When I first found out that I was going to Paraguay, I was ambivalent. I knew nothing about the country--I had to pull up google maps to find out exactly where it was. Any other time in life that I have travled, I have chosen my destination. I have some idea ahead of time why i want to visit the country and what I want to see. I start out with, however small, a connection to the place I am hoping to visit. However, Peace Corps is a completely different experience. Your skills are matched to a country that requested a volunteer, and then later on, your personality and skills are matched with a community of people. As I arrived in Paraguay, looking out into the stretches of fields and red earth roads, I was wondering, how will this place ever become home.

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:

1. (This doesn´t really count): Coca Cola
2. Store coco seeds (mini coconuts on the palm trees here)
3. Store used medical syringes
4. Store and sell gasoline, nafta, and other fuels
5. Store cooking oil
6. How to give dried beans to friends
7. Store fresh squeezed orange juice made by a family in the country to serve at a restaurant in town
8. Store lard
9. Store whey
10. Store and sell honey (one liter of honey costs 5 dollars. I may eat excessive amounts of honey)
11. Store any sort of seeds (with ash)
12. Sell milk (from dairy farms in the country to the unlucky cowless city dwellers. Milk in a carton just isn´t the same)
13. Distribute homemade pest repellents
14. With holes punched: water can
15. With top cut off: ice mold
16. Cut creatively: chicken feeder

Just some ideas...

much love.

Kuña Aty (Women´s Comission)

     Hello! I have now been living in Paraguay about 7.5 months and have spent an amazing five months in my site in south. Many of the differences in Paraguayan society and culture are becoming my norm. It´s not surprising anymore when an ox cart passes in front of my house (I am still trying to get a ride on one), I´ve learned which way to pass the cup of mate (always to the right), and I am slowly beginning to learn what seasons everything is planted and why. I am still working with the people in my site to help them figure out exactly how PC works and to find my role in the community.
    One of the things that stands out right now in my service is how often (and the amount of success) I´ve had working with women and women´s groups in my site. Comissions, especially women´s comissions, are very popular in my site. Although there are only 60 families in my community, more than 30 women (aka the mothers) participate in women´s comissions. These comissions, which can range from a PTA to a farmer´s comittee, are part of the way in which the government is able to aliment and aid families living out in the countryside. Oficially registered with the government, the comissions have the opportunity to decide what projects they would like to do to improve the community and the lives of their members (examples--raise chickens, pigs, build sanitary/modern bathrooms, get a fence around the school yard). The comissions then apply for grants from the government for the supplies for these projects.
     The traditional gender structure in my community--men working to make an income, generally outside the home, while the women work at home raising children, farm animals, and gardening--often leaves few opportunities for the men to gather in the community. On the otherhand, the women who are able to meet more often, use the comissions to voice their own needs and concerns. While the women may not have as a strong a role in their family´s personal finances, in the comissions they plan fund raisers, work with government officials, and often bring great structural (modern bathrooms) and economic changes (farm animal projects) to their homes.
     Ña Josefina (my community contact)´s comission, was the comission that requested a PC volunteer to come to the community in the first place. Ña J, who always laughs whenever I call her ¨Mrs. President¨ (Ña Presidenta), is in her mid-thirties, has three kids of her own, and is always welcoming another cousin or two to stay in her home. Sometimes when she describes the odessys of bringing in requests or forms to the government, she describes the journey in such detail and with such fervor, that I can´t tell whether or not she was successful at first (but she always is). Ña J´s comission´s main project is to provide sanitary (and modern) bathrooms to all the members of the group. This project is very special in terms of women´s development. While men in the community do not prioritize modern bathrooms over their current latrines, the women want enclosed, safe spaces. Unless the women organize and work to complete this project, their voices and need will often remain unaddressed or not prioritized. Also Ña J´s comission knows how to throw a party/fundraiser. They´ve been raking it in recently with some very successful bingo/dance parties.
    Ña Tomasa´s comission is the oldest women´s comission in my community. They are also part way through a modern bathroom project, have worked in combination with a yerba mate company and an Italian organization to grow medicinal herbs (they recieve the plants from the italian organization and sell the dried leaves to be mixed into the Yerba Mate teas), and have done projects with chickens and to improve their gardens. Observing the success and experience of Ña Tomasa´s comission, I have attempted to share some of their successful ideas and collaborations with Ña J´s comission. While Ña Tomasa´s comission is located rather far away from Ña J´s (so it would be difficult for Ña J´s women to participate), as the PC volunteer (with a bike that generally works!) I am able to help disseminate the info.
     And finally, one day I was taking a bit of a rest in the hammock (yes, I have a hammock on my porch), I heard the sound of many voices coming from my neighbor´s patio. Hmmmm...I marched over and landed on a third women´s comission (they were just beginning to fill out their paperwork at this meeting). They are very new, and I am very appreciative of their location!! Right now it seems like they all want to change but aren´t quite sure exactly the direction. They are also still learning the ropes. I am excited to work with them through this process of firming things up and starting off on their first project.
   P.S. Although it´s not technically a women´s comission, my next door neighbor (an extremely hard'working, sassy, independent teenage mother) noticed that while there are a lot of gathering and extracurricular opportunities for boys in the community (daily soccer tournaments, volleyball), there are not many extracurricular options for teenage women. She would really like to start a high'school aged girls group. This is still in the works. It was pretty exciting, however, to realize that at this point 5 months into site,
1. We could actually have a conversation in guarani and have developed a relationship where we have deeper conversations than´´what´s up¨
2. She voiced her dreams/ideas for improving her life and the community to me in a direct way (needs assesment is not an obvious concept in rural Paraguay, who knows about anywhere else in the world).
3. She realized that a girls group would be something that I could help with as a PC volunteer.

