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.