d mistaken the water for H2O’s longtime archrival, cheap vodka. I’d smelt before I’d tasted it but it had already been too late. I coughed the vodka back up and threw up in my mouth a little bit. Little did I know it in those days, but accidently drinking vodka is a lot like finding out your neighbor has just eaten the balls of a bull, and loved every bite of them. When our t-ray session was over I scurried on home with a hop in my stop-- I’d never been so excited to go home and make myself a bowl of vegetarian fried rice— for the 3rd night in a row.
Talk to the hand cuz yo breath aint fresh?
The other day I was in the pueblo teaching at the “Centro Abierto”. I mentioned it earlier as a home where a nun runs a morning school for what she calls “street kids”. Most of them have horrific family lives and are very poor so La Hermana Araceli runs a center where they come eat breakfast, go to classes, and finish with lunch. All classes are taught by volunteers in the community and the meals given for free to the kids.
I have been teaching there one day a week since I arrived in site. I take my guitar and sing songs and teach them about geography. Were currently writing a ditty about the 5, not 7, continents they teach here. I’m also starting yet another world map with them next week.
About a month ago a new girl started at the Centro Abierto, a cute 5 year old named Silvia. Silvia is tiny, like most five year olds but carries herself like a Fortune 500 executive. She arrived that first day and immediately took a liking to me. We spent that whole day together. I was holding her tiny hand, spinning her like a ballerina, and throwing her up in the air. Like the beginning of most great relationships, it was right out of a movie. As the day came to a close she pulled my ear to hear mouth to tell me a secret. “My parents split up and my dad already got married to another woman. Therefore, I don’t have a dad anymore but at least I have a mom.”
Every morning after breakfast and giving thanks to god for the food that they’ve just eaten, Silvia does a b-line for me and I give her a big hug. Ever since confiding in me she’s stayed glued to my side. Sometimes I feel bad about not sharing me attention enough but I just can’t get enough of this precious little girl. .
So while were outside at recess I snuck over to see what three girls, about age 8, were doing so privately in corner with notebooks in hand. Silvia latched onto me, like always, and we approached the girls. As luck would have it they were practicing their reading skills and asked for my help. As I joined them on a log next to a hop-scotch whose lines had been drawn into the dirt I was instantly transformed into Adam Sandler in Big Daddy when he’s at the playground telling little kids about “YooHoo with a little rum”. I thought to myself “Just chillin with some 5 and 8 year olds at recess—all I’m missing now is a cold chocolate milk. As we sounded out words together, which is ten times easier to teach in Spanish than in English, I had an absolutely heart melting moment.
One of the 8 year olds said something to me. I thought I understood what she said but it made no sense so I repeated the sentence looking for confirmation. The 8 year olds laughed at me because I’d obviously misheard a word and the catty one of the group proceeded to say “You don’t even understand Spanish OR Guarani!” Before I could even laugh at the absurdity of saying such a thing after I had only confused one little word, Silvia put her hands on her hips and threw the laughing girls a look that only the female species is capable of giving. With conviction she said “Pero EL procura, But HE tries!”. It was so incredibly cute that my heart started spilling over like an ice cream cone in the Paraguayan sun. I was one step away from throwing Silvia in my backpack, grabbing a bus to the airport and buying a one way ticket back to The States. It was the only time anyone has ever defended me since I got here-- and it came from a 5 year old named Silvia.
Me and my cougar
I came zooming down the hill on my bike, like I do every time I’m coming home from the pueblo, and I heard an unexpected yell from my girlfriend. As I had already passed the house where she was drinking terere with her daughter, I did a quick Uie and clapped outside their gate. Enguahe Mateo. I entered saying the standard permiso and walked up to my girlfriend and gave her the customary two kisses, one on each cheek. Eguapy, And I was sitting down in the t-ray circle. I gave a firm smile to my girlfriend and told her that I would have passed them by had I not heard her voice.
Backtracking for a second here— this hot and heavy relationship between us started about six months ago, as soon as I moved into my current house in the compania. On that lovely day, my neighbor, in his 40’s, had so kindly invited me to eat lunch with them and said that a special little lady who was really excited to meet me, HIS MOTHER. We met and immediately hit it off. She was exactly the kind of old women that couldn’t get enough of my Guarani and laughed at just about everything that everyone said. Just a happy go lucky women in her mid 70’s.
Since meeting her I’ve been frequently invited for lunch when my neighbors know she is going to be there. We always have a good time joking around. She has one of those infectious laughs and the way she scrunches together the web of wrinkles on her face while giggling just kills me. In the midst of a joke one day I must have asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She thankfully accepted and the joke has been running like the wind ever since.
Back to this particular day when she hollered at me as I passed by—After un buen terere I was invited inside to eat lunch with the family. Lunch was normal, the standard meat and pasta I’ve grow so accustomed to, but it was during the clean up that thing got a little awkward. My girlfriend was behind and had asked me a question. I did a quick180 so I could answer her and in the process swung my hand around over the back of the chair. It all happened so fast are the only words I can use to describe what had just occured. You see, when I had swung my arm around while turning to face her— I had smacked the absolute crap out of her boob— and we’re talking about an absolutely enormous boob, one not being supported by a bra, and with the kind of gravity compliance technology that only women in their 70’s are equipped with. I was shell-shocked. Do I say something—and acknowledge that I’ve just smacked the ever living shit out of this women’s pecho, or just act like nothing happened. I chose option two and quickly asked if I could help with any of the dishes.
Neither of us has ever acknowledged what happened. It’s like an unspoken silence that says “We both know I’ve been to second base with you, but let’s just leave it at that”
Is god living in my vegetable garden?
I must have been 17, because I remember there was 9/11 coverage on the TV. I was sitting in my living room with my dad. We turned off the TV and started in on a conversation about god. A pretty normal phase I’d say—I wanted proof that a god existed and I wasn’t going to believe in a higher power until I had it. I remember thinking “Just flip on the TV and see for yourself if you’re looking for a reason to denounce religion. People killing in the name of god and this is the kind of madness I’m supposed to take shelter in?” I remember expressing my frustration with my dad and him being sympathetic. He said something to the tune of “I understand your confusion. It’s quite a common doubt, but I think one day when you have kids of your own you’ll understand.”
¨Having kids” I though. “What does that have to do with god?”
He responded calmly with a you’ll see and my mind started wondering.
“Wait, so you’re not going to start in on some verse about how Moses parted the red sea and we escaped from slavery, and that should be my proof?” His response had surprised me. I guess I had already prepared myself to dismiss anything my dad said, but this whole kids of your own schpeal really took me off guard. It made me think, you know childbirth is a pretty unbelievable process—almost literally unbelievable.
Up until recently I had no way of even remotely comparing the incredibleness of bringing new life into this world, until I started my vegetable garden. Of course, I realize that vegetable gardens may seem like peas in comparison to child birth, but have you ever had a vegetable garden?
I have become quite fond of my garden. I wake every morning and the first thing I do is water it. It’s probably the best part of my day. It’s super quiet, there’s a chill in the air, my neighbor is milking her cow, and all the plants look gorgeous from the morning dew. After a million failed attempts at a whole range of veggies, I’ve finally started to actually eat a little bit out of my garden—peppers, lettuce, onions, corn, beans. I know it may seem like nothing, but to me it has been amazing source of fulfillment.
Yes, I have worked on a lot of farms since I got here. I’ve planted, hoed, and harvested an assortment of fruits and vegetables—but nothing is quite like doing it all yourself. To take a tiny little seed, no bigger than a thumb tack, put it into the earth, tend to the soil, and then eat its fruit just a few months later is simply euphoric.
Te pongo un ejemplo: How amazing is it that a tiny lettuce seed, about the size of a poppy seed, could be put into the ground and two months later give you a full head of lettuce. The only thing it asks in return is that you supply it with nutrient filled soil and clean up any weeds that grow around it. Imagine that, just for a minute— A POPPY SEED. It’s absolutely tiny. Imagine stripping it off your next Panera bagel, ripping a chunk of grass out of your yard and planting that little seed in its place. Then, to think that very head of lettuce you just bought at the grocery store was produced just like that. And to top it all off, if you want to wait a little while longer before ripping out that lettuce, it will make pods on top and give you plenty of seeds to go ahead and replant that delicious vegetable.
I don’t know if you’re thinking, “Wow Matt has really started smoking a lot of pot since joining the Peace Corps” or if this is actually interesting, but to me this incredible process is beyond explanation. Obviously there is a scientific explanation—but are kidding me, the size of poppy seed? Or in my dad’s example— the size of a tiny sperm?
Trust me, I know these are anything but new realizations, but in a world where something like 9/11 can attempt to crush the spirit inside of us, sometimes all it takes is a father’s perspective, or a simple vegetable garden, to remind us of that we’re just pieces of a puzzle, a really big incredible puzzle.
(Side note: I realize the above portion may seem preachy or elementary but I spent 23 years of my life and the only fruits and vegetables I’d seen were corn growing on the side of the highway and apples when we went picking for them as a little kid. I’ve gone to the grocery store a million times and it never occurred to me the mind blowing process that fills the produce section. I will surely never be able to see it the same.)
Opa for now but it shouldn’t be too long until my next post. Cuidense!
It’s a normal day at around 4:30 and its t-ray, or terere time. I’ve just been working on the farm of my neighbor all morning harvesting beans and I’m super jolly to be quenching my thirst on top of a hill full of grazing cows and a view that overlooks a sea of green and yellow sugar cane. We’re sitting next to a newly sprouting grape vine and under a giant mango tree that has been sending mangos on suicidal face dives for months on end now. I find the mangos to be nothing short of the 8th wonder of the world but to my neighbors their abundance is so overwhelming that they’ve become apathetic toward them. But in general, nothing out the usual, just sitting there having a standard conversation about nothing; the lack of rain, the fact it was recently discovered the President of Paraguay had 2 love children while he was priest, the upcoming quinceanera birthday party on Saturday and a whole mixed bag of other goodies. From that mixed bag I with old time classic “what did you have for lunch?” The very common response of empanadas was given and I should have sufficed, but it didn’t. I followed up. “What kind of empanadas?” I asked. He finished sucking the ‘remaining drops out of the guampa and pointed to a brown bull out in the distance. “You see that bull out there? We stuffed the empanadas with his eggs.” Haha very funny I said, I know that bulls don’t lay eggs. No no he assured me—we ate his eggs. I quickly tried to picture the flashcard I’d made for egg in guarani. There’s no way bulls lay eggs is there? Could that really be what he said? I kept on asking him the question, each time a little slower and louder —as if talking into a cell phone that’s getting really bad reception “you ate the eggs of a bull?” He not only assured me that I had spoken correctly but also did this whole Italian thing whereby he brought his hand to his mouth and made a kissing sound in order to signify the deliciousness of the eggs. In the midst of my confusion I asked “So where do these eggs come from, out of its ass?” No no no he told me. Not those eggs but HIS EGGS. As he said this he made a motion with his hands in front of him as if he was weighing one object in each hand to see which was heavier—left hand or right hand. And it dawned on me, like a child who finally understands the dilemma of the birds and bees, he ate bull testicle empanadas for lunch. My stomach threw itself into a pretzel. It was like that time I was drunkenly walking around a party looking for a sobering cup up water. Shining like the sorcerer’s stone on the table, there it was, a freezing cup of water. I picked it up and as I took a gulp I realize I’d mistaken the water for H2O’s longtime archrival, cheap vodka. I’d smelt before I’d tasted it but it had already been too late. I coughed the vodka back up and threw up in my mouth a little bit. Little did I know it in those days, but accidently drinking vodka is a lot like finding out your neighbor has just eaten the balls of a bull, and loved every bite of them. When our t-ray session was over I scurried on home with a hop in my stop-- I’d never been so excited to go home and make myself a bowl of vegetarian fried rice— for the 3rd night in a row.
Talk to the hand cuz yo breath aint fresh?
The other day I was in the pueblo teaching at the “Centro Abierto”. I mentioned it earlier as a home where a nun runs a morning school for what she calls “street kids”. Most of them have horrific family lives and are very poor so La Hermana Araceli runs a center where they come eat breakfast, go to classes, and finish with lunch. All classes are taught by volunteers in the community and the meals given for free to the kids.
I have been teaching there one day a week since I arrived in site. I take my guitar and sing songs and teach them about geography. Were currently writing a ditty about the 5, not 7, continents they teach here. I’m also starting yet another world map with them next week.
About a month ago a new girl started at the Centro Abierto, a cute 5 year old named Silvia. Silvia is tiny, like most five year olds but carries herself like a Fortune 500 executive. She arrived that first day and immediately took a liking to me. We spent that whole day together. I was holding her tiny hand, spinning her like a ballerina, and throwing her up in the air. Like the beginning of most great relationships, it was right out of a movie. As the day came to a close she pulled my ear to hear mouth to tell me a secret. “My parents split up and my dad already got married to another woman. Therefore, I don’t have a dad anymore but at least I have a mom.”
Every morning after breakfast and giving thanks to god for the food that they’ve just eaten, Silvia does a b-line for me and I give her a big hug. Ever since confiding in me she’s stayed glued to my side. Sometimes I feel bad about not sharing me attention enough but I just can’t get enough of this precious little girl. .
So while were outside at recess I snuck over to see what three girls, about age 8, were doing so privately in corner with notebooks in hand. Silvia latched onto me, like always, and we approached the girls. As luck would have it they were practicing their reading skills and asked for my help. As I joined them on a log next to a hop-scotch whose lines had been drawn into the dirt I was instantly transformed into Adam Sandler in Big Daddy when he’s at the playground telling little kids about “YooHoo with a little rum”. I thought to myself “Just chillin with some 5 and 8 year olds at recess—all I’m missing now is a cold chocolate milk. As we sounded out words together, which is ten times easier to teach in Spanish than in English, I had an absolutely heart melting moment.
