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.