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.