Wednesday, December 30, 2009

duality

Sometimes I imagine that life at the shelter is like one of those sitcoms or Disney Channel movies where there’s an alternate universe, a mirror image of the real world. The hero gets trapped in the mirror world, but eventually they escape back into their own reality, newly appreciative of the family and friends they’d taken for granted.

In this world, the real world, Fran is a sweet, pretty woman in love with her baby and her boyfriend. She likes practicing her English and has been known to sweet-talk me into watching action movies with her. She laughs at everything – fart jokes, Blue’s pursed lips and wiggling legs, the way her shirt is instantly soaked in breast milk whenever she hears a crying baby. She cradles Blue’s furry head in her hand and brings him close to kiss, kiss, kiss his squashy face.

Sally is a silly teenager with a penchant for pulling faces. She calls Pippi “sister” and scolds her incessantly for real and imagined offenses, from skipping a shower to having a visible bra strap. She brings us presents, mostly absurd quantities of things she’s nicked from the kitchen – a gallon of homemade dishwashing soap, a bag of cane sugar as heavy as a toddler. She sets aside food for us when we’re late to meals. She asks Pippi for candy and ice cream whenever Pippi comes back from the city, and Pippi almost always has something for her. She’s a good kid.

The kids are imps and scoundrels who enjoy rubbing their jam-covered, sand-caked hands all over my face, hair and last clean shirt. They sit on my knee and twine both their legs around one of mine, distractedly pressing their toes into my calf. The boys climb into my lap like big spiky-haired kittens, pulling my hands to their mouths to kiss and sometimes bite. The two-year-old girls, Duckie and Polly, are inseparable and always up to something, whether they’re flinging themselves off the table or demanding to be picked up and dangled backward.

In the other world, the dark mirror world, things are different.

In that world, Fran is a Burmese refugee without papers, naively trusting in the good heart of some douchebag tourist who won’t give her his phone number and usually doesn’t respond to her emails. Due to some complicated red tape, her baby can’t receive Thai citizenship unless the father confirms his own identity and nationality, which he most likely won’t, because that would create an irreversible link between himself and his child and he’d much rather disappear back into his comfortable European life. So Fran and Blue will be like so many other families here: undocumented, constantly afraid of being discovered and deported.

In that world, Sally was raped when she was thirteen. When her family discovered that she was pregnant, they threw her out, and she lived in the forest outside her village for several days before she was discovered by a teacher and sent to the shelter. She doesn’t want her baby, even hates it on some level. She was sent to the hospital with labor pains a couple days ago. Pippi went with her and witnessed Sally completely losing it, moaning and sobbing for hours, ripping at her hair. “I want to go home,” she begged, over and over again, in the few words of Thai that she and Pippi both know. “Sister, please, I want to go home.” She refused to let the doctors examine her and tried desperately to hold her hospital gown closed over her breasts. Pippi was temporarily kicked out of the room, and Sally stood next to the bed, facing down the doctors and nurses like a wild animal backed into a corner, screaming for Pippi and then, horribly, her mother.

In that world, the kids have been pulled from abusive homes, the slums, the gutter. Some of them live in fear of their mothers’ infrequent but furious beatings. Little Duckie’s mother disappeared a few months ago. She calls sometimes, promising to come back for Duckie but saying she doesn’t have the money yet. If she doesn’t come back, Duckie will probably have to go to an orphanage. You can’t blame her mother too much; like Sally, she got pregnant at just thirteen.

So there you have it: both sides of the coin. They’re both true, of course, but you knew that already. There is no mirror world, no dark reflection of a gentle and carefree reality. Life here and everywhere is funny and sad and bleak and heartbreaking and bright, all at once. These kids aren’t the worm-swollen toddlers you see on the news, defined by their misery and need, and the women aren’t the hollow-eyed rape victims you see in photo essays in Newsweek, utterly destroyed by the hand that life has dealt them. Those images are symbols of tragedy, and they tell a story that makes you hurt and then encourages you to forget, to push away that awful pain, because otherwise the weight of it all would be intolerable. In the end, you do nothing, because it’s all too much. You can’t fix every country’s government. You can’t convince all the warring factions to lay down their arms and go back to their families. You can’t adopt each and every starving orphan, and even if you could, they’re probably too damaged to ever live normal lives. You can’t save the world, and there are some things you can never change.

I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. I didn’t write about those stupid “two worlds” as a kind of Very Special Episode, an exposé about the dark side of life at a women’s shelter. I was trying, in my ham-handed way, to show you that there is always a spark of joy, even in the midst of horror. There is always laughter. There is always hope.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. Volunteer somewhere, anywhere. Look up the wish list of a local women’s shelter and consider donating a couple items, maybe something you’ve already got that’s been collecting dust in a cupboard. Learn about what’s going on in the world – even just one country, even just one town. Do your research. Write your senator. Run for senator. Raise money. Raise awareness. Save the world.

Do it now. Not tomorrow. Don’t wait until things calm down at work, or you’ve lost that pesky holiday weight, or for some magical day when you have more time or money or energy. It’s so much easier than you think. All you have to do is start.

Happy New Year.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

some pig

Here's a funny thing: sometimes, when you live on a farm filled with things like spiders and cobras, and you walk down the same narrow path every day, two different spiders will persist in spinning their webs across that path. Right at face level. Every single day.

Here's another funny thing: sometimes, when you're like me and have the memory of an aging goldfish, you will totally forget about the spiders and walk right into both webs. With your face. Every single day.


Speaking of spiders, we discovered that Charlie - what? Yes, I named our bathroom spider Charlie. No, that's not weird. No, you are a freak. Whatever! You don't know him like I do!

Anyway, Pippi and I checked on Charlie and discovered that he was still alive after about a week in solitary. He was hanging out on the side of the cup, so Pippi quickly slid a plate underneath, trotted out the front door, and hurled him, cup and all, over the hill.

"I thought when you said you were going to throw him, you meant you would shake him out of the cup," I said.

Pippi made a face. "Do you really want to use that cup again?"

She had a point. There is a fine but clearly defined line between lizard toast and spider tea.

Somewhere out there is the world's most disoriented spider.

My very favorite resident, Fran, had her baby last week. She named him Blue. I use pseudonyms for most everyone on this here blog, but that name is so perfect it deserves to be shared. Baby Blue has the most hair I have ever seen on any man, woman or child - a Samson-esque amount of hair, the kind of hair you expect to see on a Persian cat or a Yeti but not a six-pound newborn. On the night he was born, millions of bald men across the world wept fat tears of self-pity without even knowing why.

Fran is absolutely ass-over-teakettle in love with her baby, and so am I. The bottoms of his feet are like silk, and he scrunches them up and kicks his little frog legs whenever he yawns. His fingers are long, long, long, curled into tiny pink fists the size of walnuts. He is a remarkably pink baby, far ruddier than the average Thai child, which Fran says must be due to the fact that his father is white.