Last but not least--i am the very excited owner of a new cat! I was walking to my 2nd host family to celebrate PYan mothers day and i see this really nice grain sack in the middle of the road. I really wanted that grain sack!! When i picked it up, it was kind of heavy, looking inside i found Jasy, my new cat. Jasy (almost pronounced yazoo) means moon in guarani.

Thats all for now!
Emily

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. 

5 Things You’d Never Guess About Living in Rural Paraguay

                Every time that I am about to go on a long trip to a new place, the advice of one of my wise creative writing professors always comes to mind. She always encouraged me to keep a journal from the point of preparation for the journey and throughout (at least) my first few months in a new place. Why? Not so much to remember what I did every single day, but because whenever a person goes to a new place, their senses are heightened to all the differences: in people, culture, nature, etc. After a few months the novelty wears off, and for example, you assume that having assigned seats in a movie theater, and all the exasperation that it causes, is just a normal part of life. The second year the changes in nature happen and you don’t even notice anymore. After almost six months Paraguay, I am beginning to experience this process of assimilation and normalization. A chicken pecking my leg while I am eating breakfast is no longer a surprise, but rather just one of many expected mishaps. Luckily, I have kept a journal, and would like to share five things that have now become part of the norm, but that I (and perhaps you?) would have never expected about living in rural Paraguay.

1.  Some of my future tomato crop may be stolen by the howler monkeys that live in the trees of my site. However, all bananas are safe despite the stereo-type. According to one of my many host-mothers, the monkeys here don’t eat them.
2. Certain fruits: grapes, mangos, and watermelon are considered “delicado” (delicate) in Paraguayan food culture. Attempting to make a fruit salad with all these ingredients indicates (to my many host-mothers) that I am in fact suicidal. Legend has it that if a person mixes watermelon and wine (grape product), they will okapu (explode!). I love how the word okapu sounds like the (yiddish?) caput—it’s over.
3. Most families in my site own an assortment of farm animals (chickens, geese, ducks, pigs, cows, sheep—usually each family has a couple of each). The catch: these animals are generally free-range. This often makes great “animal tv”—like the particular white chicken who liked to follow my host-family’s dog to pick off of his food. In return, the chicken compliantly acted as the dog’s chew toy. My favorite free range moment: one time I was hanging out with a family and drinking terere in their entry-way. There was a loud rustling noise and barking from a distance which quickly became louder. Suddenly we all threw our legs up in the air as a tiny, yapping dog chased a huge, squealing pig across the entire house and then right between our legs. The minute the animals had cleared the front door (and were outside), the dog went off to some new amusement and the pig lay down for a nap in the mud.
4.  The buses. Getting on a bus in Paraguay is always an adventure—while many of the long distance buses are pretty new and occasionally have AC, short distance buses, especially those that come (nearby) my site, make me question if it is safer to just stay home. Imagine, a mini-bus that is a least 50 years old. It drives on both dirt and asphalt roads and has a wooden floor. Underneath the dashboard, there is a huge gap to the outdoors. It makes many suspicious grinding and clanging noises. The bus driver is generally drinking terere with one hand (though luckily there is a person on the bus who collects the fares, and he is serving the tea). The bus is stuffed to the brim with people and groceries (50 kilo bags of flour, Cosco sized bags of noodles, chicken feed, children holding new pets in flour sacks etc). If your house is on the route, the bus will stop at your door, and the guy who collects the fares will help you off the bus and bring down your belongings. The bus is also painted bright yellow, bright blue, and bright red. There is no signage, and you know it’s your bus because you recognize the driver and know exactly which side road the bus parks on before leaving about a half-an-hour later than its scheduled time.
5. Despite the four facts above, if I don’t want to cook one day, I can order a decent pizza for pickup from a family that lives about a 10 minute bike ride from my house. 

