Sarah the Beekeeper

Hey everyone! Well, I´m still here in Paraguay even though I´ve apparently dropped off the face of the planet! I only have about two months left and things are really starting to feel like they´re coming to a close. Last month Peace Corps put on a ¨Close of Service Conference¨ for all the volunteers who I trained with, as we all have a lot of things to take care of and think about before heading back to the states. We did a lot of ¨processing¨ our Peace Corps experience and discussed what´s next; job interviews, GRE, graduate school, etc. It was a lot of logisitics along with a lot of vagueness about the future. We talked about our concerns for what it will be like to reintegrate back into American culture (most returned volunteers say its harder to reintegrate back into your own culture after experiencing Peace Corps than it was to integrate into your host country initially), as well as strategies for sharing our Peace Corps service with other Americans and how we can use it to teach about other cultures for the rest of our lives.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the whole conference was when the Assistant Country Director talked to us about how to ¨sell¨ our Peace Corps experience during interviews. He pointed out that what we´ve done--move to a totally unknown place and culture, learn two new languages, adapt to living and working on our own in a totally new environment with very few resources, pick up entirely new skill sets, etc.--has prepared us to do anything. Through this experience we have proven our adaptibility and perseverance, and we have demonstrated that if we don´t know how to do something we will do what it takes to learn how, even if it is difficult. Ya know, when you say it like that it sounds pretty darn good! It really made me realize that what we´ve done here is kind of a big deal, and that its something I will always take with me throughout my life. So that made me feel pretty good.

But now comes all the logisitics of getting ready to go. First and foremost, I have to get rid of all my stuff. I feel like I´m making a will and getting ready for my own funeral. As it turns out, the community I´ve been working with is requesting an Early Elementary Education volunteer instead of an Environmental Education volunteer, and this means that if I do get a follow-up they won´t come until the next training group is ready in April. So what that effectively means is that I can´t plan on giving any of my stuff to a follow-up volunteer because I won´t even know if there will be one until I´ve been gone for four months! I will try to sell my furniture and larger stuff at a very reduced rate to my community and other volunteers because just giving stuff away can be political and cause all kinds of jealousy nightmares about who got what. For my smaller stuff I had a really great idea, a real moment of divine inspiration: I´m going to have a carpenter build me a cornhole set and we are going to have cornhole tournaments with my stuff as prizes at my going-away party in my community!!! For those of you who don´t know what cornhole is, (I really can´t imagine why not, but I´m just trying to be sensitive here) it´s a wonderful game that originated from the west side of Cincinnati, where I was born and raised (West side!!). It´s a cross between horseshoes and ski-ball, only with beanbag-like cloths sacks full of corn. Talk about intercultural exchange! If there´s anything at all Paraguayans and Ohioans can agree on, it´s corn. So I´ll be going out with a bang by having a cornhole and beer-fueled goodbye party while giving away my spatulas, pruners, and saucepans. Brilliant!

In other news, I got a dog! Well, a puppy really. He´s really barely doglike at all, seeing as he´s sort of a froofy little mess of a pooch. I know, I know, it´s crazy to get a dog 3 months before going back to the states. This is true, it´s completely insane. Apparently I had reached a breaking point in my petlessness, and I happened to see the adorable little guy at a petstore in Asuncion. I would have been able to resist, except that he is a fox terrier, which is one of the very few hypoallergenic breeds I can stand to be around, and I was planning on getting a dog very much like him as soon as I got back to the states. So I just went ahead and got him not so he can keep me company these last few months and so I can always say he was my souvenir from Paraguay! His name is Harvey and he´s really playful (read: totally crazy and hyperactive) and cute.

The other major thing going on right now is that the marathon is in LESS THAN A WEEK!!!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!! I haven´t been running much the last week or so because I´ve been sick, which is very very bad news, but as long as I´m better before the marathon I don´t think it´ll slow me down. I´m almost totally better now and I even ran 5 miles yesterday, although I pretty much hacked and coughed the whole time and wanted to die or at least pass out for an extended period of time. But no worries! It´ll happen, I know it. I ran 22 miles 2 weeks ago and real runner-types say if you can run 18 or 20 miles, you can run the marathon (26.2 miles). That sounds good to me so I´m just gonna trust that.

I have decided to raise money by running for Arkansas Hospice Foundation, the really great organization I worked for in Little Rock before coming to Paraguay. I realized it would be wasting an opportunity to not raise money for a good cause with all this damn running, and I know and respect this organization a great deal. I also figure it will help motivate me to struggle through the final few miles if I know I´m doing this for something other than myself. Please support my fundraising by going to http://www.firstgiving.com/arkansashospicerun and making a donation!!!!

Keep on smiling!

Sarah

Hello again! It's been almost three months since my last entry, for which I apologize. All the strange things in Paraguay have by now become pretty mundane to me. I don't even notice anymore when "bloggable" moments happen, as I've lost all sense of perspective on what is out of the ordinary and might be interesting or amusing to an American audience. When 5 people drive by on a motorcycle, I don't even bat an eye. When the administrative assistant at the Parguayan embassy also says he's a cab driver and can take me to the airport himself instead of calling a cab? Totally normal, how convenient. When classes are cancelled so all the teachers can make cornbread for the soccer game? Well now, how else do you expect there to be cornbread? So basically, it's same old same old here. What to share? Major highlights will do.

Well, first of all, my sister Gretchen came to visit me, which was GREAT!!! (Thanks Gretch, you're a trooper.) My friend Jill and me flew to Peru and we met Gretchen there. We spent about 10 days there before heading to Paraguay. We took an organized 5-day hike in the Andes mountains to Maccu Picchu. It was amazing. Beyond amazing. I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I've never gasped so much for air while sitting on a rock (due to the altitude and the tiny fact that we hiked 85km in 5 days, none of it flat). I've never eaten so many cream soups. It was the best vacation I've ever taken. We had a nice small group, the three of us plus a really nice married couple who were doctors from Nashville, and our amazing guide, cook and porters from our trekking company, Peru-Planet (www.peru-planet.net). Everyone got along great and the trek was a hiker's (read: my) dream come true. Peru's landscape and culture are very different than Paraguay's and I couldn't help but be struck by the differences and wonder how life must be for Peace Corps volunteers in Peru. The scenery and abundance of amazing music, arts and crafts (especially alpaca clothing and weavings) would be a real plus, to say nothing of the fact that Peruvians who understand English actually exist, but if you were anywhere near the Andes marathon training would be a total no-go with all those hills. It was amazing to me to see how people could farm slopes that were practically cliffs, of course using terracing techniques to combat the erosion. I saw cows happyily grazing near snow-capped mountain peaks above 15,000 feet on slopes that would humble a mountain goat. It was pretty cool if you happen to be into livestock.

We got a great lesson in the history of Peru and the Incan empire from our very knowledgeable guide, Pabel. He studied for 5 years at University to be a guide and he was very passionate about sharing his knowledge of the Incans with us over the course of our 6 days together. The Incans ruled for only a short period of time, but Cuzco (where we were, and close to Maccu Picchu) was the capital of their empire, and thus the center of knowledge and culture for much of the southwestern part of the continent. They had very advanced knowledge of architecture, astonomy, mathematics and engineering just to name a few of the many fields they mastered. They built amazing structures, often without mortar, carved enormous stones out of the living rock to exact dimensions, transported them for miles over mountainous terrain, and lifted them into place, sometimes very high above the ground. Most of these structures, though ruins, are in amazingly good shape. "Ruins" in this case only means they don't have roofs and sofabeds and cupboards full of cutlery and such; very little of the walls were actually coming apart due to disentegration over time. Most of the damage, in fact, was done by the Spanish when they conquered the empire and dismantled the Incan temples to rebuild them into cathedrals. The stones were carved with divots and knobs to fit together like Legos and the doorways and seams were angled trapezoids to absorb the region's frequent seismic activity. Even today the stone blocks (which are "bricks" like 5' tall and 10' long) lie so perfectly that you can't even slide a piece of paper between them. Pretty cool, I thought. And to top it off, what they DIDN'T have was steel or the wheel. They did all that with bronze-age technology and log ramps. It was such a neat place to be, knowing that it had stood the test of time and that it would surely still be standing hundreds or thousands of years in the future. That stuff was built to last.

After Peru we came back to Paraguay and Gretchen got a taste of my life here. I took her to my site and she got to meet my three host families there, as well as the amazing family who have "adopted" me in the adjacent community where I do the majority of my work. We ate lots of Paraguayan food, they played Paraguayan polka music for her on the harp, we made chipa, we visited a hive of killer bees.. it was idyllic. Well, idyllic for flat, scrubby, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Paraguay. I had a workshop planned for the teachers on how to teach with the school garden which was scheduled for before vacation, but they cancelled on me so I got to do it when she was visiting. It actually turned out better that way because I loved the chance to show her the kind of work I do here and she got to spend a whole morning at the school to get a sense of what the schools here are like. After that we went to Jill's site, who is an Urban Youth Volunteer, so she could see what a volunteer's life is like who doesn't basically live on the moon like I do, and to see the volunteer-produced radio show. We had to cut the broadcast short because the DJ was being annoying, but we still had time to "interview" Gretchen on the air, which of course involved us asking the question in Spanish for the benefit of the audience, us translating live for her, her replying in English, and us translating back to Spanish for the listeners. It was amusing. Oh, and when I say "interview," I mean questions such as "Can you do the moonwalk?" etc. After that we came into Asuncion for the 4th of July party at the American embassy, and then we headed east to see the amazing HUGE waterfalls at Iguasu. Good times. It was really great to have her here and it was nice to sort of see my life through someone else's eyes. I really forget sometimes that what I'm doing here is not exactly normal for the average American, as all the Americans I know these days have the same job I do, and it was nice to be reminded that what I'm doing is not just frustrating and stressful at times, it also happens to be pretty cool. Thanks, Gretch, for coming and putting up with the occasionally annoying lack of conveniences and things-going-right that define Paraguay. For as much as it frustrates me at times, it was really important that I got to share this strange little world with you!

On another note, my service is starting to wind down, as I only have 5 months left. I can't believe it! I really can't. So for the next 5 months I will be focusing on getting done what I want to get done before I leave this place, and setting things up for the probable case of me getting a follow-up volunteer to continue what I've started. I will have the opportunity to do a full-day workshop in August for 50-60 teachers from the whole district. I'll be focusing on how to do school garden projects and how to teach environmental themes through activities. I'm pretty excited about that! I've gotten together a pretty wide range of activities and topics I can use and am comfortable presenting, and I want to sort of take this "toolkit" I've developed to more ears before I leave.

I'm also really focusing on my marathon training pretty intensely now. There's only 15 weeks until the marathon! What was I THINKING?!? Who knows, but I am actually really enjoying it and enjoying the challenge, as well as the ability to eat an appalling amount of guilt-free carbs. I got pretty derailed from vacation but am working steadily to get back on track. With a little faith, a lot of PowerGels and an ample dose of crazy, hopefully I'll get my carbo-loaded legs to the finish line in October.

Peace, love, and ample glycogen-stores,

Sarah

Hi folks, just a quick update for now.

1. I did a half-day workshop for 8 teachers on Earth Day (April 22nd) on how to integrate environmental education into their existing curriculum. I did it with the help of my new neighbor PCV Travis, who is actually an environmental ed volunteer. It went really really well for a 1st run! We´re gonna probably do it for the high school teachers too and for the schools in his community as well. The Paraguayan government actually mandated that environmental themes be included in the curriculum over 10 years ago, but they never provided any funds or training AT ALL and so it was just a nice piece of paper. That´s Paraguay for ya.

2. My cat has been missing for quite some time and is presumed to be dead. There are various theories on this, a) He was killed by a dog, b) He ran after a girlfriend cat and can´t find his way home, or c) Someone thought he was surely a great hunter or perhaps some fancy purebred cat since he was owned by an American and had the reputation for being smart and not mean, and so someone stole him, not understanding that he is smart and not mean because I pet him and feed him and not because I paid one red cent for the little guy. I´m going with A. Bummer, but I guess that solves the cat-bringing-home issue.

3. There has been a political revolution in Paraguay. Really. The ruling part of 61 years was peacefully voted out through popular vote on elections April 20th. Trust me that this is a huge deal. Below is an email another volunteer friend of mine sent to her folks back home, and it explains it pretty well and gives a very interesting little peek into the crazy world of Paraguayan politics.

Love you all!

Sarah

*From my friend Adelia:
The first thing I want to let everyone know is that I'm safe and sound after an historic election here in Paraguay. There were worries of violence, but it went as smoothly as we all hoped! A little background to the elections.... 196 years since there has been a peaceful turnover of power. 61 years since a new party as been in power. Basically, The Colorado Party has been in power for the last 61 years. It was the party of Stroessner, the last Dictator of Paraguay who was overthrown in 1989- Not that long ago folks!!! However, somehow, his official party has maintained power. The main reason is that most people are given their jobs for being Colorado. Jobs are scarce (The biggest minority in Argentina are Paraguayans living and working and sending money home) and you have a cousin that works in such and such ministry and he can get you a job, but you have to say you're Colorado. So now you're Colorado and your job depends on them staying in power. No joke, the hospital here in my town had a huge banner up out front saying "The Directora and all the workers here are Colorado" . The other reason, and it's pretty simple, is that they use national pride. Colorado happens to also mean Red which happens to be the color of the soil here. Their platform this year was basically that you should vote for us because we're all Colorados. Unfortunately, you shouldn't vote your best friend to be president, but the smartest and the one who will think of everyone's interest and not just their best friends'.
The Colorado Party was the reason Paraguay is the 2nd most corrupt country in THE WORLD. It actually varies year by year from 2nd to 7th, but you get the point. They don't publish financial documents because they line their pockets with the state's treasure, mainly the hydroelectric dam Itaipu on the PY-Brazil border.
Finally, this past April 20th, Paraguay mustered the gumption to vote them out of power. But it was a delicate balance of things happening all at once that really prompted the vote to tip in favor of the other guy. First of all, Lugo, who is the new president elect, was an ex-bishop who joined together the biggest opposition party (The Liberales) and a bunch of little parties into the Alliance. The other candidate, the Ross Perot of Paraguay, was a guy named Lino Oviedo who has spent the last 5 or 7 years in jail for attempting to kill the president (before the current prez Nicanor) in an attempted coup. Everyone says he's innocent. He split the Colorado vote. The Colorado candidate was Blanca Ovelar. Before you get excited thinking that Paraguay is SOOO modern for having a woman candidate, know that she was Nicanor's sister in law and chosen over his V-P (Castiglioni, who ran anyway in the primaries and lost in a still contested vote) and proably in order for Nicanor to maintain power. He'd previously tried to re-write the constitution to allow him to stay in power. When that failed he chose his sister in law as his candidate. A little fishy... and obvious to most Paraguayans.
To make this a bit shorter, I'll just say that Lugo won and everyone, even most Colorados were elated. As the results came in, they took to the Plaza de los Heroes and partied until the morning. There people in a 12 block radius. It was amazing to see all this happen.
Here's some links to some articles if you're sufficiently confused!!! ha ha.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/04/20/paraguay.elections/index.html#cnnSTCText

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/world/americas/22paraguay.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Lugo&st=nyt&oref=slogin

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/world/americas/27paraguay.html?fta=y

I just have to tell you these stories, TRUE stories, of the election.

My neighbor Pablito supported the V-P candidate during the Colorado primaries. So, that candidate's people came out to help Pablito out with his teeth, which were rotting out of his head. They took them all out and were gonna come back with false teeth. However, that guy lost and they never came back, so my neighbor has no teeth.

