It's the inevitable conundrum of the human experience: We are young and we want to grow up, we are old and wish we were young.
In the Peace Corps, this ongoing battle against age takes on a new light against a backdrop of cultural mysteries and struggling to focus on the 'right now'. But 'right now' is rarely as important as the 'just a second ago' and the 'two years from now'. The battle of time and age take a back seat to the actual war we're fighting: The War of Where.
In Paraguay, we honor a couple of go-to questions on the road. It's guaranteed that each time you step outside the house in this country (whether 'you' are a seventeenth generation local farmer or a recent US import such as myself), two questions will affront your sense of privacy, if you still maintain one. 1- Where are you coming from? and 2- Where are you going? Many times, these questions precede even the globally mandatory, How are you?
Why?
Well, the people in Paraguay seem to require some sort of space-time continuum to cement each person in an ever-expanding grid. To be unaware of someone's location immediately before or after an interaction is a risky business and seems to blow an air of uncomfortable mystery upon the interaction. To insinuate that you are simply walking, aguata, no mas, is likely to cause a bit of distress in the ever-worrying heart of your new Paraguayan friend. To be sure of you as a person, it's necessary to first establish your geographical place on the grid.
Also included in this placement system are your marital status and age. These two factors seem to be inextricably connected. To incite one without mentioning the other is a possibility only after many months of friendship and shared hours together not speaking. I mean.... to be married indicates an entirely separate line of your grid of life. To be married insinuates another half to the whole that you might have been and links you not only to another human being but to that other person's entire grid as well! Things can get messy.
Age on the other hand seems like a fairly straight-forward issue but of course, in the unwavering tradition of the Peace Corps, the people here have found a way to make it depend. Depend on what, you say? It's your age for God's sake, how much more straight-forward could it be? Age is a number changeable only by time itself- time! Unfortunately, age is also a number that can be used as a basis to judge all accomplishments in life and to anticipate the impending accomplishment of your dark, uncertain future. That shadowy, uncertain road I mentioned on which people keep rudely pushing you forward.
The issue of age depends greatly on whom you are speaking to. If I say, "I'm 24," to my 86 year-old abuela she inevitably comes back with "Jovencita, todavia!" - translated as, Still a young little thing! She means to say that my entire life is ahead of me and feebly reinforces my cries that now is the time for work, for gaining new experiences, for making new friends! She agrees that love will come later. I mean, hey, she's got 60 years on me - been there, done that.
However, when I reveal my age to a campo man of 55, he is quick to tell me that time is running out, I must hurry! What am I waiting for?! If I don't buck up and find a Paraguayito soon, it may to be too late! All of the sudden, I'll find myself living in a hut in some beaten-down border town all alone, with only my pigs to comfort me when I cry at night because, as we all know, it is impossible to either travel or find the will to live without a man to push us forward.
Haikuepete! What I am doing here?!
I must tell myself... Resist, resist, resist.... from telling these panic-enabling farmers of an alarming trend that connects developed, first world countries with a higher number of women in the workforce and a lower average age of women marrying for the first time. Such a chuchi statistic seems a little pish-poshy, riff-raffy anyway ... or some Guarani equivalent of such.
So, do I want to be young or old? I DON'T KNOW! But it's impossible to stop thinking it as we are constantly reminded of our age and beat down with the question, What are you going to do when your two years are over?
Hey, didn't I come to stop thinking about the future for awhile? Wasn't one of the points of inserting myself into a foreign culture, a much slower culture, to focus on the here and now and stop worrying so much about the future?
What am I going to do when I get back? Do I have to think about that now? Do I have to remove myself from the reality of my current situation to start planning for a future that seems completely disconnected from the cow-poop, sand mortar wall in front of me? My life is suddenly full of allusions to that shaded, dangerously windy road of the future. Allusions full of pressure... and high expectations! Bah!
I'm 24. I'm single. I'm surely on my way from the market and probably headed home to hide out for awhile. Hide from all these people probing into my future which is supposed to be sitting on the back burner while I focus on myself and the present. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men.
19 September 2011
02 September 2011
Nobody knows... the trouble I've seen...
The normal cycle is as follows: You leave high school to attend a college and whether that college is near or far away you begin socializing with at least a few people who have no idea of your past. Your first car, first kiss, family history, high school experience- all of it's a total mysterious to these strangers who wander in front of you. Eventually, people get a good idea of what your life is probably like in that 'other' place - your home. Then you leave college and you go- where? To work somewhere? Alright, good job finding work first of all and second of all- isn't it daunting to imagine?!- you have to explain your ENTIRE.LIFE. to a new group of strangers with whom you share cubicles, lunches, stories about your significant others, etc. You share such a prominent chunk of your time with these people and yet, this is not your life, is it? There is a mysterious entity floating just beyond the reach of what these used-to-be-strangers could possibly comprehend because they float around in the realm completely opposite of it- your home life.
