Yesterday
I just celebrated 7 months in site and in two weeks it will be 10 months in
Paraguay. It is winter here, and while 40 degrees all the time is not very cold
for Boston, MA standards, for those of you have ever spent a forty degree
winter without heat, in a cement building, you know what I’m talking about.
Luckily, I have discovered that my mosquito net actually doubles as a
wind-break/insulator, so at least at night, when it does occasionally frost, I
do not freeze as well. Now, just because the only warm spot in the entire
country is my bed, that doesn’t mean that I have been sitting in for the past
month. Well, at least not before sundown. Here’s what’s been up this winter:
LONG STORY SHORT:
Community
Integration: people make fun of me now, which means I’m one of the family.
Women’s Commissions: creating
sustainable relationships between the commission and the PYan department of
agricultural extension, working with my ladies on pig projects, needs
assessment, and commission’s internal rules.
Jaeger Farms: the
garden is flourishing, my field, newly renovated, has some seeds in the ground,
the cat is alive, and the worms are multiplying. All but the cat are being used
as demonstrations of more sustainable agricultural practices and have inspired
experimentation in community members’ gardens.
One-on-One
Agriculture Work: playing in the garden with my comission ladies—making homemade
insect repellents, trying out double-digging, and even one worm bin!!
CNA: that time
that I had to write a 10 page community report in Spanish after only speaking
Guarani for 10 months.
LONG STORY LONG:
Community
Integration: I decided to celebrate
my 7 months in site by making gnocchi with my next door neighbor Mirna. Mirna
and her husband Herminio work and house-sit on the dairy farm next door to me,
and Mirna has come to be one of my closest friends in site. While gnocchi is a
popular dish (Argentinian influence) in some parts of Paraguay, and I actually
learned how to make gnocchi from a Paraguayan, it hasn’t quite made it out my
community. Mirna and I had a good time prepping the dough, trying to roll the
little dumplings just the right way, and of course, trying to communicate
cooking instructions in Guarani. I really need to learn the word for bowl.
While I was expecting that it would just be me, Mirna, and Herminio for dinner,
it turned out that another family dropped in to say hi and drink some mate. After some rounds of mate, Mirna loaded
up the plates (Rosana and Marcial, the other couple, were actually trying to sneak out at this
point). The verdict: Herminio and Marcial were not fans. Rosana may have been
faking that she liked it. In fact, Marcial only needed one bite to start giving
me shit, “Come on Herminio, next we’ll meet at my house and make some REAL
Paraguayan food.” At first, I was disgruntled. How many times have I eaten cow
legs, cow stomachs, pig innards, pig fat fried in cow fat, soups that have been
seasoned with a cup full of oil and cup full of salt, and taken it with a
smile? Pretty much every day until I moved into my own house. But then, after a
little bit of reflection, I realized that this was the first time that anyone
had ever hard-core made fun of me, Paraguayan style. I’m becoming one of the
family.
NOTE: I actually like cow stomach! And the pig fat fried in cow fat was pretty good too with some
hot sauce. The resourcefulness here doesn’t stop at repurposing.
Women’s Commissions:
While I wrote another more in depth blog about the three women’s commissions in
my site, I figured I would mention it here since I have been spending a lot of
time working with them recently. It is always so exciting for me to see the
women in my site advocating for their specific needs and the empowerment that
comes through their work in the commission. I just love spending time with
these feisty women. I have recently had some success supporting a relationship
between one women’s commission and the PYan department of agriculture extension
(DEAG). While I can only be in site for 2 years, the DEAG is a local resource
that will always be at these women’s fingertips. Currently the commission, the
DEAG, and I are collaborating on a pig project for increased food security and
financial income. I am also working with a second commission as they make their
“ground rules” (constitution, internal rules etc.) and figure out their goals
(needs assessment and project development).
Jaeger Farms: Aka
my demo plot, my garden, my worms, and my cat. My garden is both a “show
garden” where I demonstrate mulching, compost, companion planting etc. and a
“therapy garden.” It’s an angry day when I’m thinning. The work from the days
when I am not up to my PC-volunteer-best pays off on the better days,
especially when the women from my community come to visit. It’s easier to get
the gardeners in my community (aka the women) to try out mulching their beds
(etc) when they see a physical example of how to mulch and the results in terms
of increased vegetable yield. Also, I get to eat fresh kale on a daily basis.
