The Other Side

Time here both drags and rushes. Days either seem repetitive or brand new. As the newness and excitement wears off, life becomes life, and the wear and tear intertwine with the hilarious and the every day.

This week Peace Corps gave us a chance to express some of our difficulties about Paraguayan culture. While some people couldn´t think of some, mine were easy and were as follows:

1) the inability to be straight-forward. This goes both ways, first, when you ask for directions, people will make them up if they do not know, which means any question you have you must ask 3 or more people and balance the answers.. when busy, this sucks. Then, it comes the other way, if I say that I am not going to eat much of something because I am full, they take it as a non-straight-forward way of saying that I do not like what they are offering me. As a fairly blunt person, I find myself constantly stepping on toes while attempting to adjust to the Paraguayan waltz around the truth that they so elegantly manage.

2) the somewhat cruel way they treat kids conceived outside of marriage. they end up cooking, cleaning, and kinda of being treated like dirt by the families that adopt them. fortunately they seem to adapt well and accept cookies from me with sweet smiles. Also fortunately Peace Corps has a rule that we cannot adopt kids while in service... I think that probably derives from volunteers like me trying to save them...

3) Guarani is still hard. For example, the other night, rather than saying I am going to brush my teeth, which are rai, I said ra´y (the y is actually pronounced like a high pitched sigh and thus is very similar to an i) and thus told my host mother I was going to brush my testicles. Oops.

But, beyond the unfortunate things, I also recently realized, much to my hilarity, that my host mother pretty much thinks I can see the future. First, while she thought I would visit a volunteer near the city, I told her I would go far away and I ended up with the volunteer the furthest north. Then I told her that I was sure my first illness would not be a stomache problem, and when I came down with it this week it was indeed a fever. Addmittedly, she was freaked out. She mentioned my ability to sense things, and then, when I told her that rice in the salt would help it not stick together.... she whipped the rice out of the cubbored and had it in the salt shaker in 2 minutes flat.....
apparently now I need to be sure of any advice I give....

that´s all for now.
-Jess