Feliz Navidad to everyone who could be reading this. Christmas in Paraguay is a joyous time, papa noel is there rocking out in his north pole getup even though it is 100 plus degrees, there are fireworks, the melon harvest is in full swing, less than a dollar for a giant watermelon, we had an asado with beef, pork, and lamb (although the lamb arrived in a giant chunk and we had to take the machete to it). The best part of the asado is that you roast the meat, then take it off the grill and then everyone takes a knife and carves off what they want. There´s also alot of volleyball and soccer, its nice to get a little exercise after stuffing yourself. Its also school vacation, and there were a few proms and graduations to go to which were good times.
As for work related stuff, things have been coming together very well. I finally have people on board for the cultural center. I had been bouncing the idea around, and the response was pretty tepid, but finally a guy loved it and now people have been coming to me saying ¨Andres, remember when you mentioned a center? I´m interested now¨ so it looks like that project will take off. The idea will be to have sort of a local museum /cultural center/ reading center for the community. We will submit applications to various organizations to help us with acquiring computers, books, etc. Fortunately there is already a building next to the school, centrally located in the town, that is vacant and up for sale.
With the cooperative, we have various projects in various stages of development. There´s obviously the yerba and I have found a source of hoja verde outside of the community that could potentially supply us with 400,000 kilos. Once the barbecua is completed and we are producing the finished yerba we will also have available capital to start investing on behalf of the cooperative in things like a chicken operation, a store for the socios with flour and cooking oil for the house and toothbrushes and notebooks and pens for the niños, stevia or ka´a he´e, using the cooperative to pay peoples electricity and cellular bills, building a field for a youth soccer league, and art and computer class for the town. There is a tremendous amount of potential between the cooperative and the community in general. I am also working on projects with people in a more individual manner, with the store owners to help them manage their inventory and select their products to favor those that are popular and have decent margins and add products like prepared food (empanadas mainly), with farmers helping them expand into aquaculture and raising alternative livestock like the capybara, with people helping them set up home gardens with their own compost and home made (and free) insecticides with seeds supplied through the coop, and other stuff.
Generally everything is going very well. I killed two pigs in the days leading up to christmas and then did some veterinary work with a cow, although we accidentally ripped its tail off (it had a severe infection at its base). There´s a guy in town who has a chess board and we play frequently and I´ve mentioned to him the prospect of starting a chess club, its very dorky, but that kind of stuff is completely absent in rural paraguay, things that are creative and intellectual.
Thats about enough out of me. Time to head back to the dos and catch the afternoon volleyball session.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Away from the Dos
So, good stuff, Paraguay never ceases to amaze me with how it continually becomes more and more enjoyable. I have definitely broken into a new phase of peace corps service. When you arrive you're a little tense because you've heard all of these things about what its like to serve and you have expectations. And meanwhile you're just trying so hard to have one of those enlightening moments when you see a child playing with a tire and laughing and the world makes sense. But when you do that you find that you just keep waiting. And then all of a sudden, completely unpredictably, the sun is a little warmer on your face and you realize that it the process and the journey that is the enjoyable part. Not to be cliche or hackneyed, but its true, when you stop trying to understand and just kind of let go and live like the paraguayans, and begin to participate whether its the terere circle, the volleyball court, the yerba harvest, the watermelon field, it just all comes together and you may not have that understanding of you place in the world, but you are happy in the place that you are. Don't know how much sense that made, btu I tried.
Anyways, as for the Dos, I have been away for a while. We had thanksgiving dinner at a jungle resort in southeastern paraguay called Hotel Tirol, it was awesome, almost all of the volunteers go and it turns into a kind of mix of summer camp and spring break. The day before I had excellent chinese food in the market of encarnacion and then even better Japanese food at restaurante Hiroshima (don't think that name would fly in the states). It was good stuff, Paraguay beat Chile in their world cup qualifier moving into a tie with Brazil for first place. Brazil is coming to town in March and I will definitely be going to that. Paraguay - Uruguay was also fun a few weeks ago, but Brazil might be slightly more challenging. After that, I went and visited a few other people in my group in Cazapa and Villarica and got a taste of what its like to be in slightly larger cities and can know say it tastes like hamburgers and delicious lomito arabes. Unlike the dos where it is impossible to buy food, but I have sufficiently scouted the town to know where to go if I want a good chicken with spaghetti and more importantly where to avoid if I don't want to eat cow intestines. After that we returned to Guarambare, which was the area where we spent our first three months in country. It was nice to see the host family again and also to have our group together again. Randomly, there is a french expat in guarambare that makes excellent, excellent cheese; like aged goat cheese, queso azul, fresh mozarella, whatever. So good, we would pick up cheese and then go eat it at the bar and munch lomitos. One of the nights one of the guys in our group hosted a tatakua pizza party. The tatakua is a traditional oven that is a dome of bricks with two openings, you builda fire in it, heat up the bricks, sweep out the fire, and cook with the residual heat, and it is freaking delicious, the pizza was from scratch too. Tatakua is guarani for fire hole.
