Sworn-in!

I’m officially a volunteer!! Yay…and now my two years begin. Training ended with a very nice swearing-in ceremony in the municipality near our training-center. Two people from each host family were invited to attend (so we got to see all of our host-mamas dressed up in their finest).We had to take some oaths (to defend the US constitution, and an oath in Spanish, which unfortunately none of the volunteers quite understood), we ate a gigantic cake (apparently you only get this special cake for swearing-in and close-of-service).We also got another chance to shake hands with the American Ambassador (who gave a speech and made a joke in broken Spanish about how Obama’s swear-in oath was messed up). Then Peace Corps took us for our final ride (in our vans that we used during training) to Asuncion, where we got our bank cards and were suddenly volunteers.

Swear-ins (which take place a couple of times a year since there are four different sectors of volunteers beginning their service after a training cycle) are also the time for volunteers all over Paraguay to meet up in the Capitol. Friday afternoon, I attended two club meetings—one for the Seed-Bank club, a free resource for volunteers to introduce green manures/cover crops into their communities, and the other—a gender and diversity club, which organizes summer camps for Paraguayan youth so that they can learn about gender, religious and other type of diversity in Paraguay as well as receive leadership training. I also went to Ahendu (“I listen” in Guarani), a concert by volunteers/for volunteers. This year Koika, the Korean Peace Corps, were also invited to attend and perform—so I watched a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers rocking out to the Korean version of “I Feel Pretty” from West Side story.

On the way to my hotel, I saw my new favorite billboard, an advertisement for Jäger Condoms! This is their website (I wouldn’t open this at work): http://www.jagercondoms.com.ar/. Yeah, way better than jagermeister/McJagger/the Jaeger menswear store.

Also, realizing that I will soon be about 4 hours outside of the capitol in the Paraguayan countryside, I decided that this Saturday would be a good time to meet/find the Jewish community of Asuncion. In order to enter the Synagogue, I had to send them a letter from Peace Corps proving that I was a volunteer and they also scanned my passport at the gate. Despite this intensive security, the congregation that I met inside the Hebraica compound was really sweet. It seems like Friday night services are more egalitarian and Saturday morning services are leaning more towards Orthodox. Since I went to the Saturday morning services, it was very small, less than 20 people, and everyone was very welcoming. I was surprised to find out that this week was my bat-mitzvah portion (va’yeshlach), though unfortunately I wasn’t able to whip out any of my skillz because of the denomination of the services. After the prayers were over, there was a small kiddish, where we all sat around a large table and talked about the Torah portion.

It was very interested to suddenly change perspectives—most of the congregants (all Paraguayan) had no idea where Misiones (my site’s district/departmento) is located. They kept asking if it was in the Chaco (the desert/wasteland in the middle of the country). This was surprising since all the people in my rural training community (who generally don’t have access to maps and internet, and also are rarely able to travel the countryside) all know where it is. Also, since the Torah portion described the story of Jacob’s daughter Dinah attempting to date/marry non-Israelites, the conversation turned to intermarriage. It was pretty interesting to listen to this Paraguayan congregation of 20 (there are only about 1000 Jews in Paraguay) discussing intermarriage/ asking about non-matrilineal descent, and generally “what does it mean to be Jewish?” The Rabbi was in a bit of a bind, since it was technically an orthodox service, but he tried to present a spectrum of Jewish-law responses to the questions of matrilineal/patrilineal descent. Hopefully as I get to know the community more, I will have more of a chance to ask them what it is like to be Jewish and Paraguayan.

Not exactly sure when I will next have internet connection since I still have to find the cyber-café nearest to my site…but hopefully I will have up some more posts later this month!!

Yerba Mate aka the Diuretic Nectar of the Gods

So, I’ve been meaning to write a little something about Yerba Mate since arriving in Paraguay. For those of you who have heard of Yerba Mate before, I’m sorry that this may be a bit a repetitive, but then again, in Paraguay, where you can have three different variations of Yerba Mate before lunchtime, Yerba Mate is intrinsically a bit repetitive. Yerba Mate is a type of tea leaves (made from a Yerba Tree) that is very common in Paraguay as well as other places in South America (so folks from/who have been to Argentina have heard about it). In Paraguay, especially since coffee isn’t really a thing, Yerba Mate is kind of a staple/how you drink water. So far I have had four different preparations of Mate.

