https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=526-185
I feel as though much of what needs to be said, has, or is included in the project description at peacecorps.gov. SO I will be brief. The only elaboration I will make is that we have had the initial community meeting. The idea for the center has been slightly modified. Now more than anything else, the center can be thought of as primarily a capacitation center with the community/cultural aspect being an corralary benefit to having the building. The new government has already brought a new sense of hope and possibility to the paraguay consciousness. Lugo will serve as president without pay. He is determined to reject the tradition of considering political allegiances before hiring public servants, and he is committed to sending those servants into the paraguayan countryside to help. My site was visited by the then incoming minister of agriculture. This brings hope that we can take advantage of this newfound sense of service to bring people to the community to teach paraguayans how to improve their techniques for harvesting mandioca (their staple food) or what have you. Additinally we hope to form relations with the ministry of education and culture as well as health. I will leave it at this. Please help out if you can. Thank you so very much in advance on behalf of myself, but primarily for the people I have come to consider friends and family in Tavapy II.
Thank you again,
Andrew
Friday, August 22, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Good Trip
The point of Departure
Construction
The Banks
Open Waters
Soy Barge
Twilight
Sunrise/Skull Island
Exit Strategy
Rest
Arema
Hace Tiempo...Upon rereading some of these rambling pointless posts, I realized that things have gotten a little heavy. Volunteers don´t just sit around on the government´s dime and bitch about the situation in the States...although we do do that quite a bit. So although it may seem as though all I am doing is solidifying my dissatisfaction with the American way of life, no es asi. Let´s return to the tranquilidad. I now have two dogs. The first, Chula, was given to me by a socio, he said because I needed protection (and he gave me a tiny, underfed female dog) but really because she had been eating his eggs. I don{t have pictures of either, but Chula looks like a liver springer spaniel mixed with a greyhound. When she arrived she snuck into my room while I was sleeping and stole and ate a kilo of uncooked rice, a kilo of mandioca flour, and half a kilo of grated coconut. I fattened her up and the first thing she did was go into heat ha imembyta, shes going to have puppies. The second was a dog that showed up in the abandoned lot next to my coop. I finally lured her in and she decided to stay. She pretty much is Rusty the Narcoleptic Dog. She is a tiny brown weinerish dog that is a tough little bitch. She got hit by a car while walking back from the store with me and limped for about a minute before walking it off. I also now have a garden I built with a friend. We planted one row for our consumption of garlic, scallion, cilantro, parsley, hot and sweet peppers, carrots, lettuce, and oregano, and 4 rows for lettuce to sell and 125 tomato plants. I am building a house. The house will overlook what I have deemed the most lindo vista in Tavapy. It will be two meters off the ground to facilitate sunrise/sunset viewings and also so I can pick mandarin oranges through my window. The first floor will serve as a sheep and lamb stable. I{m going to plant a lettuce garden for myself and also a yuyo garden for my terere needs. as for my work, we´ve processed about 80,000 kilos of hoja verde leaving us with 22,000 kilos of mborovire that left the lab as ¨primera calidad¨ and we{re about to sell to one of the leading yerba outfits in the country (while being sure to leave a few thousand kilos to sell with our own label, a year down the road). Fortunately what this means is that we will have capital at the end of the harvest. Peace Corps volunteers don´t tell their counterparts what to do, we can only influence. But it looks like preference is leaning towards concentrating on corn. Fortunately, this will leave us in a great position to install capacity for 300 chickens, por alli, and however many dozen heads of hogs. When we have ganancia after the corn, it is more than feasible for us, the cooperative, to buy an oil press to provide for the towns cooking oil needs as well as the protein supplement for animal feed from the oil cake. Additionally we may launch a mandio starch project that removes the starch component of the mandio root (the almidon) and leaves a solid (typyraty) that can also be used as animal feed and the skin which can be used for organic compost. Basically, what I want for the cooperative, and what I hope that the socios will come to want, is to be the patron of the community. The patron in paraguay dictates all. But never in a benevolent manner. The patron tells you what price you will receive for your cotton. The cooperative can act as a non profit motivated intermeediary and also as supplier and creditor. Vamos a ver, but I only have hope for this town and its people. They are in a position to greatly improve things and provide reasons to stay in the campo to their children. Eventually, the idea of my sector, I believe, is to provide enough flows of value through the various projects to have enough for a manager to skim enough to make a living, after the 6 years of free volunteer service in that position. I think we are on our way. We recently attracted 4 local ag engineers to join the coop, which made me particularly happy, because they are all in their 20´s and are the future of the coop. Bueno. I{m going to try and get some pictures up, and should have my camera again in the next few weeks.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
¿Photos?
May 20th
This is Ever, my best Friend Antonio ¨Cat¨ Vargas´s son. Antonio is going through a painful separation with his wife (I only divulge this because I have a hunch he won´t be reading this) and we were talking about it, and he just goes ¨Andres, I don´t care what happens for me, I just want a copy of the picture you have of Ever¨
This is Ever, my best Friend Antonio ¨Cat¨ Vargas´s son. Antonio is going through a painful separation with his wife (I only divulge this because I have a hunch he won´t be reading this) and we were talking about it, and he just goes ¨Andres, I don´t care what happens for me, I just want a copy of the picture you have of Ever¨
Alcides. My Presidente´s first grandchild. I stayed at their house for my first month or so in site. Alcides´s favorite things were me throwing him into the air and catching him, throwing oranges as high as I can (ijyvateite!), and juking his pants off in tag-you´re-it.
The opening procession of the May 20th Independence of The Dos. The mitacuña´i is Rosy, my friend Alfredo´s daughter and his son Gustavo is carrying the stripes.
That´s Rosy
And thats the mita´itujama
Un otro no relatado
Patricia and Emanuel drawing in my room. They are the grandchildren of close friends. Antonio Torres, a volley teammate, and Ña Blanca, my go to tallerin lady.
sin titulo
Oh. And I wrote that last blog at my language teacher´s house from training. She was just put on leave without pay because cuts were handed down from Washington. I was passing through her town and she saw me heading into a cyber and we chatted. We get paid too much (the volunteers) and they´re cutting back on the most important aspect of integration, the lengua? And then we were sitting around having lunch and we saw on the news that europe is deporting its immigrants? I alemania taking the lead on that project? Jodido. Two trillion for a war and they´re cutting language teachers from the peace corps. Añarako
A picture popped up. Che kyha.
Photos doikoi
Photos are not working.
I finally got a bunch uploaded the other day, after two hours of waiting 10-15 cada uno, and the computer died and they all got undone. Anyways, there are about 20 good picture of the May 20th libertad celebration (its basically a kid parade). We´ll see if they´ll ever get up.
The last few days of been weird. Its been just over a year here, and por eso there´s been a lot of deja vu and reflection. I only stayed up all night the other night because I read two editions of People, the 100 Most Beautiful and the one about the texas polygamy cult. And I couldn´t sleep and went outside to have a cigarette (the store only had menthols) and saw the volunteers back yard which is exquisitely managed by the paraguayan owner to be and example of what a paraguayan backyard can be like. And then I stayed up all night brainstorming agroforestry, integrated, closed loop, aqua/api/silvo/pastoral/agricultural systems for paraguay. Its amazing. Fulano (paraguay´s campesino john doe) could so easily have all his fruit and vegetable needs met in 2 acres por alli. Additionally, the fruit trees (and many of the native trees) have symbiotic relationships with predatory ants, which in turn keep down the locust plagues. You can easily imagine a cooperative that plants oil palms on its members land (not plantacions of them, just 2-3-4 per acre) and then processes the nuts into biodiesel for their tractors and trucks. Also with fruit trees, yerba, oil plants, fire wood trees, trees that bees feed on, trees whose leaves can feed cattle, you can have many stories to the system. An upper strata a medium with shrubs and the lowest with traditional ag crops, corn, manioca (both of which are native and favorite foods of paraguay). Your yield drops with lowering uv penetration, but generally theres less need to fertilize the soil and use chemical pesticides. I´m an ag dork now. Its official.
Paraguay blew it against Bolivia. I thought the headlines should have been ¨perdio la batalla, gano la guerra¨because the game was only 4 days removed from the anniversary of the paz del chaco, the armistice in 1935 between Bolivia and Paraguay, which paraguay won, hence the lose the battle win the war. Thats what I love about latin america. They hate on each other so much, but at the end of the day its not so bad. I (gringo) sit and play volley with brazillians, germans, argentines, and of course los paraguayos. I was chatting with a guy who drives the bus route between asuncion and la paz bolivia and he asked me why i liked guarani so much and I told him because a paraguayan ¨ikatu he´i kurepi argentinopeguarä ha lo argentino nontendemo´ai¨ tell an argentinian he has pig skin and he won´t understand. They almost fell out of their chair. And yeah paraguayans call argentinians pig skinned, and the joke here is that you buy and argentinian for what hes worth and sell him for what he thinks hes worth, but the argentinians call the guayos funny names too, but aside from the occasional futbol riot or war, it really is a friendly banter (me parece) a lot like the british and the french. We were putting the finishing touches on the conveyor belt for the sapecadora and we were just chirping away and someone asks, ¨why does man want to fight?¨ (this was close on the heals of the ecuador, columbia, venezuela, us thing [after which I was asked if I worked for the CIA, i told the guy who asked me ¨no I´m just here to steal the fresh water¨ because thats their other big fear]) and I chimed in that my country has had its fair share of wars, and they agreed (like most of the world) but followed that they faught two disatrous wars (after the triple alliance; brazil, argentina and uruguay contra paraguay, paraguay was left with 10,000 males and 200,000 females after starting with about 500,000. There´s even a story of a group of young boys, after hearing of their father´s deaths on the battlefield, who found charcoal, probably from their tatakua´s, and drew on mustaches [to appear old enough to fight], found weapons and charged after the Brazillian soldiers only to be mowed down), we digress. Why do we fight ¨¿quien sabe?¨and I said I know why we fight and i used the exclusive we to exclude the rest of the world and only mean that group then and there, ¨rorekoma petei coronél¨ -we already have a colonel- because our treasurer´s last name is Coronél and he said to me ¨do you know Andrés, I already have a general, and went on to tell me that he calls his rembireko ¨che general´i¨ my little general. And I told him that my family calls my mother ore general´i, they couldn´t believe it, I couldn´t believe it, and we all just shared one of those moments where you´re like, we´re not different at all, to cliché it up even more. Another good one like that was when we were harvesting corn, and the socios still couldn´t believe that I could understand them. There were only three paraguayans working at the time, Anibel Ibarra and his two sons Cesar and Arsenio (his other son alcides brought me to the Dos for my first visit before I was a volunteer and ten of his kids are in Argentina or Spain). Anyways, we were getting the terere equipo ready and Cesar is saying to give the thermos to me, and his dad and brother were like ¨but Cesar, you´re the youngest¨ and I was just like ¨Añete, ne mitave¨, its true, you´re the youngest, and he kind of accepted his fate, and I was like, Cesar, I was a youngest brother too, I´ll serve. And they were just like, ¨you respect elders in the united states as well?¨ And it was just another great exchange of our shared humanity. And thats all I really hope for these days. To have the opportunity to run into another cell bag or pirate and talk la vida. Upeicha.
I finally got a bunch uploaded the other day, after two hours of waiting 10-15 cada uno, and the computer died and they all got undone. Anyways, there are about 20 good picture of the May 20th libertad celebration (its basically a kid parade). We´ll see if they´ll ever get up.
The last few days of been weird. Its been just over a year here, and por eso there´s been a lot of deja vu and reflection. I only stayed up all night the other night because I read two editions of People, the 100 Most Beautiful and the one about the texas polygamy cult. And I couldn´t sleep and went outside to have a cigarette (the store only had menthols) and saw the volunteers back yard which is exquisitely managed by the paraguayan owner to be and example of what a paraguayan backyard can be like. And then I stayed up all night brainstorming agroforestry, integrated, closed loop, aqua/api/silvo/pastoral/agricultural systems for paraguay. Its amazing. Fulano (paraguay´s campesino john doe) could so easily have all his fruit and vegetable needs met in 2 acres por alli. Additionally, the fruit trees (and many of the native trees) have symbiotic relationships with predatory ants, which in turn keep down the locust plagues. You can easily imagine a cooperative that plants oil palms on its members land (not plantacions of them, just 2-3-4 per acre) and then processes the nuts into biodiesel for their tractors and trucks. Also with fruit trees, yerba, oil plants, fire wood trees, trees that bees feed on, trees whose leaves can feed cattle, you can have many stories to the system. An upper strata a medium with shrubs and the lowest with traditional ag crops, corn, manioca (both of which are native and favorite foods of paraguay). Your yield drops with lowering uv penetration, but generally theres less need to fertilize the soil and use chemical pesticides. I´m an ag dork now. Its official.
