No Room at the Paraguay Inn

After the visa debacle we finally made it to Encarnación, the Paraguayan town across the river which I´d been staring at since I got to Posadas nearly a week earlier. Getting a bus from there to the capital of Asuncion was truly a whirlwind experience. Within about five minutes we were off the bus, offered tickets to the capital from a bus-ticket vendor about five meters away, had our Argentine Pesos exchanged for Paraguayan Guaraníes, bought tickets and climbed on a bus where we were promptly sold chipas and fresh fruit by two different street vendors. Capitalism is a beautiful thing.

Six hours later we woke up in Asunción where it became clear very quickly that Paraguay is not a common place for backpack-toting foreigners to visit. After calling Emily from a telecabina and checking my email for other news (and to try to locate our hotel) we hopped on a bus for the center of town to find our hotel and sleep more comfortable than a bus.

This search turned out to be more difficult than we thought, and has us thinking that we might have settled for a bus! Having been spoiled by the availability of cheap hostels in other places we’d showed up in Asuncion without a hotel reservation, but rather the names of about four hotels that were located close to one another downtown. None of them had availability. A few were nice enough to call nearby hotels to see if they had any availability. After two hours of playing hopscotch from one hotel to another—and feeling comically like Mary and Joseph—we were start to seriously contemplate the possibility that were going to have to sleep outside (and it is not warm in July).

It was at about this time that we encountered a pair of policemen whom we asked for directions to a hotel that might be available. This was an odd and sometimes comical experience for several reasons. The Paraguayan police look a lot more like the military who just twenty years ago ran the Paraguayan state than their black clad, pistol-wielding counterparts in Argentina. But looks notwithstanding they were very helpful. Perhaps more out of boredom and curiosity than out of a sense of civic duty the two walked with us from hotel to hotel while they asked if they had any room, explaining to us in their heavy Paraguayan accents (which we had difficulty understanding and which we made fun of brutally when they were no longer around) that this area of the city (just blocks away from the national palace) is a dicey one where there are robberies and people frequently break windows. Or something like that—like I said their accents were challenging. But the sight of young women in short skirts standing alone on these same street corners, gave us all the evidence we needed to feel fortunate that we were so accompanied.

Apart from their accents, they also asked us questions that were both somewhat comical in the time, but have also made me think. They were interested in what we were doing in Paraguay and in Latin America in general. They seemed not to understand why we were studying in Latin America or why we spoke Spanish. They asked us if we spoke Spanish amongst ourselves (we do, which admittedly is a bit strange) and with other people, which was pretty self-evident.

But the questions made me reflect on the truly strange nature of our enterprise here. The fact is that for the vast majority of the people on this earth, the number one goal in life is progress in material well-being—for yourself, for your family. An absolutely daunting fraction of humanity’s six billion souls are concerned just with having something to eat tomorrow and even those of us who eat well are concerned with making more money, or keeping our jobs, whether this year’s crop goes bad or the factory closes.

Studying abroad in Latin America doesn’t really make sense in this context. People risk their lives and fortunes just to make it to the United States from places like Cuba or Mexico, or as far as China or Paraguay. And here we are, wandering through poorly lit streets in a country we barely know, for reasons that really have nothing to do with advancing our well-being. From this context it makes my travels seem very much like a bourgeois luxury, it makes me feel class in a way I never have before. For us this is relatively normal—I have many friends who have studied abroad, they leave for a semester and come back reporting how wonderful it is, wonder being sufficient justification for doing it.

As an Argentine friend of mine recently told me “you can go to work in the silver mines of Potosí if you want, to try to understand how the miners live, but even then you won’t understand a crucial aspect of their reality—that unlike you there’s no way out for them. They have no hope for a different life.”

Most creatures on this earth have to struggle daily for survival, but we live off of the world’s surplus, somewhere along the line our parents or our parent’s parents fought so that we wouldn’t have to. In exchange they gave us a path, something to do, with parameters to follow, whether explicit or not; do activities, play sports, graduate from high school, go to college, get a job, and support a family.

About a year ago a good friend of mine singlehandedly changed my conception of this path. We met during her only semester at Case Western Reserve University, the place where I’d applied to early at seventeen and where I left behind any thoughts of attending a different school. I was attracted by her attachment to the city that I loved, even though it was based on reasons that I couldn’t have understood at the time. And unlike me she was never really thrilled about the idea of going to college. She applied practically at the last minute and almost didn’t go at all. She transferred to Case for personal reasons and for similar reasons she left after the semester was over to follow other pursuits she’d postponed for years.

Our society would seem to judge harshly her attitudes towards school and her decision not to continue with it. But it’s hard to dispute that there is something odd about the extent to which the American liberal education system is divorced from reality, in which you read about struggles instead of living them and have imaginary deadlines based on the necessities of the academic system and after which you graduate with a degree that has little to do with the careers pursued by such graduates.

I have inherited from my mother a great skepticism for the notion of going off to “find yourself” (particularly on someone else’s bill, as so often happens). And yet I now have equal skepticism of affixing oneself to the preordained ladder of success, the one that dictates a parent be ashamed if his child decides to become an auto-mechanic instead of going to college and that leaves so many of my generation floundering around for four years trying to decide what to do with themselves.

When confronted with what are admittedly peculiarly bourgeois dilemmas about choosing what to do with your life (what a blessing that you have a choice!) the present can be a powerful antidote. Existential angst is easier to set aside when you’re concerned with finding a place to sleep. It is good then, that I have the opportunity to reflect about all this now, and that I was successful months ago in Paraguay, in finding a hotel room and collapsing into sleep a half hour later, leaving such philosophizing for another day.