1. Mate—a hot drink. All you need is a thermos of boiling water, a cup (guampa), about ½ a cup of Yerba Mate leaves in the bottom of the guampa, a metal straw (bombilla), and two or more people. To serve, one person pours the hot water into the guampa containing the Yerba Mate, then dealing to the right, passes the guampa. The receiving Mate drinker/participant, sips up the boiling serving, and then passes the guampa back to the server. Server drinks last. There is a special verb for this type of Mate in guarani: Akay’u= I drink mate. This type of Yerba Mate tea is had first thing in the morning (while still picking sleep out of your eyes) and is more of a cold weather tea.
2. Cocido—this is Paraguayan tea. Take a metal spatula/fire mini-shovel. Place a couple spoonfuls of Yerba Mate on the shovel and in some cases sugar. Place coal from the fire on top of this mix and burn the Yerba Mate/caramelize the sugar. Dump this mixture (including the coal!) into a pot of boiling water. Pour 1 part water through a strainer into one part milk (preferably the milk should be straight from the cow, that you milked after drinking Mate) and eat with cookies or some other breakfast bisquity things. This is a breakfast drink!
3. Terere—this is Paraguayan ice-tea. Extremely essential in this hot country (last week it was about 110 degrees out and nobody has AC). Pull out that guampa (cup) with ½ of Yerba Mate leaves, bombilla (straw), and thermos of icy water (preferably with some mashed up remedial herbs mixed in). Server deals to the right (in the same manner as Mate, except this time the gringos don’t burn their tongues). Terere also has its own verb in guarani: aterere= I want to drink terere. Around nine am, Paraguayan snack time, is the traditional terere drinking time, but any “coffee break,” hangout time with family, or boring class, also qualify as good times to start passing the guampa.  Terere is both meant to relax (essential to the Paraguayan slogan of “tranquiiiiiilo”=everything is chill man) and to perk you back up (with the help of some remedial herbs like mint, lemon grass, etc).
4. Mate Dulce--this is a winter drink/its been raining for for days and it could be winter I'm so cold drink. If you take the instructions for Mate (category 1) and replace the thermos of boiling water with a boiling milk+sugar combination, you've got Mate Dulce. The combination of the bitter/earthy flavor of yerba mate and the sweet/creamy flavor of some fresh frothy milk is definitely my favorite, however, drinking boiling sugar through a metal straw (if the hot sugar doesn't burn the top of your mouth off, the blazing hot metal straw will) is not my favorite. A bit of a give and take situation. Luckily there are only two months of winter in Paraguay!!

In addition to the four different preparations of Yerba Mate, there are about three bazillion and seven traditions related to drinking (some form of) Yerba Mate in Paraguay. For example, the youngest person in the family is technically the server in the case of Mate, Terere, and Mate Dulce (which all involve passing the cup) and the order of serving is always to the right with the dealer last.

Here are two of my favorite traditions/stories of Yerba Mate that I have encountered so far in Paraguay

1. Santa Tomas (Saint Thomas)--the first serving of Terere (that's the "ice-tea" one) is traditionally reserved for Saint Thomas (and nobody gets to drink it). Since this serving is the first time the yerba mate leaves have had any water in them (they've just been scooped out of the tea box and placed in the bottom of the cup), the liquid produced is pretty bitter. In that case "Saint Thomas' Serving" is sipped through the straw and then spat over the shoulder. Sometimes, the dry tea leaves absorb all of the first serving of water as they rehydrate. In which case, it almost looks as if someone (perhaps a Saint) has drank all the water. Why Saint Thomas (and not Elijah)? It's a pun. In Spanish, "toma" means "he drinks" therefore Santa Tomas (pronounced Santa Toma) can also mean "The Saint drinks."
2. Terere + Watermelon = death by stomach explosion. A large part of Paraguayan food traditions have to do with bad mixtures, aka don't drink cold water while eating hot soup, don't eat hot dogs and ice cream in fast succession. The idea being that certain extreme opposites of temperature or types of food will cause a stomach-ache or fever. In terms of Paraguayan food tradition, watermelon is a very volatile fruit and is best had alone. But no matter what, one MUST NOT mix watermelon with Terere. Of course, after 3 months of intensive training and attempting to learn guarani (a language where at least half of the letters are pronounced nasally, and if you switch two letters you end up cursing someone out) a Peace Corps volunteer may begin to rebel/crack and purposely eat Terere and Watermelon together to annoy the language teachers/ wait to see if an explosion will actually occur. The results where definitely disappointing because a. no one exploded b. this seems to be breaking point which occurs with every group of PC trainees, and therefore the language teachers had a very "been there, done that, bought the t-shirt" sort of reaction.

