Paraguayan Xmas and New Years

A couple of folks have emailed to ask me about how I spent Xmas, Hannukah and New Years in Paraguay. So here goes. Hannukah was pretty quiet since PY is a rather Catholic country and I have to take it slow on bringing up/sharing the Jewish stuff with my community. Luckily (when related to Hannukah) fried food is extremely popular in PY and though I didn’t have any latkas this year, I got a good share of empanadas (hot pockets), tortillas (fried dough pancakes),and Paragauyan schnitzel. I am confident that sometime in the near future latkas will be a big hit here.

Christmas in Paraguay is quite different than Christmas in the states and one of the main reasons is because we’re in the opposite hemisphere. All the imagery of pine trees, hot cider, cinnoman/savory smells, sitting around the fireplace, and of course, dreaming of a white Christmas, doesn’t make much sense here in the 100+ degree weather. Christmas falls near the longest day of the year and markets the beginning of the harvest season for watermelon, melon, grapes, pineapple, squash and corn.

Most of the Christmas celebration takes place on the evening of the twenty-fourth, where families get together to wait for the doce, midnight. I watched my family gather together a gigantic bag of watermelon and squash for the pesebre, nativity scene, that they were going to build at their grandmother/grea tgrandmother’s house. I saw another one at a different family’s house: first they placed dried corn stalks against the wall, then a little platform with some grass and decoration and a little cradle with a baby Jesus doll and Mary and Joseph figurines. Around the base of the platform was the semi-circle of squash and melons. I tried to figure out what the fruits represented but wasn’t able to quite understand/get a straight answer. Will try again next year.

I expected families to start the cooking/food prep early in the morning (like Passover?) but most families started around four or five in the afternoon (“We have plenty of time!”) and spent the morning slowly, hanging out with the trickle of relatives arriving from other cities and towns. When the food prep did begin, my favorite part was making the clerico, Paraguayan Sangria/Fruit punch. We used chopped up apples, oranges, melon, banana, pineapple, grapes, red wine from a box, and pineapple soda. Yummm. Stick in the fridge and marinate until around 8pm when the wait for midnight begins! A bunch of Paraguayans asked me if people drink Sangria in the states for Christmas as well and they all thought it was pretty funny when I told them no because there is no fruit in season and it’s too cold!

Around 8pm I headed over to my neighbor’s house to wait for midnight. They had the radio going with Christmas music and call-ins and everyone was sitting in a circle enjoying the clerico. At nine we had a big dinner (schnitzel, rice, chipa guasu—corn quiche, and empanada) and then we just waited until 12am. As the clock hit midnight, everyone jumped up and began hugging and wishing one another a merry Christmas and then we each had a glass of champagne. The next day, we had a big lunch and then just rested. Another surprise: no presents!

New Years was very similar. One of my favorite moments from New Years was listening to a particular call-in on the radio. Paraguayan-diasporaniks were calling into my local radio station from all over the world (well mostly Spain where there is a large community). Every time that someone called in the broadcaster would ask “so where are you calling from,” and as the night got later, “so what part of Spain are you calling from?” Suddenly, I hear this woman correct the guy, “No, I’m from the states.” “What state?” And I just knew. New Jersey! 

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. 

Sworn-in!

I’m officially a volunteer!! Yay…and now my two years begin. Training ended with a very nice swearing-in ceremony in the municipality near our training-center. Two people from each host family were invited to attend (so we got to see all of our host-mamas dressed up in their finest).We had to take some oaths (to defend the US constitution, and an oath in Spanish, which unfortunately none of the volunteers quite understood), we ate a gigantic cake (apparently you only get this special cake for swearing-in and close-of-service).We also got another chance to shake hands with the American Ambassador (who gave a speech and made a joke in broken Spanish about how Obama’s swear-in oath was messed up). Then Peace Corps took us for our final ride (in our vans that we used during training) to Asuncion, where we got our bank cards and were suddenly volunteers.

