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.
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