One of the 8 year olds said something to me. I thought I understood what she said but it made no sense so I repeated the sentence looking for confirmation. The 8 year olds laughed at me because I’d obviously misheard a word and the catty one of the group proceeded to say “You don’t even understand Spanish OR Guarani!” Before I could even laugh at the absurdity of saying such a thing after I had only confused one little word, Silvia put her hands on her hips and threw the laughing girls a look that only the female species is capable of giving. With conviction she said “Pero EL procura, But HE tries!”. It was so incredibly cute that my heart started spilling over like an ice cream cone in the Paraguayan sun. I was one step away from throwing Silvia in my backpack, grabbing a bus to the airport and buying a one way ticket back to The States. It was the only time anyone has ever defended me since I got here-- and it came from a 5 year old named Silvia.
Me and my cougar
I came zooming down the hill on my bike, like I do every time I’m coming home from the pueblo, and I heard an unexpected yell from my girlfriend. As I had already passed the house where she was drinking terere with her daughter, I did a quick Uie and clapped outside their gate. Enguahe Mateo. I entered saying the standard permiso and walked up to my girlfriend and gave her the customary two kisses, one on each cheek. Eguapy, And I was sitting down in the t-ray circle. I gave a firm smile to my girlfriend and told her that I would have passed them by had I not heard her voice.
Backtracking for a second here— this hot and heavy relationship between us started about six months ago, as soon as I moved into my current house in the compania. On that lovely day, my neighbor, in his 40’s, had so kindly invited me to eat lunch with them and said that a special little lady who was really excited to meet me, HIS MOTHER. We met and immediately hit it off. She was exactly the kind of old women that couldn’t get enough of my Guarani and laughed at just about everything that everyone said. Just a happy go lucky women in her mid 70’s.
Since meeting her I’ve been frequently invited for lunch when my neighbors know she is going to be there. We always have a good time joking around. She has one of those infectious laughs and the way she scrunches together the web of wrinkles on her face while giggling just kills me. In the midst of a joke one day I must have asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She thankfully accepted and the joke has been running like the wind ever since.
Back to this particular day when she hollered at me as I passed by—After un buen terere I was invited inside to eat lunch with the family. Lunch was normal, the standard meat and pasta I’ve grow so accustomed to, but it was during the clean up that thing got a little awkward. My girlfriend was behind and had asked me a question. I did a quick180 so I could answer her and in the process swung my hand around over the back of the chair. It all happened so fast are the only words I can use to describe what had just occured. You see, when I had swung my arm around while turning to face her— I had smacked the absolute crap out of her boob— and we’re talking about an absolutely enormous boob, one not being supported by a bra, and with the kind of gravity compliance technology that only women in their 70’s are equipped with. I was shell-shocked. Do I say something—and acknowledge that I’ve just smacked the ever living shit out of this women’s pecho, or just act like nothing happened. I chose option two and quickly asked if I could help with any of the dishes.
Neither of us has ever acknowledged what happened. It’s like an unspoken silence that says “We both know I’ve been to second base with you, but let’s just leave it at that”
Is god living in my vegetable garden?
I must have been 17, because I remember there was 9/11 coverage on the TV. I was sitting in my living room with my dad. We turned off the TV and started in on a conversation about god. A pretty normal phase I’d say—I wanted proof that a god existed and I wasn’t going to believe in a higher power until I had it. I remember thinking “Just flip on the TV and see for yourself if you’re looking for a reason to denounce religion. People killing in the name of god and this is the kind of madness I’m supposed to take shelter in?” I remember expressing my frustration with my dad and him being sympathetic. He said something to the tune of “I understand your confusion. It’s quite a common doubt, but I think one day when you have kids of your own you’ll understand.”
¨Having kids” I though. “What does that have to do with god?”
He responded calmly with a you’ll see and my mind started wondering.
“Wait, so you’re not going to start in on some verse about how Moses parted the red sea and we escaped from slavery, and that should be my proof?” His response had surprised me. I guess I had already prepared myself to dismiss anything my dad said, but this whole kids of your own schpeal really took me off guard. It made me think, you know childbirth is a pretty unbelievable process—almost literally unbelievable.
Up until recently I had no way of even remotely comparing the incredibleness of bringing new life into this world, until I started my vegetable garden. Of course, I realize that vegetable gardens may seem like peas in comparison to child birth, but have you ever had a vegetable garden?
I have become quite fond of my garden. I wake every morning and the first thing I do is water it. It’s probably the best part of my day. It’s super quiet, there’s a chill in the air, my neighbor is milking her cow, and all the plants look gorgeous from the morning dew. After a million failed attempts at a whole range of veggies, I’ve finally started to actually eat a little bit out of my garden—peppers, lettuce, onions, corn, beans. I know it may seem like nothing, but to me it has been amazing source of fulfillment.
Yes, I have worked on a lot of farms since I got here. I’ve planted, hoed, and harvested an assortment of fruits and vegetables—but nothing is quite like doing it all yourself. To take a tiny little seed, no bigger than a thumb tack, put it into the earth, tend to the soil, and then eat its fruit just a few months later is simply euphoric.
Te pongo un ejemplo: How amazing is it that a tiny lettuce seed, about the size of a poppy seed, could be put into the ground and two months later give you a full head of lettuce. The only thing it asks in return is that you supply it with nutrient filled soil and clean up any weeds that grow around it. Imagine that, just for a minute— A POPPY SEED. It’s absolutely tiny. Imagine stripping it off your next Panera bagel, ripping a chunk of grass out of your yard and planting that little seed in its place. Then, to think that very head of lettuce you just bought at the grocery store was produced just like that. And to top it all off, if you want to wait a little while longer before ripping out that lettuce, it will make pods on top and give you plenty of seeds to go ahead and replant that delicious vegetable.
I don’t know if you’re thinking, “Wow Matt has really started smoking a lot of pot since joining the Peace Corps” or if this is actually interesting, but to me this incredible process is beyond explanation. Obviously there is a scientific explanation—but are kidding me, the size of poppy seed? Or in my dad’s example— the size of a tiny sperm?
Trust me, I know these are anything but new realizations, but in a world where something like 9/11 can attempt to crush the spirit inside of us, sometimes all it takes is a father’s perspective, or a simple vegetable garden, to remind us of that we’re just pieces of a puzzle, a really big incredible puzzle.
(Side note: I realize the above portion may seem preachy or elementary but I spent 23 years of my life and the only fruits and vegetables I’d seen were corn growing on the side of the highway and apples when we went picking for them as a little kid. I’ve gone to the grocery store a million times and it never occurred to me the mind blowing process that fills the produce section. I will surely never be able to see it the same.)
Opa for now but it shouldn’t be too long until my next post. Cuidense!
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The Legend of Pinkey and Lovey
Let’s jump right into it…
Dog, man’s best friend, or should I say guardian
Before getting into one of the more impressive dog stories I have ever encountered I must explain a little bit about the differences between dogs here and back in The States.
As we all know, back in The States dogs have the reputation of being our friends, but here in Paraguay they are used to safeguard homes and prevent animals from entering your yard. (Cows, bulls, chickens, pigs and other animals can be commonly found roaming around or lost. That’s why every home has a 4ft high fence made of a few rows of barbed wire) With that said, dogs can still be incredibly affectionate to their owners but that is almost never seen because owners show no affection toward the dogs. Therefore, dogs are most commonly paid attention to when anything foreign approaches a house. When something does, the dogs shoot out from under the barbed-wire fence and start barking their heads off at the foreign object. That foreign object could consist of any animal but could also be a car or person. Regardless of the type of dog, it is absolutely guaranteed to be utterly ferocious in the defense of its property.
Ok, moving closer to the story here. I’m sure that you remember that before moving to my own house I was living in the pueblo* with the sweetest women and her four kids. (She’s still my best Paraguayan friend) During my two months I guess you could say that I became very fond of their two dogs, Lovey and Pinkey. When I first moved in I began to show them some “normal American dog affection” and throughout my duration they would get super excited to see me every morning. Upon opening my door they run up to me and in the midst of their exuberation it looked almost as if they were dancing as crazily as that super sweaty dude at a concert who bounces around like a pinball trying to start a mosh-pit but eventually realizes he’s at a rock show and not a Maralyn Monson concert. Ever since I moved out they still definitely recognize me but it’s never been the same…until I spent a ton of time at their house the last few weeks because I was working on a near-by project.
*(A pueblo being little town centers with shops and a market)
The day was like any other. I finished my business in the pueblo and went over to Gloria’s house to get my bike and start on my four mile bike ride home. As I made my way into the distance I noticed that Pinkey and Lovey were still following me, a very common occurrence had I been on foot. But I most certainly wasn’t on foot. In fact the first two miles of my ride are beside a road where cars, trucks and motorcycles pass quite frequently. As I rode my bike alongside the road, the dogs had no regard for the automobiles in the street and were running on top of the pavement in my defense. In addition to protecting me from automobiles they were simultaneously fighting off dog after dog. You see, every house I pass on the road has a dog and when they see these foreign dogs approaching their turf they shoot out as if they were a greyhound at the dog track in the defense of their house. Pinkey and Lovey were continually trying to keep pace with me while barking with all their might at oncoming dogs. I was sporadically trying to burn out in attempts to lose them but they stayed right with me as if I was Obama on his way to give his inauguration speech. We got a good mile in and I stopped to call Gloria. She told me to just keep on going and eventually they’d turn around. I tried everything I could to get them to head home but it was about as useless as trying to buy an individual lawn chair. A mile later as I approached my dirt road they were still with me every step of the way. I called Gloria again and she told me she’d send one of her kids to come get the dogs once her kids got home…which wasn’t soon enough.
I entered the dirt road that would take me the next few miles and was witness to one of the more amazing 15 minutes I have ever seen. As I passed the 60 or so house that lay ahead of me, EVERY SINGLE HOUSE seemed to have a dog fly out of its yard and bark its ever living guts out at Pinkey and Lovey. Every 50 meters a new barking match, and super high intensity. We’re talking about only the kind of intensity that can been seen at a little league baseball game when the umpire makes a tough call and two opposing parents start in on a yelling match. The one outraged parents throw their lawn chair to the ground and start yelling. Seconds later an opposing parent throws out a “O why don’t you sit down?!”. The outraged parent then maturely replies with a “why don’t you make me?”. As they realize they’re the only two lunatics this worked up by a little league baseball game they begin to justify their actions by walking toward each other and yelling. As they get closer, sleeves are being rolled up and an embarrassing comb-over is exposed as an Ellisville Sharks baseball cap is thrown to the ground by a gust of wind and a bulging vain. Both faces light up bright red and a call from a disgusted wife says something like “now this really mature”. Their faces are almost smashed together as they have now entered “the zone of detectable bad breath and unwanted nose hair”. By now, spit it flying out so liberally from both of their mouths that if you could somehow capture it all if would constitute a productive step in combating the effects of global warming. That’s how intense each of these confrontations is.
And for me, I was like that parent in the top row of the bleachers just looking down on it all. This is because I was up on my bike going down a hill and I could see every situation developing as we continued to make our way to my house. With every finished barking match, they would move on but they had also just notified the upcoming dogs that something was a comin’. It made me feel like I was in the press box watching a football game where one team has just done a reverse, trying to run from one side of the field to the other. Those players close to the guy with the ball are darting over to try and make the tackle but the defensive backs who are far from the ball are sloooowy but surely make their way to other side of the field, or in this case, the road. Still on my bike, I was watching as each barking match developed, fall behind me, and catch back up with me without fail. Every new house we reached I was biting my lip that much harder because I was sure, as my mom would say, “somebody is going to get hurt”. The obviously ironic part of the ride is that they were acting as MY body guard yet I was the one scared out of my mind for them.
As we made our way into my yard 15 minutes later my heart began to slow and I took a glance back to see two limping dogs still running after me. By now it was slightly raining and I felt pretty sure that Gloria’s kids were not going to be coming out that night. I walked up to my little gate (see previous blog hammock picture), and closed it behind me as to leave the dogs staring up adoringly at me. I turning around looking out and once again felt like Obama, except now I had arrived on the stage, with my protective shield and two bodyguards by my side. I licked my lips, raised one finger in the air, and started in on a speech about how providing unsolicited security on foreign land is exactly the kind of action that leads to more violence than if no security was provided for in the first place.
I went inside and began to boil some pasta for the dogs and as I did they were STILL as ferocious as ever, except now they were defending my yard against the cows and bulls that are constantly around my house. These animals are ten times the size of these dogs and yet at the first sign of making a move toward my barbed wire fence, which they stand no chance of entering, Pinkey and Lovey were constantly darting out and barking at these giants until I woke up 10 house later to find a super rainy day and two dogs that had made their way home in the middle of the night.
It’s 1pm on a Friday afternoon
and I have left the house only to get milk and eggs from my neighbor. My laziness can be attributed to the fact that it’s been raining all day-- and when you life in a world of dirt roads there’s nowhere to go in ankle deep mud. I would say is about the equivalent of a sleet storm in the states, completely debilitating.
Luckily, the senora with the eggs and milk was making beans and since she and all my other neighbors think BEANS is my favorite food I was offered a plate to bring back to my house. You may be asking “How could beans be anybody’s favorite food?” Well I’ll tell you. The honest truth is that I really don’t like beans that much BUT I’ve made it very clear to anybody that asks me what I like to eat, I LOVE BEANS. The reason for this goes back to what I’ve mentioned about a lot of fried food and fatty meat being consumed by my neighbors and to put it nicely, I simply prefer the beans. It’s also really comical to my neighbors that I love beans because beans are kind of a “poor man’s” food. According to the stereotype, they are what you eat when you don’t have money for meat. There is a popular saying in Guarani “hendy kavaju resa”. It means that the eyes of your horse are lit up because he’s starving. It’s used to mean “times are tough right now”.
The reason for even writing right now is because I’m waiting for the rain to stop so I can head into my pueblo and finish painting a huge world map with a bunch of kids on the wall of my cooperative. But, before getting into that project I’ve got to backtrack a bit and explain why I’m doing the map in the first place.
