Opa la Entrenamiento

08 December 2010:

Training has ended in a pretty unexpected way. We found out about a week in advance that swear in day was being moved back a day, to tomorrow (!!!!) and it will be in Spanish.

I don’t like to do a play by play of what has gone on, nor do I usually remember so much, but this last weekend of training happened to be pretty unusual, and I just can’t think of any better way to write about it.

Today is the official day commemorating the Virgin of Caacupe, the equivalent of the Guadalupe Virgin in Mexico. Many people pilgrimage to this small city to attend a massive mass and pray to the Barbie-look-a-like. Since swear in is but a day afterward, initial plans to walk the 10 hours from Typychaty to Caacupe in the middle of the night were thwarted. So while most had the first of many despedida parties in town, a fellow compatriot, his host family and I kind of took the pilgrimage. Well, we cheated in that we took a couple buses over 2 hours to get to a town called Ypacarai, so that we could walk just over three hours instead of ten.

I was expecting some kind of genuine religious and cultural experience, with people of all walks of life and ages making the long trek. The people walking were mostly teenagers and young adults, clearly in the best shape of their lives, without a family to have to tend to. We met up with the guys of this family I went with, sons about my age who walked the whole way. The basilica was closed, but there was a bar gate covering one of the huge doors so you couldn’t go in, but could view the virgin and pray to her from a distance. The family prayed for about 10 minutes, and I was in dire need to pee, so I left and looked for a place to relieve myself, while they prayed. It turned out that it was all the time they spent there, and didn’t wait for the church to open like I originally had thought. Afterward, we all, the host mother, her two sons, and random family friend guy, a young couple, and two of us volunteers went to a bar. While it rained, they all drank, and a few of us crashed out on the table. I was completely out, and just remember briefly waking up, observing that the one beer bottle at the end of the table multiplied to at least half a dozen, and completely crashed out again. At about 3 am we left, and the host mother went on a shopping spree to buy cheesy ceramic figures of dolls and a dog. We then waited for a bus to take us back. I also slept through the trip back, but did notice that the people we were with were obscenely rude and loud on the bus.

On Sunday, I returned at about 7am, slept all day through about 2pm. I noticed my family was unusually quiet and the home atmosphere made me feel restless. Shortly after I woke up, I left to watch a movie at a friend’s house, and took my time to hang out there. Now, my 90-year-old host father had a surgery a few weeks before, to implant some tube to his stomach as a way to feed him. He was bed-ridden afterward, lost more weight, and was slowly just battling more and more. I came back home after a few hours, to notice a few unusual details that amounted to a bad omen and I knew before I saw anyone.

The little store the family manages was closed, but the gate was open. When I left earlier, everything was closed and that was normal because it was Sunday siesta. As I approached the house, I noted the night nurse who’d visit almost nightly was walking out of the house, and this was just at dusk. Then I walked past the window of my host parents’ room, to hear my host mother sobbing. I knew my host father had shortly passed away. I had been told the day before that it seemed fluid was collecting in his pulmonary cavities, and he was just having the hardest time breathing. He had his last breath minutes before I arrived.

As soon as we exchanged hugs, and I tried to express my sympathy, we got to work cleaning out an adjacent room that nobody sleeps in but where everyone stores their clothes. The desk and a couple huge armoires were shoved into my room, and the empty room was scrubbed from ceiling to floor. I was amidst all this, confused but quietly helping, resisting the urge to ask what was going on. Within a couple hours, lots of people were showing up and a little altar kind of thing was set up in the room for the overnight vigil.

I was allowed to sleep, but because sleeping in a room adjacent to a vigil was something I wasn’t eager to include in my new experiences, I fled to a friend’s room where I comfortably slept on my Thermarest. We had to spend all day Monday in Asuncion for last minute logistics and issues in training, and I fortunately did not have to go home for lunch. The burial was that same day, which I’m not sure anymore if I’m relieved that I missed it or not, but I truly had no idea that it was shortly after the vigil. I did however, arrive for the last half of the last rosary of prayer thereafter, and soon everyone left.

Soon after, we had dinner, and I was trying to keep quiet though they talked a little about what they did and asked how my day was. My brother even cracked a couple of jokes over dinner, and we talked about how now host mom can be free to travel around the country and visit her kids, including myself. I didn’t know what to make of this, but I guess it’s just normal when you basically have been battling with the extremely poor health of a very old mad, and it all has come to an end.

Now that it’s a couple days since that’s happened, I can’t say that everything is nice and rosy colored at home, but the presence of my host sister, her family and brother who usually don’t visit this long is kind of uplifting everyone’s spirits, especially my host mother’s.

The rest of November

16 Noviembre 2010: Long Field Visit

We had a 5 day visit to a volunteer’s site last week, during which my birthday happened in the middle of. I don’t know if this makes sense as my English seems to have already suffered some repercussions from not being in an English speaking country.

