Cricket Massacre

Today I woke up at 8:30am, shamefully late for rural Paraguay. But it was part of an honest effort to get rid of a nasty head cold by getting a few extra hours of rest. This meant that after a leisurely breakfast of eggs and coffee over an episode of Glee, I didn’t get out to start washing my laundry until 10 o’clock. All the usual reminders from the neighbors: “You shouldn’t be working on a Sunday,” “Laundry at 10 o’clock? You should have been done with that an hour ago. This is the time of day to relax and drink tereré.”

Okay, they’re right. But I have been doing laundry on Sunday for almost 2 years now. Can’t they say their piece once and then just let me be different? Plus, I’m not a stay-at-home-mom like my neighbor, who washed on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, AND Saturday. I work all week in the school and only have weekends to wash. Whatever, I just take it and keep washing.

By noon everything is hanging to dry and the sun is sizzling the water out of it, must be about 95 degrees- comfortable enough in the shade. But today’s work is not done. Dishes are next, followed by filling up my stash of 2L bottles of water (you never know when the water might go out). After a quick pasta lunch and another episode of Glee, I’m ready to scrub the grease and grime off the gas stove ‘til it gleams.

And finally, the sweep. Around and under everything with the broom. And for once I was going to pull everything out from under the sink to get it good and clean, and hopefully find the cricket that had been hiding behind there chirping its head off for over a week.

As I pulled out the little cooler from under the sink to clean behind it, a sudden burst of movement made me jump away, and I realized that the “cricket” that had been chirping the past week was actually a cricket NEST full of many adult and baby crickets! (This is terrifying because, while I am unfamiliar with American crickets for comparison, Paraguayan crickets are HUGE- about the size of a baby chicken- they have round, bulging eyes and their serrated legs HURT you when they jump on you!) They are also FAST and can jump FAR, so after what must have been a hilarious-to-see debacle trying to kill them with my broom, I ran to get my Matatodo (Raid) and sprayed them down, which didn’t kill them but at least slowed them down enough for me to get most of them with my right flip flop. So you can imagine the scene: Me, hopping around on my left foot, frantically swinging my flip flop at the jumping monsters, trying not to spray myself with Raid, while squealing in girly disgust. Not my proudest moment.

But, victorious I emerged, sweeping the dead bodies of many adult and baby crickets out my back door.

Later that night however, I would realize that a couple of the better jumpers had escaped and set up camp behind my dresser in the bedroom… MUCH worse because this meant they would be near to me as I tried to sleep, making all kinds of chirping noises all night and keeping me alert with the threat of big black cricket creatures jumping on me in my sleep.  

Disclaimer: Despite this entry, don’t doubt for a minute that I prefer cricket invasions a million times over to ant nest hatchlings or spider egg hatchlings, both of which hatching events have occurred in the ceiling over the bed where I sleep.

A Bone to Pick With Coca Cola

So it’s a hundred degrees today and after my noon bus broke down on the way to Villarrica and I had to walk the rest of the way there (in the sweltering sun), I was lucky enough to get a ride back to my site in time for our fogon commission meeting at 4:30pm. My chofer was none other than the ingeniera Delia, a middle-aged, university-educated agricultural engineer who was coming to our meeting to do a capacitation seminar for the group.

Ña Delia (Ms. Delia) had come the previous week to work with the group and was helping them put together a potential project to plant quality fruit trees in the community in an effort to improve family nutrition and increase the potential for income-generating activity (i.e. selling the extra fruit). Wonderful. Fabulous. This is why I love my community. They came up with this project all on their own and named the project Fruta nos da vida saludable (“Fruit gives us a healthy life.”) Americans would never come up with a name that beautiful. We would’ve called it the “family nutrition project” or “community income-generation strategy” or something like that.

Anyways. Delia is a well-educated and respected Paraguayan woman. However, in this seminar she began to repeat a justification for the fruit trees that she had mentioned several times in the last session with our group:

                “It’s important to have the fruit trees for our nutrition, because not only will we eat the fruit but everybody will use the fruit to make juice for their families and even to sell on the streets or at the schools so that people will buy juice instead of soda. And natural fruit juice is so much healthier than soda. Did you know that when people drink soda, especially coca cola, it eats away at your bones? If you let your kids drink soda, it will go straight to their bones and start eating away at them. You know when we drink something with natural coloring, like beets, the coloring of the beet comes out in your pee. Well when you drink coca cola, you don’t see the coloring come out in your pee, because that coca cola doesn’t come out, it stays there in your bones and eats them away.”

UM. EXCUSE ME? Now, as far as I know, there is no compound in soda that has been shown to have a direct effect on bones. As a health volunteer, you would think of this as a great opportunity to correct Delia, either in private or in the meeting, to make sure that people understand the true and scientific risks of coca cola vs. fruit juice. You might think it would be the perfect time to explain that the true risk of drinking soda is the fact that it is loaded with SUGAR whose high consumption is associated with weight gain, diabetes, hypertension, and high triglycerides (all too common health problems in our community). You might not want to lose the opportunity to explain that fruit juice can be considered almost as unhealthy as soda if you add too much SUGAR to it. You may think it is the ideal moment to describe the crucial difference between drinking REGULAR soda and DIET soda. Or, you may think it’s important to point out that while the coca cola doesn’t eat away at your bones, if your kids drink soda instead of MILK, they will be missing out on all the important bone-building calcium and phosphorus that they (as well as the adults in their family) must consume in order to have ideal bone density.  

But you would be wrong. I didn’t know WHY at the time, but my instincts told me to just shut my trap and let the show go on. Analyzing the situation later, I realized that my instinct was right. You have to pick your battles here. Why this was the wrong battle to pick:

1.       In the grand scheme of things, this was a question of nitpicking. Moving people from soda to fruit juices should be a net gain in terms of health. More vitamins, more fiber, and about the same amount of sugar. Why confuse everybody with details? Keep the message simple: SODA BAD. FRUIT GOOD. In this sense, Delia and I share the same message/goal. ¿Por qué fastidiarla?

2.       They might not have believed me anyways. The people in our community have no basis for judging or verifying who is correct in an intellectual argument between me and Ña Delia. (It’s not like they’re gonna check to see if our sources are peer-reviewed or go home and “google” it.) To them, we are both highly educated professional women, only she is older- which commands more authority. When it comes down to it, they are probably more likely to believe one of their own who appears to have more experience over that interesting but strange blonde girl who for some reason ran away from home for 2 years.

3.       It would have put an important professional relationship at risk. Paraguayans hate confrontation and avoid it at all costs. Confronting Ña Delia, in private or particularly in public, would have risked offending her, and could have put at risk an important relationship that is helping our commission design projects and obtain funding for them. It could have even put at risk the completion of our fogon project which I hope to see come to fruition before I leave.

So, although I initially felt a guilty lack-of-integrity for not having spoken up, a later thoughtful reflection led me to realize that I had probably made the best choice. I decided that if I still feel bad about it after all of our work with Delia is complete, then I can always prepare some sources and bring it up with her afterwards in the most friendly and diplomatic way possible.