Like I mentioned in the last blog, it’s hard for us to get integrated due to language and cultural constraints. Therefore, a common project that volunteers have done in the first part of their service is paint a world map in a visible place. It is a very educational, low cost, highly interactive project-- so for someone like me who can easily lose themselves staring at a map, I knew this was definitely a project with my name all over it.
My first of two recent maps was done when I went to my buddy Eric’s site a few weeks back. He had decided that he was going to paint a big map right on the front of his house and so I went out to help him. Can you imagine how outrageous painting a map on your house would be if this were The States...absolutely absurd. Anyway, my buddy lives about 10 miles from the nearest pueblo. The only way for him to get out to his site from the pueblo is by taking a 4:30 AM bus or in this case at Noon on Sundays.
I arrived on a Sunday morning so he met me in the pueblo. We went and bought a ton of paint supplies and also a ton of groceries for his new house. As we began to schlep several heavily loaded bags to the bus stop it started to rain. We both knew what this meant…the bus may not come because when it rains the bus doesn’t drive on the muddy road. We started asking around town if the bus was going to come and it seemed every person we asked said yes but gave us a different departure time. When it was all said and done we had waited 6 hours for a bus that never came. Por suerte, there is another volunteer that lives in this pueblo and we were able to go crash at his house. We popped in a DVD on his laptop and were instantly transformed to another world—a world where instead of busses being cancelled because of rain, you watch DVD’s on the bus.
So we wake up at 4am to once again schlep all the paint and groceries to the bus stop (a mile or so) and begin waiting. This time we only waited an hour and a half to give up on the bus and went back to our buddy’s house to get some more sleep. We knew another bus wasn’t coming later that day so we started the trek on foot so we could hitchhike out to his house. After a bumpy ride in the bed of a late ‘80s model F150 we got to his house and began working on the map.
Drawing a big map is actually a lot easier than it sounds because we had a book with great instructions that makes it pretty easy. Almost 36 hours later the map was done and we had a crowd of about 10 of Eric’s neighbors watching us apply the finishing touches.
This crowd I just mentioned is the exact reason for doing the map in the first place. To spark interest in not only Geography but the million other questions that come to mind when looking at a world map. In the case of these very rural Paraguayans, the chance to look a map is actually quite a rare thing. I’d say that in the course of our 36 hours of map making about one third of our mostly adult onlookers could not find Paraguay on the map and another third couldn’t indentify Paraguay’s neighbors. Most shockingly, there was also a fair percentage that weren’t exactly sure what was before their eyes—meaning there was no little or no connection between the painted colors on a wall and a world map. Many knew it was a map but didn’t know of what. They were literally that unfamiliar with a world map. I hope it goes without say that I’m not trying to put down Paraguayans but highlight the incredibly learning opportunity a map can present. They are incredibly smart and have incredibly large skills sets. Access to education is clearly where this unfamiliarity comes from.
As we sat in front of the map taking pulls of boxed wine, we were almost brought to tears seeing our group of onlookers still standing around discussing the map hours after coming up to see what we were doing. I was witness to a million amazing questions about religion, culture, attractiveness of the opposite sex in a particular country, animals, history and many other things-- all because the map was there to spark enormous curiosity in Eric’s neighbors. To say the least, we felt it was a huge a success—even if that one night is the only learning experience that comes out of the map.
So of course, the first thing I did when I got to my site was ask the manager of the cooperative if I could paint a huge map on the coop wall and draw lines from Paraguay to all the different countries that the coop is exporting it’s sugar. He gave me the OK and I got to work.
My idea, a little different from Eric’s was to first draw the map in pencil and then go to the radio and invite all the kids in town to come and paint the countries. That way, while they painted I could share what knowledge I have of the map and quiz them on what country/continent they were painting. As I write this I can say my map is about 95% done. It’s missing the exportation lines and the names of the countries but all the hard work was done.
When I refer to hard work I guess you could say that I’m referring to drawing the map, directing the kids, organizing all the materials, fixing a million coloring mistakes and setting up and taking down the stage every day for two weeks. We needed the stage because the map is huge and we needed something for the kids to climb on to reach the map. To be honest, I only mention the stage to share what was running through my head every time a kid climbed up or down the ladder to get on or off the stage.
Well first I was thinking, “ojala no se caiga”/“please god don’t fall”. But then after that I was repetitively thinking that if we were in the The States I would have had to jump through a million hoops to get all necessary permission and insurance to be able to let a group of sometimes seven or eight kids stand together on a four foot high stage that is literally right on a road where cars pass. I was just amazed at what life is like without permission slips or the thought of getting sued if someone were to get hurt. It’s literally not even on their register. I am oftentimes incredibly perplexed by a lifestyle that doesn’t involve so many rules —which is a lifestyle that can only be properly brought to life on a bus ride in the country’s capital, Asuncion.
Taking the Bus in Asuncion
You may remember me talking about crazy “bus life” in a previous blog. That part was about my bus rides during training when I was going to and from the training facility and my site. As crazy as those rides were, some of the rides in the capital of more than a million inhabitants are even crazier, but in their own way. The following paragraph will take you through an actual bus ride that I had between the Peace Corps office and a shopping mall about two miles down the street.
So I scoot out of the PC office and make my way to the main road, a four lane busy street with all sorts of stores, restaurants, and supermarkets on both sides. I look back and see that my bus is coming so I throw my arm up to flag it down. It doesn’t matter that I happen to be right in front of an intersection or that there is an actual bus stop 30 meters ahead of me, flag the bus down wherever you so please and it will stop to pick you up. So I pull my money out and hand it to the driver. Before even looking at the money he starts driving again. He shoots a glance at the money and hands me my receipt. We’re off and driving on a busy four lane street and meanwhile he throws my money in his little drawer and begins to make change…still while driving. This skill has been mastered through an ancient Paraguayan art which involves the counting/sifting of money while driving a bus full of passengers on a busy road. I finally get to my seat and look out the window. I see a pick-up truck with, wait…count em, 8 POLICEMEN sitting around the outer edges of the bed of a pick-up truck. No, that’s no misprint…I did write POLICEMEN. The actual police in the most progressive city in Paraguay stuff themselves 8 deep into the cab of a pick-up truck while on a busy road and ride around looking for beautiful women. (That’s a personal opinion) It actually reminds me a lot of my high school days, expect in the case of the policemen they actually end up talking to the beautiful women. Anyway, my eyes shoot to the front of the bus and a man wearing what I call “an actor’s book bag” puts his bag down and wipes the sweat off his brow. (An actor’s book bag is one of those bags that is kind of like a male purse and is worn with the strap cutting the chest in half. It’s almost like a laptop bag but only more stylish) So the actor’s book bag man starts in with his routine… “disculpa la molestia senores y senoras…” He then continues for the next minute explaining the counterfeit CDs he’s got in his bag. He describes how every CD is a different genre containing hits from the previous year and a hodgepodge of 80’s classics—Paraguay’s favorite decade of American music. He finishes up and tells us the price, 5 Guaranis/$1 for each CD which contain more than 100 songs each. Then he waits for that crucial second for everyone to look away and he gets right back at it “But, but , but!, today I have the special privilege of offering you three CDs for only 10 Guaranis or if you buy four CDs it will only cost you15 Guaranis PLUS, I’ll throw in a special CD containing all sorts of Regaeton you’ve never heard--for free!” It’s all very entertaining and these guys who sell the CD’s are very good at what they do. I’d almost put them on par with the people who run those late night infomercials about slicers and dicers. I can’t tell you how many times I made a move toward the phone after seeing a dozen different fruits and vegetables get diced or blended up in the matter of seconds. Late night infomercials never fail to make life seem easy. But getting back to the bus yet staying with fruits and vegetables—as the man with actor’s bag makes his way towards the exit in back, a group of fruit venders spay their respective fruits with water as if it were a produce section on wheels. The only difference is that those nice little sprinklers hanging from glistening mirrors have been replaced by dirty 12 oz spray bottles. In one hand their basket of fruit and with the other they shake the hand of the bus driver. That hand shake symbolizes: “I’m not here to ride your bus, just here to take advantage of the market you’ve so kindly gathered up for me”. As they file in like a pack of ants they try to make eye contact with every person on the bus in an attempt to sell anything from apples and watermelon to tomatoes and strawberries. Seconds later the line has made its way to the back of the bus; they all hop off and begin to flag down the next approaching bus. Meanwhile, I haven’t yet made it to my stop but the guy next to me has. He gets up and pulls the cord. The driver would gladly let him off here but because he has to make a left turn he’s moved to the center lane. We’ve come to a stop in a now six lane intersection and the guy who just pulled the chord simple walks straight off the bus through a door that was never even closed. That’s right. The front and back doors of busses quite often stay open all the time. That means not only can people potentially hop off whenever they want, like this guy, but it also means that when the bus is crowded (quite often) that people are literally hanging on for dear life as they stand in aisles and doorframes as the bus is moving . I eventually get off and walk into a mall full of gelled hair, food courts, McDonalds and a movie theater. For me, the last 15 minutes of my life has just defined “being in a developing country”.
Looking for a good most embarrassing story
One of the most commonly used ice-breakers is going around telling new people your most embarrassing story. In my case, I feel like I can never think of a good one and always get frustrated because I know I must have some good ones out there. Anyway, this next little story is about how I think I may have found a keeper…that’s if I get caught.
Let me begin by saying that many situations like the previous bus story don’t even begin to faze me anymore; it’s just how things are now. But sometimes I catch myself laughing at myself, and that usually means its fit for a good blog story. This particular story has to do with that little spray bottle that the fruit venders use to spray their fruit. Although I haven’t become a fruit salesman quite yet, I am consistently using one of those spray bottles. I use it on really hot nights to douse my bed and body before going to sleep. I do this to help me stay cool as I try to fall asleep. The part of the story that still makes me laugh is when I spray myself down with the water bottle. I stand there under my fan wearing nothing but my boxers and my glasses I begin to pulverize my neck, arms, chest, stomach and legs with water-- and for those few seconds I feel like a model preparing for a photo shoot. But in reality I can’t help but always think that if my friends back home saw what I was doing right now they’d probably be crapping their pants laughing. And the kicker is, because the next thing I do is read, I’m usually too lazy to take off my glasses and while spraying myself I end up waving my head around in all sorts of directions to prevent the water from blowing up into my glasses. It makes me think of when I was in camp in the 7th grade and one of my friends caught another friend examining his biceps in the mirror. We joked about it forever and I remember thinking how embarrassing that was for my friend who got caught. I have no doubt that if I were caught pulverizing myself with that spray bottle that I would absolutely have my new most embarrassing story.
That’s it for today. Any questions…honestly, do you all have any questions?
I have to say that I recently read an absolutely fascinating book called “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins. I highly recommend it. Ya esta.
Hasta luego.
Dog, man’s best friend, or should I say guardian
Before getting into one of the more impressive dog stories I have ever encountered I must explain a little bit about the differences between dogs here and back in The States.
As we all know, back in The States dogs have the reputation of being our friends, but here in Paraguay they are used to safeguard homes and prevent animals from entering your yard. (Cows, bulls, chickens, pigs and other animals can be commonly found roaming around or lost. That’s why every home has a 4ft high fence made of a few rows of barbed wire) With that said, dogs can still be incredibly affectionate to their owners but that is almost never seen because owners show no affection toward the dogs. Therefore, dogs are most commonly paid attention to when anything foreign approaches a house. When something does, the dogs shoot out from under the barbed-wire fence and start barking their heads off at the foreign object. That foreign object could consist of any animal but could also be a car or person. Regardless of the type of dog, it is absolutely guaranteed to be utterly ferocious in the defense of its property.
Ok, moving closer to the story here. I’m sure that you remember that before moving to my own house I was living in the pueblo* with the sweetest women and her four kids. (She’s still my best Paraguayan friend) During my two months I guess you could say that I became very fond of their two dogs, Lovey and Pinkey. When I first moved in I began to show them some “normal American dog affection” and throughout my duration they would get super excited to see me every morning. Upon opening my door they run up to me and in the midst of their exuberation it looked almost as if they were dancing as crazily as that super sweaty dude at a concert who bounces around like a pinball trying to start a mosh-pit but eventually realizes he’s at a rock show and not a Maralyn Monson concert. Ever since I moved out they still definitely recognize me but it’s never been the same…until I spent a ton of time at their house the last few weeks because I was working on a near-by project.
*(A pueblo being little town centers with shops and a market)
The day was like any other. I finished my business in the pueblo and went over to Gloria’s house to get my bike and start on my four mile bike ride home. As I made my way into the distance I noticed that Pinkey and Lovey were still following me, a very common occurrence had I been on foot. But I most certainly wasn’t on foot. In fact the first two miles of my ride are beside a road where cars, trucks and motorcycles pass quite frequently. As I rode my bike alongside the road, the dogs had no regard for the automobiles in the street and were running on top of the pavement in my defense. In addition to protecting me from automobiles they were simultaneously fighting off dog after dog. You see, every house I pass on the road has a dog and when they see these foreign dogs approaching their turf they shoot out as if they were a greyhound at the dog track in the defense of their house. Pinkey and Lovey were continually trying to keep pace with me while barking with all their might at oncoming dogs. I was sporadically trying to burn out in attempts to lose them but they stayed right with me as if I was Obama on his way to give his inauguration speech. We got a good mile in and I stopped to call Gloria. She told me to just keep on going and eventually they’d turn around. I tried everything I could to get them to head home but it was about as useless as trying to buy an individual lawn chair. A mile later as I approached my dirt road they were still with me every step of the way. I called Gloria again and she told me she’d send one of her kids to come get the dogs once her kids got home…which wasn’t soon enough.