I would like to kick that father in the teeth, but Fran is in love with him, the sort of unqualified adoration that makes you think a voodoo potion must be involved. It kills me that such a beautiful, warm woman as Fran could pin her hopes and happiness to this scumbag European who's half a world away and obviously doesn't give two shits about her, but there you are. Of course, the unfairness of it isn't lost on me: if Fran were with someone who truly cared about her, she wouldn't be here. I would never have met her, and we would never have had the chance to sit together in her dim, quarantined room, tracing spiderweb patterns on her baby's unlined feet and prophesying the man he will someday become: terrific, radiant, humble.

Monday, December 28, 2009

another riddle

Q: Who was walking back from setting up a new volunteer's room at dusk, stepped into a hole in the ground, and sprained her ankle?

A: Okay, seriously, how is this even a question? Surely it couldn't be the same person who, in the very first post of this blog, summarized her travels like so: Mostly I fall down a lot. And cuss. Sometimes both at once.

I didn't actually fall down this time, but I did cuss to beat the band. Pippi was a little stunned. "I'm not sure I've heard you drop the f-bomb before," she said.

"FUCK FUCK MOTHERFUCKER," I replied. "HIJO DE PUTA. FUCKBUCKET. THIS WOULD BE A REALLY GOOD TIME TO EXPAND MY THAI VOCABULARY."

Fortunately, I have managed to work out a way to walk on it. Painfully and with a certain amount of je ne sais quoi (literally, "looking like a jackass"), but mobility is mobility. Never mind the fact that I am an evolutionary oversight - I can limp around almost as quickly as a hog-tied turtle. I hope that image haunts your dreams tonight.

Friday, December 25, 2009

a christmas story

My dear, lovely, completely insane friend Veruca is visiting me, and it is pretty great. We've been doing lots of things that I would never do by myself, like eating gouda and drinking cheap chardonnay at the little wine-and-cheese shop near the hostel, and also some things I do all the time but which are more fun with a partner, like eating street fruit by the moat and throwing the peels at the cranky pigeons.

We celebrated Christmas Eve at a nice restaurant by the river, where we gorged ourselves on fried seaweed and cheese and ice cream. Then we searched out the least sketchy bar around and played pool, terribly, while old hairy nasty Western men canoodled with young Thai girls all around us. (I did say "least sketchy.") Strange visitors kept wandering up to the bar: hordes of creepy men, of course, but also marching bands playing off-key interpretations of Joy to the World, and once an elephant. Because, you know, it's Christmas, which in this Buddhist country apparently translates to "oh, what the hell."

This morning Veruca gave me a bunch of bootleg DVDs and we watched Korean soap operas in our pajamas, and now we're going to eat waffles and get our nails did and call our mommies and probably end up in another bar surrounded by dolled-up ladies in skin-tight sequined mini-dresses. Christmas!

Veruca has brought the joy of the season into my heart, and I am never going to let her leave. Perhaps I'll keep her under a cup in the bathroom.

Monday, December 21, 2009

communing with nature

So last night I was on the front porch trying to get a gecko out of the toaster, and Pippi said to me, "This is ridiculous."

I poked inside the toaster with my fork. "What do you mean?"

"At this moment, we have a cat under the floorboards, a big hairy spider in a cup on the bathroom floor - "

(The original plan was to slide a piece of paper under the cup and transport the spider outside, but Pippi lost her nerve. That was two days ago. Every time one of us uses the bathroom, we remind each other, "Don't kick the spider!")

" - cobras in our front yard - "

(The women harvested the rice from the field in front of our house a couple weeks ago, and all the snakes that had been living there fled to the field behind our house. A couple days later, they harvested that field, and the snakes slithered away to yet another field. A couple days later, they harvested
that field, and - well, you get the idea. We stomp real loud when we walk anywhere at night.)

" - a frog in our toilet water - "

(We're supposed to use the water from the bathroom sink, which flows directly into a cement container, to flush the toilet. The only problem is, the water is stagnant and dirty and it
stinks, and so Pippi and I have been trying to dry out the container by using the kitchen sink for all necessary ablutions. Don't get your eco-friendly hemp panties in a twist - the kitchen sink water goes into the irrigation ditch, so we're still not really wasting water. Besides, there's a frog in there! As if sticking my arm into a dark, smelly hole in the wall wasn't bad enough, now I have to dodge toothpaste-spattered frogs while I'm at it.)

" - and now we've got a gecko in the toaster." She watched critically as I banged on the outside of the toaster, resulting in a terrific racket, but no gecko. "Just leave it."

"You're the one who wanted toast."

"It's too scared. It's not coming out. Just leave the toaster out here overnight."

I pointed the fork at her. "We are not having a repeat of the spider incident. We cannot live like this. This gecko is coming out now."

"It's just going to climb back up to the roof," she said.

True. The geckos sit for hours on our ceiling, but they have a nasty habit of abruptly losing their grip and plummeting to the floor - or into your cup of tea.

"Fucking geckos," I muttered. Another jab with the fork, and suddenly I heard a flutter of movement inside the toaster, the pitter-patter of little scaly feet. I dropped the toaster onto its side, and the gecko sprang out and disappeared under the house.

"Well, that's done," Pippi said. She stood up and stretched, then headed for the fridge. "Toast?"

"It's going to taste like lizard," I said, scooping up the toaster and wiping the fork off on my jeans.

"We've got butter."

"Lizard toast. Gross."

Pippi rummaged around in the fridge. "And Nutella."

"Yeah, okay."

Saturday, December 19, 2009

the motorcycle diaries

If you were awoken last night by a faint, high-pitched shrieking sound, please don't be alarmed. It was just an echo from northern Thailand, probably some dumb American girl flying down a craggy dirt road on a greasy motorcycle, pursued at a safe distance by a slightly crazed Australian shouting, "Don't be a pussy! Speed up! Speed up!"

Last night my roommate (code name: "Pippi") and I went with the shelter's assistant director ("Robin") to Makro, the local bulk superstore. Pippi and I ran around like idiots and got lost a million times, like toddlers off the leash. Frankly, I think Robin would have been glad to abandon us in the plastics aisle if she hadn't needed our help carrying everything to the truck.

By the time we got back to the shelter, we'd missed dinner, so Robin offered to take us into town. (This after Sally had shoved half a dozen eggs into our hands, insisting that we take them for dinner. We don't have a stove or anything in our house, so I don't know how she expected us to cook them. Over a light bulb, perhaps?)

Pippi took one of the motorcycles and I climbed onto the back of Robin's, and we zoomed off toward town. I clung to Robin the whole way, my hands like catcher's mitts on her insanely tiny waist. I felt like a fucking Ent.

