counterclockwise

How do you top a 20 foot long anaconda? Well, I don’t suppose you can, really. So bear with me while I return to more quotidian topics.

There hasn’t been much of anything photogenic in Tacuatí lately because we’ve been absolutely inundated with rain. In ten days’ time, we got twenty inches. Our rutted dirt road is even more of an adventure than usual, the bus driver shrugs and stays home as often as he runs his route, and the frogs in the pond next to me sing at a cadence and a volume that closely resembles a car alarm.

For all that it’s getting hot, no one’s swimming in the river these days. Not for fear of finding snakes there, so much as for fear of getting swept away in the absurdly high water, or getting tangled in the small trees you occasionally see drifting downstream. A little ways down from where our current bridge stands, where the Vikings allegedly carved the rocks, there used to be a ferry. The pilings are still there, or so I assume. Last time I checked, the water was high enough to completely cover over the gear boxes.

The Guaraní word of the day is iñaña, meaning bad. I’m being bad, coming into town this week, because in two weeks time, I’ll be out again for a long and fantastically expensive Thanksgiving celebration in the other end of the country. I feel a bit hypocritical giving advice on frugality at work this week. But it’d been a month since I’d been to Asunción, and I was out of books and ibuprofen and peanut butter, and in the last two weeks I’d ripped major holes in both of my favorite pairs of pants. So we’ll call this a little mental health leave with time set aside for retail therapy.

Back before I left for Paraguay, I described the country to a few of you as the place where biologists go to slog through the marshes and eventually wrestle out snakes the size of water mains for the benefit of National Geographic’s cameras.

Well, it took me sixteen months, but here finally is a snake the size of a water main.

She was an anaconda, indigenous to the region, 6 meters (20 feet) long, and of unknown-but-surely-impressive age and weight. Not just impressive to me, either. Although the species is common enough out here, finding one of this size is a once-in-a-generation event. Given what’s happened to local fish populations lately, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime event now.

Two guys out fishing on the Rio Ypané found her, along an untouched stretch of river a few kilometers downstream from the town’s busy, noisy beach. She had just eaten, for which reason she couldn’t dive to escape them. So they did what most Paraguayans would like to do upon encountering a snake longer than some aircraft, and bashed her head in.

Eventually, they got her body loaded on the boat trailer and towed her through town for an impromptu parade. By this time, it was twilight, so I was stuck using my camera’s flash. And she was so long that her head and tail both hung off the ends of the trailer. So I’m sad to say that I have no pictures of her stretched to her full length - you have to see her by halves.

In the picture above, you can see the bulge of her last meal at about the halfway point in her body. In the next photo, you can see from the bulge to where her tail hangs off the trailer. And in the one after that, you can see from the bulge in the opposite direction.

The bulge was the subject of all kinds of speculation. I heard theories that it might be everything from a calf to a horse to a person to another snake to a shark. So at the end of the parade route, we all gathered ’round as a few especially tough ranch hands slowly relieved her of one gorgeous snake skin and a nasty, stinking capybara.

The world’s largest rodent is ugly in life, and repulsive even when expertly cooked. Half digested in the belly of a hours-dead giant snake, it can singe human nose hairs at a distance of ten paces. I took pictures anyways, but they are pretty bloody. View at your own risk.
Cutting open the belly
The capybara emerges
The whole ugly thing

So that’s the end of the largest snake I’ve ever seen. I wish I could have seen her in life. I wish, for that matter, that she were still alive. But all the same, I wouldn’t sell my experience having seen her for any sum you could offer.

The Guaraní word of the day, naturally enough, is kuriju, meaning anaconda. No fewer than twice during the Giant Snake Parade, I overheard people saying that they hadn’t previously believed that the kuriju was a real animal. Paraguayan TV channels run really supremely stupid schlock horror movies on Sunday afternoons when there’s not a futbol game or telenovela to be had. And given the believability deficits inherent in the genre, it’s understandable that no one was taking the creature du jour seriously.

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.

Another year, another Fiesta Patronal. My last, I suppose. It’s extremely weird to be thinking those thoughts now. But this year’s was a good one, and I’ve certainly taken enough pictures to last me. And better yet, to bore y’all senseless when I get back to the US.

Assuming I get back. If the odd little snippets of news I get out here are anything to go by, Wall Street has been reduced to rubble, the banks are giving out Monopoly money now, and mortgage lenders nationwide are running from the federal marshals. Should I cash out my return ticket and live like a queen in a riverside terreño out here?

The Guaraní word of the day is ndaipori, meaning “there are/were none”. Last year’s fiesta patronal featured a short airshow, but this year did not. Ndaipori avionkuera fiestahape koaño. But we had a parade, a barbeque, and a week’s worth of dance recitals, musical performances, and futsal games, which culminated in the victors hoisting live sheep overhead. It’s hard to feel cheated, under the circumstances.

These are not funny novelty candles. They’re just plain white wax cylinders I keep on hand for power outages. I haven’t run them through an oven, or purposely subjected them to science or art projects. They just sit in a quiet corner of my kitchen, waiting for the next tree to fall on the power lines.

The reason they’re slumping so dejectedly is that the heat is back. A few days back, I got a reading of 38 degrees Celsius in the coolest, shadiest part of my house. In northern hemisphere terms, this is like recording 99 degree heat in the first days of March.