I entered the dirt road that would take me the next few miles and was witness to one of the more amazing 15 minutes I have ever seen. As I passed the 60 or so house that lay ahead of me, EVERY SINGLE HOUSE seemed to have a dog fly out of its yard and bark its ever living guts out at Pinkey and Lovey. Every 50 meters a new barking match, and super high intensity. We’re talking about only the kind of intensity that can been seen at a little league baseball game when the umpire makes a tough call and two opposing parents start in on a yelling match. The one outraged parents throw their lawn chair to the ground and start yelling. Seconds later an opposing parent throws out a “O why don’t you sit down?!”. The outraged parent then maturely replies with a “why don’t you make me?”. As they realize they’re the only two lunatics this worked up by a little league baseball game they begin to justify their actions by walking toward each other and yelling. As they get closer, sleeves are being rolled up and an embarrassing comb-over is exposed as an Ellisville Sharks baseball cap is thrown to the ground by a gust of wind and a bulging vain. Both faces light up bright red and a call from a disgusted wife says something like “now this really mature”. Their faces are almost smashed together as they have now entered “the zone of detectable bad breath and unwanted nose hair”. By now, spit it flying out so liberally from both of their mouths that if you could somehow capture it all if would constitute a productive step in combating the effects of global warming. That’s how intense each of these confrontations is.
And for me, I was like that parent in the top row of the bleachers just looking down on it all. This is because I was up on my bike going down a hill and I could see every situation developing as we continued to make our way to my house. With every finished barking match, they would move on but they had also just notified the upcoming dogs that something was a comin’. It made me feel like I was in the press box watching a football game where one team has just done a reverse, trying to run from one side of the field to the other. Those players close to the guy with the ball are darting over to try and make the tackle but the defensive backs who are far from the ball are sloooowy but surely make their way to other side of the field, or in this case, the road. Still on my bike, I was watching as each barking match developed, fall behind me, and catch back up with me without fail. Every new house we reached I was biting my lip that much harder because I was sure, as my mom would say, “somebody is going to get hurt”. The obviously ironic part of the ride is that they were acting as MY body guard yet I was the one scared out of my mind for them.
As we made our way into my yard 15 minutes later my heart began to slow and I took a glance back to see two limping dogs still running after me. By now it was slightly raining and I felt pretty sure that Gloria’s kids were not going to be coming out that night. I walked up to my little gate (see previous blog hammock picture), and closed it behind me as to leave the dogs staring up adoringly at me. I turning around looking out and once again felt like Obama, except now I had arrived on the stage, with my protective shield and two bodyguards by my side. I licked my lips, raised one finger in the air, and started in on a speech about how providing unsolicited security on foreign land is exactly the kind of action that leads to more violence than if no security was provided for in the first place.
I went inside and began to boil some pasta for the dogs and as I did they were STILL as ferocious as ever, except now they were defending my yard against the cows and bulls that are constantly around my house. These animals are ten times the size of these dogs and yet at the first sign of making a move toward my barbed wire fence, which they stand no chance of entering, Pinkey and Lovey were constantly darting out and barking at these giants until I woke up 10 house later to find a super rainy day and two dogs that had made their way home in the middle of the night.
It’s 1pm on a Friday afternoon
and I have left the house only to get milk and eggs from my neighbor. My laziness can be attributed to the fact that it’s been raining all day-- and when you life in a world of dirt roads there’s nowhere to go in ankle deep mud. I would say is about the equivalent of a sleet storm in the states, completely debilitating.
Luckily, the senora with the eggs and milk was making beans and since she and all my other neighbors think BEANS is my favorite food I was offered a plate to bring back to my house. You may be asking “How could beans be anybody’s favorite food?” Well I’ll tell you. The honest truth is that I really don’t like beans that much BUT I’ve made it very clear to anybody that asks me what I like to eat, I LOVE BEANS. The reason for this goes back to what I’ve mentioned about a lot of fried food and fatty meat being consumed by my neighbors and to put it nicely, I simply prefer the beans. It’s also really comical to my neighbors that I love beans because beans are kind of a “poor man’s” food. According to the stereotype, they are what you eat when you don’t have money for meat. There is a popular saying in Guarani “hendy kavaju resa”. It means that the eyes of your horse are lit up because he’s starving. It’s used to mean “times are tough right now”.
The reason for even writing right now is because I’m waiting for the rain to stop so I can head into my pueblo and finish painting a huge world map with a bunch of kids on the wall of my cooperative. But, before getting into that project I’ve got to backtrack a bit and explain why I’m doing the map in the first place.
Like I mentioned in the last blog, it’s hard for us to get integrated due to language and cultural constraints. Therefore, a common project that volunteers have done in the first part of their service is paint a world map in a visible place. It is a very educational, low cost, highly interactive project-- so for someone like me who can easily lose themselves staring at a map, I knew this was definitely a project with my name all over it.
My first of two recent maps was done when I went to my buddy Eric’s site a few weeks back. He had decided that he was going to paint a big map right on the front of his house and so I went out to help him. Can you imagine how outrageous painting a map on your house would be if this were The States...absolutely absurd. Anyway, my buddy lives about 10 miles from the nearest pueblo. The only way for him to get out to his site from the pueblo is by taking a 4:30 AM bus or in this case at Noon on Sundays.
I arrived on a Sunday morning so he met me in the pueblo. We went and bought a ton of paint supplies and also a ton of groceries for his new house. As we began to schlep several heavily loaded bags to the bus stop it started to rain. We both knew what this meant…the bus may not come because when it rains the bus doesn’t drive on the muddy road. We started asking around town if the bus was going to come and it seemed every person we asked said yes but gave us a different departure time. When it was all said and done we had waited 6 hours for a bus that never came. Por suerte, there is another volunteer that lives in this pueblo and we were able to go crash at his house. We popped in a DVD on his laptop and were instantly transformed to another world—a world where instead of busses being cancelled because of rain, you watch DVD’s on the bus.
So we wake up at 4am to once again schlep all the paint and groceries to the bus stop (a mile or so) and begin waiting. This time we only waited an hour and a half to give up on the bus and went back to our buddy’s house to get some more sleep. We knew another bus wasn’t coming later that day so we started the trek on foot so we could hitchhike out to his house. After a bumpy ride in the bed of a late ‘80s model F150 we got to his house and began working on the map.
Drawing a big map is actually a lot easier than it sounds because we had a book with great instructions that makes it pretty easy. Almost 36 hours later the map was done and we had a crowd of about 10 of Eric’s neighbors watching us apply the finishing touches.
This crowd I just mentioned is the exact reason for doing the map in the first place. To spark interest in not only Geography but the million other questions that come to mind when looking at a world map. In the case of these very rural Paraguayans, the chance to look a map is actually quite a rare thing. I’d say that in the course of our 36 hours of map making about one third of our mostly adult onlookers could not find Paraguay on the map and another third couldn’t indentify Paraguay’s neighbors. Most shockingly, there was also a fair percentage that weren’t exactly sure what was before their eyes—meaning there was no little or no connection between the painted colors on a wall and a world map. Many knew it was a map but didn’t know of what. They were literally that unfamiliar with a world map. I hope it goes without say that I’m not trying to put down Paraguayans but highlight the incredibly learning opportunity a map can present. They are incredibly smart and have incredibly large skills sets. Access to education is clearly where this unfamiliarity comes from.
As we sat in front of the map taking pulls of boxed wine, we were almost brought to tears seeing our group of onlookers still standing around discussing the map hours after coming up to see what we were doing. I was witness to a million amazing questions about religion, culture, attractiveness of the opposite sex in a particular country, animals, history and many other things-- all because the map was there to spark enormous curiosity in Eric’s neighbors. To say the least, we felt it was a huge a success—even if that one night is the only learning experience that comes out of the map.
So of course, the first thing I did when I got to my site was ask the manager of the cooperative if I could paint a huge map on the coop wall and draw lines from Paraguay to all the different countries that the coop is exporting it’s sugar. He gave me the OK and I got to work.
My idea, a little different from Eric’s was to first draw the map in pencil and then go to the radio and invite all the kids in town to come and paint the countries. That way, while they painted I could share what knowledge I have of the map and quiz them on what country/continent they were painting. As I write this I can say my map is about 95% done. It’s missing the exportation lines and the names of the countries but all the hard work was done.
When I refer to hard work I guess you could say that I’m referring to drawing the map, directing the kids, organizing all the materials, fixing a million coloring mistakes and setting up and taking down the stage every day for two weeks. We needed the stage because the map is huge and we needed something for the kids to climb on to reach the map. To be honest, I only mention the stage to share what was running through my head every time a kid climbed up or down the ladder to get on or off the stage.
Well first I was thinking, “ojala no se caiga”/“please god don’t fall”. But then after that I was repetitively thinking that if we were in the The States I would have had to jump through a million hoops to get all necessary permission and insurance to be able to let a group of sometimes seven or eight kids stand together on a four foot high stage that is literally right on a road where cars pass. I was just amazed at what life is like without permission slips or the thought of getting sued if someone were to get hurt. It’s literally not even on their register. I am oftentimes incredibly perplexed by a lifestyle that doesn’t involve so many rules —which is a lifestyle that can only be properly brought to life on a bus ride in the country’s capital, Asuncion.
Taking the Bus in Asuncion
You may remember me talking about crazy “bus life” in a previous blog. That part was about my bus rides during training when I was going to and from the training facility and my site. As crazy as those rides were, some of the rides in the capital of more than a million inhabitants are even crazier, but in their own way. The following paragraph will take you through an actual bus ride that I had between the Peace Corps office and a shopping mall about two miles down the street.
So I scoot out of the PC office and make my way to the main road, a four lane busy street with all sorts of stores, restaurants, and supermarkets on both sides. I look back and see that my bus is coming so I throw my arm up to flag it down. It doesn’t matter that I happen to be right in front of an intersection or that there is an actual bus stop 30 meters ahead of me, flag the bus down wherever you so please and it will stop to pick you up. So I pull my money out and hand it to the driver. Before even looking at the money he starts driving again. He shoots a glance at the money and hands me my receipt. We’re off and driving on a busy four lane street and meanwhile he throws my money in his little drawer and begins to make change…still while driving. This skill has been mastered through an ancient Paraguayan art which involves the counting/sifting of money while driving a bus full of passengers on a busy road. I finally get to my seat and look out the window. I see a pick-up truck with, wait…count em, 8 POLICEMEN sitting around the outer edges of the bed of a pick-up truck. No, that’s no misprint…I did write POLICEMEN. The actual police in the most progressive city in Paraguay stuff themselves 8 deep into the cab of a pick-up truck while on a busy road and ride around looking for beautiful women. (That’s a personal opinion) It actually reminds me a lot of my high school days, expect in the case of the policemen they actually end up talking to the beautiful women. Anyway, my eyes shoot to the front of the bus and a man wearing what I call “an actor’s book bag” puts his bag down and wipes the sweat off his brow. (An actor’s book bag is one of those bags that is kind of like a male purse and is worn with the strap cutting the chest in half. It’s almost like a laptop bag but only more stylish) So the actor’s book bag man starts in with his routine… “disculpa la molestia senores y senoras…” He then continues for the next minute explaining the counterfeit CDs he’s got in his bag. He describes how every CD is a different genre containing hits from the previous year and a hodgepodge of 80’s classics—Paraguay’s favorite decade of American music. He finishes up and tells us the price, 5 Guaranis/$1 for each CD which contain more than 100 songs each. Then he waits for that crucial second for everyone to look away and he gets right back at it “But, but , but!, today I have the special privilege of offering you three CDs for only 10 Guaranis or if you buy four CDs it will only cost you15 Guaranis PLUS, I’ll throw in a special CD containing all sorts of Regaeton you’ve never heard--for free!” It’s all very entertaining and these guys who sell the CD’s are very good at what they do. I’d almost put them on par with the people who run those late night infomercials about slicers and dicers. I can’t tell you how many times I made a move toward the phone after seeing a dozen different fruits and vegetables get diced or blended up in the matter of seconds. Late night infomercials never fail to make life seem easy. But getting back to the bus yet staying with fruits and vegetables—as the man with actor’s bag makes his way towards the exit in back, a group of fruit venders spay their respective fruits with water as if it were a produce section on wheels. The only difference is that those nice little sprinklers hanging from glistening mirrors have been replaced by dirty 12 oz spray bottles. In one hand their basket of fruit and with the other they shake the hand of the bus driver. That hand shake symbolizes: “I’m not here to ride your bus, just here to take advantage of the market you’ve so kindly gathered up for me”. As they file in like a pack of ants they try to make eye contact with every person on the bus in an attempt to sell anything from apples and watermelon to tomatoes and strawberries. Seconds later the line has made its way to the back of the bus; they all hop off and begin to flag down the next approaching bus. Meanwhile, I haven’t yet made it to my stop but the guy next to me has. He gets up and pulls the cord. The driver would gladly let him off here but because he has to make a left turn he’s moved to the center lane. We’ve come to a stop in a now six lane intersection and the guy who just pulled the chord simple walks straight off the bus through a door that was never even closed. That’s right. The front and back doors of busses quite often stay open all the time. That means not only can people potentially hop off whenever they want, like this guy, but it also means that when the bus is crowded (quite often) that people are literally hanging on for dear life as they stand in aisles and doorframes as the bus is moving . I eventually get off and walk into a mall full of gelled hair, food courts, McDonalds and a movie theater. For me, the last 15 minutes of my life has just defined “being in a developing country”.
Looking for a good most embarrassing story
One of the most commonly used ice-breakers is going around telling new people your most embarrassing story. In my case, I feel like I can never think of a good one and always get frustrated because I know I must have some good ones out there. Anyway, this next little story is about how I think I may have found a keeper…that’s if I get caught.
