It´s All About Attitude OR Babies in Jars and Cooking with Pig Poo

Arthur, Me, Elmer, and Lyn


After Party Dance Party


Mary and New Paraguayan Friends


Carlos flipping Mbeju


Modeling the fine coop gear


Modeling the fine Coop gear


Making detergent


Our Sears Photo


Bambi, Ronnell, Mary, Ramona, and Me


This is how they trap the methane from the pig poo to cook

The culture shock hit me like a piano out of a 4 story window. One minute, I´m having my site interview, telling them that my biggest asset is my positive attitude (and believing it), and the next thing I know, I burst into uncontrollable tears in the middle of language class (my profesora is still baffled as to why the subjunctive tense would upset me so). I tried to pull it together, I really did, especially since I didn´t even really know why I was so upset, but I ended up going home from class and crying in my room for the next 17 hours. The rest of the week, I felt brittle and raw, but managed to hold it together. I was sick most of the weekend and slept it away, and then, just as suddenly as it had come on, the crash was over and I was all better, just in time for our longfield visit.
So the thing about my life is that everything seems to work out in just such a way that it´s one lesson after another at exactly the time I would need it most. I feel like I´m in my own version of the Truman Show (The Angelíc Show? All About Angelica?) and it´s all on cue. On this week´s episode, my lesson is: Attitude is Everything.

In Longfield, we go in small groups to visit a volunteer for 5 days. My group of 5 went with Sasha in the clean and pretty little town of Valenzuela. Sasha has a fantastic attitude and is adored by her women´s groups. She´s fluent in Guaraní and, as my Valenzuelan host mother Doris explained, she can eat meat and cheese and bread, which is a huge selling point for her. This was clearly one of the Paraguayan round-about insults to me - she thought I was just being a chuchi bitch with my food limitations. After Sasha and I explained it another twelve times each that it wasn´t a choice, and exactly what foods she could feed me, her initially cold demeanor really warmed up. We ended up getting along swimmingly, although, as with my other host family, they introduce me along with my food issues. "This is Angelica, our American Volunteer with the Peace Corps. She can´t eat milk or wheat or cheese or bread. Nothing. It´s a disease." This is followed by a series of questions. If it´s during dinner, the guest is staring suspiciously at my plate of rice and veggies the whole time, as though it´s something contagious from anything not deep fried. "Can she eat mandioca? Carne? Pollo? Doesn´t she get hungry?" "No, she eats a lot, but´s it´s all healthy. She´s really skinny." I cannot tell you how many times this conversation has happened here. They say that a lot of times there´s only one thing a town uses to distinguish volunteers years after they´ve gone, "Then there was Anne, she didn´t like kids. Then Joe, he was black..." and I´m pretty sure they will describe me like "Then we had Angelica. She was very tall but very strange because she only ate fruits and vegetables, no bread, no cheese, nothing else. Very strange."

But I digress. It is now crystal clear just how big of a difference fluency in Guaraní will make to Peace Corps service. Yes, everyone can speak Spanish, but speaking Guaraní is the difference between being a well-liked PC volunteer in the area and being everyone´s adopted daughter.

I´m guessing longfield was designed to just drive us into the ground, where by the end I might have happily stayed buried just to get a little rest. Between long days of projects with the group and evenings with host families, where we still had to be on, being friendly and charming in Spanish, throwing in some Guaraní words now and then, which they love, I was definitely exhausted. 4 out of the 5 of us, though, DID IT ANYWAY. Our lesson of what not to do was Bambi. Bambi is in her 50´s and worked nights doing computer repair for 20 years. She has told us from the beginning, in a million different ways, CONSTANTLY, that she does not like to work in groups, can only take other people in very small doses, likes to be alone, and hates training because we are always together. Even during the heart of my crying day, I was not as negative as Bambi is on a normal day. She has a negative comment for EVERY SINGLE activity, and then laughs afterwards to pretend like she is joking, but very clearly is not. Were she not like that all the time, I´d be much more forgiving about this week because she was sick - she had bronchitis and a fever. When she was with us, she was like a black cloud of negativity over everything. She kept telling us her symptoms and coughing on everyone. She ended up missing most of the week while she recovered in bed at her host family´s, which was exactly what she (and we) wanted.

