Bienvenidos al Campo!

Texts from Paraguay

                After we swore in as official volunteers, we all received cell phones.  I thought I’d share some tidbits of my everyday texting conversations…

Sol: “I’M ABOUT TO EAT MONO” (Mono=monkey)

Sol: “Welcome to my life.  I just got real close to a poop pants situation.  Also I caught a fish!  What a day.”

Sol: “I’m waking up at 5 so I can walk 10k.  What is my life coming to?”

Sol: “It’s 8:30 and I’m in bed.  Does that make me elderly?”

Estella: “There is a brand of diapers in our dispensa called pupy.  Gotta call it what it is I guess”

Estella: “I ate pig guts and it got stuck in my teeth!”

Sol: In response to some embarrassing thing I did…”hahahaha yes, that’s even better than your underwear falling out of your pants.”

Semana Santa/Pascua

                I arrived in my site the week of Semana Santa.  Semana Santa is Holy Week…the week leading up to Easter Sunday.  Paraguay is a primarily Catholic country so they celebrate Catholic Holidays.  Here, the main event during Semana Santa is Chipa making!  The most delicious bread made with: cheese, eggs, corn flour, butter/pig fat, wrapped in a leaf of anis and baked in the brick oven.  Families all come together to make ridiculous amounts of chipa on Wednesday, and they eat Chipa for the rest of the week.  Zoe, one of my friends from training, and I decided to have a chipa eating contest.  I won (Words of wisdom...never agree to an eating contest against a fat girl!  Poor Zoe, didn’t know about my days in Rome and the Giganti Gelato) My prize?  She has to come visit me first.

                Lucilla, the senora I met on the bus, invited me to come to her house for Easter Lunch.  I absolutely adore her and her family.  They are all super friendly.   We had hen and pasta followed by duck and rice (and of course a side of mandioca).  It was pretty darn delicious.  After lunch, I wandered back to the other side of the neighborhood for the horse races.  I still can’t get over the fact that I live in a community that has horse races…who needs the Kentucky Derby when you can walk less than a mile to see horse races for free?  There’s no mint julips (or whatever they’re called), but there’s boxed wine and coke.

Latrinas

                I’ve been in Paraguay for 3 months now, and I finally had my first latrine experience.  I was visiting one of my favorite families for lunch, and I drank a ton of terere with the senora of the household.  Terere is a major diuretic so I had to pee shortly after.  Naturally, I held my pee as long as possible hoping that I could just sweat everything out or at least last long enough to use a modern bathroom.  No such luck.  I finally excused myself to go to the bathroom.  I walked into the outdoor wooden box to find a showerhead and no hole in the ground over which to squat.  This must be the shower and the shower only, I concluded.  I made my way back to everyone and said…ughh where’s the bathroom.  They all laughed at me and then pointed me to a wooden box behind all the trees and bushes…ahh yes privacy.  I walked in to find this:

A wooden rectangle seat, with a carved out oval, and the actual hole in the ground.  I was confused and wasn’t sure exactly which way to squat so I just tried to position my butt closest to the hole in the ground; unfortunately, I did not succeed.  When your pee misses the hole in the ground, you end up standing in a puddle of your own piss, and that’s exactly what I did.  Oooops…Bienvenidos al Campo!

Reasons Why a Latrine Isn’t So Bad!

                I was talking to Zoe one day, recounting my afternoon of coming dangerously close to pooping my pants when she told me about the “Reasons Why a Latrine Isn’t So Bad” list she’d compiled.  I thought it was very funny and very accurate so I’m going to do my best to reproduce/embellish it here:

            1. It can’t smell any worse than it already does, so you don’t have to worry about stinking up the             bathroom/people knowing you just made a big doo doo.

2)     2. It’s impossible to clog the toilet.

3)      3. You can throw your toilet paper in the hole! (In modern bathrooms here, you can’t flush TP.  You have to throw your TP in a trash can next to the toilet).

4)      4. You don’t have to clean it because it’s never going to be anything less than filthy.

5)    5.   It’s a mini adventure every time you have to use the bathroom…and its especially fun at night when you have to use your headlamp to get to the bathroom!

6)    6.  You’re VERY close to nature when nature calls.

7)    7.   If you’re really lucky you might even get to experience a fecal dunk tank depending on the stability of your losa!

Moving Day

                 I’ve moved in with another host family-a family I was already spending a lot of time with…I mentioned them in my last blog, Don Hugo and family.  I’ve only been here for one day, but I feel 1000x better.

                It took two trips to walk all my stuff over.  It was the first time I’ve ever moved without some type of motorized vehicle.  I felt super foolish walking through the community with my giant backpacking bag, sleeping bag and various other bags and boxes…Bailey strutting next to me.  I arrived this morning, and I’m all unpacked and settled and life is good!

For once in my life I managed to keep something (relatively) short!  A lot has been happening, and things are just going to keep getting busier!  I’m still doing my best to learn the language(s) and get to know the community.

I miss you all more than you can imagine.  It’s a strange feeling really.  I can’t say that I feel lonely because I’m constantly surrounded by people; however, I’m constantly surrounded by strangers that I can’t communicate with effectively.  Yeah, I can get my point across when I have something to say, but the small talk, the humor, the familiarity, the understanding is lost in translation and across cultures.

I’ve been feeling bad lately because I feel like all I talk about is me and what I’m doing, but the truth is, I really enjoy hearing from everyone, how you’re doing, and what you’re up to because you’re all my friends and family and I love all of you, and I think you’re all amazing and fascinating!   Can you say run-on sentence?