Let me begin by saying that many situations like the previous bus story don’t even begin to faze me anymore; it’s just how things are now. But sometimes I catch myself laughing at myself, and that usually means its fit for a good blog story. This particular story has to do with that little spray bottle that the fruit venders use to spray their fruit. Although I haven’t become a fruit salesman quite yet, I am consistently using one of those spray bottles. I use it on really hot nights to douse my bed and body before going to sleep. I do this to help me stay cool as I try to fall asleep. The part of the story that still makes me laugh is when I spray myself down with the water bottle. I stand there under my fan wearing nothing but my boxers and my glasses I begin to pulverize my neck, arms, chest, stomach and legs with water-- and for those few seconds I feel like a model preparing for a photo shoot. But in reality I can’t help but always think that if my friends back home saw what I was doing right now they’d probably be crapping their pants laughing. And the kicker is, because the next thing I do is read, I’m usually too lazy to take off my glasses and while spraying myself I end up waving my head around in all sorts of directions to prevent the water from blowing up into my glasses. It makes me think of when I was in camp in the 7th grade and one of my friends caught another friend examining his biceps in the mirror. We joked about it forever and I remember thinking how embarrassing that was for my friend who got caught. I have no doubt that if I were caught pulverizing myself with that spray bottle that I would absolutely have my new most embarrassing story.
That’s it for today. Any questions…honestly, do you all have any questions?
I have to say that I recently read an absolutely fascinating book called “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins. I highly recommend it. Ya esta.
Hasta luego.
Monday, February 23, 2009
pics
Pic from forever ago. Eric and Paulette
Map in Eric´s site
My map
Paraguayan chair
Planting green pepper
first time I cooked...¨like this¨
Thursday, January 15, 2009
I could really use us a turkey sandwich on rye with swiss and cole slaw
So as I begin this next blog entry and look over the things I want to talk about I can’t help but think to myself how once again I’ll hardly be talking what I actually do as a Peace Corps volunteers. I mean, we’re supposed to be out here saving the world right? Well not really. Luckily from things I’d read before arriving and from people I’ve met down here I knew that getting something really significant accomplished was like trying to avoid the toilet after a bowl Paraguayan bean salad—possible but not done unless you squeeze your butt cheeks a little bit.
We come in as complete strangers who don’t speak their language. On top of that we have a sign on our back that says “rich American here to teach English”. A fantastic example I was given once was—Imagine you’re sitting in the high rise office building of a larger supermarket chain and in walks a Paraguayan farmer who can barely speak English. You may know in the back of your mind that he may have something to contribute to your company... but its sure going to take a hell of a lot time and work in order to actually listen and implement something he’s got to say.
Therefore, just to reiterate, I truly spend most of my time just working with neighbors and trying to learn about their situation so IF AND ONLY IF they someday want my help I can approach the work with sufficient background knowledge.
The bad example of trying to help someone if and only if they want my help can be found in that vegetable garden in which I was helping a few months back. You may remember the pictures.
After not having checked on things for about three weeks, I went back to see how things were going. Upon getting there I realized that the watermelon, cantaloupe, and lettuce we had planted were all ruined and inedible. After successfully planting those crops, and teaching them what I had learned and read about them, I wanted to leave them for a while and see what happened. Like so many stories I’d heard about, it turned out not so well. I had told them that the watermelon and cantaloupe require a lot of water so if there is a drought you’ll have to water them—there was a drought. I also told them that once the fruit have decent size they have to be wrapped in newspaper to protect them from the sun. Neither of these were carried out. As for the lettuce, they did eat some but left the rest to rot because they couldn’t eat it fast enough. The truth is that they could have probably taken the left over lettuce when it was ripe and sold it to neighbors.
Like I said, this experience confirmed one of life’s biggest lessons—you can’t help someone who doesn’t really want to help themselves. As it relates to this particular family, this experience has reaffirmed that many people who live in what would be by economic standards “poverty” aren’t really that interested in escaping that poverty. Due to good soil and a small population, the vast majority of my neighbors have enough food to survive every day and that’s all that matters to them. This project was done poorly because at the time I was living with a host family who didn’t have a garden I was looking for someone to let me practice preparing soil and planting something. The family with whom I worked with had said they were interested in expanding their garden and would be willing to do the maintenance after planting… but of course I really had no idea what to expect.
I should also mention that despite the failure of the vegetables in this particular little project I firmly believe and the relationship formed between me and this family is a very valid step in an effort to spread peace. The stereotypes about Americans never cease to amaze me. I was the first American this family had every met so naturally my entrance in their life came with a million questions. Therefore, if irradiating ignorance means helping the peace process then Peace Corps volunteer definitely exemplify their title.
Just for giggles, some of the questions I constantly get: “Is there beer in the U.S?”, “You and Aurora were neighbors in the US no? (Aurora was a PC volunteer from Oregon who lived in my community before me), “In the US everyone works in factories no?” (People associate factory jobs with good jobs because it means a steady paycheck and development of the country) There have been so many other good ones but there not coming to me now. Anticipate them in the next post.
A Very Paraguayan Christmas
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the question that everyone was dishing out besides “Haku iterei no?” (This is some serious heat no?) was “Moo ehasata la navidad?” (Where are you going to spend Christmas). My response to everyone was that I wasn’t sure and that I was going to split my time between neighbors in my compania and old friends from “the pueblo”, where I was living before. I soon came to realize that whoever I was talking to was going to invite me to spend Christmas with their family, and sure enough they always did.
The excitement kept building up around me and on the 22nd I was invited by a friend to come hang out with him during his radio show. I didn’t have any expectations going into his little community radio show but when I got there I came to realize that my buddy had pretty much planed to interview me. This of course was no big deal as he asked questions like the following: “So why do you wear that helmet thing when riding your bike?”, “Could you sing part of a song in English for us?”, “What kind of books do you like to read when taking a shit?”, Could you talk to us a little bit about the differences in Christmas spirit between Paraguay and the U.S.?”
I then went on to explain how helmets are a smart preventative measure and sang the beginning of a Paraguayan crowd pleasure “We Will Rock You” by Queen. The question about the toilet is actually a complete and utter lie. I just made it up. Similarly, due to the fact I’m Jewish and have never really celebrated Christmas, I had to kind of make up my answer to the Christmas spirit question. What I ended up saying was something to the following effect—“What’s interesting about that question is not that there are so many differences… but more that there are so many similarities. Christmas is a time to spend with the family, take a break from hard work, and share in the beautiful traditions of years past. That seems to me to be exactly what Christmas is not only about here, but also back in the U.S.” To say the least, that response was warmly accepted.
So you’re probably asking right now—“So do you lie to people about your religion?” The answer to that would be “no”. It’s just that on the radio which the whole town listens to isn’t exactly the best time to start introducing the Jewish Peace Corps Volunteer. I can just hear the gossip now “Did you hear that Mateo is now doing something similar to those Mormon Norte Americanos? He’s trying to convert us all to his religion, but instead of giving us money, he wants to take all of our money and start some sort of bank.”
As I am now writing this I can officially say that I’ve had not only my first Christmas but my first Paraguayan Christmas. Despite having previously been a Christmas Virgin, I can say with quite certainty that by far the biggest difference between Christmases here and there is that in the U.S. the celebration of Christmas happens the day of the 25th but here in Paraguay that celebration takes places the night of the 24th and culminates when the clock strikes midnight.
I was later trying to figure out this difference and see if I could find a direct relationship to the differences in culture. Since then, I have come to a conclusion but I can’t say for sure if this is right or not. My conclusion is that in the US Christmas has a lot to do with Santa in the snow with his rain deer, coming down the chimney and delivering presents. In Paraguay, they’ve never seen snow and due to financial restraints there is much less present giving. Therefore, instead they kind of have a party leading up to Christmas and drink and eat till their heart’s delight. The ironic thing is that they could have bought everyone fun little presents for price spent on food and booze but that’s not how they do things down here. In a society that teaches very little saving, they have adapted very well in order to enjoy life in the present.
Tsssssss, Tsssssssss
If the title above doesn’t mean anything to you-- it’s the hissing sound. More specifically, it’s that sound you make during an exam when you’re trying to get the attention of the person next to without the teaching hearing that you’re about to cheat. This is a sound very widely used down here--everywhere but the classroom.
During our two day training in Miami before coming down we had learned that hissing was a common thing for Paraguayan men to do to women…especially American women. Despite this being true, hissing is also used between any two kinds of people in order to call attention. This means that Paraguayans don’t just do that soft whisper kind of hissing but have brought hissing to a whole new decibel. It’s practically an instrument down here. What has fascinated me so much about hissing is that it is a replacement for what would be the call of a name in our culture. For example, if we were in the states and I was walking on the sidewalk on one side of the road and you were sitting on your porch on the other side of the road, you’d probably call out my name like “Hey Matt”. Here, that name call is replaced by the hiss. Although there may be several people in the vicinity of the person you’re hissing at AND you know the person’s name whom you want to call they STILL opt for the hiss. I can’t believe it to this day and simply call out people’s names when I want their attention from afar. But, I must say that I did get to use this infamous hiss just the other day.
I was walking through the little plaza in the small populated part of town and from a distance spotted the ice cream man who walks around wheeling around his Styrofoam ice cream container all day. As he began to walk in the opposite direction my mouth began to water with every step he took. I needed to act fast I knew the only thing between me and dirty ice cream scooped out of a 6 year old Styrofoam container was…a hiss. As I prepared for that hiss I though everyone in the plaza was going to look at me like some sort of alien but no such thing happened. I launched the hiss with all my might but it didn’t reach the ice cream man. It only made it as far as the kid 20 in front of him, about 50 yards away from me. The kid looked at me and I raised my eyebrows and chin in a single motion in order to signal that it was the ice cream man I wanted, not him. He quickly turned around and snapped a Paraguayan hiss at the ice cream man for me. My world turned into a baseball diamond and it was as if a ball had just been hit in the gap, the left fielder sprinted out to get it, threw a perfect strike to the cutoff man and then gunned the runner out at home. And as fast as a 6-4-3 double play, I had my ice cream in hand and was making my way back to the dugout… which I now call my home.
“Take your shirt off, twist it around your head spin it like a helicopter”
Two things that I’ve mentioned quite vigorously in this blog are that my neighbors are farmers and that it’s hot. Consequently, one has the pleasure of very rarely seeing a resting male, implying he’s drinking terere or beer on his front porch, with a shirt on. I think for me it’s quite comical to see because never in a million years could I picture my dad and buddies sitting in a circle with their shirts off and their bellies showing--as if they were Abercrombie models at the pool. But, that’s exactly what it looks like. And after a long day of work it seems like there nothing more Paraguayan than ripping your shirt off and settling down for a shirtless Brahma beer. It may be surprising that I mentioned these men as having bellies--considering they work their humps off all day, don’t overeat, and don’t have a McDonalds around every corner—it surprised me too. What I’ve learned is that these bellies come from eating fatty red meat, plenty of fried food, and a fair helping off beer each week. Truly, the most entertaining part of drinking beer with a group of shirtless middle-aged men is seeing how they simultaneously turn into mosquito killing machines. If you’re outside at about 6pm or 7pm it’s a fact that a mosquito is bound to land on you about every ten seconds. Instead of this being something that bothers them it’s as if nothing is going on at all. And while in mid conversation hands are flying all over the place killing mosquitoes that dare to make a shirtless Paraguayan man their landing pad. Even better, is when someone doesn’t feel a mosquito land on them but the guy next to them happens to see it land. He’ll without a doubt wind up and smack the crap out of that mosquito as if his open hand to the bare shin of his buddy was, as my big brother used to call it when he gave me Charlie horses as a kid, a love tap.
Speaking of my big brother, he is almost surely reading this part of the blog and asking himself “So do the women take off their shirts too?”. Well, if you consider a woman who is breast-feeding shirtless, then yes they do. The families down here are quite larger and that means ton of kids and lots of breast feeding going on around me. For some of you this may be completely normal but for me I came to Paraguay at age 23 I had only seen one women every breastfeeding in my presence. (About 15 years ago when Tim from Tennessee’s wife when they came over to fix the computer) In Paraguay, it is a completely normal to be hanging out with a women, many times more like a “young adult”, and in mid sentence without a warning she pops her boob out and brings her baby up to her chest. Now of course I understand there is nothing more natural in the world but coming from my upbringing this is still a very distracting site. The amazing part is how the other men around don’t flinch or falter in the slightest in their conversion. Me, on the other hand, I want to throw up my hands and say “Did you guys just see what happened!? She just puller her breast out without warning! What do we do? What don’t we do? Where am I supposed to put my eyes? What are the rules about looking the breastfeeding woman while she’s talking…or how about if I am talking to her? Am I a terrible pervert if I quickly glance at her boob? Somebody please fake and injury! I think I’ll go use the bathroom so I can sit on a wooden box and do some preparational meditation for the next time this happens…
Simple is Good
A few different friends have written me after reading my blog and said something to the effect of “reading your blog makes me of how thankful I am for the things I have.” In response, I have to be honest and say that although I live in an “underdeveloped” rural area, I can’t say that I always agree. Let’s examine un poco.
Here, for example, nobody has a car, restaurants to go eat at, or a cell phone constantly ringing.
In the case of our society, we have the pleasure of spending tons of money on an air/lung polluting car, while talking on a cancer transmitting cell phone, on the way to restaurant where we eat food that probably traveled thousands of miles to get to us and contains who knows what preservatives and chemicals.
Let’s pretend that over that meal we continue discussing the two situations. We may talk about things like how healthcare is so much better. But then you might look the harm done to your body in my simple above example and think “Maybe, just maybe, it kind of evens out?” (Also considering how I mentioned in a previous blog how many preventative medicines are free here.) In the states, we love the vast selection that a grocery store provides. Here, they have the incredible pride of eating the food that comes right from the soil they live and work upon. Not to mention the peace of mind they get from knowing their food is completely natural and didn’t travel on truck halfway across the country/world to find its way to their plate. In the states, we think it’s better because we have air conditioning. Here, they just use the heat as an excuse to relax more. In the states we love going out to eat. Here they eat almost every meal together, as a family (many times that includes grandparents too). In the states, we have very few bug issues. Here, there are tons of bugs and nobody is even the slightest bit inconvenienced. It’s the kind of peace of mind that allows them to ignore millions of bugs which extends into all aspects of their life, yet many Americans pay tons of money to get these issues treated.
