Do It Yourself

During my time in Paraguay, I am based mostly out of Caaguazú, a mid-sized city of about 63,000 people, where the wood industry dominates. In large cities, it is easy to let the excitement of the crowds, the various restaurants, activities and attraction sweep you away as you devise complicated agendas to make sure that you don't miss a thing.

In places like Caaguazu, you have to develop a more do-it-yourself attitude.

Two of my favorite things to do is practice yoga and dance. Both of which are tricky to do in Caaguazu. Before moving on, let me be clear about the context, Caaguazu is not like the urban areas you might typically imagine - there are no skyscrapers, or building over three stories really; there are few traffic lights and paved roads; chickens, stray dogs and other animals wander about; and while it's big enough that you don't know every person who passes by, it's small enough that you say hola (or tranquilo) to everyone anyway.

Yoga was surprisingly easy to find. My friend passed a sign several weeks ago that advertised yoga/pilates classes. The big questions were: who in Caaguazu would actually attend a yoga class and where would this teacher have come from in the first place?

The answer to the first question was immediately apparent. No one yet attends these classes in Caaguazu. Even though my friend and I showed up at the completely wrong time for class (due a slight mis-remembering mistake on our end), the teacher was so excited to have people in attendance, she offered to just have the class for the two of us anyway.

As for the teacher, now what she lacked in actual skill in teaching yoga, she made up for in enthusiasm. She was a small, round, older woman with small squinty eyes and a big smile. In Spanish, she would exclaim "how beautiful," "so flexible!," "so strong!," as she would offer us a patchwork of poses in no apparent order that she may not have seen real people actually embody before that moment. At the end, this tiny woman, who could have been my grandma, had us come to sit and led us in a closing three OMs. Neither of us expected, the guttural sound that escaped from this woman's body. It had a passion, volume and earnestness to it that filled up the entire room, rocking us out of the moment and despite our best efforts, into fits of laughter.

With the yoga class as a minor success under our belts, we moved on to dancing. We knew for a fact that there was not a club or dance hall open in Caaguazu during the week, so we went with the next best alternative. We hosted a dance party in my friend's house. With a "if you build it, they will come" attitude, I spent the rest of the day blowing up balloons and making decorations, while he spread the word to foreign volunteers, his English students, and even the people whole worked at the chipa store.

By 9pm, we had a motley crew gathered for a mix of Paraguayan and American music. Early on a party-goer mentioned that when it comes to dancing, Parguay isn't really a Latin country. As we lined up, boys across from girls, and began doing the two-step, I fully understood what she meant.