Paraiso
Hi
everybody from Paraiso, pop. 8,000, motto "If you don't need
it, it ain't here"...
After two weeks in this little costal village, Carlos (pictured
at right) has begun to worry that the outside world won't recognize
us when we return, as our semi-voluntary work for Habitat
has given us blisters, concrete stains, and improved our already spiderman-like
physiques. Snapshots of Tim: in
his bedroom | working hard
Other
than that, what we've got going on is an English class for local kids
twice a week with a Peace Corps volunteer, an odd day
here and there helping build a clinic or identifying plants in the rainforest,
and otherwise just passing time with the strange cast of characters
that happen to live here. Carlos pictured at left is helping
a student in the English class. Tim and Carlos teaching
English class.
The
first big adventure was when we went down to the cancha to play some
basketball, Tim hung out on the sidelines talking to an African-American
Jehovah's Witness from Buffalo, and Carlos played for a little
while and then took a chin to the head, started bleeding, and jumped
on a passing motorcycle to the local clinic. Five stitches later, Tim
was unsure how to respond to his host brother, who liked to say "Carlos
va a morir" and laughed at himself every time.
Other true comedians of the Paraiso community include Padre Juan,
a seventy-something New York Irish Catholic priest doctor who will tell
you how Hurricane George washed away his clinic, his house, and
his car, how where he lives now on top of a mountain he fears only earthquakes,
and how for only ten pesos he will treat anyone for anything as long
as they can make it to his clinic.
So
anyway, for us, when the friendly people from Habitat don't have anything
for us to do, there is also a friendly Spanish priest with a hundred
invitations for volunteer work, and there are two friendly Peace Corps
volunteers with extra work and other ways to pass the time, and when
all else fails Paraiso also boasts a long stretch of Caribbean shoreline.
Sometimes neither one of us is sure if we can take four more weeks.
Because life is hard in Paraiso, so very, very hard.
- Tim and Carlos
