The Patron Saint of Ipita

It’s 10:30 in the morning and I’m already buzzed. I’m sitting across from whom I later learned are representatives of Camiri’s alcaldía (ie very important people). But right now, they are just a bunch of guys looking to booze it with the white girls. Someone says, “salud!” Cheers. Another chimes in, “seco!” as in, bottoms up and drink it down, folks. Emily flashes me a grimace and I grin back at her. After a year as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ipitá, she can say with some authority: “it’s all downhill from here.”



The fiesta for San Juan begins on Saturday and continues through Tuesday. The Ipiteños have been planning for a year and killing things to grill for a week. Extended family started rolling in at 5am from Santa Cruz, Camiri and beyond. Giant sound systems compete from every corner of the plaza as locals set up tables of handmade wares to sell. The tiendas display walls of beer, imported for the occasion. Tractors roll by and dump water on the dusty streets. “For the stock car race,” Emily explains. It amazes her to watch it happen. Every other day of the year, villagers use donkeys to haul jugs of water in for their houses.

After sobering up with some picante de pollo (spicy chicken), we meander over to the race where the mayor and the local school principal, both of whom are already tipsy, stand way too close to the revved up cars waving checkered flags. A lone police officer whistles at the crowd to get out of the way -- surprisingly they do, but it doesn’t last. Emily shakes her head. “Just wait,” she says. “This is going to turn into a shit-show.”



I should explain that Emily is my favorite Mennonite. I didn’t know that about her until the third time I met her and occasionally, like today, I still find it hard to believe. This is a girl who knows how to have a good time, to drink and dance and fall madly in lust with a man she refers to as “hot cowboy.”

But she’ll tell you how much she loves her town, and it’s obvious how much they love her. She knows almost everyone there, even the visitors. Kids from her English class yell her name from across the plaza and trail behind her wherever she goes. She has the kind of close girlfriends that I can’t imagine making in a foreign language and culture. They have no qualms about putting her to work; she moves tables and mixes cake batter and runs from one end of the fair to the other. It seems like nothing would function without her.



In the afternoon, we park ourselves on plastic chairs with some of the Santa Cruz people. The cold is setting in, or at least we’re starting to notice. We share Leona between our laps, and my poncho over our shoulders. Her friends offer cups of beer to help warm us up. We get colder but ultimately more cheerful. The boys pop open a few more bottles and fill our glasses. “I’m telling you,” she whispers in English. “It’s the beginning of the end.”

A Big Hole

The dirt is as tough as bricks but I hack away, eager for something productive to do and something physical to occupy my mind. This is the spot my host family designated for my compost project. Beggars can’t be choosers.

I hit another rock and try to pry it up using the shovel as a lever. It won’t budge but a centimeter, and it’s not a rock at all; I tuck my fingers underneath and heave with all my might. Archaeologists work here uncovering treasures. I uncover, quite laboriously, random scrap metal from the backyard dump. The book says to dig about a meter deep, which at first seemed easy but now is bordering on the impossible. My homemade shovel is durable but dull and small. Neither of us is quite up for the job ahead. A jackhammer would do it, maybe.

It helps to get a little angry at the dirt, so I think about how nuts my work counterpart is turning out to be and how my little brothers are about the noisiest creatures that ever lived. Chop, thwack! I mull about how I need to find a better flea control method for my dog, get her fixed before she gets knocked up by a dirty, half-wild street animal.

Oh, and yesterday we planted seven new trees in the school as part of an arbolization project and wouldn’t you know, it took about five minutes for one to get stepped right on and busted (and all my restraint not to bust the head of the child doing the stepping). Chop, scoop. There is nothing satisfying about the tiny piles of rocky soil as I toss them over the edge.

When I start to feel the ache in my shoulders and lower back – it’s been about two hours -- I sit down on one of the random metal pipes lying all over the place and take a slug of my noxious boiled filtered water. Leona abandons her stick, comes up and plants herself beside me with one paw and her whole nose in my lap. I look out at a tough morning’s work disdainfully but my lips curve into a half-smile. “Leona,” I say. “It appears that I have dug myself into a very big hole, here.”

Perfect Society

I had two thoughts when I boarded the micro (bus) at 6:30 this morning. One: this could be a complete failure on a number of levels, for example, this could be the wrong micro, it might not stop to pick up Emily, she might not be ready, or I might forget something important. Two: this could be fun, which should always be your backup frame of mind as a Peace Corps volunteer, whether things go as you planned or not. Thus, I sat myself down armed with a backpack full of warm clothing, some snacks, water and three giant packs of seeds.

First fear realized: the micro decided not to drive into Ipita, where Emily lives. I had all the stuff and no idea where we were going. I convinced the driver to stop at the highway and he blasted the horn until her blonde head appeared, ponytail bouncing. First crisis avoided. We arrived without a hitch in Taterenda Viejo, one of the community schools surrounding Gutierrez. Here all of the houses are mud and sticks; they have no electricity. No roads network this tiny town, just little goat paths that jut off in various directions. For all intents and purposes the school is the center of town and the language is Guarani.

The internados are students who spend the weekdays with families nearby the school because their homes are much farther away. With this group we proposed to start a huerto escolar, or school garden, to ease the burden of feeding extra children on the host families. Sixteen boys and girls from the afternoon group, grades 6-11, appeared with shovels and machetes in hand, flip flops on their feet. A local family donated an enclosed garden patch, so we crossed the highway and went up a steep path to a thatched roof home then descended on the other side toward a large field with misty mountains in the distance and the beginnings of a clear, hot day.





It soon became abundantly clear that the kids knew much more about farming and gardening than we did, something Emily warned me about. I was pulling up roots in my lovely blue garden gloves while they hacked away much more quickly with their tools. At one point I fell squarely on my butt with a small tree in hand and proclaimed, “Gané!” I won! A boy handed me a machete, which I stared at dubiously. I made a half-hearted attempt to use it for the first time in my life until he laughed and did it for me.

The biggest challenge was not clearing the brush, which was hard, or finding some “fertilizer,” which took a good hour as well. It was trying to keep the young teenage boys out of the nice family’s orange tree. “No sacques la fruta,” I told them. Don’t take the fruit. “No es nuestra.” It’s not ours! I continued muttering angry bits of Spanish until Emily discovered a much more effective methodology. She ran them halfway up the hill with a machete.



As we sat drinking the powdered chocolate milk the school had provided along with some animal crackers, one of the boys turned to me and said, “no quiere llevarme a los Estados Unidos?” Don’t you want to bring me to the United States? This is a common question among kids and adults alike, one that makes me uncomfortable. They all envision this perfect society in which everyone is educated, rich and powerful. It’s taken some time to realize, by comparison, how very right they are.