We went to a casual place with lots of different counters that sell all sorts of dishes. Robin ordered for us, bless her. Pippi and I got pad thai with shrimp, huge gruesome shrimp with crunchy legs and baleful little faces, and ice-cold banana smoothies and sticky rice with mango. What did you have for dinner? Easy Mac?

I hadn't really interacted much with Robin, so it was nice to spend some time with her. She's a former resident of the shelter, and she manages a lot of the women's issues. She also speaks some English, so she's occasionally pressed into translating duty. She doesn't talk much, at least not to me, and I assumed incorrectly that she was rather serious. She's actually wonderful. Not that serious people can't be wonderful, but they probably wouldn't have laughed off the thousand times I got the motorcycle stuck in the mud this morning. If nothing else, she's got patience in spades. Patience and courage.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

a scattering of random thoughts

  • The flight from Chicago to Seoul was torturous. I sat in a window seat, trapped by Snorebag McArmrest-Thief and Camel Woman. (How do you not get up to pee even once during a 15-hour flight? That is not natural.) I did manage to sleep some, enough that I seem to have avoided jet lag entirely.
  • The director's husband picked me up at the airport. He didn't have a WELCOME SO-AND-SO sign and we'd never met, but he zeroed in on me immediately. Presumably he looked for the most rumpled, unkempt and dazed-looking woman there.
  • Immediately after arriving at my little house, I discovered (1) a massive wasp in my bed, and (2) the biggest, fattest, hairiest spider I'd ever seen, easily the size of my hand. I don't particularly want to kill these kinds of bugs - partially because there would be an unholy mess to clean up - but I also don't care to find them nestled on my pillow, ready to snuggle. One of the reasons I never went to the Dominican Republic with The Company is that all the vets talked about the fat, hairy tarantulas that would perch on your mosquito netting and stare thoughtfully down at you, as though estimating how many legs they would need to use to hold your head in place while they ate your face.
  • My roommate has the audacity to be lovely, confident, and funny. Can you believe that shit? It's not enough that's she's fearless to my neurotic, matte finish to my glossy (I'm oily, shut up), sleek to my frizzy, smooth to my bumbling - no, she has to go and beat me at my own game, too. Whatever, bitch! You're going to have wicked bad wrinkles someday!
  • My house is built a couple feet off the ground, which I can see through the half-inch gaps in the floor. I'm guessing that the gaps are intended to facilitate ventilation, but considering that the back half of my room is built over an irrigation ditch, they're mostly going to be facilitating the easy entrance of mosquitoes. And kittens. My favorite kitten found her way under the house this morning, situated herself directly under my bed, and whined until I got up and went out onto the porch to play with her. Currently she's draped in a hot, furry sprawl over my forearm, forcing me to type one-handed. Evidently kittens don't speak Thai or English, but they do understand cuddling. And I'm fluent, motherfuckers!
  • One of the other kittens went to sleep in a cooking pot and ended up getting quite singed. He reeks of burned hair, and also wants to cuddle. I move to a farm halfway around the world and I'm still covered in cat hair. Figures.
  • Our youngest resident is 14, due next week. I'll call her Sally. Sally is incredibly attached to my roommate, and will often seek her out before meals to alert her that the food is ready. Yesterday my roommate and I decided to have granola and coffee at our house instead of going to breakfast, but Sally had different plans. She practically dragged us out of the house, then indignantly told the other women that she had cooked a special dish for us, and when she'd gone to find us, we'd been drinking coffee and eating sweets. The nerve!
  • I'm going to be just fine.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

retro: meet the nazis

I have a confession to make. I am not generally fond of owning up to my mistakes, but I also have a wildly overactive conscience, and the guilt is killing me. So here it is, my big confession: for the last six years, I have been telling people that I knew a family of Nazis in Paraguay.

This is totally, totally wrong of me. Prejudiced and sophomoric, more concerned with cheap laughs than human dignity. Honestly, I'm a little ashamed of myself.

The truth is, they were only probably Nazis.

To their credit, Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis managed to blend in much better than my partners and I did. Despite their misleading title, they weren't a married couple, but rather brother and sister, and each had made respectable marriages to local (i.e., "real") Paraguayans. The man was fair of hair and square of jaw, tanned to within an inch of his life, like Val Kilmer in Top Gun. His sister was equally blonde, a large agreeable woman who sold sweets to the kids at the primary school. Our host mother referred to them both somewhat liberally as her cousins. (I don't mean to sound snobbish, but in a town with a whopping three surnames to go around, everyone is your cousin.)

Obviously, something was off. One look at their pale eyes and flaxen hair told you that these folks were not from around here - and before you nerds get all het up over recessive genes and shit, can I just remind you: three surnames.

So how did these strapping Aryan specimens come to live in our town?

Paraguay, as I like to think I've made pretty clear, is not a place to which any sane person would relocate. Your average emigrant would sooner stock up on Tang and freeze-dried ice cream and blast off for Mars. But self-imposed exile in the ass-end of nowhere becomes a lot more attractive when your alternative is life in prison for your enthusiastic participation in a brutal genocide.

See, a lot of Nazi soldiers and higher-ups flew the coop at the end of WWII, and a number of them ended up down South America way. (You know, like Portugal.) Like many of its neighbors, Paraguay was at that time under the control of a military dictator, a charming son of a gun by the name of Alfredo Stroessner. As a fervent nationalist and grade-A dick - not to mention proud owner of one ugly-ass mustache - Stroessner naturally felt a certain affinity for Hitler and his regime, and so he cordially invited the fleeing Nazis to lay low at his pad until the heat died down.

Not pictured: one single shred of human decency.

Oddly enough, the heat never did die down. While Hollywood would have you believe that each and every escaped war criminal went on to build enormous nuclear weapons and/or torture Dustin Hoffman, the reality is that most of them took a look around their new homes, shrugged, and resigned themselves to relatively harmless, patently boring lives in exile.

(As for Stroessner, he was eventually overthrown and brought to justice for his terrible reign of repression, torture, and fear-mongering - by which I mean he hung out in Brazil for the last seventeen years of his life, drinking caipirinhas with a bunch of other exiled dictators and, needless to say, yet more Nazis.)

Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis were not old enough to have taken part in any genocidal activities themselves. No doubt their parents had settled in our town when Mr. and Mrs. were children, perhaps even before they were born. They had been raised Paraguayan and, as I mentioned earlier, had both happily married locals and produced a number of adorable non-Aryan children. There was no blood on their hands. They could not justly be condemned for the sins of their parents, and yet my partners and I did so instinctively. Their appearance marked them as alien, suspect, and we eyed them with distrust, hypothesizing amongst ourselves about the nature of their crimes.

