Tavapy II - 'The Dos'

So...I apologize for writing such horrendously boring entries before. I think it is due to two primary erasons. 1: I hate blogs and never wanted to have one, and 2: I was just a scared, shivering, sick trainee when I wrote them abd ddin't have any idea where I was going to be living for the next two years and was nervous about getting a shitty site. In training everything was very structured and you worried about your guarani not being good enough and getting sent ot a city and stuff like that, although peace corps is more than happy to stick someone with no guarani into the campo. In short, it was tense and not conducive to writing flowing blogs. Then I show up at my site (a day late, mind you, because i had to stop at a seedy motel for the night because i took a late bus and couldn't reach my site and saw a colleague of mine from another cooperative show up with two prostitutes, good start). I get off the bus and walk the 6 KM to site and its like 'what's up, they call me andres, heard you guys needed a peace corps volunteer' and then we get to drinking terere and mate and hoeing in the fields and getting foot parasites.
My site is in Alto Parana, the department of Ciudad del Este, what some say is the world epicenter for smuggling and general lawlessness (this link was supplied by one mr. ben lavely http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/a_reporter_at_large_in_the_par_1.php good guy looking out for his buddy). Ciudad del Este is insane, it completely unregulated commerce run amok. There are mosques and pagodas, great asian and lebanese food, and a bridge you can walk across into Brazil. Anyways, I rarely go except for with my small farmers committee which sells their produce there and when I just have to eat something other than fried flour, you can get spicy seafood noodles there and they bring out scissors like you used to use in kindergarten to cut the noodles.

Back to the Dos. My community is actually only 4 months older than I am as it was founded May 20th 1984. It was started as a program for relocating poor landless city dwellers to the parts of Paraguay that were rapidly being colonized by Brazillian settlers, that being the reason today the closest city to me that I go to for internet is entirely portuguese speakers, at least 90%. The town 50 KM southwest of Ciudad del Este and is a 5x5 kilometer grid with three dirt roads making up the passage. Every person who went was given a plot of land 100 meters wide and 10 KM long. The first thing they all did was chop down most of the atlantic rainforest and sell the timber. And then they started making babies. Almost every family has at least 6-7 children and many have somewhere in the teens. Needless to say, their 10 hectares couldn't support them and as a result, many of the first generation born in the dos is in spain or argentina along with literally millions of their countrymen. The two main crops are mandioca which I unfortunately eat 3 times a day (also called cassava or yucca) and yerba mate which I fortunately drink a dozen times a day. Some people have home gardens, but not enough, and that will be a big project of mine along with home composting. My main project though is working qwith the cooperative that produce the yerba. The town sits on three ridges with two streams running through, arroyo Santa Lucia, and Arroyo Cuna Piru which is guarani for thin girl, as of yet I've gotten no explanation as to why. There are still stands of forest and the areas around the streams are still lush and jungle like which is nice for fishing. Surrounding the town are massive, gigantic, soy and wheat operations owned by brazillians, germans, and japanese.
My day to day in the dos varies wildly. I usually wake up at around 6. Sometimes I'll stay in bed until 7 and I'll get up and they'll say buenas tardes (good afternoon for those who don't habla espanol) to me and laugh their heads off. Then I eat fried flour with cocido which is yerba and sugar that they have put a burning ember into to melt it and then they steep it. After that I either do field work, planting, watering, hoeing, what have you, hang out with families or committees, or work on my coop's computer which is a mix of excel and minesweeper usually. Sometimes 3D space pinball if I'm feeling crazy. Whichever activity theres a lot of Terere, the cold version of Mate. The big differences between the two are the yuyos you put into them which can be anything that grows. Yuyos can be anything, there are roots, stems, leaves, what have you. You just mash them up and throw them in, or in the case of mate boil them with the water. You then drink the brew out of your guampa which is a little wooden gourd for mate, or a hollowed out bull horn for terere, and drink it with your bombilla which is a metal straw with a filter on the end. While doing this I suggest to them ideas like the net present value of a yerba tree to convince them to plant more trees, or different savings plans to finance our barbecua which is one of the ovens that you toast the yerba in (right now i'm working on a team based incentive program where they're rewarded for forming bigger teams and for reaching a monthly goal with a slightly higher monthly interest rate, and also a system that would be similar to the coop issuinging and selling bonds to its members. And generally we just chat it up. They tell a lot of jokes and are very upbeat people who are really pleasure to be around. I am also a source of entertainment for them when I do things like step in ant hills in my flip flops or better yet, one time I put my hat down while hoeing and when I put it back on was swarmed by red ants that had inhabited it. Sometimes I do things like accidentally fall into streams or step into really deep mud, sure fire way to get them laughing. One day I worked on the computer all day and built them a spreadsheet to manage the savings program and automatically tally their interest rate prizes. I got home and showed the president of the cooperative and he was just like 'looks good, time to go kill a pig'. And we did. I held its back legs senora held its chest down adn the president gave it the death jab. This was followed by pouring boiling water onto it and skinning it with spoons and brushes that are used in the kitchen and the bathroom, and then gutting it. Good stuff, and hygenic. The kicker to this is that we didn't eat the meat, just sold it. Leaving us with the following menu. That dinner was fried kidneys, liver, and neck. Next day lunch and dinner, small and large intestine. And after this I thought we were done, and I'm sitting outside reading and I look over and see senora walking out of the house with the pig head in one hand and the axe in the other getting ready to make some pig head with rice. Actually none of it was that bad. I also during training saw a cow go from standing around eating grass to hanging in 8 pieces and a bucket of guts in about 20 minutes. One day, our activity was getting honey from feral bees. Usually when you think of beekeepers they have long sleeves, smokers, and those ridiculous masks. But we set out with regular clothes, a smoking plate of cow poo, and a knife and miraculously I didn't get stung, but the guys I went with was stung 3 times. Another day I went dove hunting with a family with slingshots and clay pellets we had made the day before (I didn't try to explain to them the irony of a peace corps volunteer killing doves, but it was freaking impossible so moot point anyway, somehow the kids are able to go out in the morning and come back with a dozen dead doves). Fishing is popular and is very tranquilo, you just dig up some worms, thrown in a line, push the stick into the ground and take a nap or drink some terere. There's a lot of stream swimming although more in the summer.
As for socializing, the town is completely spread out with nothing resembling a town center. All of the committees have weekly meetings, and then people get together for birthday and saints days usually with lots of meat and lots of beer. It is incredibly difficult to describe everything, and even more so because I have such sporadic internet access, but I'll try to. I hope this entry is better than previous ones. I do really love Paraguay and the people. I am going to the Paraguay vs. Uruguay world cup qualifier home opener tonight and that should be fun. If ever you want a southern update live and by voice I can be reached at
001 595 971 101 225 calling from the US, although as you can imagine, reception is spotty in rural paraguay. I'll also try to get some pictures up soon

Hope things in the states are going well for everyone







sdfg