The site was only a few hours away from the capital, Costa Alegre (but there’s not coast), in the picturesque department of Cordillera. The place was way far out rural. Though 15km from a town, Tobati, there was a public bus that passed through town only three times a week through its dirt roads. I stayed with a host family that spoke mostly Guarani. Four weeks of language training in the mornings did nothing for me except be able to say “What? Who? When? I don’t understand, Hello” and pick up on a few random words so I could try to put together what the family was saying. Though they were incredibly giving but humble, and simpatico (can’t think of what it translates to in English), they did not seem to understand how to try to communicate with a foreigner.

There was a six-year-old girl, Analia, who was eager and happy to have a different person around, sleeping in the same room with her and her 10-year-old brother. It was nice to have a kid around who was patient in explaining things in Guarani a bit slower, and with what fragmented Spanish she had learned. Through the week, she followed me closely, always wondering what I was doing when I was writing letters, reading, hanging out with another trainee who was staying with the neighbor, helped me carry my water bottle and books when we walked to have meetings and classes at the volunteer’s house (she followed me there too!). Analia never gave up the opportunity to look through my things whenever I was looking for something, or read my dictionary while I tried to study Guarani. I initially felt flattered that a kid took so much interest in having me around, and was impressed by her ability to read in Spanish and to simply charm by trying to do what I did. However, after just a few days of constantly being shadowed by her, I had one too many hugs while I was sitting, trying to read/write followed by her smashing her face against mine or whispering/spitting into my ear, and had enough.

This was just about when it was my birthday. I tried to not have my host family know, but they found out as one of the guys mentioned it while the girl was with us, and the volunteer we were visiting kind of freaked over it, and said it to the girl, who then told her whole family. For the day and half before it, she just couldn’t shut up about it being my birthday, and the whole family asked me a million times in case I wasn’t sure or had second thoughts about my birthday, or probably because I also tried to deny it, but they wouldn’t have it. I was asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, and replied I wanted to learn a bit oftraditional Paraguayan dance. So after a dinner of salty, grilled chicken, specially made for the trainee staying with the neighbors, and myself (I felt horribly guilty when I realized that they weren’t eating chicken because there wasn’t the kind of money to buy more or kill another chicken to feed the rest of the family), the few neighbor girls and Analialoudly played the traditional polka Paraguayan music, and taught me some semi waltz moves.

23 November 2010: Future home

Just got back from another 5-day visit. However, this one was from our future sites! Unless you google map it, it probably doesn’t make a difference where I say it is. I will nonetheless. TapytanguaGuazu, a very rural community about 10km from Acahay between Carapegua and La Colmena in departamentoParaguari. The whole town is sprawled out pretty wide, and there are no more than 70 families. I don’t know exactly how to gauge it yet, but though we were not at the edge, it took us half an hour to get to a neighbor who also wasn’t on one extreme end of town. I wouldn’t even call it a town. Most people don’t yet have running water, there is only an elementary school, and for many needs, one must to go to Acahay to get them. The bus transportation from Acahay only runs a few times a day, the last bus leaving at noon from Acahay to TapytanguaGuazu, so any grocery shopping must be done by then.

Apart from all that, it is absolutely gorgeous! It is in the transition zone from forest to grassland, so it is quite evident of the deforestation. Since it is located on this important transition zone, most has been deforested for firewood or use of land for animal husbandry. The only part left forested is on the cerro, a steep hill.

I’m still not sure what can be done, but at the same time, I’m excited for all the possibilities. The girl who worked there before me, has been welcomed by the elementary school, and has also received some funding from the Paraguayan government and help from a US organization called Friends of the Americas. They no longer burn their trash, so use an old dried up well as a perfect trash pit. The schoolteachers also seem to have adopted some more interactive teaching methods and use recycled things as didactic learning tools.However, there is a strong women’s group that she started, and made fogones in their houses (brick wood burning stove/oven with a chimney to send the smoke out of the room and also uses less wood).

30 November 2010: Sweet blood

I have nothing much new to say that is worth sharing or remembering. I have just been training more, learning Guarani, learning about trees, N-fixing plants to improve soil, gardening, etc. There were some quick workshops on what to turn to when and how to… build latrines and fogones, teach hygiene and nutrition, etc, but it was all too rushed. Otherwise, we tend to hang out and have the same kind of conversations of college but some of the experiences just happen to involve more Paraguayan and developing world situations, such as chivivi (diarrhea), bowel movements in general, using latrines, funny misunderstandings in living with local families, and dealing with cultural differences.

Other than that, I must have delectable blood for mosquitoes. I’ve been bitten more than many others, and worst of all, the skin of my legs reacts terribly to them, making each place of a bit huge and swollen, so my legs are covered in big red itchy blotches.