The Census

The official, door-to-door Health Census is our first and perhaps most formidable task as Rural Health Volunteers. We must arrive on the doorstep of at least 50 different houses in our communities and ask a buttload of questions such as “Where does your water come from?” and “Where do you go to the bathroom?” It’s surely akward, but it must be done. How on earth can we begin to “help” our communities if we don’t even know what the problems are, what people need, what they already have, and what they want? All development work has to ultimately be done by the people who are “being developed,” which means I have to start with THEIR actual needs and THEIR actual motivations, and not just project my perception of their needs and wants upon them. 

So I am dutifully completing my census (censo) of Potrero Baez, the 120-house community where I now have a house, friends, (probably enemies too), lots of work, regular bouts of diarrhea, and an adorable puppy.

But the work has been very, but very slow. Making my house liveable has eaten up literally weeks of my time: waiting for the construction guy to come, waiting for the plumber to come, waiting for the electrician to come. (Not to mention a few days wandering around asking people where I can find a construction worker, plumber, and electrician. It’s not like they advertise- everybody just knows.) And it’s not like in the U.S. where they say they’ll be there between 10am-4pm and then they show up at 5pm (which is bad enough). It’s more like: He says he’ll be there on Tuesday morning, but he actually shows up Wednesday afternoon when you’re not home, so you have to walk to his house on Thursday to reschedule for Friday, then after ditching out again on Friday, he finally shows up on Saturday at 7am when you thought you were gonna sleep in. Hah, right. Also, making trip after trip on the colectivo to Villarrica (the centro) to buy things like shower parts, parts for a ceiling fan, sink parts, cement, and other household parts/items/tools has also eaten up days or weeks that could have been spent censo-ing.

So yesterday, after a failed morning attempt to get out and “censo” (there was a death in the community, which means everybody goes to the family’s house to offer condolences all morning), you can bet that when I got out around 3pm to try again, I was anxious to check 2 or 3 houses off my list before nightfall at 5pm.

Now, I had always assumed that the town drunk, we’ll call her “Doña Leonida”’s affinity for me would be more of a liability than an asset. Little did I know that my patient tolerance for her annoying, drunken visits, and unintelligible ranting in Guarani would soon pay off. As it turns out, drunk though she may be, about half of a square-kilometer of my community is populated by relatives of Ña Leonida. So after she dragged me to her house insisting that she be the first census interviewee for the day, I could hardly refuse when she suggested that she accompany me to all of her nearby relatives’ houses to do THEIR censo interviews as well. Jaha! She said excitedly, “Let’s go!” 

First we visited one of her daughter-in-laws who is studying nursing at a university, and after completing her family’s censo thanked me for the work that I’m doing, and invited me to stop by the house for lunch any time.

Next, while at another house interviewing Leonida’s sister, I asked “Mboy personapa oiko hina ko’ape nde rogape,” “How many people are there living here in your house?” Three, was her effortless response. “What?” shouted Leonida accusingly, “Don’t you lie to this pretty girl.” They then proceeded to have an argument in Guarani about how many people are really living there. “I know what these census people use this information for,” shouted her sister, “If I tell her that so-and-so is living here, then she’s going to write it down and the government is going to find out!” Don’t ask me why she believes this to be true, or what she thinks is going to happen if the government finds out that so-and-so is living there. Leonida turned to me “There are 4 people living here,” she corrected her sister, and proceeded to provide me with what I assume to be their correct names and ages. 

After that we went to her cousin’s house, where there appeared to be a gathering of 5 or 6 men sitting around smoking and chatting. For a young blonde foreign female, it felt like walking into a lion’s den. But Leonida fearlessly led me into the thick of it. “Come here muñequita,” her nickname for me. (“doll”) She pulled me right into the middle of the circle. “This girl’s here to work,” she told them. “Answer her questions, let’s go!” she ordered her cousin, who looked at me skeptically while making fun of me for surely not understanding any Guarani. I proceeded to explain to him in Guarani that I understand and speak quite a bit and that I had been conducting all of my census interviews in Guarani. But when my still flawed language skills prevented him from understanding one of the questions, Ña Leonida stepped in, “You idiot,” she shouted at him, “don’t you understand what she’s trying to ask you?” and proceeded to translate the question perfectly into Guarani for me. By this point, she had memorized my census questions word-for-word.

Afterwards we went to one of her daughters houses. The daughter is also a known alcoholic and lives with her husband, 8 children ranging from 1-23 years old, and 2 grandchildren in a 3-room house. (Yes, at a mere 60 years of age, Leonida is a great-grandmother.) The oldest son of the 8 children is in jail for armed robbery. The youngest of the 8 children is 18 months old and has an enormous genital hernia that the parents have been ignoring for months. “You have to take him to the hospital as soon as you can,” I reminded the father, even though the nurse at our Puesto de Salud told him the same thing months ago. “At the Regional Hospital, they will do the surgery for free- but you have to take him this week, this is an emergency,” I urged the father (who seemed to be slightly more responsible than the mom). I have often seen this baby sitting outside on the ground, bare-bottomed and unattended in front of the family’s house, crawling around the filthy yard that is filled with assorted garbage and poop from a variety of animals and people. Unfortunately, I will not be surprised if the baby still has not been taken to the hospital by the end of the month. Frankly, it is a miracle that he has reached 18 months given his living conditions, the fact that his mother was 45 when she gave birth to him, and the fact that she continued to drink heavily throughout her pregnancy (according to reports from a variety of community members).

At another of Leonida’s cousins houses, the father mistakenly told me there were only 6 people living in the house- he and his 5 children, apparently forgetting to mention the 7^th, his wife. As we were walking away Leonida suddenly put her arm out in front of me “Wait,” she said, “did you write down his wife’s name on your paper?” Nope. “HEY!” she shouted back to her cousin, a 50-year-old man, “What’s your wife’s name again?!” We added it to the family’s form, and continued on. 

But by this time it was already starting to get dark out; we had to call it a day. “But there are so many more houses to go to,” she said. “You have to come back tomorrow to do more. Will you come back tomorrow?”

Thanks to my town drunk, I had just had the most productive day of censo-ing yet.

“Yes ma’am, you BET I’ll come back tomorrow.”