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.

Love Letter

Dear Paraguayan Summer,

I know we’ve had some harsh words in the past, and I know I said I never wanted to see you again. But, you see, I’ve been with Winter for a few weeks now, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. And I just wanted to say: I’m sorry, Paraguayan Summer. I know I can’t take back all those mean things I said about you, but I wish I could. Please come back. I can’t go on like this anymore.

As I was hanging my last load of laundry on this 50-something Winter day, I realized I couldn’t feel my hands or toes anymore, and wondered if my newly washed clothes would even dry before nightfall at 5pm. I couldn’t help but long for those days we spent together, washing clothes at dawn, enjoying the refreshing splash of the water as I watched your hot sun dry my clothes within minutes... then drinking ice cold beers with  neighbors into the late evening. Tonight it will dip below 45 degrees, and even with the 3 blankets on my bed, I may scarcely sleep better than I did during those sweaty 80+ degree nights by your side. Not even grapefruit juice and whiskey will warm me up enough to sleep well. Sure, those rich enough to have space-heaters may have the luxury of betraying you indefinitely, but as I shiver under the covers I will slip in and out of dreams with you, Summer…

You see, the truth is: It wasn’t you, it was me. Those few months we spent together was my first time dealing with the kind of heat and steam that a Summer like you brings with it. I wasn’t prepared for 100, 110, or 120+ degree days... the sleeplessly hot nights and delusional sun-shiny days. I was so selfishly concerned with the increased likelihood of rapidly growing skin cancer that I didn’t realize all of the beautiful things about waking up with you by my side every day. My eyes were so blinded by your blazing sun that I couldn’t seem to see all the amazing things there are to appreciate about your season.

I hope one day you can find it in your heart to accept my apology, and should you ever decide to come back, know that you can trust me to be stronger, more appreciative, and more accepting of all that you have to offer. I promise that I can change. Please, please hurry back! My life is so cold and dark without you.

Love,

Casey

Sin City

This past week I went to a very dark place, perhaps the darkest recess of my Peace Corps experience thus far. As I’ve become more and more integrated into my community the people have started to open up more and more to me. Several señoras have brought me into their circles of social knowledge (i.e. chisme), and have shared with me some of the most intensely personal experiences a person can share. They share with me their stories of suffering, the suffering of others, the hatred that others have for them, and the hatred that they have for others. Relationships of all sorts in the community are truly toxic.

Last weekend one of the movies that happened to be playing on the 2 channels that we get out here in the campo was Sin City, and although I didn’t realize it while I was watching it, I realized this week that Paraguay is its own metaphoric version of Sin City. Its many warring factions are not kept in check by the rule of law because most law-enforcers and other holders of power are indeed members of the various warring factions and are at liberty to use said power as a weapon when necessary (with little or no consequences if they play the game correctly).

On Wednesday after having a conversation with a teacher that I know, I was shocked and saddened by a story she told me. A very capable and intelligent young teacher with a toddler son, she applied for an open job at a nearby school. She won the position (winner is determined by the Ministry of Education based on resume/ability/interview/etc.), but because she refused to sleep with a person in a position of power at the school, he and his family mounted a huge campaign against her, spreading rumors about her, getting signatures on a petition, holding tiny “demonstrations” against her, and exploiting her disability (due to a moto accident, the woman walks with a limp), claiming that it would impede her from performing her teaching duties. His goal was to get her kicked out of the position she had just won. Several people who I know in the community turned against her and did and said horrible things. The first day that she was supposed to go to work, she received threats by text message from one of my neighbors (who by the way, was 8 months pregnant with a married man’s baby at the time), who said that if she tried to go into the classroom, she and other members of her family would drag her out “by her hair, kicking and screaming” if necessary. She was too terrorized by the threat of violence to go to school that day. (And indeed, the “protestors”- mainly family members of the director and community members with personal vendettas against the woman- had gathered and were stationed outside the school.)

