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.

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?)

retro: the bad beginning

I am 16 years old, surrounded by total strangers in a field in the heart of South America. It's late at night, I don't speak the language, and a man in a dress is trying to light me on fire.

Perhaps some background information is called for.

When I was 15, I decided to live in Paraguay for two months. (As you do.) To that end, I spent five months being trained by my local chapter of a volunteer organization I will refer to as simply The Company. (Nervous parents of volunteers are notoriously Google-happy, and some of the events I will be discussing would make their eyes roll back in the heads. So "The Company" it is, as dumb as it sounds.)

Why Paraguay? At the time, The Company had projects in eight countries. I could have spent my summer frolicking in the lush tropical paradise of the Dominican Republic, or eating tamales in Mexico, or comically struggling to communicate via mangled Portuguese in Brazil. Instead, I elected to freeze my ass off and eat cow intestines for eight weeks. Why?

In a nutshell: because I am contrary. It's true. Ask my mother; she's been saying it for years. I have a terminal case of yeahwellyourFACEitis.

So when our training staff told us that no one ever wanted to go to Paraguay because it was cold and the food was weird, I immediately decided: That. Right there. That is what I want.

Let me say now, with the benefit of hindsight, that such reasoning is remarkably stupid. Smart people avoid difficult situations not because they are big old pansy-asses, but because those situations genuinely suck. Not me. I am the girl who, when informed that all of my peers have elected not to jump off a bridge, decides to leap off headfirst as a sign of my courage and individualism. That'll learn 'em!

So I went to Paraguay. It was the first time I had really been outside the country, if we're considering Canada in this context to be not so much a foreign country as a suburb of the U.S. (No offense, Canadians! I like your beer!)

A word of advice: if you have never traveled outside the U.S., rural Paraguay is a hell of a place to make a crash landing.

And rural it was. Oh, we had running water and even electricity, but that was the extent of our luxuries. Our next-door neighbors were a brisk five-minute walk away. Pigs wandered around the front of the house, while our family's cows traipsed twice daily across the "front lawn" and occasionally got tangled in our hanging laundry. We frequently found ourselves chasing chickens out of our bedrooms and off the dining table.

I had done some background reading, and I knew that Paraguay was a fairly small country, having lost most of its land to neighboring countries in the last couple centuries. Still, to my untrained eye, gazing out across the fields, Paraguay seemed to go on roughly forever.

My partners and I were doomed from the start. We quickly became embroiled in psychological guerrilla warfare against our host mother. The food was frequently gross and occasionally unbearable. Sometime in July, the temperature plummeted, leaving us cold and miserable. We were bored out of our minds. Also, my hair looked like this:

Yowza.

So obviously it was a difficult summer.

That's not what I'm here to talk about, though. That stuff came later.

I'm here to talk about our very first night in the community, not two hours after we'd arrived at our host family's house. Not two hours after we'd hauled our bags out of the pick-up and lugged them into the rooms we'd be sharing with our new sisters and brother. Not two hours after our supervisor had disappeared into the night, abandoning us to our uncertain fates with hardly a fare-thee-well.

Half an hour after all that, our host family told us that the town was celebrating the Día de San Juan that night, and would we like to come?

For those of you who happen to be unfamiliar with Latin American holidays, St. John's Day is what you get when you take a normal feast day - food, revelry, a dash of religious devotion - and you set all those things on fire. Bonfires? Awesome! Burning effigies? Not only tolerated, but encouraged! Very careful games of soccer with a blazing ball? Oh, what the hell - you only live once!

You may be starting to put together a picture of how I ended up in that field, surrounded by strangers, running for my life from a man wielding a flaming cow skull on the end of a stick.

In fairness, I should note that he started out brandishing the skull at everyone. He swung and jabbed the object of terror at the circle of onlookers, taunting us, and various parts of the crowd would scatter as they found themselves in the Danger Zone. Our host family had long since disappeared, characteristically abandoning us the moment we arrived at the festivities, and I lost track of my partners almost immediately as we split up and ran in opposite directions.

As time went on, I began to realize that I was having exceptionally bad skull-related luck. Time after time, it seemed, I zigged when I should have zagged. No matter where I ran, the flaming cow skull of doom followed close behind.

I had become a target.

Why did Cow Skull Man choose me? He must have sensed intuitively that I would provide maximum entertainment. Fear! Confusion! Abject humiliation! I believe I spotted Mark Burnett crouched next to the sopa stand, taking notes.

So I ran, and the cow skull followed me. Maybe, I told myself insanely, maybe this was some kind of initiation ritual. Next I would have to jump over five cows and stick my hand into a glove filled with bullet ants, and only then could I call myself a man.

Everyone around me was shouting in Guaraní, the indigenous language spoken by 90 percent of Paraguayans and 0 white teenagers from the Rust Belt. I do speak the language a little now, enough to modestly demonstrate to a native speaker my innate talent for mental illness - how dog hand hungry water name? - but on that night, dashing frantically from one cluster of strangers to another, I understood not a word. They may have been telling me to run, or maybe to play dead. They may have been asking each other who the hell I was and what I thought I was doing, monopolizing their flaming cow skull like that. They could have been shouting the football scores, for all I know. What they were not doing was helping me in any way as I ran for my life.

"Come on," you may be thinking. "It wasn't that big a deal. It's not like he actually would have risked burning you."

My dear, innocent friends: you have far too much faith in the average Paraguayan religious performance troupe. This was not a lighthearted game, but an exercise in natural selection. Only the strong would survive; the slow and clumsy among us were picked off like sickly gazelles on an African safari. The town drunks had a particularly hard time of it, as Cow Skull Man mercilessly prodded them into submission until they lay in drowsy, smoking heaps on the ground.

("They're just borrachos," people told me later, as if a high BAC somehow protected these sad bastards from immolation. "They probably didn't feel a thing.")

On the other hand, no one died, minus one unfortunate cow. Clumsy oaf that I am, even I escaped with nothing more serious than shin splints and a mild case of self-loathing. So maybe I was safe after all. You think?

Q: Would my pursuer have killed or even seriously maimed me?

A: Of course not.

Q: Would he have hesitated, even for a moment, to stick that fiery cow skull halfway up my ass?

A: Why don't we ask the drunks about that one.

a riddle

Q: What has two thumbs, an obnoxious affinity for sparkle text, and is in the process of acquiring a one-way ticket to Thailand?

A:

THISBITCH
In case that was too subtle for you: I've accepted a position as volunteer coordinator at a women's shelter in northern Thailand. I leave the second week of December, which means I have about four weeks to wrap things up at my current job, get my visa, buy appropriate attire and supplies, pack, cuddle my kitten until he screams for mercy, get a sassy haircut, and of course panic. Oh, and learn Thai. It's bad form to move someplace without speaking the language, right? And to wander around going, "PANCAAAAKES," in an increasingly more demanding tone of voice?

You guys! I'm moving to Thailand!

HOLY SHIT I'M MOVING TO THAILAND.

hello, babies.

This is a travel blog, I think. More or less. I get tired of locking and unlocking my school blog, and now that I am no longer 14 and obsessed with AFI, I think it's time I moved beyond LiveJournal.

I may archive some of my old travelogues here. That's a very fancy word, "travelogues." Dignified. Like they ought to involve long treatises on self-discovery and personal growth.

This blog is not about self-discovery and personal growth.

Mostly I fall down a lot. And cuss. Sometimes both at once. Once in a while I get arrested, but they usually let me go. I've had my fair share of cow brains and foot parasites. I am not a good role model, for anyone.

Don't try this at home.