Contrast that with Ronnell, who was sick with what turned out to be a flu, and although he was feeling worse and worse as the week progressed, he never once complained and would only mention it when asked directly how he was feeling. Thursday, we had a misguided adventure when we tried to walk 2k into the campo to go to a socia´s house for some Paraguayan food and conversation. We ended up getting lost and walking about 5k before we found them, and the whole time Ronnell is trying desperately to hold things in from both ends, and keeping up like a champ. When we got there, he threw up massively in their yard, but was still very polite and waited patiently until it was time to walk the 2k back, still without complaint.

It sounds cliché, of course, but especially in the PC, where you are put in places and situations that you would never otherwise be in, attitude REALLY is everything. It will completely make or break you. It´s the difference between Liz, whose group went into the deep campo for their visit, and who "showered" with a bucket of water, standing in a tire in the middle of the kitchen, with no curtain or privacy (with a family who was very sweet but who literally kept their recently miscarried fetus in a jar of formaldahyde in a shrine in their bedroom), and could still laugh about it and say she could live in the campo as long as she had a bathroom, and Bambi, who after a week of more relaxation than any of the rest of us have had in the last 7 weeks, during the conversation where we were summing up the week, learning from the experiences, and getting great advice from Sasha about being volunteers, interrupts TWICE to ask when we are leaving (but laughs afterwards t pretend it´s a joke).

No one is pretending there aren´t bad days and that´s it´s not sometimes hard to be positive (from what the volunteers have said, it´s about half and half good and bad days), but those of us that suck it up and work through it are the ones that really grow from this. I´ll be one of those.

On a more technical note, here are some of the things we´ve done in the last couple weeks. Ronnell and I did our first charla at the children´s home. It was about washing hands - an important topic right now since hospitals are overflowing and flus are sweeping through communities faster than you can say "¿Quieres tomar Maté?" We had a handwashing song and fingerpaint - it went went over really well. Since then, Belén and Camila and I have had a couple of fingerpainting parties. At first, Camila didn´t want to use her fingers and only wanted to copy my pictures, but after a while of me talking about "creatividad" while we painted, she really got into it. She´s slightly obsessed with me now and apparently paced around the house the whole week I was gone, pausing periodically to glance at my door.

Also, we took a field trip to a farm where they recycle the manure of all the animals in order to be more self-sustainable. The rabbit poo went to the worm beds to make good soil and the pig poo was anaerobically decomposed in plastic tubes for the methane, which was then brought on a line to the house for cooking. The food was a big hit.

I now know how to perfectly flip mbeju in a pan, how to make my own detergent, and how to wash my clothes by hand in tubs (although I´m pretty sure that at my site I will be supporting the local economy by paying someone to do it). Mary and I gave a charla about leadership to some kids who didn´t want to be leaders at all, except for one motivated girl who, thank God, actively participated.
I´m in the process of having a bad filling fixed in my tooth. The first step was chipping off the old filling with a drill and no novicaine (this is no A Million Little Pieces - it wasn´t as bad as it sounds).

I´m in the market for some Paraguayan jeans (probably without the rhinestones) since all my clothes are stretched out from the lack of dryers around here. I don´t know how the Paraguayan girls keep their clothes tight enough to give them cameltoe, but the definitely manage it.

Having now traveled with our language teacher, Ramona, we´ve learned that she is super chuchi and refuses to walk in mud, or sometimes just at all. She also won´t put her head in the water when she takes a shower (because she can´t swim, she explained), so had to go to the beauty shop twice during our trip to have her hair washed.

Miguel from the training group had a birthday during longfield - his host family made him a special batch of meat-filled pig leg (with the hair still on it), which he gracefully avoided since he´d learned how the hairs get stuck in your teeth from the last time it was served to him. We threw him a suprise party when we got back. It was great. He was really surprised, it was lots of fun, and then we went over to another house for a dance party until 2 something, which is the latest I´ve stayed up since I´ve been here and it´s good to feel like a grownup sometimes.
That brings us to right now, and things are going well. 8 days and counting until I find out my site, so I´ll let you know.