A Host of Hosts

                I’ve just moved (again!!). I am now living with my third host family—well more like a host-grandmother—in my site. Next stop, my own house! One of the most challenging but also interesting parts of being a PCV is that I have to live with a host family both during training and during the first three months in site. Though in some countries, like Peru, volunteers must live with a host family for their entire stay in country, after those first three months I have the option of renting my own house. Starting with a host family gives me some amount of “protectsia” in site, helps me integrate (whether I like it or not), and also helps me connect to the resources in my community.

                The first host family that I lived with, I chose because during my first time visiting site (all volunteers visit their sites for 5 days, then return to stay after a couple more weeks of training) Na V was the only person who seemed to understand that if she spoke a little bit more slowly (versus loudly) I would be able to understand what she was saying in guarani. I love her house because she has these two gigantic mango trees. They are perfect for hanging a hammock right down the middle (I may have spent the majority of the month in that hammock) and have the magical mango-tree air-conditioning. It is definitely about 20 degrees cooler under those mango trees at all times and there is always a breeze. Her house is also on the top and edge of a hill, so there is always an amazing view of rolling hills, palm trees, and distant houses. Na V also really loves animals. She always has a million chickens around, cows, pigs, and even a sheep. Everyone would always threaten to slaughter the sheep for her daughter’s quinceneara (15’th birthday), but Na V would hear none of it. She taught me most of what I know about medicinal herbs and also introduced me to about thirty families in my site on foot in the hottest part of the summer.

                The second family I lived with really wanted me to be with them for all two years! Three out of five of the children still live at home and they are just the best kids. They are so full of life and I enjoyed just sitting and watching them at play. Backyard soccer could be pretty intense. My host mom Na R has so much love for all of them (and some left over for me too) and is always super-enthusiastic about trying out different agricultural techniques. She is the oldest of ten children, many of whom still live in my site, and is super boisterous. Her father and mother are pretty much the patriarch and matriarch of half of my site (probably because they have so many kids). My contact is married to one son, two sons renovated my future house, and I am renting my future house from a son-in-law. Also the father is a really impressive farmer and hopefully I will be collaborating with him in the future. Living with Na R, I got to know the whole family better. Also Na R has really delicious grapes. Everyone else’s grapes ran out in January, and we were still harvesting well into February.

                Finally, my current host-grandmother Na S lives on the complete other side of town. Living in her house, I am realizing that even though I have lived in my site for two months (and it’s not that large), I still have so much more to explore. Just being physically present in another part of town has helped me meet so many new and kind people. Many of them just show up to visit Na S and I get to sit in on the conversation. Yesterday, one of the neighbors visited. This morning I returned the visit and went with the neighbor’s daughter to visit yet another new family. As we walked down a hill (where I had never been before), suddenly the path opened up to an area of flat fields, with barely any houses or trees and lots of cows. I thought I knew my site’s scenery by now—hilly with lots of different types of trees—this was the complete opposite. And I got to meet a family who grows rice! I don’t know anything about growing rice and I think they may be the only ones left in my site who grow it.

