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 OK, as promised, here are some Ahecha pictures. These aren’t the best of the best (those, I’ll save for a later date), but they are some of my runner up favorites.

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Almita loves the swings near her grandparents’ house, and so do her sister and her friends.

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Evelyn’s little brother Reinaldo spends a lot of time listening to music.

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Liz Mariela’s mother looks very much like her daughter, and they both have a lot on their minds.

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Lucy thinks the process of taking photos is just as interesting as the photos that come out.

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Lots of neighborhood kids come to Valeria’s house to play, and she loves being at the center of activity.

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Vanessa knows that good things are worth the wait.

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The Guaraní word of the day is ky’ha, meaning hammock. Or swings. In Guaraní, as in Spanish, the two share a term. The swings in Almi’s picture, above, are in the small plaza where my coop has its office. They were installed a few months ago and are one of the hottest spots in town for the 12-and-under set. Kids swarm them in the afternoon, and when one becomes available, somebody cries out “Hamaca libre!” and starts a stampede of shrieking mita’iguera.

After an eventful, long, and long-overdue vacation to the United States, I’m safely back in Tacuatí. It’s nice not to be living out of a suitcase anymore, but I’ve had to start from scratch on acclimating to the heat down here. My tan is recovering nicely, though.

And as I’m getting back on the hora paraguaya, it’s hard to believe all that went into those few weeks. Great to see you, Mom, Bill, Katie, Dan, Preston, Bruce, Sandra, Colin, Zak, Laura, and Richy! Great to meet you, Rosa, Benito, Alba, Beno, Miguel, Santiago, and Juan Carlos!

Also - dog sledding:

And - the Grand Canyon:

And - Nogales-Sonora, Mexico:

Six time zones. Nine planes. And maybe a few major holidays in there somewhere. You tend to lose track…

The Guaraní word of the day is tembiapo, meaning work. Back to it, people. See you in seven months!

I made a hummingbird feeder this past week.

I took a half liter (16.9 oz) plastic bottle, melted a hole in the cap, and used candle wax to seal in a straw. It’s hanging on my front porch in a little crocheted sling. I’ve seen one bird at it so far, and about fifteen curious neighbors.

I’ve got a beautiful tree in my yard that flowers intermittently all year round and attracts hummingbirds like nobody’s business, but it’s in a seldom-viewed corner of my yard. My new feeder is probably the avian equivalent to living on a diet of only fast food, and it’s leaving a sticky, ant-ridden patch on my porch, but it has the virtue of being where I can see it.

Provided, of course, that I’m not making a trans-equatorial migration of my own at the time.

The Guaraní word of the day is mainumby, meaning hummingbird.  There are a few dozen different species in South America, ranging from the mundane oh-I-saw-one-of-those-in-my-azalea-bush-last-week sorts to spectacular sometimes-the-truth-is-stranger-than-fiction freaks.

OK, I’m going to break from my usual web policy and for once announce where I’m going before I get there.

I’m going home for Christmas! Call me! E-mail me! See me in person! Kick my ass in video games! Feed me foods that are not mandioca! I promise I’m not carrying any tropical diseases. Well, OK, at least not any contagious ones.

Airline schedule permitting, I should be available in Knoxville from January 1, and leaving midday on the 5th. I’ll have access to my e-mail. Write for phone numbers - I’ll be mooching off my mother’s cell and landline while I’m in town.

The Guaraní word of the day is mo’o meaning where. Mo’o am I going? To visit people I love! To the land of eight-lane asphalted highways, 24-hour Super Target, hot water on tap, microwave ovens, and ubiquitous broadband. To Colorado, to the Grand Canyon, to the Arizona border country, and to Knoxville! Life is good.

While at Thanksgiving this year (which was an exceptionally good party), I had the chance to go to a place in southern Paraguay called Trinidad, where the meticulously maintained ruins of an old Jesuit mission can be found.

In the early 18th century, slavers were decimating the indigenous populations of Paraguay and many other places. They justified this by saying that while they were wreaking horrible damage on the lives of the people they captured, they were really doing them a favor in the long run, insofar as their enslavement also presented an opportunity to baptise them and give them better afterlives.

The Jesuit missions were an attempt to undermine this argument by preemptively converting the indigenous people to Christianity. They were progressive, even by modern standards. The mission had an educational system, subsidized care to the poor and infirm, and cooperated with the preexisting chiefs. The angels carved onto the cathedral had indigenous features - a strange and sad sight, considering that modern Paraguayans would just about riot if the local cathedral tried the same thing.

The Jesuits got away with it all for a good while, but eventually their political enemies caught up with them and their permission to operate in the territory of Paraguay was revoked. And today the people are Catholic, bilingual, and clamoring at the gates of the foreign embassies in Asunción to get work visas for back-breaking agricultural labor and hotel maid jobs. So in the end, it’s hard to say who won.

The Guaraní word of the day is petei, meaning one. It can also be used to mean “a” or “an”, although Guaraní speakers don’t use that form anywhere nearly as often as English speakers do.

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!