Today’s Post: I went to my country.
Yes, loyal readers, after a lengthy vacation hiatus, Jake in Paraguay is back again with dispatches from the heart of South America. But first, we have some catching up to do. So, I’ll start at the beginning of my vacation: my trip home to the United States.
Since the discontinuation of direct air travel between Asunción and the States, America-bound travelers leaving Paraguay have been required to change planes, often in Lima, Sao Pablo, or Buenos Aires. From there, the most common landfall in the U.S. is Miami, Florida. For a vacationing volunteer, what could beat Miami as a perfect transitional bridge between life in the Paraguayan campaña and the urban United States? As my friends Cyrus and Emma put it, ‘’Miami is kind of a third world city.” And landing there was not as shocking as I had expected my re-entry into American culture to be. I spoke Spanish well through baggage claim and would have probably kept going if Emma had not been there to pick me up at the airport.
You see, southern Florida was also a great place for me start off my vacation because, through total coincidence, Ellis, my best friend from adolescence and Cyrus and Emma, my college roommates, moved there within months of each other. Deep emotional bonds were pulling me to Miami, and, surprisingly, they weren’t being exuded by elderly Jews.
Emma and I headed over to pick Cyrus up from work and, after a brief stop at their apartment, we went straight to the beach. Sharing whiskey and ginger ale with two amazing friends as the sun sets over a pristine stretch of Miami Beach – it was nice to be back in America. Keep in mind that it is winter right now in Paraguay, so wearing only my swim trunks felt novel even before we went swimming in the lukewarm ocean. The evening’s sensual delights continued with a tasty shrimp stir fry back at the apartment, followed by visits to Cyrus’s favorite bar in their neighborhood…and the local gay bar a few blocks away. I think we were going for maximum cultural shock. It worked. Awkwardly sipping a beer in a South Beach gay bar, I felt like I did during my family’s trip to Scandinavia, which is to say about six inches too short, three times too hairy, and mistaken in my decision to wear shorts. The evening ended with cookies and cream ice cream and a supple futon that I fell asleep on roughly six hours past my normal Paraguayan bedtime.
A hot shower (!) in the morning refreshed me for the trip’s next delight. After leaving Emma at work, Cyrus and I headed out to a rendezvous with Ellis, whom I had not seen for over three years. But more importantly, Cyrus was depositing me not just with Ellis, but also with her then-fiancé, John. Indeed, though I had certainly enjoyed my time with Cyrus and Emma, my ultimate purpose for a visit to southern Florida was to serve as the best man in Ellis´s wedding. Delighted to see Ellis and meet John, I was also weirdly disoriented by breakfast with my two ´´best friends,´´ who had really only ever met briefly in the past. Luckily, neither one exploded, challenged the other to a duel, or protectively put his/her arm on my shoulder. Cyrus took off (to re-appear in Jake in Paraguay in our next installment) and Ellis and John ferried me away for two days of wedding preparations.
It was wonderful to see Ellis again and to catch up on several years of missed face-to-face friendship. She met her now-husband when both were living as ex-pats in China (she, teaching English, he, working as a balloon artist) and they became engaged soon thereafter. Their wedding was the impetus for my vacation in the States and Ellis’s request that I be her best man was one of the honors of my life. The next several days featured joyous reunions (Ellis’s whole family was there, of course, as well as my brother Ben and Elisa and Theora, two of our close friends from high school), strange wedding errands (retrieving chocolate figurines for the cake and arranging a professional-grade balloon hand-off in a pawn shop), and feasting (the rehearsal dinner was catered paella from a pan larger than my bath bucket in Prettyview). Ellis’s wish was for us all to go get manicures and pedicures the day before the wedding. Bowing to peer pressure and exigency, I agreed to my first ever pedicure. I only mention this because it is the means by which I had clean feet for the first time in a year and a half. Tipping my technician 50% did not alleviate my guilt over the horrible mess of ancient red mud, scabbed over pustules, and frayed toenails that she was confronted with. At least she used gloves, if not, as my father suggested she might have, a blindfold.