Paraguay blew it against Bolivia. I thought the headlines should have been ¨perdio la batalla, gano la guerra¨because the game was only 4 days removed from the anniversary of the paz del chaco, the armistice in 1935 between Bolivia and Paraguay, which paraguay won, hence the lose the battle win the war. Thats what I love about latin america. They hate on each other so much, but at the end of the day its not so bad. I (gringo) sit and play volley with brazillians, germans, argentines, and of course los paraguayos. I was chatting with a guy who drives the bus route between asuncion and la paz bolivia and he asked me why i liked guarani so much and I told him because a paraguayan ¨ikatu he´i kurepi argentinopeguarä ha lo argentino nontendemo´ai¨ tell an argentinian he has pig skin and he won´t understand. They almost fell out of their chair. And yeah paraguayans call argentinians pig skinned, and the joke here is that you buy and argentinian for what hes worth and sell him for what he thinks hes worth, but the argentinians call the guayos funny names too, but aside from the occasional futbol riot or war, it really is a friendly banter (me parece) a lot like the british and the french. We were putting the finishing touches on the conveyor belt for the sapecadora and we were just chirping away and someone asks, ¨why does man want to fight?¨ (this was close on the heals of the ecuador, columbia, venezuela, us thing [after which I was asked if I worked for the CIA, i told the guy who asked me ¨no I´m just here to steal the fresh water¨ because thats their other big fear]) and I chimed in that my country has had its fair share of wars, and they agreed (like most of the world) but followed that they faught two disatrous wars (after the triple alliance; brazil, argentina and uruguay contra paraguay, paraguay was left with 10,000 males and 200,000 females after starting with about 500,000. There´s even a story of a group of young boys, after hearing of their father´s deaths on the battlefield, who found charcoal, probably from their tatakua´s, and drew on mustaches [to appear old enough to fight], found weapons and charged after the Brazillian soldiers only to be mowed down), we digress. Why do we fight ¨¿quien sabe?¨and I said I know why we fight and i used the exclusive we to exclude the rest of the world and only mean that group then and there, ¨rorekoma petei coronél¨ -we already have a colonel- because our treasurer´s last name is Coronél and he said to me ¨do you know Andrés, I already have a general, and went on to tell me that he calls his rembireko ¨che general´i¨ my little general. And I told him that my family calls my mother ore general´i, they couldn´t believe it, I couldn´t believe it, and we all just shared one of those moments where you´re like, we´re not different at all, to cliché it up even more. Another good one like that was when we were harvesting corn, and the socios still couldn´t believe that I could understand them. There were only three paraguayans working at the time, Anibel Ibarra and his two sons Cesar and Arsenio (his other son alcides brought me to the Dos for my first visit before I was a volunteer and ten of his kids are in Argentina or Spain). Anyways, we were getting the terere equipo ready and Cesar is saying to give the thermos to me, and his dad and brother were like ¨but Cesar, you´re the youngest¨ and I was just like ¨Añete, ne mitave¨, its true, you´re the youngest, and he kind of accepted his fate, and I was like, Cesar, I was a youngest brother too, I´ll serve. And they were just like, ¨you respect elders in the united states as well?¨ And it was just another great exchange of our shared humanity. And thats all I really hope for these days. To have the opportunity to run into another cell bag or pirate and talk la vida. Upeicha.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Guarani parte moköi whoop whoop
es la verdad, menthols suck
So yes, another sleepness night in paraguay. Literally not a wink, and thats weird because the last few days have been harsh. Three nghts ago, we were having a few beers getting ready to head to the defenders of the chaco stadium to see paraguay brazil the next day, and we run into a group of parguayans. But not campesinos como yo estoy acostumbrado, chuchi (thats rich, luxurious in the G) lebanese ciudad del este´ers rolling around asuncion in a late model benz SUV. Asi es paraguay, we were with them at night, but if it had been day time we surely would have driven past donkey carts loaded with mandioca heading to the municipal market. Anyways, the dudes introduced themselves and had a table filled with MGD´s straight up high life (because in paraguay, they actually think budweiser is the king of beers [Labatt´s Blue was launched in Paraguay about 3 months ago as well...Ejuke goldsalt]). And they were just like, lebanon, you know like the war with israel. They knew we were americans, and they should have realized that could have been a touchy subject, but I was just like ndaipori mba´ere, la guerravaijepi. Kopyhare daha´ei guerra peguarä - there isn´t why, war is always ugly, tonight isn´t for war - just hoping we could kind of be like ¨moving on...¨ like when I was headed to heathrow and a japanese family asked me if I knew which the asian terminal was and i didn´t know and we struck up a convo and I asked where they were from and they go nagasaki and I said, ¨oh I know th...yikes¨. But as per usual, it was tranquilo. They knew enough english, and we know bastante castellano. I don´t even remember their names because the first thing they wanted to kno0w were the dirty words, so from that point on one of them was f--- face, another was jaguacuña (b*t*h), and the last was f----t. And they gave eachother those names. They taught us some arabic, if anybody out there knows it you´re a kasemagh (i think thats it) and then we taught them how to shotgun and open beer bottles with lighters. The only friction was that they couldn´t speak guarani and their girlfriends were paraguayaitekuera (mestizo) and they got a little possessive when we were talking with their ladies in a language they couldn´t understand. But tranquilo, they said it was a ¨dirty language, for the field¨. i corrected him and said kokue peguarä (for the field). Thats not offensive in paraguay either. The brazileros don´t learn it, neither do los alemanes, ni los polacos, ni koreanos, ni los ricos de asuncion. Oosh (thats a word in guarani). Speaking of rivalries with brazillians...
http://www.tsn.ca/soccer/story/?id=240830
bam! deal with it braziputos!! And it was a sick game. Paraguay should have won 4-0 btu what can you do. For me there were three highlights to my experience of the game. The win. The sun setting into the chaco (which in quechua means land of the animals. for Yerba Mate the word mate is derived from quechua as well. Its is their word for gourd because only the new world had the cucurbit family and they hollowed and cured the gourds to use as the yerba cup. Go look at google earth ha evevemi Alto paranaguive cuzcopeve and tell me that preconquest south america didn´t have a thriving economy.) and over the rio paraguay as time was running out and the entire city emptied into the streets to party almost all night in the plaza de los heroes bien cerca de el panteon de los heroes and the palacia de justicia (in fact near the place where the people from the Dos came to demand title to their land from stroessner). The commentary behind me of a father and his son at the game:
a paraguayan midfielder is getting ready to iso some helpless brazillian and dude just says to his player ¨veni papi, no hay nadie, solo marecones¨
...his son after it was 2-0 goes ¨papa, papa, ya ganemos¨, ¨noooo hijito, no hay que pensar eso¨, and then i turned around ¨ne´irä ñagana...pero angu´ite che ra¨ we still haven´t won...but in a second my friend, because in guarani you tack on che ra, my friend, for emphasis. Ro´yyypaite che ra its freaking cold! but then Ro´uuu che ra means eat me my friend. Another good misspeak is the word haku. It means hot for weather and horniness. If you´re overheating you say che che mbyryai. But we had a quince to go to during training (sweet 15), and we were being good social volunteers dancing with the mitacuña´i, but che ajerykyhina (i was dancing) with like a 12 year old, but we had just started learning guarani and i wanted to use it (but didn´t know how to), so I was just like che hakuuu, telling a twelve year old how horny i was. Found out about three days later and understood their response: they laughed, as usual. There are tongue twisters in guarani, tribalenguas, speaking of laughing. One goes ¨aguapy pykapuku ha apukapuku¨ which means i sat on the bench and laughed a long time. ¨aha aha ha ha´a¨ i go to leave and I fall. I´m going to kick it up a notch for this leccion´i. For basics there´s a post from about a year ago with what i was learning as a trainee. So, most people are like guarani is a simple indiginous language, how can it convey meaning like english? It does. Oikopaite. For starters they have the two we´s jaguapy is we all sit, roguapy is we sit, but fulano can´t and when you use the exclusive you generally gesture to include the people. In english we have the same word when for siz different meanings:
when i did that
when i did that a long time ago
when i do that
when i will do that
when did you do that?
when is the game?
ajapokuri
ajapova´ekue
ajapojave
ajapovove
araka´epiko/pio/pa (those three if you hear them they signify a question, but pa is also like an empasizer as well and they are 100% interchangable. One of the only distinctions is piko can stand alone. Fulano goes, ¨man, the corn is germinating like a crazy¨ and his buddy goes ¨piko?¨) rejapora´e - araka´e ndepiko/pio/pa rejapora´e - araka´e nde rejapopiko/pio/pa
y finalmente
mba´epa/piko/pio hora/día/semana/ lo partido
Guarani is funny. Its all abrupt syllables and nasal vowels. But it builds itself, and you can break it down and compartmentalize the different ¨particles¨. Going through a pack of menthols last night helped with the breakdown as well. G is structured such that you stack the particles on to the back of the word usually, but sometimes in front.
oke is he sleeps
okese he want to sleep
okesema he already wants to sleep
okesemapiko does he already want to sleep
but okë means door
kookë is this door upeokë is that door
and oike means he enters
oiko means literally to live like maintain homestasis, but also live as in dwell, and to function
doikoi means it doesn´t work
doikoimo´ai means it won´t work
oikoramö and oikorö both mean if it works.
so now it gets interesting
dawn in G is ko´ë. If you greet someone before like 7 you say mba´eichapa ne ko´ë ? literally how did you dawn, not wake up (wake up is pu´a. The state called itapua is called that because in that section of the rio parana there´s a big island, and ita is the word for rock and pu´a means more to rise so the state is called like risen rock)
but then tomorrow is ko´erö. Which means literally ¨if the dawn¨. so now it gets good
upe before a word means that. upetatu means that armadillo
upea means that one (and paraguayans have the bad habit of calling people ¨that¨ which took getting used to)
upeaicha means like that because you tack icha onto words to say like. So you´d say this in a really excited way with your voice modulating and you´re just singing and you go ¨eh! hakuiterei che ra. Che amanota. ugh nde japu, chente amanota. Ñaikotevë petei cerveza jaguatïicha¨ and that last bit you´re asking for a beer like a dogs nose.
and lastly upeicharö means ¨if like that¨ a little how we would use ¨well then¨ or ¨entonces¨ in spanish or ¨entaö¨ no portugues
alright, only three more things. the particles mbo/mo (depends on whether the word its attached to is nasal or oral [G has a 33 letter alphabet, nasel vowels (y included) and a nasal g. Have fun with that.) uka and ve.
Ve kind of signifies more. Hakuve kopyhareve (that ve means nothing). Kuehe pyhare ho´ysa
but that means its hotter this morning. last night was chilly. ou means he or she comes. and douvei means he or she doesn´t come around anymore. nome´evei shes not giving any more...you hear the muchachos using that a lot.
but then ve has a really interesting meaning.
The interrogatives in guarani are
who
what
where
when
how
mava
mba´e (which also means thing)
moo
araka´e
mba´eicha
but then to say the following
nobody
nothing
nowhere
never
you say
mavave
mba´eve
moove
araka´eve
in my unqualified opinion its kind of like when you´re asking a question you´re by definition lacking something. Its like who and more who for nobody.
but then there´s two other really intersting uses
gui and guive
and
pe and peve
gui and pe means from and to respectively
but guive and peve mean since and until. So its like more to the final destination. The G is awesome. It starts to unravel like this. But after half a year of listening all day everyday.
ha iporä
mbo and mo come before the word. And they modify a word such that the noun is making the word modified by mbo or mo i don´t know how to explain it. But mira. chyryry means fried. But ambochyryry means i fry. You impose one word on the other kind of. potï means clean and amopotï means i clean / i make clean
and you can make funny words with that. nañembyatymo´ai means I won´t join. Nachemombyry´ai´mo´ai means it won´t make me warm. nañañemongetamo´ai
means we (inclusive) won´t talk about it (-mo´ai signifies a future that won´t occur) but here the trick where ro´u becomes eat me. IF you say ore ro´u you´re saying we (exclusive) eat. But if you say che ro´u you´re saying i eat you. Which makes sense when you think about it, because the ro (unlike the rö for if) signifies an accion between 2, 3 people, but a paraguayan would say roganapaite la guerra del chaco ¨we really won the chaco war¨ kind of like they´re excluding the bolivians in absencia.
The intersting part about the mbo and mo is there hidden role. akaru means i lunch. but amongaru means i make another lunch (to feed, alimentar). just e is the infinitive for speak and ambo´e means teach (i make speak). ajapo means i make or do and amba´apo means i work (i make do).
Uka is attached to the end of words and means to make someone do something for something or someone, kind of. ahecha means i see and ahechauka means i show (i make see). Its weird because they seem similar, but aren´t.
