Right before joining Peace Corps, I
spent three months living in South Africa for a study abroad program.
I remember waiting to leave at the Cape Town airport after weeks
spent romping through the wild bush of the Eastern Cape: there had
been so many adventures and so much excitement that I was as high on
adrenaline as I was on the new-found girlfriend I was bringing home
with me. It was an incredible experience and all I could feel was
pure joy.
Right now, I am preparing to say
goodbye to Paraguay—a country far less thrilling than the untamed
wilds of South Africa, but whose absence I will feel so much greater.
This is my last week as a Peace Corps volunteer. These are the last
few days I will spend in this little slice of heaven and hell that I
have made into a home. These are the last sips of tereré
that I will share with a community of people that supported me and
loved me and shared their lives with me for two years. These are the
last nights I will sit on a porch with my little army of adopted
Paraguayan campo dogs—Lobo, Tony, and Tyson—drinking cheap
Argentinian wine and smoking hand-rolled black tobacco cigars that
taste as sweet as the South American sun. It is in these quiet
moments of reflection and appreciation that I can hear and feel my
heart slowly breaking.
Leaving this place is going to kill
me, but at least that's how I know that this was far more than just
some fling, some adventure-seeking high-octane power-trip through a
third world country where I got my kicks but missed everything else
of value. No. For me at least, living in Paraguay has been a process
of slowly getting this country, its culture and its people deeper and
deeper under my skin. My life here has often been quiet and slow,
sometimes maddening and almost impossible, and everything in between.
But one way or another, of all the unlikely places in the world,
Paraguay has become such an important part of my life and my
development as a human being. It has seen me grow, it has challenged
me at every corner to do so, and it has cradled me though some of the
darkest and brightest times I have ever seen.
So much of what has gone on here
during my Peace Corps service has been a private affair. Living alone
in an isolated community means that, while my days were spent working
with Paraguayans, most of my nights consisted of long hours alone in
my home. In that sense, what has functioned as two years of service
to this community, to Paraguay and to my own country has also
functioned as a sort of personal, intellectual-spiritual retreat for
myself. I am coming home soon but I am not the same person. I don't
even know who I am sometimes, but then again, I have never known
better. I have tried very hard to share as much of this experience
with other people—friends from the states, fellow Peace Corps
volunteers, even some close Paraguayan friends—but the reality is
that so much of this is incommunicable and so deeply personal that
sharing it is impossible.
Every travel and intercultural
experience is valuable, no matter how long or how brief. All such
opportunities serve the desperately important purpose of breaking
down the cultural, social and racial barriers that hinder and harm
our world so terribly. But few places or programs in the world offer
what Peace Corps offers; there is no other experience in the world
like a two year Peace Corps stint. None. I don't mean to come off as
pretentious or self-important, and I am sorry if it reads that way.
Allow me to make my case: Peace Corps is not tourism, it is not just
a volunteer program and it is really not a traveling experience. It
is a living experience where in order to even begin to accomplish any
volunteer goals we must first integrate into communities and with
people that have often never seen Americans before and rarely venture
far from home.
“Traveling” and “tourism” are
things that Peace Corps volunteers do as a break from this intense
living experience; sure we go on trips to other places from time to
time, but when we are in our communities, we are not traveling, we
are home; we are not tourists, we are just another neighbor. In my community, for example, no foreign tourist could just
wander in one day and set up a home and start living. Firstly, they
would likely never even find the place and secondly, there are so
many social and economic barriers to forcing oneself in the middle of
such tight-nit, inter-related, and closed-off communities. The
pretext of being a Peace Corps volunteers gives us the in and the
experience we have as a result of that foot-in-the-door is like
nothing else in the world.
I have mourned with families over dead
loved ones. I have been there when babies were born and then watched
them grow and eventually learn my name. I have harvested crops and
shared in the seasonal bounty of these blood-red soils. I have hunted
and foraged in these woods, grown my own food, killed my own meat,
and, by necessity, become more in-tune with the weather and natural
world than ever before in my life. I have sat at local political
meetings and watched my friends speaking in defense of their future
and the lives of their children. I felt me heart break with these
people when some were thrown homeless onto the streets and I was unable to do anything. I felt the
joy of sharing in successful development projects and great personal
achievements with so many others. This place is the first community I
have ever really felt a part of and I know that when I am here,
whether today or in 20 years, I am home.
Have no fear friends and family, I am coming back to the states (at
least for a bit), although I am sure
you've all enjoyed the respite from my chaos in your own way. But it will be with a
heavy, heavy heart; a heart so full of love for this country and its
people, for all the incredible friends I have made through Peace
Corps, and for two of the most personal and yet
community-oriented years of my life.
Re-adjustment will be hard, I
know that, it doesn't worry me. What worries me the most at this
point? What are the thoughts that have been keeping me up through these hot nights with just the sounds of the cicadas and night-jars for company? Whether Don Zaccarias will
get better and have enough company. Whether someone will keep caring
and loving my dogs. Whether there is a future for the youth of Guido
Almada. Whether this next year and all its fickle weather will
diminish the harvest. Whether Don Antonio's wife will ever recuperate
and whether his daughter will be able to walk normally again. Whether
the Brazilian soy producers will begin to displace these people as they push further west.
Whether there will be enough land in the future or anybody left to
work it. Whether the community water pump will make it through
another brutal summer and who will pay to replace it if it doesn't.
Whether Caesar will get a good education and have a decent life
despite his disability. Whether the government comes through on their
promise of milk cows and chickens for the community. Whether, when I
come back, this place is as beautiful as it is now.
I do not mean to idealize it all too
much. There are certainly things that I won't miss. But I love this
place and these people despite all their flaws, in fact, I love them
all the more because of these shortcomings. I know that I will
never be Paraguayan and that I will never totally be a part of this
community; at the end of the day everyday, I am an outsider. Still, I
have come so far in my understanding and my genuine concern for these
people that I think it kind of puts me in a different category
altogether. I am not a member of this community even though I played
a part in it for two years, but the community and all its members are
a part of me. That's gotta count for something.
So it seems almost too fitting that
this should be my last blog about my Peace Corps service as a
volunteer. I will be writing and blogging extensively in the coming
months, but as of next Monday, I will no longer be a PCV. This marks
my 100th entry since I began this personal blog just
before my trip to South Africa almost 3 years ago now. It also marks
my final blog from the Paraguayan countryside and my final blog as a
Peace Corps volunteer. For the next few months, I will be backpacking
and traveling through Patagonia in Argentina and Chile then moving
onto Peru and Ecuador. Thank you to all who have followed me thus far
on my journey and supported and loved me the whole way. I love you
more than you can possibly understand.
Maybe its not that I left my family in
the states for 2 years or that I am leaving my family here in
Paraguay. Maybe its just that my family has grown and
expanded—across countries and continents and languages and
socio-economic classes—and now there is just that much more love in
the world. Que suerte.
Rohayhu.
from home, from Paraguay,
little hupo