As an anthropological aside, I would posit that getting a pedicure is a very strange experience. Perhaps I am simply unused to the trappings. Or, and I hesitate to resort to gender essentialism, it could be a girl thing. But so many aspects of the pedicure seemed odd (though not always unpleasantly so) to me: the strangely intimate and also clinical scraping and cutting, the lack of verbal communication between pedicurist and client (although maybe mine was just too mortified to speak to me), the social clientele (a brassy woman in the chair next to me offered me the use of her encarnadine nail polish), and the shockingly aggressive “massage” chair. Culture shock may have made the whole thing more off-putting, although I can’t complain about the wonderful feeling of clean feet that followed me out.
Ellis was a gorgeous and happy bride having the wedding she wanted. The way she and John arranged their wedding said a lot about both of them and their relationship. They and their friends and family were responsible for most or all of the ceremony, decorations, music, and food. Every aspect felt personal and meaningful, rather than just traditional. As I said above, it was an honor to be there with and for Ellis as her “man of honor.” I don’t have that much more to say about the wedding than that it was a joy. The only hard part was saying goodbye to the bride and groom after the reception so that I could continue on with my visit in the States.
My brother and I had planned to take a redeye flight to Philadelphia the next day to attend our cousin Rachel’s graduation from Swarthmore. Unfortunately, our flight was cancelled and we missed the graduation. It was disappointing. I would like to say, though, that we handled it better than one couple, two Christian Zionists whom I had been spying on before we even boarded the plane. When it turned out that that flight would not be taking off, they exploded in a public, tawdry way that, though distasteful, was actually rather entertaining to me after a good year and a half outside of America. Ben ingeniously booked us two replacement flights – a later flight to Philadelphia for him and a trip back to Phoenix for me.
So finally, I was on my way to my real “home” in the States: Phoenix, Arizona in the flowering of the summer. Meeting my mom, stepfather, and grandfather as I emerged from security at Sky Harbor airport made my insides melt with delight. As I hugged them, I felt filial love and the favorable environmental conditions cauterizing away my lingering bacterial foot infection (I’m so sorry, pedicurist!) and presumptive giardia. The evening continued in this vein. My stomach was filled with spicy Thai food and my arms with the embraces of our three clean, friendly dogs. More hot showering ensued, and I spent my first night at home since entering the Peace Corps.
Since I started college, vacationing in Phoenix has always seemed like going to a resort. I guess that is actually how most tourists in my hometown feel, but you’d expect it would be different for somebody who grew up there. Nevertheless, I basked away during my time in Phoenix: lunch and coffee dates with some of my favorite people, hikes and runs in the mountain preserve, swimming with my cousin, movies in the theatre, bike rides, bookstore browsing, excessive hot showers, and endless dog love. I played my autoharp and walked or biked over to my grandparents’ house every day. I ate my mom’s “crispy” (meaning intentionally burned) stuffing, my Grammy’s kasha varnishkes, and my aunt’s famous barbeque chicken and chocolate chip cookies (consumed sequentially, of course). I wore a tank top, exercise shorts, and a head band pretty much all the time and didn’t worry about what my neighbors would think. I used the internet constantly and didn’t feel (too) guilty about it.
Though I’d missed my cousin’s graduation, I did get to spend some time with Rachel and meet her boyfriend, Ernesto. They’ve been dating for years, so it was a treat to get to know him. The three of us got to hang out a fair amount and got along well. What else would you expect from three hopelessly nerdy biology majors? And my one Saturday at home was, fortuitously, the date of my stepmother’s Bat Mitzvah. Shirley converted to Judaism and, impressively, became a Bat Mitzvah along with several other adults in her and my dad’s congregation. So, I got to drive up to Sedona and share in the festivities. It was great to be a part of it, but also fulfilled me spiritually and socially as a Jew. As much as I try not to dwell on it, it is hard to be the “one Jew in Prettyview” and to have very little opportunity to practice my religion with others in Paraguay. I was hoping to go to services while home, and attending Shirley’s Bat Mitzvah was the perfect way to do so.
Finally, I used my time at home to think about and prepare for my life after finishing my master’s degree at UW in June of next year. I have decided to apply to Ph.D. programs this (northern hemisphere) fall in order to have, I hope, an academic home in (northern hemisphere) fall 2012. I have some ideas about schools and fellowships to apply for and don’t feel too daunted about the idea of preparing applications from Prettyview. I feel better, now, about finishing my Peace Corps service in December.