That's all for now...

--Emily

Women's Comite and Change of Address

                In just under two weeks I will be moving out to my new community in southern Paraguay (aaah!). It feels a bit strange to be packing up again. Training is winding down (today we presented our Aspirantes en Accion projects—where I had worked on building a sun-shade with my neighbor) and the minute that the training community has started to feel familiar, we are beginning to say goodbye. On the one hand, this does give me some hope for my new community that after the first three months it will begin to feel like home. On the other hand I am going to miss my host family a lot!

 One of the things that has been kind of funny/taunting all of us agricultural volunteers is that here we are surrounded by trees and vines heavy with fruit that will be ripe the week after we move to our new site! I am talking mangoes, tons of grapes (“when we can’t eat anymore, we make it into wine”) papayas, guayabas, pears, peaches, pomelos etc. Last night my host sister was joking that I will be able to eat the grapes and watermelon with them by text message. Obviously there will be all these things in our future sites as well, but it’s difficult to have so much communal anticipation of the bumper crop (here it’s in January, think late July in the States) without being able to experience it with the community.

Yesterday we visited two different volunteers in the Cordillera region of Paraguay (kind of middle of the state, towards the east). In the morning we learned about banana farming (a bit of new territory coming from New England) and in the afternoon we did mini-lessons about chicken raising for a women’s comité. In Paraguay, one common way for groups to organize to do projects and receive municipal/government funding is through the formation of a comité. Though I am still learning the exact rules and regulations of a comité and how it is formed, the general idea is that they must consist of twelve or more individuals, they generally have presidents, VPs, and treasurers, they are registered through the local government and as mentioned above, comité members often work together on different projects.

Many communities have “women’s comité”s (my community has two) and one common project is raising chickens. The women each receive a certain amount of chicks sponsored by the government and occasionally a small starting amount of feed (in my community, the women receive 15 chickens and 4 kilos of feed, and they need to buy the remaining 20 kilos). While most families have free-range or “casero” chickens, the chickens they receive through the projects are bred to be meat chickens (they don’t live very long, they get big and juicy as quickly as possible, and have some other genetic tweaks). While the traditional method for raising chickens in Paraguay falls under “free-range,” the meat chickens require slightly different techniques (using chicken coops, balanced feed, etc) to achieve maximum deliciousness and (in the case of the women attempting to sell their chickens) the best price at the market. Our mini-lessons covered topics such as vaccination, keeping a clean chicken coop, and making feeders/waterers from recycled materials. I was really glad to have the practice because I will very likely be giving similar mini-lessons in my future community.

Since I am no longer going to be a trainee after the next two weeks, my official Peace Corps address is changing slightly (if any of you who promised me letters would like to send them by snail mail).

Emily Jaeger PCV

Cuerpo de Paz

162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López

Asunción 1580, Paraguay

South America

 

Mail sent to this address goes to the PC office in Asuncion, about a 3.5 hr bus ride from my site. Therefore, I will have access to this mail no more than once a month (possibly much less often). This second address is for the post-office in the nearest city to my site, which hopefully I will be visiting more often.

Emily Jaeger

Av. Monsen˜or Hojas

No. 664 c/Martin Maríallano

San Juan Bautista, Misiones, Paraguay

South America

(for some reason my computer does not know how to make a normal “enya” on the word monsenor…sorry!).