Just two other cositas ou coisinhas. They sing when they talk. opurahe´i means he sings. osapoca´i means he shouts and he´i means he says. But its wild. My voice has changed as a result. I can talk really high pitched when i´m chirping. Three things i guess. Another thing is about a third of the time, you´re not even speaking a language. Like when we talk about the yerba moving you just say like mbop mbop mbop, I occasionally pull out beep bop boop you´re fired too. And then the last is the learning process. One anecdote will claraficar todo. there´s three different ways to conjugate verbs and I asked my neighbor ¨antonio, which of the three types of verbs is this? and he just looks at me and goes ¨andres, whats a verb?¨ so yes. Its fun though. I try and learn two or three palabras por dia. Stupid stuff too, like the names of the different types of grass. You can be sure that if something is annoying or has a use they have a name in guarani, which is impressive given its rather turbulent history. Kapi´i atï and kapi´i una have seeds that are awful. But kapi´i pororo they pick and bundle up and make torches for the festival de san juan. I´m spent. I didn´t just burn through a pack at my site though, i´m still in transit back. But safely with a volunteer along the way. She´s leaving in a few weeks and is from my sister G, so I wanted to get pictures for her of her site at sunrise and I was up at 3 anyway i figured almost there, just go for it. And now its time for my siesta. After a few photos. Later
So yes, another sleepness night in paraguay. Literally not a wink, and thats weird because the last few days have been harsh. Three nghts ago, we were having a few beers getting ready to head to the defenders of the chaco stadium to see paraguay brazil the next day, and we run into a group of parguayans. But not campesinos como yo estoy acostumbrado, chuchi (thats rich, luxurious in the G) lebanese ciudad del este´ers rolling around asuncion in a late model benz SUV. Asi es paraguay, we were with them at night, but if it had been day time we surely would have driven past donkey carts loaded with mandioca heading to the municipal market. Anyways, the dudes introduced themselves and had a table filled with MGD´s straight up high life (because in paraguay, they actually think budweiser is the king of beers [Labatt´s Blue was launched in Paraguay about 3 months ago as well...Ejuke goldsalt]). And they were just like, lebanon, you know like the war with israel. They knew we were americans, and they should have realized that could have been a touchy subject, but I was just like ndaipori mba´ere, la guerravaijepi. Kopyhare daha´ei guerra peguarä - there isn´t why, war is always ugly, tonight isn´t for war - just hoping we could kind of be like ¨moving on...¨ like when I was headed to heathrow and a japanese family asked me if I knew which the asian terminal was and i didn´t know and we struck up a convo and I asked where they were from and they go nagasaki and I said, ¨oh I know th...yikes¨. But as per usual, it was tranquilo. They knew enough english, and we know bastante castellano. I don´t even remember their names because the first thing they wanted to kno0w were the dirty words, so from that point on one of them was f--- face, another was jaguacuña (b*t*h), and the last was f----t. And they gave eachother those names. They taught us some arabic, if anybody out there knows it you´re a kasemagh (i think thats it) and then we taught them how to shotgun and open beer bottles with lighters. The only friction was that they couldn´t speak guarani and their girlfriends were paraguayaitekuera (mestizo) and they got a little possessive when we were talking with their ladies in a language they couldn´t understand. But tranquilo, they said it was a ¨dirty language, for the field¨. i corrected him and said kokue peguarä (for the field). Thats not offensive in paraguay either. The brazileros don´t learn it, neither do los alemanes, ni los polacos, ni koreanos, ni los ricos de asuncion. Oosh (thats a word in guarani). Speaking of rivalries with brazillians...
http://www.tsn.ca/soccer/story/?id=240830
bam! deal with it braziputos!! And it was a sick game. Paraguay should have won 4-0 btu what can you do. For me there were three highlights to my experience of the game. The win. The sun setting into the chaco (which in quechua means land of the animals. for Yerba Mate the word mate is derived from quechua as well. Its is their word for gourd because only the new world had the cucurbit family and they hollowed and cured the gourds to use as the yerba cup. Go look at google earth ha evevemi Alto paranaguive cuzcopeve and tell me that preconquest south america didn´t have a thriving economy.) and over the rio paraguay as time was running out and the entire city emptied into the streets to party almost all night in the plaza de los heroes bien cerca de el panteon de los heroes and the palacia de justicia (in fact near the place where the people from the Dos came to demand title to their land from stroessner). The commentary behind me of a father and his son at the game:
a paraguayan midfielder is getting ready to iso some helpless brazillian and dude just says to his player ¨veni papi, no hay nadie, solo marecones¨
...his son after it was 2-0 goes ¨papa, papa, ya ganemos¨, ¨noooo hijito, no hay que pensar eso¨, and then i turned around ¨ne´irä ñagana...pero angu´ite che ra¨ we still haven´t won...but in a second my friend, because in guarani you tack on che ra, my friend, for emphasis. Ro´yyypaite che ra its freaking cold! but then Ro´uuu che ra means eat me my friend. Another good misspeak is the word haku. It means hot for weather and horniness. If you´re overheating you say che che mbyryai. But we had a quince to go to during training (sweet 15), and we were being good social volunteers dancing with the mitacuña´i, but che ajerykyhina (i was dancing) with like a 12 year old, but we had just started learning guarani and i wanted to use it (but didn´t know how to), so I was just like che hakuuu, telling a twelve year old how horny i was. Found out about three days later and understood their response: they laughed, as usual. There are tongue twisters in guarani, tribalenguas, speaking of laughing. One goes ¨aguapy pykapuku ha apukapuku¨ which means i sat on the bench and laughed a long time. ¨aha aha ha ha´a¨ i go to leave and I fall. I´m going to kick it up a notch for this leccion´i. For basics there´s a post from about a year ago with what i was learning as a trainee. So, most people are like guarani is a simple indiginous language, how can it convey meaning like english? It does. Oikopaite. For starters they have the two we´s jaguapy is we all sit, roguapy is we sit, but fulano can´t and when you use the exclusive you generally gesture to include the people. In english we have the same word when for siz different meanings:
when i did that
when i did that a long time ago
when i do that
when i will do that
when did you do that?
when is the game?
ajapokuri
ajapova´ekue
ajapojave
ajapovove
araka´epiko/pio/pa (those three if you hear them they signify a question, but pa is also like an empasizer as well and they are 100% interchangable. One of the only distinctions is piko can stand alone. Fulano goes, ¨man, the corn is germinating like a crazy¨ and his buddy goes ¨piko?¨) rejapora´e - araka´e ndepiko/pio/pa rejapora´e - araka´e nde rejapopiko/pio/pa
y finalmente
mba´epa/piko/pio hora/día/semana/ lo partido
Guarani is funny. Its all abrupt syllables and nasal vowels. But it builds itself, and you can break it down and compartmentalize the different ¨particles¨. Going through a pack of menthols last night helped with the breakdown as well. G is structured such that you stack the particles on to the back of the word usually, but sometimes in front.
oke is he sleeps
okese he want to sleep
okesema he already wants to sleep
okesemapiko does he already want to sleep
but okë means door
kookë is this door upeokë is that door
and oike means he enters
oiko means literally to live like maintain homestasis, but also live as in dwell, and to function
doikoi means it doesn´t work
doikoimo´ai means it won´t work
oikoramö and oikorö both mean if it works.
so now it gets interesting
dawn in G is ko´ë. If you greet someone before like 7 you say mba´eichapa ne ko´ë ? literally how did you dawn, not wake up (wake up is pu´a. The state called itapua is called that because in that section of the rio parana there´s a big island, and ita is the word for rock and pu´a means more to rise so the state is called like risen rock)
but then tomorrow is ko´erö. Which means literally ¨if the dawn¨. so now it gets good
upe before a word means that. upetatu means that armadillo
upea means that one (and paraguayans have the bad habit of calling people ¨that¨ which took getting used to)
upeaicha means like that because you tack icha onto words to say like. So you´d say this in a really excited way with your voice modulating and you´re just singing and you go ¨eh! hakuiterei che ra. Che amanota. ugh nde japu, chente amanota. Ñaikotevë petei cerveza jaguatïicha¨ and that last bit you´re asking for a beer like a dogs nose.
and lastly upeicharö means ¨if like that¨ a little how we would use ¨well then¨ or ¨entonces¨ in spanish or ¨entaö¨ no portugues
alright, only three more things. the particles mbo/mo (depends on whether the word its attached to is nasal or oral [G has a 33 letter alphabet, nasel vowels (y included) and a nasal g. Have fun with that.) uka and ve.
Ve kind of signifies more. Hakuve kopyhareve (that ve means nothing). Kuehe pyhare ho´ysa
but that means its hotter this morning. last night was chilly. ou means he or she comes. and douvei means he or she doesn´t come around anymore. nome´evei shes not giving any more...you hear the muchachos using that a lot.
but then ve has a really interesting meaning.
The interrogatives in guarani are
who
what
where
when
how
mava
mba´e (which also means thing)
moo
araka´e
mba´eicha
but then to say the following
nobody
nothing
nowhere
never
you say
mavave
mba´eve
moove
araka´eve
in my unqualified opinion its kind of like when you´re asking a question you´re by definition lacking something. Its like who and more who for nobody.
but then there´s two other really intersting uses
gui and guive
and
pe and peve
gui and pe means from and to respectively
but guive and peve mean since and until. So its like more to the final destination. The G is awesome. It starts to unravel like this. But after half a year of listening all day everyday.
ha iporä
mbo and mo come before the word. And they modify a word such that the noun is making the word modified by mbo or mo i don´t know how to explain it. But mira. chyryry means fried. But ambochyryry means i fry. You impose one word on the other kind of. potï means clean and amopotï means i clean / i make clean
and you can make funny words with that. nañembyatymo´ai means I won´t join. Nachemombyry´ai´mo´ai means it won´t make me warm. nañañemongetamo´ai
means we (inclusive) won´t talk about it (-mo´ai signifies a future that won´t occur) but here the trick where ro´u becomes eat me. IF you say ore ro´u you´re saying we (exclusive) eat. But if you say che ro´u you´re saying i eat you. Which makes sense when you think about it, because the ro (unlike the rö for if) signifies an accion between 2, 3 people, but a paraguayan would say roganapaite la guerra del chaco ¨we really won the chaco war¨ kind of like they´re excluding the bolivians in absencia.
The intersting part about the mbo and mo is there hidden role. akaru means i lunch. but amongaru means i make another lunch (to feed, alimentar). just e is the infinitive for speak and ambo´e means teach (i make speak). ajapo means i make or do and amba´apo means i work (i make do).
Uka is attached to the end of words and means to make someone do something for something or someone, kind of. ahecha means i see and ahechauka means i show (i make see). Its weird because they seem similar, but aren´t.
Just two other cositas ou coisinhas. They sing when they talk. opurahe´i means he sings. osapoca´i means he shouts and he´i means he says. But its wild. My voice has changed as a result. I can talk really high pitched when i´m chirping. Three things i guess. Another thing is about a third of the time, you´re not even speaking a language. Like when we talk about the yerba moving you just say like mbop mbop mbop, I occasionally pull out beep bop boop you´re fired too. And then the last is the learning process. One anecdote will claraficar todo. there´s three different ways to conjugate verbs and I asked my neighbor ¨antonio, which of the three types of verbs is this? and he just looks at me and goes ¨andres, whats a verb?¨ so yes. Its fun though. I try and learn two or three palabras por dia. Stupid stuff too, like the names of the different types of grass. You can be sure that if something is annoying or has a use they have a name in guarani, which is impressive given its rather turbulent history. Kapi´i atï and kapi´i una have seeds that are awful. But kapi´i pororo they pick and bundle up and make torches for the festival de san juan. I´m spent. I didn´t just burn through a pack at my site though, i´m still in transit back. But safely with a volunteer along the way. She´s leaving in a few weeks and is from my sister G, so I wanted to get pictures for her of her site at sunrise and I was up at 3 anyway i figured almost there, just go for it. And now its time for my siesta. After a few photos. Later
Monday, June 16, 2008
just a quickie
thats a good preface to this story.
So i leave asuncion terminal at 2. The bus crashes into a pickup about 40 k out. We bajarnos and wait for another bus. Buses come and go and I finally get on another at around 4. Tranquilo. But, lightning struck a second time in a town called Juan Mallorquin, known in guarani as ka'arendy (yerba burning. one of the funny things about paraguay is that a lot of the towns have sweet names in guarani but were changed to lame spanish names). So we get into mallorquin and the bus just crawls to a stop and dies, oil leak. So at this point, around 7:30, I know that I can't make the 7 o'clock last bus to encarnacion from ciudad del este. SO naturally I went to the terminal and got a box of uvita and a leg of chicken (uvita is a cheap argentinian wine, of such high quality that it gets exported to the former soviet bloc as evidenced by the cyrhillic alphabet on one side of the packaging). The stem was for immediate gratification, and the uvita was my reward for when i presumably would arrive back in my site. So finally another bus comes at around 9 -por alli- and i hop on. Home free. Only have to catch the 11:30 encarn bus at kilometer thirty (beautiful, beautiful kilometer thirty). But nahaniri. The bus driver's wouldn't let me off because they said it was too dangerous and they would leave me at the toll booth, about 5 k further down the ruta. So i get off at a deserted toll booth and with my motile options limited to a moto taxi, which would get me thrown out of the peace corps, hitching with the police (but that was out because they were in the process of making a bust on a brazil bound smuggler), and hoping an asuncion bus would roll through and bring me back to 30. Fortunately, por suerte, a bus came. I tried to explain my plight and asked to not pay. Doikoi. Not only did they make me pay 10 thousand guaranis to go 4 kilometers, but as we were rolling by the police (paraguayan bus drivers are the worst rubberneckers in the world) he just goes "why is your bag so heavy? all the marijuana?" and i was just like thanks dick, right in front of the police mid bust you're going to make them think that i'm trafficking drugs? Anywho, arrive in 30 tranquilamente and head to the hotel that i stayed at almost exactly a year ago when going to my site for the first time and getting similarly stranded. I can't describe the seediness (the only billboard in 30 is a wild west wanted billboard of 4 guys with warrants for their arrests in brazil and paraguay, and of course their aliae? if thats the plural. Caballito (little horse) is wanted for traffickingdrugs into brazil, good to know, comforting. So I head to the motel. Doorbell, nobody's home. I wait and wait and finally there's some movement and out comes a dude in his tighty whiteys who starts dancing on his little balcony. Next his girlfriend walks out topless. I'm just like "is there space for the night?" . Don't know, I'm not the owner. I go in and do the paraguayan doorbell, clapping your hands really loudly, but nobody stirs. So I feel defeated, time for the uvita. I take some bricks from a construction site, three to sit on and wait for the bus and a fourth for self defense should necessity require as such, and rip that uvita box open like its all going to the ukraine. Dude comes over: "que tal?", ha che "mba'e la porte?" He leaves and sits with his buddies and I'm just like shit, they're drawing straws for who gets to mug gringo. But finally they yell over to me "ejumi" (thats the polite command in guarani to come over). So I go over, clink my box-o-wine with their cerveza ha roguapy. And we chat. Pablo the mechanic, his friend, another mechanic, and the guard with the sawed off. They were some of the most calidad dudes I've hung out with. They're sitting there like the potato eaters but instead of gnarled hands illuminated by a warm hearth, its grease covered paws and the omnipresent fluorescent lighting of paraguay. And pablo goes "anders, do you know who the happiest man in the world is?" who? "el pobre" the poor man. Why pablo?, "because he knows exactly what he has, nothing". Anete che ra. Now, thats not the most profound statement in the world. But sitting around drinking with friendly people in a shite corner of the world, it was fun. But he goes on "Andres, do you know who has it the worst in the world?" no pablo, who? mavapa? "El pobre...cuando lo rice esta corriendo, esta tomando ejercicio, cuando el pobre corre, esta robando. Cuando el rico tiene vino, esta tomando un poco, disfrutando la vida; cuando el pobre quiere tomar, es un borracho." Thank you pablo. When the rich man runs, hes exercising, when the poor man runs, he's stealing. When the rich man is drinking he's enjoying, when the poor man drinks, he's a drunk. The some deep (albeit contradictory; is the poor man happy or sad, or both?) stuff to hear from third world mechanics. Finally, 1 o'clock rolls around. I'm like amigos, this bus isn't coming, what am I going to do? "Andres, vamos arrelar la situacion" jaha. They went into the junkyard and grabbed a tarp and some insulating foam and made me a nice little bed. I didn't have my sleeping bag, but the fates smiled on me that night and it was a balmy paraguayan winter night. I shook their hands and thanked them, and the guard with the sawed off ambles over to his post and says to me, "anders, don't worry, voy a protegirte"
Although I only slept 3 hours until 4 when the mechanic opened for business and had to get back to my site for pay day at the yerba factory. I swear to los dios, that it was the most beautiful dawn I've seen in paraguay. I knew red clouds signify rain, sailor take warning, but I didn't care, I laid on my foam and watched that sun rise como la kuarahy nosemo'ai ko'ero. I told them before they left that night that I was going to come back to drink terere with them, and although I haven't yet had the opportunity, I will make it back. Tranquilo.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Tranquilove
So, things got a little dramatic in those last few posts. I apologize for that. The heavyness does not coincide with the tranquilidad of the dos. So its been just over a year in paraguay at this point, I arrived on el primero de junio del año dos mil siete. I thought I would take this opportunity to share some of the funnier anecdotes of the last 12 months. Forgive me if I repeat any, but none of these entries have been prewritten and I have a tendency for rambling and tangential thought.
