counterclockwise

Let’s have a little break from youth photography, shall we?

I’m in Asunción for the next few days. In the original plan, I was going to take a morning bus in, print out the Ahecha photos we’ll be showing in our in-site exhibition, and leave that very same evening. After all, these little excursions are expensive, and I was just here two weeks ago for my routine performance review.  But then it turned out that I needed at least one night in town to get the photos developed. OK…

Then it was my friend Danita’s 26th birthday. Aside from the fact that Danita is just an all-around wonderful person, she was going to rent an ox-cart (!!!) to bring friends out to visit her site. Who can say no to a thing like that? So sign me up for two nights out of Tacuatí.

Then it resolved that I could get the most expensive parts of this trip (viz, my bus fare and hotel room) reimbursed if I participated in the administrative staff’s annual planning and budgeting workshop. And that’s been an interesting experience. But it does require an extra night tacked onto my trip.

And then this very afternoon, like a stupid sun-addled tourist, I lost my wallet somewhere between the Peace Corps Paraguay office and the USAID facility where we’ve been having the workshop. So now I’m in town for yet another extra day while I get my most important cards canceled and/or replaced.

I’ve been looking at the weather reports now, and it seems at least possible that after all this resolves, I’m still going to be rained out of site until approximately the heat death of the universe. Which — in a place as hot as Paraguay in the summer — seems like a very long time indeed.

The Guaraní word of the day is hake, meaning “Look out!” Hake señorita! Your wallet fell out of your purse! But thankfully, it was the day before pay day, not the day after so there was very little cash inside. Also, I don’t carry my passport or other important documents pertaining to my northern hemisphere life there. Also, I keep an emergency back-up stash of money in my mailbox in the office. And most importantly, this has happened to hundreds (if not thousands) of scatter-brained, kumbayah-curdled volunteers before, and the PC/Paraguay staff has recovery process down to a fine art.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Guaraní, Peace Corps Paraguay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.