counterclockwise

I’ve finally gotten my fridge now. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen since my last plane ride. After three months of 40 °C (around 105 °F) days, a glass of ice water is more appealing than a bottle of the vintner’s finest.

Not that that stops my Paraguayan friends from enjoying wine in their own style. Most of the year, very sweet box wine is served over ice and mixed with equal parts of Coca-Cola or whichever local brand is available. But since it’s Christmas and nobody in his right mind would drink egg nog in this climate, we make the vino a little more festive by adding fruit and juice, or just using pineapple soda in place of the Coke. Ah, tradition.

The local radio stations have been playing “Feliz Navidad” remixes for weeks, the corner stores are well-stocked with pan dulce (which is basically the PY take on fruitcake), and light poles over the sweltering streets of Asunción are decorated with incongruous leaping reindeer. But for all that, I have an enormous amount of trouble believing that the holidays are upon us. The kids are on summer vacation, for heaven’s sake, I get sunburned if I stay outside past 9 AM, and my laundry goes from dripping wet to bone dry in two hours’ time.

The Guaraní word of the day is páila, meaning skillet. I found a really nice one, cast iron, in Asunción. It’s heavy with a solid wooden handle, and as one of my classmates commented, you could probably kill someone with it if you were properly motivated. But all the same, I’m in love and prepared to leave behind more than a few pairs of socks to give it suitcase space sometime around August 2009.

I saw the strangest thing in Asunción today. Something I haven’t seen in months - a commercial airplane. I still haven’t seen a comtrail crossing the sky out here. It’s plausible that I never will. The only time I can ever remember seeing a bare blue sky in the US was in the immediate wake of 9/11 when all the flights were grounded. Next time the weather’s clear, go outside, look up, and then tell me how many comtrails you see.

On the way to Encarnación for Thanksgiving, I saw evergreen trees for the first time in months. Equally wierd.

And this entire country is completely devoid of squirrels. I can’t imagine why - Paraguay seems like it would be a pretty squirrel-compatible ecosystem. The rats, bats, and birds like the trees here well enough. 

When I leave my site for volunteer events in the big city, traveling over asphalt and speaking English, sometimes it seems almost possible that I’ve just landed in Central Florida, circa 1966. Then some odd realization like the above comes along, and I realize all over again exactly how alien this place can be.

The Guaraní words of the day are hi’a cheve, meaning “it seems to me”. Hi’a cheve that I was well and truly due for this last excursion but hi’a cheve that it will be a good while before I’m ready for another.

Well, if you ever wondered what it would look like to transplant an Alpine chalet into the subptropical rainforests of South America, I’ve got an answer for you. Actually, it works out rather well. Among other things, it makes a nice venue for bringing about 200 Americans together for Thanksgiving.

I had a blast - ate too much, learned about the nesting habits of red-rumped blackbirds, experimented with carving figurines into mandioca roots, spent hours in the pool, and spoke more English than I have at any time in the last three months. I wouldn’t have changed a thing about it, although next year I might sign up for the cooking committee and try my hand at roasting a Paraguayan gobbler.

Now I’m back in Asunción for two short days before beginning my three-month inservice language training. I didn’t have much of a plan for today, but it’s hard to go into the office without finding something to do. My something ended up being helping to reorganize our little library.

Your typical Peace Corps Volunteer is the sort of person who can leave friends, family, home, career, language, and all manner of creature comforts for two years, but cannot go more than a week without recreational reading. Out here it’s a survival adaptation, because when you’re rained out of work, play, and electricity for five days at a stretch, you can only straighten out your sock drawer so many times. So we have a little ad-hoc library in the head office, filled with all the books that previous volunteers didn’t want to drag through an airport on the way back home.

It’s a very eclectic collection, ranging from War and Peace to trashy chick lit to pulpy genre titles that have been gathering dust for half a century. There’s no catalog, no checkouts, no limit on the number you can have out at any given time, no due dates, and no waiting lists. Turnover is absurdly fast and people are generous with the contents of their care packages, so there’s always something new to find. After six weeks or so in the campo, it’s like passing the gates of paradise to come in and change out your titles.

The Guaraní word of the day is guyra, meaning bird. We devoured quite a few of them over the holiday, and passed no shortage of hours watching the blackbirds attend the odd hanging nests they’d woven into one of the hotel’s palm trees.

I do have a lot to be thankful for. Certainly I’m thankful for all of you being in touch by e-mail and snail mail alike. Or just reading and wishing me well. I’m living a pretty good approximation of the high life out here, doing good work, enjoying some adventures, and I’ve got more to look forward too when I finish my service.

