counterclockwise

The Ahecha photography project is drawing to a close. We’ve returned the cameras, developed the best photos from the more than 5,000 taken by our students, and held a little exposition in the lobby of the town court house. Now it just remains to do a photo swap with another project community. Then, if all goes well, some of our kids’ photos will be shown at the national exhibit in Asunción.

Want to see our favorites? I’ve put them up recently on Ahecha’s Flickr page. Click on over and take a gander.  The Flickr page is for a limited time only. Try the dedicated page on this website, instead.

The Guaraní word of the day is poteí, meaning six. These poteí mita’iguera really did us proud with their work. But they’d giggle if you said that to them. Your modern Guaraní speaker tends to prefer Spanish for numbers over 5 or below 1.

Yesterday’s wallet debacle has been resolved now. I have my replacement bank card. And since my other cards were reported found (but not, alas, the cash) a few blocks away from where I lost it, I won’t have to replace my Official Gringa ID Card. I’m just glad this happened the day before pay day, when I was nice and broke, and not the day after.

And if that weren’t enough, the office staff at Peace Corps/Paraguay really went above and beyond for me today. It all started with a package sent from the US to a friend of mine - no need to name names at the present, although I reserve the right to use this information for future blackmail purposes. The folks who sent this package are the sort of law-abiding, tax-paying nortes who obey traffic signals even when the cops aren’t looking, and fill in accurate values on the customs declaration form. If you’re reading this blog, chances are good that you’re cut from the same cloth.

The Paraguayan customs service exists to punish people for this kind of naivety.

When you declare a package with a value of over $100, what you are really declaring to a certain segment of Paraguayan officialdom is “I have much, much more money than I have guile and therefore I deserve to be robbed blind.”

At the customs office this morning, papers in hand, the cheerful security guard at the front desk pointed me towards his equally cheerful buddy Enrique. Ol’ Brer Enrique scrutinized the papers, including a pair of fancy governmental service passports, and came to the conclusion that his lucky day had arrived. “It’ll take a while to track this down in the warehouse,” he told me, “but I’ll call when I’ve found it and know what your fees will be.”

And sure enough, about fifteen minutes later my phone was ringing. The conversation went like this:

“Hola. Meri?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“OK, we’ve found your package. It’ll be thre**((+^$%#sand Guaraníes to pick it up.”

“I’m sorry. Did you just say three hundred thousand ($60)?”

“Ha, ha.  No, only three thousand ($0.60).”

“OK, great. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

By the time I get there, Enrique’s had a change of heart. “No, you must have misunderstood. It’s 300.000 Gs to pick up this package.”

I was pretty much flustered enough to fall for it, especially since DHL had already charged an extortionate fee and for various reasons I’d come expecting the worst. But fortunately (!?!) some other thief had already claimed the contents of my wallet, so there was no opportunity to cave to this little scam.

“Oh hell, that’s a lot of money. Sorry, Enrique. I don’t have the cash on me. I’ll have to come back later. How late are you open?”

And here, he got nervous and made his fatal mistake. “We’re open to five,” he said. “But let me give you my cellphone number. Make sure you call me personally when you get in; don’t go to the front desk. And, uh, maybe we could arrange a discount or something.”

After a bit of thought on the bus ride back, it dawned on me that there might have been something suspicious about that whole exchange . . .

So I talked to my new boss (Elisa), our security coordinator (Gustavo), and an office worker who routinely deals with different mail services (Eduardo). And within two hours, they’d worked their own personal connections to track down Enrique’s employment status at the customs bureau, clarify a paperwork embroglio with DHL, shame Enrique into reducing his “services fee” from $60 to $10, and take me back to the airport in the air conditioned comfort of a Peace Corps vehicle.

So I did end up paying (or, rather, my friend will end up paying) a bribe to Enrique. But it’s a sixth of what the opportunistic little turd originally asked for, and sources in the know tell me that we were doing good to get it. A small “services fee” in this sort of situation is practically customary. And I’d handed him all the papers when I still thought he was just a nice guy doing his job. And finally, he couldn’t have cut his bribe to zero without essentially admitting that the whole thing was a scam all along.

When Eduardo and I pulled up to the customs office, Enrique had the chutzpah to pretend that it was just an innocent little calculation error in a routine fee - despite the fact that this was supposed to be a fee-less pick up. But you have to let him get away with saving a little bit of face, because if you push too far he’ll feign righteous outrage in self defense and wind up costing you a lot more than two hours and ten dollars.

But after the fact, you’re free to go on the Internet and tell the world that Señor Hugo Enrique of Aduana (Paraguayan customs) is a cheating, lying, thieving little son of a slug, and that the airport in Asunción would be much improved if he got sucked into a jet engine and converted into fertilizer for the grass surrounding the tarmac.

Two lessons from this, then.

1.) NEVER DECLARE A CUSTOMS VALUE OF MORE THAN $100!!! Ever! Aside from charging a ton of legitimate fees, and causing massive delays, you draw the attention of the scum of the earth.

and 2.) Thank heavens for Paraguayan staff members at the office who know the system, have the contacts, speak the language, and fight on our side.

Let’s have a little break from youth photography, shall we?

I’m in Asunción for the next few days. In the original plan, I was going to take a morning bus in, print out the Ahecha photos we’ll be showing in our in-site exhibition, and leave that very same evening. After all, these little excursions are expensive, and I was just here two weeks ago for my routine performance review.  But then it turned out that I needed at least one night in town to get the photos developed. OK…

Then it was my friend Danita’s 26th birthday. Aside from the fact that Danita is just an all-around wonderful person, she was going to rent an ox-cart (!!!) to bring friends out to visit her site. Who can say no to a thing like that? So sign me up for two nights out of Tacuatí.

Then it resolved that I could get the most expensive parts of this trip (viz, my bus fare and hotel room) reimbursed if I participated in the administrative staff’s annual planning and budgeting workshop. And that’s been an interesting experience. But it does require an extra night tacked onto my trip.

And then this very afternoon, like a stupid sun-addled tourist, I lost my wallet somewhere between the Peace Corps Paraguay office and the USAID facility where we’ve been having the workshop. So now I’m in town for yet another extra day while I get my most important cards canceled and/or replaced.

I’ve been looking at the weather reports now, and it seems at least possible that after all this resolves, I’m still going to be rained out of site until approximately the heat death of the universe. Which — in a place as hot as Paraguay in the summer — seems like a very long time indeed.

The Guaraní word of the day is hake, meaning “Look out!” Hake señorita! Your wallet fell out of your purse! But thankfully, it was the day before pay day, not the day after so there was very little cash inside. Also, I don’t carry my passport or other important documents pertaining to my northern hemisphere life there. Also, I keep an emergency back-up stash of money in my mailbox in the office. And most importantly, this has happened to hundreds (if not thousands) of scatter-brained, kumbayah-curdled volunteers before, and the PC/Paraguay staff has recovery process down to a fine art.

 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.

Just a quick heads up to a new site feature:

On your right, there’s a link to a page featuring the 2008-09 Tacuatí Ahecha group. As the project goes on, I’ll post some more student photography here. For now, get to know the girls a bit.

I´ve taken down the dedicated Ahecha page, but you can still see that content here.

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.

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.