Che Avy´a Ko´ape

First of all, Happy New Year to all of my friends and family out there. I have been thinking of you and hope that this year is one of serenity, and consolidation of Democratic control of the House and Senate, for us all. For me, this year, 2010, is my Paraguayan Year - the year I may not see the United States and, at any rate, won´t be living in it. It´s daunting, but frankly, I´m happy it´s here.

Christmas, which, for the first time ever, I was forced to celebrate, and New Year passed through my village with quite a flourish. Families stay up until midnight to welcome Christmas on the 24th and the New Year on the 30th and both holidays featured plenty of drinking, cards, firecrackers, and gorging. In some ways, it felt more like the 4th of July to me, since these are of course summer holidays here. We ate watermelon, asado (barbecue of lamb, pig, chicken, or cow), chipa guazu (like incredibly moist corn bread made from a special moist corn called choclo, pig fat, whey, salt, cheese, and water), and clérico (a drink made of a mixture of orange soda, champagne, wine, fruit juice, Kool Aid-like powder, and plenty of diced fruit). Happily for me, Christmas merited zero mention of, you know, any spiritual meaning - in my house, that is. So I didn´t feel too uncomfortable celebrating.

Today´s blog post is an expression I probably use every day in my new host community, one that is sometimes either ambivalent or an outright lie: I´m happy here! Paraguayans tend to ask us Peace Corps volunteers that a lot and it´s pretty serious to say ´´I´m not happy.´´ Therefore, I usuall reply che avy´a, even through gritted teeth.

This is to say that my first few weeks in my new host community were among the most challenging of my adult life. I have had to draw on emotional and, occasionally, physical resources that I have either never relied upon before or have never drawn on so deeply before. These have included: tolerating uncomfortable social situations, withstanding boredom, seeking common ground across big cultural and even personal differences, pretending to have fun, hoeing for hours on end in the sun, restricting myself from using the family whip on pigs and/or younger brothers, withholding judgement on behavior I don´t initially like, and adjusting my own attitudes and preferences to fit those of others. More than anything else, I have had to practice humbling myself: asking for help and admitting when I don´t understand or can´t do something. Most helpful have been the support of my family and friends at home, kind words from my first few friends here in town, stolen hours of reading around siesta or bedtime, and unhealthy binging on holiday foods and lollipops.

My host family here was a dad and two of his grade school-age sons. Mom and the two other siblings were in Argentina, where she was working to make extra cash around the holidays. My brothers gave me a hard time, often, but also showed me through their actions how to run a house in the Paraguayan campo. With mom gone, they did most of the cooking and cleaning, and I got to help. Learning to cook over an open fire was helpful. For the next two weeks, I have a different kind of living situation. I´m living in the spare room off a carnicería in the center of town. My host dad runs it during the day and I eat my meals with him and his wife. They are an older couple with grown kids. They are very sweet people and I appreciate their generosity. My host mom looked liked I´d slapped her when I suggested that she let me wash my own dish. I´m hoping that she´ll let me help out more as they grow more used to me. Though living in a butcher shop is a little odd, I love having my own room and no host siblings. It´s tempting to tell my host community that the Peace Corps changed its mind and is letting me move into my own home before the official March date.

On this note, using the term ´´my new host community´´ is becoming rather cumbersome. But I don´t want to compromise my community´s privacy. Therefore, I´m going to try to use pseudonyms from now on to describe where I live. I will refer to my community itself, which is home to about 800 people, as Prettyview. As far as I have been able to tell so far, it is composed of roughly four zones: el Centro (where I´ll eventually live and where the schools, church, etc. are) and three more offshoots populated mostly by farms called Palmita, Fields, and Jesus. Right now, I´m in the nearby town of San Juan (a real name), using the internet and buying some special foods to share with my current host family. So far, I´ve lived in Palmita and el Centro, but I´ve visited the other neighborhoods in my daily visits to meet new families. These visits are my main form of work right now. Every day of visits, I try to meet a few new families and record information about them in my little black book, which I will hopefully use to make a map of the community and to keep records of my work as it develops.

So that brings me more or less to the present. Spending a day in San Juan has definitely given me a little bit of a boost. It´s nice to be on my own for awhile and to escape from the need to be interacting with other people all the time, usually in Guaraní. On this note, a trip to Asunción is going to be, despite my desire to stay in site and not take ´´vacations,´´ a necessity this month. I´m almost through all the books I checked out from the PC library and my other books from home are still in storage with the other items that didn´t make it into the bags coming with me on my trip to Prettyview. Reading (in English) is one of the few barriers between me and my very own Paraguayan conniption, so there really isn´t much of a choice. I´ll finish Anita Diamant´s The Red Tent, which I highly recommend, especially to biblical enthusiasts, Jews, fans of C.S. Lewis´s Till We Have Faces, and midwives (you know who you are), and then head to Asunción. Until then, as we say in parting here in Paraguay, ´´dale!´´