The Colorado Party paid for 60 two story buses to bring Colorados living in Argentina to vote in Asuncion. However, after they lost they never bought the return tickets and there were 500 people standing in the bus terminal waiting to go back to Argentina.

Hello everyone! I am pleased to report that I am still alive and kickin’, despite the long time since my last entry. A lot has happened since coming back from vacation, most of which has been good. I’m starting my garden again, the school year has started, I had the chance to help edit the quarterly volunteer newsletter, work has taken some interesting turns for the better and my cat loves me more than ever. I like to pretend that the weather is getting cooler, but even though it’s really not I can take comfort in the fact that I don’t have very long to wait before the near-constant sweating subsides to near-constant shivering.

Right now I’m in Asuncion for a sort of "one-year reconnect" conference with members from my training group, which, true to Paraguayan form, is actually being held three months after the one-year-in-site mark. Igual, nomás. It’s been very beneficial and did for me just what it was supposed to do: help me to process my service up to this point and to clarify and focus my outlook for the last leg of my time here.

They started out with an activity that helped us to visualize where we are in our service. They drew a timeline on a long banner of paper that stretched the length of an entire wall. It started with us arriving in Paraguay and ended with our follow-up group swearing in and going out to our sites to continue the work we are beginning in our communities. There were little illustrations like a book and terere during training, to symbolize the fact that during training we were clueless and so just read a lot and drank a lot of terere. Then they asked what kinds of pictures should be in the stretch between swearing in and today, and we joked "more books and terere!" Our coordinator asked us what kinds of projects we’ve done in this time, and people ended up calling out things and we came up with a list of seven things. "Great start!" he joked to our group of 15, "You guys have done seven things!" Then he asked us what kinds of projects we have planned for the next stretch; the part between now and when we swear out in December. We called out our goals for the next 9 months and came up with a list of about 15 different kinds of projects. The point, which we have been hearing since training, emphasized that the 2nd year of service is always much easier and more productive that the 1st year. Though it is possible to carry out some real project development during the 1st year, for the most part the real work of the 1st year is social; getting to know people and your community so that, once you have developed trust, can mostly tell what is going on and can communicate better, you are able to make better choices about who to work with, what to do and how to do it. Putting it into perspective like that was really helpful, and it justified the struggles that we’ve all been facing during the first, and hardest, part of our service.

I really identified with this activity because, as I sort of mentioned before, I have struggled with my primary project of beekeeping since I got to site. It took me a long time to figure out what people really wanted from me in this aspect, and to my great dismay I realized that the last volunteer for the most part taught them what they really wanted to know about bees: how to build simple inexpensive beehives at home, how to capture wild colonies and how to harvest the honey. I was aware they knew how to do these things, and so I tried to teach them more advanced hive management skills, but it became clear that it just wasn’t where they wanted to focus their efforts. Fine, but I still live and want to work here and so I had to figure out somewhere else to put my energies and talents where they could really help to meet actual needs and desires of Paraguayans.

Well, my ship finally came in. After vacation I contacted a high school teacher named Maria who I met last year when I was teaching English in the next community down the road. I really connected with her and she impressed me as someone who was a bit worldlier and naturally curious than most people I’ve met here. Last year she asked me about things like composting and school gardening, but at the time my language skills were abysmal, I didn’t understand the culture and I made the mistaken assumption that any garden project would have had to go through the high school science teacher, with whom I had tried to work and failed and who I really did not like or trust. So instead last year I focused on teaching English. This was probably for the best because it allowed me to tend my own garden at home for a season and to develop, through trial-and-error, an understanding of the local soil and weather, which are totally different from anywhere else I’ve gardened and made me feel practically like a beginner all over again.

I contacted Maria via text message to arrange a visit. I mostly just wanted to get her general advice on how I could work in the schools this year and how to approach the school director (like the principal). I mentioned the possibility of a school garden project almost as an afterthought. Even though I hadn’t worked with her directly last year, she was the teacher who I felt the biggest connection to; she had taught me Guarani a few times on the side and I’d developed a relationship with her family via beekeeping. I saw her as my "in." She responded immediately and invited me to have afternoon snack at her house the next day, Sunday afternoon.

When I showed up she was cooking empanadas with two other women who I recognized from last year, but whom I’d never actually met. Luckily for me, one of the other women was the director for the elementary school. They were cooking empanadas filled with soy protein, an inexpensive and healthy meat substitute which Peace Corps volunteers use and promote in health projects but which almost no Paraguayans know of or use, especially in the campo. Trust me that this is a sign of worldly "with-it-ness" that you just don’t see around here. She also uses olive oil for its health properties and eats oatmeal, which even urban Paraguayans don’t think of as human food. Believe it or not, in a homogenous culture like Paraguay, something that simple makes someone very different. We’re talking borderline revolutionary. Anyway, we got into a long conversation about the magical isoflavinoid wonders of the common soybean, preventive healthcare through proper nutrition and she even asked me what the word "organic" means. I was thrilled to oblige and share my knowledge, and while munching on the golden pockets of vegetable protein I realized something—I was really having fun! I really and genuinely liked hanging out with them.

Usually when I visit people, no matter who it is, I have the same conversations every single time; it’s always either about weather, bananas, chickens and whether or not I’ve found a Paraguayan boyfriend yet. I wish I were exaggerating, but sadly, I am not. If the opportunity presents itself, and sometimes even when it doesn’t, I try to steer the conversation in a direction that will allow for "everyday teaching moments," as Peace Corps likes to say. But usually when I try to find ways to pass on knowledge through conversations it just doesn’t work. People aren’t interested and may listen politely for a while, but the conversation ends up back at bananas and boyfriends sooner or later because that is what they really want to talk about. When I was around Maria and the other women it occurred to me that none of my other neighbors actually ask me good questions like they do. The difference is that they really want to learn things, and in addition to a friend or neighbor with a funny accent, they see me as a resource available to them that can help them know about what they are already interested in, and achieve what they already want to do. After a year and a half in this country, I know I have finally found my people. I have finally found my work. Now that I see what it really is, the difference is like day and night.

I asked Maria about the school garden project. In the work papers left to me by the volunteer before me I had found an official inquiry to the local government for materials to begin a school garden, and it was signed by the previous volunteer and Maria. She explained that the volunteer had helped them to put together and file the pedido (official request, like a grant proposal) with the state government and that they had gotten all the materials they needed, but that the volunteer didn’t continue working with them to show how to implement it and so it never got off the ground. (Sidenote: In the volunteer’s defense- she never wanted to work in the schools, wasn’t a diehard gardener and I think only helped them in the 1st place during a point in her service when she was desperate for work, but soon she found more people to get started with beekeeping and since that was her primary project and her passion she focused on that for the rest of her service, successfully introducing beekeeping to several families as a result. I, on the other hand, really do have a passion for working in the schools and gardening and I welcome the opportunity to carry on what she, luckily for all of us, got started in the schools. Development is a process, after all..) So anyway, as soon as we started talking school gardens Maria lit up completely. She told me that they still have all the materials, from the fencing right down to the seeds. There is a tractor available to till the land, which could be used at any time. All they need, she said (looking at me directly in the eye), is someone to help plan the implementation; someone with experience and technical skills to really make it into a learning thing.

She pointed out that lots of people here grow a few vegetables at home, but really there isn’t a whole lot of real technical understanding of how to make things better. In general people are discouraged by the harsh climate. They lose faith that anything can work and as a result end up not tinkering around or experimenting to see what works, which any gardener will tell you is the very essence of tending a garden. What happens is that people plant a bunch of seeds and sort of "leave it to God." This means that nothing comes up at all or everything comes up at once, the harvest lasts a week, and the rest of the year there is nothing. When the teachers themselves come into a gardening project with these same experiences and skill sets, of course they are not prepared to understand how to really take advantage of a garden as an interactive learning lab. It made sense.

Luckily, I had brought with me two books that I was hoping to base my work in the schools on this year. One was called "Using School Gardens as a Learning Tool" and the other was a handbook for teachers with detailed lesson plans for teaching environmental education alongside standard subjects such as math, language, social studies, art and science. I whipped those babies out and started showing them the lesson plans. I showed them that you can teach geometry and area by planning garden layouts, practice multiplication by calculating square meters needed per plant and seeds needed per acre, teach social studies and geography by showing where in the world each vegetable originated and what kinds of foods people make with it, teach language by reading stories and songs about the water cycle or biodiversity in Spanish, etc. etc. There were also hands-on activities for almost every lesson plan, which is something practically unknown in Paraguayan schools. Each lesson listed which requirements it can fulfill in the general education plan issued through the Ministry of Education, so there’s no guesswork for the teachers to know where they can fit them in.

Maria and Gabina, the director of the elementary school, basically flipped. They were stunned. Amazed. I can’t even describe to you the looks on their faces. The switch turned on, the fire was lit; they saw for the first time just how not-boring and truly interactive learning can be. They were almost urgent in their insistence that I help them do this. They told me to show up at school the next morning at 8am to get started.

I showed up at 8, very optimistic but not really knowing what to expect. I talked some more to Directora Gabina and met the other teachers. We sat and drank terere for a long while just getting to know each other, and I assumed that that would be the bulk of what I would do that day. Well, I was wrong. After the terere break, Gabina, Maria and I went back to Gabina’s office and we basically planned the launch of the project. We brainstormed for 3 hours and came up with a basic outline for an official project description. They decided they also wanted to start a fruit tree grove next to the garden, and make a "miniature forest" plot of native hardwood trees to teach about the environment. They listed all the resources we have, material and human, and those that we still needed. They identified and prioritized their goals and objectives. They planned 2 bake sales for the next week (which were successful and carried out on time) to pay for the gas to run the tractor. They even made a timeline—with dates—for the next few months for when we could plow, put up the fence, make the beds, have the parents’ meeting, etc. The vast majority of this was all them; I just occasionally weighed in with a few opinions, but they were driving the whole planning. I cannot emphasize enough that in Paraguayan culture this kind of spontaneous, self-directed planning and attention to detail just doesn’t happen. I felt like I was in the Peace Corps Twilight Zone. Peace Corps puts on workshops to try to teach our community contacts these kinds of skills, but these ladies were already way ahead. I don’t know where they learned to do it, but they absolutely knew what they were doing.

Now it was my turn to be shocked and amazed and have my fire lit. I came back a few days later and Maria had written the entire project description out in pencil, and had made a "spreadsheet" timeline with a ruler and pencil that detailed meticulously, line by line, every activity we need to do to for the entire year for the project, who’s going to do it, and on what week it’s gonna happen. I just have to say again that here this just doesn’t happen. I know in the states that kind of thing is common and even expected, but here it might as well have come from outer space. I didn’t even have to push them or remind them to do it; the very next visit it was done. I was totally dumbfounded. All I had to do to dumbfound them in turn was to flip on dusty, untouched computer in the corner and type up the project description and put the timeline into Excel. This is what Peace Corps should be, but up to this point for me, hasn’t been: me bringing just a little push of inspiration and a few computer skills to help people to accomplish what they already want to do in the first place.

The next step was the parents’ meeting. The lucky part was that my new Paraguayan boss was up in the area already doing site presentations for newly sworn-in volunteers and she was able to extend her trip and visit me for the day. First she stopped by my community and talked to my contact for beekeeping, who has long ago decided he doesn’t like bees, which made for an interesting visit. Before she or I really said anything, my contact launched into a longwinded explanation and pseudo-apology for why there’s just no work for me in my community, why people aren’t interested in beekeeping and why it’s nearly impossible to get people there to work together. These are all things I’ve come to understand about my community, but I can’t begin to tell you how gratifying it was to hear my contact say them to my boss. I felt so justified for struggling all this time, and as she explained to him, professionally but firmly, that two years is too long to expect an adult to not have real work and that Peace Corps expects that if I can’t work in my community that I will look for work elsewhere, I felt a huge relief. I felt finally free to not keep putting my energy where it wasn’t appreciated and to pursue this new work, though not in my primary project of beekeeping, guilt-free.

After this necessary but somewhat awkward encounter, we drove to the next community to have lunch with Maria and Gabina. My boss was extremely impressed with them, and it was really great to have my new "co-workers" be able to talk to my Spanish and Guarani-speaking boss about Peace Corp, since she was able to explain far better than I can all the ways I can help to support their work. Maria and Gabi kept saying things like, "We know we need to take as much advantage of her time left as we can," and "We don’t want to waste the opportunity we have to work with a volunteer." No one has ever said that kind of thing about working with me, and it made me feel appreciated and like they really get why I am here and how I can help. They were already asking my boss about the possibility of getting another volunteer after me to continue working with them. I had pretty much given up on the idea of having a follow-up volunteer since there’s not even enough work to keep me busy, but for the first time I realized that it’s not only possible but actually likely that I’ll have a follow-up, only they won’t live in my community of L. Petit, but instead in Móngelos, the community where the school is. This really changes my outlook entirely. Thinking no one is going to come after you is kind of a bummer. But now I’m not just finishing out my time here, I’m getting things ready for someone else to continue. Big difference.

After lunch was the parents’ meeting. At first we were afraid that no one would show up because it’s sesame harvest time and most families are busy with that. But sure enough people started showing up—many of them even early! By the time the meeting was scheduled to start the classroom was full, people were standing and spilling out onto the porch. Gabina got up and introduced the theme of environmental education, which I’d been promoting to her pretty hard as something we could focus on through the garden. Without even telling me, she had prepared a poster with a picture of a crying sun, a crying tree and a crying Earth. She gave a great little mini-lesson to these farmers/parents on what the environment is and how our lives are dependent on it. She even had two of the most famous environmental quotes written out on other posters in Spanish: "Only when the last fish has been caught, the last tree has been cut down, and the last river polluted will man realize that money cannot be eaten," and then she asked the group, "What can we do about it?" and then read the quote "Think globally, act locally." Again, I was just astounded. Where she gets this stuff I have no idea, but man I’m glad she gets it. My boss just looked at me and I smiled, like, "Can you believe this woman??" Gabina had me get up and say a few words, and then my boss got up and explained to the parents what Peace Corps is and why I’m here, how I can help to work with the school and support this project, etc. etc. It was basically like the site presentation Peace Corps does to introduce to a community brand new volunteers in their sites. My boss is really amazing, and it was half information speech and half pep talk. The parents were so excited that they asked her tons of questions, and they were even already asking about getting another volunteer after me to keep supporting the project for the longer term. It couldn’t have gone better. This is really important because it’s the parents who will volunteer their labor to put up the fence and make the garden beds. Without the parents’ support the whole thing would be much more difficult.

The next week I went with Gabina to the state government to ask for a few more materials that we still need to add the tree groves and carry out the project. The visit went extremely well and I think we will get everything we need. The school year is only now really getting started (even though classes started a while ago nothing really starts in earnest until after Easter), and when I get back to site there will be a detailed schedule available of all the classes with their learning objectives. I’m going to sit down with the teachers to plan when we can do which lessons and we’ll make another nifty little schedule in Excel. I’m also going to do a half-day or all-day workshop in April with all the teachers to introduce to them how they can make the most of the garden to teach their various subjects, as well as how to integrate environmental themes into their standard curriculum. I’m pumped. Very pumped.