Our host family did not feel the same, and so we occasionally found ourselves joining Señor Iceman and his family for meals. No doubt eager to impress the
norteamericanos, his wife invariably served intestine soup. I am deliberately not calling this soup menudo. Both dishes revolve around offal, but menudo is generally flavored with chile, lime, cilantro, and other tasty condiments, while this soup was nothing more or less than intestines au jus. I could barely eat it, although my suffering was mild in comparison to some other volunteers'. I distinctly remember one entry in our supervisor's route journal that announced, K ate cow intestines and barfed TWICE!!

Our host was a loud, gregarious fellow, and he enjoyed chatting with me and my partners. One night, he took it upon himself to explain to us why we as Americans were perceived as intrinsically cold and aloof. Being lectured on our people skills by a Nazi was bad enough, but the worst part was that he was right. He spoke emphatically, frequently reaching out to lay a hand on our shoulders, and every time he extended a hand toward Lady Partner, she visibly shrank back in her chair. In her defense, she understood very little Spanish, and so was oblivious to the topic of conversation. Still, it was embarrassing. Here we were, trying to defend the generally affable nature of our people, and LP was cringing away from our cousin's hand like it was covered in horse shit and plague sores.

Night had fallen by the time we left his house, the new moon plunging our surroundings into a darkness unimaginable to anyone accustomed to street lamps and light pollution. My partners and I strode briskly off down the familiar road toward home, putting some distance between ourselves and our host family, and immediately fell to arguing. Dude Partner and I attempted to communicate to LP that her behavior had been embarrassing and insensitive; LP attempted to communicate that we should mind our own fucking business.

"I have personal space issues," she said defensively, storming ahead of us down the enormous hill that led from the primary school to the church.

"I have cow intestine issues, but you don't see me being such a baby," I snapped back, a bit disingenuously, as that evening's stew had brought me perilously close to a full-on meltdown. "Suck it up, already."

DP was a bit more sympathetic. "You have to compromise," he said. "You don't have to go around hugging everyone, but he's our cousin. That's just how they roll here."

I would have agreed, but I was distracted at that moment by the sensation of my foot suspended dreamily in mid-air. It was dark enough that we couldn't see the placement of our feet, and, rocket scientist that I was, I had unwittingly strolled onto a ridge of exposed rock. This wouldn't have been so bad, except that, as is often the case, the ridge stopped when it was good and ready. I did not, and so I face-planted off the edge, arms flailing like the wings of an angry goose, and skidded face-first down half the length of the hill.

Stunned into silence by the abrupt and dramatic nature of my fall, my partners stopped bickering and hurried down the hill to stare at my prone body. Twenty feet behind us, the darkness echoed with the raucous laughter of our host mother, who never saw an accident she didn't approve of. My knees and elbows were hot and stinging with pain; later inspection would reveal that I had managed to shave off several layers of skin, simultaneously packing the open wounds with sand. To add insult to injury, I was lying in such an awkward position that I couldn't figure out how to stand up without sending myself tumbling further down the hill.

Goddamn fucking Nazis, I thought.

Of course, it wasn't really their fault. It was my fault, for not paying more attention to the placement of my feet, and it was LP's fault, for being so goddamn obstinate, and it was God's fault, for putting that rock where it had no business being, and above all it was Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis' parents' fault, for moving to Paraguay half a century before and setting the whole thing in motion.

I rolled over, staring up at the pitch-black sky and the curious faces of my partners, neither of whom were making any effort to assist me. Our host family was catching up to us, tittering noisily in Guaraní. I hated them, hated all of them - our stupid nasty host mother; my stupid gawking partners who didn't care enough to drag me off the ground; the stupid neighborly Nazis who didn't even realize how out of place they were.

The fall had obviously rattled a few things loose - teeth, brain cells, my last remaining ounce of dignity - and I couldn't help wondering, as the blood rushed to my brain, what the original Mr. and Mrs. Probably Nazis would have thought if they could have seen me at that moment: the young idealist, the idiot, angry at a country that refused to let her save it. So quick to judge, to instinctively recoil from anyone who didn't fit into her view of the world. Unable to move past her prejudice, to reconcile her naive expectations with the strange, gloriously unpredictable quirks of reality.

I spat out a mouthful of blood-tinted sand and glared up at my partners. "Help me up, man," I demanded, "come on, what the hell are you waiting for," and DP stretched out a belated hand to drag me, stumbling, to my feet.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

retro: shit happens

1

When I first applied to volunteer with The Company at the delicate age of 15, I would never have dreamed of discussing bodily functions - mine or anyone else's - without a gun to my head and a blood oath that the conversation would never be made public. Human waste was something to be discussed only by highly-trained medical professionals and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I would no sooner have discussed bowel movements in a public forum than I would have lobbed the foul results at the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Let's just say times have changed.

2

Lady Partner suffered intense constipation for our first few weeks in Paraguay. It was understandable, at least for the first week or so. Everyone knows that travel can mess with your system, and the food our family was feeding us was enough to cork even the healthiest G.I. tract. It didn't help that LP was a huge germaphobe; she could barely look at our flimsy little toilet, much less park her ass and get down to business.

Take your time, Dude Partner and I told her. Don't push yourself. It'll happen when you're ready.

Two weeks into the summer, though, we all started to get concerned. Two weeks is an awfully long time to store ten pounds of cassava in your large intestine.

In desperation, LP confided in our supervisor, a fellow germaphobe. We had thought that our sup might take LP to a doctor, or at least offer some suggestions for speeding things along, but instead she shrugged off our concerns, saying that when she was a volunteer in the Dominican Republic, she had gone a whole month without pooping.

A MONTH. 1/12 OF A YEAR. ONE WHOLE FUCKING MONTH WITHOUT POOP.

A normal person cannot not poop for a month. She would die. Her body would slowly fill up with waste, like a hot-air balloon being inflated. Like that kid in Matilda who's forced to eat a massive chocolate cake, more cake than most of us could comfortably eat in a lifetime, until he eventually reaches the consistency of a sack of wet cement.

It's just an analogy, you understand.

Our supervisor was not a normal person. An inspiration to obsessive-compulsives everywhere, she shamelessly admitted to us that she never sat down on a toilet. Never. Not at a hotel; not at a friend's house; not in her own personal bathroom that she shared with nobody but Jesus. Her quadriceps were formidable, like cast-iron thigh guards. It made a strange kind of sense that this young woman might go for months on end without pooping. If you can go through life without ever - ever - letting your derriere touch a toilet seat, you can probably do pretty much anything.

3

One of my fellow staff members in Mexico was a trifle obsessed with maintaining digestive harmony. Worried about the potential consequences of the substantially "heavier" Mexican diet, he saw to it that our small kitchen was always well-stocked with bags and boxes of food-shaped laxatives.

