A Cultural Note About Death

So, I’ve been avoiding my blog for the past few weeks mostly because I’m kind of lazy but also because Nessie (or La Baronesa) died a couple of weeks ago. It was a terrible thing to see her die and was obviously quite painful for her at the end. I believe she had hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, which was probably a result of either her eating meat that was thoroughly cooked and then left out or possibly a problem she was born with. The meat hypothesis seems like an obvious one to me—Paraguayans cook their meat for an extremely long time, nearly burning it most of the time. There is never any pink in cooked meat here. Anyway, so I was totally heartbroken over Nessie to say the least. I live alone and it was nice having a distraction from a bunch of drama in my site that was happening in September. (There were two huge rifts in two of the main groups I work with—one ended up with a woman saying “You hit my kid in the face, I’ll hit you in the face” to a woman at the comedor. All this happened literally in front of 40 kids. They wouldn’t listen to me when I told them to take it to a more private place, nor when I reminded them of how immature and what bad examples they were being. Frustrating.) So Nessie had been a very positive distraction for me, and was the cutest thing ever. When she was obviously very sick (it happened pretty suddenly), I walked over to a veterinarian’s house with a neighbor. I don’t trust this vet to begin with since he had told my neighbors that their dog, Mika, was allergic to cats and that’s why her eyes were so red and messed up. It was very obvious that this was not the reason for her eye problem, and no amount of allergy shots helped. But my vet lives 45 minutes away and wouldn’t be able to help until the next morning. So we walk over to Dr. Incompetente’s house. He gave Nessie a few shots. (After looking all this up online it turns out that there was really nothing he could have done to save her at that point.) After giving Nessie the shots and some medicine orally, he asked how she was doing. I choked out that she wasn’t breathing. The vet’s wife in the exact same moment in which I gave the news asked if I wanted a new puppy. Just like that. Tactless.

So I bring this up for a few reasons. The cultural differences between here and the US are quite great on a handful of topics—one being pets and the other being death. It is common for a puppy to die here, so no one thinks anything of it when it happens. Dogs are frequently for protection and normally sleep outside. The US is obviously an extreme—people pick up their dog’s poop after them, sometimes put them in ridiculous clothing, give them medical attention that some humans don’t get, and mourn over their death. I cannot explain how many people have offered to give me a new puppy in the past 10 days or so since Nessie died. It is really sweet of them to offer, but I think I’ll wait a while to have a new puppy until I’m back stateside.

The other much more serious death that has taken place in the past few weeks happened while I was in Buenos Aires. I’ve been teaching in one particular class (11th grade) for a few months now. We’ve done a lot of work on sex ed and HIV/AIDS weekly. Apparently two kids from the class (a brother and sister) were leaving school 2 weeks ago and were both hit by a bus. The boy died instantly and the girl has been in a coma ever since. Victor, a teen I work with in that class and in a lot of other groups, told me about the accident, though I don’t hear much about it since it happened a few neighborhoods over. When I talked to him about how his classmates were coping, he said that some were just not going to school anymore and that others were mourning in various ways. I asked about support for the students and family, but he seemed confused. I asked about social workers, psychologists, anything, but he said there was nothing. This is astounding to me. In the US, we’d have grief counseling or at least a guidance counselor to talk to the students, but here there is nothing. The class is doing a bunch of fundraising to help out the parents of the girl who is still in the hospital, but that is the only kind of support Victor could think of. There are a group of psychologists who come on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to the community center in my neighborhood and I’ve invited them to come to help out with the class this week but they still haven’t given me a solid response. When I asked them, they didn’t even understand at first what kind of services I wanted them to offer to the kids for a day. It is that peculiar. Anyway, unfortunately I don’t have any more news on that subject, but am really hoping they’ll be able to help out this week. Otherwise the kids are going to just continue to bury their feelings or avoid dealing with it for now. I’m hoping that once school ends (exams start in 10 days or so) some of them take advantage of the very cheap individual sessions that the psychologists offer; maybe I can figure out a way to have the group drop the charge for this particular group of students. We’ll see…