Día tras día

I'm currently staying with my host family in Guarambaré. My previous post not withstanding, it's wonderful to see them again. Words fail to describe the privilege of being able to travel across the world and to be received with such kindness and generosity. 

A few quick notes from the last few days:

• In every family I’ve visited several family members have diabetes and/or hypertension. It’s not hard to see why - there’s not much societal immunity to cheap, heavily-marketed, processed foods full of sugar and white flour. There’s growing awareness and concern, but still it seems like many people don’t have the fundamentals to understand how sugar is sugar, even if it’s dissolved in soda. It’s a shame because the country is rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, and people do in fact eat them, but they’re generally looked down on and not considered proper food. 
• My host mother in Guarambaré was stuck by a driver in front of her business/home about a month ago. She’s mostly recovered but her back was injured and still hurts a lot, especially since she spends long days on her feet working in her beauty salon/school. This case was particularly stupid - they showed me the security camera footage from the pharmacy next door - she’s walking on the side of the road and the driver just slowly backs into her from a long ways away. He was probably looking at his phone? It’s a bizarre outlier, but it does highlight how dangerous it is to walk in many places in Paraguay today, with heavy truck, car, and motorcycle traffic, and few, poorly maintained sidewalks. 
• Now that I have a good-paying job, and since my life has continued to be blessedly easy and fortunate, the contrast between my living conditions and those of my Paraguay friends is all the more stark. When I came here in 2011 I’d had a hard time finding a job after college during the Great Recession, had loads of student debt, and most recently had been working - and freezing my butt off - for minimum wage as a Salvation Army bell ringer outside of a Fred Meyer in Portland . I could at least share stories of some difficulties I’d had. Now, I make good money at a job I like. I have a masters degree in a subject I find fascinating. I live in a safe, clean house with a wonderful girlfriend. Neither I nor any of my family members have grave diseases. My government rained money on out economy during the pandemic, unlike here, where there was a crippling recession, many lost their jobs, and simply couldn’t put food on the table. My life circumstances are objectively, to an almost unbelievable degree, fortunate. At least I can complain about housing costs… 
• The heat yesterday was oppressive - I think it got up to 98 F, with 50% humidity towards the end of the day. It rained last night so it cooled off quite a bit, but the humidity is also much higher. It was even hotter the week before I arrived. I’ve also been blessed with several cool windy days in the 70s, but everyone I talk to mentions how much hotter the weather is these days. We’ve only in November, the equivalent of May in their calendar. I remember December and January being impossibly hot, feverlike months, especially my first year in Nueva Germania in the north of the country. Folks know it’s climate change, though I haven’t heard any interest or enthusiasm about how to address it. There’s no rage, just dismay, and a certain grudging acceptance. What else can they do? Paraguay contributes to little to global carbon emissions, doesn’t have fantastic state capacity for major policy programs, and has little influence abroad. Fortunately electricity remains cheap, and clean (hydropower), and air conditioning is increasingly ubiquitous.  Still, I’m afraid of what will happen here in the next few decades. Is there a breaking point?
• In addition to the increasing availability of air conditioning, I’ve also noticed folks I visit now have good quality modern washing machines. When I was here ten years ago most washing was still done by hand or in large, strange sloshing machines that didn’t really get the job done. Every house I’ve visited (all middle-class households) has wifi and everyone has smart phones. Say what you will about the global economic system, but the availability of these affordable, incredibly useful products in a relatively poor country is most definitely a happy story.
• When I was here last Facebook was the new thing, significantly altering how and increasing the amount of time people used the internet. The effect of cell phones was still working it’s way through the economy, with the legacy government provided landline telephone provider existing largely as a source of patronage jobs. Peace Corps Volunteers used our tiny simple cells phones to send texts and call each other (in free 10-minute increments). Smartphones, especially the Samsung Galaxy 3, were just starting to appear. Now WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) is the ubiquitous way to call or text, including video calls and sharing images. Google maps is also pretty widely used and incredibly helpful - my host family’s hair salon is shown, for instance. Mostly people send short voice messages instead of calling or texting, which hasn’t widely caught on in the USA, among my social circles at least, but makes sense in a place with relatively low functional literacy and where oral and written communication differ in the language in which they are expressed. (Written communication tends to be a fluid mix of Spanish and Guaraní, while written communication is usually confined to just Spanish.) 
• The little things, the little ways things are done always remind you that you’re in a foreign land. Habits of eating and drinking, expectations around the kitchen, ways of traveling, the questions that are asked and the appropriate responses. There are little things that annoy me of course - dirty refrigerators, no napkins at the table, no middle sheet on the bed - but it’s all relative. Good to remember how our expectations are invented. Good to be reminded there’s no one right way to do things.

Family time

One part of the Peace Corps experience that was particularly challenging for me was living with host families. On the one hand host families are incredibly important for learning the language and culture, for making connections, keeping us safe, in addition to providing a safe accommodations. But the reversion to being a dependent after having so recently achieved adulthood was difficult. 

Staying with a host family meant being forced to make conversation, eat food I didn’t want to eat, time my schedule to theirs, and essentially become a child again. Paraguayans have a wonderful generous desire to make guests feel welcome. With the language and cultural barrier this can become incredibly over-bearing, with the merest investigative question interpreted as an unfulfilled desire and attempts to accommodate the guest feeling like an exhausting high-stakes quiz show, with both the vocabulary and cultural context opaque to the participant. One thing I hated most was being waited on for meals. If I ever left the table for some reason, coming back my food and beverage would be gone. I couldn’t prepare my own meals or wash my own dishes or create my own elaborate coffee rituals. I would often eat alone, which is not the point of host family life, because my exalted status as a guest put me above the regular meals  

In general in Paraguay, and to a greater or lesser degree throughout Latin American, men are expected to behave like children, unable to clean or cook or take care of themselves, and to live with their mothers and sisters attending to them until they find a wife who will take care of them in the same way. This was brought home even more to me the other night, as I was drinking beer with an older friend in NG, with strong ideals and a liberal  outlook on life chastise his wife for not properly cleaning the tops of the beer cans to remove the grit. We were sitting, drinking beers that she delivered to us two at a time, while she cooked dinner. He never thanked her or offered to help.

