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).