This process of explaining what has happened before, the actions that carried you forward to the place where you stand now, literally becomes longer everyday, doesn't it? Our histories stretch out behind us in a winding trail with every step we take forward toward the future. Every minute, every second, that slow and laborious (although certainly entertaining) story of our past stretches on and on and the eventual re-telling inevitably becomes less accurate, more exhausting.
Now, what makes this relating of your past so much less daunting is that the people with whom you interact, those would-be-strangers would gradually acquire the titles of co-workers, friends, lovers, spouses, likely have similar backgrounds. Thus it becomes unnecessary for you to dive into the tedious details of how your family ate dinner (with what utensils, in what room of the house, consuming what food) or what high school was like (were there desks? what time did you start and finish? did you have summer vacation?). Instead you can float on the surface of those experiences, including only the really moving or entertaining details that catch your eye from a distance.
However, imagine if you moved to a far-off land where those similar backgrounds disappeared into the abyss of the cultural grab bag that threatens and simultaneously enhances international travel. Really, you don't have to expend the energy to imagine the situation. I will describe it for you vividly as it's happening to me at this very second. Now you can use that saved brain power to do something productive like pulling the stick of Congress's ass or complete a Rubik's cube. Good luck.
Here in Paraguay, most people I meet assume that it's impossible for us to share any common history beyond the physically evidenced fact that we are of the same species both breathing this stuff called air. What luck! We're both humans. But honestly, there aren't really clouds in the US are there? No, no, that's not right. Do you really celebrate Christmas there? And you go to high school too? Well that's poppycocks!! Surely two continents so spread apart couldn't have developed in such a similar social fashion.
Well, remember, Paraguay, it isn't so similar as you think but, yes, we also indulge in weather patterns, education and family traditions - even in the US.
But honestly, back to the point. These would-be-strangers from a different country who now comprise the majority of my social life have no inkling as to my 'past life,' as I like to think of it. Not the past life where I desperately hope I was a lady-in-waiting for Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth as this would explain my abnormal interest in the time period, but my past life where I shopped in downtown Philly, got professional hair cuts and ate fat-free frozen yogurt all at a moment's notice. These aspects of my life, along with my family, friends and education, are all beyond the realm of the people around me. They did not experience them with me and therefore I must begin the re-telling. The differences this time? The re-telling is done in another language, an automatic point deduction from the categories of clarity and accuracy. Secondly, the re-telling is done in the setting of a different culture; there go points from realism and relatedness. Finally, many of the pictures I'm trying to paint with my Guarani and Spanish words are non-exist in this place (e.g. la-z boys, bunk beds, maple trees, smores, Ghostbusters, sledding) and so the re-telling of my life becomes a fanciful story of made-up objects and mutant plants, not unlike a Dr. Seuss book.
Por eso (for this), I often feel as though my strings have been cut and I might easily float off into the void where no one knows who I really am or what I come from. I'm ungrounded. In this first real opportunity for me to completely re-invent myself and plant my strings again, attaching them to whichever foundation I see fit, I find myself desperately trying to pinpoint the exact locations from which my strings were cut upon disembarking the plane in Asuncion: In Hudson, Michigan; in sipping hot chocolate after rolling around in the snow; in my grandparent's lake house; in learning to drive with my Dad on back roads. I tell anyone who will listen in any language available to me every scrap of past I can remember. I babble on to strangers on the street about, Oh Che Dios! My Mom does the same thing! I joyfully recount my life in a series of mythical Dr. Seuss-like journeys around places that surely don't exist in the real world (do they?): Mackinaw, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Sleeping Bear Dunes (yes, she's talking about a Dr. Seuss story, for sure). Because I suddenly realize, staring into a blank future and a present that- I'm serious now- is a Dr. Seuss hybrid with an episode of the Twilight Zone, that all I really want are the simple things that I so despised before. I'll save the world for now but after that I want what's simple. I want a rocking chair, a faithful dog, Sunday dinners and yes, I want to live in a country song. So what? If I chose to take extravagant vacations twice a year to satisfy the burning itch that is the travel bug (is that what that is? I was looking at pamphlets...) you don't get to judge me. Because I know what I want- and that took long enough.