Clearly this list could go on forever but the point of bringing this up is not to be depressing and point out how destructive our culture is, but much more to reiterate what we all already know—luxuries or “things” don’t make us any happier or our love any richer.
Many Paraguayans here often ask me if I like Paraguay better or worse than America. What I tell them is that there is no real answer, “it’s just different. For me, whether I’m in Paraguay or in the US, it’s much more practical to find happiness within my present surroundings than try to and change my surroundings to what I think is going to make me happy in the future.”
Lastly, it would be completely unfair to the ideals of democracy and development to finish this up without mentioning the things Paraguayans would start cutting off limbs in order to have--and rightfully so. Those include: a high functioning system of law and order, education (especially a computer based one), and health facilities/insurance.
Hope everyone had a very happy new year. I truly miss you all. I love getting updates on your lives so please email them. Take care.
~Mateo
We come in as complete strangers who don’t speak their language. On top of that we have a sign on our back that says “rich American here to teach English”. A fantastic example I was given once was—Imagine you’re sitting in the high rise office building of a larger supermarket chain and in walks a Paraguayan farmer who can barely speak English. You may know in the back of your mind that he may have something to contribute to your company... but its sure going to take a hell of a lot time and work in order to actually listen and implement something he’s got to say.
Therefore, just to reiterate, I truly spend most of my time just working with neighbors and trying to learn about their situation so IF AND ONLY IF they someday want my help I can approach the work with sufficient background knowledge.
The bad example of trying to help someone if and only if they want my help can be found in that vegetable garden in which I was helping a few months back. You may remember the pictures.
After not having checked on things for about three weeks, I went back to see how things were going. Upon getting there I realized that the watermelon, cantaloupe, and lettuce we had planted were all ruined and inedible. After successfully planting those crops, and teaching them what I had learned and read about them, I wanted to leave them for a while and see what happened. Like so many stories I’d heard about, it turned out not so well. I had told them that the watermelon and cantaloupe require a lot of water so if there is a drought you’ll have to water them—there was a drought. I also told them that once the fruit have decent size they have to be wrapped in newspaper to protect them from the sun. Neither of these were carried out. As for the lettuce, they did eat some but left the rest to rot because they couldn’t eat it fast enough. The truth is that they could have probably taken the left over lettuce when it was ripe and sold it to neighbors.
Like I said, this experience confirmed one of life’s biggest lessons—you can’t help someone who doesn’t really want to help themselves. As it relates to this particular family, this experience has reaffirmed that many people who live in what would be by economic standards “poverty” aren’t really that interested in escaping that poverty. Due to good soil and a small population, the vast majority of my neighbors have enough food to survive every day and that’s all that matters to them. This project was done poorly because at the time I was living with a host family who didn’t have a garden I was looking for someone to let me practice preparing soil and planting something. The family with whom I worked with had said they were interested in expanding their garden and would be willing to do the maintenance after planting… but of course I really had no idea what to expect.
I should also mention that despite the failure of the vegetables in this particular little project I firmly believe and the relationship formed between me and this family is a very valid step in an effort to spread peace. The stereotypes about Americans never cease to amaze me. I was the first American this family had every met so naturally my entrance in their life came with a million questions. Therefore, if irradiating ignorance means helping the peace process then Peace Corps volunteer definitely exemplify their title.
Just for giggles, some of the questions I constantly get: “Is there beer in the U.S?”, “You and Aurora were neighbors in the US no? (Aurora was a PC volunteer from Oregon who lived in my community before me), “In the US everyone works in factories no?” (People associate factory jobs with good jobs because it means a steady paycheck and development of the country) There have been so many other good ones but there not coming to me now. Anticipate them in the next post.
A Very Paraguayan Christmas
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the question that everyone was dishing out besides “Haku iterei no?” (This is some serious heat no?) was “Moo ehasata la navidad?” (Where are you going to spend Christmas). My response to everyone was that I wasn’t sure and that I was going to split my time between neighbors in my compania and old friends from “the pueblo”, where I was living before. I soon came to realize that whoever I was talking to was going to invite me to spend Christmas with their family, and sure enough they always did.
The excitement kept building up around me and on the 22nd I was invited by a friend to come hang out with him during his radio show. I didn’t have any expectations going into his little community radio show but when I got there I came to realize that my buddy had pretty much planed to interview me. This of course was no big deal as he asked questions like the following: “So why do you wear that helmet thing when riding your bike?”, “Could you sing part of a song in English for us?”, “What kind of books do you like to read when taking a shit?”, Could you talk to us a little bit about the differences in Christmas spirit between Paraguay and the U.S.?”
I then went on to explain how helmets are a smart preventative measure and sang the beginning of a Paraguayan crowd pleasure “We Will Rock You” by Queen. The question about the toilet is actually a complete and utter lie. I just made it up. Similarly, due to the fact I’m Jewish and have never really celebrated Christmas, I had to kind of make up my answer to the Christmas spirit question. What I ended up saying was something to the following effect—“What’s interesting about that question is not that there are so many differences… but more that there are so many similarities. Christmas is a time to spend with the family, take a break from hard work, and share in the beautiful traditions of years past. That seems to me to be exactly what Christmas is not only about here, but also back in the U.S.” To say the least, that response was warmly accepted.
So you’re probably asking right now—“So do you lie to people about your religion?” The answer to that would be “no”. It’s just that on the radio which the whole town listens to isn’t exactly the best time to start introducing the Jewish Peace Corps Volunteer. I can just hear the gossip now “Did you hear that Mateo is now doing something similar to those Mormon Norte Americanos? He’s trying to convert us all to his religion, but instead of giving us money, he wants to take all of our money and start some sort of bank.”
As I am now writing this I can officially say that I’ve had not only my first Christmas but my first Paraguayan Christmas. Despite having previously been a Christmas Virgin, I can say with quite certainty that by far the biggest difference between Christmases here and there is that in the U.S. the celebration of Christmas happens the day of the 25th but here in Paraguay that celebration takes places the night of the 24th and culminates when the clock strikes midnight.
I was later trying to figure out this difference and see if I could find a direct relationship to the differences in culture. Since then, I have come to a conclusion but I can’t say for sure if this is right or not. My conclusion is that in the US Christmas has a lot to do with Santa in the snow with his rain deer, coming down the chimney and delivering presents. In Paraguay, they’ve never seen snow and due to financial restraints there is much less present giving. Therefore, instead they kind of have a party leading up to Christmas and drink and eat till their heart’s delight. The ironic thing is that they could have bought everyone fun little presents for price spent on food and booze but that’s not how they do things down here. In a society that teaches very little saving, they have adapted very well in order to enjoy life in the present.
Tsssssss, Tsssssssss
If the title above doesn’t mean anything to you-- it’s the hissing sound. More specifically, it’s that sound you make during an exam when you’re trying to get the attention of the person next to without the teaching hearing that you’re about to cheat. This is a sound very widely used down here--everywhere but the classroom.
During our two day training in Miami before coming down we had learned that hissing was a common thing for Paraguayan men to do to women…especially American women. Despite this being true, hissing is also used between any two kinds of people in order to call attention. This means that Paraguayans don’t just do that soft whisper kind of hissing but have brought hissing to a whole new decibel. It’s practically an instrument down here. What has fascinated me so much about hissing is that it is a replacement for what would be the call of a name in our culture. For example, if we were in the states and I was walking on the sidewalk on one side of the road and you were sitting on your porch on the other side of the road, you’d probably call out my name like “Hey Matt”. Here, that name call is replaced by the hiss. Although there may be several people in the vicinity of the person you’re hissing at AND you know the person’s name whom you want to call they STILL opt for the hiss. I can’t believe it to this day and simply call out people’s names when I want their attention from afar. But, I must say that I did get to use this infamous hiss just the other day.
I was walking through the little plaza in the small populated part of town and from a distance spotted the ice cream man who walks around wheeling around his Styrofoam ice cream container all day. As he began to walk in the opposite direction my mouth began to water with every step he took. I needed to act fast I knew the only thing between me and dirty ice cream scooped out of a 6 year old Styrofoam container was…a hiss. As I prepared for that hiss I though everyone in the plaza was going to look at me like some sort of alien but no such thing happened. I launched the hiss with all my might but it didn’t reach the ice cream man. It only made it as far as the kid 20 in front of him, about 50 yards away from me. The kid looked at me and I raised my eyebrows and chin in a single motion in order to signal that it was the ice cream man I wanted, not him. He quickly turned around and snapped a Paraguayan hiss at the ice cream man for me. My world turned into a baseball diamond and it was as if a ball had just been hit in the gap, the left fielder sprinted out to get it, threw a perfect strike to the cutoff man and then gunned the runner out at home. And as fast as a 6-4-3 double play, I had my ice cream in hand and was making my way back to the dugout… which I now call my home.
“Take your shirt off, twist it around your head spin it like a helicopter”
Two things that I’ve mentioned quite vigorously in this blog are that my neighbors are farmers and that it’s hot. Consequently, one has the pleasure of very rarely seeing a resting male, implying he’s drinking terere or beer on his front porch, with a shirt on. I think for me it’s quite comical to see because never in a million years could I picture my dad and buddies sitting in a circle with their shirts off and their bellies showing--as if they were Abercrombie models at the pool. But, that’s exactly what it looks like. And after a long day of work it seems like there nothing more Paraguayan than ripping your shirt off and settling down for a shirtless Brahma beer. It may be surprising that I mentioned these men as having bellies--considering they work their humps off all day, don’t overeat, and don’t have a McDonalds around every corner—it surprised me too. What I’ve learned is that these bellies come from eating fatty red meat, plenty of fried food, and a fair helping off beer each week. Truly, the most entertaining part of drinking beer with a group of shirtless middle-aged men is seeing how they simultaneously turn into mosquito killing machines. If you’re outside at about 6pm or 7pm it’s a fact that a mosquito is bound to land on you about every ten seconds. Instead of this being something that bothers them it’s as if nothing is going on at all. And while in mid conversation hands are flying all over the place killing mosquitoes that dare to make a shirtless Paraguayan man their landing pad. Even better, is when someone doesn’t feel a mosquito land on them but the guy next to them happens to see it land. He’ll without a doubt wind up and smack the crap out of that mosquito as if his open hand to the bare shin of his buddy was, as my big brother used to call it when he gave me Charlie horses as a kid, a love tap.
Speaking of my big brother, he is almost surely reading this part of the blog and asking himself “So do the women take off their shirts too?”. Well, if you consider a woman who is breast-feeding shirtless, then yes they do. The families down here are quite larger and that means ton of kids and lots of breast feeding going on around me. For some of you this may be completely normal but for me I came to Paraguay at age 23 I had only seen one women every breastfeeding in my presence. (About 15 years ago when Tim from Tennessee’s wife when they came over to fix the computer) In Paraguay, it is a completely normal to be hanging out with a women, many times more like a “young adult”, and in mid sentence without a warning she pops her boob out and brings her baby up to her chest. Now of course I understand there is nothing more natural in the world but coming from my upbringing this is still a very distracting site. The amazing part is how the other men around don’t flinch or falter in the slightest in their conversion. Me, on the other hand, I want to throw up my hands and say “Did you guys just see what happened!? She just puller her breast out without warning! What do we do? What don’t we do? Where am I supposed to put my eyes? What are the rules about looking the breastfeeding woman while she’s talking…or how about if I am talking to her? Am I a terrible pervert if I quickly glance at her boob? Somebody please fake and injury! I think I’ll go use the bathroom so I can sit on a wooden box and do some preparational meditation for the next time this happens…
Simple is Good
A few different friends have written me after reading my blog and said something to the effect of “reading your blog makes me of how thankful I am for the things I have.” In response, I have to be honest and say that although I live in an “underdeveloped” rural area, I can’t say that I always agree. Let’s examine un poco.
Here, for example, nobody has a car, restaurants to go eat at, or a cell phone constantly ringing.
In the case of our society, we have the pleasure of spending tons of money on an air/lung polluting car, while talking on a cancer transmitting cell phone, on the way to restaurant where we eat food that probably traveled thousands of miles to get to us and contains who knows what preservatives and chemicals.
Let’s pretend that over that meal we continue discussing the two situations. We may talk about things like how healthcare is so much better. But then you might look the harm done to your body in my simple above example and think “Maybe, just maybe, it kind of evens out?” (Also considering how I mentioned in a previous blog how many preventative medicines are free here.) In the states, we love the vast selection that a grocery store provides. Here, they have the incredible pride of eating the food that comes right from the soil they live and work upon. Not to mention the peace of mind they get from knowing their food is completely natural and didn’t travel on truck halfway across the country/world to find its way to their plate. In the states, we think it’s better because we have air conditioning. Here, they just use the heat as an excuse to relax more. In the states we love going out to eat. Here they eat almost every meal together, as a family (many times that includes grandparents too). In the states, we have very few bug issues. Here, there are tons of bugs and nobody is even the slightest bit inconvenienced. It’s the kind of peace of mind that allows them to ignore millions of bugs which extends into all aspects of their life, yet many Americans pay tons of money to get these issues treated.
Clearly this list could go on forever but the point of bringing this up is not to be depressing and point out how destructive our culture is, but much more to reiterate what we all already know—luxuries or “things” don’t make us any happier or our love any richer.
Many Paraguayans here often ask me if I like Paraguay better or worse than America. What I tell them is that there is no real answer, “it’s just different. For me, whether I’m in Paraguay or in the US, it’s much more practical to find happiness within my present surroundings than try to and change my surroundings to what I think is going to make me happy in the future.”
Lastly, it would be completely unfair to the ideals of democracy and development to finish this up without mentioning the things Paraguayans would start cutting off limbs in order to have--and rightfully so. Those include: a high functioning system of law and order, education (especially a computer based one), and health facilities/insurance.
Hope everyone had a very happy new year. I truly miss you all. I love getting updates on your lives so please email them. Take care.
