The bus groans, heaving up the hill. The driver slams the bus into another gear. Someone pulls the cord, there’s a buzz, and then the bus lurches to a stop. Everyone is thrown back—even the people sitting hold on tight. In Paraguay, you can catch the bus anywhere along its route and get off anywhere along the way. You just buzz to stop and put out your hand (like you would hail a taxi) to get the bus to stop.

The bus starts again and the person who got on pushes through the metal turnstiles at the front of the bus and takes a seat. At the back of the bus are maybe five plastic burlap bags with produce. If you can lift it onto the bus you can take it on. The wind whips through the open windows; a welcome coolness to offset the penetrating sun. I should have sat on the shady side.

We jolt to another stop. Some school children get on. They duck under the turnstile because they didn’t pay. A woman next to the seat where I’m sitting presses against my shoulder and the bus roars up the road again. The bus swerves back onto the street from the curve where it had been driving for the past kilometer. The bus puffs black smoke as we pass someone on a dirt bike.

We stop and someone selling apples and someone selling donuts gets on. They make their rounds and get off at the next stop. They carry their goods in baskets and plastic bags.

I wonder how many people on the bus are going to my community. I watch the palm trees wiz by, surrounded by tall grass. There are cows tied up along the edges of the road. The bus driver drinks terere. His windshield is decorated with stickers of Jesus’ face and fringe. When the bus isn’t full, I love the ride.

It’s chilly, as in I’m not comfortable outside in my shorts. It’s before 7 am and I’m sitting in the dim kitchen drinking my daily morning coffee and eating my daily morning bread. It’s Saturday. My family started playing the polka at 6 am. Being a light sleeper, I gave up trying to snooze and brushed my teeth at 6:20 am.

The chicken that I thought was one of my best friends tries to steal my bread. The kitchen has a window without glass or a shutter and a door that stays open to the outside during the day. The cold air wafts toward me. I set my mug on my leg to warm up.

This morning, the coffee is already sweetened. That’s not always the case, but today it is. The coffee is syrupy, painfully sweet. It’s like liquid coffee-flavored hard candies.

A Paraguayan coffee recipe:

• 2/3 – Hot water
• Just enough to thoroughly color the water – Instant coffee or finely ground coffee
• 1/3 – Milk
• Many, many spoons – Sugar

Mix coffee and water. Add milk at the end of the cooking process. Add sugar before drinking.

Soaking my white bread in the coffee-flavored-sugar, milk-flavored-water I wonder why my family makes their coffee this way. In my past life, I didn’t drink coffee, but this is Paraguay.

In the shadows, I consume my coffee—reminding myself not to gulp it every time I lift my mug.  The new sun makes the trees outside shiny green.

“Oh, I get it,” I think. “I know why they use so much sugar in their coffee…it must be the cheapest ingredient, apart form water, in the mix. That’s it, they add sugar to make it taste like something.”

Somehow that realization is settling. I sip my coffee and dunk the last of my bread. I too would rather have sugar-flavored-coffee than coffee-flavored-water everyday.

Serving in the PC is an emotion roller-coaster. Here is an example of my feelings and thoughts during a typical weekday. 

5:30 am – Tired: I wish my family wasn’t so loud getting ready for work and school.

6:00 am – Screw it: I’m not that tired, so I might as well get up. I have to pee anyway.

6:15 am – Yay: The morning is cool and the sky is gorgeous.

6:16 am – Pumped: I’m so productive when I start the day this early.

7:00 am – Reflective: Well, this coffee with bread is actually pretty good considering I didn’t like either before coming to Paraguay.

7:15 am – Relieved: Writing it all down in a journal makes it easier. I don’t know when I’ll be able to talk to someone about it anyway.

7:30 am – Excited: I’ll get to work early today. It’s going to be a good day.

8:00 am – Cared for: The people at the health post are awesome.