July, apparently, is when everyone starts disking their
fields. Even though August is really the major planting season, some early
varieties of corn and debatably beans and sweet potatoes are ready to go in the
ground now. Watching everyone prep their fields I decided the time had come for
some major renovations. With a little help from Herminio, my little field, 3x7
meters, is now about 15x15 meters. We prepared the earth by hand with hoes
because the tractor could not get in to my backyard without destroying the trees.
With any luck, my corn and beans will grow (!) and I will get a chance to model
some methods for soil recuperation/erosion prevention.
When I headed out to site, I swore that the only pets I
would have in Paraguay would be worms. Worms??? California red worms are
special earthworms that turn your food scraps into worm castings/miracle grow.
You also have the joy of telling people “I have worms!!” and watching them look
towards your stomach in horror. While the worms aren’t originally from PY, they
can’t survive outside the worm-bin (and become invasive worm monsters) and they
are much easier to maintain than compost (which has to be turned). Turns out,
the cat is a great companion specie for worm-farming, because she protects the
worms from mice and other furry problems. As a pet, I love the cat very much,
appreciate that she has never used my carrot bed as a litter box, and enjoy
laughing at her residual fear of motorcycles (she came to me in a bag that had
fallen off the back of one these vehicles).
One-on-One
Agricultural Work: One of my favorite ways to build relationships with the
people in my community, spread the good word of sustainable agricultural
practices, practice my guarani, and mooch off of Paraguayan’s honey combs
(world’s best snack ever) is through one-on-one hands-on agricultural
education. I show to up to a family’s house to share the cup (of yerba mate)
and through conversation I find out about some pest problems in the garden, an
interest in worm bins or compost—that they’ve heard about, but don’t quite know
how to make—etc. Then we set a date, I come back, and we make homemade
repellants or whatnot together. In these mini-projects, we are using local
resources (be it leaves from a certain type of tree for the repellant, a
cracked bucket for the worm bin), I am passing on the knowledge in a more fun
way than a lecture, and the process of working together and follow-up helps me
and the family get to know each other better.
When I originally came to the community, it became pretty
clear that the reason the original 16 families invited me to site was to work
with them on a modern bathroom project. While I quickly began to feel that
these women were my family, my home base in the community, I was frustrated
that at first there wasn’t enthusiasm for what I could offer about agriculture.
The rest of the members of the community were a little confused as to why a
random American was suddenly living in their village in the first place. These
mini-projects have helped me learn a little more about what the community needs
agriculturally (what do people already know, what subjects are they asking
about, what people are interested in learning new/different techniques). I am
hoping to use the information I’ve gathered to direct a small series of more formal
classes (that will allow more people to access what I have to offer) and the
relationships I’ve built, to among other things, fill the seats.
One of my favorite “mini-projects” so far has been the worm
bin that I built with Na Rafaela. She is an amazing gardener, a bit of a
gardener perfectionist: she rarely allows anyone but herself to step on its
hallowed ground. She had visited my garden, liked what she saw, and asked me
“so how are those worms doing?” which
is about as direct as it will get here for “I want the worms!” We built the
worm bin out a cracked bucket. When I started explaining how the worms like
food scraps, she got so excited, that she announced in her boisterous way,
“That’s it! My kids don’t even like vegetables. From now on, I am making salad
and one half goes to me and the other half goes to the worms!! One tomato for
me, one tomato for the worms.”
CNA: or the
Community Needs Assessment, is a report that I have to write about the
agricultural (etc) situation in my community and opportunities for change.
During my first few months in site, my main focus was getting to know the
community, and this document is a summary of that work. The idea is that I will
write this report, present my “findings” to community members, and leave the
document for them to use (it will probably live at the school). The document
will include ideas for potential projects that I culled from door-to-door
interviews, contact info for resources for funding, etc. I am really glad that I learned how to make a
needs assessment report, since it seems like a pretty basic requirement for
learning about and working with any new group at any job. It was, however, a
bit of an adventure to fit the concept census, reports, and needs assessment to
the Paraguayan reality. And all of that with my baby Guarani skills. I couldn’t
just hand a form to check like the U.S. census, and, for example, it only took six months to properly
communicate to the DEAG that I wanted them to show me their agricultural census
results for my community and to actually receive them.