Post 3 month training was all based around language which was a nice little boost for us. I am close to being completely conversational which makes it very easy to get around paraguay. Anyone outside of asuncion prefers it, and will do favors for you ranging from hithcing a ride to inviting you to their house for terere or sopa paraguaya. After training, we spent a few nights in Asuncion. Fun it was. First night headed to mercado cuatro which is the huge market at which you can buy literally anything to find some korean barbeque which was unbelievable. I have to say, I had braced myself to not eat kimchi for 2 and a half years and was pleasantly surprised I was able to indulge that little pleasure. Afterwards, we're just walking around downtown asuncion, which is not the best place to be at 11, and hear BB King coming out of a bar adn think, awesome, a jazz club, and they're settign up equipment for a show. Get in the show starts and its a paraguayan heavy metal band, which was amazing in its own right. They played some ozzy osbourne, but it was like watching people who had only read about what they should do at a metal concert trying to make it happen. All in all its been a good little excursion out of the dos, and I'm looking forward to returning. And I did not raft 440 Kilometers down the rio parana.
As for the work I'll have when I get back to the dos, I'm very much looking forward to it. We have procured money for the barbecua from yerba sales. We pulled in a cool 5.4 million for last year's harvest. The shitty thing was that it was low quality and we had to sell it at a low price. Worse than that, we had to take our 3000 kilos, dump it out, mix it manually with 3000 kilos of our buyers yerba, and then repack it and load it into a truck. It took about 15 hours and then the truck died and we had to push it. It was shitty work, but when I am green head to toe covered with yerba dust, it does wonders for my profile in the dos. So now that we have the funds for the barbecua, my main goals are to help with planning and coming up with a protocol for its operation, because our capacity will be so greatly augmented, coming up with a strategy to secure the raw leaf of people who are not socios, expand the services of the cooperative to make a push to get more socios, and to generally improve our practices for record keeping and that sort of thing. Its funny, I've become a serial micromanager. On top of work with the coop, I'll probably teach some english, do school gardens, work with the women's comittee (which is already very well organized and runs a weekly party for the town in which there is a soccer tournament in which the champion doesn't carry a trophy off teh field, but rather a live pig for their team asado that night; needless to say, i'm looking for a team), do work with the small farmer's association, and right now I am planting the seeds in people's heads in my community to make a community cultural/learning center. That last one would be a herculean effort and would definitely recquire financial assistance either from USAID or sympathetic americans statesside. The Dos is an intersting place, I've found more about its history from talking to people and apperantly, it wasn't just founded by the government. Apperantly they original inhabitants went there and engaged in a three year, at times armed conflict that they refer to as the 'lucha' in which they fought against a wealthy chilean who had bought off the police force. After three years of struggling for the government to recognize their right to the land, the people finally organized a truck to carry them all to asuncion to protest the nacional government, Stroessner, to give them title, and it worked and the town was officially founded May 20th, 1984, which I still can't get over that the town was founded the same year I was born. Anyways, the idea is to form a center that would document this history. There are 'artifacts' all over the place, the first well, old farm equipment, and that sort of stuff, but the most abundant resource is the people. My dream would be to have interviews with people in digital form that could be put on communal computers at this center that would also have encyclopedias and that sort of thing. The town isn't ready for a library yet, so it would have to be very heavy media. Basically, I want the people who made the history to establish the historical record. But, it would be expensive, and difficult to reach concensus on things, btu I have 20 months to work on it. Right now I am only hinting at the notion of memorializing this struggle, and people are fairly receptive to that.
So I am now off to the mall to get some burger king for lunch at the mall where I saw transformers twice in one day, not very peace corps, but Asuncion is a city where a souped up mercedes suv will be waiting at a red light next to a donkey cart. Good stuff,
hopefully paraguay will continue to give me things decently interesting to write about.
