Throughout training (my first three months in my community) I continued to feel this sense of ambivalence. Yet, when I finally got to visit my community (where I am doing my volunteer work and living for 2 years) I finally found my connection--the reason why Paraguay is another home for me, a place that I love and feel close to: Paraguayans can and regularly do make something out of nothing. Recycling, repurposing, creating treasures (or at least useful household items) is a part of the daily experience. A pot with a hole in it becomes a strainer for cheese or noodles (with more holes punched in). The shell of a broken oven, transformed into the legs for an outdoor table and food prep area. I always love looking at chicken houses, garden fences, etc and discovering all the mba.e kue, ex-things, things that have been repurposed to create something new.
To give you an idea of the recylcing genius down here, I would like to share with you all the example of the 2 liter coke bottle. In the states, if you drink coke, you might bring the old bottle to the supermarket to recycle it and collect the deposit. Or you might drop it off in a nice blue bin. In Paraguay, here are just some of the examples I have seen of ways to repurpose a coke bottle:
- (This doesn´t really count): Coca Cola
- Store coco seeds (mini coconuts on the palm trees here)
- Store used medical syringes
- Store and sell gasoline, nafta, and other fuels
- Store cooking oil
- How to give dried beans to friends
- Store fresh squeezed orange juice made by a family in the country to serve at a restaurant in town
- Store lard
- Store whey
- Store and sell honey (one liter of honey costs 5 dollars. I may eat excessive amounts of honey)
- Store any sort of seeds (with ash)
- Sell milk (from dairy farms in the country to the unlucky cowless city dwellers. Milk in a carton just isn´t the same)
- Distribute homemade pest repellents
- With holes punched: water can
- With top cut off: ice mold
- Cut creatively: chicken feeder
much love.