In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to this trip. By volunteer standards, I haven’t been doing much traveling. Also, I haven’t been doing a whole bunch of sleeping since I sighted a few rats brazenly moving through my bedroom. So a couple of nights in a hotel should do me some good.

The Guaraní word of the day should mean “thanks”, but Guaraní as it’s presently spoken doesn’t much have its own term. The Spanish word is used much more frequently, albeit modified to “gracia” or “graciamante” to accommodate the Guaraní speaker’s accent.

The word of the day, then, is jopara, meaning mixture. The vast majority of conversations in this country take place in a jopara of the two principle languages, heavier on the Spanish in big cities and formal occasions and leaning more towards Guaraní when you’re telling the kids to go feed the chickens.

During our two-day staging event in

A pessimist says the glass is half empty.
An optimist says it’s half full.
A Peace Corps Volunteer says, “Hey, I could take a bath with that!”

This past week was an outstanding example of the phenomenon. Volunteers in each region of the country get together on a monthly basis at something called a VAC meeting. We get announcements from HQ, do a little student-government type work, solicit each other’s help on projects, and take the opportunity to laugh and gripe a bit in English. This month’s VAC meeting was held in Tacuatí. Lori, the other Volunteer in Tacuatí, and I were going to split the crowd between our two houses.

But then it rained and a tree fell on the power lines near my house. The whole pueblo lost both power and water for about a day. Out here, everything shuts down when that happens. People lock their doors and don’t peek out again until the radio starts back up. So it ended up that all eleven of us stayed overnight at Lori’s house (all 100 square meters and one waterless bathroom of it). We boiled pasta with rainwater, roasted marshmallows over her stove, and drank warm beer by candlelight. And everybody was up and ready for the 5:30 AM bus without so much as a word of complaint or a misplaced toothbrush. We’ve got a really awesome group of people down here.

The Guaraní word of the day is the verb (a)reko, meaning “to have”. To say “We (exclusive) have rain” is oreko ama. To say “We (exclusive) do not have power” is ndorekoi energia.

I’m just now moving to more independent digs, so this seems like a good point to stop and recall the good times in my first apartment in Tacuatí. I had great neighbors in my little house. Here’s one of my favorites:

She was a gift to the family, and brings the household chicken population up to about half a dozen official members and assorted visiting scavengers. She’s a pretty homely specimen with rusty brown feathers and a bare red neck. She doesn’t have a name. And if I understood my contact correctly, she’s due for the dinner table pretty soon. All the same, I’ve gotten attached to her. The family started its flock about the same time I arrived here, and she was the first hen. She’s an undemanding creature, quiet by chicken standards, and uninterested in pecking order politics. She doesn’t roost with the others and is unusually comfortable around humans.

During our first few weeks in Tacuatí, she decided she liked my kitchen. Most of the time, it’s dark and still and cool in there. In particular, I had a disconnected and disused sink full of fabric scraps. My favorite hen was the first to start laying her eggs there, and I’m still naïve enough regarding chickens to find that delightful. Eggs! Fresh from the source! Delivered to within arm’s reach of my frying pan! How cool is that?

The Guaraní word of the day is ryguasu, meaning chicken generally or hen more specifically. The chicks, then, are ryguasu ra’y. The roosters are ryguasume.

First, a short medical note for those who were concerned. My feet are in no danger. When I said the larger pique worm was the diameter of a pencil eraser I didn’t mean to imply a foot-long monster parasite. While they’re incubating, they curl up into little disks, and the disk diameter is what I was referring to. Any given cross-section of the worm is no thicker than a pencil lead and in any event, it was in the skin of a callus and has apparently caused y’all more pain and trauma than it caused me.

On a less nausea-inducing note, the pueblo of Tacuatí, like most if not all Paraguayan towns, has a patron saint (the Virgin of Something I Couldn’t Make Out Even After Asking Three Times) and a celebration on behalf of that saint. Ours was September 24. The two days prior were spent in bingo games, elementary school dance recitals, barbecues, and general party preparations.

Every year, the streets are lined with streamers. In the US, you’d buy them at Party City for $5 per 100 yards. They’d be made of vinyl in some Chinese factory, and one guy with a ladder could do the entire parade route in a morning’s time. Here, the streamers are individually hand-glued paper strips because that $5 is about Gs. 20,000 – a new pair of sandals, or 10 liters of milk, or a day’s wages for a domestic employee. Things like vinyl and machinery are relatively expensive in Paraguay, but labor is disproportionately cheap. And a person can glue a lot more than 100 yards worth of streamers in a day.

Then too, it’s just tradition to do it that way. And they are pretty, provided they don’t get rained away.