Half of our food was labeled Doble Fibra, which is exactly what it sounds like. We had Doble Fibra cereal, Doble Fibra granola bars, Doble Fibra bread, not to mention at least three other brands of bran cereal and a stockpile of yogurt the likes of which the world had never seen.

It was frankly a little disturbing, especially on those days when certain members of staff would slump down at our little plastic table and moan, "That's number fourteen since breakfast." As careful as we tried to be, intestinal turmoil followed almost inevitably from our work - traveling between four towns every week, eating and drinking with up to twelve different families, then returning to staff house and gorging on cheap street-stand tacos. (Okay, so maybe we could have been a little more careful.) Our tummy troubles never lasted for long, but the bouts of illness were ruthlessly productive. Being forced to consume more fiber on those awful days seemed downright cruel, like giving blood thinners to a hemophiliac.

4

In my experience, there are few things that long-haul Company vets love more than trading poop stories. Like the girl who shit her pants in the middle of the night, hid her malodorous pajamas outside, and emerged the next morning to find that the family pig had disposed of them. Or the girl who reaped Montezuma's Revenge in an agave field with a whole busload of people watching her, and then had to get back on the bus. Neither of those stories are mine, but believe me, I can hold my own.

This competitive poop talk may seem like an odd hobby, but to hardcore Company folks, excrement is a relatively unremarkable part of daily life. Not just our own poop, either, but that of the people around us. Supervisors routinely ask their volunteers about their digestive health. If a vol is sick, their business becomes our business. (So to speak.) We run their symptoms by a checklist of indicators that tell us whether they need to see a doctor; if they do, the accompanying staff member is often obliged to translate every last sordid detail. As a result of this ongoing dialogue, Company staff members tend to be pretty nonchalant about poop, not unlike soldiers desensitized to violence. If it's not bloody or explosive, it's not a big deal.

Oddly enough, this nonchalance does not cross over into the rest of my life. I very rarely talk about poop with any non-Company friends or loved ones - partially because it doesn't get you invited to many dinner parties, and partially because I am keenly aware that such a thing is considered deviant behavior outside the bubble of international development NGOs. Many people are ashamed to have anyone realize that they are even capable of such an activity.

(Not to essentialize, but by people I of course mean women. I have never met a man who is not quietly proud of his body's every output.)

Don't get me wrong: even I am not interested in the intimate details of my friends' morning routines. Still, it's a shame that the subject is so very taboo, even in the abstract. Lighten up, guys! Like the book says:

Except my former supervisor.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

retro: bolivia

Editor's Note: The following is a series of journal entries from my trip to Bolivia in the summer of 2007. I was working with a professor at my college, an expert on the area who I shall creatively call Professor, to create a children's history textbook on the history of the Multiethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM) in the department of Beni. As part of the project, we went down to the TIM itself to present a draft to the Territory's leaders and rifle through their records. The trip was supposed to be relatively simple, easy, and productive.

I should have known better.

Wednesday: in which a plane is struck by lightning and La Paz is fucking freezing

I arrived in La Paz feeling like crap. I really shouldn't have been surprised. A contact at CIDDEBENI had said we should fly through Santa Cruz, as La Paz is unfit for human habitation. He was not joking.

La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, with an elevation of nearly two miles. (Suck on that, Denver.) The low levels of oxygen mean you're constantly gulping for air, always feeling like you're not getting quite enough. You get headaches and vertigo. Night terrors are common. So are isolated hiccups.

It's also freezing. Apparently it was the first day planes had been allowed to land in about a week, due to snowstorms.

Also, our plane was struck by lightning. It was...exciting. Professor slept through it. Mark my words: he will be the first man down when the zombies come.

We flew from La Paz to Trinidad in a wee little propeller plane manufactured by Fisher-Price.

Actual size.

It was so small that you could not walk to your seat, but were obliged to hunch over and shuffle. The extent of your crouch depended on your height: being short, I got away with Cro-Magnon Man, whereas Professor had to resort to Quasimodo's Brother Who Broke His Spine.

I sat at the front of the plane, near the open cockpit. I could see the pilots, and despite my initial concerns over the size of the plane, I was reassured that I was in good hands - not the pilots' hands, of course, since just then they were somewhat occupied making obscene hand gestures, but someone's. Also the pilots kept laughing hysterically, which I believe should be outlawed. If I am not allowed to bring toothpaste on the flight, the pilots are not allowed to cackle. It's only fair.

I was willing to cut them some slack, though, since it was obvious that they were just filling in for the nine-year-old boy who normally steers the plane via joystick. Anyway, I soon forgot to worry about them, since I spent most of the flight willing myself not to vomit. I had a very vivid image in my head of all the cells in my body, halfway through mitosis, gagging their little cellular brains out.

Thursday: in which I write a letter to the bats in my ceiling

Turns out that we arrived in Trinidad right in the middle of a cold front. The temperature hovers around fifty degrees during the day, then plummets at night. The hotel has no heating, and each bed is equipped with a single cotton blanket. Luckily, I'm alone in a three-person room. I do most of my writing and translating in bed, and at night I pile the three blankets onto one bed and sleep in my clothes. Still not as bad as Paraguay!

The water at the hotel comes in two varieties. Most of the time, it is delivered directly from an ice floe in the Arctic. In the early morning, though, the shower water is clearly piped in from Hell. Not the frozen, ninth-circle sort of Hell, either - I mean skin-scalding, blister-raising, pagan-incinerating Hell. Needless to say, there is no happy medium. Anxious to avoid third-degree burns on some fairly delicate areas, I ended up soaping up and sort of throwing water at myself, scalding my hands in the process. Real cute.

And now, a few letters.

Dear Professor,
One of the things which I don't really like about the way that you have, in the time that we have been working together, written the text of the book that we are producing, considering the variety of elements that go into our work and the time it takes for me to translate said text into elementary Spanish, is the tortured and grammatically implausible way in which you structure sentences.
Standing to the side so that the god of clauses may strike you down with precision,
M

ATTN: Family of bats, c/o my ceiling
You are SO LOUD. Quit the freaky bat sex or whatever and come down to eat some of these mosquitoes.

ATTN: Professor, c/o the Department of Redundancy Department
It is not okay to use the word "develop" three times in one sentence, no matter how long that sentence may be.

Dear young man who drives around and around Trinidad late at night with his car stereo turned up to 11,
You are going to Hell.
Regards,
M

Friday: in which we head to San Ignacio and somehow manage to not get ourselves killed

Today has been an exciting day. We left Trinidad about 8:30 this morning, taking a camión to San Ignacio. I have taken some fucked-up forms of transportation in my life, but this one is definitely up there in the ranks.

