Elections were held this week. Being a spectator of the process was as amusing as it was vexing. The political campaign ads in the States that you see on tv, the internet, billboards, bumper stickers, blimps, graffitied on public bathroom stalls, or thrown through your living room window wrapped around a brick are all, compared to the advertising in Paraguay, rather unobtrusive. Here, the candidates don’t wait until you are watching tv or driving your car or sitting on the toilet in a public restroom to get their message to you. They quite literally bring the ad to you via a guerilla war of vapid advertising. Cars and horse-drawn carts drove up and down the streets of my site all-day for weeks shouting the names of who you should vote for. Ever see Back to the Future? Remember those “Re-Elect Mayor Goldie Wilson” mobile ads? Imagine that, but with about 8,000 more megaphones. And, well, in Spanish.

You might complain that elections in the United States have become silly pissing-matches devoid of any substantive issues. In comparison, the local elections here made America’s political atmosphere look like two local Mensa chapters debating evolutionary biology. There was one ad I caught (while watching the Giants win the World Series! in a bar in Asuncion) that simply showed the picture of a candidate for about 15 seconds with two general political-ad words like “Honesty” or “Decency” or “Integrity” or something like that in bold letters above his head. A narrator simply stated the candidates name until time expired. Nothing else.

[continue reading...]

Folks here in Paraguay neither trick nor treat this time of year. The general reaction to my explanations of how Halloween works in the States is confusion mixed with sympathy for the frightened children. I tell a story about how my family once sent a five-year-old Power Ranger running out of our haunted house after seeing what appeared to be our neighbor’s severed head resting on the kitchen table. My intention with that story is to get people to laugh, but they don’t see the funny side in traumatizing children. I suppose the idea of going door-to-door making ultimatums whilst wearing masks sounds more like extortion than a fun holiday if you’ve never participated in Trick-or-Treating first hand. My explanations of Halloween and April Fools Day seem to make Paraguayans think that Americans are just huge jerks to each other.

I had some time last week to go out to the campo to visit a Rural Health Volunteer friend of mine. To say his site is off the beaten path would be an understatement, considering how far he is from anything resembling a path – beaten or otherwise. On our way back into town we crossed a footbridge that reminded me of that final scene in Temple of Doom. I think the bridge from the movie was probably safer, even with the gators, archers, and evil cult leaders trying to rip out your heart. It is made of five wires about the thickness of dental floss, and uses two tree trunks skinnier than my legs to support it at either end. In the middle, I felt the bridge sway back and forth and found myself wondering how deep the murky river below us was. I managed to snap a photo of the unevenly placed footboards, (as well as this shot of the bridge from the end). I’ve been across some scary bridges in my time here, but that one takes the blue ribbon.

[continue reading...]

I’ve mentioned the idiosyncrasies of Paraguayan plumbing in earlier posts. For those who don’t remember, let me put it this way: The important barrier that normally exists between water and electricity is a bit blurry here. Homes that are fortunate enough to have those two utilities generally don’t use the same technique that you may be familiar with for heating the water you use in the shower. In place of a tank that uses gas to heat your water to a temperature that your skin may find agreeable, we have little devices that just breathe fire into the water shortly before leaving the shower head in the form of an electric coil.

I seem to recall an episode of Bill Nye that taught me that water and electricity, when separate, are pretty great for mankind. But when they get together, they can be more problematic than a Gremlin at a water-park. Whenever I flip the switch to my shower’s heating coil, I have to remember not to touch the metal faucet with my bare hands. Consequently, I have a 2×4 in the shower which I use for adjusting it to avoid a shock, (unless I need a little better-than-coffee kick in the morning).

[continue reading...]

I don’t do drugs, but I will be writing this next post really, really high. I just got through painting my concrete cell of an apartment, and that paint was stinky. Now I have nothing to do but sit on the roof waiting for the paint to dry, and convince myself that those flying monsters are just the paint fumes playing with my imagination. Please forgive any typos; I’m not really myself at the moment.

Since my return from Amurca (that’s actually not a typo, I’ll explain that later), life has been hectic. I’ve had to start from scratch as far as work is concerned. My new site is more or less in Asuncion, which when compared to my old home up in Concepcion, is massive. That means the opportunities for lending my services are much more plentiful than in my former site. I was essentially the first Peace Corps volunteer in my first site, so explaining to people what I was doing there was tricky. Luckily, I have that experience to help me the second time around, so settling in here has been much easier. This site also had a female volunteer from my same training group that arrived in February of ‘09, but she ET’d (Early Terminated) a few months into service. Before her, there had been other volunteers, so people around here know what Peace Corps is – That is to say, they don’t think we’re a front for the CIA, like some Paraguayans seem to think up north.

[continue reading...]