So that’s the bulk of what’s been going on. The other big thing in my life is that I’ve decided to train for a marathon in Buenos Aires that will take place on October 12th. Originally I wanted to do a half-marathon, but come to find out you can only register for the full marathon and I would not feel good about running just half of it and just sorta going, "Oh crap," and then stopping without a finish line or anything. So I’m going for it. It’s a huge undertaking. I know two volunteers who did it last year and it is an all-consuming thing to take on, but I’m really looking forward to the challenge. I know there will never be another time in my life when I have both youth and tons of free time to train, and so I want to take advantage of it. I’m looking forward to getting to that level of health and fitness and I know it will be a great example to show my community of goal setting and persistence and all that good stuff. I’ve been running regularly for a while now and it’s been really surprising how much opportunity it has given me to teach about health, exercise and nutrition because everyone is extremely curious about it and no one really knows about that kind of stuff here. I’ve even gotten one of my host mothers, a diabetic woman in her 50’s to exercise for the first time in her life. That kind of thing just blows me away. Sometimes the obvious work, the work we think we’re "supposed to be doing" is the hardest to do as a volunteer; but one day you go for a run and before you know it people are literally running up behind you, wanting to be taught about exercise. Así es la vida! (Life’s like that!) At any rate, I’m having a blast with it and I’ve finally gotten to a fitness level where I can run a long time at a good speed and really feel great doing it. If anyone feels overcome with desire to support me on my goal, I would appreciate gift certificates to www.roadrunnersports.com to help me cover the costs of keeping in non-worn-out running shoes and stocked up on energy gels.

One other development in my life is that my cat has fallen totally and irretrievably in love with me, and I’ve decided I just can’t leave him in Paraguay. He never leaves my side. When I take a shower, he waits outside the door for me. When I wash dishes at the spigot, he’s playing with bubbles between my ankles. It’s cute. So I’m bringing him back. Seeing as my entire family is allergic to cats, chances are I will try to find someone else in the States who in inclined to adopt a needy Paraguayan feline, but I’d feel so much better turning him over to someone else in the US, land of kitty tunnels and Fancy Feast, than I would leaving him here, land of throwing random things at cats for fun. So there ya have it. If you anybody out there wants a sweet little trilingual kitty named Pringles, let me know.

I’ll try not to wait so long next time before I update so it won’t be so ridiculously long.

Peace, love and Meow-Mix,

Sarah

February 4, 2008

Well, here I am in Asuncion again back from vacation. After spending two weeks in Buenos Aires and Uruguay, I´m a little more tan, largely refreshed and considerably more broke. I have lots of stamps in my passport, a few rather amusing pictures and impressive leg muscles from carting my crap around three countries in my ginormous backpack.

I went with my friends Jill, Loren and Rosana, who are all Urban Youth volunteers from another training group. During their training they decided (half jokingly) to end their Peace Corps experience by forming a motorcycle gang of three called ¨Big Mama¨ and two-wheeling it back to the states. This was no doubt influenced by the fact that Peace Corps reminds volunteers roughly 17 times per day during training that we are forbidden to ride motorcycles in Paraguay. I was taken on as an honorary member of Big Mama, for this, the preview voyage, which came to be known as Big Mama Goes to the Beach. And no, I don´t plan to Harley my way back to Ohio after my service in December.

Big Mama Highlights

Day 1: Big Mama buses to Buenos Aires. 21 hours. Board the bus and go only about an hour before stopping at the border. Wait for like 3 hours for all the people in the herd of buses in front of us to go through passport control. Can´t wait to stop sweating. Sleep overnight in the bus. Seats were described to us as ¨semi-cama,¨ which means ¨half-bed.¨ This is a lie.

Day 2: Big Mama gets to Buenos Aires (BA) and stops sweating. Perfect weather. Stay at a really cute hostel run by a crazy Argentine woman who was like the crazy Latina aunt I never had. Realize Argentina is nothing like Paraguay. At all. Delight in the smorgasboard of options and foods newly available to us. Buy good wine and real cheese (!) and go to a really beautiful park for a picnic. Lay on the grass and eat exotic things like cherries. Drink terere (cold yerba mate) and have all the Argentinians look at us like clueless tourists because they only drink their yerba mate hot in Argentina. Giggle. Eat good dinner. Realize the downside of Argentina being as developed as Europe is that things cost just as much as Europe or the states. Remember that Pepsi exists. Struggle to not speak Guarani. Start to develop an Argentine accent in Spanish.

Day 3: Go to La Boca, birthplace of the tango. Site of a really neat artisan market. Old working class neighborhood settled by immigrants, mostly Italians, who worked on the docks of the Rio Plata. A neighborhood of unbelievably colorful houses everywhere you look. Festive atmosphere, live tango shows at every cafe, impromptu street parades, a hundred million tourists. Ate tamales at a cafe on the main strip and watched tango dancers swirl around me. Realize Americans just don´t know how to dance. Male tango dancer pulls me up from the table to his little sidewalk dancefloor, puts me in a rather expressive tango pose, friends snap picture. More giggling. In the afternoon tour Recoleta cemetery, the burial site of Eva Peron and every other super-rich Argentine who has ever lived. Take a million pictures. Peruse another artisan market. Enjoy taking the subway. Am reminded just how much America misses out with our gaping chasm of a public transit system. Continue to enjoy not sweating. Even wear makeup and cute clothes. Barely recognize myself. Eat more real cheese and drink more good wine.

Day 4: Big Mama takes the boat. Catch giant ferry boat across the channel to Uruguay. It was a huge boat probably capable of carrying 300+ people. I didn´t even know when I walked onto the boat it was so huge and decked out (no pun intended). There was a lobby. A full duty-free store onboard. A video game area. A live dance show. Seats like a huge airplane. It looked like a cross between a casino and an airport. It was like flying and taking the airport with you. The only way to travel, as far as I´m concerned. Make port at Colonia, Uruguay. Big Mama decides to wait and take the later bus to Montevideo and spend a few hours in Colonia. Big Mama may or may not have examined the possibility of renting motos and two-wheeling it for a few hours along the coast with the wind in her collective hair. Have dinner and catch the last bus to the capital, Montevideo. Realize that Uruguay is nothing like Paraguay either, and it´s not just due to the total absence of the Catholic church and the overwhelmingly white population. Realize Paraguay is surrounded by largely developed countries that are nothing like it which barely know or care it exists. It might as well have been a different continent, or planet. Even in the countryside there were tractors and trucks everywhere. Get funny reactions everywhere we go when we say we live in Paraguay. Arrive late at the hostel in Montevideo. Fall asleep almost immediately, but not before discovering Big Mama is sharing a dorm with the craziest Brazilian lady on the planet whose hee-hawing laugh is loud enough to raise the dead.

Day 5: Montevideo. Walk up and down the main drag window-shopping. See the sights, take it in. Notice that all food in Uruguay is square. I must be the national shape. Big Mama buys bongos. Stay up late at hostel hanging out with our roommates, a cool Argentine girl and the Brazilian with the colorful chuckle. I have to admit she really added something.

Day 6: Big Mama checks out of hostel and buses to Punta del Este. Supposedly one of the best surf spots on the South American atlantic coast. I say supposedly because it was really windy and the waves were crazy and choppy and just plain nasty the whole time we were there. Discover where South America keeps all of its money; there on that narrow speck of a peninsula jutting out into the atlantic. Probably no more than 2 miles long and 6 blocks wide, it wouldn´t surprise me if Punta del Este has a Gross Domestic Product greater than the entire republic of Paraguay. It was a weird little tribe of old rich white people and trust fund babies with designer sunglasses. I saw a vegetable peeler on sale for $29. I was underdressed at McDonalds. I am not kidding. They didn´t even give me a tray. Wow. And there we were having just crawled out of Paraguay, feeling a bit disoriented by all of it. For example, Loren got a bit shaken up by an automatic door on the way into the gas station. When she reached for the handle and the door opened all on its own, it scared her half to death. We´ve kinda gotten unused to that kind of thing.

Day 7: Big Mama gets beached. Jill and me get up early, grab a surfboard and head to the beach. Punta del Esteñans are apparently not early risers. Beach totally deserted until after 9. Jill paddles out and tries to catch waves, but mostly just bobs around on her board for a few hours because the waves aren´t breaking well enough to surf. She catches three short rides but still has a ball being knocked around by the surf like a rubber ducky in a typhoon. Weird girl. I watch, alternatively trying to pick up pointers for how to do it and wondering if I´ve completely lost my mind. I spend a lot of time just playing in the waves, diving under the big ones and popping up on the other side. Good times. I get a feel for handling the surfboard in the whitewater near the beach, but it´s hard because the surf is crazy. Ride a few waves on my belly, realize it´s way harder than it looks. Decide it´s not the day to learn to surf. Big Mama spends 9 hours straight on the beach. Proof I´ve lost my mind. I read, play bongos, read, play bongos, slather on copious amounts of sunscreen. We all get burned anyway. Jill gets sun poisoning and spends next 3 days vomiting and wishing she is dead. But how bad can it be, we´re on vacation? Besides, it was 2 for 1 mojitos night at the bar in our hostel. Yes, there was a bar IN the hostel. Drink mojitos with random people we meet from Norway, Sweden, Ireland and Nigeria.

Day 8: Big Mama takes it easy and applies a lot of aloe vera. Loren and Rosana go dancing and get back at 7:30am, but I call it an early night. They are insane. Jill remains in a sun-poisoning induced coma.

Day 9: Get up early and jog all around the coast of the peninsula. Probably the longest I´ve ever ran. Made me feel 100% better. Had been eating so many french fries that I felt myself turning into one. In BA Big Mama collectively decided to train for the annual Buenos Aires marathon that happens every November. Well, we decided to train for the half-marathon. Lots of PCVs do that kinda thing as a way to keep themselves mentally and physically healthy during service. So jogging around the coastline of a beautiful little peninsula on vacation, complete with perfect weather, was the best possible run to have after deciding to push myself in that way. I like jogging in Paraguay, but the scenery leaves something to be desired and it´s usually 100 degrees. Leave Punta del Este in the afternoon to go to La Paloma, a sleepy little beach town where we rent a beach house for the remainder of our time in Uruguay.

Days 10-12: Big Mama kicks back. Take it easy in the beach house. Watch cable TV. I take advantage of the nice kitchen and cook lots of delicious food, which was fun for me and also a good way to save money after being in Punta del Este. Beach time, etc. On the last night we build a fire in our little backyard area and have a little ceremony where we write down things we want to leave behind in our lives and in our service, and then things we want to bring into our lives or change for the better. We put our papers in the fire and share with each other, and it was all really nice. We really don´t have much opportunity for that kind of reflection in Peace Corps. Usually when we do get together we just want to have fun and blow off some steam, and sometimes the hard parts are the last thing we want to talk about. Afterwards we took some of the ashes down to the ocean and put them into the surf. It was a nice way to end our vacation.

Days 11&12: Loren and Rosana go back to Asuncion. Jill and I go back through Buenos Aires and spend two more days there before heading back to Paraguay, where we immediately resume our familiar lifestyle of near-constant sweating.

All in all it was a great vacation. Lots of good relaxation, nice companionship with English-speaking folk, lots of fun and a surprising amount of perspective on Paraguay. I´ll put up pictures when I can!

Jajotopata,

Sarah

p.s. Very highly recommended beach books: The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini (I think), and The Hummingbird´s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. Best books I´ve read in a long time.

I managed to put together a passable summer camp for the first two weeks of January, and I'm pleased to say it went well. The first day about 15 kids showed up. They were extremely shy and looked a little scared. They had never been to anything like a camp before and didn't really know what to expect. Paraguayans tend to avoid unknown situations like the plague, so even though things went well the first day I was a little terrified they wouldn't show up for the rest of the days. After all, when I tried to do things with their parents a few people would show up at first and then less and less each time until no one showed up at all. This would be especially bad since I've been sort of hoping to work with more with kids during my second year of service.

Thankfully they proved me wrong. The next day about 25 kids showed up. After that 32, then around 45. I chalk this up largely to the fact that I had a drawing for goodies at the end of each day. I wrapped up Burger King crowns and bubbles and bracelets and stuff in the pages of Newsweek and raffled them off. Word spread fast, apparently!

I think they did have fun during the rest of it, too, though. We sang songs, played games, made drawings and I gave fun educational talks. One day I talked about bees and their community and how a hive is like our own community in that it's important and ok for everyone to do different things so we all help each other. Another day I talked about parasite prevention with another health volunteer who came to help me out. After that I talked about dental health and how to NOT lose your teeth, and taught 45 kids how to brush their teeth. Now THAT was a riot! Two days got rained out; nutrition day and self-esteem day. I'll try to do them after I get back from vacation if I can herd up the kids again.

So all in all I'm feeling pretty good about the camp and my prospects for doing meaningful work with youth over the next year. They actually keep coming to meeting and even bring their friends!! Yay for kids. It's nice to leave for vacation on a brighter note. I'm boarding a bus in 4 hours to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina. A real vacation! Woohoo!!! I'll spend a few days there, then go to Uruguay for some serious beach time and surfing. Then back to Buenos Aires for a few more days before coming back to Paraguay. I won't have my cell phone so if anyone needs to reach me, try email!

Cheers, amigos!

Sarah

Forget eggnog. On Christmas Paraguayans drink a much more weather-appropriate cocktail called clérico that´s made of chopped tropical fruits, wine, and soda. It´s oddly refreshing in a slightly gross way. They also kill thousands of pigs and roast em up on a spit. Today will be filled with the fairly constant death squeals of the Christmas pigs. A rather different ambiance than jingle bells and christmas carols, but hey, to each their own.

Forecast for Concepcion, Paraguay
December 25, 2007

Day:
Partly Cloudy High
96°F

Precip
20%

Wind: SSE 5 mph
Max. Humidity: 60%
UV Index: 10+ Extreme


Sunrise: 6:02 AM Local Time
Avg. High: 91°F
Record High: N/A


Night:
Partly Cloudy Overnight Low
75°F

Precip
20%

Wind: E 5 mph
Max. Humidity: 80%


Sunset: 7:37 PM Local Time
Avg. Low: 72°F
Record Low: N/A



Last Updated Monday, Dec 24, 3:29 AM Local Time

Last time I posted I didn´t really talk about what´s been going on in my life, so pull up a chair and I´ll tell ya. I was partying it up with about 130 other volunteers in Encarnacion at a swanky resort run by German-Paraguayans. Here are some highlights: I developed a taste for Johnnie Walker scotch, played some canasta, learned that I do NOT have a future in competitive ping-pong, listened to accordian music, jumped off the diving board in all my clothes and then climbed out and decided that I might as well just go ahead and try firedancing with fire for the first time since I was all nice and damp, caught up with friends, ate turkey. (Sorry mom, about the firedancing. I know I promised, but just think how much more interesting Thanksgivings will be after I get back if I could add that little spark to the after dinner festivities! You could watch while standing by anxiously with the hose.) It was a lot of fun to say the least. It´s the biggest party of the year and I´ve been hearing about its well-deserved reputation since training last year.