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving from Paraguay! Thanksgiving in Paraguay was probably one of the most memorable experiences of the holiday in my life. Since all the city buses in Paraguay are essentially large taxis (privately owned, following set routes), Peace Corps rented out one of the buses (so that we could all ride together) and all the trainees piled onto to this city bus (holes in the floor and all) and rode out to the American Embassy in the capitol. In about an hour, we went from dirt roads and scraping the remnants of cow poop off our shoes, to walking through the Persian-carpeted halls of a very nice residence on “American” soil in the ambassador’s private residence.

This contrast further highlighted the special position of the Peace Corps volunteer, in that we are able to move through groups of different socio-economic status. Not only would it be a rare occurrence for a member of my host community to be able to enter the American Embassy and hobnob with an ambassador, but also the ambassador, with security regulations (to have bodyguards) and whatnot, would have a difficult time visiting and getting to know communities similar to the ones where PCV’s live and serve. We begin the connection between the two groups.

This special and fancy celebration of thanksgiving was also a great end to a very exciting week—the week of future site visits. After a small ceremony in a retreat center where we each met our community contacts, each volunteer followed their contact to site for a 5 day visit. My community contact, Josefina, is the president of one of two women’s committees in a small rural town just outside the city of San Juan Bautista in Misiones. After a three and a half hour bus ride, we arrived at the “tres bocas” (essentially intersection) of my site and began the 3k walk on a dirt road into my site.

The first thing I noticed about my site was its (extreme) natural beauty. Rolling hills, all different types of trees, the road is littered with water-smoothed (semi-precious?) stones, and there are many large fields (many with horses), and you can see far off into other towns in the hills. Throughout the week in my site, I was often distracted from conversation by the beauty of the land around me. The next thing I noticed about my site was how nice the people are there. Josefina dropped me off at her cousin’s house, where I would be staying for the rest of the week, and immediately I was surrounded by a lot of smiles and laughter.

Though most of my conversations on the bus ride over had been in Spanish, the minute I arrived in site, that changed immediately. In my site they ONLY speak guarani. But luckily I have been studying guarani for (all of) two months. My host-family quickly picked up on the fact that if I smiled and nodded while they were talking (especially accompanied by a thumbs up), I actually had no idea what they were saying. Luckily the people I met also realized that if they spoke a little more slowly, I often understood what they were trying to say (mainly by recognizing one or two words and guessing the rest). The “thumbs-up” accompanied by “al pelo” (which means ‘great!’) became a running joke for the rest of my visit, because whenever my host mom figured out that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, she would give me a big smile, thumbs up, and an enthusiastic “al pelo.”

In addition to filling out a lot of forms (to have contact phone numbers and directions on how to get into my site in case of emergency), Peace Corps suggested that a good activity to do with community members (to have something to talk about at first) is a community map. I thought this was a good idea to also prevent me from getting lost. So by the second day, I had pulled out a large piece of paper and started working with the kids and skeptical adults on the community map. It’s still a work in progress, but the activity worked really well because it also motivated my initial contacts to walk with me all over my community (“so you can put it on your map!”) and even though it rained for 2 out of the 4.5 days I was in site, I actually met many new families and saw all but one corner of the community. I also got to know some of the kids really well because when I had worn out the parents from all the walking, they would send the daughters to walk with me. The girls’ favorite game was asking me how to pronounce Spanish names in English. This worked well for names like Eduardo (Edward) and Cynthia (Cynthia), but not so well for Moniserat and Gerardo.

It turns out that my community has a lot of interesting (and unexpected) varieties of animals. First of all, my site has monkeys!! I saw them in the trees and apparently they like to eat tomatoes. Sigh. Secondly, my site is just a little ways out from the wool capitol of Paraguay, San Miguel, and so a bunch of families have flocks of sheep—the first I have seen in Paraguay. Also, horseback riding is really big (lots of cowboys in my area) and Josefina’s family owns a horse. Of course they thought it would be a really good idea to bring the horse around and put me on it. Of course I didn’t actually know how to ride a horse. So after a couple turns with someone walking the horse while I sat on it, they decided it was time to take off the training wheels and let me ride on my own. They told me how to make the horse move and turn, except they forgot to tell me how to make the horse stop. So I’m sitting on the horse going in circles in the front lawn (too afraid to go far away in case it shied and bucked me off) and the horse wants to run, while I would prefer to move at snail speed. So I call out to the family (trying to figure out how to say “stop” in guarani) who are all sitting on the lawn clearly enjoying the spectacle, and they tell me to pull on the horse to make it stop. So I pulled on the mane. This is not how to make a horse stop.