The truck is outfitted with a series of hard wood planks laid across the interior, creating makeshift benches. The only way to get on is to scale the side like a monkey (Professor's choice) or to haul yourself up the one little ladder and side-step along the edge like a suicidal stockbroker until you find a place where you can squish in with everyone else (mine). The "floor" is piled high with mounds of luggage and there are knees everywhere, so it's hard to find a place to put your legs, which is bad news once they start driving and you need to brace yourself. Most of the road between Trinidad and San Ignacio is extremely rough, and every time the truck hits a bump, everyone goes flying up into the air and then comes crashing down. Sometimes the planks fly up too, which is an adventure. My shins are ripped up and bruised from being braced against the bench in front of mine; I think I may need to have one of these splinters surgically removed. Needless to say, my ass hurts like hell.

Also, I'm covered in dust. It hasn't rained much lately, so the dirt road was relatively dry. Every time we passed another vehicle - truck, bus, car, bicycle, especially large lizards - we would all duck down and cover ourselves as a massive cloud of dust rolled through the truck. Ah, the many wonders of open-air travel!

The trip from Trinidad to San Ignacio is supposed to take three and a half hours; it took us nearly seven. You have to cross three tributaries of the Mamoré River on the way. Everyone gets off the truck, they stick it on a big floating wooden platform (powered and steered by a wee motorboat tied to the side), and you sloooooowly make your way to the other side of the river. This strategy worked well the first two times we tried it, but the water level in the last tributary was especially low due to the drought, so the ground was wet and the trucks kept getting stuck as they tried to drive onto the platform. They had to dig and construct a new ramp, meaning that we were stuck on the riverbank for a couple hours.

We eventually got to San Ignacio, where Professor and I fell out of the camión and took a couple taxis to a hostel. I suppose I should mention that all the taxis in San Ignacio are motorcycles. I tossed my bag on the handlebars, climbed on the back (side-saddle, because I am so ladylike and all), and off we went. I had a white-knuckled grip on the back of the seat, but mostly I was at the whim of gravity, my own balance, and the mood of my driver. It was fucking terrific.

The hostel is a nice little place with a pretty courtyard. The owner is a chatty old man who gave me chicha (a maize-based drink often fermented into alcohol) and, after a few minutes of conversation, asked if I was española. Not gonna lie: I love getting that question.

Saturday: in which Professor and I are not married, people like me better, and six men fall from the roof of a church

Apparently birds in the Amazon are fucking LOUD. Some of them sound like screaming children. That's not terrifying, or anything.

At lunch today, Professor was talking about how he's never received so much "positive attention" as we've been getting. He mused that perhaps it was because he's usually by himself, and loners tend to get left alone. I joked that maybe people just liked me better, and he laughed.

Dear Professor,
I was not really kidding.
Regards,
M

I keep getting addressed as Señora, which, okay - AWKWARD. It's pretty obvious that most people assume Professor and I are married, which is just...gross. When Professor obliviously introduces me as his ~*~student~*~, I actually feel guilty, like the two of us have run off to Bolivia to have a forbidden tryst under the guise of "research." Just typing that last sentence made me a little queasy.

Meanwhile, I'm proofreading the draft and the accompanying letter that Professor wrote to the subcentral [i.e., the local government], and I have to say, there's an awful lot of yo this and mi that.

Dear Professor,
Consider yourself warned: if you attempt to take sole credit for this book, there will be a throw-down.
Regards,
M

We went by the church, which was fascinating. It's the original Jesuit mission church, as far as I know, so it's at least four hundred years old. The roof is held up with huge mahogany poles donated by the Territory. Apparently they redid the roof a few years ago, and six people died - by falling, presumably. I didn't really press the subject, but I get the impression they're not huge fans of professional scaffolding here.

Saturday night: in which I sprain my ankle, or fracture it, or something equally stupid

Continuing in my fine tradition of falling down a lot, tonight I stepped the wrong way on a broken sidewalk and went down like a ton of bricks, spraining my ankle in the process. I've never actually done such a thing before, but I'm making an educated guess that such is the case, since my ankle is swollen and I can't walk or move my foot without incredible pain. Looks like I'm pretty well crippled for the time being. I guess I just have to take it in stride, since I seem to be a walking punchline these days, but in the end it comes down to this: if you didn't laugh at any of the jokes in this sentence, you have no soul.

Sunday: in which I hop everywhere and ow ow it HURTS

Okay, I'm less happy about this whole thing now. It hurts really bad, and I'm starting to worry that it's broken. I'm also worrying about how I will possibly get around for the next few days, never mind back to the U.S. I can't put any weight on it - how will I climb up the ladder of the truck and clamber over to a seat? Once I'm on, how will I brace myself? How will I get off and on and off and off and off and on and off again, like the trip demands? How will I climb the stairs at the hotel in Trinidad, or the steps of the plane? How will I navigate La Paz? How will I run through O'Hare to make our extremely tight connection? We'll make it work out of sheer necessity, of course, but it's going to be humiliating and extremely painful.

I can't put any weight on the ankle, so I'm reduced to hopping everywhere. Going to the bathroom or changing clothes is a major undertaking involving foresight and ingenuity. I have no idea how I'm going to bathe.

Professor brought food back for me, and we ate at the table in the courtyard of the hostel. Of course, the table is across the courtyard from my room, a distance that covers maybe sixty feet but felt like eight billion trillion miles as I hopped along, clinging to Professor's elbow. It was one of the more humiliating walks of my life. We finally got to the table, where we were joined by the hostel's owner. The three of us had a pleasant conversation, including a discussion of how Professor was going to have to abandon me here and I would become ignaciana. The owner offered to marry me, so I guess I'd be set.

Professor says I have very much endeared myself to the staff here, but I don't know how much I personally had to do with that. Everyone loves a gimp!

Monday: in which I bore myself to death

I am so bored. Other than translating - a pretty thankless task in itself - I have approximately fuck-all to do. There are a couple Internet cafés in town, which would undoubtedly help kill some time, but I can't get to them. The fact is, laid up as I am, I can't leave the hostel to do anything: attend meetings, get food, wander the town. Instead, I've finished reading two books, re-read The Economist about a million times, and played innumerable games of Solitaire and Minesweeper. It's starting to screw with my head. Last night I dreamt I was playing poker in an airport with Gordon Brown. I don't even play poker.

Wednesday: in which we might be trapped in San Ignacio

I woke up to rain this morning, which is not a good sign. A little rain will tamp down the dust, but if it really gets going, the roads will be wiped out and we'll be trapped. Such is the capricious nature of the Amazon.

