Monthly Archives: July 2014

Vergüenza: Sink or Swim

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President's Palace, Asunción“Vergüenza” means “shame” in Spanish. In the everyday application of the word, “vergüenza” means shyness and someone without “vergüenza” isn’t ashamed to do whatever it is they want to do. This little word summarizes whether you will sink or swim as a volunteer. Why?

There is no room for being shy (having vergüenza) in the life of a PC volunteer. I and all other volunteers are weird and foreign to our communities, but our job is to get to know the people as best we can and make a life in Paraguay…as quickly as possible.

To get to know people we end up making a lot of “cold calls”—just walking up to houses to visit. We invite ourselves to any event we hear about:  Funerals, birthdays, soccer games, Bible study; the list goes on and on.

To make a life in Paraguay we (the volunteers) have to ask endless questions. In a country where there aren’t really even road signs, the only way to figure out where things are and who can help us is to ask. For example, there’s no directory of electricians that could help me when my power goes out. But, there are at least three electricians who live within a ten-minute walk from my house.  We can’t Yelp or Google maps stores and restaurants (except, maybe, in Asunción) because most of them are off the Internet grid and the only way to know they exist is to ask or stumble upon them.

But, it’s not just that we don’t know where anything is. It’s also that things are done differently here. This is the land of house-front stores and handy men and women. Because of this, we have to learn how to navigate a world of informal, personal business interactions. It’s a world that the organization, digitalization, and formalization of the US has pushed to a back burner, but in Paraguay it’s very much front and center.

Volunteering is an exercise in losing vergüenza. To stay afloat you simply must be bold.

Where’s the Big Dream?

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The RoadFull disclosure: I’m a dreamer. I like to think about the future and make several, multifaceted plans about where I want to end up and how to get there. I like to make plans, but I’m always happy to change and revise them whenever I learn something new or gain new insight.

As you might imagine, as a dreamer, I like to talk to other people about their goals and aspirations.  Because of this, I often find myself struggling to connect to young Paraguayans. Many of the young people I talk to here don’t dream big.

During training we did this activity that is an interview with yourself in 10 years. The idea of the activity is that one person pretends to be a reporter and asks you about what your life will be like in 10 years. I modified that and started asking young people where they see their lives in 5 years. I thought it might be a fun conversation starter.

I was wrong. The 5-year question usually yields a very short answer. The youth I have ask say the following: 1) a house, 2) a stable job, 3) a boyfriend/girlfriend, 4) children, 5) a car. Now, any of those individual topics could be interesting, but the response is usually that brief and in list form.  When asked what kind of job, the respondent often shrugs. When asked about their house, boyfriend/girlfriend, or children the answer is equality nondescript. One interesting tidbit: Often the respondents think they will have children, but aren’t sure if they’ll be married. They sometimes have a plan for how they are going to get all the things on that list, but always.

I used to find myself sad that the people I talked to didn’t have big dreams, but then I wondered why I was sad because they were probably happy with what they were doing and where they were going.  It’s hard to not make assumptions and project your beliefs on others. Living in a different culture makes in unavoidably obvious how different each person sees the world.

What Do You Do With Your Trash?

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House at the edge of the fieldIf your community didn’t have trash collection services, what would you do with your trash? That’s a questions that most Paraguayans face. Few communities have any organized trash collection, so every family is on their own.

Let’s assume you’re already doing everything you can to produce as little trash as possible.

Would you burn your trash?

Burning your trash would get rid of it, which is a plus because it would keep your property neater. But, when you burned plastic it would create a terrible smell and release bad chemicals.

Would you throw out your trash, just on the ground at the edge of your property?

That would avoid releasing bad chemicals in the air like when you burn it. Tossing trash is easy. But, it would make the entire area where you throw your trash ugly, and you might have to clean up trash a lot when animals and wind bring trash into your living space. Depending on what kind of trash you have and where you decide to throw it, it could contaminate water or make animals sick.

Would you bury your trash?

Burying your trash would get it out of sight and avoid releasing bad chemicals into the air. But, you’d have to dig a hole and cover it, and then a dig another one when it got full. That’s more work than burning it or tossing it. Depending on where you decide to dig your trash pit, it might contaminate your water, and it would make that area bad for growing things if you wanted to put a garden there in the future.

Would you divide your trash and treat each type differently?

It would be a lot of work, but you could do something with each kind of trash.

You could burn your paper trash. That would get rid of a lot of it—in Paraguay you can’t flush toilet paper so you have to get rid of used toilet paper somehow.  Because it’s paper it wouldn’t release too many harmful chemicals into the air.

You could make a compost pile or feed your food scraps and other organic waste to animals.

You could collect and reuse glass, metal, and plastic bottles, jars, and containers. In some places in Paraguay you can get money for glass and plastic bottles you bring to recycling, but sometimes those centers are really far away. Sometimes there is someone who goes around buying glass and plastic bottles for recycling.

What about all other plastic waste? It could be buried. With things like plastic wrappers and bags you could use them for other things. You could make trash art or eco-bricks. Plastic is the trickiest.

In places where there are public trashcans and trash collection it’s easy to just toss your trash and never think about it again—especially in areas where litter doesn’t serve as a visual reminder. But, despite what you think, your trash does go somewhere. In Paraguay, often that somewhere is a lot closer to home than a dump at the edge of town.