Ogres Are Like Onions

Hello again! I have been living in my site, a small rural village about four hours south of Asuncion for a little over three weeks now and I am having a wonderful time. One question that has come up from both family, friends, and the Paraguayan families that I meet every day is “what exactly is your job?!” (other than sitting in the hammock under the mango tree?). The overall goal: my job is to build capacity, to work with the people in my (new) community to give them opportunities, skills, experience to improve their own lives. Sounds a bit vague/let’s all sit in a circle and sing kumbaya? Perhaps. For a few more details: I help the community analyze what it needs through a “Community Needs Assessment.” After presenting this information back to the community, I work with interested/motivated community members on some of the needs/goals that came up in the earlier interviews (as I am in the agriculture sector, most of these projects are related to agricultural production). The idea is that as I am facilitating these projects I am also handing over the leadership/organizational skills and contacts with any outside organizations to my host-country partners.

                Right now, I am just working up to step one: Community Needs Assessment—I am about one month into the six month process (which also means that I have no idea yet what actual projects I will be working on).Currently I am turning into a social butterfly (which is in many ways ironic). I have to visit at least half of the families in my community (about 40 families), perform a census (number of people, ages), ask about forty questions related to agriculture (what plants & animals people currently own, how they feed and upkeep animals, production rates, soil quality for planting, household finances, and interest in new crops/ animals), and ask them what they like/dislike/want to improve in their community. I have to visit any committees (in my site there is a farmers’ committee and two women’s committees), teachers, and any “outside” organizations that interact or could interact with my community (for me that means a representative from the municipal department of agriculture, an agricultural school, and a hotel).

I’ve started out by trying to visit 40 families (at least once) to present myself and get to know them a little before even beginning to ask questions. I want people to know who I am first and feel a little more comfortable talking to me before I start asking them about their successes and struggles. Since I don’t have a bike yet, that has meant a lot of walking in very hot weather (and you have to cover up, I never imagined myself walking around in a hundred degrees farenheit in long pants, long sleeves, and a hat!), a lot of terere (ice-teaish stuff), a lot of guarani (they DON’T speak Spanish in my site), and a lot of awkward moments (luckily Brandeis prepared me for awkwardness).

And so far it’s been going good. I have been picking up so much guarani. When I first started the house visits, things were a bit rough language-wise, since the only comment I could really manage was “so, I see you have chickens.” Generally not much of a conversation starter. Luckily, many of the families/people I have met seem enthusiastic, or at least curious, about my presence in the community, and during many of those first visits they helped me expand from the chicken topic. Three weeks into my site and I can already understand many of the questions thrown at me and respond in a way that people almost understand! Woot. Also I can understand many of the conversations around me, which is super-helpful. I’m catching a lot of little details about the community that way. Also, my lovely host-mom Na Vicenta has insisted on accompanying me to almost all of my visits, and as I am more used to her intonation, and she is more used to my chicken-scratch style of speaking, when there are major misunderstandings, she has been helping me out. She is one of the few people in my site who figured out right away that if she spoke slowly (as opposed to regular speed but with added volume) that I would understand what she was saying.

I (aka a Peace Corps volunteer) was specifically requested to come to my community by one of the women’s committees in my site and my contact (aka the person who has all my emergency contact info and set up my initial host family) is the president of the committee. Therefore, I have been using the committee and its participants as a sort of “home field.” For example, they aren’t uncomfortable if I write down the answers to the census questions (whereas when I visit other people I can only ask as much as I will be able to remember, and then I write responses later). Also I have been using a couple of different mapping/graphing tools with the members to get to know the growing seasons, the lay of the land (community maps), and the strengths and weaknesses of the commission itself. Unfortunately, unlike my guarani skills, my drawing in straight lines skills have not improved just yet. Eventually, I will also be using some of these tools with other community members and groups to help them prioritize their needs (what do we want to work on first/what is more important to do/what project has the most interested participants and organizers), and lay out the steps towards reaching their goals. Eeek!!

One of the many great things about my site is that within a forty minute walk of my current host family is another volunteer, Andrea, from the Environmental Education sector (lots of overlap). She lives in the neighboring community, and has helped me out a lot with her year’s-worth of insight into the community. A couple of days ago I went to visit her and after I asked her a million questions about the community, we ended up watching Shrek. I couldn’t stop laughing. I realized that in my community I AM DONKEY! Like Shrek, most of the people in my site did not ask for me to be there, and now I keep following them around, asking lots of annoying questions, eating their food, and accidently setting off dragons (well, perhaps not dragons, but I do seem to have my fair share of somewhat entertaining misadventures).

And now for…the moment(itos)

•  Not being able to get off the bus at my site because my backpacking pack couldn’t fit through the doorway.
• The three laughing women (my contact, my current host-mom, and my next month’s host mom) who greeted me at the roadside with a clamber of guarani.
• Learning all the right noises and hand-motions to dispel the legions of free-range chickens/ dissuade them from their favorite past-time of pecking my knees in the middle of serious conversations.
• Walking with my current host-mother through the fields to visit new families. To me we are walking through weeds and grass. To her, the earth here is a pharmacy. She points out and explains each different bark and weed with special properties, and soon the landscape opens up for me as well and we collect the herbs together to put in terere and mate.
• Watermelon season! Holding half a watermelon cradled in my lap and eating the whole thing with a spoon like a bowl of ice-cream. Placing the finished half on the ground where a dog laps up the remaining juice and seeds and chickens peck away at the juicy parts of the rind, leaving thousands of little indents on the inside.
•  Spending many a siesta in the woven hammock which hangs between two gigantic, wild mango trees.
•  Watching my contact’s  daughter climb to the highest branches of the mango tree (at least forty feet up) to throw down the first sun ripened fruit.
• Learning on Christmas Eve that my new favorite Paraguayan dish is mondongo milanesa aka schnitzel of a particular cow stomach (cows have more than one stomach, mondongo is the white bubbly one)
•  Attending many birthday parties for 90 year olds and watching tipsy family and neighbors (who are essentially family, the way things go in the countryside) dancing together in the backyard to the blast of Paraguayan regaton and polka.
• Falling flat on my face (chin that is) in front of my contact while trying to cross a wire fence. Luckily (as one of the other volunteers pointed out) there were no cow patties nearby.
• Learning how to do ao poi, Paraguayan embroidery, from one of my neighbors.
• Watching my host mom unwind the pig. Essentially the pig is kept on a long leash tied to a post. At some point the pig had just wound himself around and around until he had gotten himself into quite the situation. So my host mom grabbed him by the back two hind legs, and as the pig screamed bloody murder, she walked him around and around the post until he was free again.