This is a tough one to start, and unfortunately won´t be accompanied by photos, i´ll get those up at some point though.
Well there was the raft. Built from bamboo, four 55 gallon drums, planks, and 100 meters of rope stocked with a watermelon, coconuts, canned meat, and 40 empanadas for a 400 kilometer stretch of the parana river, with some hijinx along the way. That was fun.
I´ve gotten into random truco (paraguayan card game) games at bus terminals at night with people who just want the gringo´s money (and they do think we have it, I told some people my salary once (1,200,000 guaranis/month) and they asked me if that was in dollars.
I walked 38 kilometers the other day. Because I misunderstood directions and ended up at a different aquaculture place than the one i wanted and the brazillian owner was on vacation in brazil, so after 19K there i spoke to the help in portuguese for about a minute and then turned around to head back to santa rita. But, I´m told I did walk through the kilumbo district, so thats cool. Speaking of districts, there´s also the dog meat asadito district in KM 30.
As for misadventures, one day I set out on my bike to find the Monday (pronounced monda uh) waterfalls, because I had heard of their existence and knew how to find the Monday river (¨monda¨ means to steal and ¨y¨ means water, so its the stolen water river) so I rode my bike the 10 km north until i hit the river and then just turned east and 80 km later I was at the ciudad del este airport tired and defeated having ridden through back country alto parana, shanty towns, isolated river towns, illegal timber operations, a drug field or two (i think), without food or water (i had to stop at random houses to explain my plight) only to finally get on a bus to go spend the night at another volunteer´s site and have the stereo play the theme song from ghostbusters. I almost cried from happiness. Another bike adventure was to scout the Parana and the town we would leave from, Domingo M irala. That needed a 25 KM ride to Santa Rosa del Monday (the self proclaimed capital of soy), a 25 k hitch with a guy named Everaldo Freitz, and then a final 25 on a boondocks bus. Only to arrive there, explain the plan, tell them when I was going to come back to build the raft, and then find there is no bus back to my site. So I had to hitch up to ciudad del este and then find my way out of that city with a bike to look after. And I´ve been a victim there before. I was walking with another volunteer and we had a big bottle of dasani water and the pirañitas (literally little piranhas, but street urchin kids) came over and demanded the water. I tried ooshing them but there was a line of paraguayans waiting for a bus and one of the little kids shouted ¨che y¨(my water) and snagged it. Fortunately there were scissor noodles to console me on the second floor of this asian hotel that overlooks the golden domed mosque/apartment complex located next to the Shalom Peluqueria (Shalom Barber). The restaurant is on the second floor and one time the elevator was taking forever so i took the stairs, and since we were only a floor up i figure the next flight would be the lobby. But instead I opened the door into another plexiglass door seperating me from a bunch of korean gamblers in an unlicensed casino mushed between the floors.
After a tatakua pizza party, we had missed the last bus back to Las Piedras, our host community, so my solution was to walk towards asuncion until we found a place to stay. We ended up spending the night at the by-the-hour Motel VIP Aquarius. The next morning I had to find my way back to get to language class and on the walk to Guarambare bought a watermelon to break the fast and a cornacopia of yuyos for my mid morning terere.
One of my neighbors pigs that had been eating my soap and my other neighbors vegetables was smitten through a cosmic act of karma when it got run over by a tractor.
Our yerba buyer, Rolan, came back to buy our first 4000 kilos of processed yerba. Rolan, the first time he came, regaled me with stories from his days in the paraguayan special forces and his deployment to the dominican republic to fight leftist revolutionaries in the jungle as part of the US led Operation Power Pack. He said that he didn´t mind spending 5 months in the jungle fighting guerilla warfare, it just bothered him that ¨the US never said thank you¨. Hes bringing me to his next supplier to see a slightly larger yerba operation and to hang out some more. He´s a paraguayan of german descent. His grandfather died in russia on the eastern front in WW2 and his dad emmigrated to paraguay during the war. I was sick one of the nights he came and he went into the forest and came back with Jagua pety (dog tabacco) and made a drink out of it for me. When he was last in the dos, he taught me how to listen to the bird calls to get a read on the weather and also put me in contact with his nephew who imports stuff from china. He´s interesting, but kind of makes me nervous, but overall very solid.
My guarani has improved dramatically recently. With the yerba factory moving, I usally work until about 1 at night with them chirping all the while in the guarani. My jobs are either moving the hoja verde to the conveyor belt, feeding the grinder, or loading the barbacua. Feeding the grinder blows. Before I got a face mask, all of the yerba powder was going straight up the nose and into the lungs, and the workers in that part, the cancheadoras, get covered in green powder and the joke is that you look like a parrot. But Yerba is highly caffeinated. And you´re still drinking terere and mate while working and inhaling it. I´ve never experienced hyper sensitivity like that before really.
The Guarani just makes life funnier. Since all paraguayan children outside of asuncion are spoken to in Jopara (the mix) by their parents when they are young, yet they are taught in school in spanish and have a class dedicated to pure guarani, when they´re just riffing in jopara, anything goes. They´re filthy but hilarious, and since its in guarani (jopara rather), the only people who would be judgemental wouldn´t understand. One of the major guarani insults is ¨go f- the devil¨. And then the word piranha is derived from guarani. Pira is fish, and aña is devil. So they´re really called devil fish.
On the inevitable corny/dramatic note. I couldn´t sleep the other night. It was nearing one year to the day of my arrival and my bosses had just come and the harvest was getting totally geared up the next day. I woke up at 3:30 and couldn´t get back to sleep. there wasn´t any yerba, so I had to settle for green tea. But I was sitting in my yard waiting for the sun to rise listening to some samba, and I finally understood one of Beth Carvalho´s lyrics from her song ¨O mundo è o moinho¨ (the world is a mill). She just goes ¨em cada esquina, cae um pouco de sua vida¨, on every corner falls a little of your life. And I don´t know why, but that, mixed with the fog´s slow thickening and the sun´s first rays poking up made me feel grateful to have had the opportunities that I´ve had so far to leave little bits of my heart and life with people whom I would never have met had things gone differentlly.
And now, the foods I couldn´t eat when I first got here make me hungry (cow´s head, pig guts, chicken feet) and the things i couldn´t understand make me smile and laugh. The forest is filled with familiar trees and yuyo herbs, the wind with recognizable bird and insect calls, the sky with stars and clouds that are comforting, but most importantly, the houses are filled with friends and family. I spend 2 dollars a day on average, 4 for a major splurge like asado or coconuts (my biggest indulgence is olive oil for 10 dollars). And yet we were sitting around the fire warming our hands, drinking the night time mate, and Antonio and I were chatting about Mercosur, the small producer, sustenance farming, and we decided that the four important things in life are free; family, friendship, youth and nature.
Good stuff. Hope everything is well for everyone.
This is a tough one to start, and unfortunately won´t be accompanied by photos, i´ll get those up at some point though.
Well there was the raft. Built from bamboo, four 55 gallon drums, planks, and 100 meters of rope stocked with a watermelon, coconuts, canned meat, and 40 empanadas for a 400 kilometer stretch of the parana river, with some hijinx along the way. That was fun.
I´ve gotten into random truco (paraguayan card game) games at bus terminals at night with people who just want the gringo´s money (and they do think we have it, I told some people my salary once (1,200,000 guaranis/month) and they asked me if that was in dollars.
I walked 38 kilometers the other day. Because I misunderstood directions and ended up at a different aquaculture place than the one i wanted and the brazillian owner was on vacation in brazil, so after 19K there i spoke to the help in portuguese for about a minute and then turned around to head back to santa rita. But, I´m told I did walk through the kilumbo district, so thats cool. Speaking of districts, there´s also the dog meat asadito district in KM 30.
As for misadventures, one day I set out on my bike to find the Monday (pronounced monda uh) waterfalls, because I had heard of their existence and knew how to find the Monday river (¨monda¨ means to steal and ¨y¨ means water, so its the stolen water river) so I rode my bike the 10 km north until i hit the river and then just turned east and 80 km later I was at the ciudad del este airport tired and defeated having ridden through back country alto parana, shanty towns, isolated river towns, illegal timber operations, a drug field or two (i think), without food or water (i had to stop at random houses to explain my plight) only to finally get on a bus to go spend the night at another volunteer´s site and have the stereo play the theme song from ghostbusters. I almost cried from happiness. Another bike adventure was to scout the Parana and the town we would leave from, Domingo M irala. That needed a 25 KM ride to Santa Rosa del Monday (the self proclaimed capital of soy), a 25 k hitch with a guy named Everaldo Freitz, and then a final 25 on a boondocks bus. Only to arrive there, explain the plan, tell them when I was going to come back to build the raft, and then find there is no bus back to my site. So I had to hitch up to ciudad del este and then find my way out of that city with a bike to look after. And I´ve been a victim there before. I was walking with another volunteer and we had a big bottle of dasani water and the pirañitas (literally little piranhas, but street urchin kids) came over and demanded the water. I tried ooshing them but there was a line of paraguayans waiting for a bus and one of the little kids shouted ¨che y¨(my water) and snagged it. Fortunately there were scissor noodles to console me on the second floor of this asian hotel that overlooks the golden domed mosque/apartment complex located next to the Shalom Peluqueria (Shalom Barber). The restaurant is on the second floor and one time the elevator was taking forever so i took the stairs, and since we were only a floor up i figure the next flight would be the lobby. But instead I opened the door into another plexiglass door seperating me from a bunch of korean gamblers in an unlicensed casino mushed between the floors.
After a tatakua pizza party, we had missed the last bus back to Las Piedras, our host community, so my solution was to walk towards asuncion until we found a place to stay. We ended up spending the night at the by-the-hour Motel VIP Aquarius. The next morning I had to find my way back to get to language class and on the walk to Guarambare bought a watermelon to break the fast and a cornacopia of yuyos for my mid morning terere.
One of my neighbors pigs that had been eating my soap and my other neighbors vegetables was smitten through a cosmic act of karma when it got run over by a tractor.
Our yerba buyer, Rolan, came back to buy our first 4000 kilos of processed yerba. Rolan, the first time he came, regaled me with stories from his days in the paraguayan special forces and his deployment to the dominican republic to fight leftist revolutionaries in the jungle as part of the US led Operation Power Pack. He said that he didn´t mind spending 5 months in the jungle fighting guerilla warfare, it just bothered him that ¨the US never said thank you¨. Hes bringing me to his next supplier to see a slightly larger yerba operation and to hang out some more. He´s a paraguayan of german descent. His grandfather died in russia on the eastern front in WW2 and his dad emmigrated to paraguay during the war. I was sick one of the nights he came and he went into the forest and came back with Jagua pety (dog tabacco) and made a drink out of it for me. When he was last in the dos, he taught me how to listen to the bird calls to get a read on the weather and also put me in contact with his nephew who imports stuff from china. He´s interesting, but kind of makes me nervous, but overall very solid.
My guarani has improved dramatically recently. With the yerba factory moving, I usally work until about 1 at night with them chirping all the while in the guarani. My jobs are either moving the hoja verde to the conveyor belt, feeding the grinder, or loading the barbacua. Feeding the grinder blows. Before I got a face mask, all of the yerba powder was going straight up the nose and into the lungs, and the workers in that part, the cancheadoras, get covered in green powder and the joke is that you look like a parrot. But Yerba is highly caffeinated. And you´re still drinking terere and mate while working and inhaling it. I´ve never experienced hyper sensitivity like that before really.
