Welcome to 1984

I was sitting in my room last night when all of a sudden a mouse darted out from behind the dresser. This surprised me because I had just set a trap I was sure it couldn´t escape. A few minutes later, another mouse darted out. When yet another mouse darted out, I started worrying. I realized that the mice had started multiplying! I now have at least 3 mice in my room, maybe even 4. I could handle the one because it spent of its time behind the dresser, but these mice were running everywhere! They were running, 2, 3 at a time all across the floor and it was freaking me out. I was so shocked that I let out a scream. My host parents came over, heard my hysterical explanation in Spanish, laughed, and returned to bed. An hour later, sitting on my bed still in complete shock (with the mice still running everywhere), I knocked on the door to the main section of the house (I sleep in a room next to the kitchen). I had to knock for more than 15 minutes because everyone was alseep. I told them I was sleeping in the main room with my host sister and I wasn´t going back until they were dead. If the only news you hear about me in the future is about the Peace Corp volunteer who went crazy and spent all her time hovering above the space behind the dresser with a machete in her hand...you´ll know why.

Welcome to the Jungle

As I lay in bed last night, wide-eyed as I tried to locate a mouse with my cellphone flashlight, I reflected on the days before I spent half my time asserting my superiority over dumb animals. Actually, to tell the truth, I’ve been for the most part unsuccessful in contending with nature.
Let me start from the beginning. I used to think that roosters were smart birds that signaled the dawn by crowing. I was sooo wrong. Roosters are the dumbest birds alive. They crow ALL THE TIME. One rooster starts up so the others feel obliged to respond, and before you know it, they’re engaged in the loudest and most obnoxious conversation you’ve ever heard in your life at 10 PM…and 12 AM, and 2 AM, and 5 AM. The roosters here make me want to give up being vegetarian and kill them with my bare hands (Incidentally, you kill a chicken by grabbing it by its head and twisting it around until it breaks. It apparently takes a few minutes for its heart to realize that it’s dead, so it will usually run around for a few minutes afterwards spurting blood everywhere – a site I have been lucky not to have witnessed as of yet – giving rise to the expression "like a chicken with its head cut off.")
Americans love having dogs as pets, and I am no exception. Paraguayans are not so nice to dogs and it’s understandable once I realized that dogs here are mangy, pike-ridden beasts. As one other volunteer said to me, "It’s amazing how the only thing Paraguayans have managed to coordinate on around the country is having their dogs freak out when they pretend to throw a rock." I’ve pretended to throw a rock on more than one occasion, when I’m running and a dog comes chasing after me, barking. Kissing also works. It tends to stun dogs, just stop them in their tracks. However, my host family has the two stupidest dogs in Paraguay. Somehow, they missed the message about going away when someone kisses at them. I’ve consequently spent the last week chasing one of them out of my room with a stick (he has a habit of laying under my bed, making my room smell like wet dog). I’m still too American to actually hit a dog.
I don’t think twice about squishing bugs between my fingers. I talk to the many creatures who hang around inside my shower, including a praying mantis, a toad (luckily still a tadpole and not yet the huge slimy creature as big as the size of your head that it will soon grow into). My new bedfellow is a mouse. At times I think it’s cute, crawling out from behind the dresser to gnaw on pieces of food. On the other hand, the endless scratching at night has me desperate to kill the sneaky bastard (It successfully avoided the trap I laid. The food was gone alright, but it’s still at large…or small as the case may be). That as a matter of fact is what I hysterically started yelling the last time I spotted it, along with, "Die! Die!"…to think I used to think I was vegetarian because I didn’t like the killing of animals. Now I spend my days plotting how to kill a rodent. To be fair, when a pig was being slaughtered outside of our training center (right in the middle of class people started walking through the house, preparing to kill and cook a pig in order to celebrate the fútbol victory from the day before), I practically had a meltdown.
I’ve had to deal with all this while at the same time constantly telling Paraguayans, "That’s right, I am vegetarian. Why? Because I believe that animals are life too and I don’t want to hurt them." Sigh…I’m officially living in the Paraguayan zoo.

Mandio-Bindi Pictures

Pics from my week-long visit to a volunteer (Mandio-Bindi)
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2112006&l=0d482&id=7402849

Off I go!