Two other things that I really enjoyed about my site were the variety of trees that families planted and the way that my contact Josefina cooked. Every family that I visited boasted at least ten different types of trees in their yards, many of which were fruit trees. My host family had mandarins, pears, peaches, bananas, mangoes, tajy (edible legume tree), oranges, lemons, pomelo, guayaba, mammon, grapes (vine, whatever), and those were just the fruiting ones. Another family I visited also had avocado. I learned that mango season is just in time for my (usually quite snowy) birthday. Awesome. In my site, people don’t eat fruit from the store, but rather harvest it from their trees or from their neighbors trees. Josefina’s cooking also mirrored this “farm-to-table” practice. I got to observe the process of making Paraguayan cornbread (Sopa Paraguaya) and a couple of other dishes in which all the ingredients (hand-ground corn flour, eggs, milk, cheese) came directly from my contact’s land. Few meals in the U.S. are that level of home-grown.

Paraguayan Moment(itos)

·         Watching my host-mom make cheese by stirring a pail-full of frothy milk with a large hunk of cow-stomach (rennet).

·         Playing an intense game of backyard soccer with my 11 yr old host brother and his two younger siblings (5ish yrs old). Every time that my team (me + the two little kids) began to win, Junior (the 11 yr old) would say “best out of three.”

·         Freaking out my host mom by eating food without salt and by “accidently” cutting the soup vegetables into large chunks (dicing is more in style here).

·         Meeting my neighbor’s mother-in-law who is 92 and still running her home/farm.

·         “House-hunting” with my contact (aka bushwhacking, getting caught on barbed-wire, and collecting cuttings to plant in her yard).

·         Learning how to peel mandio (yucca) with a knife and watching my host mother re-do all of my mandio, but each time she re-peeled fewer mandio.

·         Crunching on the remains of the sugar-cane crop with my new besties Betty and Lalie (two very patient eleven year olds).

·         Hearing about another volunteer in the area who “ndohou kuaai so’o”—the problem is not that she’s vegetarian, it’s that she literally doesn’t know how to eat meat.

·         Getting a tour of my neighbor’s medicinal herbs and tasting/smelling each one.

·         Calling home on the embassy phone (unfortunately “US Embassy Paraguay” did not register on the caller-ID). 

3 day, 3 week

Hello once again from Paraguay. I am pretty excited because in three days I am going to find out where I will spend (hopefully) the next two years...site placement!! For the past sixish weeks I have been living in a training community, slowly learning about Paraguayan culture and learning guarani at rapid-fire pace. However, in 3 weeks I will be moving out to the new community where I will slowly begin my volunteer work. Yaaay.

These past few weeks I have gotten a couple of different tastes of volunteer life. I spent the past week with three other trainees (aspirantes in spanish) and our language teacher out at a volunteer site. We got to teach two classes and I also gave the instructions for an icebreaker for an HIV/AIDS/safe sex presentation. The ice-breaker was called "Pass the Yucca" and involved a race to pass a yucca root around a circle without using hands (aka held between the knees and passed to the knees of the next person).

Another taste of volunteer life came about through a training homework assignment called "aspirantes en accion." The idea is to do a mini-development project with a neighbor in your training community. I had to interview four different community members in guarani about their household, land, crops etc and then ask them what they wanted to improve on their land and in their community. Then I ask them how I can work with them to do any of those things. Next step, choosing one person, meeting with them a bunch to talk out ideas, and then finally doing a mini-project related to agriculture/family economy/food security. I ended up working with my host-uncle Diosnel and we built a sun shade for the garden. In Paraguay, many people have "victory gardens" which supply their family's vegetables and herbs for all meals. Gardens are traditionally a winter/fall/spring project, because it is so hot and sunny in the summer that the plants cannot grow in the intense heat. However, by building a sun shade, a family can continue growing vegetables in the summer (which allows them to keep the money they would otherwise spend on buying vegetables/ encourages them to eat vegetables in the summer).