Thursday: in which we ARE trapped in Trinidad

We made it out of San Ignacio yesterday, due to a bit of luck and a very capable driver. I managed to secure a seat in the cabin of the truck, which was fortunate, as it would have been hell to ride in the back with my ankle still acting up. I was squished in with another woman and her sick baby. It sounds terrible, but it was actually a very pleasant 3+ hours, all things considered. The woman was actually a girl, a very pale 17-year-old from the upper crust of Puerto San Borja who got knocked up at a young age (15, if my calculations are correct) and married her boyfriend, as you do. She was taking her daughter to a doctor in Trinidad. The two of us made friends, then chatted and played with the baby for the rest of the trip. What can I say? I love talking to people.

My new friend was obviously afraid of the water crossings. Apparently a friend of hers was on a truck that rolled off the back of the platform, nearly killing everyone on board. (Aaaaand I just realized why they make everyone get off.) Also, I mean, she was 17 and had rarely left San Borja. Not exactly a seasoned traveler. She clung to my arm and hid her face in my shoulder for all the crossings.

So anyway, we're back in Trinidad. In a couple hours, we'll leave for the airport, where we'll catch our flight to La Paz and then back to the States.

15 minutes later:

HAHAHAHA. Oh my God, I am like a bad-luck token. It turns out there's a paro here in Trinidad today, a work-stoppage, and so everything is shut down - including the airport. And all other forms of transportation. The paro doesn't end until 6:00 PM. Professor and I are going to try to take an overnight bus to Santa Cruz and fly out from there.

Friday: in which I ride my last motorcycle

Turns out that the mototaxistas in Trinidad are even crazier than the ones in San Ignacio. Or maybe it's just that they have more competition. Either way, there were many moments on the way to the bus station last night when I thought, Well, I guess I'm going to die now. MD is going to lord this over me forever. Of course, when I jumped off at our destination, my first thought was: Let's do it again! My brain is trying to kill me.

We had to wait at the bus station for a few hours last night. The mosquitoes were out of control, grouping in numbers so high I believe the scientific categorization would have been "plague." They were vicious, too. I woke up on the bus this morning to find the evidence of their handiwork: big, red, swollen bites all over my wrists and, weirdly, my palms.

Friday evening: in which we get stuck in Chicago and my foot has swelled to the size of my head

Our flight from Miami to O'Hare was randomly pushed back an hour, so we'll miss our flight to Cedar Rapids - apparently the day's last flight into Iowa. Professor and I have won the fabulous prize of staying overnight in Chicago. I normally like staying in hotels, but (1) Professor and I are going to kill each other soon, (2) I want to be home, and (3) if there were a hierarchy in Airport Hell, O'Hare would be the gigantic tri-mouthed devil snacking on Judas Iscariot. Finding your ticket counter, finding your terminal, getting to your gate: it really is the epitome of going around your ass to find your thumb, as MD would say.

And it involves so much walking. I hate to complain - okay, who am I kidding, I love to complain. If God did not want me to complain, He would not have made me so prone to bizarre twists of fate. Anyway, I pretend to hate to complain, but I've been stomping on my sprained ankle for a couple days now, and it hurts like fuck. My whole ankle and foot are swollen and throbbing. My other leg hurts, too, from the way I've been limping. It got to the point today that the thought of taking another step made me want to vomit. Professor magnanimously offered me some migraine pills, which ironically have helped with the pain but given me a massive headache.

Early Saturday morning: in which asdfjkdhjsjkfds

God be praised, we did eventually make it to our hotel, after a series of events so miserable and infuriating that I dare not recount them for fear of sending myself into a suicidal/homicidal rage.

I finally got the chance to unwrap my ankle, after two days of stomping on it, and...wow. You would not believe how swollen my foot and ankle are. I don't believe it, and I'm staring right at them.

You would also not believe how utterly blanketed I am in mosquito bites - angry, vicious red spots surrounded by white circles. They are everywhere, in the most unlikely places, including my eyelids and the palms of both hands. I counted 53 on my left calf alone. Between the swollen foot, the rash of red spots, and what are starting to feel like swollen glands in my throat, I'm frankly amazed that Customs allowed me back into the country.

Saturday: home sweet home

Made it home. Time to die.

retro: costa rica

Editor's Note: The following is a series of journal entries written in the spring of 2008, when I went to Costa Rica with my Sustainable Development seminar. My classmates and I spent two weeks in the cooperative community of El Silencio, working on various parts of the coop and studying how the town functioned. For the record, El Silencio is a lovely town and everyone there was very patient with our weird surveys and diagnostics. If you're looking for a chance to live and work in a small Costa Rican community, or if you'd simply like to see a small-scale agro-ecotourism project in action, check them out. Give the macaws a good kick for me, would you?

During our time in Costa Rica, I also turned 21 and accidentally won $300 in a San José casino. Good luck duplicating that.

Sunday, 16 March

I guess I may as well admit this: the hills of San José are making me nervous. People generally have one of three responses to my weird hill phobia, or sometimes all three: (1) that's stupid; (2) that's crazy; (3) get over it. If I may respond to each of these points in turn:

(1) Well, no shit.
(2) See above.
(3) GREAT FUCKING IDEA, I'LL GET RIGHT ON THAT. GOLLY, WHY HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT.

Tuesday, 18 March

I started writing about our visit to the Chiquita banana plantation today, but we're going down a really bad road and consequently my writing looks like I'm having a stroke. Tyler is laughing at me. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.

Wednesday, 19 March

Tell you what, it is hot as fuck up in here.

Oh, novelas, love of my life. So far there's been a sugar daddy, a secret pregnancy, and an affair. (EDIT: Two affairs! Man, these bitches are slaggin' it up all over town.) How did I ever live without these?

I am digging this host family already. I finally have a cool dad! Seriously, I have had burning Cool Dad Envy ever since I started doing AMIGOS. My host dad in Paraguay was a shadow of his insane wife, and the only word my Nicaraguan dad ever spoke to me was adios on the day I left.

Plus, I mean, shit - this is easy. Families who accepted you in advance and actively want to house and feed you? That's patty-cake, man. Easy. Your Mom easy.

Auuuuugh. I came home from our seminar meeting at the albergue (lodge) to find a fat cockroach on my bed. Not as big as the ones in Nicaragua or Mexico, but still, you know...substantial. And right smack-dab in the middle of my bed. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I was barefoot, sweating like no human being has ever sweat before, tired and dirty and weirdly paranoid. I adjusted my balls, batted the cockroach onto the floor, and crushed it with a shoe. I'd like to think of this as some kind of personal growth.

Having said that, there's nothing quite like a roach in your bed to make you nervous in your own skin. It's my bed! I sleep there! I'm helpless! What if I wake up and it's on my face?

Thursday, 20 March

As always, things look better in the morning. There's something about the combination of restfulness, early sunshine, and hey, no enormous cockroaches on my face! that really brightens the mood.

