Here Comes the Sun(Flower)

To those of you who I got to see during my (brief) stint in Boston—it was so great to see you and talk to you! It was so special to come home to so much warmth. To those who I missed this time around—I will probably be back in about a year for either Passover or my brother’s graduation. If you live on the west coast, you have about a year to move to Boston. Anyways, it’s been great to be back in site and I am beginning to reconnect with my neighbors and the rest of the community. The first thing that I noticed on the ride back to site was the fresh green color of all the plants outside the bus window. It’s been raining!! Yay. I won’t say that the drought is over (don’t want to jinx it) but, there has been a good deal of rain these past few days and everyone is thankful.

As some of you may know, as an agricultural volunteer, I am required to have both a garden and a demo-plot. While I have at different points worked on vegetable farms, I have never had my own garden or field, and I always feel a little anxious when I put my seeds in the ground. Will anything come up? Will something come up and be eaten alive by bugs? (yes in the case of my bean plants…). Following some perma-culture/peace corps guidelines, way back in February, I placed my garden behind my house, near enough to a water source and in a place where I would have some natural fence posts (aka trees).Then I double-dug all of my beds the day after the one day it rained all summer. I dug my demo-plot (three rows of a field) under my bedroom window. That way, I wouldn’t be able to ignore any bugs or weeds. 

 A bit of rain in my absence was good news for my garden, which thankfully didn’t die while I was gone. I had thrown some seeds in the ground (most of them were old, it didn’t really matter since I assumed they were going to die in my absence) and they all came up! Well only 1 lettuce plantling came up out of a meter of old seed, but hey, the seed was old anyway.  I’ve got some little carrots, chard, kale, garlic greens, and radishes . Yummm. Also, I was greeted by some gigantic sunflowers (their stems were thicker than my thumb!). This morning, after yet another full day of rain, I checked out the sunflowers and found that at least half of them are about to bloom! I am so excited to see their bright yellow faces following the sun right outside my bedroom window.

My Paraguayan neighbors keep asking me why I am planting sunflowers. The true answer is because sunflowers make me happy. But I am also planting them because sunflowers can be used as green manure—think growing compost. When they are nice, big, and leafy, I cut them down and let them decompose in my field, thus adding nutrients back into the soil and increasing the yield of future crops in that field. Hopefully my bright yellow beauties will encourage the folks passing on the road in front of my house to stop by and ask about my demo-plot. Hopefully the sunflowers will also screen my sad looking beans…damn moth larvae. I am hoping to make some organic insect repellants to save my beans and hopefully they will make a comeback!

Rally

Heloooo!! It's been a while. Mostly because I lost my flash drive while cleaning my room about a week back...But all is well and here is a little glimpse of mid-March in my "hometown"

                When I first visited my site in late November, my very enthusiastic host brother Junior (14) turned to me and asked “Do you like rally?” I didn’t have any idea what a rally was, and through broken Spanish, hand motions, and sounds, I figured out that rally meant a car race. I was still pretty confused. Why was he asking me, of all things, if I liked car races (as opposed to soccer, a slightly more popular sport in Paraguay)? I think I managed a guarani version of “sort of, I guess?” as my response. I didn’t really know where this whole car race thing was going. The question stuck with me, and I assumed it was along the lines of many other questions I have since been asked in site about what it means to be American (for example, under the assumption from television that most Americans are blond with blue eyes, many people have asked me if I dye my hair black or if my mother is blond). 

                Fast-forward to the first week of March when my PC neighbor (the volunteer who lives in the next town over) asks me if I am excited to watch the rally. The what? About 3.5 months from the original, extremely-random-sounding, question, I finally got the full story. Every year, on approximately the second week of March, there is a rally/ car-race that passes through my site and many of the surrounding towns in the area. And they are real race-cars (she showed me pictures, and I have now seen the race in real time). Of course, back home, race cars going about 100 miles an hour are generally confined to rinks where they can’t spin out into innocent people’s backyards, tear down power-lines, or rip up fences. Details, details. (The local government, in fact, has to sign an agreement that they can’t hold the rally accountable for any damage to property or persons).

                The week leading up to the rally, every commercial break includes a commercial for Rally Misiones, depicting the racers driving across the back roads (I kept trying to see if one of the scenes was my site) with a Lord-of-the-Rings-esque soundtrack. I was in love. So was my (ex) host-brother who pretty much gave up eating to see every single moment of the races that were within biking distance in other towns. His mother was not impressed. She did not appreciate that the race, which passes on the road directly in front of her house, was about to dump 100 tons of red dust on all her belongings. It has rained all of three hours in my site since I arrived three months ago, so things are getting pretty dusty. My nice red dirt roads have turned into a gigantic sandbox, which is always a little special on the bicycle, as it doesn’t function on sandy terrains. Now add about 4-hours-worth of race cars skidding around curves and zooming down the straight stretches. Race day was going to be followed by a lot of sweeping.

                Inspired by my (ex) host brother’s enthusiasm, I decided to spend the day of the race with him and his family. Although the Lord-of-the-Rings commercials promised a very exciting day, I suspected that watching my host brother get a kick out of the race was going to be the highlight of the day. Around 10:30 am, as I was sitting drinking terrere with my ex-host mom, contact, ex-host brother, and assorted family and extended family members, a jeep with a big sign for security on it passed by, playing a siren. My contact jumped up and shouted “It’s starting” and we all ran across the street, and across a bit of a field to get the nearest exciting curve. There we found a couple of out-of-towner strangers who had parked in my contact’s backyard, all the neighbors, and one teenager who was working security (rapidly repeating into a walkie-talkie “ok, vale, vale, ok!”  very official). The cars passed one at a time (they were clearly racing for time, not passing each other) and showered impenetrable clouds of red dust on the audience as they zoomed by, making very enthusiastic zooming noises.

                The most exciting moment of the rally was when suddenly a race-car broke through the tape marking off the boundaries of the curb, came straight for me (my contact, and assorted family members), and then quickly turned off and pulled straight up into my contact’s lawn. Apparently it had broken down. With my contact’s teenage son and other assorted boys from the neighborhood following everything closely on their camera phones, the drivers climbed out, communicated with the security guy (more “ok, vale, vale!”), and took off on foot. This made the day of the teenage boys who got up nice and close and took a look inside the race car through the windows. As everyone (but my ex-host brother) began to lose interest, we all drifted off to have lunch at my host mom’s house. It was pretty funny to be sitting around the table, eating a traditional soup, while race cars zoomed by every two minutes, spewing dust all over the yard. By the end of the day everyone’s clothes and skin were tinted red from the dust, and my contact’s son had a good laugh when he caught site of my hair, normally black, turned completely red from the dry earth.