Anderw
Anyways, as for the Dos, I have been away for a while. We had thanksgiving dinner at a jungle resort in southeastern paraguay called Hotel Tirol, it was awesome, almost all of the volunteers go and it turns into a kind of mix of summer camp and spring break. The day before I had excellent chinese food in the market of encarnacion and then even better Japanese food at restaurante Hiroshima (don't think that name would fly in the states). It was good stuff, Paraguay beat Chile in their world cup qualifier moving into a tie with Brazil for first place. Brazil is coming to town in March and I will definitely be going to that. Paraguay - Uruguay was also fun a few weeks ago, but Brazil might be slightly more challenging. After that, I went and visited a few other people in my group in Cazapa and Villarica and got a taste of what its like to be in slightly larger cities and can know say it tastes like hamburgers and delicious lomito arabes. Unlike the dos where it is impossible to buy food, but I have sufficiently scouted the town to know where to go if I want a good chicken with spaghetti and more importantly where to avoid if I don't want to eat cow intestines. After that we returned to Guarambare, which was the area where we spent our first three months in country. It was nice to see the host family again and also to have our group together again. Randomly, there is a french expat in guarambare that makes excellent, excellent cheese; like aged goat cheese, queso azul, fresh mozarella, whatever. So good, we would pick up cheese and then go eat it at the bar and munch lomitos. One of the nights one of the guys in our group hosted a tatakua pizza party. The tatakua is a traditional oven that is a dome of bricks with two openings, you builda fire in it, heat up the bricks, sweep out the fire, and cook with the residual heat, and it is freaking delicious, the pizza was from scratch too. Tatakua is guarani for fire hole.
Post 3 month training was all based around language which was a nice little boost for us. I am close to being completely conversational which makes it very easy to get around paraguay. Anyone outside of asuncion prefers it, and will do favors for you ranging from hithcing a ride to inviting you to their house for terere or sopa paraguaya. After training, we spent a few nights in Asuncion. Fun it was. First night headed to mercado cuatro which is the huge market at which you can buy literally anything to find some korean barbeque which was unbelievable. I have to say, I had braced myself to not eat kimchi for 2 and a half years and was pleasantly surprised I was able to indulge that little pleasure. Afterwards, we're just walking around downtown asuncion, which is not the best place to be at 11, and hear BB King coming out of a bar adn think, awesome, a jazz club, and they're settign up equipment for a show. Get in the show starts and its a paraguayan heavy metal band, which was amazing in its own right. They played some ozzy osbourne, but it was like watching people who had only read about what they should do at a metal concert trying to make it happen. All in all its been a good little excursion out of the dos, and I'm looking forward to returning. And I did not raft 440 Kilometers down the rio parana.
As for the work I'll have when I get back to the dos, I'm very much looking forward to it. We have procured money for the barbecua from yerba sales. We pulled in a cool 5.4 million for last year's harvest. The shitty thing was that it was low quality and we had to sell it at a low price. Worse than that, we had to take our 3000 kilos, dump it out, mix it manually with 3000 kilos of our buyers yerba, and then repack it and load it into a truck. It took about 15 hours and then the truck died and we had to push it. It was shitty work, but when I am green head to toe covered with yerba dust, it does wonders for my profile in the dos. So now that we have the funds for the barbecua, my main goals are to help with planning and coming up with a protocol for its operation, because our capacity will be so greatly augmented, coming up with a strategy to secure the raw leaf of people who are not socios, expand the services of the cooperative to make a push to get more socios, and to generally improve our practices for record keeping and that sort of thing. Its funny, I've become a serial micromanager. On top of work with the coop, I'll probably teach some english, do school gardens, work with the women's comittee (which is already very well organized and runs a weekly party for the town in which there is a soccer tournament in which the champion doesn't carry a trophy off teh field, but rather a live pig for their team asado that night; needless to say, i'm looking for a team), do work with the small farmer's association, and right now I am planting the seeds in people's heads in my community to make a community cultural/learning center. That last one would be a herculean effort and would definitely recquire financial assistance either from USAID or sympathetic americans statesside. The Dos is an intersting place, I've found more about its history from talking to people and apperantly, it wasn't just founded by the government. Apperantly they original inhabitants went there and engaged in a three year, at times armed conflict that they refer to as the 'lucha' in which they fought against a wealthy chilean who had bought off the police force. After three years of struggling for the government to recognize their right to the land, the people finally organized a truck to carry them all to asuncion to protest the nacional government, Stroessner, to give them title, and it worked and the town was officially founded May 20th, 1984, which I still can't get over that the town was founded the same year I was born. Anyways, the idea is to form a center that would document this history. There are 'artifacts' all over the place, the first well, old farm equipment, and that sort of stuff, but the most abundant resource is the people. My dream would be to have interviews with people in digital form that could be put on communal computers at this center that would also have encyclopedias and that sort of thing. The town isn't ready for a library yet, so it would have to be very heavy media. Basically, I want the people who made the history to establish the historical record. But, it would be expensive, and difficult to reach concensus on things, btu I have 20 months to work on it. Right now I am only hinting at the notion of memorializing this struggle, and people are fairly receptive to that.
So I am now off to the mall to get some burger king for lunch at the mall where I saw transformers twice in one day, not very peace corps, but Asuncion is a city where a souped up mercedes suv will be waiting at a red light next to a donkey cart. Good stuff,
hopefully paraguay will continue to give me things decently interesting to write about.
Anderw
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