In a more general sense, one I didn’t anticipate, this was another benefit of my vacation home. I feel really good about my time in Paraguay, as a volunteer and as a human being. I have been able to integrate socially, build relationships, and accomplish work goals. To do this, I have, of course, suppressed feelings of homesickness, cultural difference, frustration, and transience. I usually don’t think this in so many words, but my attitude in Prettyview has often been: “I love living in Prettyview as much as I loved living in Oberiln or Seattle. The people who I am closest to here are practically my real family. My friends are lifelong friends. I will always live in Prettyview as a forestry technician and my work needs to reflect this long-term commitment.” None of these things are actually true, although I hope to remain close to my Paraguayan “family” long into the future. But believing them has helped me to be a good volunteer. The dark side of this conceit, this striving toward ideals that don’t really match reality, is that I have been purposefully ignoring some of the great joys of life: attachment to my biological family, friendships more than two years old, a sense of attachment to the places I was raised and educated in, and my hopes for a future that will take place in the American ivory tower rather than the Paraguayan eucalyptus plantation. I’m happy that my illusions have helped me to live productively and happily in Prettyview, but going home provided an important reality check about what life will be like when I return for good.
I know that his post has mostly been a “what I did during my vacation” narrative – the sort of thing I normally eschew here at Jake in Paraguay – so I’ll try to end on a more contemplative note. In writing this entry, I searched deep within my “self”/myself to learn what my trip back to America revealed about cultural differences, core-periphery relations, (post)modernity, urban/rural, post-material, developing, developed, capitalist, pre-/post-dictatorship, pluralist, corporatist, democratic…blah blah blah. Upon waking from this solipsistic slumber, I developed a pithy list of Three Culture Shockers for the Peace Corps Volunteer Returning from Paraguay:
1. People in your home country will still speak…your native tongue. If you continued to use this language (along with either shouting or a translator) during your travels, then this will not be an issue for you. If, on the other hand, you have been speaking primarily Guaraní and Spanish for the last 20 months, you will need to get used to English again. For me, this was easy with people I already knew. Speaking English to Emma shortly after arriving in Miami was natural, because I know that Emma definitely speaks English. But strangers? My response was always to use Guaraní or Spanish. Waiters and attendants at stores or restaurants were the most challenging. You can get by with Spanish in Miami, but nobody will understand you if you hesitantly begin ´´Ikatupiko…´´ or ´´Permiso. Moopa ikatu atopa…´´ Likewise, forget about winning the friendship of passing strangers with a forceful ´´¡Op!´´ or ´´¡Adio!´´ or ´´¿Mbaeteko che ra´a?´´ As a result of this phenomenon, I was, for my first few days in America, rather shy and passive with strange people, whose linguistic preferences I didn´t automatically assume to be English.
2. Where is everyone? Emma and Cyrus actually told me to anticipate this. American suburbs, although to a lesser extent cities and towns as well, seem completely depopulated relative to comparable locations in Paraguay. And by depopulated, I mean stripped of the teeming masses of humans, animals, sounds, and smells that seem as though they should be there. I often felt that my suburban neighborhood in Phoenix was bourgeois, soulless, pretty, and boring. But I never thought of it as being suspiciously silent (no blaring Polka Paraguaya?) or abandoned by hordes of ravenous pigs. Awaking to urinate at 3:00 AM, I would wonder, ´´have all the roosters died or been slaughtered by some evil presence in preparation for the release of a basilisk? Where is the persistent grumble of moto engines? The whine of mosquitoes?´´ I could run for miles through the streets in my part of town without seeing a single ox. The only domestic animals around were suspiciously well-groomed dogs and horses being ridden, not by eight year-olds helping with the cotton harvest, but by retirees clad in turquoise jewelry. Be prepared for the desolation. It is not a zombie apocalypse, just your home country.
3. Stop profiling people! If you are driving in a car, riding a bike, or out walking or running, you will see people of all different ethnicities, classes, ages, sizes, etc. Blonds and people with backpacks will not be Peace Corps volunteers. They will (probably) not be missionaries. Unless you know one of them personally, do not smile and make eye contact or strike up a conversation with them or ask them where their site is located based on the fact that you both speak English. I possibly made several joggers feel unsafe this way. You are in America, a land of pluralism, and although it was actually kind of effective to profile non-Paraguayans in Paraguay, that doesn´t work in the United States. Welcome home.
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