retro: the scorpion king

I talk a lot of crap about Paraguay. Tripe this, Nazis that, demonic host mother wah wah wah. It's actually a fine country, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from going there. The thing is that, on a personal level, my time in Paraguay was without question the most unpleasant travel experience I've yet had. To this day, I have semi-regular nightmares about being sent back to live with my host family.

There is one arena, though, in which Paraguay stands heads and shoulders above the competition: bugs.

As in, there really weren't any. There was the occasional spider the size of your hand, but they were fairly passive and easy to kill. Our most serious pest problem involved frogs. And fleas. And foot parasites. Okay, on second thought, there were plenty of bugs in Paraguay.

Nicaragua, though - Nicaragua presented a whole new set of plagues. The latrines were filled with equal parts human waste and genetically-enhanced cockroaches. I was beset by swarms of mosquitoes, which had been virtually nonexistent in Paraguay. Worst of all, Nicaragua was the country where I discovered scorpions.

Scorpions are the worst.

I was only stung once during my first summer in Nicaragua, but it was more than enough to put me off the whole thing for life. The incident in question occurred when a scorpion of unknown size, species and political loyalties scampered over my hand in the middle of the night and thoughtfully decided to leave his calling card. If any of you would like to experience such a thing for yourselves, I would recommend that you get a friend to wake you up by stabbing you in the hand with a cattle prod. And then have them turn up the voltage. And then kick you in the stomach, just for laughs.

I jolted awake to a burst of fiery agony, pain flaring across the back of my knuckles and up my pointer finger. "HURGH," I said, clutching my hand to my chest. "GLRRK. HRBRBTL." Deprived of both oxygen and vowels, the only coherent thought I was able to process was that I had to be quiet, so as not to wake anyone up. Imminent death is one thing, but there's just no excuse for inconveniencing folks.

I rocked back and forth for a while, mouth open in a giant, wheezing O - the only time in my memory that I have ever been too incapacitated to curse. My fingers didn't seem to be moving very well, but I figured that was just a side effect of my failing nervous system, so I wasn't too terribly concerned. I looked forward to it, actually. Sensory deprivation sounded like an excellent idea at that point.

Looking back, it's clear that I probably should have said something. "Hey, Josefina," I might have whispered to my host sister in the next bed. "Listen, I hate to bother you, but I think I'm dying." Instead, I heaved one shaky breath after another, fingers fever-hot and swelling up like balloon animals, and eventually passed out.

I was fine, of course. My hand was swollen in the morning, but the searing pain had given way to a dull throb of discomfort. Within days, the soreness and the swelling had both vanished, and I pushed the incident to the back of my mind, a mildly amusing story to tell my friends when I came home.

A few days later, my partner J and I were sitting on my bed, preparing for the next day's class. I was sitting against the wall, head tilted back against the rough dried-mud surface as I tried to think up a better strategy for wrangling 45 small and insolent children. Anything had to be better than our current tactics of menace and bribery - though, admittedly, we would happily have carried on with these if they had actually worked. (Is it any wonder I went on to study politics?)

Out of the blue, J said, "Hey, M, could you come over here for a minute?" In retrospect, she was remarkably calm, especially for someone whose own run-in with a scorpion had resulted in the kind of screams known to shatter glass and knock satellites out of orbit.

"Why?"

"Just come here," she said evasively.

Confused, I scooted over to her part of the bed, at which point she grabbed my face and turned me around to see the World's Largest Scorpion sauntering up the wall right next to where my head had been.

It is impossible to exaggerate the size of this scorpion. It was larger than my hand; very possibly it was larger than God's hand. I've owned smaller cats. I could not believe that something so huge and evil-looking was allowed to exist. It seemed to upset the natural balance of things. Like, surely if this monstrosity was allowed to roam free, the world should also be filled with giant kittens and bunny rabbits, to compensate.

When I get to this point in the story, people invariably ask me the same question: So how did you kill it?

To which I invariably reply: Motherfucker, are you high?

Because, of course, I did not kill it. I didn't happen to have my armor-piercing bullets with me, and a grenade might only have made it angry. In all seriousness, the only weapon that could have taken this thing down was a machete. Besides, it was almost certainly some sort of god, and I wasn't willing to risk bringing its wrath down upon my unprotected head.

Too stunned to beg for mercy, J and I just watched with shock and awe as the scorpion strolled up and over the wall, easily slipping through the gap between wall and roof, and disappeared from our lives forever.

