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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.
  

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.