Swear-ins (which take place a couple of times a year since there are four different sectors of volunteers beginning their service after a training cycle) are also the time for volunteers all over Paraguay to meet up in the Capitol. Friday afternoon, I attended two club meetings—one for the Seed-Bank club, a free resource for volunteers to introduce green manures/cover crops into their communities, and the other—a gender and diversity club, which organizes summer camps for Paraguayan youth so that they can learn about gender, religious and other type of diversity in Paraguay as well as receive leadership training. I also went to Ahendu (“I listen” in Guarani), a concert by volunteers/for volunteers. This year Koika, the Korean Peace Corps, were also invited to attend and perform—so I watched a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers rocking out to the Korean version of “I Feel Pretty” from West Side story.

On the way to my hotel, I saw my new favorite billboard, an advertisement for Jäger Condoms! This is their website (I wouldn’t open this at work): http://www.jagercondoms.com.ar/. Yeah, way better than jagermeister/McJagger/the Jaeger menswear store.

Also, realizing that I will soon be about 4 hours outside of the capitol in the Paraguayan countryside, I decided that this Saturday would be a good time to meet/find the Jewish community of Asuncion. In order to enter the Synagogue, I had to send them a letter from Peace Corps proving that I was a volunteer and they also scanned my passport at the gate. Despite this intensive security, the congregation that I met inside the Hebraica compound was really sweet. It seems like Friday night services are more egalitarian and Saturday morning services are leaning more towards Orthodox. Since I went to the Saturday morning services, it was very small, less than 20 people, and everyone was very welcoming. I was surprised to find out that this week was my bat-mitzvah portion (va’yeshlach), though unfortunately I wasn’t able to whip out any of my skillz because of the denomination of the services. After the prayers were over, there was a small kiddish, where we all sat around a large table and talked about the Torah portion.

It was very interested to suddenly change perspectives—most of the congregants (all Paraguayan) had no idea where Misiones (my site’s district/departmento) is located. They kept asking if it was in the Chaco (the desert/wasteland in the middle of the country). This was surprising since all the people in my rural training community (who generally don’t have access to maps and internet, and also are rarely able to travel the countryside) all know where it is. Also, since the Torah portion described the story of Jacob’s daughter Dinah attempting to date/marry non-Israelites, the conversation turned to intermarriage. It was pretty interesting to listen to this Paraguayan congregation of 20 (there are only about 1000 Jews in Paraguay) discussing intermarriage/ asking about non-matrilineal descent, and generally “what does it mean to be Jewish?” The Rabbi was in a bit of a bind, since it was technically an orthodox service, but he tried to present a spectrum of Jewish-law responses to the questions of matrilineal/patrilineal descent. Hopefully as I get to know the community more, I will have more of a chance to ask them what it is like to be Jewish and Paraguayan.

Not exactly sure when I will next have internet connection since I still have to find the cyber-café nearest to my site…but hopefully I will have up some more posts later this month!!

Yerba Mate aka the Diuretic Nectar of the Gods

So, I’ve been meaning to write a little something about Yerba Mate since arriving in Paraguay. For those of you who have heard of Yerba Mate before, I’m sorry that this may be a bit a repetitive, but then again, in Paraguay, where you can have three different variations of Yerba Mate before lunchtime, Yerba Mate is intrinsically a bit repetitive. Yerba Mate is a type of tea leaves (made from a Yerba Tree) that is very common in Paraguay as well as other places in South America (so folks from/who have been to Argentina have heard about it). In Paraguay, especially since coffee isn’t really a thing, Yerba Mate is kind of a staple/how you drink water. So far I have had four different preparations of Mate.