The Guarani just makes life funnier. Since all paraguayan children outside of asuncion are spoken to in Jopara (the mix) by their parents when they are young, yet they are taught in school in spanish and have a class dedicated to pure guarani, when they´re just riffing in jopara, anything goes. They´re filthy but hilarious, and since its in guarani (jopara rather), the only people who would be judgemental wouldn´t understand. One of the major guarani insults is ¨go f- the devil¨. And then the word piranha is derived from guarani. Pira is fish, and aña is devil. So they´re really called devil fish.
On the inevitable corny/dramatic note. I couldn´t sleep the other night. It was nearing one year to the day of my arrival and my bosses had just come and the harvest was getting totally geared up the next day. I woke up at 3:30 and couldn´t get back to sleep. there wasn´t any yerba, so I had to settle for green tea. But I was sitting in my yard waiting for the sun to rise listening to some samba, and I finally understood one of Beth Carvalho´s lyrics from her song ¨O mundo è o moinho¨ (the world is a mill). She just goes ¨em cada esquina, cae um pouco de sua vida¨, on every corner falls a little of your life. And I don´t know why, but that, mixed with the fog´s slow thickening and the sun´s first rays poking up made me feel grateful to have had the opportunities that I´ve had so far to leave little bits of my heart and life with people whom I would never have met had things gone differentlly.
And now, the foods I couldn´t eat when I first got here make me hungry (cow´s head, pig guts, chicken feet) and the things i couldn´t understand make me smile and laugh. The forest is filled with familiar trees and yuyo herbs, the wind with recognizable bird and insect calls, the sky with stars and clouds that are comforting, but most importantly, the houses are filled with friends and family. I spend 2 dollars a day on average, 4 for a major splurge like asado or coconuts (my biggest indulgence is olive oil for 10 dollars). And yet we were sitting around the fire warming our hands, drinking the night time mate, and Antonio and I were chatting about Mercosur, the small producer, sustenance farming, and we decided that the four important things in life are free; family, friendship, youth and nature.
Good stuff. Hope everything is well for everyone.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Centro Cultural de los Pioneros de Tavapy II
Just got back from Brazillian steakhouse. It is rico. Seeing as how what i eat in site is mandioca root, corn, rice, onions, and occasionally meat, all you can eat buffet and a selection of a dozen grilled meats works pretty well...although I am having trouble walking.
Right now I just want to post the project description from the first USAID grant and the project narratives from the Peace Corps Partnerships program I am currently applying for. Bear in mind that the two excerps stand alone without their entourage of budgets, work plans, monitoring and evaluation plans, community involvement plans, calendars, contracts, or any of the nuts and bolts related items. Peace Corps Partnerships is a program through which a link is posted online on the Peace Corps website and all who view it are able (and encouraged) to donate. The only reason I am posting the full bit here, is because at peacecorps.gov, they only post the 250 word overall description and that can´t do justice to the necessity in the community for this project. The post immediately before this one (Ñamono´o) begins to describe the situation, and I truly hope that the following excerpts will help to clarify the situation in Tavapy II and the worthiness of the project. Beginning with the SPA project description:
__________________________________________________________________
that was for the original Small Projects Assistance grant that I wrote, although above it is in its translated form, as it was originally written in Spanish. I post that, as evidence of the ability of the community to manage large sums of money. The socios of my cooperative are putting the money to good use in an efficient, expedient, transparent, and most importantly, community oriented manner, for that I can vouch. The following will hopefully give an idea of why this project should happen, and how it will be executed:
so that is verbatim from the application. My officers from Peace Corps have told me that they are in agreement that the project has worth. And here I make our case. The community of Tavapy II is a beautiful place. Speaking for myself, I love it and will never forget it. I admire and respect the habitants and regard nearly everyone I have met as a close friend, a surrogate family member, or an aquaintance that I have unfortunately not yet had the chance to get to know better. They have worked diligently and suffered nobly to be in the position in which they find themselves today. Theirs is a community of tranquility, peace, and sustainability, a beacon in one of the darker corners of the second most corrupt country in the world. Ciudad del Este and the vast expanses of Brazillian and German soy act as sirens to live life for the material. Yet traditional customs endure. And although many have had to answer the call of duty to their families and go abroad to work, where they are frequently treated as sub human, the original spirit endures. However, it is gravely threatened. However bravely these young adults venture out into the world, their absence remains poignant.
Every few months a new parcel of land is bought, the trees are cut, and the one time exemplar of agroforestry is turned into another expanse of biological desert, the sole occupant being genetically modified soy. Slowly and inexorably, these losses have accrued. One of my deepest fears is that someday, the last acre will be sold, and Santa Rosa del Monday, the namesake capital of our department, and the self proclaimed ¨Capital de la Soja,¨will permanently extend her reach. This is a land of abundant fertility. After the jungle ceases to exist. However the nagging problem of tropical soils that offsets their many advantages is their fragility. Ultraviolet rays destroy the soil ecosystems that were once protected, stands of exotic Eucalyptus turn the soil acidic, and the large scale farmers use their John Deere tractors to spray abundant amounts of Monsanto chemicals which are slowly choking the rivers and streams and contaminating the Guarani Aquifer, the largest freshwater resource in the world.
They say that the ancestors of the Guarani indians left their amazonian home in search of paradise. They stopped in Paraguay in the Bosque Atlantica. However, this paradise also offers one of the highest soy yields in the world. And the soy world works as such; a priveleged person has the capital to get the equipment, the soy goes to pressing plants in Brazil and returns as expensive oil or the bean´s residue is shipped to china to feed their growing cattle herd. I do not mean to paint a hopeless picture, just a cautionary tale. Additionally a cultural center will not solve these problems, but increased use of agroforestry practices, introduction of alternative crops and animals, and initiation of value-add projects (like the yerba mate factory) can help them to raise their productivity, provide for more jobs, and afford to stay. I believe the center can help them be proud and happy to stay. For this reason we initiated a project that at face value will have no bearing on their yearly income (although the center will strive to provide job skills and a venue for visiting development workers). Small contributions can make worlds of difference. 20 dollars coveres three books; 100, one thousand bricks; 500 another computer. Although some weeks will pass before we will receive the URL for the donation site, I wanted to write this appeal now, with close proximity to the town´s day of liberation (May 20th, 1987), and with the emotions I felt that day at the event fresh in my heart and mind.
Thank you in advance to anyone who has read to this point or generally to anyone who takes a peak at this blog and maybe shares my feelings for these people and friends.
Graciamante,
Andrew Wilcox
Right now I just want to post the project description from the first USAID grant and the project narratives from the Peace Corps Partnerships program I am currently applying for. Bear in mind that the two excerps stand alone without their entourage of budgets, work plans, monitoring and evaluation plans, community involvement plans, calendars, contracts, or any of the nuts and bolts related items. Peace Corps Partnerships is a program through which a link is posted online on the Peace Corps website and all who view it are able (and encouraged) to donate. The only reason I am posting the full bit here, is because at peacecorps.gov, they only post the 250 word overall description and that can´t do justice to the necessity in the community for this project. The post immediately before this one (Ñamono´o) begins to describe the situation, and I truly hope that the following excerpts will help to clarify the situation in Tavapy II and the worthiness of the project. Beginning with the SPA project description:
Proyecto de Reconstrucción de una Barbacua para la fabricación de Yerba Mate y el mejoramiento de la Cooperativa Multiactiva Tavapy II
Tavapy II is a community of approximately 400 houses located in the district of Santa Rosa
The fire was a major blow for the cooperative which sold its last
Community impact has the potential to be far reaching, immediate, and substantial. The cooperative has demonstrated its concern for women and children through its pursuit of female members and its interest in providing recreational and educational activities for the children.
The cooperative is very egalitarian and is constantly searching for ways to help, but is unfortunately often thwarted by the lack of access to capital. The requested funds would provide the cooperative with the `jump start´ it would need to be in a position to create its own capital and break the cycle of dependency while pursuing a diversified battery of projects geared towards local development be it income generating, educational, or environmental.
__________________________________________________________________
that was for the original Small Projects Assistance grant that I wrote, although above it is in its translated form, as it was originally written in Spanish. I post that, as evidence of the ability of the community to manage large sums of money. The socios of my cooperative are putting the money to good use in an efficient, expedient, transparent, and most importantly, community oriented manner, for that I can vouch. The following will hopefully give an idea of why this project should happen, and how it will be executed:
1. Please write a 250 word summary of the proposed project. This allows potential donors to better understand the project. Describe the project objectives. Explain the community contribution for this project and briefly outline your request for the Partnership Program. Note: This summary will be posted directly on the Peace Corps Website.
In 1984, Tavapy II was constructed as three parallel dirt tracks spaced two kilometers apart. During a three year struggle against the Stroessner regime, the original occupants eventually succeeded in attaining title to their land on May 20th, 1987. Under Stroessner, Paraguayans could not meet in groups larger than three. This, along with a lack of town planning, led to a fractured community in Tavapy II. There is no town center for social gathering or commercial activity. This decentralization is exacerbated by the flight abroad of the town’s second generation. The children are left without a space to play, teenagers without an area to learn, and the town without a sense of shared pride.
This project will provide a rural Paraguayan colony with an integrated cultural, social, and educational community center geared specifically towards the children and young adults. The center will consist of a computer room, library, and general purpose room. Activities offered will range from art class to a youth soccer league. Reference resources will strive to provide general knowledge and also specific vocational skills. The general purpose room will serve as a meeting area for local committees and visiting NGOs. The computers will be utilized to teach computation and to reach relatives more affordably through the launch of a VOIP program.
The community contribution will be denominated in labor and expertise regarding construction. Oñondive, ñande ikatu ñamopu´ãporã : Together, we can make it better.
2. Please provide a 1-2 paragraph description of your community and the community members involved with the proposed project.
Tavapy II is a community of roughly 400 households located
3. Please explain, in 1-2 paragraphs, the merit of this project, and why it is a priority in the community. What happens if the project is not implemented?
Tavapy II, when founded in 1984, was constructed as 3 parallel dirt tracks spaced
The center could provide for this need in a physical sense, but more importantly in a social and educational one. Classes, activities, and events will all be geared towards strengthening community pride while also broadening intellectual horizons and augmenting vocational skills. What happens if the project is not implemented? Nothing. A few people would be disappointed that a project fell through, but for all intents and purposes the failure of this project to initiate would not be catastrophic, rather it would return the community to the same road it has already trodden. Things would remain the same and the community would continue to atrophy abroad. Whereas, should the project come to fruition, the center could induce people to stay in their home community while empowering them sufficiently such that going to work as a farmhand in Argentina or a maid in Madrid no longer makes economic sense given the marketable job skills they could wield.
4. Describe, in 2-3 paragraphs, how the community is the driving force behind the project. Please discuss who in the community first proposed the project as well as how the beneficiaries are involved in the project’s planning and implementation. What are the roles and responsibilities of the community members?
It is self-evident for anyone who has spent time in Tavapy II, that the residents are proud of what they have and have done. Yet rarely do they have the opportunity to express this pride. The response to the community center idea was overwhelming, and for this reason, the volunteer chose the Cooperative to manage the project simply because it already has management structures in place. As for planning and implementation, the community members involved have already participated and settled on basic function, size, and basic layout. As for roles and responsibilities, the principal actors will be members of the cooperative. They will conduct community outreach while also managing funds and construction. The cooperative has not yet formed this committee for the sole reason that the volunteer believes it best to wait for project approval in order to give non-members a chance to join the cooperative and the center committee.
5. Please describe, in 1-2 paragraphs, the community contribution to this project. Contributions can include the costs of manual labor and transportation as well as contributions of cash or raw materials. Community contribution must total at least 25% of the total project cost.
Primarily, the community contribution will be labor related. A carpenter will make chairs and tables, the electrician will wire the building, and so on. Additionally, the unskilled labor, cement mixers, brick layers, etc, will be provided by the community. Transportation of materials will also come from the community contribution.
Most importantly, members of the community will provide for most of the recurring operational necessities of the center such as cleaning services, running the classes, and monitoring the various rooms.
6. Please present and discuss, in 3-4 paragraphs, the plan for implementing this project. Describe the phases of the project. Define specific tasks involved with the project, the order in which they will occur, and who will accomplish each task.
The project can be roughly divided into three main phases, pre-construction, construction, and post-construction. In the first phase, of paramount importance is gathering community input, as the success of the center is dependent on its relevance to the people it will serve. Secondly, the Cooperative will need to have, in place and ready to work, a system for managing the money that will arrive and the tasks that will need to be completed. This will be accomplished through the formation of a committee from within the cooperative, dedicated entirely to the construction and management of the center. Lastly, the donations themselves need to be corralled. The volunteer has been in contact with various networks of acquaintances from the
The second phase, construction, will be contingent upon the input received from the community in terms of basic layout. As for execution, there is sufficient expertise within the cooperative to provide for architectural, electrical, and aesthetic needs. Also within the cooperative is a socio with a truck to facilitate the movement of materials to and from the construction site. The last phase of construction, which could also be considered the first phase of post-construction is the launch of the center. The volunteer believes that how the finished product is introduced to the community will have considerable effects on how it will be used. Because of this we have two alternate launch targets to afford flexibility should any problems arise. The first, 7 months from now during the Christmas/New Year´s holiday season, and the second a full year from now to commemorate the liberation of the land of Tavapy II on May 20th 1987. The launch will be a chance to celebrate the completion, to usher in a new addition to the community, and to exhibit the various functions of the center.
The post-construction phase is primarily concerned with operation, but also, should the preceding operations run smoothly, with the center´s expansion, both in scale and variety of services. As for labor, the center will require a monitor, a janitor, and teachers and coaches for the various classes and activities that will be offered. Operational costs will include electricity, internet, and replacement of depreciated items and will be covered by a small fee charged for internet use.