The Fiesta itself includes a Catholic Mass followed by a procession through town. The parish statue of the Virgin in question is placed on a litter near the head of the queue and solemnly walked through the nicer streets in town. Hymns are sung, fireworks are lit, prayers are recited, and kids are carefully herded into more or less orderly lines. At the end of the route, a few closing prayers are given, and then begins the asado. Good times. We even had an impromptu air show. A pair of military pilots on a training run spotted the crowd, buzzed us, and did a few barrel rolls. Not quite the Blue Angels, but you’ve got to love the spontaneity of it.

The Guaraní word of the day is heta, meaning plenty. We had heta people, heta to see, and heta so’o at the asado.

One of the odd little side effects of being in the southern hemisphere is that our daylight savings times are also backwards. Since our summer is just now getting cranking, we’re going to spring forward here shortly.

Up until now, we’ve been synched up with US Eastern Standard Time. But when Paraguay’s daylight savings time takes effect this weekend, we’ll spring forward an hour. And here shortly, DST will come to an end in the US and y’all will fall back.

End result, I’ll shortly be two hours offset, time zone wise. If it’s 8 o’clock in the US, it’ll be 10 o’clock here, and so on. In general, the best hours to catch me by phone are in the evening, say between 7 and 10 PM local time.

The Guaraní word of the day is kuarahy, meaning sun. We’re seeing quite a bit of it now. I amused lots of Paraguayans last week with my peeling sunburn, and I’m working on a very impressive farmer’s tan.

Was last week’s solar eclipse visible in the northern hemisphere, too? Ña Carmen was very thoughtful to tell me about it and so one of the radio DJs and I went out to look. We went during the middle of its projected showing, but couldn’t really see anything.

Eclipse or no, we have had some spectacular sunsets and sunrises lately. A lot of the local estancias have been having terrible brush fires due to our long-running (but very recently alleviated) drought. We aren’t threatened by the fires here, but we did get a tremendous amount of smoke, giving us some really extravagant twilight hours.

The Guaraní word of the day is pyhareve, meaning morning. In order to make the most out of each Horqueta trip, I get up really freaking early in the pyhareve. You need to be at the town bus stop at 5:30 to get the first bus out of Tacuatí, and you do need the first one. Depending on what return buses are operating that day, I have between two and a half and five hours to hit the bank, buy vegetables and whatever else I can’t find in site, meet and greet other Volunteers, and get online. Previous trips were quickly consumed with house wares shopping, but I’m hoping things will proceed at a more leisurely pace now that I’ve more or less got my apartment furnished. On the other hand, now I’ll have fewer excuses to go in.

Sorry for the long delay. So far I’ve been unable to make an in-town Internet connection, which means I only get online when I dedicate the day to getting into Horqueta, the nearest town with an Internet café. Hopefully the situation will be ameliorated here shortly, but meanwhile this is the best I’ve got. I have been received your text messages, Bill and Katie, and they’ve been great day brighteners. Also, Katie, the copy of Vogue was a smash hit with Paraguayans and other volunteers alike.

Life is finally starting to normalize a bit. My first two weeks in Tacuati were stressful. My house was only half finished and I was three-quarters moved in. The yard was crawling with workers putting in the new fence and my kitchen was consumed with preparing lunch for ten every day.

The living is definitely better with the fencing moved out of my breezeway, a fridge brought in, my gas tank connected, a door to which I have the key, a light bulb in the bathroom, and my hammock set up in a nice shady spot.

Likewise, the coop is on the road to recovery. My predecessor in town terminated her service early, leaving a gap of almost a year without guidance. In the meantime, the paperwork was neglected. So when I came, it was apparently clean slate time. All the ledgers and loan applications were sacked up and carted to a new office, the only paid employee went her separate way, and a replacement fresh out school was hired.

I spent my first week here waiting for the stars to align for the move, and the second week unsacking and reorganizing financial records. So it’s been at least two weeks since we’ve been able to transact any business. But at least now I’ve got a feel for the state of the co-op´s record keeping. My job is going to be reinstating the practice of writing out receipts and calculating interest, and teaching the movers and shakers some skills in accounting and computer operation.

The Guaraní word of the day is ama, meaning rain. My first night in my new house coincided with the first rain Tacuatí had had since May. Since then we’ve reverted to a more parched state, but I’ll take it as a promising sign that the drought broke with me.

Bonus note!! If you want to get technical about it, Tacuatí is supposed to be a nasal word with a tilde over the final i. However, as a practical matter, modern computer systems don’t recognize that character without getting into special font sets. I’m not going to inflict that on you. The popular alternative is to use a standard accent mark over the i. Since all Guaraní words are accented on the final syllable anyway, the mark usually goes without saying and its presence implies that something more is afoot.