1. Mate—a hot drink. All you need is a thermos of boiling water, a cup (guampa), about ½ a cup of Yerba Mate leaves in the bottom of the guampa, a metal straw (bombilla), and two or more people. To serve, one person pours the hot water into the guampa containing the Yerba Mate, then dealing to the right, passes the guampa. The receiving Mate drinker/participant, sips up the boiling serving, and then passes the guampa back to the server. Server drinks last. There is a special verb for this type of Mate in guarani: Akay’u= I drink mate. This type of Yerba Mate tea is had first thing in the morning (while still picking sleep out of your eyes) and is more of a cold weather tea.
2. Cocido—this is Paraguayan tea. Take a metal spatula/fire mini-shovel. Place a couple spoonfuls of Yerba Mate on the shovel and in some cases sugar. Place coal from the fire on top of this mix and burn the Yerba Mate/caramelize the sugar. Dump this mixture (including the coal!) into a pot of boiling water. Pour 1 part water through a strainer into one part milk (preferably the milk should be straight from the cow, that you milked after drinking Mate) and eat with cookies or some other breakfast bisquity things. This is a breakfast drink!
3. Terere—this is Paraguayan ice-tea. Extremely essential in this hot country (last week it was about 110 degrees out and nobody has AC). Pull out that guampa (cup) with ½ of Yerba Mate leaves, bombilla (straw), and thermos of icy water (preferably with some mashed up remedial herbs mixed in). Server deals to the right (in the same manner as Mate, except this time the gringos don’t burn their tongues). Terere also has its own verb in guarani: aterere= I want to drink terere. Around nine am, Paraguayan snack time, is the traditional terere drinking time, but any “coffee break,” hangout time with family, or boring class, also qualify as good times to start passing the guampa.  Terere is both meant to relax (essential to the Paraguayan slogan of “tranquiiiiiilo”=everything is chill man) and to perk you back up (with the help of some remedial herbs like mint, lemon grass, etc).
4. Mate Dulce--this is a winter drink/its been raining for for days and it could be winter I'm so cold drink. If you take the instructions for Mate (category 1) and replace the thermos of boiling water with a boiling milk+sugar combination, you've got Mate Dulce. The combination of the bitter/earthy flavor of yerba mate and the sweet/creamy flavor of some fresh frothy milk is definitely my favorite, however, drinking boiling sugar through a metal straw (if the hot sugar doesn't burn the top of your mouth off, the blazing hot metal straw will) is not my favorite. A bit of a give and take situation. Luckily there are only two months of winter in Paraguay!!

In addition to the four different preparations of Yerba Mate, there are about three bazillion and seven traditions related to drinking (some form of) Yerba Mate in Paraguay. For example, the youngest person in the family is technically the server in the case of Mate, Terere, and Mate Dulce (which all involve passing the cup) and the order of serving is always to the right with the dealer last.

Here are two of my favorite traditions/stories of Yerba Mate that I have encountered so far in Paraguay

1. Santa Tomas (Saint Thomas)--the first serving of Terere (that's the "ice-tea" one) is traditionally reserved for Saint Thomas (and nobody gets to drink it). Since this serving is the first time the yerba mate leaves have had any water in them (they've just been scooped out of the tea box and placed in the bottom of the cup), the liquid produced is pretty bitter. In that case "Saint Thomas' Serving" is sipped through the straw and then spat over the shoulder. Sometimes, the dry tea leaves absorb all of the first serving of water as they rehydrate. In which case, it almost looks as if someone (perhaps a Saint) has drank all the water. Why Saint Thomas (and not Elijah)? It's a pun. In Spanish, "toma" means "he drinks" therefore Santa Tomas (pronounced Santa Toma) can also mean "The Saint drinks."
2. Terere + Watermelon = death by stomach explosion. A large part of Paraguayan food traditions have to do with bad mixtures, aka don't drink cold water while eating hot soup, don't eat hot dogs and ice cream in fast succession. The idea being that certain extreme opposites of temperature or types of food will cause a stomach-ache or fever. In terms of Paraguayan food tradition, watermelon is a very volatile fruit and is best had alone. But no matter what, one MUST NOT mix watermelon with Terere. Of course, after 3 months of intensive training and attempting to learn guarani (a language where at least half of the letters are pronounced nasally, and if you switch two letters you end up cursing someone out) a Peace Corps volunteer may begin to rebel/crack and purposely eat Terere and Watermelon together to annoy the language teachers/ wait to see if an explosion will actually occur. The results where definitely disappointing because a. no one exploded b. this seems to be breaking point which occurs with every group of PC trainees, and therefore the language teachers had a very "been there, done that, bought the t-shirt" sort of reaction.