The assumption has been when folks find out I’m not married that I still live with my mother. The first time that happened I didn’t even process it - but later it occurred to how strange an assumption that is compared to my normal perspective. 

All that’s to say that I’m glad I’ve lived enough that I can cook and clean and take care of myself. I love and deeply appreciate the folks hosting me again on this trip - it's incredibly generous of them to have me and fulfilling to be able to visit in this way. It's also been wonderful to get to stay with a young couple who is not at all like this. But my goodness I'm glad I can afford to stay in hotels as well, and that I'll be home soon where I have agency and a wonderful girlfriend who treats me like an adult. 

Twelve Years Gone - November 2023 visit to Nueva Germania

 One of the strangest things about traveling, especially on a relatively short break from a regular working schedule, is that it highlights how linear time is. I’m here, sitting on the porch on a blessedly cool drizzly morning in Nueva Germania, Paraguay, at a friend’s house. I lived in this town from May 2011 to February 2012. There are chickens wandering around the patio and yard (as there are everywhere). It’s a world apart from where I was and what I was doing a week ago, and the week before that and the week before that and the week before that. In a big way it feels like I’ve been transported back to twelve years ago when I lived in this town, when I was last immersed in these sights and smells and sounds and social cues and ways of speaking and all of it. 

Generally I remember past experiences as kind of cloud of memories/places/interactions, all essentially related to each other and to the present moment in a not very hierarchical way. Most of my memories are from close to home, and it’s easy to revisit them and the places where they happened. But when I’m at my desk at work, no amount of remembering could put me on this bench in Nueva Germania, and it’s difficult to even come up with any sensations that are close to the sights, smells, sounds etc. of this part of the world. But then, by boarding a plane, and then another, and then two more after that, and then a taxi and a bus, boom I am here and in a lot of ways it’s like I’ve transported twelve years back into my past.

Many of the teachers I worked with here are still working, but are near retirement (teachers retire early here and then get a pension). Few people I was close with have passed away. The streets and buildings and foods and animals are still here. So the memory still holds its shape, for now, and it’s satisfying and reassuring and fun to step back into it, and bind it more coherently to the rest of my life.

At the same time my past experience of Paraguay was shaped by my peculiar role as a Peace Corps volunteer. Idealistic, still fresh out of college, getting by on a low-budget, trying to let go of my American assumptions, with a bevy of compañeros to confide in and compare experiences with and get tips tricks and reliable updates. Now I’m a tourist, not bound by any organizational rules, with money to spend, and a short timeline. All of my Peace Corps companions are gone, except Johanna who works for the department of State now, and has been posted at the embassy for the last year or so. I’m older, more confident, wiser I think, and with so much less to prove.

Back then, especially when I started, I had a tendency to romanticize poverty. Partly that was out of a desire to help those with the least resources, but partly it was my desire to be a time-travelling tourist, and see how people lived fifty or a hundred years ago. I came here with no computer or audio player and initially tried to live without a refrigerator when I moved out on my own. My dad ended up bringing me a laptop and shipping me an old ipod and I broke down and bought a refrigerator, but I did make it the whole time without air conditioning in my home.

I was trying to shed my Americanness and live in a “true Paraguay”. But there was no such thing. Waves of change were washing over the country then as they are now. The spread of technology in the last ten years is impressive; smartphones seem ubiquitous, and mobile internet coverage is excellent, so far at least. Residential wifi seems to be a common thing, partly purred on by the pandemic. Air conditioners likewise are even more common, which is a good thing because it’s gotten hotter, and they still have cheap, clean hydroelectric power. 

I was surprised to find that they’ve paved most of the streets in Nueva Germania. I think they paved over all the ones that were previously cobblestone, I imagine that provides a solid base for the asphalt on top. There are a few new public buildings, and new houses, though I don’t remember well enough to know exactly which. Everyone uses WhatsApp on their phones instead of regular texts and calls. There’s a lot you can look up online, and gosh it’s so much easier to travel with a smart phone, with Google Maps and Translate etc. It’s also fun to have such a good camera on my phone, and to be able to easily upload photos and videos to social media.

Lyda waiting for the bus with me

I asked Lyda about earlier changes. The highway that runs through town and connects with the capital has only been paved since 2007 or so. Running water only became available in town a decade or so before that. Lyda was in her mid-twenties when electricity arrives - so about 35 years ago, maybe around 1990. I didn’t ask Lyda about water transportation, but I remember my Doña Lola and Don Ramon previously telling me they remember when boats where still the primary way to get to other cities and towns.   

Lyda dealt with her own linear time dilemma during my stay. Her mother passed away the day after I arrived. She said just a few weeks ago they had been sitting on this same porch together, laughing and joking. Her mom liked to stay up late, and would try to get Lyda to staff up late too even though she had to work. 

I’m so fortunate to be able to come back and see my friends, people that cared for me, people I worked with. To step back inside that memory with the perspective of a 37 year old gainfully employed adult. It’s helps clarify what about that time was contingent on my temporary perspective as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and what was really about this place.