12:00 pm – Starving: I’m starving and really need to pee. How do Paraguayans drink so much terere and never need to use the bathroom?

12:30 pm – Reluctant: Just eat it. I should be thankful someone made me lunch…

1:00 pm – This sucks: It’s sort of hot and now I don’t know what I want to do or what I should do.

1:30 pm – Bored: Fine, fine, I’ll study Guarani…maybe I’ll read instead.

3:00 pm – Escape: I got to get out of here. It’s clearly time for a walk, run, or trip to the grocery store.

4:00 pm – Missing people: Is anyone in the states online? What are my g-mates doing?

4:15 pm – Grr: Of course no one is online; it’s still during the work hours.

5:00 pm – Satisfied: Most of my Paraguayan family is home. We are drinking terere, and I actually know what they are talking about (mostly)!

5:45 pm – Frustrated: I’m never going to learn Guarani. Why did my host brother have to ask me a question in Guarani so fast?

6:00 pm – Hungry but it’s okay: I don’t think we are having dinner for a while still. But, I feel so integrated and connected sitting here drinking terere.

7:00 pm – Greasy: Tortillas, so good at first, so bad later.

7:30 pm – Indecisive: Do I want to watch TV with my family, work on my novel, study, read, or plan charlas? …Is there another option?

8:00 pm – Calm: Watching this soccer game is engaging enough, and they are calling the game in just Spanish so that’s nice.

8:30 pm – Awkward: Everyone in my Paraguayan family is falling asleep and the TV is in their room. Looks like I should go to my room.

8:45 pm – Not tired: Now what?

9:30 pm – Doubtful: I think I’ve been productive today. I feel like I’m not doing enough.

10:00 pm – Defensive: Stop putting yourself down, you’re doing just what you should be doing.

10:01 pm – Sleepy: On that note, let’s go to bed shall we?

10:30 pm – Awake: Why am I still awake?

It doesn’t rain in Paraguay; it dumps buckets. We have days darkened by ominous clouds with sheets of rain. We have nights that boom with thunder and gleam with lightening. You’ll never go back to fireworks after you’ve seen a Paraguayan lightening storm light up the starless sky.

When it rains the streets become red rivers. We don’t have glass in our windows so rain beats against the shutters and drips down the wall. If you don’t have a good roof it will inevitably drip. In my current house the kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms are in separate buildings and the only water faucet we have is outside—the downpour days are damp days. You can’t avoid water specks on your hair and shirt.

Children don’t go to school when it rains and sometimes work is cancelled. The buses run less than usual. Most people have dirt bikes, which don’t protect you from the rain. There’s too much mud to drive a car.

Because you have to close the shutters it’s dark inside. Early afternoon feels like early evening. The electricity flickers or goes out entirely, so you are trapped in the dark. You unplug everything, including the fridge, in case the power surges when it comes back. It drops 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit and wind rustles the trees. Sometimes the water stops working.

My dirt lawn is textured with little craters from the rain pounding into the fine rust-colored sand. The trash that is around our lawn is carried away by the rain. Old terere and food scraps thrown out days earlier are washed down downhill.  Water pools on the cobblestoned roads and the paths turn to quicksand and streams. I’ve seen it hale nickel-sized ice chunks. The rain hammers on metal roofs and patters on ceramic ones. The mosquitos come out in flocks.

I sit in the gray dark in my room and think about the houses made of wood slabs, metal roofing, and tarps I saw at the edge of my community. I doubt the people who live there can stay dry.

If you can overlook the fact that everyone is not speaking English and you’re never entirely sure what is going on around you, Paraguay can seem a lot like the US, especially the rural US. However, contradictorily, you would never mistake your life in Paraguay for that in the US.

So what makes the two countries different? What makes Paraguay a developing country and the US a developed country? These are hard questions, but here are some observations about Paraguay I think illustrate some aspects of life here.