If past experience is any guide, there is both good news and bad news to this situation. The good news is that it will not get too much worse than this for the rest of the summer. The bad news is that summer is eight months long.

The Guaraní word of the day is mínga, meaning mutual aid or cooperative work. Work at my actual coop has been just straight-forward number crunching lately, largely a one-person effort. But I’ve recently been involved with a secondary domestic violence project. That one has involved the cooperation of the town judge (the initiator and facilitator), the radio station (free advertisement), the Catholic parish (use of their meeting facility), the judge’s assistant (general secretarial help and test audience), Peace Corps Paraguay and other NGOs (stacks of materials and tapes), fellow volunteer Liam (use of speakers and chair wrangling), and myself (as-needed fetching and pestering). Good times!

In my last post, I had a picture of a cryptic little symbol carved in stone. This is one of several found on the banks of the Rio Ypané. No one know what they mean - except for some modern day graffiti - and their creators’ origins are similarly murky.

If you asked a Tacuateño, he’d tell you that the Vikings carved those rocks. This is possible at least in theory. The Rio Ypané drains into the Rio Paraguay, which itself drains into the Atlantic Ocean, which was pretty much clotted with Vikings at one point, at least in the northern half. In the seventies, some French archaeologist apparently came out to Tacuatí and allegedly discovered a trove of Viking artifacts.

I personally think this guy was enjoying a few too many of Paraguay’s botanical resources, and I don’t mean yerba mate by that. But the Paraguayans I’ve talked to really seem to prefer the Viking theory to calling it art made by their own indigenous ancestors. Vikings are more dramatic, and what the average modern Paraguayan feels about the indigenous tribes is somewhat akin to what a French Parisian feels about the Roma street person lurking around the Metro station.

The Guaraní word of the day is ita, meaning stone. During our training, we lived in the community of Las Piedras, meaning The Stones in Spanish. It was a satellite community of the larger town of Ita. And oddly enough, Las Piedras wasn’t too terribly far from another Paraguayan river called the Ypané, although my past and present rivers are connected by no other common thread.

I’m in Horqueta, shopping, checking e-mail, and surveying the damage a bit. A major hailstorm passed through here, with chunks in the citrus-fruit size range. My friend Rachel has a repair crew on her roof this morning, putting fresh tin over the perforated pieces, and she’s not the only one.

Tacuatí escaped completely unscathed, just a little damper than usual for this time of year. Last year at this time, we were in the middle of a long drought, punctuated by major brushfires. This year, our fortunes appear to have reversed. I, for one, am entirely pleased with the change.

The Guaraní word of the day is amanday, or hail. There is a Guaraní neologism for ice (”frozen water”), but hail is the only form of the cold stuff a pre-twentieth century Paraguayan would ever see.

Tacuatí is getting a new Peace Corps Volunteer, bringing our total gringo population up to two, including me. The new guy is Liam (Paraguayan nickname yet to be determined). He’ll be working with the mayor’s office to organize neighborhood commissions. Paraguayan local government is strange in that the mayors and city councils don’t just decide to do small projects on their own. Neighborhood projects have to be planned and requested by grassroots groups, then approved and funded by the municipality, then executed by the grassroots group that got the process started.

As you can imagine, some neighborhoods have much more success putting together a proposal, getting it approved, and then following through than others. So we wish Liam well with his efforts to identify solvable problems and then get to know capable problem solvers.

The Guaraní word of the day is ava, meaning indigenous person. In classic Guaraní, the language actually calls itself avane’e, or the speech of the natives. They call Spanish karaine’e, or the speech of fancy gentlemen. The Guaraní word for “who”, mava, can be translated as “which Indian”.

Another day, another rushed trip into Horqueta, although I´ve exacerbated this one by not prewriting my e-mail and entry here. So forgive the typos; I´m working on less revision time than usual.

I’m in town to help with a friend’s winter camp and attend a volunteer meeting. I’ll be one of the old ladies at this meeting. I now have more time behind me in my Paraguayan stay then I have ahead of me.

The Guaraní word of the day is mita´iguera, meaning children. My friend´s camp has about fifty kids ages four to ten. We made soy empanadas yesterday, and today is game day.

The new faces are new officers on the “board of directors” for my coop. We finally had our annual meeting. It was well past the theoretical deadline, but still six weeks earlier than we managed last year, so I’ll take that as a win. Some of our officers have just changed hats (e.g., last year’s Vice President is this year’s Secretary), but we also have a few hardy souls who are entirely new to the board.

As far as that goes, I have to admit that the places aren’t quite brand new anymore, either. The coop actually moved into its new office back in April, and I’m only just now getting around to posting a photo. The new digs are a major step up in the world. The old place was roomy, but had gappy wooden walls and a leaky tin roof. In the summer (all eight months of it) it heated up like an oven. The new place is two tiny rooms - one closet-sized office and a bathroom where we hoard burnt out computer hardware. But that’s all we need, and the building itself is much nicer brick and tile, situated in a little public plaza.

The Guaraní word of the day is a three-for-one deal: Ypane. This is the name of the river that runs by Tacuatí. I’d tried forever to find its meaning, with no luck until here lately. The first part, Y, means water. But “pane” proved more elusive. It turns out to be a combination of two words, then. “Pa” means rear or tail. And “ne” means rotten smelling. So I live in the scenic town of White Cane, situated over the Fetid Backwater River.