I finally got my site assignment. I will be in the department of Caagazú, very near the border of Alto Paraná. Apparently, weeks of intensive studying and paying attention in class, as well as mad-Guaraní skills, actually paid off. I got the site I wanted, I got the prize site. You have to cross a river to get to my site! (which is especially exciting in a landlocked country. The lake is actually the result of the Itaipú Dam, meaning it is man-made) There’s a balsa (barge), which takes people, motos, buses, and huge semis filled with bananas across the lake. Being that this is Paraguay, the balsa doesn’t have a motor. Instead, it’s pulled by a motorized boat which is tied to the side! Somehow it manages to make it across every time! My site is even more rural than I asked or hoped for. There is no running water and the electricity often cuts out. Because of the lack of running water, I’ll be using a latrine and getting my water from a well. The site is practically an island (an island within the island that is Paraguay), meaning not only is it in the middle of nowhere, but it’s also isolated. It’s 10 km from the nearest town (not including the river). Only one bus runs everyday, heading into town at 7 in the morning and returning at 12 noon. It doesn’t run if it’s raining of course, leaving me with a two hour walk along the muddy dirt roads on either side of the river.

The name of my site means “there’s work to be done,” which is an incredibly appropriate name. The volunteer before me was super-guapo (hard-working), super-active, meaning I have a lot to live up to. Hardly anyone speaks Spanish and he spoke pretty fluent Guaraní. For the next several months, while I learn the language and observe the community, I’m going to be known as “that quite girl who never speaks.” It helps that I’m the complete opposite of the former volunteer; they’ve already commented how they’re trading the blond blue-eyed boy for the morocha (“burnt skin,” basically brown) girl. But, I’m still absolutely terrified of not living up to the high standards the past volunteer has set for me.

To completely contrast with that, I’ve spent the past three days in Asunción in “chuchi-town.” After our swear-in, the entire group of us checked into a really nice hotel which offers discounts for Peace Corps volunteers. To celebrate our swear-in, and because we know we won’t get it for a while, we’ve been treating ourselves to good food at nice, super-expensive restaurants around town. For the past two months I’ve been contrasting Paraguay with Argentina, as that’s my former Latin America experience and it’s what I know. I was shocked at how different they are, but now I realize how completely wrong I was. Asunción is pretty similar to Bs.As. minus the amazing food and gorgeous architecture. The youth party till 6 AM, they use the same slang – “che, boludo!” –, they listen to American music. They say that the cities of the world are much more similar to each other than they are to the rest of the country. For example, Mumbai and New York are more alike than Mumbai and the rest of India. The same applies to Paraguay, maybe even more so. Asunción has the same standard of living as Israel, which is number 15 of countries, while rural Paraguay has the same as some of the poorest African countries, around 147. That’s a huge gap! That means that all the wealth is concentrated in the capital, while the rest of the country lives in poverty rivaling Bolivia. It makes me think that maybe Paraguay isn’t such a weird country after all; it’s not that different from what I know. But the fact that this gap exists is the reason Paraguay needs development workers: because becoming number 15 is within the realm of possibility for the rest of Paraguay. Our job as PC volunteers is to work to make it so.

My address has changed. It is now:

Pooja Virani, PCV

Cuerpo de Paz, CHP

162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López

Asunción 1580, Paraguay (South America)

Pictures of my future site: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2112995&l=0d4a4&id=7402849

Mandio-Bindi

Latrines, wells, outside showers, coconuts, home-made bridges…you might be wondering where I went.

I spent last week at a volunteer’s site in Alto Paraná. We went in a group of four, three trainees and our language professor. I was worried it would be more class (All of us are ore kuerai – fed up – with class by now. We just want to get out to our sites.), but it was anything but. There was a great moment when I squatted in front of an outside spigot in the dark to wash vegetables and I thought “This is Peace Corps.” There were actually several of those moments, especially the afternoon we spent sawing and sharpening sticks of bamboo and peeling Brazilian coconuts, all with our Swiss Army knives (I actually cut my finger pretty badly, which I’m sure the whole town is still talking about using “ploos,” the Paraguayan noise for when a person loses a finger). We actually spent a lot of the week lying around in a hammock reading or playing with our Swiss Army knives. I don’t want to give the impression that Peace Corps volunteers just siesta and T-re all the time, because that’s not true at all. The truth is that it’s not a 9-5 job, it’s a 24/7 job. Our host volunteer may have read a ton of books since arriving in his site, but many of those are work-related. How many people do you know who spend the time they’re not in the office reading up on pisicultura or agro-forestry? He spends days at a time hashing out finances and coming up with project proposals, but he also spends a lot of time bonding with his neighbors and integrating into his community. Sitting around and drinking tereré is actually the time when most coop or comité members talk business and make decisions. Integrating into the community is not only part of our job, it’s necessary for us to make any contributions. To that end, this experience wasn’t great just because it was super tranquilo, it was also a chance to practice integrating into a community. Instead of having a four-hour language class each day, we practiced speaking with our host families and the coop members. And I was amazed at how much Guaraní I’ve learned! I can actually hold a decent conversation if the people have patience with me and are willing to listen to my slow speech and comprehension. The nice thing is, they are. I’ve learned how important Guaraní actually is. Sure Spanish is the official language of business, but Paraguayans (especially in the campo) tell jokes, they tell their stories in Guaraní. Knowing a little bit of Guaraní makes them much more ready to open up to you.