As I chatted with an old woman on the second of my day’s three flights, I realized just how long it had been since I was in the States. She and her husband were on the way home from a trip to Peru, where they were doing an amateur archaeology expedition. They told me about their trip, and were curious about my life as a Peace Corps volunteer in a country where not a single guidebook they came across recommended visiting. I was suddenly having my longest pure-English conversation in 18 months. It exposed the gaps that have formed in my English, and the tenuously-constructed substitutes of my second and third languages that have come to fill them in. There are some words in Spanish and Guarani that describe things that English simply can’t. Amongst volunteers there exists a shared vocabulary, known in Guarani as “Jopara,” which strictly speaking, refers to a mix of Spanish and Guarani. But for PCVs, that mix has English thrown in. Rather than make the resulting mix better, it just dilutes it. As I sat there next to the lady whose name I didn’t catch, I felt my face turn a surprisingly bright shade of red as I became increasingly aware of the hum of the engines and nearby conversations as I searched for how to translate a very basic word in English in the middle of what should have been an easily communicable sentence. I hadn’t realized until that moment how rusty my native language was, and how long it had been since I was home.

Overall, the trip felt as brief as a bungie-jumper’s split-second contact with the water below the bridge from which he jumped. I saw that river coming at me fast, and didn’t realize what had happened until the cord tensed up and shot me back from where I came, leaving me nothing but a pair of wet shoes as proof that I actually made contact, (or in my case, a slightly larger gut after eating delicious organ-free meals for two weeks).

[continue reading...]

[Other Chapters] | [Vimeo permalink]

Ever since Peace Corps unexpectedly pulled me out of site like a mean little brother pulling the Band-Aid off the wound of a sleeping sibling, I have wandered Paraguay with little more than a small backpack. My belongings were fetched by a PC driver after my evacuation and placed into storage. My life since that unfortunate departure has been a series of hostels, hotels, floors, sleeping bags, and couches. Living out of a backpack has become slightly more challenging than my typical lean-travel style to which I have become accustomed because of the recent change in seasons. While New Yorkers are complaining of 100+ degree temperatures, it’s been hovering just above freezing point here. Anything north of 0 degrees is shorts and tee-shirt weather for people from Canada, but it is just frozen-hell here since homes are not even remotely insulated. Taking a shower with unheated water becomes a debate with yourself about how bad you actually smell. Sometimes if your smelliness factor is only at a five out of ten, you forgo this icy-cold process of making yourself look like a member of The Blue Man Group without the use of any paint; Stinky and warm is sometime preferable to clean and frostbitten.

Now the time has come to hang up my stick and bindle, put away my sleeping bag and make the very-welcome transition from homelessness back to having my own home. I was given several options to choose from for my new site, all of which had some appealing aspects. After finishing the slow review process, I decided to move to a site just outside of the capital. I’ll be living in a city called San Lorenzo for the remainder of my service, where I’ll be working with children in a small hospital, as well as continuing some of my work that I had been doing in schools up in my former site of Concepcion.

[continue reading...]

The government tried everything. They sent more cops, but I’m pretty sure the cops here haven’t made an arrest since 1987, so sending more chefs into the kitchen spoiled an already nasty soup. They sent in the special forces, but the special forces might as well have been a traveling circus; All they did was set up camp and freak out little kids. The government even tried to hire Scooby Doo’s gang, but sadly, they only specialize in de-masking angry old men in supposedly-haunted amusement parks. In the end, nothing could defeat the rag-tag group of ruckus-raising rebels known as the Paraguayan Peoples’ Army (EPP). Peace Corps got tired of nothing being done to secure the region, so the life support finally got pulled on the Concepcion VAC. What was a 15 person group of volunteers in the region at this time last year shrank to just four last December. Now, the four of us remaining volunteers are evacuated out too.

For those who don’t remember or are just tuning in, this story all begins last year when a rich Paraguayan rancher was kidnapped by a fledgling terrorist group based in the rural region outside my (now former) site of Concepcion. They held him for a couple of months and made a few demands, including a sizable ransom. The family paid, but no one acquiesced to the other, broader demands. Eventually he was released, unharmed but sporting a rather scraggly beard. The group seemed to be fading into obscurity for the first few months of this year, but when a confrontation with police left a few officers dead, the government declared what basically amounted to a “State of Emergency.” You may recall that I was pulled out of my site while the military moved into the region. I returned to site when the military ran out of gas money (seriously), but the EPP remained at large.

[continue reading...]

Phrenology was a science based upon the idea that the shape of the human brain could indicate certain character traits or mental abilities. For example, if you had a large section for music, that meant you were likely to be a good musician. I say this “was” a science because its foundation was debunked long ago, like Alchemy or Geocentricity (or Evolution, if you happen to be a member of the Texas Board of Education).

Despite not being based on science, I still like the idea of such a clear delineation of our brains for specific things. In my own brain, somewhere between the area for storing obscure baseball statistics and the more recently-formed area for Guarani expressions, there exists what I imagine is the one of the larger parts of my Phrenology grid: “Lego engineering.” A big chunk of my childhood was spent using Legos to build vehicles, buildings, and on one occasion, a maze for an experiment involving short-term memory of worms, (my parents were just so happy to have me play with worms inside the house for a change). While this section of my brain is a bit bloated (and using up space that could be put to better use today), I credit it with nurturing what became a far more important section, labeled “creativity.” I always enjoyed following the directions and building that pirate ship that was pictured on the box, but that ship was always deconstructed as soon as I was done and recognized that the piece used for the mast would be perfect for the new design I had been brewing in my mind for an airplane. I’ve been thinking a lot about this geeky pastime of my childhood because of my biggest challenge: Expanding the creative section of kids’ brains here in my site, and trying to get them to build stuff that is not pictured on the outside of the box, so to speak.

[continue reading...]