I've been told a few times already that my Spanish is good. The thing is that at this point in my life, my Spanish is not, in fact, good. I can only conclude that people are fooled by my accent, which is still pretty decent. I've lost a lot of vocabulary that's taking its sweet time coming back, and I make amateur mistakes with verb conjugation if I haven't thought it out ahead of time. I find myself talking around missing words more than I used to.

!DIGRESSION ALERT!
Reminds me of the time in La Piedad that I forgot the word for "envelopes." (In keeping with the spirit of this story, I will not mention the word here. Also, I have forgotten it again.) I was in the only open papelería I'd been able to find in the whole city, and anyway I like a challenge as much as the next idiot gringa with no survival instinct, so I just admitted to the woman behind the counter that I'd forgotten the word. I proceeded to describe in detail what I was looking for: yea big, rectangular, made of paper, you put on a stamp and the address and you send letters in it. The woman offered up the word, then gave me a patronizing smile and said, in Spanish, "So you don't speak Spanish, huh?" I was thisclose to snarling, "BITCH, I AM SPEAKING SPANISH RIGHT NOW." I mean, geez, is it a crime to forget a word now and then? (Sobres! That's the one.) Especially considering how much variation in vocabulary there is across Latin America. I'm lucky I remember my own name sometimes.
END OF DIGRESSION

I am thirsty all the time. [Our professor] bought enough garrafones of purified water to give us each one liter per day. Ha ha ha...ha. According to the wealth of experiential wisdom that is AMIGOS, you need at least two liters a day in good conditions. Meanwhile, we're hiking hither and yon and I personally am sweating out at least a liter per hour. (Conservative estimate.)

Saturday, 21 March

I've been working at the coop's wildlife rescue center. The center is home to eight scarlet macaws, eight spider monkeys, three white-faced monkeys, a wild pig, and five assorted parrots.

To get to the rescue center, I walk down the road a ways, climb the big fucking hill to the albergue, then descend into the forest. The "steps" constructed for this purpose were clearly designed by someone with an eye for human suffering. Probably Eli Roth. Every step requires serious consideration of the laws of physics, especially when the rain has left the way muddy and strewn with wet leaves. I only fell on my ass once today, so I'm doing better than expected.

Once I make it to the center, shaken but alive, I have a whole host of wonderful things to do. To start with, I get to scrape out the rotting fruit from the stands, doing my best to ignore the deeply unpleasant sensation of grubs between my fingers. (Fruit, it turns out, rots really damn fast in the tropical forest.) I also attempt to give the baby white-faced monkey his bottle. (He's a little...skittish. I can handle skittish cats, but skittish monkeys are a whole other story.) Then, after cleaning the cages, I cut up more fruit so I can have more grubs to scrape out the next day.

The worst part of all, even worse then the bare-handed grub-scraping, is cutting up the papaya. I stand by my opinion that papaya is a demon fruit, full of lies and malice. Sounds delicious, looks delicious - smells and tastes exactly like human vomit.

On the bright side, I do get to cut up the fruit with a machete. Shit, y'all, I gotta get me one of those.

Alejando the spider monkey likes to take showers. Really! We spray him through the cage, and he scrubs away with all due diligence. It's a bit spooky, actually. He looks exactly like a small, somewhat hairy person who for whatever reason has decided to live in a cage and shit on the floor.

Monday, 24 March

Macaws, it turns out, are mean fuckers. One attacked my coworker Johan today, and not for the first time. I did the only thing you can do in that situation: turned the hose on it. Macaws fear neither god nor devil, but they are scared as shit of water. Once he recovered, Johan cornered the little fucker and sprayed it until it was drenched. As it clawed its soggy way up the side of the cage, I couldn't stop myself from thinking, "IT EATS THE VOMIT-FRUIT IN PEACE OR ELSE IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN."

Besides being bastards, the macaws are seriously unnerving. They move with eerie symmetry, like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. When I clean the smaller cage, the two macaws in there will gradually edge closer and closer to me until they're perched right over my head, staring at me with identically tilted heads and sinister birdy expressions that suggest imminent homicide.

One of the white-faced monkeys has a nasty habit of leaping onto your head, biting your ear, and attempting to have relations with the nape of your neck. It's pretty funny. Also weird as fuck. But mostly funny.

Jesus fuck, it's hot. I come back from the rescue center and my host mom is like, "Hot lunch? :D?" I can barely work up the motivation to toy with it. All I want to do is drink every drop of water that has ever fallen from the skies.

Tuesday, 25 March

I had an extremely awkward interaction this morning with Juan Carlos, the guy who runs the rescue center. He was saying how some women apparently think one of the other volunteers is really handsome, and said volunteer made an obviously fake pass at him. This quickly devolved into a discussion of The Gays, complete with exaggerated mincing. JC turned to me at one point and said, "I don't understand it, M. With so many beautiful women like you, how can a man want another man?"

Reader, please picture this: I am literally dripping with sweat, bright red from heat and exertion, face smeared with rotten papaya and monkey excrement, plain (but feisty!) at the best of times - which this is appreciably not - and also, you know...queer.

"Uh," I opined, helplessly. WELL SAID, M OLD CHAP.

In other news, we have these Canadian volunteers working at the rescue center who are here as part of a rehabilitation program. None of them speak Spanish, and only a couple speak any English. (Fucking Quebec.) JC seems to have taken it upon himself to teach them about the sanctity of their lives and why they shouldn't smoke cigarettes. Yes, that's right. He is telling RECOVERING HEROIN ADDICTS in REHAB not to smoke. This will end well.

Wednesday, 26 March

Today JC left me in charge of the center for a couple hours. He told me to have the Canadian volunteers rake the paths that go up to the albergue (including the one with the unfortunate stairs). When I communicated this to the Canadians, they said they'd done it the day before. The sad part was, we still had plenty to rake - being in the middle of the tropical forest, and all. Super, JC. Demonstrate to the recovering druggies that they can do the same thing over and over and things will never get any better, no matter how hard they try. That'll learn 'em.

Thursday, 27 March

Our driver, Miguel, gave me a ride to Quepos, where I bought my ticket to San José and sat down to wait for a couple hours. There were a couple guys calling, "Taxi! Taxi pa' San José!" I seriously considered it for about 2.7 seconds, like so: I wonder how much that would - shit, to get axe-murdered? No, ta. I don't scare easy when it comes to foreign transportation, but I maintain a healthy fear of unregistered taxis.

Apparently Miguel really liked me. God only knows why. ...well. To be fair, it turns out that I am capable of being extremely charming for limited periods of time. For this reason, the people who like me best are often those who know me least. But the truth will out, unfortunately, and given time, the content of my character begins to shine through, like radiation seeping from Mme. Curie's pores. (Too soon?)