Rally

Heloooo!! It's been a while. Mostly because I lost my flash drive while cleaning my room about a week back...But all is well and here is a little glimpse of mid-March in my "hometown"

                When I first visited my site in late November, my very enthusiastic host brother Junior (14) turned to me and asked “Do you like rally?” I didn’t have any idea what a rally was, and through broken Spanish, hand motions, and sounds, I figured out that rally meant a car race. I was still pretty confused. Why was he asking me, of all things, if I liked car races (as opposed to soccer, a slightly more popular sport in Paraguay)? I think I managed a guarani version of “sort of, I guess?” as my response. I didn’t really know where this whole car race thing was going. The question stuck with me, and I assumed it was along the lines of many other questions I have since been asked in site about what it means to be American (for example, under the assumption from television that most Americans are blond with blue eyes, many people have asked me if I dye my hair black or if my mother is blond). 

                Fast-forward to the first week of March when my PC neighbor (the volunteer who lives in the next town over) asks me if I am excited to watch the rally. The what? About 3.5 months from the original, extremely-random-sounding, question, I finally got the full story. Every year, on approximately the second week of March, there is a rally/ car-race that passes through my site and many of the surrounding towns in the area. And they are real race-cars (she showed me pictures, and I have now seen the race in real time). Of course, back home, race cars going about 100 miles an hour are generally confined to rinks where they can’t spin out into innocent people’s backyards, tear down power-lines, or rip up fences. Details, details. (The local government, in fact, has to sign an agreement that they can’t hold the rally accountable for any damage to property or persons).

                The week leading up to the rally, every commercial break includes a commercial for Rally Misiones, depicting the racers driving across the back roads (I kept trying to see if one of the scenes was my site) with a Lord-of-the-Rings-esque soundtrack. I was in love. So was my (ex) host-brother who pretty much gave up eating to see every single moment of the races that were within biking distance in other towns. His mother was not impressed. She did not appreciate that the race, which passes on the road directly in front of her house, was about to dump 100 tons of red dust on all her belongings. It has rained all of three hours in my site since I arrived three months ago, so things are getting pretty dusty. My nice red dirt roads have turned into a gigantic sandbox, which is always a little special on the bicycle, as it doesn’t function on sandy terrains. Now add about 4-hours-worth of race cars skidding around curves and zooming down the straight stretches. Race day was going to be followed by a lot of sweeping.

                Inspired by my (ex) host brother’s enthusiasm, I decided to spend the day of the race with him and his family. Although the Lord-of-the-Rings commercials promised a very exciting day, I suspected that watching my host brother get a kick out of the race was going to be the highlight of the day. Around 10:30 am, as I was sitting drinking terrere with my ex-host mom, contact, ex-host brother, and assorted family and extended family members, a jeep with a big sign for security on it passed by, playing a siren. My contact jumped up and shouted “It’s starting” and we all ran across the street, and across a bit of a field to get the nearest exciting curve. There we found a couple of out-of-towner strangers who had parked in my contact’s backyard, all the neighbors, and one teenager who was working security (rapidly repeating into a walkie-talkie “ok, vale, vale, ok!”  very official). The cars passed one at a time (they were clearly racing for time, not passing each other) and showered impenetrable clouds of red dust on the audience as they zoomed by, making very enthusiastic zooming noises.

                The most exciting moment of the rally was when suddenly a race-car broke through the tape marking off the boundaries of the curb, came straight for me (my contact, and assorted family members), and then quickly turned off and pulled straight up into my contact’s lawn. Apparently it had broken down. With my contact’s teenage son and other assorted boys from the neighborhood following everything closely on their camera phones, the drivers climbed out, communicated with the security guy (more “ok, vale, vale!”), and took off on foot. This made the day of the teenage boys who got up nice and close and took a look inside the race car through the windows. As everyone (but my ex-host brother) began to lose interest, we all drifted off to have lunch at my host mom’s house. It was pretty funny to be sitting around the table, eating a traditional soup, while race cars zoomed by every two minutes, spewing dust all over the yard. By the end of the day everyone’s clothes and skin were tinted red from the dust, and my contact’s son had a good laugh when he caught site of my hair, normally black, turned completely red from the dry earth.