Going back to site after all that excitement was a bit of a bummer, but that´s to be expected. I´ve been disappointed with my community a lot lately and I´m definitely feeling the 1-year hump a lot of volunteers go through. If my service were a week, this is definitely Wednesday. The short version is that I´ve realized (or rather finally accepted) that for the most part my community doesn´t really want to work with me. The beekeeping committee thing is permanently stalled. It was hugely disillusioning to discover that people in my community would rather pass up a real live opportunity than actually work together. And I know full well that they understand how much money they could make--on par with their cash crop in a boom year, but every year, and with way less work and income. So basically they lost the opportunity to get a LOT of free equipment they´d never be able to buy to secure that opportunity, to say nothing of the temporary technical assistance they´re never gonna get again. At this point I would not recommend to Peace Corps that they place another PCV in my community. I kept having meeting after meeting and 1 person or no one would show up, different people each time. Everyone knew that all they had to do to get the free equipment was to show up to a meeting and bring the equivalent of their SSN so the Municipality could verify they´re a real person, and still no one showed up. Eventually I flat out told people I wasn´t gonna pursue it anymore they were basically like, ¨Yeah, that development stuff is for other places. Here we don´t like to cooperate on anything.¨

All this was punctuated by the Red Cross relief that was brought into the community after the drought and wildfires. Apparently in every other community the distribution went orderly and well, but in my community they forgot the list of names and people lied and took 2 or 3 times what they were entitled. As a result food didn´t reach everyone. The insults and gossip flew and Red Cross threatened not to come back with subsequent rounds of rations. The Municipality called an investigation, which of course went no further than gossipy radio reports about the idiots in Roberto L. Petit. ¨Great,¨ I said to one of my host mothers, ¨We´re famous.¨ As it turned out the Red Cross did come back, this time with the list. On the day they came back I went to watch how it all worked, and I saw my entire community crushed up together around a cattle truck full of bags in the hot sun, casting sideways glances at each other and elbowing for position, waiting to be given their bag. I knew then that my community does not want to function by going to meetings and classes and making official requests to the Muni. It wants to function by having outside people pull up and start unloading a truck full of free stuff so they can start fighting over it. Too bad that´s not how you get beehives. Or anything for that matter, except a few bags of food in a drought year. This is what dictatorship teaches people.

Also, my contact Don Guillermo has decided he doesn´t like beekeeping. A bit of a bummer, but not unforeseen. He´s a terrible beekeeper because he can´t relax and doesn´t even comprehend the concept of ¨gentle¨ so he always pisses off the bees, starts getting stung and then splits on me halfway through the job. It´s actually kinda funny because even though I´m there they don´t get pissed at me. I guess they can tell a difference. So there I usually am calmly closing up the hive and finishing watering his bees for him and there´s a black stream of bees flying over my shoulder trying to chase him away. When I finally make my way out of the apiary, he always asked me if I got a lot of stings and I always tell him I didn´t get any.

This past time I gave him a nice positive pep talk about being tranquilo and slow movements and all, and as soon as we got into the apiary he was like a maniac with a death wish. After a few panels he split, predictably, but this time he took the smoker with him. I was so mad that after a minute or so I left the apiary, hive wide open, and chased him down. I was like ¨What the hell are you doing leaving me there without a smoker? There are THOUSANDS of bees over there and we´re trying to steal their honey!¨ I told him I couldn´t work with him anymore if he was gonna keep doing that, that it wasn´t safe, that I couldn´t do the revision for him every time while he just stood there smoking himself, asked him how he was gonna work bees after I leave when I wont be there to do it for him, blah blah blah. He told me he was just gonna harvest the honey and then burn all the hives because his bees were ¨ungrateful.¨ All in all it was a good heart to heart. He´s never shown any interest in anything but just harvesting, so by this point I realized it was a lost cause. I´ve also realized that all my beekeepers but one are scared of the bees and only interested in going out to harvest. Two more of my beekeepers had their hives die over the winter. The new families I´d found to work with were under the unfortunate impression I was going to just do it for them, and don´t seem sincerely interested in making their own bee veils and smokers so they can even accompany me to the hives.


So in large part my primary project is spiraling away from me and I´m sort of taking stock of what I can do to make my second year worthwhile. Its more clear to me every day that, as sad as it is to say, most adults are pretty much beyond hope to reach for meaningful changes in their lives. By the time people get to a certain age they just don´t want to change anything, they only want things to get better. I´m sure this is not a uniquely Paraguayan thing, but the culture that´s developed here in the wake of hundreds of years of dictatorship really takes it to a new level, there´s so little hope and no one believes anything can happen unless well-connected people are in charge. So I think I´m gonna focus my second year on working in the school and working with youth, since not only is there actually the possibility to affect their lives, but they actually want you to tell them things and help them learn stuff. All you have to do is sing songs with them and they´ll listen to whatever you have to say for the rest of your life. I also think I like teaching and the classroom environment. In addition to teaching English I´ve gone in and been a special beelady guest for elementary school age kids, and I loved it. For now I´m planning a summer camp and hopefully other volunteers up in Concepcion will make the trek out to my site to help give talks on nutrition, parasite prevention, and self-esteem in between sessions of macaroni-necklace making, juggling and drumming on random stuff. I´ll help out at another PCV´s summer camp in late December to sort of learn the ropes a little better and then hopefully put it together in time for the 2nd week of January, and if not then, February.

In late January I´ll be headed to Buenos Aires and Uruguay for a sorely-needed vacation, during which I plan to spend a lot of time on the beach enjoying fruity drinks with little umbrellas, staring at the ocean, and occasionally paddling out with a surfboard and trying figure out what the heck I´m supposed to be doing, hopefully without drowning or getting eaten alive by sharks. Oddly, I´m really looking forward to it.

Today I´m headed to the goodbye party for the other beekeeping volunteer up here in Concepcion. She is in the group that came a year before I did, and she is finishing her service in a week or so. I can hardly believe that my sister group is about to swear out and my new sister group is about to swear in! That means I´m one of the big kids now. Time really flies here. Only when I think about how much I didn´t know a year ago, how I didn´t speak hardly any Spanish and had only heard of Guarani, the language I now use primarily at home, do I realize how far I´ve come. When I think of it that way, I feel really ready to take on the next year and apply all that I´ve been working so hard to figure out these past 12 crazy months.

I love you guys and miss you! Wish I could be there for Christmas and I´ll be thinking of you guys. Maybe next year I´ll go out in the back yard and firedance in the snow for you all! Hahahaha!

--Sarah

p.s. I´m learning to play banjo. Now THAT´S gonna be a great addition to my 2nd year.

November 18, 2007

Thanks Giving

“Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” G.K. Chesterton

Being a Peace Corps Volunteer affords many valuable, hard-won lessons. I am grateful for them all. Volunteers are sent to places that suffer the absence of basic things that contribute to quality of living. That means you can bet life is harder there for everyone, including volunteers.

When some aspect of my life or work is difficult I try to remind myself of this: that whether or not I can see it at the time, there is a lesson disguised in there that will become obvious with time. This is what keeps me from becoming overwhelmed by what is missing here in Paraguay.

The lessons take many forms, but usually they just boil down to the same things: becoming aware of how much I don’t know, and discovering how much I really have. The lesson I am most grateful for is the most simple: always be grateful.

If you have never lived outside of your own culture it is hard to have perspective on what is and isn’t really there. In Paraguay the real problem is that people are so used to accepting hardship and powerlessness that they can’t imagine a better life or believe they can improve their own lives. In America we have so many blessings the real problem is remembering or noticing them all. Let me show you how it looks from my perspective.

As an American I am grateful for:

Paved roads—and the trucks that use them to bring things to our stores, and the cars that use them to take people to jobs and schools, which means income and education, which means empowerment and connection to the larger world, which means hope and broadening of minds; roads that may hurt our environment in many ways but also are the backbone of our municipal trash collection, which makes our world less littered and less toxic because we don’t have to burn or bury our trash at home; roads that bring ambulances and fire trucks when we need them, and the peace of mind of knowing that they could come at a moment’s notice even when we don’t need them; roads that keep people moving around, learning about and coming to appreciate different places and opportunities and lifestyles, that let us meet and know so many more people than just a few close neighbors, which teaches us to not fear the differences.

Electricity—that doesn’t go out every day and spoil everything in our refrigerators, that lights up our streets at night so we can leave our house after sunset and not be afraid, that powers our computers and vacuum cleaners and keeps us from freezing in the winter and baking in the summer, that always brings us cold drinks and cooks us hot food, that helps us open cans at the touch of a button and reheat our food without burning wood, that lets us bathe with warm water, that keeps people’s hearts beating in hospitals and premature babies alive and growing, and that is so important and omnipresent that we only notice it when it fails us, and that also does a lot of frivolous stuff we probably don’t need.

Running water—that lets us clean our bodies, things and homes, that brings us water that is safe to drink without boiling and doesn’t taste terrible, that waters the crops we rely on for our food and keeps pets and livestock from relying on ponds and puddles, that doesn’t go out without warning in the middle of a shower or stay broken for days, that lets us easily maintain good health and hygiene, and makes our world more beautiful by making flowers and lawns and landscaping even possible, to say nothing of golf courses, swimming pools, and fire hydrants.

Washing machines—and other radical instruments of women’s liberation; because I spend SO much time washing my clothes by hand here, because I know that Whirpool did as much to free women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Betty Friedan combined, because if we still had to wash clothes by hand like they do in Paraguay, women might not have discovered yet the historically and culturally alarming fact that, hiding right behind their eyes and between their ears, is a fully functioning brain should they care to use it. Because it kills me that the women here are so busy cooking and washing clothes and doing dishes and sweeping the dirt and feeding the chickens and nursing the kids and shelling the corn that it seems like they don’t ever have time to think about anything else. Because it kills me that it seems like the women here are almost as invested in machismo as the men. Because I sometimes wonder what the women here would do with themselves if all of the sudden they didn’t have to do all of that, and I think it would terrify them and many in this generation would do it anyway because that’s their comfort zone; it’s all they know. But hopefully a few of them would discover they have a brain too. I’m grateful that I discovered this fact early on, which I now attribute in part to early exposure to washing machines and electric stoves.

Schools—which people gripe endlessly about but are unimaginably much better than they could be, which have teachers who generally know what they are teaching and are expected to do more than make students just copy lines verbatim for every subject and call that learning, which encourage kids to actually think critically and turn into adult citizens instead of just adults, which on the whole expose kids to a world of things they might be good at and enjoy, which usually have books (thought they may be old) and paper and maps and on-site lunches (though they may be unhealthy), which still expect kids to hope for something by telling them they can be anything they want to be if they apply themselves (though they may be building false hope for some, at least they aren’t denying it to all).

Supermarkets—where you can go and get whatever food you want and thus not worry about being malnourished or even getting bored with the same thing all the time, where you can walk in with a purse or a bag and not have to check it at the desk because the manager thinks you’re going to steal something if you keep it with you, where your biggest problem is choosing between 93 kinds of salad dressing rather than not even finding the white vinegar that you were going to use to make it from scratch.

Computers—Especially access to the internet and early childhood exposure to computers, which teach kids without them even knowing it what a window is, a cursor, and a keyboard, which connects us to information and gives us a truly revolutionary belief: that if we want to know something, we can find it out. That changes everything.

Bookstores—Barnes & Noble is a triumph of civilization. All that knowledge in one place, all those people who can and want to read who make it economically possible, and a culture that understands that reading can be a leisure activity. Not to mention the good coffee. I can’t tell you how much I want to take my 14-year-old Paraguayan host sister by the hand and walk her through the foyer and polished wood and brass doors of Barnes & Noble; I can’t tell you how much I want to see the look on her face as she sees that many books.

The Home Depot—Another triumph of civilization. Where you can build absolutely anything you want. It’s all there, and there are even trucks that can take advantage of our paved roads and deliver it right to your house.

Window screens—Because life is better when you’re not covered in flies and mosquitoes.

Restaurants—Because we know what things taste like everywhere, because half the time when I share “American” food (which is to say food I eat in America that Paraguayans don’t know of) it’s really Italian or Asian or Mexican or something. Because we enjoy the gastronomic riches of the whole world and the only reason we don’t have Paraguayan restaurants is that the food isn’t all that great here.

Art—Because we also get exposed to all kinds of music, and there are things like art museums and theaters (movies) and theatres (stage plays), and performing arts of all kinds, because our kids get to play with crayons and markers and some of them even grow up to make objects of breathtaking beauty, which they then share with us all.

Hospitals—Where we have equipment and supplies and real doctors, and where you don’t have to bring your own plates and silverware if you want something to eat like you do here in Paraguay.

And above all else:
Democracy—Because we got the whole modern experiment started and as a result our culture has never been brainwashed to blindly and without question accept the whims of a dictator, because instead we’ve been raised to believe in civic responsibility and accountability of government to the people, because we can complain out loud and do often, because when a whole culture believes in self-determination and the possibility of progress people start believing that about themselves as individuals too, and when that happens people learn to improve their own lives and the whole thing takes on it’s own momentum.

But we’re just learning that our wonderful democracy works so well because we have an equally wonderful history that makes it uniquely like it is. The biggest challenge of this century will be discovering how democracy can really take hold in places with very different histories. Dictators create cultures where people learn to look to others to tell them what to do, and to respect people who command fear and make their own rules. Paraguay has officially had democracy for 18 years now, but with a few hundred years of dictatorship under its cultural belt, it really doesn’t have a clue what to do with it. Americans can’t tell them (or anyone else) what to do with it by commanding respect and making the rules; how would that be different for them than being told what to do by a dictator? Democracy is about people figuring out on their own what they need to do about their lives. This is a mindset that must be learned; the desire for freedom may be universal but the skills to make responsible use of it is not. We are lucky as Americans because we both have democracy and a clue what to do with it. Remember your high-school history and civics teachers? I do. Thank you, all the Mrs. Meadors of the world. I’ll think of you when I’m eating turkey this year.