She had often had opportunities to get a job in the nearby school, but had always refused to sleep with the director. She told him, “No, if I get a job here it’s going to be because I deserve it, not because I slept with somebody.”  He said “Then keep on dreaming, sweetheart.” Finally, her day came, and she won the job legitimately. In the end, he still got her kicked out and put somebody else in the position. “I always knew I would never be able to keep the job,” she told me. “The director is too powerful. He has too many friends in high places in the Ministry.” And it’s true. All it really would’ve taken is one or two phone calls and she would’ve been out, period.

I had heard many versions of this story from different “players” in the community (chisme is, of course, the national sport in Paraguay, people often joke). I’ve also heard some other stories recently about things people have done to other people. And yesterday I just went into a very pensive state, wanting desperately to understand what makes people feel that it’s O.K. to treat each other the way that they do. It’s like we are lost here; it’s as though there are no guiding values or sense of morality. Even I sometimes feel as though I am drowning in a sea of confusion, losing myself, desperately trying to grasp onto those Sunday school values that have always guided me through life… and finding that they are useless and cannot keep me afloat in this Sin City-like society in which I seem to find myself. When you live in Sin City, maintaining such “Sunday School” values can leave you completely at the mercy of others, meaning that at best you are powerless, but at worst, you become a victim of human nature’s worst.

It’s a metaphor because in Sin City, the war is real, physical. When you lose, you die a real, physical death; your major organs go one-by-one and all your vital signs stop. In Potrero Baez, the war is mainly social/psychological. When you lose, you die a no less real, but social & emotional death. And more often than not, it isn’t a sudden-death, but a long, slow, process of pain and suffering that lasts a lifetime. Like they say: As soon as you’re born, you start to die, and you keep dying your entire life.

And that is how the game is played, ladies and gentlemen. Life in rural Paraguay is a minefield of social foibles (starting with who you’re born to) that can make or break your ability to avoid extreme social/psychological/economic/physical suffering… but the reality is that the social war is constant, nobody is safe, and nobody goes untouched. At some point, everybody is excluded, everybody is abused, everybody is used… and if you refuse to exclude, abuse, and use, then You. Lose.

What really shocks me is that not only is there no practice of good and ethical values (honesty, integrity, compassion, responsibility, love, respect, equality, etc.)… but there really is not even a rhetoric, a pretense, or even the most minimal consideration for those values. They are considered useless, period. One who adheres to them is naïve, period. One must become letrado (i.e. understand the rules of the REAL game) as soon as possible, in order to survive, period. There is no time or use for Sunday School chatter in a dog-eat-dog world. Nobody pretends to be good- the most they try to do is show that others are worse than they are.

Morality here is an option, a luxury, that is often only comfortably available to those who do not know necessity. And those who do not know necessity are precisely those who are MOST likely to abuse their relative power to get what they want, when they want it. No ethical or moral scruples to worry about.

Welcome to Sin City… my house is the 3^rd one on the right.

“So many soldiers on the other side… I take their lives so they can’t take mine.”   (Avenged Sevenfold, “M.I.A.”)

Theme Post: Who is Your Peace Corps Hero?

(Warning: You will only understand this post if you are familiar with the Dr. Sir Rev. Stephen T. Colbert's television show "The Colbert Report.")

Stephen Colbert is my Peace Corps hero. Like Stephen, I always knew that, together, I was going to change the world. Streaming full episodes of his show onto my computer into my Paraguayan home each night has kept me in touch with my traditional values, and offers a daily reminder that an internet connection is much more important than running water.

Stephen’s show is different. It’s not just some collection of reasoned arguments supported by facts. That would be the coward’s way out. No, he tells the truth. His truth. He says what he thinks. He thinks it, he says it. Sometimes he doesn’t even think it, he just says it. But whatever he says, it always reeks of Truthiness. Stephen taught me that true Truths are self-evident and require no more research than a good look in the mirror, which in Paraguay means walking around my community as the people dutifully inform me of every good or bad change in my appearance. 

Whenever I start to doubt that Paraguay is the right place for me, I just go back to Stephen’s core values and realize that I am in one of the best possible places. So many Paraguayan values are right in line with Stephen’s teachings. For example, both are fervent supporters of Jesus, Catholicism, babies, meat-eating, beer, and rugged masculinity. 

