Back with my people

I can chalk up another one for "weird places to get stung by bees". We were harvesting honey two nights ago and what that entails is taking the panel of honey comb and cutting off the wax cap the bees put on honey that is ready. While doing this Kai Zakaria and I always enjoy liberal amounts of this honey-laden wax and I happened to accidently eat a bee still clinging to the wax. The bee stung me right in the roof of the mouth. Honestly, it was not as painful as it sounds. Sure, it hurt a lot but there are worse places to be stung, like ankles, hands, neck, and eyelids! The hardest part was getting the stinger out because the skin is soft and the stinger got in pretty deep.

In other news I am still dealing with this tree seed issue. It is unbelievable. I have been calling them up and they are basically giving me the runaround.

First I call and the secretary puts me on the line with an ingeniero who tells me he has no idea where the solicitude is. I give him the receipt number and he tells me to call back in half an hour. I call back and the secretary tells me that he found the pedido and the seeds should be ready in a couple days, can I come to get them? Sure, I said, though they had promised to send them to my pueblo earlier. She tells me to call again because the ingeniero is in a meeting. I call again, the ingeniero has no idea where the solicitude is. "But I just talked to the secretary, she said you had my pedido and the seeds would be ready". So I call the secretary again and ask her what, exactly, is going on. I am very confused. She says that the other ingeniero must have the solicitude, but he is on vacation. I should call back in a week, she says.

Unbelievable.

My frustration had reached a new peak. These people are so incompetent, it is unbelievable. And then I started to think about all the people I have had to deal with that are in organizations like this, or at banks, or in Asunción. All of them make things so much harder than they have to be. It´s no wonder it is hard for people in my community to get anywhere or to feel like they can get anywhere.

I came to the realization, especially in Asunción, that I just cannot associate with these people. They aren´t like those people who I live with and work with every day. The funny thing is that these people in Asunción are more like me when I was in America. That is to say, we are more or less have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, schooling atleast past highschool, etc. Yet I feel much more at home with the people in my community. They are my people. I would rather work in their fields then walk around a mall in Asunción. And you know what? That isn´t a bad thing. To me, the people in my community live more honest, respectable lives than some of those people I have met in Asunción who get by through corruption and taking advantage of those who dont know any better. Am I making a generalization? Sure. But I am frustrated, and the only place that I consistently have found any type of truth or understanding has been in my little community of poor farmers, not a big city with it´s malls, and nice cars, and restaurants. And I dont think I would want it any other way.