~Mateo
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Che Apurahei Guaranime
This is the debut of my first song written in Guarani (with a little spanish). It was played at Peace Corps fundraiser in Asuncion. (unfortunately the video starts a little bit into the song)
The lyrics...roughly translated:
How´d you wake up?...woke up great because I got to sleep in late
Later on I´ll be workin on the farm
Drinking terere with my crew, and chattin it up
Chorus;
This is what life is like
Terere, in the shade, speaking guarani
I´m living care free/chilled out
Yo what up, how is going? Fantastic
Because I´m about to eat a kick ass bbq with my family
Later we´ll head to the soccer game, drink some beer and eat Chipa (a paraguayan bread)
Right on brother!
Chorus
I´m waiting for a girl to come through my window (a paraguayan joke)
¨Come over here for a minute¨ some good luck (The ¨come here...¨ also being a popular saying)
Unbearable is the heat here
Later on well hit the party and get sloppy drunk, Dance with beautiful women
Yeah, I´m happy in Paraguay
Chorus
Thursday, December 11, 2008
My new life
Aiko chano, companiape!
Tanto tiempo no? Please forgive the fact it’s taken me forever to get an update on this blog. As crazy as it sounds, I actually feel really busy. That’s mostly attributed to the fact that I’ve finally moved to my own little house, I went to Asuncion for a few days to watch election coverage, then the next week we had a few days of training back in my original site to go over some Guarani, and finally all us volunteer met up for Thanksgiving. All of those excuses have turned out to be fantastic reasons to be busy. I absolutely love my new house and all my new neighbors. They have welcomed me to their community with only the kind of generosity I’ve seen here in Paraguay. And during Guarani class I turned into the complete language dork that I am … eating up every Guarani tip I could get like an 8 year old devouring a Snack Pack in an elementary school cafeteria. With the rest of my time I’ve been trying to make my rounds and get to know my new neighbors. Since just about every single one of my neighbors is a “productor” of some crop(s), an important part of “making my rounds” involves working with them. So far I’ve been working with melon, pineapple, and sugar cane. Most crops will change as the seasons change, except for sugar cane, which is only harvested for 6 months of the year the other half consists of cleaning and preparing the land for the next year. By far the most laborious work down here is with the sugar cane…but I’ll get into that a little later. I should also point out the colossal amount of Terere I’ve been drinking/sharing with the neighbors. It’s so fundamental to the culture down here that it’s absolutely unimaginable what this country would be like without it. Down here, us “norte americanos” call it T-ray, and the act of sharing would be “gettin in on a T-ray circle”. Because I live without a refrigerator or freezer I often drink lukewarm t-ray at my house. Therefore, when I drink at a house where the precious invention of ice has been added to the t-ray it’s like I’m almost in one of those exaggerated Corona commercials where a gorgeous couple lies next to a crystal clear beach as they open up their icy cold beers. If Corona shot a commercial down here it would probably consist of a group of Paraguayans sitting under huge mango tree, sitting in those amazing Paraguayan chairs, with a Paraguayan fan hanging from the tree above. Unfortunately, as highly technologically advanced as Paraguayan fans are, they still haven’t figured out how to put one under a tree, where t-ray circles take place. Do I hear Peace Crops project???...I think so. One more thing about t-ray, while am at it. Aside from pouring the water from a thermo to a special little mug filled with dried “yerba” leaves, they usually also put a “remedio” or “juju with the water in the thermo. Most of these consist of plants or roots that grow wildly. The average Paraguayan can probably indentify up to 20. Sometimes a Paraguayan will have sought out a particular remedio and bring back to plant in their yard. The most popular ones are called “refrescantes”.
So if you can’t tell from what I’ve written so far, all is going just splendid…o sea “de lujo” se dice aqui. There are a few things that are worth complaining about; the bugs and the heat. The heat is just inescapable and relentless like no other heat I’ve encountered. The inescapability of the heat constantly makes me think of the repeated argument I’ve had with my parents about how when going out for the night I need to wear a jacket. This fight, or should I say “exchange of a few words”, always ensues as I’m about to leave my climate controlled house, get in my climate controlled car, and drive to another climate controlled place. Therefore, you’d think that because my dad is a lawyer he’d see my case neatly and clearly laid out. But just I as expect him to start slapping his fist on the arm of his LazyBoy to let us know court is adjourned, he irrational grants my mom a victory. Damages being that I now have to go upstairs and get my coat just to later throw it in the back seat of my car. Anyway, the point of this nonsense is to point out that here, whether inside or outside the house, one must have the weather in mind. Therefore, seeing men without shirts is practically the norm here. If Paraguay had St. Louis winters I promise you guys I’d always wear a jacket before leaving the house in the cold.
The bugs are the other issue here. I’m already used to the mosquitoes but it’s the insane number bugs I find in my room at night that are taking the getting used to. They are huge, numerous, and also inescapable. The most frustrating part is how they manage to get in my mosquito net and annoy the crap out of me when I read in bed before going to sleep. Fortunately, I’m not getting bitten a lot. But in order to kill a lot of them I have to smash them into my bed. Each time it leaves a little dead bug smudge on my sheets. It’s gross but necessary. Another gross aspect of the bugs is watching tons of them fall dead on top of my mosquito not each night. This is the result of my “killer” fan being directly above my bed and smashing anything it touches with the force of a South American dictator. I also have frogs living in my bathroom. They’re kind of my buddies…harmless and amazing to look at. I usually find them next to my sink or taking a shower with me. They are the kind of frogs you see pictures of in a National Geogrphic…slimy/transparent green but huge bulging eyes. I’m working on a good picture but I’m waiting for a super good one till it makes its way to you all.
Bueno, (deep breath) that’s my transition word down here. I’ve written down some interesting things I’ve noticed over the past month and so I’m going to take it topic by topic.
Before getting started I should mention that when I just wrote “bueno” it made me think how I never mention that I do indeed speak Spanish here…it’s not all Guarani for me, even though it is for a majority of Paraguayans. (I kind of feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds with both Spanish and Guarani) Just to clarify again, almost everyone at least understands Spanish and a decent percentage have no problem speaking TO ME in Spanish, as long as we aren’t in a group. Put two Paraguayans together and it’s definitely Guarani. That’s why it’s so important that I speak it. I would say that I’ve taken advantage of those that are comfortable with Spanish while still making what I’ll call a “valiant” effort at Guarani at the same time.
Speaking of language, that’s actually one of the topics I wanted to touch on in this blog. More specifically I wanted to explain what makes language incredibly unique down here, which is “the joapra” or the simultaneously mixed use of Spanish and Guarani. There are really three ways in which the jopara works.
The first is when two people are talking and the conversation goes back and forth from Spanish to Guarani. This usually happens in more of a business/professional setting because although the speakers are probably more comfortable with only Guarani, there are so many technical words and phrases that can only be said in Spanish that it just has to be this way. The second way to speak the jopara is by speaking mostly Guarani but often adding in words in Spanish at the same time. This is mostly due to the fact that: some words just don’t exist in Guarani because it’s an indigenous language, other words are so difficult to pronounce in Guarani that the people prefer the Spanish word, and lastly because Spanish is more articulate. The third and most interesting way is used when a Spanish word takes on the Guarani conjugation and pronunciation. For example: Guarani works like English in the sense that the person doing the action is established before the root of the verb. An “a” before a verb means “I”. Vender(Spanish)= to sell. Because there is no word for “to sell” in Guarani they just convert “vender” to avende. This is done with many different verbs and can sometimes make following a conversation a whole lot easier. For us volunteers, the classic example of this is the use of “no entiende= he doesn’t understand”. The ironic part about this is that Paraguayans can’t be discrete about saying “he doesn’t understand” while in my presence. It’s “nontendei”. (the “no” in this case is just a coincidence…Guarani doesn’t use “no”) Ridiculously similar no? This happens to me almost every day when I’m with a group of Paraguayans speaking Guarani and someone thinks I don’t understand, which may or may not be true. After determining that I don’t understand this someone will usually say under their breath “noentendei”. This person is trying to be secretive about telling his friends that I don’t understand but really it’s just as painful as if he approached me like a drill sergeant and screamed in my face “You don’t understand, you American idiot!”. It’s terribly evident this person is trying to speak Guarani so that I once again don’t understand, but really I couldn’t be more obvious, and at this point I feel like ripping my hair out.
Ok, so continuing with what I was planning on writing:
Mitaikuera=ninos=children. They have taken a liking to my entrance in my community in the same fashion that my host brothers did in my very first house. They come to my house uninvited, say “permiso”and start looking through all my stuff and asking an endless amount of questions. Here are some good ones: I was asked how much money my wooden hammer costs. An hour after unpacking my stuff I was asked if I plan on leaving my speakers or if I’ll take them back to the states…in 21 months! I was told my bike helmet was very nice and he asked if he could buy it off of me. One kid crawled on my filthy floor on his hands and knees to see what was under my bed. They touch absolutely every little thing and think my digital clock, which I bought at The Dollar Store before coming, is some incredible alien concoction.
Otra cosa. I did have a friend from the states point out that my house isn’t nearly as rustic as they were thinking. I thought that was a great opportunity to explain that by just by walking down my street you wouldn’t thinking the people are very poor here, but you’d be mistaken. Most families, if they have one nice thing to their name, it’s their house. The most common reason for this is that an astoundingly high number of people have had a family member work in Argentina or Spain, save a bunch of money, and buy a new house. In fact, the number one revenue source in this country is those remittances! The average person here has very little but you can bet your ass that what they do have they take amazing care of. This goes back to how they’re always sweeping. They also take amazing pride in their cleanliness of their clothes and their appearance.
The ice cream and chair incidents
I’ve now had two similar incidents that have absolutely amazed me. The first was when I went to little furniture store to buy one of the fantastic chairs I speak of. I went in where I’m used to seeing them outside and told them I wanted to buy one. They told me that wasn’t possible. They only sell the chairs in groups of four, with the matching table. (These are lawn chairs here folks, not a dining room set!) I explained that I live alone and have no need for four chairs… but that meant nothing. Baffled, I asked if when they buy the chairs in bulk if there is some special relation to this grouping of four…no, they told me. I asked if ever in the past someone has come in wanting only one, two, or three and after thinking for a sec I was once again told no. I’m my attempt to get them to sell me just one I tried explaining that there’s no chance I’m buying four, so just sell me one and you’ll get my money. Flashing the money still did nothing. They sell in fours and that’s the end it. Therefore, I still don’t even have my own Paraguayan chair but 80% of families have their group of four.
The other incident was almost the same but when buying ice cream. The 16 year old attending to me was sold out of their medium size cups. Therefore I told her to give me the amount of ice cream that fits in the medium size cup but in the large cup. She looked at me as if I’d just spoken Farsi. “I can’t do that” she told me. I asked why and she told me that the bigger cups cost more for them so if she gives me a bigger cup she has to fill it up and charge me for it. I politely explained how business and the employee-client relationship works. “The point of a business is to make money. “You are a business?” I asked. I don’t want the big size, so if you don’t give me the medium amount of ice cream your sale will be zero but if you fill the larger cup with the medium amount of ice cream you’ll then earn a profit, although it may not be as much as if you had the medium cups in stock, like you should. Then I explained that she should also give me what I’ve requested because I’m a frequent customer of the medium size cup. By not giving me the meduim we’d be facing a serious violation of the employee-client relationship….which entails giving me the ice cream for the sake of repeat business and all the money I’ve already poured into your store. But of course, all of this explaining did nothing to help her understand what I want and why she should give it me. She told me that her mom, the store owner, had instructed her on how to serve ice cream and it just doesn’t work how I was trying to order. Therefore, I walked out, dying for an ice cream, but hoping that maybe one day she’ll look back on that day and figure out what I was talking out. Hopefully, this serves as a great example of why business volunteers like myself are needed down here.
Bueno, next story. So I was in my training site doing those few days of Guarani class I mentioned earlier and I was hit with the familiar feeling of my stomach dropping out like a bowling ball thudding onto the wooded floor. To a normal American this would be called diarrhea, but down here it’s so common that we just call it “the D”. When I get done taking care of business and go to flush I quickly realize that there is no water. What? No water? Yet, the water sometimes goes out for a while here. The problem here isn’t exactly that I can’t flush it’s more that I’m terrible afraid for the person that has to lift that seat up after I’ve made a clean getaway. I crack the door open with a tissue is hand, this way just in case someone is waiting outside I can fake a sneeze, start to blow my nose and hope that the other bathroom door opens up before I have to concede my lose and explain that “you won’t be using this toilet anytime soon.”
I said earlier that I’d get into how cutting down sugar cane is absolutely back breaking work. Well we’ve arrived at that part of the blog. Cutting down sugar cane involves taking thousands of machete hacks to 15 foot high canes of sugar, cutting off the leaves, throwing the cane into piles and eventually lifting the piles into an ox cart. This is all done in brutal heat while wearing long sleeves and pants to protect yourself from the millions of tiny thorns every sugar cane leave has covering it. The process of lifting the piles of sugar cane is also incredibly laborious. It’s like putting together a pile of uneven/curved bench press bars, squatting down, pulling them against your legs, hurling them over your shoulder and then walking them up a short latter to the guy in the ox cart. This is by far the best workout you can find down here.
The reason I mention that the cane is uneven and curved is because those aspects make it incredibly difficult to throw a bunch over your shoulder while only using one arm to balance the pile. (The other arm is needed when you climb the latter.) Very often in my first attempts the cane was swaying as if my shoulder was a rubber ball submerged in water. One time I dropped a ton of cane can yelled “fuck”. The Paraguayans I was with stared to crack up even though they’d never heard the word before. The immediately asked me to repeat it and asked for the Guarani equivalent. They took to it like a Paraguayan 9 year old takes their new American neighbor. All day they were screaming “fuh” every time a little thing went wrong. Whoever thought cuss words could bring about such a nice cultural exchange?
Well, I actually have some more I was planning on writing but I’ll just save it for next time because I’m exhausted from this blog. It’s pretty good stuff so you’ll have a lot to look forward to.