7. Please indicate, in 3-4 paragraphs, the skills and knowledge that will be acquired by the community through the implementation of this project. How will the project increase the capacity of individuals and support the community in meeting its long-term goals? Does the community have the resources to sustain the project in the long term?
The skills and knowledge that could be bestowed by this center are kaleidoscopic. How does one quantify the benefit received by a child who has just completed her first water color painting? Generally speaking, the center will serve as a general knowledge repository, a resource center for the schools, a place to have classes that are for the sake of learning not solely for a grade, and a reception area for various events and activities. The volunteer believes that the center will help the community meet its long term goals narrowly and broadly. In the narrow sense, for example, classes at the center could teach about the relationships between cells in excel and generally how to use a computer. But in the broad sense, and in the opinion of the volunteer the more important aspect of self-improvement, the center could facilitate the process of learning, helping participants to express themselves while learning how to be inquisitive. Additionally, the center could serve as a beacon for all to see of what can be accomplished when the community comes together and works as one.
The volunteer does believe that the community has the resource to make this project sustainable. After all, only the initial capital hurdle is prohibitively expensive. After which, many of the costs can be met through voluntary contributions of time and resources, community efforts, and smart structuring of the center’s assets, for example, having a gaming console for a DVD player and charging a small fee for its use instead of having solely a DVD player. In this sense, the volunteer will help the stewards of the center to run it somewhat like a business with regards to efficiency, cash flows, and managing costs.
so that is verbatim from the application. My officers from Peace Corps have told me that they are in agreement that the project has worth. And here I make our case. The community of Tavapy II is a beautiful place. Speaking for myself, I love it and will never forget it. I admire and respect the habitants and regard nearly everyone I have met as a close friend, a surrogate family member, or an aquaintance that I have unfortunately not yet had the chance to get to know better. They have worked diligently and suffered nobly to be in the position in which they find themselves today. Theirs is a community of tranquility, peace, and sustainability, a beacon in one of the darker corners of the second most corrupt country in the world. Ciudad del Este and the vast expanses of Brazillian and German soy act as sirens to live life for the material. Yet traditional customs endure. And although many have had to answer the call of duty to their families and go abroad to work, where they are frequently treated as sub human, the original spirit endures. However, it is gravely threatened. However bravely these young adults venture out into the world, their absence remains poignant.
Every few months a new parcel of land is bought, the trees are cut, and the one time exemplar of agroforestry is turned into another expanse of biological desert, the sole occupant being genetically modified soy. Slowly and inexorably, these losses have accrued. One of my deepest fears is that someday, the last acre will be sold, and Santa Rosa del Monday, the namesake capital of our department, and the self proclaimed ¨Capital de la Soja,¨will permanently extend her reach. This is a land of abundant fertility. After the jungle ceases to exist. However the nagging problem of tropical soils that offsets their many advantages is their fragility. Ultraviolet rays destroy the soil ecosystems that were once protected, stands of exotic Eucalyptus turn the soil acidic, and the large scale farmers use their John Deere tractors to spray abundant amounts of Monsanto chemicals which are slowly choking the rivers and streams and contaminating the Guarani Aquifer, the largest freshwater resource in the world.
They say that the ancestors of the Guarani indians left their amazonian home in search of paradise. They stopped in Paraguay in the Bosque Atlantica. However, this paradise also offers one of the highest soy yields in the world. And the soy world works as such; a priveleged person has the capital to get the equipment, the soy goes to pressing plants in Brazil and returns as expensive oil or the bean´s residue is shipped to china to feed their growing cattle herd. I do not mean to paint a hopeless picture, just a cautionary tale. Additionally a cultural center will not solve these problems, but increased use of agroforestry practices, introduction of alternative crops and animals, and initiation of value-add projects (like the yerba mate factory) can help them to raise their productivity, provide for more jobs, and afford to stay. I believe the center can help them be proud and happy to stay. For this reason we initiated a project that at face value will have no bearing on their yearly income (although the center will strive to provide job skills and a venue for visiting development workers). Small contributions can make worlds of difference. 20 dollars coveres three books; 100, one thousand bricks; 500 another computer. Although some weeks will pass before we will receive the URL for the donation site, I wanted to write this appeal now, with close proximity to the town´s day of liberation (May 20th, 1987), and with the emotions I felt that day at the event fresh in my heart and mind.
Thank you in advance to anyone who has read to this point or generally to anyone who takes a peak at this blog and maybe shares my feelings for these people and friends.
Graciamante,
Andrew Wilcox
Ñamono´o
We Harvest
The harvest started Wednesday. The day after we added the final touches to the new factory. The day my boss and his assitant came in the morning and a trainer and language teachers came in the afternoon to see my site and to place trainees to stay for a week in July. That day saw just under 3000 kilos of green leaf (hoja verde) pass. The next just over that number. Today, we should have about 4000 arriving for processing. And when I get back to site we will probably work until about 2 in the morning before we leave the full barbacua to toast the yerba slowly for the next 24 + hours.
La ka´a oime kokuepe ha lo obrerokuera oikyti la partehovynte yvyrahegui. Ha upei ha´ekuera omohënuhe petei camion ha ogueraha la ka´a fabricapeve camionari ikatuva oraha 5000 kilopeve. Ha oñepyru omonandihina la ka´a camionhegui. Uperire la ka´a ojupi petei cinta automatico ha ho´a tataari. La ka´a okai sapynte. La tatahakuiterei ojavyhatä la ka´a ha oipë´a 50% la y yvyraroguehegui. Ha upei, la ka´a osë la sapecador ha petei carai omoi la ka´a barbacuape. La barbacua oreko petei tatakangyi. Ha kotata ojavymbegueiterei. Upeare, la ka´a oikotev´ë tiempopukuite ohoopahagua. Ha 24 horakuerarire, lo obrerokuera oipë´a la ka´a ha koaga la ka´a orekonte 36% ygua. Ha´ekuera oikytïjey la ka´a ha ojapo ka´a mborovire. Ha upea opytata ikotype petei te´ä mokoi año ha oïma ho´uhagua.
Bueno. The yerba is in the field and the workers only cut the green parts of the tree. Then they fill a truck that can carry up to 5000 kilos and bring the hoja verde to the factory. There they begin to harvest the yerba of the truck. After that the yerba goes up a conveyor belt and falls over a fire. The yerba burns for a second. The very hot fire burns the leaf with force and removes 50 percent of the water of the leaves of the tree. And then the yerba leaves the sapecador (the first over) and a guy puts the yerba in the barbacua. The barbacua has a small weak fire. And this fire burns the leaf very slowly. Because of this the yerba needs a very long time to finish. And after 24 hours the workers take out the yerba which now has only 36% water. They then cut the yerba again and make mborovire (coarsely chopped yerba) And it will stay in its room for one or two years and then is ready to drink.
so that may read weird, but that is because i tried to write it in english with structure more like the paraguayans talk guarani. And that is actually jopara, which is the guarani word for mix, because one never speaks pure guarani unless you visit the actual indians in their few reserves. Or by the side of the road in garbage bag tents or in the plazas of asuncion when they go to protest their land being stolen because some person has a piece of paper that says the land was sold to them fairly from public lands. But thats for another day.
The process at the factory is incredibly dramatic. The fires consume about 10 cubic meters of firewood. Fortunately, the socios manage the forest on the land, like most campesinos but unlike the 200 acres mechanized soy lots that have cut all of the trees except for usually the tajytu´ichave to serve as a reminder of what was there. That is the national tree of paraguay and grows over hundreds of years and once a year explodes in butterfly frequented yellow blossoms. During the winter when they bloom, the forest that remains, is dotted with them as they emerge above the canopy. But again, I digress. It is an incredible sight to see them cleaning the forest. One day, all the socios showed up with machetes and i was like what are we doing today. Limpiando...cleaning, and they still spoke to me mostly in spanish to help with my understanding. So i grabbed my machete and we got to work. Then, it all looked the same to me, and they were just chopping away. So I started and they stopped me and were like andres what are you doing you cut down a tree! because they all looked like weeds to me. But what they were doing was going through and cutting all but the one and two year old saplings out of a jungle. Now, because they´ve taught me, we walk through and see the mbokaja, yvyrapytä, tajy, oveñia, apepu, kurupa´y, paraiso gigante, aguacate, mandarina, guayabi, inga, and the rest. Fortunately a handfull of those either produce edible fruits, leaves you can put in your terere, bark you can make tea out of, firewood for the factory, construction materials, and so on. And I called them weeds what we cut, but they´re really not because they use about 50% of them as remedios. I haven´t taken medicine in 11 months. My throat hurt so I put Tororatï (the seed looks like a bull´s horn) in my mate in the morning. I had flu like symptoms so vervena went in that morning and i drank apepu juice. I had a rash at one point and i used the leaves of the ambay (which have a rough surface and exfoliate) to clear it up. You have to drink the root of the vine mbarakaja py´ape (cat´s paw because the little claws it uses to climb tree look like a feline nail) in your terere if you want a healthy urinary tract. Pynoguasu makes you hungry and has stinging leaves and you smash the roots and wood of it and put it in terere as well. Right now, i´m drinking my terere with lemon grass (kapi´i cedron), coconut tree root, cat´s paw, pynoguasu, and a fifth that i can never remember the name of and always just point to at the herb lady´s stand...its like momombo´u or something in that neighborhood. I only describe that in such dull detail because the yerba is important here. Its part of their livlihood and also what they, and i drink hot as mate every morning (usually husband and wife at about 4 in the morning talking about the upcoming day; me by myself), and twice a day every day cold as terere with groups of friends talking about the weather, whats going on, why venezuela and ecuador want to fight with columbia, and so on.
As for my superiors being here, things went well. They got to see the coop going about its business and the community. Fernando, our boss, told me that paraguayan colonies are so dispersed because stroessner would follow a pattern. The people would get restless and he would divy up portions of land and assign them to loyal colorado subordinates. They then would split up a parcel of about 5000 acres into 10 and 20 acre parcels and only give them to people who had previously displayed loyalty to the colorados. The grand design of it all was to put the houses in the middle of their plots so that any attempt to meet and organize required 3,4, 10 kilometer walks. And Stroessner, the megalomaniac that he was, not only prohibited the people from gathering in groups of larger than 3 (as enforced by the police who would arrive and beat the people, unless of course they were from within the colorado machine), but when he did grant them permission to be together, for birthdays, funerals, anything, he made them hang up his portrait in the locale of the gathering. It was fucked up. And the thing that makes me so sad about that, is that paraguayans love eachother´s company. They don´t want things, they want enough to have a pig killed for a rico asado for grandma´s birthday or for weddings, or for a girls quince (they have sweet 15´s here). And when you´re sitting around drinking terere under whichever fruit tree is in bloom or the tree that has the best shade, everyone is laughing, telling stories, new jokes. They never use the word no. When offered something that you don´t want, it is considered very rude to say no. If you don´t want it, you use one of the excuses, the best of which is i just ate watermelon, because they think water melon is worse than pop rocks and soda, the only problem being they´ll ask you why you didn´t share your watermelon. And thats how it is among them, in my experience at least. If you have something, you share it. And with really good stuff, paraguayans know how to enjoy it. With watermelon, everyone gets a spoon or a knife and takes turns going to town on half a melon. With barbeque, they´ll cook it on a spit and you get a knife and cut until you´re full. Which reminds me of the funniest spanish expression i´ve yet heard. All you can eat is said ¨tenedor libre¨ which just means free fork (but libre is generally used to mean free like freedom, not free without cost) , which strikes me as hilarious. Apuka ahendujave upea...I laugh when I hear that.
Back to the land distribution by Stroessner, that ugly legacy is what makes my site Tavapy II special. The mid eighties were marked by the movimiento del campesino, in which poor farmers seeing this land redistribution, which wasn´t only to colorados, but foreigners loyal to vidella and pinochet as well, began squatting on land and calling the tierra colorada theirs. The first people in the Dos, los pioneros, arrived in 1984. The land belonged to a chilean and was all jungle. They lived there, with the women and children sneaking into tavapy uno at night to carry back mandioca and the men working to build houses and school and bridges out of the wood they could cut with their axes and machetes. Periodically the national police would make raids. The people would hide in the forest, in predetermined places where they also held meetings to organize. Se dice...oje´e...they say that the only reason Stroessner didn´t send in the cavalry was because his regime was beginning to draw international attention and whisking 500 people into a plane for one last flight was no longer an option. Maybe it was because they hid well. I´m not sure of the exact chronology of the last chapters, but I know the campesinos, the pioneers, organized at some point and decided to board flatbed trucks and go to Asuncion and demand title to the land. And on May 20th 1987 they won it. The say ¨ganemos la lucha¨ when they tell me about it, we won the fight. And they are always quick to point out that at no point did they use violence, even when harassed and at times tortured. Some of Stroessner´s methods were as foll0ws; electrical shocks, tying men to unbroken stallions, dipping them head first into vats of feces, and of course the various iterations of murder. Fortunately noone in the Dos was subjected to the latter two. So we had a rightous celebration Tuesday. The whole town turns out, people from Tavapy Uno, and also people from all over the country, for as Fernando told me, the fight for Tavapy II is regarded as one of the critical moments of the movement and Stroessner´s loss of total control that culminated with General Andres Rodriquez walking into a cabinet room with an unpinned grenade in one hand and the pin in the other and the subsequent flight of Stroessner loyalists to the other general´s side. Se dice no más. It might be difficult to find that one in a text book, but during training we had a lecture from a paraguayan history professor (who told us that story) whose grandfather saved stroessner´s life in the chaco war in 1934 when they were both leuitenants in the army. And Stroessner sent his family a case of Dom Perignon every year at Christmas with a handwritten note and every year the man sent it back. This continued while the grandfather´s son (an active liberal) worked for the opposition and was sequestered. News of his son´s kidnapping induced a heart attack in the grandfather and yet the champagne kept arriving.
