Thursday, November 9, 2023

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.

Monday, November 6, 2023

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.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Tapeguaheporãite

Welcome to my Peace Corps blog. I'm done writing here, but please have a look if you're interested in Peace Corps, Paraguay, or my silly life.

These are some of the posts I'm most proud of:

My ode to Paraguay
http://ianparaguay.blogspot.com/2013/05/teta-hovyu.html

A run-down of one of my best days of Peace Corps service
http://ianparaguay.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-is-great-day-like.html

A journey I took through the dark heart of the country during summer vacation

A short portrait of a pleasant evening in summer

An essay on the global entertainment industry, the third world and Opa Gangnam Style

A visit to the first part of the country I lived in and a profile of two friends/PCVs who lived up there.

A breakdown of all the cool stuff I made there

Some interesting comparisons from my statistics phase

Some philosophizing after my site change

My ode to buses

I guess I have a lot of favorite posts.

My essay on the relevance of rain and mud in daily Paraguayan life

My reaction to being suddenly relocated to a different site on the other end of the country 

Interesting experiences in my old site in the summer


Thursday, June 13, 2013

product

I just added pictures to the last two blog posts
the entire album can be accessed here

enjoy!

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

further

a rundown of my arrivals and departures since Cafayate

Salta again 5/26
bought my ticket to Coquimbo, walked to the top of the big hill, took an early morning taxi to the bus terminal 5/28



Had the most epic and beautiful bus ride of my life crossing the Andes and the Atacama desert. I took about a million pictures, we´ll see if any turn out.




Antofagasta 5/28
waited three long hours in the inexplicably crowded terminal at Antofagasta. I should have just bought my ticket to there, and then bought another to Coquimbo once I arrived. There were buses leaving headed south every half-an-hour, but I had already purchased my ticket for 2am.

The bus ride down the coast and through the mountains was incredibly barren.
Coquimbo 5/29
A seedy but in its way charming little port city across the bay from La Serena. Stayed two nights in a neglected hostel in an majestic old house.



Vicuña 5/31
A charming little Chilean-Andean town up a sweet, relatively lush valley.  Met nice French and Spanish girls at the hostel. My camera battery died as I took pictures of the sunset from the big hill there. I haven´t yet found a way to charge it.



Santiago 6/1
Stayed three nights with a sweet, generous, and hilarious Anglo-Chilean couple at their nice house by the country club in Santiago. Explored downtown two days. It is an impressively modern, cultural, sophisticated, vibrant, efficient city.

Valparaiso 6/5
Just arrived in the most wonderful hostel I have ever seen. Can´t wait to explore this quirky, wonderful city. Had a big great meat-tomato-avocado-sauerkraut sandwich as I walked from the terminal. I will try and find a way to charge my camera.

  



Friday, May 24, 2013

Other places

5-24-13
Three days after leaving Paraguay I´m in a town called Cafayate, south of the city of Salta, Argentina. This is wine-country, a high desert valley watered by mountain runoff. The mountains rise steeply rfom the valley floor and seem to come in all shapes and colors and forms imaginable. The town is tidy and peaceful, with many tourists, and is surrounded by wineries.



Yesterday I stayed in Salta, which is a lovely, sophisticated city. There are many differences between this part of Argentina and Paraguay, 800 desolate kilometers away, but what struck me most profoundly was the sophistication, the civilization even (if civilization is a measure of how good a group of people is at living in cities) of the urban culture, which could not be more different from Paraguay. In the beautiful central plaza, surrounded by interesting and historic buildings, with hundreds of pedestrians passing in all directions I was struck by the near silence of it all. There were hardly any motos, the buses do not roar like semis, many of the streets around the plaza are only open to foot traffic, there weren´t even any barking dogs.  The city operates with a casual, elegant earnestness.  



Between here and there lies the vastness of the Chaco. As we were crossing it the night of the 22nd, I could still see Paraguayan culture in the items for sale in the lonely little towns where we stopped. Here, though, Paraguay is completely absent, except in the practice of drinking yerba mate.I keep wanting to speak Guarani with people and being disappointed.

5-25-13
It was not so easy to get out of Paraguay. I think I was reasonable in not expecting it to be so difficult, but I´ve always been bd at these sorts of things. I was in Guarambare last Saturday night and Sunday, visiting the Benitez family one last time, then I came into Asuncion last Monday to complete my paper-work and swear out as a Volunteer. My phone broke on Saturday, making it hard to make those last goodbye calls, and I started having major gastro-intestinal issues Sunday. Peace Corps service doesn´t end without a fight.