                Much love from the other side of town (or as my 2^nd host mom would describe amooooite = waaaaay over there).--Emily

A typical (?) day in Paraguay

So what does a typical day in site look like? Well everyday definitely brings its own adventure but as time goes on, things are beginning to fall into a general structure (which of course will change beginning on the ives of March when I move out from my final host family).

                I wake up between 6:00 and 6:30am every day. By this point, my host-dad has already gone off to work (he is a farmer and is currently working on a cotton crop at a nearby agricultural school). As I stumble out into the light, I usually run into my host-mom sitting in the ogaguy (essentially a roofed porch between the room for the kitchen and the bedrooms/overhang?). She greets me with the traditional morning salutation mba’eichapa neko’e (how did you dawn?). After this little guarani quiz, we sit together and drink mate.

Though most of my host families don’t eat breakfast until a couple hours later, my defiantly American stomach starts grumbling for breakfast around seven. The most common Paraguayan breakfast that I’ve seen in my site is the infamous tortilla—essentially a savory fried dough made with home-made Paraguayan cheese and home-grown scallions. Unfortunately I have discovered that the aforementioned defiantly American stomach and the tortilla do not get along. So, following in the footsteps of many other PCVs in Paraguay, I have introduced my host-mother to oatmeal. She was both somewhat frightened and amused as she watched me the first time I attempted to make (non-instant) oatmeal in a soup-pot on a wood fire. Unfortunately the oatmeal box only offers microwave instructions. Hmmm.

As I make sure that my oatmeal does not boil-over while hoping that a little more of the water will boil off, the children begin to wake up and my host mom goes to milk the cow. By the time the cow is re-tethered, I’ve eaten breakfast, and the kids have started their first round of soccer for the day, it’s usually around 8:15. 8:15-11:00am has become my “work time.” While the sun hasn’t yet reached its full strength, I take the opportunity to visit neighbors (sometimes visiting neighbors can involve an hour walk to get to them, other days I just go next door), dig my mini-field/demo-plot, monitor and turn the two composts that I helped build, or whatever else needs to be done. During my visits with neighbors, in addition to terere-ing, I am attempting to learn the agricultural practices in my community and community needs. I have been learning what crops are most common, what pests are most common (currently the bean crops are being attacked by a bug called purgon), what people feed their animals, etc.

Generally, I get another round of terere-time with my host family around 11am. While at first, I sometimes found the amount of terere overwhelming, now that the sun has reached its full power , I’ve found myself asking for an extra pitcher after my host family has had enough. January and February are the hottest months here and it can be over 100 degrees farenheit for days at a time with no AC. Lunch is usually at noon and the most common dish is hot stew (either beef, chicken, or beans) with either rice or noodles mixed in.  And then siesta (yay!!). Coming from a siesta-less culture, it’s always a little funny/surprising to see my entire host family all asleep at the same time in the middle of the day. Siesta is only about 2 hours (everyone is awake by 2:30) but it is generally too hot to really get moving until 3:30 or 4:00.

During this siesta/hiding out from the heat time, sometimes I get some sleep in, but when it’s too hot, I read about gardening and work on my ao poi—Paraguayan needlepoint. Right now I am copying patterns from another woman in the community (she has hundreds and copying them will probably serve as my down-time entertainment for the rest of my time in Paraguay). On Fridays at 5:00pm, I attend the meeting for the women’s commission who requested me. Right now I am still observing and learning, and they are working on fund-raising and organizing a project to get modern bathrooms sponsored by the local government. On other afternoons, I generally go on a visit to next door neighbors or help out with some of the agricultural chores around the house (which currently includes harvesting, husking, and pulling kernels off of corn). It’s always much easier to ask people questions about their agricultural practices while I’ve got an ear of corn in my hands (and am sharing the work).

8pm is dinner—usually something light (I make salad or have a little bit of leftovers). Similar to my experiences in Israel, lunch is the heaviest meal, with a light breakfast and dinner. And shortly after dinner comes the bucket bath. Attempting to get water from a bucket onto me and soap/shampoo from me back into the bucket without flooding my bedroom (where I take said bucket bath) is always a bit of a challenge. By 9pm, after a quick glance at the stars (the constellations are different here and I can see the milkway!!) I am off to bed.