But the fiesta was fun. Some people donated meat for barbecue, there was volleyball, bingo, the whole town celebrating its right to exist; people who have gone to Buenos Aires and Barcelona found a way to come back and see their mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. And I played volleyball with the director of the school and we served some muchachos some pancakes. But, i was the only one eating them that night, when my last working brake on my bike stopped working on a hill and i had to bail. Fortunately i tucked and rolled out of it, but my camera doesn´t have such abilities.
Unfortunately my wrists can´t tuck and roll out of how tired they´re getting. so thats about it.
The harvest started Wednesday. The day after we added the final touches to the new factory. The day my boss and his assitant came in the morning and a trainer and language teachers came in the afternoon to see my site and to place trainees to stay for a week in July. That day saw just under 3000 kilos of green leaf (hoja verde) pass. The next just over that number. Today, we should have about 4000 arriving for processing. And when I get back to site we will probably work until about 2 in the morning before we leave the full barbacua to toast the yerba slowly for the next 24 + hours.
La ka´a oime kokuepe ha lo obrerokuera oikyti la partehovynte yvyrahegui. Ha upei ha´ekuera omohënuhe petei camion ha ogueraha la ka´a fabricapeve camionari ikatuva oraha 5000 kilopeve. Ha oñepyru omonandihina la ka´a camionhegui. Uperire la ka´a ojupi petei cinta automatico ha ho´a tataari. La ka´a okai sapynte. La tatahakuiterei ojavyhatä la ka´a ha oipë´a 50% la y yvyraroguehegui. Ha upei, la ka´a osë la sapecador ha petei carai omoi la ka´a barbacuape. La barbacua oreko petei tatakangyi. Ha kotata ojavymbegueiterei. Upeare, la ka´a oikotev´ë tiempopukuite ohoopahagua. Ha 24 horakuerarire, lo obrerokuera oipë´a la ka´a ha koaga la ka´a orekonte 36% ygua. Ha´ekuera oikytïjey la ka´a ha ojapo ka´a mborovire. Ha upea opytata ikotype petei te´ä mokoi año ha oïma ho´uhagua.
Bueno. The yerba is in the field and the workers only cut the green parts of the tree. Then they fill a truck that can carry up to 5000 kilos and bring the hoja verde to the factory. There they begin to harvest the yerba of the truck. After that the yerba goes up a conveyor belt and falls over a fire. The yerba burns for a second. The very hot fire burns the leaf with force and removes 50 percent of the water of the leaves of the tree. And then the yerba leaves the sapecador (the first over) and a guy puts the yerba in the barbacua. The barbacua has a small weak fire. And this fire burns the leaf very slowly. Because of this the yerba needs a very long time to finish. And after 24 hours the workers take out the yerba which now has only 36% water. They then cut the yerba again and make mborovire (coarsely chopped yerba) And it will stay in its room for one or two years and then is ready to drink.
so that may read weird, but that is because i tried to write it in english with structure more like the paraguayans talk guarani. And that is actually jopara, which is the guarani word for mix, because one never speaks pure guarani unless you visit the actual indians in their few reserves. Or by the side of the road in garbage bag tents or in the plazas of asuncion when they go to protest their land being stolen because some person has a piece of paper that says the land was sold to them fairly from public lands. But thats for another day.
The process at the factory is incredibly dramatic. The fires consume about 10 cubic meters of firewood. Fortunately, the socios manage the forest on the land, like most campesinos but unlike the 200 acres mechanized soy lots that have cut all of the trees except for usually the tajytu´ichave to serve as a reminder of what was there. That is the national tree of paraguay and grows over hundreds of years and once a year explodes in butterfly frequented yellow blossoms. During the winter when they bloom, the forest that remains, is dotted with them as they emerge above the canopy. But again, I digress. It is an incredible sight to see them cleaning the forest. One day, all the socios showed up with machetes and i was like what are we doing today. Limpiando...cleaning, and they still spoke to me mostly in spanish to help with my understanding. So i grabbed my machete and we got to work. Then, it all looked the same to me, and they were just chopping away. So I started and they stopped me and were like andres what are you doing you cut down a tree! because they all looked like weeds to me. But what they were doing was going through and cutting all but the one and two year old saplings out of a jungle. Now, because they´ve taught me, we walk through and see the mbokaja, yvyrapytä, tajy, oveñia, apepu, kurupa´y, paraiso gigante, aguacate, mandarina, guayabi, inga, and the rest. Fortunately a handfull of those either produce edible fruits, leaves you can put in your terere, bark you can make tea out of, firewood for the factory, construction materials, and so on. And I called them weeds what we cut, but they´re really not because they use about 50% of them as remedios. I haven´t taken medicine in 11 months. My throat hurt so I put Tororatï (the seed looks like a bull´s horn) in my mate in the morning. I had flu like symptoms so vervena went in that morning and i drank apepu juice. I had a rash at one point and i used the leaves of the ambay (which have a rough surface and exfoliate) to clear it up. You have to drink the root of the vine mbarakaja py´ape (cat´s paw because the little claws it uses to climb tree look like a feline nail) in your terere if you want a healthy urinary tract. Pynoguasu makes you hungry and has stinging leaves and you smash the roots and wood of it and put it in terere as well. Right now, i´m drinking my terere with lemon grass (kapi´i cedron), coconut tree root, cat´s paw, pynoguasu, and a fifth that i can never remember the name of and always just point to at the herb lady´s stand...its like momombo´u or something in that neighborhood. I only describe that in such dull detail because the yerba is important here. Its part of their livlihood and also what they, and i drink hot as mate every morning (usually husband and wife at about 4 in the morning talking about the upcoming day; me by myself), and twice a day every day cold as terere with groups of friends talking about the weather, whats going on, why venezuela and ecuador want to fight with columbia, and so on.
As for my superiors being here, things went well. They got to see the coop going about its business and the community. Fernando, our boss, told me that paraguayan colonies are so dispersed because stroessner would follow a pattern. The people would get restless and he would divy up portions of land and assign them to loyal colorado subordinates. They then would split up a parcel of about 5000 acres into 10 and 20 acre parcels and only give them to people who had previously displayed loyalty to the colorados. The grand design of it all was to put the houses in the middle of their plots so that any attempt to meet and organize required 3,4, 10 kilometer walks. And Stroessner, the megalomaniac that he was, not only prohibited the people from gathering in groups of larger than 3 (as enforced by the police who would arrive and beat the people, unless of course they were from within the colorado machine), but when he did grant them permission to be together, for birthdays, funerals, anything, he made them hang up his portrait in the locale of the gathering. It was fucked up. And the thing that makes me so sad about that, is that paraguayans love eachother´s company. They don´t want things, they want enough to have a pig killed for a rico asado for grandma´s birthday or for weddings, or for a girls quince (they have sweet 15´s here). And when you´re sitting around drinking terere under whichever fruit tree is in bloom or the tree that has the best shade, everyone is laughing, telling stories, new jokes. They never use the word no. When offered something that you don´t want, it is considered very rude to say no. If you don´t want it, you use one of the excuses, the best of which is i just ate watermelon, because they think water melon is worse than pop rocks and soda, the only problem being they´ll ask you why you didn´t share your watermelon. And thats how it is among them, in my experience at least. If you have something, you share it. And with really good stuff, paraguayans know how to enjoy it. With watermelon, everyone gets a spoon or a knife and takes turns going to town on half a melon. With barbeque, they´ll cook it on a spit and you get a knife and cut until you´re full. Which reminds me of the funniest spanish expression i´ve yet heard. All you can eat is said ¨tenedor libre¨ which just means free fork (but libre is generally used to mean free like freedom, not free without cost) , which strikes me as hilarious. Apuka ahendujave upea...I laugh when I hear that.
Back to the land distribution by Stroessner, that ugly legacy is what makes my site Tavapy II special. The mid eighties were marked by the movimiento del campesino, in which poor farmers seeing this land redistribution, which wasn´t only to colorados, but foreigners loyal to vidella and pinochet as well, began squatting on land and calling the tierra colorada theirs. The first people in the Dos, los pioneros, arrived in 1984. The land belonged to a chilean and was all jungle. They lived there, with the women and children sneaking into tavapy uno at night to carry back mandioca and the men working to build houses and school and bridges out of the wood they could cut with their axes and machetes. Periodically the national police would make raids. The people would hide in the forest, in predetermined places where they also held meetings to organize. Se dice...oje´e...they say that the only reason Stroessner didn´t send in the cavalry was because his regime was beginning to draw international attention and whisking 500 people into a plane for one last flight was no longer an option. Maybe it was because they hid well. I´m not sure of the exact chronology of the last chapters, but I know the campesinos, the pioneers, organized at some point and decided to board flatbed trucks and go to Asuncion and demand title to the land. And on May 20th 1987 they won it. The say ¨ganemos la lucha¨ when they tell me about it, we won the fight. And they are always quick to point out that at no point did they use violence, even when harassed and at times tortured. Some of Stroessner´s methods were as foll0ws; electrical shocks, tying men to unbroken stallions, dipping them head first into vats of feces, and of course the various iterations of murder. Fortunately noone in the Dos was subjected to the latter two. So we had a rightous celebration Tuesday. The whole town turns out, people from Tavapy Uno, and also people from all over the country, for as Fernando told me, the fight for Tavapy II is regarded as one of the critical moments of the movement and Stroessner´s loss of total control that culminated with General Andres Rodriquez walking into a cabinet room with an unpinned grenade in one hand and the pin in the other and the subsequent flight of Stroessner loyalists to the other general´s side. Se dice no más. It might be difficult to find that one in a text book, but during training we had a lecture from a paraguayan history professor (who told us that story) whose grandfather saved stroessner´s life in the chaco war in 1934 when they were both leuitenants in the army. And Stroessner sent his family a case of Dom Perignon every year at Christmas with a handwritten note and every year the man sent it back. This continued while the grandfather´s son (an active liberal) worked for the opposition and was sequestered. News of his son´s kidnapping induced a heart attack in the grandfather and yet the champagne kept arriving.
But the fiesta was fun. Some people donated meat for barbecue, there was volleyball, bingo, the whole town celebrating its right to exist; people who have gone to Buenos Aires and Barcelona found a way to come back and see their mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. And I played volleyball with the director of the school and we served some muchachos some pancakes. But, i was the only one eating them that night, when my last working brake on my bike stopped working on a hill and i had to bail. Fortunately i tucked and rolled out of it, but my camera doesn´t have such abilities.
Unfortunately my wrists can´t tuck and roll out of how tired they´re getting. so thats about it.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Opama la Eleccion
and so ends 61 years of single party rule in Paraguay. Thats Lino O neither the big victor nor the big loser, those spots belong to Fernando Lugo and Blanca Ovelar (and especially Nicanor). We have been on alert level Bravo for the last 48 hours, a step up from Alpha, and a step before Charlie, consolidation for evacuation. It was touch and go for a bit there. I watched the news with Feliciano one day as sin techos (the homeless) were marching on Asuncion demanding what they were promised by Nicanor. Violence broke out and the police, who are notoriously pro-colorado had injured several rioters and were riding around on horses and anti riot tanks with water cannons. In the days leading up to the election, Lugo had 33% of the vote, Blanca 28, and Lino O 27. Lugo ended up winning every department and the Colorado party accepted its defeat with relative grace. But now, after over 60 years without change, all of the government ministries are going to have new staff and personel. It will be interesting between now and August when Lugo gets sworn in. As for the day, it was relatively uneventful in the dos. People were getting ferried to and from the polling stations, but otherwise going about their lives. I decided since there was a chance it could have been one of my last days in paraguay that I should make a note of some of it.