I gained two main insights from this mini-project:

1. How much the volunteer is a cheer-leader. The process of interviewing people got the ball-rolling--however the idea of the sunshade came directly from diosnel's family (when I asked what they wanted to improve about their land), and though my presence at times may have been a motivator, Diosnel worked on some aspects of the construction (in preparation) while I was on volunteer visit, and he told me about how he wanted to maintain the sunshade once I had moved to my new site (sustainability of the project). He also had much more of the technical skills needed to put the thing together.

2. Rain can throw a wrench in everything. From my (Bostonian) perspective, stores, public transportation, people's plans only stop and shutdown because of weather in the case of extreme snow (more than 1 foot), or major flooding. In the Paraguayan countryside, if its raining, that is it. The roads become rushing rivers, schools close down, and everyone shuts their windows and goes back to sleep. All plans are subject to be canceled in the case of rain. Learning how to weather the disappointment is important, since it does rain about once a week!

Paraguayan Moment(itos)
*Sitting with my host family in the house drinking cold tea (terrere-more on this later), when all of a sudden I hear a loud commotion and see what looks like a gigantic black dog running towards me. As the commotion passes (and everyone lifts up their legs), I realize it is actually a gigantic, muddy, squealing pig being chased through the house by a lap dog.
*My host mother is afraid toads. I come home to her trying to sweep a toad the size of my face out of the house with a broom. The toad was alive and wide-eyed as it rolled side over side out of the house.
*Watched a grandmother wash her toddler grandson in a large bucket filled with bubbly water. He was so pleased to be in this bucket and was totally peeing in it. The bucket came up to his shoulders and was the perfect size for him.

If you want to send me a letter

Please address all letters, bottles of soy sauce, and packets of kale seed to

"Emily Jaeger," PCT

Cuerpo de Paz

162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López

Asunción 1580, Paraguay

South America

This address will change slightly come december, but I will keep you posted. It can take packages up to three months to arrive (if you send stuff fedex, it doesn't go through the post-office system, which is better) so please don't send any perishable items, aka squash kugel. 

Also it is recommended to number letters if you are sending a few, so that I can know if i have received them all/ which ones are missing. 

Jaha Campope! (Let's go to the country!)

Pre-note: Important Vocab for this Post
Campo--spanish (aka castellano) for countryside
--pe--guarani for "to"
departamento--state-like divisions in Paraguay
Chipa--a corn + yucca flour biscuit flavored with cheese and anise
Sopa Paraguaya--paraguayan cornbread
Milanesa--shnitzel made with chicken or meat
Empanada--stuffed dough pocket, generally containing meat, eggs, or



And now for another type of Paraguayan moment: wiping the red dirt of my shoes, pulling any leaves out of my hair, taking a short ride on the mini-bus, and arriving at a very good imitation of the Natick mall. Ok, so the Asuncion mall where I'm now typing up this blog post is not actually the size of the Natick mall, but every store here is truly brand-name. They have a radio shack. Headphones may or may not cost 50 dollars each. Three weeks out in the country has made this switch very jarring. There is just such a huge discrepancy between socio-economic status of the people here in the mall (living in this area) and those with whom I am currently living. And my current community is campo (rural) on training wheels.

This week I got a bit of a sneak-peak into campo life. As a trainee, I get to take a couple of different trips to visit current volunteers who are currently serving in the agriculture extension in Paraguay. These past few days, I went on my "short trip." I traveled (mostly alone) by bus to Cordillera, another departamento, where I visited Sam, a volunteer who is working with her community on soil recuperation.

Mini-lesson on soil: organic matter, aka decomposed plants, leaves fallen from trees, decomposed animals, decomposed wood, is a very important component of soil make-up. Although healthy soil needs to be only about 5% organic matter, that 5% is crucial. It serves as plant food (unlocking crucial minerals so that plants can use them and providing additional nutrients) and gives the soil texture to help prevent erosion.  Because Paraguay is generally a very hot and humid country, organic matter in the soil deteriorates very quickly. The nutrients that plants need to grow tall and delicious leech out of the soil very quickly during heavy rains. Additionally, while it takes many years for organic matter to build up naturally, farming without any efforts to replace organic matter also causes speedy deterioration.(( I will definitely have a little more time to explain this issue a little further on in my service. ))

