Keep Exploring

As volunteers, we sometimes forget that life continues a world away from our service in-country. As much as we would love the world of our friends and family to just freeze the moment we get on the airplane to staging and only resume the day we return back home, this simply cannot be. Life continues for everyone. Our friends and family get jobs, get engaged, get married, and continue celebrating in our absence. We feel left out during the good times and helpless during the bad. This one of the hardest parts of service. Especially on a day like today.

I can usually find the words to describe how I’m feeling, but today, the words escape me to elaborate on how much my heart aches. To my dear friend Kelsey McLean, you are an amazing soul and were one of the most joyous people I have ever known. Never has anything like this happened to a person so undeserving. I feel honored to have known you, to have had you as a lab partner through so many ecology and chemistry experiments, to have sat with you on sunny days studying on the green grass lawns of Gonzaga, discussing how we’d rather be camping or hiking than doing another lab report, to have had your support from day one in this endeavor to join the Peace Corps and embark on a great new adventure, to have laughed with you and been able to have heard your laughter and see your smile, brilliantly on display under a backwards blue floral snapback. On every adventure from now on, every hike, every camping trip, every bike ride through the woods, every exploration, I will think of you and raise a gluten-free beer to your memory. Rest in peace Kelsey, and never stop exploring.

478

On my first trip to Asunción, I firmly decided that I did not like the city. It was dirty. It was gritty. It had no culture. What did one do in Asunción? But now, on the city’s 478th Birthday, the tables have turned, my mind has changed, and I’ve come to fall in love with a city that came out of no where to show me another side of Paraguay.

I have fallen in love with the plazas, surrounded on all sides by street vendors, selling a manner of all things. I have fallen in love with these street vendors, with their neatly lined up sunglasses and stacked magazines and small grills, emanating with the smell of chorizo and asadito, and the terere. Mountains of yuyos. Carefully selected, crushed, mashed, pounded, juiced, wetted, iced, poured, ahhhh… All for a small price of five thousand Guaranies; chump change for an hour under the Lapachos. I have fallen in love with the trees. Huge, ancient Lapachos, with their hands of five leaves, stretched out over the city providing relief from summer heat and turning winter into spring as the entire city explodes into a brilliant painting of pink. I have fallen in love with the colors. Pink flowers of the Lapachos and more pink, proudly displayed along the costanera at the Palacio de los Lopez, green of the terere, blue and red and white flying high above the buildings, black and white, red and blue, yellow and black jerseys wandering around in search of fellow fans, white flowers, orange flowers, red flowers, yellow flowers, pink flowers, green leaves, green everywhere as you look out the window of your kamikaze bus speeding along Avenida Mariscal Lopez. I have fallen in love with rickety old buses. Buses you think will fall apart the moment the driver careens around the next corner, you’re sure of it, this is the day the bus will just tip over or the floor will fall out beneath you, this is the day you die, you are positive, oh god here comes another corner, and yet you’re still here, on board, packed to bursting with city dwellers on their way to work, to lunch, to go shopping, to go wearily home on the multicolored boxes that systematically work their way around the city. I have fallen in love with the grit. With the dirt. With the trash. With the graffiti. Because where else in the world will you see a wall with a sprawled “Mba’eteko?” I have fallen in love with “Puede Ser.” It could be. It easily could be as you walk through markets pasts stalls of jeans and flip flops and termos and mountains of fruit and cases of cheese and slabs of meat and strings of sausage and whole surubi caught that morning and bouquets of flowers and the smell of rice or tallerin or vori vori or chipa guazu floating from the kitchen of a motherly kuña karai just waiting for you to come in. “Puede Ser.” It could be. They say it, my wallet says it, the small voice with a disregard for budgeting says it as I wander through Mercado 4 wandering if I’m outside or inside at the moment, because there’s no real way to tell. I’ve fallen in love with late night street corner chats, Pilsen in hand, American music blasting from the cover band inside, Spanish and English and maybe some Guaraní mixing and tumbling in the mouths of the twenty-somethings mingling around. I’ve fallen in love with a hostel. A hammock. A patio of potted plants. A yellow gate. A dormitory bed. A sofa made from old pallets. A large wooden table where I drink endless coffee before departing for meetings or adventures in the morning. A place where I feel at home with my friends as we see each other all at once for the first time in a couple months. I’ve fallen in love with a city that surprised me. It really came out of no where. A city that, although I’m not there often, I feel just as much at home in as I do in my rolling hills of Itapua or the well manicured lawn of my university or on top of a mountain looking down at the beautiful city where I grew up. I’ve fallen in love with Asunción, a city kept secret from the rest of the world, a city of extremes, a city that has become my home away from home away from home.

P.S. If you’d like to see some beautiful photos demonstrating the urban culture of Asunción, follow Foto Ciclo on Instagram! Good stuff!

Oho la Luz

Oho- it goes. Oho la luz– “the lights went out”

August is warmer. August is drier. August has been windier, causing my power lines to shake in the breeze. Every time a breeze rolls in, my lights flicker, my phone buzzes constantly as it charges: charging, not charging, charging again. Sometimes, it doesn’t go back to charging, but I hear Cumbia or Polka or Paraguayan Harp playing from the old radio in my family’s house, so I know Óga Ita hasn’t entirely lost power. Just me. Just my house. The wind has yet again pushed a little too strongly against the illegal power connection that my host brother originally made to connect my house to the main line, therefore loosening it. So I grab my broom. I trek across the grazing pasture to the road. I put the broom in my teeth and start climbing the electrical pole, using old knobs from long-gone branches as hand and foot holds. Pulling the broom from my clenched jaw as I reach the top, I whack the electrical wire a couple times to tighten the connection and then carefully set the wire on top of a small nob on the top of the pole. That’s the sweet spot. I turn to look at my house and see that my light is steady, no longer flickering. I chuck my broom and climb down again, knowing I’ll probably be back in a few hours if the wind keeps up; fifteen minutes if it gets stronger.