In fact, I would suggest that if our ultra-conservative politicians (American heroes) get kicked out of America by that fascist, socialist, Muslim, Christian, traitor, president Barack Obama, they should consider coming to Paraguay in their exile. There’s no EPA here to bust ‘em on their new Hummers, or FDA to infringe on their liberty to clog their arteries with those delicious trans fats… in fact they probably won’t be bothered by any government regulation. Efforts to redistribute wealth (government robbery of the hard-working) are almost nonexistent. Gays stay in the closet, its normal to gawk at black people, and the women already know that their natural strengths are in the kitchen. It’s almost like a conservative Utopia! Come on home, boys.

Stephen taught me to read his book, watch his show, and be him. Even if I’m 5,000 miles away, I can still say the pledge of allegiance every night before I go to sleep, and continue to fear bears from afar. Stephen Colbert is my hero: he is America, and so can YOU!

The Joys and Perils of Integration

 So on my quarterly project review form that I have to send in to my Peace Corps bosses every few months, I was asked to answer the question: "How integrated do you feel in your community?" My multiple choice answer options were: "Not Integrated," "Somewhat Integrated," "Integrated," or "Well Integrated." I was then asked to explain my answer, to write about "what I have learned about integrating" and if have any "suggestions for training" new volunteers to better integrate. I decided to copy and paste and share my answers with you.

I feel somewhat integrated into my community. That's not to say that I feel isolated or unhappy; I'm just being very honest about the realities on the ground. The reason for not feeling "Integrated" or "Well Integrated" is that as an outsider, it's very, very difficult to truly integrate. I've even seen Paraguayans who come to rural communities but who grew up in Asuncion who have trouble integrating, even though they are within their own country, their own languages, their own families.

However, I've found that it's actually O.K. to be "somewhat integrated," and that it doesn't have to mean that people don't like you, or don't respect you, or that it affects your work negatively. In fact, people might actually like and respect you MORE for being less integrated. The part that IS integrated just has to be strategically chosen. There are parts of Paraguayan culture and behavior, for example, that I personally do not like and that I do not agree with, and the fact that I have chosen not to integrate in those ways and have in some instances openly resisted certain customs or behaviors (albeit kindly and respectfully) seems to have actually led to MORE, not less, respect and trust in my community. So much in fact, that my community leaders have asked me to teach not just health classes, not even just English classes, but ETHICS classes talking to children about vaues.

So what have I learned about integrating? Not only that it's impossible to make everybody happy, but also undesirable, because when you lose your own integrity as a person it makes it hard for people to respect you and easy for them to take advantage of you. And this is a problem that I have repeatedly seen from fellow volunteers: we arrive so eager to please and so desperate for approval that some of us will do anything, or many things, that go against our customs or values, just to be accepted by our communities.

I've found that if you do the basics: treat everybody with dignity, respect, and compassion, be friendly and talk to people about themselves and yourself (NOT others), and be super guap@* in your work... The details are negotiable and it's OK to be who you are.

I know that I, like many PCTs, came here with a condescendingly idealized notion of the "third-world" rural farmer as a simple, humble people, innocent victims who suffer undeservedly, who can do no wrong and to whom I must bend and bow in order prove that I don't believe myself to be inherently better than they are. Ironically, in this way we dehumanize the gentekuera**, because all humans are imperfect and everybody does bad things. Recognizing that doesn't make me alzadita*** or a poor-integrater.

Choosing to integrate in the ways that seem necessary and with which you feel comfortable, while neglecting to integrate in ways that do not seem necessary or with which you do not feel comfortable, may leave you feeling only "Somewhat Integrated," but it can also leave you feeling good about yourself and about the cultural (not just technical) impact that you are leaving on your community.

My suggestions for training the new PCTs? Help them integrate, help them to decipher the most basic and important to-dos and not-to-dos in rural Paraguay. But also make sure they know that it's OK to be themselves, and that integrating doesn't mean letting people co-opt your personality or take advantage of your desperation to be liked.





*guap@ = guapa or guapo= (adj.) Hardworking, a good worker
**gentekuera = (n.) The peoples, the community, the family
***alzadita = (adj.) From the Spanish alzar ("to lift up") = Believing oneself to be better than another; one who looks down upon the lowly others.

