Other than asking if I know Tara one of the main things Paraguayans love to talk about is whom you are dating.  Seriously, it is one of the first things they will ask and they will find any excuse to talk about it.  That being said Paraguayans view relationships extremely differently than we do.  If you are dating someone you are obviously going to marry them and have their babies.  I am getting the impression that there aren’t many breakups in Paraguay.  What there is a lot of is infidelity.  Not, let’s sweep this under the rug and not talk about it infidelity. I mean the neighbors know, the town knows, the wife knows and everyone accepts it.

Last week when I was at a party celebrating the 3 Kings day (January 6), the women at the party asked me if I agreed that if my boyfriend had another girlfriend that was fine I would just rather not know.  When I responded that I would absolutely want to know so that I could kill him the women were all shocked.  They could not believe that I expected my boyfriend to only be with me.  When they found out my boyfriend is in Paraguay they then informed me that he is indeed cheating on me and that I shouldn’t worry because eventually get “acostumbrado”.  When I tell them I have no intention of getting used to this they are shocked and laugh at how funny I am.  I accept that they say I will have to get “acostumbrado” to eating fried food at every meal and not having eaten anything green in a month but I do not accept that I will get accustomed to getting cheated on.

This is probably one of the aspects of Paraguayan culture that I am having the most trouble getting used to.  In Paraguay they use the saying “cuckolded”, only they say it in Spanish.  This essentially implies that if your spouse is cheating on you then you will grow horns.  They taught us about this in training and at the time I didn’t understand how this was relevant to our integration; I completely understand now.  One woman at the party looked at me and said, “If horns were flowers, my head would be a garden”.  My jaw dropped.  I then looked around at all of the little girls that were laughing and wanted to explain to them that if they didn’t want their boyfriends to cheat on them in the future they should stand up for themselves.  At this point I already looked pretty crazy to all of these women, and the only men in the group had sort of started backing away from me so I decided I should wait a few months before getting on my soap box. 

Now, one of my goals for my 2 years of service is to teach these girls that they don’t have to accept this behavior.  True, my town views me as the outrageous American that expects her boyfriend to be satisfied with only one girlfriend when everyone else in town has three or four.  And yes, I think I have slightly terrified the men in town since I kept going on about how I would raise hell if I found out I was cheated on, but this is one aspect of life in Paraguay that I am not going to be culturally sensitive to.  Since this party every woman in town thinks it is hilarious to ask me if I know where my boyfriend is and what he is doing, to which I reply in mixed Spanish and Guarani, “you are damn straight and he isn’t with another girl”. 

Sunrise in my site!