Paraguay has a huge problem with erosion but as an even more pressing matter for the rural community which is dependent on agriculture as a source of income, each year, the crops on a given field get shorter and shorter. If farmers don't know how to replenish/recuperate soil, their profits plummet and they begin to panic. Burning fields in attempts to replace nutrients (providing a temporary carbon-boost), planting a different, but more destructive crop, or slashing/burning forests in order to open new fields are all (extremely) unsustainable, but possible reactions when the farmers notice the corn getting shorter each planting. Sam is currently working with community members to teach courses on how to replenish organic matter in the soil--making and adding compost to garden soil, and using different crops in the fields to add nutrients to the soil (cover cropping/abonos verdes--more on this later!! I think i can only do one mini-lesson per blog), and trying to convince farmers NOT TO BURN their fields.

Sam's site was described as truly "Campope." I took a four hour bus ride out to the country, then reached a small town center. From there, 45 minutes on a dirt road. Close call with a cow in the middle of the road. Yikes! The view: very flat land, not as red as in my current community, lots of grasses and termite mounds (stay away, those ants are truly evil), cows, and scattered trees with orange-colored limes. Sam's community is very spread out, she needs a bike to visit most of her neighbors. But, despite being way-out, her community had indoor bathrooms!!!! Anywayz...I got to see and sample her vegetable garden, met her host family (volunteers must stay with a family for 3 months once they reach their permanent sites), talked with some community members about their personal fields and livestock, and practiced my machete skills by helping Sam "mow" the lawn.

A note about Paraguayan farming: while this may be a surprise to some and completely obvious to others, most of the Paraguayans I have met have fields, gardens, and animals for personal consumption. A family that has a cow is not necessarily selling milk, they may only occasionally sell extra eggs from their chickens, and while it may seem like they have rows and rows of yucca in their backyards, they only use this crop for dinner. While soil recuperation works to provide secure income for families, on a basic level it also assures that they have food on the table.

And...now onto some more "Paraguayan Moments"
1. After everyone turned off the lights in my house, around 9pm, I could hear my host family in the adjacent two rooms calling back and forth to each other from their beds and laughing.
2. buses in paraguay can become moving stores, as coca cola, sandwich, fruit, juice, and chipa (hella good cheesy/anise corn biscuits) vendors push through the aisles of the crowded buses. I really appreciated this around lunch time on the bus home. I really did not appreciate this when the juice vendor spilled juice on me as he was passing the cup to my neighbor.
3. Paraguayans do a "shiv'a"/memorial service for family members who have passed every three months for the first three years after the death. I attended a 1.5 year ceremony for the family that lived behind my house. The family had set up a room in their house with a white shrine (candles, flowers, and a picture). Half of the neighborhood arrived and sat in a huge circle of chairs in the front lawn. After a short service led by one of the sisters (in Spanish, hail mary's i think??), family members came out with gigantic plates of cookies, everyone grabbed a few. Then they passed out mini-plates with a tiny piece of milanesa (fried meat, in this case chicken), chipa, a small piece of sopa (corn bread), and an empanada (fried dough pocket stuffed in this case with eggs and parsley). Then they passed out coca-cola and nuts (for the kids). Since it was right before dinner, most families brought this home to eat at their own houses. After stopping in to talk quickly with the mother of the deceased, we went home. More investigation is necessary to figure out why these foods are associated with funerals...
4. My host mother had me stuff the empanadas for lunch today so that I could learn how to make them (she is very worried that I am going to go out to the campo, stop eating meat, and waste away).

until next time...I promise I'm working on the pictures...

Hello From Paraguay!

Peichano (so!) I have been in Paraguay for about a week and a half--just beginning my 10 week training session in Guarambare, a small city/town about an hour away from the capitol. I am living with a great host family, a short bus ride from the training site and am learning so much from them about Paraguayan food, traditions, farming, etc. Also they are helping me with both Spanish and Guarani, the language that I will be learning for the next weeks. Guarani is crazy (awesome). Half of the letters in the alphabet are pronounced nasally, and the y, which is also the word for water, is almost pronounced like a gulp of water. During my free time the first few days, I just visited different families and asked them how to say ¨water¨ in Guarani in an attempt to get the sound down.