I started as usual with the morning Mate and fortunately had half of a coconut leftover to break the fast with. Rikky the dog came over to check out the scene as did a group of Ña Maria´s piglets. I decided that I was just going to be holding down the fort all day waiting for the election results, so I went to the almacen to buy some Kentucky soft packs, the smoke of choice of the Paraguayan campesino. There I talked with Feliciano, the owner about the election, and he told me he wasn´t going to vote because he was embarassed because he is missing the finger you dip in the ink (like the iraqi elections) from a corn harvesting accident. I told him ¨ani ti, enterove oikotevê mba´e¨ (don´t be ashamed, everyone is missing something) and was on my way. I saw Ña Blanca, Antonio Torres´ wife on the way back adn stopped to have breakfast with them, fried flour and milk. They showed me their peanuts that were drying after the harvest. I left. I had recently begun learning the southern (and northern) constellations and decided to bring the star atlas, a book on integrated aqua/agriculture, a New Yorker, and a Brief History of Time to my spot under a tree where I read. I was trying to figure out how many ducks Antonio´s fish ponds could support when, two children came along, Jose Ignacio and another who I hadn´t known and they played while I read. One of them rode my bike around the yard and I gave the other a National Geographic of the 100 best wildlife photos. Iñacâhatâ (literally, their heads are hard, but they say it about children to mean they have a lot of energy) and when they calmed down they started reading the New Yorker out loud and laughing at the ipod Nano advertisement.¨Nderakore!¨ is what Jose said, thats basically like holy shit. They left and I threw Steven Hawking at a chicken that was trying to sneak into my room. I made myself a quick lunch of some vegetables I had bought in Santa Rita (because its only onions and tomatoes in the Dos) and laughed as an old VW minibus cruised by filled with Lugo supporters and followed closely by a Blanca endorsing VW hatchback that was probably smuggled into the country from Brazil by Lino O´s stolen car ring. I did grow bored though and realized it had been raining and that the monte´i (little jungle) was probably buzzing, so I laced up the boots and grabbed my machete and was off. Two big finds:
The first is the blue morpho butterfly and is about 5 inches across and the second is an orchid-like mushroom I found. I headed back and it was starting to get dark. My neighbor, Alfredo, who everybody calls Pombero (the paraguayan boogey man) was leaving
I lend Pombero my bicycle and he gives me ice for my terere. These days the darkness brings the coldness, and since we had been harvesting corn recently, there were plenty of husks and cobs to start a fire with. I built it in a little oven I built out of the extra bricks we didn´t use from the construction of the Barbacua. I hadn´t realized it, but almost all of my days have come to be a lot like this. In the coming week, I will visit Wilfredo, who I got bee equipment for in exchange for some of his honey and him taking the lead with the coop´s future hives, Cristobol to bring him a watering can for his lettuce production (again in exchange for some delicious lettuce), my horse guy who is helping me find a horse (wilfredo´s kids show up to computer class riding barefoot and bareback), Antonio to talk ducks and maybe capybara (i´m crossing my fingers on that), and anyone else who wants to talk about multicropping Leucaena and Mandioca. On the work side, I have to liase between my coop and three organizations, Paraguay Vende (USAID project to connect producers with consumers/export markets), Credicoop (cooperative of cooperatives that gives out credit on fairly favorable terms, which in paraguay is 15% on a short term loan), and Fecoprod (federation of production coops to match our inputs with other coop´s outputs and vice versa). Also there´s another 5,000 kilos of avatì pytâ (red corn) to harvest and the 18,000,000 guaranis we need to figure out how to invest (we´re working towards pig and egg production for the short term, and things like expanding our yerba supply, producing firewood, and getting internet for our long term). But when we´re busy, I have the most fun, because there are a lot of socios coming through and a lot of terere time.
And when we´re just sitting aroundwe have the best times. Good stuff
Monday, March 24, 2008
Asi es Paraguay
Entonces, upeicharo...its nice to finally have a picture or two in this thing. That is the view that I wake up to see every morning. After stumbling to my stove and getting the water heating up for my Mate, I´ll usually sit and watch the sun rise until about 7 , get a quick exercise in, and then get the day started. Things have been hectic to quite hectic recently. The yerba harvest is almost upon us and we are waiting on the check to work its way through the bureucratic machinery of the State Department. But we should be receiving that $4000 in the first week of april in time to start making down payments on peoples´ yerba leaves in order to assure our supply. Our capacity will be in the ballpark of 200,000 kilos which just about corresponds with what resides in the Dos. But christ its going to be a lot of work. Processing yerba involves 48 hours of operations for one batch. We are looking at a conservative per kilo price of 2300 guaranis to process and will be selling at between 2500 and 3000. The yerba game is certainly one of volume. Fortunately we have a parcel of land that has been managed to provide firewood and could lower that cost by 100 - 200 guaranis. Jahechata. Also, if the members of the cooperative are providing the labor, its not free, but at least the cash is circulating within the cooperative and the community.
We currently have three issues looming on the horizon: how do we ensure that the people we make down payments to don´t go and sell to others and keep the cash. There is almost no enforcement mechanism in place to make rural campesinos honor contracts. The brazillians in the Dos tell me that they came to Paraguay because Brazil was too strict. On a side note, to show the sketch level of the cops here, and the general corruption, I usually leave my bike at the police station in tavapy 1. And one time when I was picking it up, the comisario asked me what they get for watching my bike. So I just told them that I could give them little american flag pins, of which my parents brought 60 and I have been giving out like they´re going out of style, which they very well could be, and they were happy and asked me if I knew the kilumbo (whorehouse) in the Uno. I do, because I was riding my bike back one night and I saw a socio of the cooperative, Porfirio, also mounted on his two wheeled steed. As we were riding some girls starting yelling at us to come over "ejuke, eju" I didn´t know at the time that it was a kilombo, but Porfirio told me it was. Porfirio´s nickname is Tatu, which in guarani means armadillo (his brother is mbarakaja, cat, and literally moves like a cat, its amazing.) So I went to tell the police that yes, I knew the whorehouse, and I asked them if they knew Tatu, to tell them that he told me about it, letting slip in my mind for a moment that Tatu in guarani is also the word for a woman´s naughty bits. So the police asked me if I was familiar with the whorehouse, and I accidentally asked them if they were familiar with vaginas, oops. But they had a huge laugh about it and forgot about wanting to bribe me and I was on my way with a backpack full of coconuts and ramen from santa rita.
But I digress, the second issue for us is how we are going to organize all of the different inputs for the ka´a (yerba) with their differing availibilities, timings, and others such considerations. Thirdly, we need to figure out what they are going to do with the money that will be left over after the harvest in order to start these projects as soon as possible to recoup our costs in time for the next yerba harvest. There are currently 4 options for that. Expand loan services to members, start buying grain during periods of low prices and reselling it (and avoiding a socgen), starting a supermarket with lower prices for socios, and buying a parcel of land to put a community center on. And that segues into the next proyecto potencial. I am currently submitting a proposal to provide a community/recreation center for the dos. Hopefully, its basic layout will be as follows, a room with computers, a room with books, a general purpose room, and a field with a snack bar adjacent to the building. I firmly believe in the value of the project for a variety of reasons. The Dos, as it is today, is without a center of any kind. Commercially, socially, what have you. As it consists of three parallel dirt roads spaced by two kilometers, each lane has a school, and they are all woefully underequipped. The idea behind this center is to fill some of the gaps in the educational system while providing a sense of pride and a shared space for the town. But here´s the rub. Having already exhausted governmental funding options for the cooperative (additionally the limit on the amount wouldn´t have been able to do a center) I will be looking for funding from a program called Peace Corps Partnerships in which a profile of the project will be posted online and anyone who views it can make a tax deductible donation (its March by the way). I obviously will be relying on the generosity of others, but I do believe in the overall message of this program. Rather than paying taxes and having a fraction trickle down to agencies like Peace Corps (with a majority going to State, Defense, etc.) this program presents an opportunity for americans to express their good will directly to a group of needy people and also a level of accountability unattainable in the normal functions of government. So thats my work in a nutshell right now. Minus the farmer´s committee, but that is a kilombo (that word has a double meaning too for things that are just a disaster). Then there´s my life.
That is me in front of the first phase yerba oven wearing my business outfit. Actually, things had gotten a little stressful, so i took a day off and whittled a hawk out of a choice piece of wood, from a old growth tree that regrettably was cut down. But someone came to talk community center, so i put the hawk down and they played with my camera while we chatted. I normally wear a lax reversible for my day to day, but will throw on my traditional paraguayan shirt (ao po i) and some pants if there´s a meeting or I´m going to do something, but I generally avoid shoes if at all possible.
Funny story, so I was weeding a patch of land I had cleared for my garden, getting it ready for a hoeing, listening to some tunes on the ipod speakers and I hear this muffled noise behind me. I turned around and it was a girl in town who is deaf and can´t speak. She likes me because I will always try and converse with her in whatever way we can (and deafness in paraguay is a huge problem because the language they all speak, jopara [the spanish guarani creole] isn´t taught in the schools, they only teach spanish and pure guarani and as a result people who can´t hear are tremendously isolated, which leads to a really crushing story but, later). Anyways, shes been known to pinch my ass in the past, which I´m not a huge fan of, but this time she just stood there for a while and eventually pointed to herself and then to me and then did the motorcycle throttle motion which in paraguay means "to do it". Naturally, I too was speechless at the moment, but eventually decided that miming needing to hoe and doing a "time´s a wasting" wrist tap would work. And eventually, after meekly scraping at the ground for a few minutes (because I was tired and had finished for the day) she left. And two days ago she sent me some avocados, so at least things didn´t get weird between us. My in site love life consists of stuff like that, and receiving text messages from 15 year old girls in broken english, which works for me, I´m not entirely keen on having relations with a 15 year old or a 23 year old with a machete wielding campesino for a father.
But its fine, I basically live the life of a 50 year old paraguayan. Those are the people I work with mostly, and they are amusing and like to hang out.
Meet the socios:
(some of them)
Seated in the bottom left in the blue billed hat is Anibel Ibarra. I stayed with him my very first night in the Dos when I was only on my future site visit in training. He is a Lino Oviedo fanatic (that´s one of the presidential candidates, don´t forget to tune in for the elections in late april. Oviedo was a former general who tried to stage a coup d´etat in 1996 only to reconcile with the then leaders only to have them betray him and put him in jail for mutiny. Upon which Raul Cubas ran for and won the presidency on the platform of freeing Oviedo. After which the vice president Luis Argaña was assasinated, supposedly in a plot hatched by Oviedo. After this he fled in exile to Argentina and then Brazil, from where he supposedly ran one of the largest stolen car rings of Ciudad del Este. He returned to Paraguay in 2004 and was arrested and imprisoned once again only to be freed by his former party the Colorados (party of Stroessner that has been in power since the Paraguayan civil war in 1947) in order to split the vote of Fernando Lugo, the socialist ex-Bishop, and ensure a Blanca Ovelar victory who they say is no more than a pawn for Nicanor Duarte Frutos, the current president who was previously president of the country and the senate at the same time and tried and failed to amend the consitution to give himself another term as president. Asi es las cosas politicales de Paraguay.But Anibel is a solid guy and he´s getting me a Lino O hat. And he is the father-in-law of:
Miguel Franco seated in the red chair on the right. Born in Argentina to Paraguayan parents, he returned to Paraguay and married a Paraguaya and runs one of the best operations in the community. Sadly, and I do mean very sadly, his son, who was deaf, committed suicide just over a year ago. Fortunately he has a daughter, Rosy, who is too young to remember, whose cheerfulness really helps the family to cope, I think. He is a close friend and someone who knows all too well how important it is to treasure the moments and people you have and have had.
The guy next to Anibel in a blue hat is Antonio Torrez, my closest neighbor, who I go to eat with frequently, and recently, he has been bringing his family to eat at my place. I made them a Puttanesca sauce that they loved, and have introduced them to ginger, okra, and spicy foods (notice the bottle of Cholula hot sauce on the table in the picture). He loves Old Bay Seasoning. He is also the president of the Junta de Vigilancia of the cooperative, which makes sure everything is above board. I´ve committed to sharing the costs of planting a few acres of vegetables with him and with;
Antonimo "Mbarakaja" Vargas, the guy standing with the cigarette. He was my closest neighbor for a while, but has moved back to his house after going through a separation with his wife, who has since moved to Argentina (along with probably half of the 20-30 year olds in the community). He is far and away the funniest person I know in the Dos. And he teaches me how to go into the forest and find the different yuyos for tereré. I was trying to sell him on the idea of keeping bees and said that they are still essentially wild animals, and he just goes, "Andres, romonda la cava´i miel. Ore ha´e salvaje"...that we´re the wild ones for stealing their honey.
Next to Antonimo is his brother Porfirio "Tatu" Vargas. He goes around every day and sells lottery tickets to the people in the town. He is funny, but quiet. Another socio told me he was dying and I believed it until I was told otherwise, such are the jokes of paraguay.
In the green shirt is Cristobel Coronel, another socio and the treasurer of the cooperative. I was at his house in the beginning and was trying to learn about our finances, and he took out a rumpled plastic bag with 400,000 guaranis ($80) in it and that worked, I understood the state of the coop after that. But he is solid as well. I hate to sound repetitive, but they are all very quality people, they work hard, they´re funny, and they´re just good people. He cut my hair once and was the first person to take me to cut yerba leaves when I first got in. But he still has my shirt that I gave him when he was selling melons in the rain in Tavapy Uno and I was heading back to the Dos.
The guy on the far right in the blue pants and red shirt is Pedro Vargas Morel, eldest brother of the Vargas clan. I spent Easter with their family and we roasted a pig in the tatakua (the paraguayan brick oven; dome of bricks, fire inside, is removed and the residual heat cooks the meat and also the different combinations of corn, lard, and salt that paraguayans pass off as a food group). He also always wears old worn out soccer cleats with air holes cut in them. He sews the bags of yerba closed when they´re full. We harvested soy the other day, which by hand is a pain in the ass and the hands, and took a dozen of us 12 hours to do 1 hectare while a john deere combine harvester did 10 hectares in the field immediately adjacent to us in 45 minutes, but that land is owned by someone outside of the community (soy in paraguay is interesting in and of itself, but that´s for another day). Anyway, the machine that shells the soybeans gets dragged to the field and then run by this little mini-tractor that is just an engine and two wheels. It was going over a lot of ruts and the dude riding it almost fell off so i said "toroicha" - like a bull, and Pedro goes "Ñati´u!" which just means mosquito. It was so old school, I felt like I was watching John Henry race the railroad spike driver. Very solid.
The arm on the right belongs to Aldo Aranda, the president of the cooperative. He was involved in most of my escapades my first few months in site when I was living at his house. He is also Pedro´s neighbor.
I haven´t mentioned Feliciano Benitez (butcher, cardplayer, has 91 year old chaco war veteran for a father, and he´s full of jokes too. He loves when I tell him about how I almost went to Mongolia), Dario Mendez (the youngest of the socios, guy I play chess with, he´s taking the lead on the community center) and a handful of others.
We do have our asemblea general this coming saturday which is our yearly meeting. It will be high stress but good. We can set the agenda for the harvest, what they want to do after the harvest, and we also have a huge asado and everyone hangs out ha upei roka´uta.
That´s about it for now. I´m going to the brazillian steakhouse for lunch (all you can eat buffet and meat for $6) after which I´ll bring these coconuts back to the dos and distribute them. Omarcha.
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