El Censo... Do you have erectile dysfunction?

I´ve been doing house visits lately.

As a Rural Health and Sanitation (I don´t know who I fooled to convince them that I could teach people how to be more sanitary) volunteer you must conduct a census of your community. This is another way in which I have been other worldy fortunate in La Peña because there are less houses in my entire community than there are on School St in Hudson, or even Hobart in Amherst... does that give you an idea?

Although the census seems like a pain in the ass, it really is a hell of a time if you just remember to not take yourself too seriously.

I find that I am walking up to adobe houses without doors, fully equiped with my trademark backpack, a hefty pachinga of water, and a runt of a dog following rather skiddishly about 3 meters behind me, making every attempt to introduce myself to people that have already heard everything I have ever said in La Peña through the grapevine.

Each interraction unfolds relatively similarly. Lets watch...

Wearing my best wrinkled khakis (with appropriate paw prints on my lap from the beggar at dinner the night before) and my $1.99 pink collared shirt from the Salvation Army (yup, that one) I stroll up to a house full of women and children who try their hardest to act surprised that I am there. I stride gingerly toward the barking dogs making zero to less quick movements until their attention turns to Guanaco and they absolutely pommel him. I´m almost in.

I often wonder if the families know that they all have the same passwords to enter into their homes. I´ve been extraordinarily lucky with ´buenas tardes´ followed by a ´con permiso´ and I´m welcomed as if I were a long lost Gringo member of the family. Even an ýankee doodle´would throw any unwanted intruders for a loop, but I have been a serious beneficiary of homogenous passwords. Either I am tricking these wonderful people or they are, in fact, wonderful people and genuinely are embracing me. I still haven´t figured it out yet, but I´ve got a team on it.

Sweating profusely I am asked to sit down in a plastic chair put at exactly the wrong angle to be able to comfortably see anything going on around me. I proceed to ask how everyone is doing, if they´ve got time to humor me, and if they´d care to take a seat themselves. Most say bien, sí, and no, respectively. I proceed with this uncomfortable conversation telling them who I am (all they hear is ´Gringo´), why I am there (to change the world), and that this information, however intrusive it is (and it really is), va a ayudarme a conocer la comunidad. Mind you that the conversation is made exponentially more uncomfortable because my chair situation has me staring the back corner of a latrine with parrot poop falling on my crocs or am straining my neck at a 176 degree angle in order to see that the woman I am speaking with is too busy throwing rocks at chickens to notice that I am, in fact, fighting through all sorts of fecal matter to inquire about how many times she has had diarrea in the past 2 months. This is about the point when I start to take myself a lot less seriously.

The census couldn´t be more fun after that moment. I ask each family (I spare no one) about remesas (awkward), hand washing, teeth brushing, breasts, trash burning, chagas and dengue, and then we get to the serious stuff. ¨How much do you know about AIDS?,¨ ¨Who here decides how many children you are going to have?¨ - this is a fun one because the mother who has birthed 14 children says ¨nosotros dos, ambos¨ - ¨when did you last have a pap smear?¨ (and for the love of god who came up with the name ´pap smear?´ Furthurmore, who has the authority to keep it after all these years of those words struggling through grimaced lips? I call for a revolution!), and ¨Señor, do you have problems getting it up?¨

This is how I get to know the community. It really is a fun time. People here are extraordinarily shy because I am the first gringo that they´ve ever worked with but I think its a lot of fun to just dive in head first. Throw every family a ¨Hey, how are you?¨ and follow it up with the knockout blow ¨Do you two have problems in the sack?¨ Granted, the answers aren´t the same that they would give a licensed professional, but to me thats not the point.

The census has been helping me do two things: with questions like these it shows that I am here to work. I am going to ask the hard questions, I am going to show up at your doorstep whether you like it or not, and I am going to write down things about you that you definitely do not want me to write down. This census is a first for the people of my community and with questions like these any other conversation we could possibly have seem natural and easy.
The second thing it helps me do is be myself. I´m strange, I say stupid things, I do stupid things, and in large groups the masses tend to ostracize people like me. But when I show up at your doorstep my strangeness isn´t amplified, its made more personal. Our funny moments or slip ups in Spanish or miscommunications aren´t public fodder, they are inside jokes. These moments are no longer gossip between everybody about how it was weird when the gringo tripped over a stone walking past the church, these moments become ¨Míre pues! Se acuera cuando Gregorio nos dijo que no le gusta llevar pantelones! Que chiste, eso hombre!¨ In the process of the census I lose my lore and I gain a name, and these mishaps become moments shared and not moments seen.

And for that I will continue to ask each grown man that I stumble upon how much trouble, if any, they are having producing baby #15.