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.
