Pepinos y Pimientos

There was a dengue outbreak in Buenos Aires.  Nothing too major, but about 5 adults and a few kids were stuck in bed for about a week with the sickness.  Leonor freaked out when she first heard and started yelling at me about how I have to go get someone to fumigate for them.  Now, I realize that the white-American card can work in my favor sometimes here with the higher-ups but she tries to use it a little too frequently for my liking.  It turns out they didn’t need my help anyways, the medical center had to get the positive results from the people with dengue and then I guess they are required to come out and fumigate.  I don’t really know what I had in mind when they said fumigate, but I definitely was not expecting a thirteen-year-old boy with braces to show up with a motorized backpack sprayer.  The whole thing was a really strange experience.  I was napping when I hear a banging at my door and Lizbeth thrusts my cat in my arms saying to keep it in my room so it doesn’t die of fumes.  I’m still half asleep and don’t really make much of it but keep the cat in my room and go back to bed.  I wake up to the sound of a lawnmower, which is strange because they don’t have those here (except for when the municipality brings in one to mow the soccer field every month), in the house.  I feel as though I’m dreaming it but I decide to get up and investigate.  I open my bedroom door to a child with a huge backpack sprayer on his back walking in the house spraying his chemical concoction.  I freak out close the door, throw open my windows, and try not to inhale too deeply.  Pretty soon my eyes and nose start to burn and I decide I need to get out of the house into some fresh air.  I go out to the porch and am greeted by the same fumes, fog, and a drizzle.  Parked in the road in front of the house is a truck marked as Malaria Prevention and there are men in silver hard hats with clipboards walking around putting chalk marks on the houses across the street.  The mixture of having just woke up and the toxic fumes is making my head spin and I’m not sure if any of this is real.  But then Leonor shows up with a large grin of satisfaction on her face and tells me then just got done spraying the whole school.  It begins to rain harder and I shrug and tell Leonor it was a waste for them to fumigate today, and she smiles and assures me that all the chemicals will stick because they mixed them with diesel.  I just shake my head and she says well it’s better than dengue.  A few days later, the concrete floor in the house still shines with diesel and the puddles outside have that wonderful rainbow film of gasoline on the surface.

I have had a lot of free time and have been reading a lot of books lately.  But eventful things that I have done in the past couple of weeks include starting a garden at my host family’s house.  Leonor kept nagging me about the garden and I kept telling her we don’t have seeds yet.  So she tells me to get the ground ready and she will buy the seeds to plant.  Well, I spent two days clearing the remnants of years of burning and dumping trash into the area she wanted to be her garden.  I added what was left of my compost pile (the chickens got into it and destroyed/ate most of it) and sweated through all of my clothes.  When I told her the ground was ready, she hands me two old packets of cucumber and bell pepper seeds that her son had brought over from Germany.  I asked where the rest of the seeds she told me she would be buying were.  This is when she decides to tell me she ran out of money and couldn’t buy the seeds.  She couldn’t have told me this while she watching me sweat buckets preparing the ground for a garden? Nope, that would be too easy.  So, right now she has some beautiful raised beds that are growing weeds. 

Since the chickens destroyed my compost pile, I decided to make a wormbed.  Pepito dragged some lumber from the fields and we spent a morning building a large box with rotting wood and rusted nails.  I got some red worms sent to me and now I have a wormbed.  Except, Leonor will not let her organic stuff rot a little before she puts it in the box so currently the box is swarming with gnats.  Hopefully, she will figure it out sooner or later since she won’t listen to me.

The guy in charge of the canal project showed up at my house one day to drop off AutoCAD plans for me to look over.  It was so satisfying to unroll the sheets on the kitchen table and stare at them.  Efrian, the canal guy, told me that these were project plans.  In reality, it is just the location of the proposed canal and the existing ground profile.  There are no calculations whatsoever.  There was a meeting later that day where BA asked the Secretary of the Ministry of Water to come and look over the project and discuss funding options.  The Secretary almost laughed in their faces as he asked where the calculations, material list, and costs were.  Apparently, Efrian had no idea he needed such things, he just thought he could estimate the canal project at a couple million dollars and go from there.  So the Secretary basically said actually come up with a project plan and then call me up and we will talk money.  This is promising for me because I hope to help with the project plan since they have no money to hire Ecuadorian engineers…woohoo.  Things are super slow moving here though (it took 2 years to write a study on the need for irrigation) so who knows if I will actually get to do much in the 2 years that I am here.             

Random Thoughts:

• Turns out my family lied about my cat breaking the chick’s leg.  The little girl that lives across the street stepped on it accidently.  This does not explain why they cut off the cat’s whiskers.
• We are confused about the gender of my cat.  Eventually I’ll take it to the vet and he’ll figure things out.
•    Danny left.  Leonor locked Vito out of the house one night on purpose (the poor kid is emotionally and physically abused on a regular basis).  I stepped in and opened the door for him because I was sick of how Leonor treats him.  Danny was just coming out of his room and must have agreed with me and starts yelling at Leonor.  I take this as my cue to go in my room and shut the door.  From what I could make out between the sobs and screams, Leonor expects to be treated with respect from an adult like Danny and that she is super hurt that his is questioning her parenting skills, etc.  The argument ends, I hear Danny go into his room and pack his things.  He was gone before anyone got up in the morning.  It’s been about a week and he hasn’t come back yet.
•  My program manager from the Peace Corps came to BA for a general site visit to fill out some more papers to send to good ole Washington DC.  He told me after the visit that I do indeed live with the devil.
•  Patricia and I have been bonding over the new house she is building.  I went with her to a tile store in town and we spent all morning picking out the tile for her kitchen and bathroom.  When we got home though, Leonor said the colors were ugly.  I have also helped Patricia pick up other odds and ends and arrange her furniture in the house.
• The kids and I picked up trash around town one day.  We cleaned all of the school, the park, and part of the soccer field and it looks a lot better now, but there is still a lot of trash in town to pick up…I might make it a weekly thing.  And most of the town has built their platforms trash.
•   I am getting pretty good at being sarcastic in Spanish.
• Pepito has been going out to hunt wild boar lately.  He carries this super old shotgun around and claims he always hears the noises but has get to see the boar to shoot it.