Aipota Nde Yty

Today’s Entry: I want your trash.

Last weekend, I bought my first pack of cigarettes. In the previous twenty-four years of my life, the only time I’d even touched a cig was to dissect one during an anti-smoking lesson in middle school and in the course of picking up littered butts. But I am now the owner of a 20-pack of “Kentucky” brand cigarillos. How did buying it feel? Two experiences come to mind.

The first is a shameful and sweaty night at Oberlin’s Mudd Library. It is my sophomore year and my Dutch visiting Statistics professor has interpreted my offhand criticism of The Bell Curve as a profound desire to deliver a brief presentation on the topic in front of the class. I could use the extra credit, but am now horrified at the thought of touching, much less reading, much less checking out a copy of the work of pseudoscientific racism that, up until now, I had despised in blessed naïveté. After removing several works of The Bell Curve criticism from adjacent shelves, I slip the book itself into my pile with the spine pressed against my chest. Checking out my selections, I pray that the student librarian reads the situation correctly: “One work of right-wing pedantry plus 10 excoriating responses equals just another curious mind.” On the way home, I picture myself in confirmation hearings for the position of EPA czar. My college library lending record has been leaked to the press! A furor erupts. The binding feels hot against my sweater.

And at the same time, buying cigarettes was reminiscent of the more commonplace, and thus somehow worse, sense of furtiveness I used to experience in the States when buying a quart jar of Smucker’s Red Raspberry Preserves. Does the cashier know that I will eat most of it straight out of the jar with a spoon? And if not, why is she giving me that accusatory glance? And really, who needs toast?

I did as much damage control as possible, explaining to the owner of my favorite álmacen why I needed cigarettes, asking her to keep our secret, and then hiding the box in my house. But I eventually had to take the next step, opening the cellophane, gingerly sniffing the box´s sweet odor, and then slitting open 10 cigarettes and dropping the enclosed tobacco into boiling water. All of this, in preparation for charla dos in a series of four gardening workshops I am doing with the three agricultural committees in Prettyview. This second meeting is all about pest control: crop association, organic ant repellent, and tomato traps. The last item consists of a plastic bottle with holes poked around the top. You fill it with a mixture of boiled cigarette butts and tomato juice and suspend it from the posts used to tutor tomato plants. Insects that prey on tomatoes are attracted to the juice, fly inside the trap, and then die (though much more rapidly than their human counterparts) when exposed to the nicotine in the cigarettes. I like the trap idea because it selectively targets only the bichos* that threaten the crop, rather than all insects, and because it elegantly takes advantage of secondary metabolites.

Secondary metabolites, also called secondary compounds, are chemicals plants make that, while not implicated in essential physiological function, play roles related to defense against pathogens and predators. It is hypothesized that they spun off from chemical components essential to photosynthesis, respiration, etc. and the plants that produced high levels of these mutant compounds displayed a competitive advantage against plants without them. Secondary metabolites are distasteful, debilitating, or deadly to plant pathogens and predators. They include caffeine, nicotine, theobromine, tannins, latexes, and many other compounds that humans love to eat, drink, smoke, and otherwise exploit. One reason behind the human love affair with secondary metabolites adapted to ward off bugs is that we have much larger bodies. The small amounts of caffeine that we consume in the form of coffee leave us buzzed. The amount of caffeine that an insect ingests while feeding on coffee plants is proportionally much larger and probably doesn’t encourage a repeat experience.

My recipe for tomato traps actually calls for boiled cigarette butts rather than cigarettes. But I went ahead and spent the 25 cents for a pack of fresh cigarettes. The reason is: I’m tired of asking Paraguayans for their trash.

***

Who knows what I will be remembered for in Prettyview? If I had to guess now, I would imagine that the dirty connotations of my name, a particularly catchy children’s song I taught all the students from prescolar to sexto grado, and memories of how “fat” I was will probably linger longest after I am gone. Forget the trees planted and the moments of deep cross-cultural exchange. Did you see how long he would talk on the phone to his family in Norteamerica? But I also think that my neighbors, perhaps somewhat rightly, will remember me as a scavenger.

Paraguay has a big trash problem. Capitalism and all of its inorganic garbage have arrived without the attendant advances in waste disposal, recycling, or even the understanding that old batteries and cans won’t turn into abono (fertilizer) with time. Even relatively humble rural families produce plenty of dirty ules (plastic bigs), candy wrappers, cans, and glass bottles. Most simply form a big pile and burn it all, while some bury the waste in a pit. Nowadays, digging a new garden entails turning up trash from the last few years a few inches under the soil’s surface. Given this, I have tried to work reuse of old materials into my projects. Milk, wine, or juice cartons become macetas (plant containers); plastic bottles become hand-washing stations; cardboard boxes become didactic materials; and ules become small cold frames over seedboxes. But begging for and carrying around all this trash sometimes makes me look a little eccentric. I usually don’t know whether it is better to explain why I am stuffing things into my pockets or to quit without further incriminating myself.

To be fair, I also lust after organic yty (waste). I have been trying to encourage the creation of aboneras (compost piles). Animal rekaka, yvyra raka rogue, tembi’u yty, tainimbu, and ryguasu rupia pire (that’s animal feces, tree leaves, food waste, ashes, and eggshells, respectively) are all useful. Since, as a single-person household without animals, I don’t produce much, I often ask for gifts. Again, my behavior begs the question: Is it best to explain to Doña Vargas that I want her cow feces to do a compost project at the colegio or should I just let her fill in the blanks? My most bizarre moments occur when I borrow my neighbors’ wheelbarrow and take my shovel out to collect cow patties in the road. Part mendicant, part streetsweeper, and part organic gardener, I gather the neighborhood’s cow crap.

Really, begging for cow manure makes me feel like a character in Purple, Green, and Yellow, a picture book by Robert Munsch my mom would read to me and my brother as kids. The protagonist uses a series of markers to draw increasingly realistic “cow plops.” Something about the way my mom would say “cow plops,” (emphasis on “plops”) a phrase I had never heard before, was enough to send us all over the edge into uncontrollable laughter. Having become something of a cow plop connoisseur myself, now, I feel as though things have come full circle, as they so often do with feces.

Perhaps the most understandable object of my newly found magpie (or packrat?) instincts is seeds. Since arriving in Prettyview, I have labored to build up my collection of tree seeds, especially. As new species go into flower, I begin ingratiating myself with the owners of particularly accessible or fecund specimens. My favorite seed tree is an yvyra pyta (Peltophorum dubium) that, due to some past trauma, dips its crown to within a meter of the ground – perfect for one seed-hunting Jacobo. Seeds obviously have value, but I know that my sometimes miserly attraction to them has defined me in a few families’ eyes. Nevertheless, nothing feels better than collecting a big bag of tree seeds and taking them back to my midden, I mean, house.

Thus I embrace my inner hoarder and hope that my Prettyview friends will look back fondly one day on the American who wanted their trash.

*My dictionary defines bicho as a small animal, a bug, or an insect. Paraguayans truly aprovechan (take advantage of) the word for all it is worth. Bichos here may be as small as microorganisms (bicho’is, or “little bichos”) or as big as weasels, armadillos, capybaras, and, once, a deer. For an American used to interpreting bicho as “an insect,” it takes some time to get used to the full usage of the word in Paraguay. I am also frequently reminded of my brother’s difficult-to-interpret Spanglish cry of ¡Qué Bicho!