Aikema Escuelape

Today’s Post: I learned a lesson (Lit: I entered the school.)

With just two and a half months until Jake in Paraguay becomes Jake in Gringolandia, our retrospective theme continues. I can’t really wallow in nostalgia since the first two volumes (of a four-volume set, in press under the tentative title One Jew in Prettyview) of my journal presently reside in a desk drawer in Phoenix, Arizona. Yet memory serves, and today, the theme is: misconceptions from my first months as a Peace Corps volunteer and their subsequent correction.

Una Delicadeza. It took me a long time to accept that my place in Paraguay was not the kitchen. For my first few months living with host families, I routinely inserted myself there, offering to peel mandioca, to wash dishes, and even to cook. Rebuffed, I contented myself with learning about Paraguayan cooking. In my first week, my host mom in Guarambaré announced to me that she was going to make tortillas. I eagerly watched her every move.

Moving to a new place is nothing if not a way to forcibly heighten your awareness of the world around you without resorting to drugs or spiritual training. Everything is new, and thus, possibly, worthy of attention. If you stick around long enough, you will begin to ignore the commonplace. This desensitization is often lamented, but it’s really quite a gift. Do you really want to spend the rest of your days attending to the specific color of the walls in your house? Or the way that your neighbor’s dog or elderly aunt barks every morning from seven to nine? It is best that these ambient stimuli recede into the “not worthy of interest” realm of sensation and make not even a mark on our long-term memory.

But to move to Paraguay is to become, temporarily, highly attentive, to have no cognitive filter. I assumed that tortillas were a delicacy, possibly one cooked to celebrate my recent arrival. How lucky I was! When I could have been writing in my journal or writing in my journal or even writing in my journal, I was present to watch my host mom make tortillas, an opportunity I might never have again. For good measure, I memorized the recipe and recorded it in my journal.

Oh, Jake of 2009. If only you knew how many tortillas Paraguayas you would eat and how much you would come to dislike them. To make a tortilla Paraguaya, combine flour, eggs, milk, and salt to form a batter akin to that of a salty, unleavened pancake. It is optional, but certainly not necessary, to dump in cheese, rice, cornmeal, lettuce, green onions, ground meat, or other condiments. Then deep fry the batter to make a salty, crispy, deep-fried pancake. Serve them with mandioca. Tortillas are easy to make, full of calories, and, superficially, “tasty.” The American equivalent of feeding your family tortillas for dinner is perhaps a cross between taking them out to Wendy’s and cooking Kraft macaroni and cheese. I don’t wish to disparage the tortilla. But imagine a foreigner watching you intently and clearly memorizing everything you do as you empty a violently yellow cheese packet into a cooling saucepan of elbow noodles.

¿Qué día es el novenario? I’ve written about novenarios (or “ñembo´ehápekuéra´´), one of my favorite traditions in Paraguay. As the Spanish name implies, a novenario is a nine-day mourning ritual observed after someone dies or on the anniversaries of his or her death. Some people also hold novenarios in honor of saints’ days. In Prettyview, novenarios generally are held between four and five in the afternoon. Attendees gather in front of a shrine of the recently defunct or the revered saint and pray a series of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. (I have to say that the phrase “fruto de tu vientre” sounds even stranger to me than “fruit of thy womb.”) I attended my first ñembo´ehápe shortly after arriving in Prettyview. The mother of one of the town’s nurses had died and my then-host parents are very close to the family. I was looking forward to learning about a new aspect of Paraguayan culture. Yet getting to the novenario proved very confusing for me.

I felt awkward about barging into a service for someone’s mother, not yet aware that novenarios are foci for little children, the elderly, and other socially marginal community members, many of whom constitute a core of mourners enticed by the meal usually held on the ninth day of prayer. Besides, my Guaraní was still mediocre. So I followed my host dad around all afternoon the first day of the novenario. As the sun set, I asked him when we were going. He told me that the ceremony was over. Irritated and mad at myself for letting the opportunity go by, I ate my tortillas and went to bed.

