Best. Day. Ever. (but sans H2O!)

Best. Day. Ever.
OK, so maybe not best day ever, but I’ve had an excellent day. And here’s why: I had a great meeting with the mayor of Limpio. Limpio is a town of 80,000, and I live about 3km outside of it in a neighborhood of 800 houses. It was only brought to my attention by a friend from the states that knowing the mayor of a town of 80,000 is weird, but I don’t find it strange in any way. The current mayor is named Tito, but his brother was the previous mayor. Though the previous mayor was supportive enough in my projects and always donated money when various neighborhood groups I’m involved with asked, I wasn’t the biggest fan. The reason? The traditional greeting between a man and a woman in Paraguay is a double kiss—a cheek-to-cheek on both sides. (Generally your lips don’t make any contact.) The old mayor used to intentionally aim for the corners of my mouth. It made me uncomfortable, and with good reason. Since the woman is generally in control of what kind of greeting it is between a man and a woman (double kiss or handshake), after he pulled this maneuver with me twice I gave him the hard extended hand, signifying that I was only interested in a handshake. That didn’t help him from doing the “killer” move on me. I say Killer, because that’s what we used to call it at the camp where I used to work. Someone is designated as the “killer” and while everyone goes around shaking hands, he/she scratches the palm of the hand of the other person. The other player then shakes hands with a few other people and keels over dead. It is truly a great game, but the former mayor was not playing this game at the time. It is a (super creepy) sexual advance.

Regardless, this new mayor, Tito, is not creepy towards me in any way—he is actually quite professional. I’m very pleased with this fact, to say the very least. Today we had a meeting in which I wanted to talk to him about three things. 1) Peace Corps in general, that I am getting a follow-up volunteer in my site when I leave in April that he should coordinate projects with, and that I’m trying to send an environmental PCV to another section of Limpio to work with the water treatment plant, which has a huge amount of veggie seeds and vegetables and trees that anyone can transplant for free. Essentially, I wanted to show him how great Peace Corps is and how helpful we can be to Limpio. 2) If he wanted to sign a note saying that he’d send 100 saplings to the next town over so I could help another PCV do an environmental camp with kids. This was only tricky in that I was asking for him to send a truck over with the trees so we wouldn’t have to take them on the bus, and it is actually not benefitting Limpio in any way. 3) This is the most important, and what I was buttering him up for, to be perfectly honest. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m working with a library committee to build and start a library. The problem is, we want to put the library in a municipal building without giving all of the power to the municipality to move the library to wherever they choose. This means asking the mayor to sign a document. I was a bit letrada (this basically means sneaky/tricky in PY) and told him that we were looking for a place where we could put the library, but where it is safe, and has a night guard. He fell for my wonderful trap and suggested the municipal-run community center in my neighborhood. Though we haven’t signed a contract as of yet (that should happen this upcoming week), he is enthused about the project and more than willing to help. This was a huge load off my shoulders. We should be getting the money any day now, and will soon be buying books and the shelves and such to equip the library with all it needs. My library committee and my follow-up will most likely be in charge of organizing it and getting the ball rolling, since I have such little time left here.

On another note, the mayor gave me some other good news. He said that he is donating the money to fix the motor on the water tank that gives me and about 350 other houses water daily. My water situation is unstable to say the least, with water about 5 hours a day, but the motor broke on Friday and we have been without a single drop of water ever since. I ran out of potable water yesterday, which…umm…sucked, but my neighbors gave me a bunch today since they have a different (and more expensive) water source. I have a big barrel of water I fill whenever I can in case of emergencies, but even that is down to about 2 inches of water. Today I bathed at the Peace Corps Office, since I had to go in there briefly to deal with some other things, but otherwise I’ve just been using an absurdly small amount of water to bathe. To be honest, I’ve not been the cleanest person here the past few days…and remember, we’re in the midst of summer. Thankfully it has been rainy and a bit cooler in the past few days or I have no idea how I’d be surviving… I’m hoping that tomorrow the motor on the water tank gets fixed and things return to normal.