About my host family (sorry if this post is not as pretty as the last, as I am writing it in an internet cafe): my host mother, Mariana, is a house-wife and my host father, Abrahan, is a farmer. Their daughter Marta, who is 24, works in the office at a factory near my training site, and their younger son, Diego, is in school. They have a field for growing the (present at every meal) yucca, corn, peas, and sugar cane, beautiful gardens, two cows, two oxen and an ox cart, multiple chickens and roosters, two dogs (one who´s name is ¨dog¨), and one cat. They live very nearby to Mariana´s two sisters and brother-in-law, and everyone is always visiting back and forth or just calling across the front lawn to talk to each other.

This past weekend I met one of Marta´s cousins, and did a poem exchange, so I am going to include the first verse here, just so you can get an idea of the language that I have been learning for two weeks:

Nde pora

nde pora repukavo
mombyrymi
ipora nde mborayhu
emañaro yvotyre

(which if i remember correctly, means "you are beautiful, you are beautiful from afar, you are beautiful when you are looking at a flower").

Training is very intense--in a good way. In the space of ten weeks, we are learning two languages (spanish, though more focused on guarani), farm tech-- (how and what to plant in paraguay), animal husbandry (aka raising 20 extremely fuzzy future meat-chickens which we will get to slaughter at the end and share with our host families),  and vegetable gardening--paraguayan culture lessons, learning how to get from one place to another, and finally recieving about 1 shot per week. Next week typhoid! The other volunteers aregreat people and a very supportive community--as we are all trying to navigate our way into the paraguayan culture.

One of my favorite things so far about living in Paraguay is the greater connection to nature. Every family in my town has some amount of  agricultural production (vegetable gardens, yucca fields) for personal use. Most houses don't have screens in the windows and therefore nature is often inside the house as much as it is outside. I have become atuned to exactly when the bugs come out--the exact moment of sunset to shut the blinds, the type of insects (and the bevy of frogs that show up for some dinner) which signify that it will rain in the middle of the night. One of our coordinators described Paraguay as a sort of garden of eden, because seeds really take to the soil here and it is quite possible to pull off a branch/twig from many trees and simply stick the branch in the ground. A couple weeks later, you will have a new rose bush or sweet potato plant.

Unfotunately, I will not have very reliable internet sources for the next three months (!!) but hopefully after that I will be able to post a little more regularly and hopefully will be able to get up some of my photos (which are mostly of cows and chickens, but interspersed with some of the people in my neighborhood).

Chag sameach!
--Emily

10 Day Count-Down: How it Feels to Wait

Copying out the list of every book in the library on Paraguay. Planning to read them all. Barely managing three. Trying to imagine myself in a land were women once chewed, spat out, and fermented the remains of corn husks to make drink, where missionaries stood behinds curtains and smoke to convert with visions. Each day waking to decide there will be electricity, there won't be electricity. Too sad because I'm leaving them for two years to visit or call friends until the last week, when we can only say goodbye. Meeting prophets on trains, and looking for prophets on trains. Walking in spirals of miles around my home trying to to breath in and memorize the exact scent of September here and oak trees (there won't be oak trees there?). Too exhausted or afraid to leave town until I leave town. Buying seven shirts, returning six. Not yet able to buy luggage or the right size underwear. Forgetting each day to make the important calls. Staring at life insurance forms and wondering where to find two witnesses to the hypothetical division of the books, papers, and hand-me-down dishes I leave behind. Trying to decide who is important enough or annoying enough to hypothetically inherit this collection. Re-reading Pride and Prejudice for the thirtieth time. Breaking in the heavy leather boots. Finding a new part of my body aching each day and then healed the next. Opening travel guides of South America to find Paraguay missing--the heart plucked out or hidden from sections on the surroundings: Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. Finding one Paraguayan restaurant in Queens. Imagining what recipes I will make with only corn, yucca, meat, cheese, onions, beans, and tomato. Eating lots of kale. Visited one night by a ghost at the edge of my bed. A woman in a white and black polka-dot dress who I have never seen before. Who breaks into a million shivering gray pieces when I call out to her.