To sign off, a quote from the One-and-Only, the most appropriate inspiration in my present life (not my past): Dr. Seuss (only minimally related to the topic above).
"You have brains in your head. You have shoes on your feet. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go."
-Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!
This process of explaining what has happened before, the actions that carried you forward to the place where you stand now, literally becomes longer everyday, doesn't it? Our histories stretch out behind us in a winding trail with every step we take forward toward the future. Every minute, every second, that slow and laborious (although certainly entertaining) story of our past stretches on and on and the eventual re-telling inevitably becomes less accurate, more exhausting.
Now, what makes this relating of your past so much less daunting is that the people with whom you interact, those would-be-strangers would gradually acquire the titles of co-workers, friends, lovers, spouses, likely have similar backgrounds. Thus it becomes unnecessary for you to dive into the tedious details of how your family ate dinner (with what utensils, in what room of the house, consuming what food) or what high school was like (were there desks? what time did you start and finish? did you have summer vacation?). Instead you can float on the surface of those experiences, including only the really moving or entertaining details that catch your eye from a distance.
However, imagine if you moved to a far-off land where those similar backgrounds disappeared into the abyss of the cultural grab bag that threatens and simultaneously enhances international travel. Really, you don't have to expend the energy to imagine the situation. I will describe it for you vividly as it's happening to me at this very second. Now you can use that saved brain power to do something productive like pulling the stick of Congress's ass or complete a Rubik's cube. Good luck.
Here in Paraguay, most people I meet assume that it's impossible for us to share any common history beyond the physically evidenced fact that we are of the same species both breathing this stuff called air. What luck! We're both humans. But honestly, there aren't really clouds in the US are there? No, no, that's not right. Do you really celebrate Christmas there? And you go to high school too? Well that's poppycocks!! Surely two continents so spread apart couldn't have developed in such a similar social fashion.
Well, remember, Paraguay, it isn't so similar as you think but, yes, we also indulge in weather patterns, education and family traditions - even in the US.
But honestly, back to the point. These would-be-strangers from a different country who now comprise the majority of my social life have no inkling as to my 'past life,' as I like to think of it. Not the past life where I desperately hope I was a lady-in-waiting for Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth as this would explain my abnormal interest in the time period, but my past life where I shopped in downtown Philly, got professional hair cuts and ate fat-free frozen yogurt all at a moment's notice. These aspects of my life, along with my family, friends and education, are all beyond the realm of the people around me. They did not experience them with me and therefore I must begin the re-telling. The differences this time? The re-telling is done in another language, an automatic point deduction from the categories of clarity and accuracy. Secondly, the re-telling is done in the setting of a different culture; there go points from realism and relatedness. Finally, many of the pictures I'm trying to paint with my Guarani and Spanish words are non-exist in this place (e.g. la-z boys, bunk beds, maple trees, smores, Ghostbusters, sledding) and so the re-telling of my life becomes a fanciful story of made-up objects and mutant plants, not unlike a Dr. Seuss book.
Por eso (for this), I often feel as though my strings have been cut and I might easily float off into the void where no one knows who I really am or what I come from. I'm ungrounded. In this first real opportunity for me to completely re-invent myself and plant my strings again, attaching them to whichever foundation I see fit, I find myself desperately trying to pinpoint the exact locations from which my strings were cut upon disembarking the plane in Asuncion: In Hudson, Michigan; in sipping hot chocolate after rolling around in the snow; in my grandparent's lake house; in learning to drive with my Dad on back roads. I tell anyone who will listen in any language available to me every scrap of past I can remember. I babble on to strangers on the street about, Oh Che Dios! My Mom does the same thing! I joyfully recount my life in a series of mythical Dr. Seuss-like journeys around places that surely don't exist in the real world (do they?): Mackinaw, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Sleeping Bear Dunes (yes, she's talking about a Dr. Seuss story, for sure). Because I suddenly realize, staring into a blank future and a present that- I'm serious now- is a Dr. Seuss hybrid with an episode of the Twilight Zone, that all I really want are the simple things that I so despised before. I'll save the world for now but after that I want what's simple. I want a rocking chair, a faithful dog, Sunday dinners and yes, I want to live in a country song. So what? If I chose to take extravagant vacations twice a year to satisfy the burning itch that is the travel bug (is that what that is? I was looking at pamphlets...) you don't get to judge me. Because I know what I want- and that took long enough.
To sign off, a quote from the One-and-Only, the most appropriate inspiration in my present life (not my past): Dr. Seuss (only minimally related to the topic above).
"You have brains in your head. You have shoes on your feet. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go."
-Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!
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