On a less positive note, we are still waiting for the Spring rains to begin. Winters here are usually dry, but this past one has been especially so. Normally the dry stretch is made bearable by the assurance of heavy, regular downpours in the Spring. The rains are over 2 months late and there is little sign of a break anytime soon. The situation is actually quite dire; farmers must wait on the rains to plow and plant their fields. Corn, sesame and beans should have already been in the ground a while now.
When I arrived in Paraguay almost exactly a year ago the fields were lush and green. The corn was off to a good start, tobacco already waist high, the tight rows of new sugarcane reaching proudly towards the sky, towering above my head. Now there is practically nothing left in the fields. The corn has long been used up, and now the sugarcane.
This is a real problem not just for people, but for animals as well. The pasture grasses are nothing but brown tufts stubbornly held in place by the hard crust of the sun-baked ground. The cows have nothing to eat. Some are so skinny it is painful to even look at them; nothing but bones sticking in all directions and patchy, sunken skin. For a while they were being fed sugarcane, which does nothing but keep them alive; no nutrients, just calories. Now with the sugarcane gone or almost gone, people have no choice but to slaughter their cows for the meat before starvation takes them, and even still there are animals dying in the fields. The cows wander around the pastures all day looking for minuscule bits of green. They cluster under the trees and look up tiredly at the leaves, eventually getting the energy to stand up on their hind legs and reach with their probing tongues at the few leaves that might not have been stripped off yet, as many times as not returning to the ground with a defeated thud. Many of the ponds are also dry. The farmers whose ponds have dried up completely must herd their cows twice daily to deeper ponds farther away. All day long herds of tired, skinny cows flow back and forth past my house.
People generally have too many cows to begin with and would do better with fewer well-fed cows than many starving ones, but the mindset that having more cows means having more security is deeply rooted and resistant to change. I’ve been talking to some of the farmers I know about improved pasture management and the need to reduce herd size, but for now they’re so consumed with worry I know it is not the time to reach them about that. After the drought is over I hope to return to the subject in earnest, using the drought as a very real example to learn from. But for now animals are suffering the brunt of the drought.
The situation got even more complicated about 2 or 3 weeks ago when the wildfires started. Of course everything was completely dried up. Unfortunately traditional land preparation methods in Paraguay for agriculture involve burning the fields to clear out the noxious weeds before planting. Add to that regular strong winds and what resulted was a real national disaster. The fires in Paraguay made international news. I don’t remember how many thousands of hectares have burned so far, but it´s a lot.
My community was unfortunately no exception. One day I got a call on my cell phone from the Peace Corps Safety & Security office, asking me if I smelled any smoke or saw any flames. I told them no, but they informed me there were wildfires up around my area and that I was to evacuate and notify them if I saw or heard anything. It was a bit disconcerting to realize that I was Peace Corps´ best source of up-to-the-minute information on the issue. If I was Peace Corps´ early warning system, then what was mine?
As it would turn out, my early warning system was a rather loud roaring sound. Sure enough, the next afternoon I was sitting in my house when I heard it; a low, crackling groan coming from the fields across the street. I leaned to look out the window and saw dark red flames shooting up high above the fields, singing the lower leaves off the mango trees and shooting up the blackening trunks of the coco trees. The fire was still a few hundred yards away from my house and the winds were blowing it parallel to the road. I felt like I would have at least enough warning to get on my bike and get out to where I could take a bus if the winds shifted the fire towards me. Luckily, the winds held and the fire spread South in a line that burned all the fields but spared the houses and animal corrals.
I was already planning to take the 3am bus out the next morning since I happened to be out of cat food. When I went outside to catch the bus the sky was neon orange. The eerie glow swirled and rippled as the backlit smoke churned upwards from the horizon. It was an artificial, strange kind of daylight, like snow-cover seen at night through polarized lenses. It reminded me of the scene in Gone With the Wind when Atlanta is burning.
When I got into town I heard a radio report that the fires were worst in my community, and that they stretched all the way to my neighboring PCV´s community 15 miles away. There were rumors about a special airplane coming in from Russia to put out the fires by air. I thought this was just another one of those things you hear in the Paraguayan media that aren´t true, but come to find out a Russian plane was in fact supposed to come, but it was diverted at the last minute.
Most of the farmers I worked with had fields burn. One of my socios went out in the middle of the fire to move his one hive of bees so that it wouldn´t burn. Thankfully, he was able to save it. As far as I know no one had their mandioca burn, which would have been a real tragedy. With food scarce and the growing season looking more and more bleak (since nothing has been planted yet), people will have to rely on their mandioca to keep them alive. It´s kind of like the human equivalent of the sugarcane for the cows; it has no nutritional value, but it has calories and it will keep people from starving even if none of the other crops come in. I don´t even want to think about what would happen if the mandioca ran out. Even though it didn´t happen in my community, I know there are a lot of Paraguayans who have lost their mandioca and even their homes in the fires.
Thankfully the Red Cross showed up and has started giving out emergency relief rations to the communities hardest hit by the fires, but there are still lots of communities suffering from the drought who are in just as dire of a situation. They brought 88-pound sacks of mixed foodstuffs to each family: pasta, rice, flour, beans, corn, coffee, sugar, salt and yerba mate (the tea for terere). They will come back every month or so with more rations. I imagine the situation will only get worse over the next year as the full effects of the delayed planting come to the forefront. Crops might not have time to develop properly before it gets cold again, and even if they do yields will be less and cash crops will be sold after the market is glutted from the harvests of other regions.
Every day we sit together and talk about the rain and how it hasn´t come. We never get tired of talking about it. It´s always the most interesting and important thing to talk about. Some people have started sleeping outside, not for usual reasons like it´s too hot to sleep inside, but because if it starts raining they want to know right away. We spend a lot of time sitting in silence looking at the clouds; sizing up the wind. It´s starting to make people go a little crazy, myself included. Whenever there are clouds at all you get your hopes up all day long, and invariably they´re blown away by nightfall.
It´s just exactly like The Grapes of Wrath. What farmers in Paraguay are facing—increasing desperation due to competition from outsiders who can afford to buy up land and modern machines, longer droughts and increasingly severe weather, overextended soils due to year after year of corn and cotton, families split apart by children leaving the farms to find profitable work elsewhere—this has all happened in my country generations ago. The farmers themselves didn´t fare too well when it happened in the states and there´s no reason to believe they´ll fare any better in Paraguay. It´s a hard situation to be in, and a hard one to walk into and to try to find some way to help. I just hope that by teaching people beekeeping I can give them one way to diversify their income and become less vulnerable to a single crop or source of income.

October 5th

Hola! I had a pretty darn good week this week. On Monday I had planned to do a meeting/talk with my current beekeepers to teach about swarm prevention, which is the most important theme for beekeeping for most of the year and I knew they didn´t really understand it when I just tried to talk about it while we revise the hives. So I made a 20-page storybook complete with detailed drawings to show and explain exactly what happens when bees swarm and why it lowers the honey harvest and how we can prevent it. I made it about two imaginary beekeepers, Don Fulano (which is like the Spanish equivalent of Joe Schmo) and Don Guapo (which means Mr. Handsome and Hardworking). Don Fulano doesn´t like the bees and only wants to go check on them when it´s time to harvest, but of course Don Guapo revises his hives ever 15 days and therefore ends up harvesting way more honey.

Well, 5pm Monday rolled around and I went to my 3rd host family`s house (they are the most ¨guapo¨ of all my beekeepers and support me a lot). I sat there drinking terere with the Senor and his daughter for about 45 minutes and no one showed up. So I decided we`d just try again tomorrow. I taught English at the high school Tuesday morning, but spent the afternoon riding around rounding up all my beekeepers and heckling them to come to the meeting. 5pm rolled around again, and a few didn´t show but enough were there to make me happy. And it went SO great! I was able to do it all in Guarani, and even though I`m sure it was sometimes jibber-jabber, I could tell that real honest-2-goodness learning had occurred. I wasn´t sure how they´d respond to the story, they are adults after all and it was definitely like a kids book, but for one Paraguayans don´t really have storybooks at any age and for another thing Paraguayans really value storytelling. Halfway through the story they were all leaning forward and talking about what was happening in each picture. It was rather delightful. When I was done I asked a few check-for-learning questions to see if they got the main points, and they were so quick to answer me that they started answering questions I hadn´t even gotten to yet!

The most rewarding part of it all was yesterday morning when I was revising a hive with one of the socios who heard the story. He was taking to another one of my socios who missed the talk, and explaining about Don Fulano and Don Guapo with such humor and enthusiasm that they almost seemed like real people. I think these characters will stick in people´s minds and I can continue to teach all kinds of things in a sort of WWDGD (What Would Don Guapo Do) kinda way. Whoda thunk my first competed ¨book¨ would be in Guarani and have stick figures doing beekeeping. Ç

Last night I also had a meeting at the local school that was open to anyone interested in beekeeping, current or new. I pitched it as a free complete beekeeping class that I was starting, which is true, but yesterday I mostly wanted to just see who showed up so I´d know how to plan for it. Well, 3 new socias showed up and they were all women! I was shocked and pleased. I had been planning anyway to talk about the earning potential in beekeeping since that would apply to both current and new socios, and to see what they thought about organizing into an official group to solicit modern beekeeping equipment from the state government. 3 hours before my class my nearest PCV neighbor called me and told me the government has a bunch of modern beekeeping equipment it´s just waiting to give away. Talk about timing. So we had the meeting and they decided they wanted to pursue it. I stressed a lot that using the higher tech equipment means a commitment to learn how to use it and to work together as a group, and they still seemed very much enthusiastic about it. So that´s exciting! This afternoon I´m going to the Municipality to talk to the Dept. of Agricuture guy who is in charge of donating stuff to committees. I´m also gonna get the forms to start an officially recognized committee specifically for beekeepers, which is good because with all these female socias, they´d be at a real disadvantage if we let the existing all-male farmers committee take over the acquisition.

So all in all I had a real watershed of a week as a volunteer. I´m sure carrying out all this will be incredibly hard and I expect it to fall apart at least a few times before it´s really up and running, but I´m game for that.

http://pics.livejournal.com/beesinparaguay/gallery/0000zd0p

Its been a long, dry and relentlessly windy winter here in Concepcion. Other than a few days of light mist and one “rain shower” that was all of 27 seconds long, it hasn’t rained in 3 months. The soil and air are so dry that the dust never really settles. The roads are so sandy in parts that they’re practically impassible on a bike; it’s the exact opposite problem I was having with the mud a few months back, but with the same results. Even inside my house there’s no escaping the dust. With the dry air my mud roof is literally crumbling away and falling on everything. Some of the chunks are large, but what is worse is the fine dust that settles on everything. Before I lay down in my bed every night I take off the sleeping bag to shake it out and beat the film of settled dust off the mattress and pillow. The winds also blow the dusty air into my room. Every morning I sweep my floor, removing about a cup of dirt, and watch with dismay as the thick airborne dust blows right back in, made especially visible by the angled light of sunrise. There really is no such thing as clean; only less dirty. I imagine if my mother were to visit she would just sweep the entire time in a futile campaign to get rid of the dust that never leaves.

In all this dryness I can’t imagine what it would be like if my community didn’t have functioning running water. Some volunteers live in places without it, or in places that might as well not have it because their community well pump is so unreliable. My community has only had running water for about 7 years now. Back in mid-May the pump in my community broke and I got a taste for what it would be like without it. For about a week I carted all my water for drinking, cooking and washing from a well about 150 yards away. I filled two 5-gallon buckets I hung from the handlebars of my bike and tried not to slosh it all out on the way back. Since we usually do not have to rely on well water, the water was from an old, poorly maintained well. It was brown and had tiny little things swimming in it if you looked closely. I boiled what I needed for my drinking water but still ended up getting sick.

Right now, though, what is making everyone sick is the dust. August in Paraguay is known as the month where everyone has colds and flus since it’s the last month before the rains and usually the driest. I’ve been no exception when it comes to health. I spent last Monday and Tuesday in bed all day not even wanting to stand up. I had a fever of 103 F and had a cough that sounded more like a death rattle. My host mom was very concerned and took good care of me with a near constant stream of remedios (natural medicines) made from the plants in my yard. She even made a tincture from plants and some kind of alcohol made from sugar cane and had me rub it all over my body to cool me down. I was skeptical, but afterwards I felt cooler and my skin had never felt so soft out in the campo! Paraguayan culture has a strong and extensive tradition of natural medicines, and so whenever I am sick I always ask my Señora what kinds of remedios I can take in addition to taking whatever medicines I have in my med kit from Peace Corps. Usually the remedios involve large amounts of honey and citrus and tasty teas, so it’s usually worth it no matter if they help or not! (Though I think a lot of times they do.)

One advantage to winter in Paraguay, I recently discovered, is that if you want something built, there are lots of guys with time on their hands and eager for a paycheck. Part of the reason my house took so long to construct, I now realize, is that it was smack dab in the middle of sesame harvest season, which is their main cash crop in my community. I should have known! But in August nothing is going on. All the cash crops are harvested, the weeds aren’t growing, the mandioca plants and even the grapefruit trees have lost most of their leaves, and people are just waiting on the rains in September to start planting again.

After a winter of bucket baths I was starting to go a little, well, insane. I decided that I needed my own shower. With hot water. And a latrine. I told my contact this, and he sprung into action in a way I’ve never seen before. On a Tuesday I told him I could pay for it, and by sunset on Wednesday there was a hole 2 meters deep dug for my latrine, trenches for the walls, a kitchen room had been added to the plans, and 1,200 bricks and the rest of the materials were being delivered in front of my house. “What country am I in again???,” I thought to myself. Winter. That’s what country.

Over the next few days they finished the two rooms and installed the pipes for the shower. I was speechless and happy. It’s amazing and a little sad how happy it made me to have my very own hole to pee in. The shower is really the kicker, though. It’s mortared-over brick, which is way nicer than both a bucket and my host family’s rotting wood floorboards. Although it’s still pretty open and the dirt gets in, but at least I can wash it away every day. I did, however, discover a simple way to turn my regular old bar soap into a 100% natural exfoliating soap; simply drop it from time to time. With the fine grit and all it makes a very nice natural clay exfoliant. The kitchen room is a great addition as well. It only raised the price of the project $30 and now I have a separate area for my refrigerator and stove. This really opens up my floorspace and now I even have a little sitting area, which is great because I like it when people come hang out at my house but before it just lacked the right pizzazz as a venue for that kind of thing. This week I taught my host mom how to make carrot cake and we hung out at my house all afternoon talking about recipes and gardening. It was so great! It was a good way to spend time with my host mom, and also teach a recipe that uses vegetables. In Paraguay even when people do have vegetables they don’t really use them except for raw in salads because they just don’t know how to cook with them, so actually cooking with Paraguayans fits in with the nutrition part of my project. I can see a lot more of that kinda thing in my future now that my room isn’t so cluttered with all my stuff. It’ll also be nice when the kiddies come over to color, which has now become part of my daily routine.

I´m working more with the bees to get ready for the spring season, and I´ve started to work with the schools as well. That´s a whole other blog entry and I´d like to do it justice, so I´ll save that for next time. Take care, friends!

Jajotopata,

Sarah

From Site, 8/4/07

The other morning was rather interesting. My bathroom was not yet complete, and so I was walking to my family’s latrine. I was still half-asleep and bleary-eyed, sort of stumbling really, when out of nowhere I came under attack by a squadron of geese. Now, for those of you out there with goose experience this will come as no surprise. Over the months here I’ve come to believe that geese are surely the closest living relative to the pterodactyl.

When I first got to site I toyed with the idea of getting some geese since I had decided not to get a dog. You can’t train geese to sit or roll over, but they do serve as “watchdogs” because they make noise when people approach. Months ago I asked my host mom how one might go about getting some geese. She told me her female goose lays eggs once or twice a year and that next time she goes into heat I could have the eggs and raise the goslings as my own. “Great!” I thought—Something I can do with my host mom and free goslings to boot. What could be better?

Over the following months my enthusiasm for geese waned rapidly. Quite often when I go visit my family I am first greeted by them, squawking their heads off and waddling threateningly towards me. There’s something creepy about how they come at you: butts wagging purposefully back and forth with breast and lower neck flattening down parallel to the ground, their upper neck sticking menacingly into the air with beaks wide open so you can see straight down their honking hollow necks. To top it all off their beaks are serrated. Serrated. It’s like they’re trying to show you that they can swallow your whole arm if they really wanted to. Thankfully, they move around throughout the day and they’re not always right there to see me come in. I try to remember to scan the area for geese when I approach and strategize my path in order to slip in under the radar. It doesn’t always work. The worst is when I have to use my family’s latrine in the middle of the night and I set them off at full volume. Sometimes it wakes up my family and they come out to see what the commotion is, and there I am at 3am yelling in Guarani through the outhouse stall that it’s just me and not to worry while the geese are going into hysterics outside.

Well, I guess it was because I wasn’t fully awake, but I didn’t remember to scan the area for geese the other morning as I approached the outhouse. I heard them before I saw them. I just kept walking, hoping to reach the door before they could surround me. No such luck. Usually they just kinda threaten me and maybe do a few goose shadowboxing maneuvers, but this time was different. Without hesitation the female laid into the leg of my pants with her beak and started thrashing back and forth. She was flapping her wings against my legs as hard as she could, which come to find out is pretty darn hard. It left some marks. The three males were flapping around her too, but their blows were just glancing my ankles. I knew better than to stick my fingers within reach, so I tried to swing about wildly with my other foot to scare her away. Thankfully my balance is pretty good or I might have met a grim end right there in front of the outhouse. I was only wearing my Crocs, so the foot protection wasn’t all that great, but at least it was better than flip flops. Finally after about 10 seconds of full-on pummeling she released her snapping-turtle-death-grip on my pants, and started to waddle away a bit, still squawking her head off over her shoulder for good measure.

I took a glance around and noticed that no one had witnessed this little encounter, and to be honest I was kinda disappointed. When something like that happens the least you deserve is for someone to laugh at you and with you for how ridiculous you undoubtedly were at the time. Oh well. There’s always next time.