My already fragile sanity teetered a bit closer to the brink the next day when I encountered several elderly women heading to the nurse’s house for the novenario. Why would my host father have lied to me? Maybe I misunderstood him and got the day of the novenario wrong? But sweaty and dressed in bright yellow shorts, I was ill-prepared to go pray over a dead stranger. I had missed the novenario – two days in a row.

I’m not sure how many days passed before I realized that novenarios last for nine days. At least I no longer felt as though I were trapped in some sort of recursive hallucination. (Nor did I know that feeling trapped in a recursive hallucination is a not uncommon side effect of cultural adjustment.) When I finally did get to the novenario, sweating profusely through my collared shirt and slacks, I was greeted by the nurse’s brother, visiting from Ciudad del Este and attending his mother’s funerary prayers, that day at least, in a tank top and a bathing suit.

I learned many things about ñembo´ehápe culture over the next two years. I spent my first one in a state of visible empathetic mourning for the family of the deceased, but soon learned that only the most heinous and premature of deaths call for this. Rather, it is even expected that guests alleviate the sense of loss by joking around and gossiping, right up until someone begins wailing or passes out from grief. Or that it is much more shameful to turn down an invitation for the usually quite generous final lunch than it is to take advantage of a death in the community to score a free meal.

Novedades. A common greeting in Prettyview is “Ha mba’epa nde vallepe” (And what’s up in your neighborhood?). The standard responses range from “nothing” to “nothing novel” to fulfillment of the implied request for gossip, no matter how trivial, about people who live closer to you than to the person to whom you are speaking. But it’s also acceptable to say, simply “tranquilopa” (total tranquility).

The pace of life in rural Paraguay belies the fact that, as is the case everywhere and in all times, things change. Even in Prettyview, you can’t step into the same arroyo twice. But I, and I would imagine, other outside observers, are often tempted to interpret the lives of the rural poor as somehow static or eternal. If this has ever been true, it is certainly no longer so. When I arrived in Prettyview, I imagined that I was being imported into an environment that would be more or less the same when I left. I was wrong. Two years later, new neighbors have moved into the house next to mine; the staff of the primary and secondary schools, health post, and police station have changed; genetically modified cotton, cloned eucalyptus, wireless internet and smart phones have arrived; new denominations of money have been printed; neighbors have been born, died, divorced, and recognized children born out of wedlock; families have immigrated and emigrated; and the mayor (and dominant political party) of the district has switched. I recently looked at some of the maps I drew when I first introduced myself to all the families in the community. Of the roughly 125 houses I visited, a good 15% have either been knocked down, significantly renovated, abandoned, or inhabited by a different family than lived there on my first visit. Yes, Prettyview is probably changing faster than ever before due to greater connectivity with the wider world. But it’s impressive to consider that life here has probably been, to some extent, like this since the village was first founded 90 years ago, and most people still know as many names, faces, and places as they do.

Stereotypes come easily to foreigners because our cultural and linguistic separation and lack of history in our new homes keep us from appreciating the nuances that give rise to unique identity. My initial undersensitivity to the reality of change in Prettyview was one assumption that, paradoxically, it took me quite awhile to discard.

Chanchos. I love Paraguay and many Paraguayans. There is, in fact, only one thing I hate in Paraguay: pigs. Chanchos, kurékuéra, swine – whatever you want to call them, I want to see, but preferably not hear, them all slaughtered. Let’s declare Prettyview a no-pig zone, make tons of chorizo, freeze most of it for later, and get on with life.

My hate affair with pigs began in training. There weren’t too many porkers running around my host community near Guarambaré because, in an urban setting, the danger of theft or accident is high. Most people kept their pigs in chiqueros and my family didn’t own pigs. The only pig I knew belonged to my friend Brian’s host family. This pig, which spent its days tied up along the path we took to get to another friend’s house, squealed incessantly and writhed around as though possessed. Unused to the behavior of pigs, we assumed that it had a porcine mental illness.