Infrastructure

• Dirt bikes are the most common mode of personal transportation. Buses are a critical way of going farther distances or to areas where you don’t want to drive or park your dirt bike. Along with motor vehicles, you will see ox carts and horse carts on the road.
• If it’s raining school and work may be cancelled. We are in the sub-tropics; a heavy rain will turn streets into rivers that are fast enough to carry a child away. Dirt bikes don’t have roofs to protect you from the rain.
• On the walk from your house to the nearest supermarket, your eyes and nose may sting because people are burning trash. Most areas don’t have trash collection so some of the easiest ways to get rid of trash are to burn it or bury it.

Daily Life

• Paraguay has it’s own soundtrack. A soundtrack that blasts from almost every house from morning to evening.  Have you every heard the Paraguayan polka?
• Most people and houses are well kept. I don’t mean to say they are flashy, because they’re not. “Humble” and “neat” are some words that come to mind.
• The tablecloth serves as a napkin for whipping your mouth and as a cover for the table and then a cover for food left on the table. It’s not uncommon for family members to share one or two glasses while drinking juice, soda, or beer.

Personal Interactions

• In your community, everyone you pass acknowledges you with a greeting, nod, or smile. Most people in your community are related.
• You don’t just do errands, but rather you have conversations with people while buying things. A lot of shopping can be done at house-front, mini general stores.
• Children live with their parents until they marry. Siblings are likely to share beds and it’s not uncommon to have several beds in one room.

Animals

• Dogs run free everywhere. They aren’t trained; they aren’t de-bugged; and they aren’t spayed or neutered.
• Except in the city, there are a lot of free-range chickens.
• You can sit at a bar in the middle of a medium-sized town and cows will wander down the street by you.

Peace Corps training ended in a hot second. Well, it was actually raining and not too hot. 

After taking the oath, the other new volunteers and I only had an evening and morning to say goodbye, not only to our first host families and training staff, but also to each other. The morning after swear-in, Peace Corps drove us to various bus pick-up points so we could travel to our sites. We aren’t supposed to leave our sites for the next 3 months. It’s a dramatic change, especially after having so much time in training to chat with each other about our daily challenges.

When I arrived at my site I was numb. I’d stayed up late the night before wishing other volunteers in my group good luck. I’d also gotten up early to say goodbye to my family before they left for school and work. My new host family kept asking questions—about how I was, about my trip—it was so sweet of them to care, but I wasn’t ready to think of answers. I said I was tired, that wasn’t really the case, I didn’t know what I was.

Recall how you felt the day you finished high school, the day you moved to college, the day after you got your college diploma, and the first day of your first job after college, combined all those feelings, that is what it felt like to finally move to my site.

Top 10 thoughts while traveling to my site:

1. How on earth am I going to bring all my stuff to my site using a commuter bus? Considering that I’m living here 2 years I don’t have much stuff, but I can still hardly lift my large suitcase.
2. When will I see the volunteers from my group again? How often will I see them? During training I saw them daily (and that was comforting).
3. Am I ready for whatever is waiting for me at my site? I hear I’ll have down times, up times, slow times, busy times, fun times, sad times…that’s a lot of times.
4. Am I going to accomplish anything? Will I learn the language and get to know the community? Will people work with me? Will I be creative and come up with good projects to help people improve their health?
5. No really, what are the next 2 years going to look like? They say every volunteer’s experience is unique, so what’s mine going to look like?
6. Am I going to get sick? I don’t want a parasite or dengue. Actually, I don’t even want to have a cold while in Paraguay.
7. How are the rent and other money conversations going to go? Paraguayans tend to be comfortable talking money, however I feel trepidatious.
8. What am I not anticipating that’s going to be a challenge? Sometimes the unknown is the most stressful.
9. Am I going to make friends in my site? Two years is a long time, in-site friends would make life more enjoyable.
10. Who will I be 3 months from now? A year from now? Two years from now? I already feel like I’m a different person than the one who left the US (and that was just 10-ish weeks ago).