That's all for now...

--Emily

Women's Comite and Change of Address

                In just under two weeks I will be moving out to my new community in southern Paraguay (aaah!). It feels a bit strange to be packing up again. Training is winding down (today we presented our Aspirantes en Accion projects—where I had worked on building a sun-shade with my neighbor) and the minute that the training community has started to feel familiar, we are beginning to say goodbye. On the one hand, this does give me some hope for my new community that after the first three months it will begin to feel like home. On the other hand I am going to miss my host family a lot!

 One of the things that has been kind of funny/taunting all of us agricultural volunteers is that here we are surrounded by trees and vines heavy with fruit that will be ripe the week after we move to our new site! I am talking mangoes, tons of grapes (“when we can’t eat anymore, we make it into wine”) papayas, guayabas, pears, peaches, pomelos etc. Last night my host sister was joking that I will be able to eat the grapes and watermelon with them by text message. Obviously there will be all these things in our future sites as well, but it’s difficult to have so much communal anticipation of the bumper crop (here it’s in January, think late July in the States) without being able to experience it with the community.

Yesterday we visited two different volunteers in the Cordillera region of Paraguay (kind of middle of the state, towards the east). In the morning we learned about banana farming (a bit of new territory coming from New England) and in the afternoon we did mini-lessons about chicken raising for a women’s comité. In Paraguay, one common way for groups to organize to do projects and receive municipal/government funding is through the formation of a comité. Though I am still learning the exact rules and regulations of a comité and how it is formed, the general idea is that they must consist of twelve or more individuals, they generally have presidents, VPs, and treasurers, they are registered through the local government and as mentioned above, comité members often work together on different projects.

Many communities have “women’s comité”s (my community has two) and one common project is raising chickens. The women each receive a certain amount of chicks sponsored by the government and occasionally a small starting amount of feed (in my community, the women receive 15 chickens and 4 kilos of feed, and they need to buy the remaining 20 kilos). While most families have free-range or “casero” chickens, the chickens they receive through the projects are bred to be meat chickens (they don’t live very long, they get big and juicy as quickly as possible, and have some other genetic tweaks). While the traditional method for raising chickens in Paraguay falls under “free-range,” the meat chickens require slightly different techniques (using chicken coops, balanced feed, etc) to achieve maximum deliciousness and (in the case of the women attempting to sell their chickens) the best price at the market. Our mini-lessons covered topics such as vaccination, keeping a clean chicken coop, and making feeders/waterers from recycled materials. I was really glad to have the practice because I will very likely be giving similar mini-lessons in my future community.

Since I am no longer going to be a trainee after the next two weeks, my official Peace Corps address is changing slightly (if any of you who promised me letters would like to send them by snail mail).

Emily Jaeger PCV

Cuerpo de Paz

162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López

Asunción 1580, Paraguay

South America

 

Mail sent to this address goes to the PC office in Asuncion, about a 3.5 hr bus ride from my site. Therefore, I will have access to this mail no more than once a month (possibly much less often). This second address is for the post-office in the nearest city to my site, which hopefully I will be visiting more often.

Emily Jaeger

Av. Monsen˜or Hojas

No. 664 c/Martin Maríallano

San Juan Bautista, Misiones, Paraguay

South America

(for some reason my computer does not know how to make a normal “enya” on the word monsenor…sorry!).

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.