Six Signs You are (Still) in the Peace Corps

“We must not cease from exploration. And at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”
-T.S. Eliot

During the first couple of months I was in Paraguay, everything seemed surreal. I would note every little tiny detail of everything that I saw or that happened to me and it was the most incredible thing ever. I.e. the time I stopped on my way to somewhere and watched carpenter ants carry leaves many times their size for a solid ten minutes. Or when I went nuts because I saw a firefly with a totally different light pattern then Illinois fireflies. Or when I laughed for about 2 straight minutes at the descriptive language for describing a cold beer in Guarani, which translates as: “This beer is nice and cool like a Penguin’s butt.”

‘Culture shock’ is the commonly used phrase to describe this adaptation process to a new culture. After several months of immersion, culture shock typically wears off, as it has for me. I am at home in my environment again, in my own element. Things in my day-to-day that I would have, at the beginning of my experience, deemed ridiculously journal-worthy often don’t even get a second thought now. This weekend I had a realization that I have become desensitized to a great many things after living in ultra-rural Paraguay for more than 7 months. So, in case I forgot, here are six signs (taken this past weekend) to remind me that I am still in the Peace Corps:

1. Saturday morning is extremely rainy. You realize this means this means that you will not be able to go into town for at least 3 days if not more because of the road conditions. Instead of reacting negatively, you celebrate the joyous fact that you will have a morning to read the classics and do yoga without interruption from neighbors randomly stopping by to hang with ‘the Americano.’

2. Water is dripping into your house in at least 7 different spots. Instead of getting upset you congratulate yourself on how much foresight you had to put your bed in the ‘dry corner’ of your hut.

3. You have an intestinal disturbance that clearly would have been ‘Kaopectate’ worthy back in the states. As you squat in the roofless latrine during a storm, being downpoured on, your only reaction is to chuckle about how smart you were to bring dry TP with you in a plastic bag.

4. When you come to a recently formed river cutting across a road, you are already knee deep before you realize you just took off your shoes to wade through muddy water. (I remember my denial the first time this happened: “well there has got to be some way around this thing…nope there aren’t too many pedestrian bridges in Paraguay”) You just have to embrace bare feet in the boondocks.

5. You are overjoyed to walk into a neighbor’s house and find them watching an (extremely) mediocre Wayne Brothers movie, let alone when in English, dubbed into Spanish. In this particular case the contraband film, obviously pirated, filmed in a movie theatre, is “White Chicks.” It may be the Waynes bros, but hey, it’s a relief from the usual 7 hour epic Chinese kung-fu flicks that everyone is always watching.

6. The highlight of your day is figuring out that you can leverage your machete against a tree in such a way that you will be able to split bamboo with maybe 400% more efficiency. So genius.

By the same token that I have been come desensitized to Paraguayan life, its going to be interesting to note what I think of Brookfield when I get back a week from Tuesday after having been gone 10 months. Trains? Snow? Chipotle burrito? Irish Times, and Guinness on tap? Chinese food? Wisconsin cheese available in a store near you? Two story houses? Indoor Heating? Hot showers? I’m going to feel like a tourist in my hometown.