The boy from kill the cat: Mississippi roots meet the Amazon.

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Not a single piranha that day, not even a bite. So I was happily distracted from my piscatorial misfortune by friends asking, "Jose, how's your family in Mississippi?" You see, despite the confusion about my name, everyone in this indigenous Chiquitano village in lowland Bolivia knew Mississippi was home.

"Shane" had immediately proven an impossible utterance. After several weeks, I knew I had to change my name. I abandoned "Shane" for "Jose" in honor of the legions of Bolivians named Joseph. And later, proud of my developing linguistic wit, I began introducing myself as "Jose, fin del pueblo," convinced I had decoded "Townsend" into "at the end of town." After about a year of crinkle-eyed introductions, a friend explained that I was calling myself something akin to "Joseph, end of the people." I could just imagine the fun people had with that one: "That's Joseph who will bring the end of the people" or "That's Joseph whose family has brought the end to another people and that's why he's homeless and here with us...."

"Mississippi" is a word in Quechua--that much was agreed. The exact translation, though, was difficult, as it always is when Spanish is the second language of all involved. "Kill the cat," some translated. "Hang the cat," said others, chuckling a more specific interpretation. I was happy not to translate it.

Dead cat and all, folk in San Juancito welcomed me into their adobe and motacu palm homes. And they did so, I believe, because they appreciated my rural Mississippi roots. My father and I used to gig flounder by lantern light in the backwaters of Krebs' Lake, sliding our feet to avoid the stingray's spine. Once on a night-long racoon hunt in the creek bottom, a mountain lion's scream paralyzed everything, frogs, whippoorwills, us. And in the Pascagoula River swamp, we snatched water moccasins by day and alligators by night, their eyes shining red in the spotlight's beam.

So there was a familiarity in San Juancito, in Don Jose's good-natured, "Let me show you how to fish," and in the peace and quiet. There was peace. Some evenings we tossed hand-lines baited with meat to catch piranhas. At night with spears, waist deep in the same water, we gigged long-whiskered catfish and caiman so heavy that the bamboo spear sagged under their weight--well, maybe a little. But most often, nearing midnight on the darkest nights, we used machetes to cleave the dorsals of wary dorado, the freshwater barracuda. Easing side by side, we slid our feet through the clear waters of the Rio Paragua, searching by the thin beam of one light for an errant shadow, taking careful aim and willing yet another fish.

"A country boy like us," they said. Jose, fin del pueblo, el gringo campesino de mata el gato: Joseph, the end of the people, the country boy from kill the cat.

So that August evening, when my friends asked, "Jose, how's your family in Mississippi?" I smiled, not hearing the concern that must have been there. But the newscaster's voice rang clear through that monofilament-entwined radio: "The biggest hurricane in history" was on its way to Mississippi. And in a village of 40 families, tucked away in the forest near the Brazilian border, some wrung their hands and others prayed for "our family" and it did not matter that they didn't know my name.

The author served as a micro-enterprise development volunteer with the Peace Corps in and near San Ignacio de Velasco, Bolivia, in 2003-05. A version of his story appeared in WorldView Magazine.