I've since encountered lots of scorpions: big scorpions, baby scorpions, brown and red and orange scorpions. I've found them under my cot, inside my mosquito netting, investigating the contents of my backpack. I am notoriously trigger-happy when it comes to bugs - except for the occasional pet spider - but despite the fact that I hate and fear scorpions above all other vermin, I have yet to kill one. I'm intimidated by the difficulty of such an attempt, especially considering that my hand-eye coordination leaves a lot to be desired. But I'm also worried that, should I succeed in slaughtering one of the little bastards, I'll wake up one night to another visit from the scorpion king...and He won't be happy.

retro: the way to my heart

I love milanesa. Of all the foods I tried in Paraguay, milanesa is one of perhaps three that I would voluntarily choose to eat over, say, fried cardboard. It's a pretty simple dish, just pieces of thinly-sliced beef or chicken, breaded and fried, often with a dash of cumin. It's not so different from chicken-fried steak, I guess, except that chicken-fried steak is uniformly disgusting, whereas milanesa is a gustatory delight. Don't ask me to explain the wind, okay?

One evening in mid-July, my partners and I returned from our mid-summer break/training session to find that our host mother had made milanesa for dinner. Thank God. Finally, something we actually wanted to eat. Dude Partner and I dug in happily while Lady Partner, a committed vegetarian, looked on.

As we ate, DP and I discussed the food in front of us. Was it chicken or beef, we wondered? It looked too pale to be beef, but it didn't taste like chicken either. Curious, we peeled away the breading to get a better look at the meat within. This was a mistake. The meat looked distressingly gooey, as though someone had blown his or her nose onto it before frying it up. We chewed more slowly, pondering this development. The milanesa was awfully hard to cut. And it was so chewy, like trying to sink your teeth into a whoopee cushion.

"What kind of meat is this?" we asked our host brother.

He shook his head. "No, no, it's not meat."

The generic word for meat in Spanish mainly refers to beef or pork, which explains why our vegetarian partner was frequently served chicken and, disturbingly, hot dogs. ("I'm sorry, I don't eat meat." "...and?") We tried again. "What animal is it from?"

This he could answer. "Cow."

Well, that narrowed it down. "What part of the cow?"

Mouth full of the mystery non-meat, he merely hammered on his chest.

My partners and I fell into a hushed, heated debate. Heart? No, heart would be too tough. Lungs? Who eats lungs, anyway? Pancreas? Gallbladder? God, what else was even in the chest?

By this time, our host brother was laughing at us. "Tripa," he said patiently. "It's tripa."

Tripa. Sounded like - but, no, that wasn't in the chest. The guy had worked at a carcinería, a meatpacking factory. Surely he knew where the damn stomach was.

Well...he didn't.

At least the milanesa was edible, if somewhat less appealing after we registered its gummy, goopy nature for what it was. The real challenge came a week later, while our supervisor was visiting. Strangely enough, our sup was also a vegetarian, so it was a particularly bad night for our host mother to serve Broiled Stomach Pilaf.

The milanesa had masqueraded well, but this dish was unmistakably composed of offal. Fat, rubbery chunks of stomach nestled on a bed of plain rice. The smell was nauseating. The "meat" was plain, unadorned. It was unashamedly stomach, grayish and weirdly furry on one side. My partners and supervisor and I stared at it, and then each other, each silently running through the same list of options.

A. Eat it. Die.

B. Don't eat it, thereby insulting host mother and risking starvation. Die.

C. Flee on foot, heading for the mountains. Stumble upon the ghost monkeys or the rumored al-Qaeda training cell. Die.

The future was bleak.

Daringly, our supervisor attempted to cut the Gordian knot with an advanced weasel maneuver. "I'm sorry," she simpered apologetically, eyes artfully wide and innocent in her face. "I'm awfully sorry, but the thing is, I'm a vegetarian."

Our host mother frowned. "So?"

Thrown by this brusque response, our supervisor faltered slightly, then pushed on. "Well, I mean, I don't eat meat." Her eyes were growing wider by the second. She looked not unlike a Bratz doll.

"It's not meat," our host mother said, shoving a forkful of innards into her mouth.

Our sup was persistent. "But, you see, I don't eat any part of the animal." Clear, straightforward, unambiguous. Even a master weasel like our host mother couldn't argue with that.

"Ah," our mother said, appearing to concede. "I see. Well, why don't you wait a moment, and I'll get you something else." She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

It seemed that, against all odds, our sup had emerged victorious. She flashed us a triumphant smile. "Was that so hard?" she whispered, a touch patronizingly.

But we had all underestimated the magnitude of our host mother's cunning. Our sup realized her mistake moments later, as Mommie Dearest returned from the kitchen, self-satisfied smile firmly in place, with a plate piled high with cold, slimy hot dogs.

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.

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: 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.