After doing my business I burst through the doors and made a run for it back to my house. They were right outside the latrine while I was in there and it soon became clear to me that they were not leaving. They remained stationed around the latrine for the next few days, guarding it presumably. I was afraid this would come to be a real problem, what with digestion and all, but luckily my own latrine was completed right around the same time. Later my host mother mentioned to me that the female goose had finally gone into heat and for that reason was being extra feisty. I’ll say. I told her they chased me down and attacked me and she laughed at me a lot. She asked me with a smile if I wanted the eggs and I declined. I told her that after being attacked I wasn’t so inclined to raise them for goslings but I’d be happy to take them if they were fried and on a plate with a side of mandioca.

From site, 7/11/07

Well, I’ve been back here in Paraguay after a whirlwind visit back to the homeland. I’m pleased to say I enjoyed my visit to the states immensely (which is an understatement), but also that I wish that I had had more time to visit more people and spend more time catching up. Two weeks was not enough!

I had some anxiety about returning to Paraguay after seeing the states again. I’d heard stories about other volunteers who visited home early on in their service and who were miserable upon their return, having been reminded of all they were giving up by being here, how much they missed folks back home, etc. For some volunteers, it’s just too much and they decide they’re better off going home early after all. I really missed folks back home, so I decided to risk it. I was in a pretty decent place in my service before I left, so I was hoping that bouncing back would be bearable.

Though I enjoyed every second of being home, I am pleased and relieved to report that I’ve had just the opposite experience returning to Paraguay. When I got back to site I was so happy to see my host families. It made me realize how much I’ve bonded with them already. Also, I’d heard that some volunteers struggle with language after speaking so much English during their visit to the states, but I came back speaking and understanding considerably more Guarani than I had before. I think my brain just needed a rest from it to let my subconscious mind process all that language I’d been hearing. Now I am literally amazing myself on a daily basis. I almost always get the gist of conversations. I share mate’ tea with my host mom every day and we casually chat about all kinds of things. This depth and ease of communicating was not possible before. Who knew that the best way to jumpstart your Guarani is to hang out in Arkansas and Ohio for a while?!? Go figure.

I’ve chosen to come to this country twice now, and since my recent return I really have a sense of ownership of my time here that I hadn’t fully developed prior to my trip. I am excited about the remaining year and a half I have here; the work I have the opportunity to do, the people that are and will become my Paraguayan family and friends, all the wonderful things I will learn along the way. My attitude is noticeably better. I am so much quicker to laugh and I feel a sense of relief. Most of all, I’m having a lot more fun.

Being back on my home turf reinforced for me just how different life really is here. It also made it clear how different it is for me to be in Paraguay as a cultural minority. (When I first arrived at the Miami airport it actually felt odd to be in public without being stared at.) But I think as a result I’m much more at peace with my role as a total outsider. When I first got to site I felt claustrophobic with all the attention to my differences, especially given the fact that Paraguayan culture is very homogenous and does not tend to value diversity. A few months ago I had a conversation with a college buddy of mine who is living in Italy and we commiserated with each other, both of us being cultural outsiders. I recall whining to her about the conformity and saying that I felt like I was living in an Amish community where everyone speaks Guarani. But after spending some time in my own culture again I am eager and even tickled to point out my differences to Paraguayans, to share my American-ness with them, to say “Look how we’re different! HA!” and laugh about it together. Part of this is because I was reminded throughout my visit of all the truly great aspects of American culture. I’ve never felt more pride for my country—for the incredible opportunities it presents to individuals, for the variety of culture, art and industry, for the unshakeable faith we have in striving towards something better. Another part of it is because I realized that perhaps the most important thing that I can share with them as an American is a willingness to publicly appreciate the differences in myself and others.

Being in the states also showed me just how accustomed to Paraguayan culture I really am. First of all, nothing bothered me. And I mean nothing. Ask any Paraguayan to describe Paraguay in one word, and they will say “tranquilo” (tranquil, peaceful). Paraguayans do not get ruffled or upset. They do not get stressed out. This is in no way due to the fact that things don’t go wrong here. Quite the contrary, actually. You can pretty much count on stuff to screw up in any number of ways. But when things do mess up, Paraguayans don’t let it stop them from enjoying themselves and they don’t see it as a Problem That Must Be Eliminated At All Costs. They don’t let it raise their blood pressure and they don’t seek vindication through temper tantrums or hissy fits. Instead they see the messiness as a natural part of life and just deal with it. In fact, I suspect that Paraguayans love the unpredictability of life and even count on it to keep them entertained. They would never understand why someone would want things to be completely predictable.

But in America people can get upset at the tiniest of inconveniences, the most miniscule grievance or simply something unexpected. (Road rage, anyone?) And the funny thing is, life is so easy in America. Everything is so convenient; everything you need is more or less available, things are more or less reliable, and there’s usually help to be found if you just keep asking the right questions long enough. As a result, I think we tend to go overboard when anything at all goes haywire. The standard response to life’s little trials in Paraguay is “Tranquilo, no mas!,” which roughly means “Peace, it’s all good.” It’s the Hakuna Matata of Spanish. I can’t even tell you how many times I thought to myself “Tranquilo, no mas!” during my visit. Truthfully, I was pretty tranquilo as Americans go before living in Paraguay, but a deeper change has taken place. Tranquilo is not just a phrase; in Paraguay it is a philosophy of life. In this sense I’ve been acculturated to Paraguay in a deep way.

Here’s an example. Finding a parking space. In the United States, some consider a close parking space a moral entitlement as a consumer, if not an inalienable right of citizenship. At one point during my visit I was staring longingly from the back seat of our car at a restaurant full of wonderful food I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about in months. My mouth was already watering and I had a slight pang of anxiety when it occurred to me that I couldn’t order everything and that I’d have to make a decision from a large number of choices, which is something I just don't do much of these days. As I was mulling this over we circled the rather small parking lot, yet again, in search for a closer parking spot, passing up all the empty but perfectly good spots towards the back. I was suddenly struck with an absurd sense of straddling two cultures as a picture flashed in my mind: I am dropped off by the bus on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It’s 5km away from where I hoped I'd be dropped off. I’ve been shopping and I have a lot to carry. It’s in the hottest part of the day and the bus pulls off in a cloud of dry dust that chokes me and forces my eyes shut. There is no breeze and the dust hangs suspended in the air like a fog. The very old lady who got off with me asks me where my bike is. I tell her I left it at home this time. She jokes that she left hers behind as well. “Caminando, caminando…,” she says, and we both laugh. (“Walking, walking..”) We both pick up our bags, say goodbye, and start walking our separate ways.

Another example. While taking the bus back from Asuncion earlier this month we started having engine trouble. The road to Concepcion goes through the Chaco region, which is some of the last truly wild country in the world. The region makes up over 60% of the land mass of Paraguay, but only 2% of the population lives there. It’s that wild. Like badlands. Thankfully we made it to Pozo Colorado, which is a town about halfway. We were stuck at the gas station while they worked on the engine. No one complained. Paraguayans saw it as an opportunity to go inside the gas station and watch the Cup of the America’s soccer game. It was a big night of the tournament, after all, since Paraguay was playing the United States and nothing brings lighthearted joy to the rest of the world like America’s utter inability to succeed at soccer. (Final score: Paraguay 7, USA 0.)

Luckily I was with another volunteer. We decided we might as well get a few beers since we had a wait. She went in to buy the beer and everyone was so absorbed in the game that the attendant told her to go behind the counter and just grab what she wanted, then bring him the money. Finally we were up and running again, but about an hour later we broke down again. So there we were in the middle of the Chaco at night, bus broken down, no other cars around. In America as soon as the engine cut out there would be an audible response, nervous laughter at first and then people getting cranky or frantically upset. In Paraguay? Nothing. No complaining. Nothing. Tranquilo, no mas. I turned to the volunteer next to me and said, “Ya know, if they have to send another bus we won’t make it into Concepcion until tomorrow morning.” Being also acculturated to things in Paraguay, she said “Nope, sure won’t,” laughed, and popped open a beer. What did we have to complain about? We had comfortable seats, good company, crackers if we got hungry, an iPod full of music, and there was even a toilet on the bus. Tranquilo.

And so the long and short of it is that I’m feeling a lot more comfortable here. There’s not a whole lot of work to do right now since it’s winter and that’s downtime for the bees, but I’m trying to keep busy in other ways. I finished seeding my garden and it’s growing nicely. I went to the school to talk to the director about teaching, which I’ll begin doing after their vacation is over in a week. So I’m preparing for that. Been doing some coloring with the kiddies. I’m finding it ever more enjoyable (and easier in many ways) to work with the kids, and so I’ll probably be doing more of that. I’ve been invited to help out with a weekly radio show that two volunteers do over in Horqueta, which should be amusing to say the least. They usually do it in Spanish, so maybe they’ll let me come on as the volunteer that makes all the listeners laugh by trying to speak Guarani on the air.

Two other really amusing and fun things since I’ve been back: I went to a birthday party for one of the volunteers in Horqueta, who come to find out does fire-dancing. (Actually it’s called poi, if you want to look it up.) You sure meet some interesting people in Peace Corps! She broke out the kerosene and special Kevlar-tipped chains during the party and put on quite a show right there on the patio. It was incredible! Later she taught me a few of the moves, but of course when they were not aflame. I have since crafted my very own practice set out of two cans of baking powder, some rope, a bit of ribbon, safety pins, and dirt. I’ve been having a ball practicing and my host families, who have long since decided I’m nuts, are amused to say the least. (Talk about being comfortable sharing my differences!) I have no plans to EVER try it with fire (Mom...), given my natural clumsiness and regrettable flammability, but its a lot of fun nonetheless and an experience I won’t soon forget!

Also, I brought my mountain dulcimer back from the states with me and I’ve been playing it a lot. Nothing says “tranquilo” like the sound of a mountain dulcimer in the campo. My host families love it; it blows their minds, which always tickles me. Try as they might, they can’t say “dulcimer,” so they call it my baraka’i which means “little guitar” in Guarani. I’ve tried to explain that it’s just as strange and rare to most people in the US as it is to them, but I’m not sure if they believe me. Ha! I've really missed playing it and I love that I can share one of my favorite parts of American culture—the folk music—with my families here. It's one of those warm-fuzzy Peace Corps moments. (I'm also proud to take credit for bringing the frisbee to Colonia Roberto L. Petit, Paraguay.)

Here's a warm-fuzzy for ya: One night my host mom showed up on my doorstop after dark. I was cooking eggs. She told me a Señor had come and that she wanted very much for me to come sing and play my dulcimer for him. So of course I grabbed my baraka’i and off we went. I ended up sitting on the front porch with 12 other people, playing my dulcimer and singing “Where the Soul Never Dies,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” followed with a 10 minute or so improv jam session. It was so much fun! Only later when they asked me to come into the house for a prayer did I realize that it was a baptism for my host nephew and that I was the band! HA! That’s Peace Corps life for ya—you never really know what’s going on, but you just hang in there and hope to have some fun along the way!

Peace, Love, and Tranquilo,

Sarah

From site, May 17th

For the last month or so I’ve been working a lot on getting my garden up and running. It’s been an enormous undertaking. For starters, it’s enormous. I wanted to make it so that it would not only provide me with a steady stream of fresh vegetables to improve my dismal diet, but also so that I could use it as a teaching tool for my work. So I’m taking the all-American approach and making it twice as big as the average garden in my community. Keep in mind that the average garden around here usually feeds a family of 10-12. Times two. Everybody either thinks I’m nuts or wants to buddy up with me, anticipating a torrent stream of vegetables that I can’t possibly eat all by myself. If all goes well they will be right, although I’m also hoping that a side-effect of a gluttonous harvest will be an opportunity to dabble with (and teach) food preservation techniques, which are pretty unknown here as far as I can tell.

I’ve divided the plot into two sections, though, and I will only plant one side at a time with vegetables. The other side I’ll use to plant a demonstration plot of green manures and cover crops, and I might phase in chickens later if I can get a good living fence going to divide the two sections. Each season I’ll switch sides to take advantage of the fertilizer and the improved soil on the one side, giving the soil on the other side time to rest after the vegetables while at the same time building up humus and creating an overall more fertile soil. Doesn’t that make you feel all tingly?

I’m afraid that “all tingly” was my guiding emotion as I set out on this project, to the exclusion of reason, common sense and self-preservation. See, I decided to put my garden in the only place in my entire yard where I had yet to clear-cut the original grass at least once. This stuff hadn’t been touched, mostly because it was the thickest grass as far as the eye can see and it was off in a corner, so it didn’t really bother me to keep the “natural” look.

But as a garden spot it has advantages. It gets a lot of good sun on one side, and not as much on the other, which means I can garden in the sunny side in the winter and the shadier side during the summer. The summer here gets so hot that shade is not an option if you want to grow anything during the hotter months. Also, it’s right by the road, which means that everybody will see it and hopefully wonder what the crazy American girl is up to now. If past experience is a reliable judge, everyone will want to come in and see everything that I have in there. Fabulous, I say. Let the teaching moments begin. My host mother warned that the “kiddies” might jump the fence and steal my vegetables, which doesn’t bother me too much either, since I’ll probably have a lot of them, and at least they’ll be getting some vitamins and a subconscious education in diversified garden layout and proper mulching practices. Finally, the soil there is probably some of the best in my yard. If you dig down a little it’s dark brown, which is truly unusual around here. The thick grass growing on it also suggests it has a good capacity for cranking out biomass. You can tell a lot about a soil’s fertility by looking at what kinds of weeds it is growing.

So the decision had been made. That’s where I was going to garden. I told my host family, who immediately thought (yet again) I had gone completely insane. I’m pretty sure they took it as conclusive evidence that I have no idea what I’m doing after all. They suggested I put my garden in with theirs, which I was trying to avoid because I didn’t want their garden to become my garden (and thus risk their working in the garden to become my working in the garden), and also because I wanted enough space to try out lots of crops and techniques without the risk of starving my poor family to death. Besides, their garden is hidden away and I wanted something more visible, “kiddies” or not.

They tried to explain to me how hard it would be to clear the land. I told them I didn’t mind the work. “We’ll burn it instead,” my host father decided, which for a Peace Corps Volunteer is almost the last thing you want to do as an official promoter of sustainable and safe agricultural practices. I politely said thanks-but-no-thanks, desperately wishing I knew enough Guarani to explain the intricacies of organic matter and the vital role of microorganisms, and then he suggested the last thing a Peace Corps Volunteer wants to do: “We can put a lot of poison on it. That’ll kill everything, but you have to wait a while to plant because it’s all covered in poison,” he explained. I shuddered to think of the kinds of poison you can legally obtain around here to clear some land. Again I thanks-but-no-thanksed, and insisted I would do it with a machete and a hoe. I cut all that grass before, how hard could it be, right? He again brought up the thick roots, and told me it “couldn’t be done,” which if you’ve read my previous journals, you know how I react to being told such things.

Realistically, I’ve done enough landscaping to know that grass roots are persistent little buggers, but I was planning to dig them out significantly. Since I was going to make the beds using the double-dig method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biointensive) it was a given they’d be dug out. And the other parts and the whole other side was going to be planted immediately in a cover crop, which should grow faster than, and shade out any remnants of, the original grass. I even had an ace-in-the-hole, which at that moment I chose to pull out.