Upon moving to Prettyview, I became involved with pigs in ways that I never dreamed of. Since they are mostly confined to concentrated animal feeding operations (not endorsed by Jake in Paraguay) in the States, I had never lived close to pigs before arriving in Paraguay. As a sometime vegetarian and “lightly observant” Jew, I generally did not eat the foods that pig flesh yields. This was all about to change.

A first observation: Brian’s family’s pig was not any louder or more apparently insane than a normal pig. Pigs can be quiet and “cute,” but, especially when hungry, their default behavior includes grunting, screaming, squealing, rooting around violently, chomping, kicking, running in strange and unpredictable directions, and eyeing their human masters as though evaluating a frontal attack. When a sow (even the word is horrible) is ready to breastfeed her ravenous piglets, she simply flops over on her side and lets them violently suckle from her somehow pornographic teats. I am in no way offended by the sight of a woman breastfeeding her child. But when a sow passes in front of my house these days, I generally leave my washing for a few minutes and go inside. What ensues if I don’t flee always feels so…violating. Anyway, the screaming, usually worse around mealtimes, is only slightly more atrocious than the basal level of grunting that a foraging pig produces. I now interpret this grunting to mean “Let’s see what delicious things you have planted for me to feast on.”

My early mistake about pigs in Prettyview was to view them as a force that I could possibly vanquish. Here, most pigs are free range, which means that they are home for breakfast and dinner, but spend most of the time inflicting ecological damage on Prettyview and psychological damage on me. Pigs have destroyed my garden at least four times and killed hundreds of tree seedlings in my vivero. They have similarly prejudiced every school garden and over half of the family tree nurseries I have worked in. For my first year in Paraguay, I though the response to this was to make stronger fences, encourage neighbors to pierce their pigs’ noses with wire (this precludes foraging), gossip about especially negligent pig owners, and excessively grind my molars together, then eat an entire tray of biscuits. I would frequently chase pigs out of my yard and even stabbed a juvenile pig with a machete. (I am not sorry.)

This, however, was my erroneous journey into pig samsara. I became so immersed in hating pigs that I was blind to the underlying reality. To paraphrase Jesus, who, famously, had his own history with the animals, the pig will always be with you, but Jacobo will return to the United States after two years. I needed to learn to go beyond ignoring pigs and accept that they are simply too economically valuable and, if cooked properly, delicious, for the people of rural Paraguay to renounce them. As much as I wish that the environmental destructiveness, huge appetites, and noise pollution that pig raising entails were sufficient to dissuade farmers from allowing those little oinkers to see the light of day, pigs are part of Paraguay.

Since accepting this, I have had a wider variety of pig experiences and reached a new state of pig tranquilidad. I have enjoyed eating pigs, whether in my host mom’s chorizo or tasty but always digestion-inducing crackling (chicharrones). A salty, well-spiced pig stew hits the spot on a cold day. And nothing makes chipa, chipa guazu, or reviro taste better than some pig fat. My higher blood pressure and mandioca belly aside, I haven’t suffered too much from eating pigs. Now when I hear snuffling, I don’t grab my machete and start screaming “KUCHI!” I just take a deep breath and hope that the next time I hear that particular pig, it’s sizzling on the parilla.

Etc. My time in Paraguay has of course entailed a multitude of cultural adjustments and lessons learned. Don’t ever try to use the cajero automático on the days that teachers get paid. You can buy three kilos of flour at the despensa, but be prepared for everyone to think you’re a hoarder. Don’t be a punk and reveal why you really came after only thirty seconds of tereré. Water and the weather can be hot, but if you are, it means you are sexually aroused. Nobody wants to hear you opine that without its stellar goalie, the national soccer team wouldn’t have won a single American Cup game. Yet wearing a “Selección Nacional” t-shirt, speaking Guaraní, and lustily slurping your mate really will make everyone fall in love with you.

Yet these lessons were mostly the result of instant feedback. What I’ve come to appreciate in these waning days of my Peace Corps service are the things that required the fullness of time to be revealed. They aren’t obvious to brief visitors to Paraguay or to somebody who is not paying attention. They will be, more than photos of me on oxcarts or the (fictional) baby I am taking home, my “recuerdos de Paraguay.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a novenario to crash.