Now see here
Summer break in Tacuatí just got a little more interesting. Ahecha Paraguay is coming out here. It’s a project for teaching photography to youth. My site mate and I will be able to borrow five high quality digital cameras to teach kids the basics of composition and choosing shots. If you’ve seen the documentary Born into Brothels, you’ll have some idea of how this goes. We hope to start classes after school lets out for the summer, get cameras in January, and then develop and exhibit the photos starting in Februrary.
Now for the bad news. First I was a single woman putting her cat on the Internet. Then it was another cat. Then it was two cats and crochet projects. And now - have mercy! - the carnage count extends to cats, crochet projects, and a kitten. Consider this my cry for help. Lock me in a padded rubber room, put me on potent pharmaceuticals, or just turn me on to a new hobby. I can’t go on like this.
Mimosa had a wee contraceptive failure, resulting in her first (and hopefully only) litter. Only two kittens were born. By the lump-counting method, I’d expected twice that number, and only one has survived. The one still with us is the darker one of the left. I’m not naming him, because I’m not keeping him. He’s been promised to a family in town. For perhaps the first time in Paraguay’s history, the owner of a female cat has more requests for kittens than she has of same to deliver. I can’t tempt fate that that’ll happen again.
The Guaraní word of the day is memby, meaning son. And ta’ýra, meaning the same thing. But Guaraní is funny about this one. There are two words for son, and two words for daughter. And which one you use depends on which parent’s perspective you’re referencing. So, for example, I am my mother’s memby kuña and my father’s tajýra. As a woman, I might have membykuera and memby kuñakuera, but I will never have ta’ýrakuera and tajýrakuera.
Unless, of course, I become one of those women obsessed by her wretched cats, in which case all talk of a future family is a moot point.