“Can I please borrow your pig?” I asked, in perfect Guarani (I’d even checked with my language teacher weeks before). I had been waiting to ask that question ever since I read the section on swine in my Introduction to Permaculture book. (Can you blame me?) My host mom and dad and several siblings blinked at me for a second, then burst into laughter. Come to find out that’s every bit as funny in Guarani as it is in English. “Pigs like to dig,” I explained. I would cut the grass down to the ground, put up the fence, and then let the pig go to it for a while. Pigs are champion weeders, and they’ll dig out just about anything if left to forage in a confined area. My family, being familiar with the tendencies of swine, were impressed. After they stopped laughing and complimenting my clever use of pigs, they explained that I didn’t want to borrow their pig because their pig is “crazy,” but that I could probably borrow the pig across the street, which is “not so much.” Fantastic, my plan was unfolding.

Much to my dismay, I was never able to borrow a pig. In fact, I’m still waiting on my #$@%^@g fence. I could have borrowed a pig if the fence was up, but as it happened, it took about two weeks just to cut the planks (and I was paying the guy, probably too much), and then they sat there in a pile in front of my house for another two weeks. I was told it would take a day. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to Paraguayan construction timetables. At any rate, while all this was happening I was cutting the grass. It became abundantly clear to me that if I waited to start hoeing until all the grass was cut, then it would all grow back before I could get back around to the beginning. So I did it in sections, first thinning it out and slashing it down and then hoeing up the roots as best as I could. What this effectively means is that I did all the pig’s work. And man am I tired. The roots were so thick that the hoe didn’t really do it either. I almost broke my hoe, to say nothing of my self. I ended up having to go back for a third round of heaving up clods with a shovel, and then a fourth and final round of hoeing, yet again. I still have a few square yards to go, but for the most part it’s all done and ready to be seeded.

As I sit and write this I can actually hear my fence being put up. Finally. It is a beautiful sound. And I am inside resting with my feet up in warm, fuzzy socks, enjoying homemade buttermilk biscuits with homemade butter, and letting the Advil take effect. I’d really like to say that I’m taking this well-deserved and desperately-needed moment of convalescence due to some moment of clarity; some stirrings of self-preservation among a maelstrom of persistent, shocking stupidity, but alas that is not the case. They are using my shovel, and so I can’t work right now.

I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m some kind of glutton for punishment. I did join the Peace Corps, after all. But I think it’s more likely that I just have a landscaping problem. I started doing it after high school because my friends were doing it. I could even earn a little money on the side. What’s the harm, right? Before I knew it, it became an every weekend thing. I started pushing the good stuff on all the casual gardeners I knew, “Try these Swiss-made Felco© No. 2 Bypass Pruners—you’ll never go back.” Blisters, muscle aches, thorns, sunburns and green snot didn’t slow me down. And look what it’s come to now. Cold, tired, irritable, sore, calloused and yearning for a shovel. And it’s even raining a little, for God’s sake.

The other day I barely managed to stop myself from buying a beautiful orchid from a street vendor in Asuncion. They’re all over the place here, but serious gardeners know that orchids are the Hotel California of horticulture. There are gardeners, and then there are orchid people. Lord, give me strength.

Clearly out of control, September 2006

Let this be a lesson to all of you. Don’t let it happen to you. Get your vegetables at your local farmers’ market and never look back. And whatever you do, never count on borrowing a pig.

When I got back to my site after a week of intense Guarani-speaking during in-service training, I was feeling pretty upbeat about my language skills. I pretty much shocked myself with how well I did, and all in all I was feeling like a super guapa volunteer (which in Paraguay means “hardworking” and everywhere else means “handsome," for reasons that will never be clear to me).

The best advice I’ve ever been given about being a PCV was from Lori, another volunteer in up in Concepcion. Her mantra: You can’t get too happy. At first I thought that was a rather fatalistic and darkly amusing way to look at the challenges of life here. In time I have come to see it as plain old pragmatic wisdom, suitable for any decent fortune cookie or issue of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Maybe it was because I was back in the relatively protected and structured world of training, maybe it was because I was around other Americans and I started to slip, but yes my friends, I got too happy. I returned to site all charged up to keep riding the wave of Guarani proficiency I had been on all week. I was eager to show my community what a guapa volunteer they had in their midst, fully prepared at a moment’s notice to compose complete sentences if called to do so.

However, I returned to a version of Guarani that was barely recognizable. For the first time I had the ears to hear it; after speaking Guarani for a week with teachers and city people it was abundantly clear just how different they speak back at my site. Toto, we’re not in Guarambare anymore. More like the west Texas of Paraguay. I soon realized that the only thing more depressing that thinking “I am completely unable to communicate and I’m probably not working hard/smart enough,” is “I am completely unable to communicate because my neighbors don’t really speak in syllables nor do they have teeth, and there’s nothing I can do to change how they talk.” It was a bummer. I wish I could organize some kind of international trade deal to bring syllables to the Paraguayan countryside by taking extra syllables from places they aren't needed, like old George Jones songs. (For example, "wall" does not need 7 syllables. "Nerentendeipiko" deserves at least 2 or 3.)

So in light of this, I decided I should try to remind myself of the things I like about Guarani. It’s really a fascinating language and the way that meaning is created is really unique and special. Oftentimes words convey meaning by stringing together several smaller words or syllables (well...) that signify more basic things. The combinations are sometimes truly amusing or profound. At the least, they almost always provide a new way of looking at the word itself. Below are some of the more interesting ones I’ve come across. Enjoy, che amigo kuera!

Guarani-- Basic Translation-- Literal translation (more literal anyway..)

Yvyramata -- tree -- The water for the part that will be the stem OR The soil for which is destined to be the stem/plant

Cuñatãi -- Young lady (señorita) -- Woman with teeth (see what I mean?!?)

Vakapipopo -- Soccer ball -- Jumping cow skin

Ype -- Duck -- In water

Avañe’ẽ -- Guarani -- Native speak OR Speech of man

Karaiñe’ẽ -- Spanish -- Señor speak

Karaiveve -- Angel -- Flying Señor

Yvypóra -- Man -- Dirt phantom

Yvytimbo -- Dust -- Dirt smoke

Tatakuáa -- Smokehouse -- It knows fire

Kuatiañe’ẽ -- Book/Newspaper -- Talking paper

Ñandukavaju -- Tarantula -- Horse spider

Ñandejárañe’ẽ -- Evangelist -- Speaks Our Father

Avati ku’i -- Cornmeal -- Corn that’s small

Kuarahy osẽhápe -- East -- The place where the sun comes from

Mbo’ekuaa -- Persuasion -- Knowing how to teach

Mbo’epochy -- Subversion -- Angry teaching

Mba’apo -- Work -- By means of the hand

Po -- Five/Hand -- Five/Hand

Yvy guỳpe -- Mole -- Under the dirt

ñe’ẽpoty/ñe’ẽyvoty -- Poem -- Flower talk/Blossom talk

kuarahyjereha -- Sunflower -- It carries itself to the sun

Well, here I am again after a good while. A lot has happened since my last entry. First of all, my house. I am now living in it and have been since around March 20th or so. I only got electricity this past week, and for several weeks there were large gaps between the boards that make up my walls since they hadn’t added the little runner boards between them to close the gaps. Concepcion is known for its strong winds. As a result so much dirt would blow into my house that I would sweep up about half a coffee cup of stuff from my floor every morning. I developed a cold, which turned into a lung infection, and I can’t help but think the giant chamber of swirling dust that was my home is partly to blame. Also, I don’t recommend living without a refrigerator.

On March 22nd was my official site presentation to the community. I spent the week or so beforehand visiting every family in my community to deliver invitations and introduce myself. This was very good, as it forced me to go out there and meet everyone I hadn’t met yet, and afterwards I felt much better and more settled in the community. I also met many nice people and several potential contacts for future projects. And now everybody knows who that funny blonde girl is who always rides by on a bicycle and waves like an idiot. (I recently found out that in Paraguay waving in means “come here.” So basically I’ve been inviting complete strangers to a game of chase as a zip by on my bike.)

My site presentation itself went incredibly well. There were probably around 20 people there; a very good turnout from what I understand, and there weren’t even any snacks. My boss and his assistant, a former crop extension volunteer, gave a nice presentation on what Peace Corps is, the work that we do, and what resources I can offer the community. We did an activity where the Paraguayans got together and listed their expectations of me and what they had to offer me, and I did the same of them. Then we compared notes. It was all very nice and in the end I think people felt optimistic about the work we can do together over the next two years. I was definitely on a high myself coming out of it, and very much looking forward to taking advantage of the momentum it created and getting down to work.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. I went from maybe my highest point at site to my lowest, literally overnight. After my site presentation I took advantage of the free ride in the Peace Corps vehicle and went into Concepcion to celebrate the successful presentation with my nearest PCV neighbor. We had a great time. But when I got back to my site on Saturday, everything changed. Late that night, one of the sisters in my host family committed suicide. She hung herself under the mango tree in the back patio. It was already dark, and I was asleep in my house when I heard the screams. They started all at once and didn’t stop. I’ve never heard a sound so terrible. It was the most bone-chillingly raw sound I have ever heard. I didn’t know humans could make sounds like that. I didn’t know what to think. In my half-sleep it took a minute to register that they were coming from next door, then that they were human cries. I was dumbfounded.

Scenario after possible scenario played through my heard, each one making very little sense, seeming so unlikely. I was afraid something terribly dangerous was going on. With anguish I went back and forth between feeling an obligation to run over and see if I could help, and gripping fear of going out of my way to become involved. What if something violent was happening and going over there would put me in danger? Did I want to become a witness against someone in my host family? Would I have to move to a different house, or even a new site in another part of the country? But what if someone was injured and there was something I could do to help them? Surely they would come and get me if that was the case, I thought to myself. They know I have a medical kit; that’s the first thing they would think of. They had told me never to leave my house after dark; surely they would come to get me. But they didn’t, and I sat there agonizing like some kind of Hamlet, immobilized by the moral debate raging inside my head. I heard a motorcycle start up and speed away, then another. They weren’t headed towards Concepcion, where there is a hospital, or towards the police station or even the local health post. They went the other way, and I was afraid someone was trying to get away. But like I said, nothing made sense. I couldn’t imagine my host family members doing anything so violent or wrong; nothing that could justify the screaming that I was hearing that didn’t stop. It never crossed my mind that it could be a suicide.

The family wailed and screamed for about four and a half hours without stopping, then there was silence. Towards the end they were screaming words, and I was able to understand enough of the Guarani to know that somebody had died. Whatever had happened was over. I fell into a fitful sleep for a few hours until the morning came.

The next morning I found out what had happened. I was shocked, but in retrospect it seems to make more sense. Who can really say why she did it, but she’d been having a lot of troubles the last few months and was in a really tight spot in a lot of ways. I imagine she just wanted out. The short version of the story is that she tried to go to Spain twice to work, was turned back at the airport in Spain once, and then the second time missed her flight due to an accident. Her family was in debt for the two tickets, a huge amount of money for them, and then she was going to need ongoing medical treatments for the accident that were of astronomical expense. If they could even scrape together the money, and I doubt it, it would take everything they had. Everything. And so maybe she wanted to spare them of that. I don’t know. It’s so hard to know anything in Paraguay for sure; there are never a shortage of versions to any truth.

The problem for me has been explaining to people why I did not leave my house. I tell them I was afraid and didn’t understand what I was hearing. I think many people understand, but I know there are some that do not. When Paraguayans heard the noise, they immediately understood it to be the sounds of mourning. With no cultural context for such a sound, I was paralyzed by fear. In the US, when you hear a sound like that you don’t usually go knocking. Relatively speaking, in American culture there is a tendency towards non-intervention in other people’s bad luck, to say nothing of tragedies. There is much more social distance between people; Paraguay is nothing like that. I know in large part my decision to stay was culturally driven, but on a personal level part of me feels ashamed. The incident brought into vivid relief a cultural tendency that does not represent the best of Americans; as a culture we are relatively distant and even cold to our neighbors. Normal relationship patterns in the states are unthinkable here. Normal behavior here is inscrutable to me, or at the least it takes me off guard. As I watched the rituals of grief and death and burial over the next few days—the way they lay their grief wide open and let it overtake them to get it out, the way they didn’t shy away from the body but grabbed it with both hands and shook her, asking why, talking to her and holding her hand—I began to realize that maybe I had a lot more to learn about the culture here, and my own, than I had previously thought. I realized I had no idea what was culturally expected of me.

The next week I pulled out one of the books that Peace Corps gave me during training. The book is called Culture Matters and it deals with how volunteers struggle to understand cultural differences. It covers the differences between American culture and the general tendencies of the cultures where most volunteers serve. It shows how easily misunderstandings arise when people view the same situations through different cultural “eyes”. So far in site it seemed to me that people weren’t too fazed by my behavior, more just curious, but as the book pointed out people very likely “faze” differently in other cultures, but I’m just not recognizing the signs. A lot of the situations that have frustrated me or that have seemed rude to me made more sense after reading about how someone from another culture might view the same situation. It really helped connect a lot of dots for me, and also made me realize just how differently Paraguayans might view my behavior than I do, and vice versa.

There were little quizzes in the book that presented situations and asked how you would react. Come to find out, other than a regrettable yet persistent tendency to completely lose track of time, I am just about as American in my outlook as I could possibly be. So American it hurts. My communication preference: direct rather than indirect. My sense of justice and proper dealings: universalist rather than particularist. My comfort level with status: egalitarian rather than high status difference. The list goes on. An example: Not only am I completely missing it when people try to tell me things indirectly, but I could very well be seen as rude when I try to communicate directly. Paraguayans will never give you a straight “no,” but they will give you a qualified “yes” (i.e. “yes, if you like,” “yes, that’s possible,” or “yes, is that what you want?”) when they really mean “no.” Misunderstandings like this have made scheduling visits and work very frustrating these first few months. When plans “fell though” I came away thinking they were rude or irresponsible, and they probably thought I was either completely dense or downright pushy. As far as they were concerned they had told me no, as far as I knew they had told me yes.


American Girl in Italy by Ruth Orkin

So these are the things I’m trying to figure out right now. Just what the heck is going on. As hard and sad as it was to go through such a tragedy, now that I can step back from it I realize that in the end it has helped me begin to learn more about the cultural differences that I am facing. It was also the most incredible and intense intercultural experience of my life. When you join Peace Corps you expect it to be hard, but I almost feel like “hard” is not an appropriate word for it. Finding a parking space at the mall before Christmas is hard. Bathing a cat is hard. This.. this is something altogether different. I feel like there should be 32 words for “hard” that PCV’s can use to describe varying qualities of difficulty, just like Eskimos have 32 words for snow and some other language (I forget which) has something like 24 words for “love.”

But don’t get the wrong impression—there are good things going on right now too. Mostly, I now have a kitten and that makes me extremely happy. When the poor little guy arrived he was just a little bag of bones about to starve to death. He did nothing but eat and nap for 48 hours, during which he never stopped purring. Since I’ve never really had a cat, I honestly began to wonder if maybe they did that all the time and I just never noticed. His coat was softer the next day, and skin started to cover his jutting hips and backbone in two days. It made me feel good. If nothing else, right now I am helping this one Paraguayan, feline though he may be. I am also teaching English now to my contact's daughter, and finding it surprisingly enjoyable. I'll start teaching two more students the week I get back.

