Visiting Maria

by Rose Allen (United States of America)

Making a local connection Paraguay

I took a sip of the thick, bright juice. My nose wrinkled. It was heavy with pulp, something I hadn’t yet gotten used to. I preferred the cans of fizzy Fanta that were in almost every restaurant and market; it was the first time my mom had let me drink so much soda. The chipas were too dry to eat on their own though, and I needed the hearty bread to ease my motion sickness. Even with the pulp, the cool juice was refreshing in the sticky, mid-morning heat. Our driver chatted with the chipa vendor and the two passed a guampa gourd of tereré between them, sucking the cold, bitter tea through a silver bombilla straw. We were two hours into a bumpy three-hour drive to visit Maria and her family and we were running late. Recent flooding had made the unpaved Paraguayan roads even slower than usual so they took us directly to the school - one long, low building split into classrooms. As we walked up the steps nearly a hundred children and teachers started clapping. We were seated at the center of a semicircle and spent the next hour watching their performance of traditional song and dance, including the famous baile de la botella bottle dance. We toured the school, the principal proudly showing us the desks and lavatory our modest sponsorship had provided. Our guide explained that we were only the second foreigners to visit the community and the first hadn’t spoken any Spanish. I peered out from behind my mom and looked at the faces of the children trailing behind us; their big brown eyes, dark hair, and tan skin so similar to mine. I looked up at my mom. My adoption wasn’t a secret, but I’d rarely noticed our mismatched features before: her chestnut curls, freckled skin, and light blue eyes. Suddenly, she seemed almost exotic in the sea of brown skin, South American lilts, and red dirt. At Maria’s home, two dirt-floored rooms joined by a covered common space and an open-air cooking fire towards the back, chickens clucked and pecked around a swath of shrubby bushes. The cooking fire crackled. Maria’s mother was a smiling, round-faced woman, her wide feet and plastic sandals both covered in a permanent dusting of red earth. Conversation flowed as easily as it could with an interpreter; though Paraguay is a bilingual country, its citizens speaking both Spanish and the indigenous Guaraní, in Maria’s community, Guaraní was more common. Flanked by sisters, cousins, and neighbors, we were shown the new water pump, the newborn piglets, and then, tucked carefully in a corner of their home, a neatly stacked pile: all the letters, photos, books, and toys we’d ever sent to Maria. As the afternoon wore on Maria’s mother and mine fell into a comfortable version of conversation as Maria’s mother began bringing pots and platters to the table. The entire neighborhood had pitched in with dishes and ingredients to prepare a feast; thick borí borí stew, fresh-off-the-fire chipas, and dense sopa paraguaya cornbread among others. We ate. What I knew then, even at nine years old, was that the only barrier between Maria’s life and mine was chance. She was a sister in another life. The version where I had not been adopted, where my mom shared my blood and my thoughts found voice in a bilingual tumble of Spanish and Guaraní. My world may have been the dusty paths between school, the water pump, and an earthen-floored home filled with the smell of simmering borí borí. Instead, my blue-eyed mom and I said our goodbyes, my mom and Maria’s embracing with tears in their eyes, and Maria and I exchanging shy smiles before we climbed back into the dusty pick-up to start the jostling drive back to Asunción. Two days later we flew home to California. It was just as we’d left it, but something felt different. The wooden floors were too shiny, the boxed juice too smooth, and though my mom was still my mom, I studied my face in the bathroom mirror and wondered about a woman 6000 miles away whose eyes maybe crinkled like mine when she smiled.