Happy New Year! I pray that everyone has entered 2009 well and content. One thing I’ve heard more than once here is a reflection upon the year 2000 when the world was supposed to end. Here we are nearly a decade later alive and well! Take that, computers!
It’s been difficult to adjust to the sights, sounds, and feelings of the holiday season here. Not difficult in the sense that I’m unhappy, but rather my brain never really connected the season that was with the season I felt. Last night was more “normal” than Christmas, but I’ll get to that later.
Our Christmas was spent with some visitors and friends from the States. Three of the Koch kids from Syracuse had come down to spend some time painting the school (it looks pretty nice now), so there was at least a small bit of familiarity for me as I have basically known them since they were born. Apart from the giving of gifts, the rest was foreign. On Christmas Eve, we went to La Quinta (a large house recently placed under the auspices of the school) for some swimming and eating. Our friends Ben and Vivi were there with us as well. I made fudge again (but not as much as last year), and at around 10 we ate our asado, which was more than delicious. We shall never forget the pork.
The other thing that happens on Christmas Eve is the setting off of fireworks at midnight. Really, though, kids will have been setting fireworks off for a few weeks already, but there is a sort of culmination on Christmas Eve; A Silent Night it is not. We gentlemen slept at the house in the air conditioning. Merry Christmas to me! The next morning we all gathered at the Caballero house for an exchange of gifts and some tasty lunch. I was given a jar of raspberry jam – my favorite – and a cookbook of Paraguayan food. I am particularly excited about trying that out. I’m on my way to Paragauyanhood, I think. We rounded the day off with more swimming.
Last night the only thing missing was coldness. In recent years I’ve cared less about the ball, but Paraguay has their own version. Once again, we handled small, cheap explosives, from the old to the young. We had a delicious dinner of ham (hard to find here), sopa, potato salad, veggies, cheese, salami, Doritos, and sparkling ciders. The Doritos were imported by the Americans I think. Then we went around the table and each person had to speak a blessing on everyone else.
After dinner we drank tereré for a bit, getting some visitors with food from their own tables, which we traded for food from ours. Eventually we walked down to Pastor Pedro’s house, and I brought my fudge (they have no such thing here – there’s not even a word for it, so I simply called it “sweet”). We set off some fireworks with the kids, tossing them at one another and such. It was all completely safe, I promise… Anyway, it wasn’t hard to tell when it was 12, because the sky became ablaze with multicolored sulfuric light, and it sounded like a war zone. Amidst all the “Feliz Año Nuevo!” text messages we were all getting, we embraced one another, wishing God’s blessing on each other and celebrating our entry into yet another year.
And here we are. Below isn’t a video blog, but it’s a bit of the sights and sounds of Paraguay on New Years Night.
I'm Jason, and I like to write.
It doesn’t look quite safe to me. I hope no one was hurt. We were not there at New Years, but at Christmas and it’s hard to make the adjustment to the warmth when you’ve always associated the holidays with winter. Glad you are adjusting well. God bless! Lilly