Now here are the fun details about living conditions in the campo you’ve all been waiting for: latrines, wells, and outside showers. We’re talking a hole in the ground and a separate caseta (wooden hut) for the shower. This actually wasn’t too bad, I have a latrine in my host family’s house and by now am used to bucket bathing in all temperatures. They did have running water luckily, though it was sparse and they had no sink. And the water we drank definitely had little red worms floating in it (hope those don’t come back to haunt me later…). It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be (though man, that latrine did stink!), though it did make me realize how my current town is much more of the suburbs than the actual campo (countryside). It was easy to see that just looking at the chacras (farm fields), which were mixed in with the wilderness instead of being ordered and neat rectangles (of course that may also be because the town we visited has only been around since 1984). One field is divided in sections by a stream, which the farmer can cross at two points, either by way of a thick branch (not a log) or a homemade bridge. Think Indiana Jones and you can imagine what this homemade bridge looked like. It was made out of bamboo ready to snap at any point. The funny thing is how the farmer once planted watermelon on the other side of the bridge and had to carry it all back across!

And finally, for mandio-bindi. As many of you know, there’s a wonderful Indian dish called aloo bindi (potatoes and okra). Well, this volunteer has been trying to get his neighbors to plant okra because it grows very well in Paraguay, so he essentially used me as the tool to convince them. Being resourceful (as every PC volunteer should be!), I substituted mandioca for potatoes, fresh cilantro for coriander, and ground mustard for mustard seeds, and added cumin and lemon…and voila! Mandio-bindi! It wasn’t quite Indian, but it definitely wasn’t Paraguayan either. And they loved it! It was actually quite interesting because the volunteer set me up with the host mom that loves to cook vegetables. So the last night she brought over vegetables, pots, pans, plates, cutlery, and the whole family to the volunteer’s house and prepared an amazing Indian meal. That’s right, Indian. She mixed together red peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, cumin, peas, the water from the peas, and a ton of ginger. The volunteer suggested curry powder and unlike most Paraguayans who would have been hesitant to try a new spice, she readily agreed (a Paraguayan with actual taste!). And so we had Indian curry! (And it did really taste exactly like aloo-mutter) Talk about a cross-cultural experience!

A Call For...

I find out about the next 2 years of my life on Friday (meaning I finally get my site). Please pray for me.

This is also a call, more specifically a plea, for packages or letters...yes, snail mail. Please brighten up my life with some love from the States :)

My address is:

Pooja Virani, PCT
Cuerpo de Paz, CHP
162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López
Asunción 1580, Paraguay (South America)

Run around, get dirty, climb over fences, get hurt for crying out loud!

The other day I returned home from school early. I saw my host dad riding in a carro (bull cart) with one of his helpers, so I asked for a ride. Cristhian, my host brother, and his friend scrambled up the wheels into the cart. I tried the same, failing miserably and scraping up my arm in the process because the cart had started to move. I got up the more conventional route, sitting down on the back and hoisting myself up. The two bulls were new and the two men were testing them out, with success. They even let me steer the cart for a while, which is much harder than it looks (and that ride is much bumpier than it seems!) After the ride, I went out to the fields with my host parents where I helped them pick mandioca, while my mom mocked me for covering the back of my pants in red dirt (from trying to get into the cart). I broke the mandio off in pieces, covering my hands in dirt. I then walked with my dad through the farm while he talked about the cows. I returned to the house, my hands and pants dirty, my feet scratched up from walking through the chacra in my sandals, and my arm bruised, but completely content. I realized that this is why I’m in Paraguay, I want these experiences. I want to get dirty, scrape my arms and legs, work and learn in a farm. It’s like being a kid again, unafraid of anything, especially getting dirty or a little bruised.

P.S. Anyone who can tell me what movie the title of this blog is from wins a prize.