ANOTHER mom?! Yep, and new godchildren too.

So it’s been way too long since I’ve written in my blog. I usually only wanted to write in my blog when I had a special experience or profound insight to share… but I’ve realized that what I now consider “normal” or “everyday” experiences are actually still pretty interesting to readers back in the U.S. So I’ve decided to start writing about the daily/weekly “normal” experiences as well as the particularly special or profound ones. I wrote the following on Dec. 7th, 2011:

The past two weeks have been kind of a blur. The week of Thanksgiving I took a young nursing student (my neighbor’s younger sister) with me to the Peace Corp’s national HIV/AIDS capacitation workshop. We both got certificates saying that we are trained in the basics of HIV/AIDS and ready to teach charlas and classes about the topic.

The person that I brought to the workshop is a very bright 20-year-old, and recent nursing school graduate. Yes, she has a nursing degree and is now licensed to work as a nurse in any health post, health center, or regional hospital. However, let me give you an idea of just how thorough Paraguayan nursing school is. In our HIV/AIDS workshop, the first thing we did was take a multiple-choice “Pre-Test,” on the basics of HIV/AIDS. Some of the questions included “Are HIV and AIDS the same thing?”, “Does the birth control pill prevent HIV transmission?” and “Can women get HIV?” Basics.

As I was sneakily peering over the girl’s shoulder, I realized that she was answering almost all of the questions completely wrong. To the latter question, for example, she chose the answer: “No, women cannot contract HIV because female sexual secretions kill the virus.” By the end of the 2.5 day workshop, she was able to answer all of the questions, and some much more complex ones, with 100% accuracy. …Shouldn’t all nurses be able to do the same?

This past week (Dec. 1-3) I took the president of my Fogon Commission, Benita, to another workshop in Asuncion about fostering Volunteerism in our communities. It was not the best experience because apparently the people who planned it (a Paraguayan NGO) didn’t see anything wrong with asking an audience to sit on their butts for 9 hours a day for 3 days listening to horribly boring and irrelevant lectures with little to no opportunity for audience participation. To give you an idea of how bad it was, the workshop started out with some 80-90 participants on Day 1, but by Day 3 so many people had thrown in the towel that there were only about 25 of us left (mostly just the PCVs and our community contacts). Benita and I spent the 3 days elbowing each other when one of us fell asleep, and giggling as we looked around the room at all the people dozing off or in some cases completely passed out in their chairs. Next time, I will be sure to bring a Sudoku book to pass the hours.

Nevertheless, it was still a really good opportunity for Benita to get out and about (she had to ask her husband for “permission” before accepting my invitation). According to her, he only allowed her to go because I have a good reputation and standing in the community and he trusted me not to bring any dishonor on the family. A 50-year old mother of 4 (her eldest daughter is my age), Benita is a traditional, classical Paraguayan woman, very religious, and highly respected in the community. During our 3-day workshop, she adopted me as her daughter and proceeded to treat me as such, the whole time, asking other PCVs “no sabes adonde se fue mi hija?” (“do you know where my daughter went?”) when she couldn’t find me, and when she was ready for bed each night, came to look for me to remind me that it was getting late and I’d better think about getting to bed soon. She also “protected” me from Paraguayan men she suspected of making advances on me, telling one such muchacho that he had spent enough time discussing the seminar with me and that if he had any sense of respect he would leave me alone until tomorrow. Not to mention that the night I got a late text message, my “mom” had no verguenza to ask me suspiciously “dios mio, now who on earth is texting you at this hour, mi hija?”

Needless to say, 3 days of that was quite enough. It was flattering, but do you really think the girl who grew up with 3 moms (my biological mom, her life partner, plus my stepmom) and is now a 23-year-old adult really needs yet ANOTHER mom-figure? Dios mio.

In between these 2 workshops in Asuncion was the great “Despedida” at the school to close out the school year and start summer break. For the preschool graduation I was asked by the parents to serve as a madrina de honor (“honorary godmother”) for the little 4-year-old tykes (my favorites students), and in the ceremony got to assist the other teachers as we handed out their certificates.