Thursday, February 25, 2010

¡Todo Apodo!

Mbaeteikopio?  aka. What it is?

that isn´t a literal translation btw.

Well, i have kind of been absent from blogland for a little while now, but i´ve made it back.  I thought that i would share with everyone the joy of nicknames in paraguay. 

EVERYONE, and their mom, really though, has a nickname it py.  it is pretty fun, but it makes it really hard sometimes to figure out who you are talking about.  and sometimes when you meet someone they tell you their real name, but that is probably the only time you will ever here that name b-c everyone in the whole world calls them another name.

During my time here in paraguay i have manage to pick up a few apodos myself, which we will now review.
  1.  Yankee - i know it, you know it.  i am not a yankee!  but my neigbors don´t know it haha. This nickname was coinged by a 2 year old that i know, whose dad is also Carlos.  He didn´t want to call this big american man the same name as his dad, so he picked out yankee...haha.  When i was living with them a common sentence from the 2 year old was "Epu´a Epu´a Yankee!  Oíma la comida!" which is to say, Get up Get up Yankee!  The food is ready!  it was really cute.
  2. Carlos Paraguayo - This is perhaps the more endearing nickname i have picked up.  It was arrived at after sitting in a wine circle (circles are how you drink things here, terere, beer, wine, water, mate, anything liquid) most of the other sitters in this circle had already had a little too much to drink, haha, but after i spoke a good amount of guarani and knew the verses to one of the polkas (Che paraguay) they were like you are paraguayo, CARLOS PARAGUAYO! haha...i like this one.
  3. Carlos Jety - This means Charles Sweet Potato.  haha...i´ve actually only heard this one once, but after me and some peeps had dug up like 20 lines of sweet potatoes, they were like you are pretty good at that, you are Carlos Jety.  haha.  
Amidst all of this i get the typicaly, Americano, Chawz (what it sounds like when spanish speaking people say Charles) or just stares. haha. 

Everything is pretty tranquilopa here though.  still trying to figure out how exactly i fit into my community and what sort of work we are going to get going for my time there, but we´ll see. 

i miss and love you all so much!

Charles/Yankee/Carlos Paraguayo/Jety D. Helms

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