Just a reminder, I wasn’t joking when I said I NEED NEW MUSIC. New albums that I believe have come out since I came here include: Imogen Heap, Jacks Mannequin, Greg Laswell, Tim Easton, The Format, Ben Kweller, Regina Spektor, Matisyahu, Bright Eyes, Cold War Kids!, Nightmare of You!, and any good Latin music
(my name), PCV
Cuerpo de Paz
Chaco Boreal 162 casi Mcal. Lopez
Asuncion, 1580, Paraguay
Hasta la proxima!
Tanto tiempo no? Please forgive the fact it’s taken me forever to get an update on this blog. As crazy as it sounds, I actually feel really busy. That’s mostly attributed to the fact that I’ve finally moved to my own little house, I went to Asuncion for a few days to watch election coverage, then the next week we had a few days of training back in my original site to go over some Guarani, and finally all us volunteer met up for Thanksgiving. All of those excuses have turned out to be fantastic reasons to be busy. I absolutely love my new house and all my new neighbors. They have welcomed me to their community with only the kind of generosity I’ve seen here in Paraguay. And during Guarani class I turned into the complete language dork that I am … eating up every Guarani tip I could get like an 8 year old devouring a Snack Pack in an elementary school cafeteria. With the rest of my time I’ve been trying to make my rounds and get to know my new neighbors. Since just about every single one of my neighbors is a “productor” of some crop(s), an important part of “making my rounds” involves working with them. So far I’ve been working with melon, pineapple, and sugar cane. Most crops will change as the seasons change, except for sugar cane, which is only harvested for 6 months of the year the other half consists of cleaning and preparing the land for the next year. By far the most laborious work down here is with the sugar cane…but I’ll get into that a little later. I should also point out the colossal amount of Terere I’ve been drinking/sharing with the neighbors. It’s so fundamental to the culture down here that it’s absolutely unimaginable what this country would be like without it. Down here, us “norte americanos” call it T-ray, and the act of sharing would be “gettin in on a T-ray circle”. Because I live without a refrigerator or freezer I often drink lukewarm t-ray at my house. Therefore, when I drink at a house where the precious invention of ice has been added to the t-ray it’s like I’m almost in one of those exaggerated Corona commercials where a gorgeous couple lies next to a crystal clear beach as they open up their icy cold beers. If Corona shot a commercial down here it would probably consist of a group of Paraguayans sitting under huge mango tree, sitting in those amazing Paraguayan chairs, with a Paraguayan fan hanging from the tree above. Unfortunately, as highly technologically advanced as Paraguayan fans are, they still haven’t figured out how to put one under a tree, where t-ray circles take place. Do I hear Peace Crops project???...I think so. One more thing about t-ray, while am at it. Aside from pouring the water from a thermo to a special little mug filled with dried “yerba” leaves, they usually also put a “remedio” or “juju with the water in the thermo. Most of these consist of plants or roots that grow wildly. The average Paraguayan can probably indentify up to 20. Sometimes a Paraguayan will have sought out a particular remedio and bring back to plant in their yard. The most popular ones are called “refrescantes”.
So if you can’t tell from what I’ve written so far, all is going just splendid…o sea “de lujo” se dice aqui. There are a few things that are worth complaining about; the bugs and the heat. The heat is just inescapable and relentless like no other heat I’ve encountered. The inescapability of the heat constantly makes me think of the repeated argument I’ve had with my parents about how when going out for the night I need to wear a jacket. This fight, or should I say “exchange of a few words”, always ensues as I’m about to leave my climate controlled house, get in my climate controlled car, and drive to another climate controlled place. Therefore, you’d think that because my dad is a lawyer he’d see my case neatly and clearly laid out. But just I as expect him to start slapping his fist on the arm of his LazyBoy to let us know court is adjourned, he irrational grants my mom a victory. Damages being that I now have to go upstairs and get my coat just to later throw it in the back seat of my car. Anyway, the point of this nonsense is to point out that here, whether inside or outside the house, one must have the weather in mind. Therefore, seeing men without shirts is practically the norm here. If Paraguay had St. Louis winters I promise you guys I’d always wear a jacket before leaving the house in the cold.
The bugs are the other issue here. I’m already used to the mosquitoes but it’s the insane number bugs I find in my room at night that are taking the getting used to. They are huge, numerous, and also inescapable. The most frustrating part is how they manage to get in my mosquito net and annoy the crap out of me when I read in bed before going to sleep. Fortunately, I’m not getting bitten a lot. But in order to kill a lot of them I have to smash them into my bed. Each time it leaves a little dead bug smudge on my sheets. It’s gross but necessary. Another gross aspect of the bugs is watching tons of them fall dead on top of my mosquito not each night. This is the result of my “killer” fan being directly above my bed and smashing anything it touches with the force of a South American dictator. I also have frogs living in my bathroom. They’re kind of my buddies…harmless and amazing to look at. I usually find them next to my sink or taking a shower with me. They are the kind of frogs you see pictures of in a National Geogrphic…slimy/transparent green but huge bulging eyes. I’m working on a good picture but I’m waiting for a super good one till it makes its way to you all.
Bueno, (deep breath) that’s my transition word down here. I’ve written down some interesting things I’ve noticed over the past month and so I’m going to take it topic by topic.
Before getting started I should mention that when I just wrote “bueno” it made me think how I never mention that I do indeed speak Spanish here…it’s not all Guarani for me, even though it is for a majority of Paraguayans. (I kind of feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds with both Spanish and Guarani) Just to clarify again, almost everyone at least understands Spanish and a decent percentage have no problem speaking TO ME in Spanish, as long as we aren’t in a group. Put two Paraguayans together and it’s definitely Guarani. That’s why it’s so important that I speak it. I would say that I’ve taken advantage of those that are comfortable with Spanish while still making what I’ll call a “valiant” effort at Guarani at the same time.
Speaking of language, that’s actually one of the topics I wanted to touch on in this blog. More specifically I wanted to explain what makes language incredibly unique down here, which is “the joapra” or the simultaneously mixed use of Spanish and Guarani. There are really three ways in which the jopara works.
The first is when two people are talking and the conversation goes back and forth from Spanish to Guarani. This usually happens in more of a business/professional setting because although the speakers are probably more comfortable with only Guarani, there are so many technical words and phrases that can only be said in Spanish that it just has to be this way. The second way to speak the jopara is by speaking mostly Guarani but often adding in words in Spanish at the same time. This is mostly due to the fact that: some words just don’t exist in Guarani because it’s an indigenous language, other words are so difficult to pronounce in Guarani that the people prefer the Spanish word, and lastly because Spanish is more articulate. The third and most interesting way is used when a Spanish word takes on the Guarani conjugation and pronunciation. For example: Guarani works like English in the sense that the person doing the action is established before the root of the verb. An “a” before a verb means “I”. Vender(Spanish)= to sell. Because there is no word for “to sell” in Guarani they just convert “vender” to avende. This is done with many different verbs and can sometimes make following a conversation a whole lot easier. For us volunteers, the classic example of this is the use of “no entiende= he doesn’t understand”. The ironic part about this is that Paraguayans can’t be discrete about saying “he doesn’t understand” while in my presence. It’s “nontendei”. (the “no” in this case is just a coincidence…Guarani doesn’t use “no”) Ridiculously similar no? This happens to me almost every day when I’m with a group of Paraguayans speaking Guarani and someone thinks I don’t understand, which may or may not be true. After determining that I don’t understand this someone will usually say under their breath “noentendei”. This person is trying to be secretive about telling his friends that I don’t understand but really it’s just as painful as if he approached me like a drill sergeant and screamed in my face “You don’t understand, you American idiot!”. It’s terribly evident this person is trying to speak Guarani so that I once again don’t understand, but really I couldn’t be more obvious, and at this point I feel like ripping my hair out.
Ok, so continuing with what I was planning on writing:
Mitaikuera=ninos=children. They have taken a liking to my entrance in my community in the same fashion that my host brothers did in my very first house. They come to my house uninvited, say “permiso”and start looking through all my stuff and asking an endless amount of questions. Here are some good ones: I was asked how much money my wooden hammer costs. An hour after unpacking my stuff I was asked if I plan on leaving my speakers or if I’ll take them back to the states…in 21 months! I was told my bike helmet was very nice and he asked if he could buy it off of me. One kid crawled on my filthy floor on his hands and knees to see what was under my bed. They touch absolutely every little thing and think my digital clock, which I bought at The Dollar Store before coming, is some incredible alien concoction.
Otra cosa. I did have a friend from the states point out that my house isn’t nearly as rustic as they were thinking. I thought that was a great opportunity to explain that by just by walking down my street you wouldn’t thinking the people are very poor here, but you’d be mistaken. Most families, if they have one nice thing to their name, it’s their house. The most common reason for this is that an astoundingly high number of people have had a family member work in Argentina or Spain, save a bunch of money, and buy a new house. In fact, the number one revenue source in this country is those remittances! The average person here has very little but you can bet your ass that what they do have they take amazing care of. This goes back to how they’re always sweeping. They also take amazing pride in their cleanliness of their clothes and their appearance.
The ice cream and chair incidents
I’ve now had two similar incidents that have absolutely amazed me. The first was when I went to little furniture store to buy one of the fantastic chairs I speak of. I went in where I’m used to seeing them outside and told them I wanted to buy one. They told me that wasn’t possible. They only sell the chairs in groups of four, with the matching table. (These are lawn chairs here folks, not a dining room set!) I explained that I live alone and have no need for four chairs… but that meant nothing. Baffled, I asked if when they buy the chairs in bulk if there is some special relation to this grouping of four…no, they told me. I asked if ever in the past someone has come in wanting only one, two, or three and after thinking for a sec I was once again told no. I’m my attempt to get them to sell me just one I tried explaining that there’s no chance I’m buying four, so just sell me one and you’ll get my money. Flashing the money still did nothing. They sell in fours and that’s the end it. Therefore, I still don’t even have my own Paraguayan chair but 80% of families have their group of four.
The other incident was almost the same but when buying ice cream. The 16 year old attending to me was sold out of their medium size cups. Therefore I told her to give me the amount of ice cream that fits in the medium size cup but in the large cup. She looked at me as if I’d just spoken Farsi. “I can’t do that” she told me. I asked why and she told me that the bigger cups cost more for them so if she gives me a bigger cup she has to fill it up and charge me for it. I politely explained how business and the employee-client relationship works. “The point of a business is to make money. “You are a business?” I asked. I don’t want the big size, so if you don’t give me the medium amount of ice cream your sale will be zero but if you fill the larger cup with the medium amount of ice cream you’ll then earn a profit, although it may not be as much as if you had the medium cups in stock, like you should. Then I explained that she should also give me what I’ve requested because I’m a frequent customer of the medium size cup. By not giving me the meduim we’d be facing a serious violation of the employee-client relationship….which entails giving me the ice cream for the sake of repeat business and all the money I’ve already poured into your store. But of course, all of this explaining did nothing to help her understand what I want and why she should give it me. She told me that her mom, the store owner, had instructed her on how to serve ice cream and it just doesn’t work how I was trying to order. Therefore, I walked out, dying for an ice cream, but hoping that maybe one day she’ll look back on that day and figure out what I was talking out. Hopefully, this serves as a great example of why business volunteers like myself are needed down here.
Bueno, next story. So I was in my training site doing those few days of Guarani class I mentioned earlier and I was hit with the familiar feeling of my stomach dropping out like a bowling ball thudding onto the wooded floor. To a normal American this would be called diarrhea, but down here it’s so common that we just call it “the D”. When I get done taking care of business and go to flush I quickly realize that there is no water. What? No water? Yet, the water sometimes goes out for a while here. The problem here isn’t exactly that I can’t flush it’s more that I’m terrible afraid for the person that has to lift that seat up after I’ve made a clean getaway. I crack the door open with a tissue is hand, this way just in case someone is waiting outside I can fake a sneeze, start to blow my nose and hope that the other bathroom door opens up before I have to concede my lose and explain that “you won’t be using this toilet anytime soon.”
I said earlier that I’d get into how cutting down sugar cane is absolutely back breaking work. Well we’ve arrived at that part of the blog. Cutting down sugar cane involves taking thousands of machete hacks to 15 foot high canes of sugar, cutting off the leaves, throwing the cane into piles and eventually lifting the piles into an ox cart. This is all done in brutal heat while wearing long sleeves and pants to protect yourself from the millions of tiny thorns every sugar cane leave has covering it. The process of lifting the piles of sugar cane is also incredibly laborious. It’s like putting together a pile of uneven/curved bench press bars, squatting down, pulling them against your legs, hurling them over your shoulder and then walking them up a short latter to the guy in the ox cart. This is by far the best workout you can find down here.
The reason I mention that the cane is uneven and curved is because those aspects make it incredibly difficult to throw a bunch over your shoulder while only using one arm to balance the pile. (The other arm is needed when you climb the latter.) Very often in my first attempts the cane was swaying as if my shoulder was a rubber ball submerged in water. One time I dropped a ton of cane can yelled “fuck”. The Paraguayans I was with stared to crack up even though they’d never heard the word before. The immediately asked me to repeat it and asked for the Guarani equivalent. They took to it like a Paraguayan 9 year old takes their new American neighbor. All day they were screaming “fuh” every time a little thing went wrong. Whoever thought cuss words could bring about such a nice cultural exchange?
Well, I actually have some more I was planning on writing but I’ll just save it for next time because I’m exhausted from this blog. It’s pretty good stuff so you’ll have a lot to look forward to.
Just a reminder, I wasn’t joking when I said I NEED NEW MUSIC. New albums that I believe have come out since I came here include: Imogen Heap, Jacks Mannequin, Greg Laswell, Tim Easton, The Format, Ben Kweller, Regina Spektor, Matisyahu, Bright Eyes, Cold War Kids!, Nightmare of You!, and any good Latin music
(my name), PCV
Cuerpo de Paz
Chaco Boreal 162 casi Mcal. Lopez
Asuncion, 1580, Paraguay
Hasta la proxima!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