Also, this week I’m back in Guarambare for a training reconnect with my entire training group. I’m studying Guarani every day and staying with my host family at night. Come to find out, I can speak Guarani. This came as quite a surprise to me, since I still don’t understand hardly anything in my site and people there don’t usually understand me. But when I went back to my host family in Guarambare, we spoke all Guarani and I understood it all! We chatted for like 45 minutes and I only had to ask for clarification 3 times. (What?!?!?) And in language class, I’m basically tearin’ it up. This has put me in an incredibly good mood. It leads me to believe that maybe the communication gap isn’t totally my fault, and that maybe the people in my site just mumble all the time (most don’t have teeth), or simply don’t have the patience to listen well. They aren’t all that used to listening to people with accents. I think they just assume I’m making no sense, and so sorta tune me out sometimes. I’ll have to work on that. But the good news is that at least I do know the stuff after all, I’m not crazy, and if I just keep at it maybe we’ll start understanding each other better. And after this week I will be able to say even more. Hopefully it’ll make those endless terere sessions just a bit more bearable, and (dare I say) productive.

I miss you guys! Enjoy springtime for me. I miss it a lot. It’s finally starting to cool down here, and now I’m finding the downside to that: cold showers + cold weather = no fun.

Saludos,

Sarah

Holy Happy Hallelujah, Batman—I have a roof! Last Saturday eight guys from my community got together for one heck of a work day. After hours of backbreaking work, countless gallons of mud, enough tereré to float a barge, a few periods of heavy rain, and about 1,500 bundles of dried grass, I am proud to say that at least now I have a roof over my head. Figuratively speaking, of course, because I am not yet the owner of walls or a door. So though I do have a roof, it is not the one over my head, since I’m still living with a family.

If I had stopped to reflect on the matter for half a second, it would have occurred to me earlier that making a thatch roof would be a huge amount of work. Much more work than slapping a few sheets of corrugated metal up there and calling it a day, for sure. Of course, I had not given this much thought until I was knee-deep in it. To make a thatch roof you have to harvest the grass first, of course. It requires a certain kind of fibrous grass that meets a minimum height. There is nothing even remotely like pasture management here, and so the men had to literally wander around the fields looking for random clumps of the right kind of grass, and then pull it up by the roots. I suspect this is partially why it took so much time, and so many fields, to harvest enough for my small little house. After it is harvested there is a drying period, and then it is collected into bundles just big enough to get your hand around, and tied with a fresh coco palm frond.

When we started on Saturday all the grass had been harvested and dried, but only some had been bundled. A few men cut down some fronds from a nearby coco tree and got to work tying the bundles. When they were tied they would be handed off to someone else, who laid each bundle, one by one, on a tree stump and neatly trimmed the edges with a machete. Another small group dragged an old dead coco tree up to the house and began splitting it with an axe into long, narrow strips. These were handed off to two guys waiting on top of the framed-out roof, who nailed down the bars lengthwise to add structure to the roof and support the bundles. There was another guy in a corner of my yard digging what appeared to be a pond.

Through all this I didn’t have a clue what to do, so I just grabbed a machete and started cutting my grass like usual. If I was going to be useless to the guys, I figured the least I could do was to get some work done myself, and to be conspicuously hardworking. I hoped that eventually they would crack and realize that they might as well get some work out of me, even if it was of the most auxiliary variety, since I was clearly going to be working anyway. At first the effect backfired. Not all of the men who’d showed up to work had personally witnessed the Americana-macheteing-events of the past weeks. Doubtlessly they’d heard rumors, but I guess they just assumed it was another one of those tall tales that people like to tell for fun. Kind of like a myth or a fishing story. It became clear that some of them simply assumed that surely these people couldn’t mean I was REALLY using the machete, but rather I was simply doing something along the lines of holding it while I walked around my yard for hours at a time.

In the beginning I was sent for tereré several times. I was told my host sister was busily making it and that I should go get it and bring it back. Of course, when I asked her about it she had no idea what I was talking about. She made it anyway, but by the time I got back someone else had already brought some. At one point one of the guys tying bundles stopped and came to help me cut grass. I politely tried to explain that I could cut grass any old day, that the roof was the important thing today, and that I was only cutting grass because I didn’t know how to help with the roof. He laughed and started cutting grass so fast and so hard that I really and truly feared for his life and for all of us around him. If he lost his grip on that thing it could have sailed 70 yards. It could have brought down a cow across the street, maybe two. There was so much blood rushing to his face that veins were popping out and he was turning bright red; not a small feat for a man with such a chestnut complexion. I’ve seen guys when they cut the grass amongst themselves, and was this guy was doing was barely recognizable. It was like some kind of Saturday Night Live parody skit of a Paraguayan Machete Grass Massacre in fast-forward. I absolutely could not stop myself from laughing, which was fine because besides the fact that he was laughing as well (a bit manically), there was so much blood rushing through his skull that he couldn’t have heard a freight train derail.

We kept cutting for a few moments, and finally I asked, “Are you just doing this because I’m doing it?” He nodded and grinned and launched back into his homicidal grass slaying. I pointed out again that I really liked doing it, and that I actually wanted to do it. I directed his attention to the 1/2 to 3/4 of an acre of nicely trimmed grass around him, and boasted that I had done nearly all of it. He looked skeptical. Finally I said, “I really need your help with the roof. You know everything there is to know about making roofs, and I.. I don’t know anything.” Well, that did it. Back to the roof he went. Lord.

After the small pond hole was dug, the guys started carting in water in a 5 gallon or so container. I don’t know how many times they went back and forth, but it was borderline unbelievable how many trips they made. They were making a thick muddy soup to dip the bundles in so the roof would resist the rain better. The sandy-clay soil here is so devoid of organic matter that the water just flows right over it. This, by the way, is why everything floods so badly every time it rains and the road washes out so terribly. It’s also a big part of why the crops suffer so badly, because the water doesn’t penetrate well and the soil can’t actually absorb or retain much moisture at all. So the water was added and pretty soon we had a little pond that looked a lot like butterscotch pudding. Each of the bundles, about 3 feet long, were half submerged into the mud before being layered on the roof. They were pretty heavy after being dipped, there were a ton of them, and finally they decided to let me help as a pack mule. I couldn’t have been happier.

I have never been so dirty in my life, and for those of you who know me, you know that is a serious statement. The bundles slopped mud from my boots to my waist. You couldn’t even tell what color my pants were, but as luck would have it, they were the exact same color as the mud so staining wasn’t an issue. I stacked up the muddy bundles on my future front porch, and one of the guys handed the bundles up to two guys on the roof, who laid them and smoothed the mud. Jets of fresh mud sprayed from above as the men crafted the roof. I had mud on my face, in my hair, covering my hat. Mud made its way into my mouth and I couldn’t spit or drink enough to get out all the sand that crunched between my teeth.

Halfway through this ordeal it began to rain pretty hard. They covered the empty peak of the roof with a tarp and we all crouched inside to wait out the storm. They all got a big kick out of me when I told them that it suited me just fine to keep it like and call it a roof. Eventually the storm subsided to a light drizzle and we got back to work. We were slightly rejuvenated by the rest. The guy who had earlier massacred the grass with me was also carrying the muddy bundles over to the roof. There were two guys in the mud pit submerging the bundles, and they were handing out the bundles to each of us, one for each side. In a burst of energy Mr. Massacre grabbed his bundles and ran over to my side to get mine before I could make it back. As he was laughing hysterically and carrying the sloppy mass of goo over to the house, I ran over and grabbed the next set of bundles from his side before he got back. Everyone thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Paraguayans love to play jokes and have fun, and by all accounts I heard during training they love it even more if you can turn it back on them and join in the fun as well. So we did that for a while longer until I decided it got old, which for me was like twice more and for him ended up being more like 10 or 12 more times.

I couldn’t be happier about having a roof. I’ve also pretty much cleared my lot of grass, and it really looks like something now. I will probably make use of the giant hole they dug for the mud by turning it into a simple pond for some ducks and geese, based on a simple design from a fellow volunteer. He added a basic drain and diffusion gully to his which allows him to use the manured water to fertilize part of his garden whenever he cleans out the pond. I’d actually thought about doing that anyway, since I want ducks and (maybe) geese to help out with the grass cutting, so basically the guys just saved me the trouble of digging the hole. I’ll just need to dig the drain trench and spread a thin mortar mix to line the hole to help it hold water a little better.

Supposedly my house will be completed by March 22nd, which is when my boss comes to do my official presentation to the community. I’m making little invitations with Spanish on one side and Guaraní on the other to invite people from my community. I’m hoping to be able to do it at my house, as a sort of open house welcoming thing.

On Friday I went into Concepción to help out with an AIDS awareness workshop for teenagers put on through Peace Corps, Red Cross, and the Ministry of Public Health. I was able to get my community contact’s daughter to go, which made me very happy. There’s definitely a shortage of reliable, scientifically informed information available to people here, and it felt good to help make sure even one more person was exposed to actual facts about AIDS. It’s not a huge problem here, but it is growing at an alarming rate and there are superstitions or half-truths in abundance. After the workshop I went into Asunción because my dear parents, bless their hearts, have sent me a laptop for my upcoming birthday and I wanted to pick it up since (hopefully) I’ll be in my house soon. I am literally giddy with joy about this. I don’t miss my car, I don’t miss my TV, I don’t even miss my hot water too much, but I do miss my computer. In addition to keeping track of my work information in Excel, I plan to do a heck of a lot of writing with it over the next 22 months. I want to document what I can of my experiences. I also want to take advantage of my free time by accumulating as much material and practice for writing as I can. I do enjoy it quite a bit and I have learned that I lack the patience for a pen. Or maybe I just have too much to say. Highly likely.

I’ll head back to site on Monday morning on the bus. If I play my cards right it’ll be with a door and a window, and maybe even some pipes for running water. Miracle of miracles, the bus now drives right through my community again! The municipality sent out a tractor last week to level the road and make it passable again. I remember the days of complaining about the snow plows hadn’t cleared the roads in time for work in the morning. Here, it took two months for the city to make the roads passable again. My initial reaction? Not too bad. It could have been worse. I was expecting to have to wait until fall or winter. I suppose it helps that most people have motorcycles and can get in and out if they need to, but oh, how things are different here. :)

Last night on the phone my sister asked me, "So, what exactly is your job other than drinking tea with people and sometimes working bees?" A valid question. "That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out," I replied without having to think too hard about it. My job right now is to make contacts, learn language, figure out what the community wants, and to find my role in the community. To a large part I do not determine my role in the community, a fact that is becoming more clear to me lately. I especially understand this after talking to lots of other volunteers here in Asuncion going through the same thing. We all applied to Peace Corps for our own reasons, and we all had some vague idea about what we would be doing. I didn't really want to teach English. I wasn't so hot on the idea of teaching a lot in a classroom. My hazy vision involved a lot more work in the fields, with plants, and direct cooperation and planning with farmers. (And in this hazy vision I spoke the local language with breezy competence...) And some of those ideas may turn out to be more accurate as my service progresses, but for now I realize that to a large degree whether they happen or not is not up to me.

Now that I'm at site, sometimes work comes to me. One of my neighbors down the road is a teacher. She is a relatively well-educated and progressive woman. She speaks Spanish and we can actually discuss things in some detail. She wants me to come take a look at the computers at the school. They were donated from god-only-knows where. Supposedly they work, but no one knows how to use them. The teachers can't very well teach the kids how to operate them if they don't know themselves. She also has a son, who is about 14 years old. He is polite but shy around me, and I later discovered he was so flustered because he was mustering up the courage to ask if I would teach him English.

There are many things I can't do right now. I can't communicate well enough to really get a clear picture of what the situation is for the farmers--when they plant and plow and hoe and thin out, what kinds of bugs or diseases there are and how they address them, why they plant what they plant and how they decide how many hectares to devote to each crop, how they fertilize, whether they really have a reliable source of seeds they can afford, whether they are being cheated by their buyers, if they really understand that erosion is seriously limiting their yields, etc. Even if I can patch together a good question, I rarely understand the answer. Half the time even when I think I get the gist, I later discover that I'd misunderstood. I can't really express the biological cycles that underlie best practices in beekeeping, or even basic techniques in proper hive revisions. For my socios who only speak Guarani, I usually end up only being able to answer their repeated inquiries about when we can harvest the honey, and how many liters there might be. I can't explain in a clear, impactful way why their chickens aren't laying or why their pigs are taking twice as long to grow to half the size they could be. If they spoke and understood more Spanish, maybe I could give it a decent shot, but most people don't.

What I can do, though, is keep going out to the hives with people and send the message that it's important to revise regularly. I can take a look at the computers at the school. I can get on the ball and learn to teach ESL. I can go to the Agro products depot in town and find out what kinds of things are available there. I can talk to other volunteers about projects they've done to get ideas. I can learn everything I can about soil fertility and erosion management for tropical soils so when I do have the language skills, I will be prepared to present farmers with options to help increase their yields.

I'm not going to lie; this past month has been really tough. I was living the whole time with a family who understands virtually zero Spanish. After talking to other volunteers here in Asuncion, I realize that in terms of language my site is pretty extreme. Every volunteer is dealing with totally unique obstacles in their site, and mine are language and lack of transportation. I realize that though it's hard in the beginning with the language, there are many other obstacles I am not facing that might be harder to overcome, or at least less likely to ease with time. But the stress of facing it right now is intense and constant. Except for monthly visits to Asuncion, I never go home from work, so to speak. Even in the office I work to gather research materials, and getting around town I'm speaking Spanish. I get to talk to my friends in English, but it's always about our work. It is an odd job and nothing like jobs in the states.

By the time I left site earlier this week, I was starting to go crazy. I felt the need for an "outlet" so strongly that I decided that as a "gift" to myself I would bike the entire 32km in to Concepcion rather than riding a few km and taking a bus the rest of the way. I strapped my backpack to the bike rack, turned on upbeat music loud in my earphones, and pedaled out my stress like my life depended on it. At the time, it felt like it did. I had time to think, and between that and the excercise and the good, familiar music, I was a different person by the time I reached the city. After talking to other volunteers, I felt even better. I now have a clearer picture of what I need to be doing in my site. In a nutshell: forget about what I wish I could be doing and accept the work that is available to me right now, with whatever limitations, whatever it is. I also realized that doing so is the only way I can possibly be happy and avoid insanity. How's that for existential epiphany?

The farmers' committee in my community has graciously offered to volunteer their labor, without charge, to build my house. The idea is that I volunteer for them and so they want to volunteer for me. I appreciate this gesture very much, and I hope to return the favor in any way I am capable over the next two years. Most of the straw has been harvested for my roof, but not all. It's scarce right now, and I insisted on straw because it's 10 degrees cooler than the other options, like half-pipe tiles or corrugated metal. Hopefully it will all be harvested by the time I get back to site. After that we'll have everything we need for the house itself and construction can begin. I have no idea how long this will take, but I am hoping not very long. I am living now with a 3rd family, and though they speak much better Spanish (to say any at all), a large part of my cultural fatigue is because I don't have space or time to myself. I think I'll be a lot better off once the house is ready.

I've actually been working a lot with the bees, which has been wonderful. Last week I worked bees 5 days and probably got stung around 40 or 50 times. By the end of the week I noticed that the stings weren't swelling up anymore. How nice! I was hoping that would happen.

Now I'm in the office finishing up some research on ESL, techniques in agricultural extension, and small-scale irrigation systems, and gathering some materials to take back with me. I'm going to a meeting in a few minutes for the new Peace Corps seed bank that's starting up, and I'm pretty excited about that. Later tonight and all-PCV Bluegrass band will be playing at a pub here in Asuncion. I can't wait! Word is out that I have a history of pickin' and grinnin' on the mountain dulcimer. Watch out, Ascuncion! I'll probably head back to Concepcion early tomorrow, and then maybe bike back or take a bus if there is one. I haven't decided yet.

Peace, love, and existential awareness,

Sarah