I spent Monday morning trying to figure out how to get my readjustment allowance check into my bank account. With dad´s help, and at a cost of about 200$ I got that taken care of by about noon. I swore out Monday afternoon, turned in my broken phone, and stayed the night in my favorite hostel. Tuesday I went shopping for gifts for my family, which went well, and met Ellie and her fianceé Alexis in the plaza for tereré one last time. We got a good Paraguayan lunch in a nice little place frequented by working Asuncenos. One of the things I like about hanging out with Ellie and Alex is that they live in a much more Paraguayan way than most vounteers, because, well, he is Paraguayan. I could always count on an inviation to a hearty hot lunch when I was in Encarnacion, and here in Asuncion, instead of going to the same touristy/fancy restauarants that volunteers always go to they had sought out an authentic Asunceno lunch place as a matter of course. They will be married in the states as soon as they can get the paperwork processed.

I headed to the office to pack and ship a suitcase of things I didn´t want to take with me on my travels, and to finally pay my 170$ Argentine entrance fee (which was a pain in the ass, also). Once my suitcase was ready I went to DHL to send it. I expected a cost of $200 or so, hopefully less. I was told that it would cost no less than $600 to ship my 20kg suitcase home, and that was if I took out my laptop. Stunned, I returned to the office again by taxi. Generous as always, Ellie and Alexis agreed to carry my suitcase home with them on the plane and ship it from Tennessee, saving me about $430. I dropped off the suitcase with them to the bus terminal to buy my ticket to Salta.

I had inquired the week before about going to Salta and there hadn´t been any problem, I was told that buses head there at 9am daily. However it seemed that the Argentine bus companies had changed thier schedule, or that Argentina had changed its clocks, and that the connections no longer worked. After about half an hour we cobbled together an itenerary with two layovers with the second of which only 10 minutes, meaning I could easily be stranded in Formosa if the bus from Clorinda were late.



True to form I overslept slightly Wednesday morning. Granted, I no longer had a phone with an alarm clock, but I should have asked someone else to set an alarm to wake me. I got confused by the city buses one last time and arrived at the terminal frantic and wet from the rain 5 minutes after my bus to Clorinda was scheduled to leave. I hired a taxi to chase it down, and after about 15 minutes we caught up to the bus somewhere in the northern sprawl and I was able to board, relieved.

Arriving in Clorinda I had a hell of a time convincing the customs agents that it was fine that I have two passports: a peace-corps one (which I used to leave Paraguay and will not use again) and my old, regular one (which I used to enter Argentina). Fortunately it was not my Clorinda layover that was tight.

Clorinda was dismal, grey and muddy in the rain. I changed my Guaranies to Pesos with one of the many street corner money changers after searching about an hour for a proper Casa de Cambios and stocked up on bread and fruit for the long trip across the Chaco. So far things looked about the same as the other side of the river, but there were more bicycles and donkeys (I don´t think I ever saw a donkey or mule in Paraguay) and fewer motorcycles. The schools looked nicer. Though my bus left 20 minutes late from Clorinda we arrived at the large, clean terminal in Formosa with plenty of time to spare.

Clorinda, Argentina

During the night we stopped in many tiny towns in the Chaco. They all followed the same plan, a large double avenue with a park down the middle, turning off the highway to the south. Streets gridded out from the central avenue. The investment by the federal government was obvious in these otherwise poor, isolated towns. Around 11pm the bus stopped on the highway. There was a torch-fire burining and there appeared to be a tree across the road. The Chaco is partially forested, but the trees are not tall and mostly grow a good distance from the hiughway, so I was surprised thinking that wind had blown it down. It turned out that the road was being blocked by the indigenous tribes of the region, protesting I don´t know what, but the proper protest had not begun, so after ten minutes or so, they moved the tree and let us through.

In the night I searched for signs of the distant Andes. The near-full moon lit up the overcast sky, but everytime I opened my eyes the horizon was still perfectly flat. We didn´t begin climbing hills until 5am or so, after the moon had set. Arriving in Salta I still had seen just a few hills in the early morning light. I didn´t glimpse my long imagined Andes until Thursday morning. 

In Argentina there are more:
Cyclists
Cars
Pedestrians
Donkeys, goats
Varieties of beer
Nice things
Tourists
Mountains
Panflutes
Wool hats and sweaters
Hostels
Hot water tanks
Smokers
Backpackers
Asphalt

in Paraguay there are more:
Toilet seats
Motorcycles
Cows, chickens, pigs
Money changing houses
Mobile vendors
Cars with huge speakers
Stray dogs
Imported products
Plastic bags (with every purchase)
Trees
Medicinal herbs
Cobblestone

bicycle fish vendor in Clorinda


Hope you´re well. I´m loving it all.