http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/world/americas/21paraguay.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=paraguay+&st=nyt&oref=slogin

NY Times whoop whoop...

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

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.

I have been working

not all of the taxdollars are going to waste. So it turns out life is not all about stealing honey and watching chickens fight in the Dos. The last week I have been making a proposal to a program of USAID that could potentially provide my cooperative with the initial capital to buy and process 25,000 kilos of yerba from people other than members of the cooperative. It could result in the difference between us processing, and adding valu to, 40,000 kilos and 300,000, and a difference between maybe 10 million guaranies and over 100 million. It is so satisfying working with funny money exchange rates. But right now, I have pitched the idea to the number two in charge down here, and he is on board to support it, so if all goes according to plan we should be getting a check in two or three months for $4000, which would really open up the door for the coop to expand aggressively, both in terms of production next year by augmenting the barbacua we do have, and also into services for the socios and the community at large.
So unfortunately I did have to take 3 days away from eating melon and hanging out with socios to sit in front of a computer for a few days. I'll attach the proposal for anyone who might be interested. But in that time I also mowed the lawn in front of the coop (severly shocking myself in the process. Every part of the lawn mower that is metal is conductive and wants to zap. So to mow, you jam wires into an outlet after splicing them to the mower, and then through some socks and plastic bags over your hands and get after it. Although once, I got the shit zapped out of my arm when I thought it was unplugged and went to reattach the wires. Whoops. The paraguayans were amused by it though and told me 'animano', which means don't die). And with a mowed lawn, I went to ciudad del este to buy a soccer ball and now we usually have daily games for whoever wants to kick around. We also have a seed bed thats got eucalyptus sprouting, but we'll be using it with all sorts of native and exotic seeds to reforest the area a little. Other than that, there is just a lot of hanging out, but kind of with a purpose. Just because we're sitting around drinking cana with a'pepu (the lemon/orange that grows near my house) doesn't mean we can't be talking about his fish ponds, or at times, we're sitting around eating a watermelon talking about different protein levels in different grasses for the cows. My job is basically information collection, and then helping the people to design projects with that knowledge presented to them. Because they do, and I tell them this all the time, have the knowledge, I just take it and put it into a plan or a spreadsheet and we have a base to begin planning logistics.

My day to day life, is just so incredibly tranquilo with the heat. It is difficult though to get around and visit anyone, because anywhere I go they're yelling at me to stop and drink terere and the kids run after the bike yelling "henjy! henjy! because thats the best they can do for andrew. I get a lot of texts to go play volleyball as well, which is good, because i've built up a decent amount of sports capital now and they say "ojugakuaa" he knows how to play, and I can play with the big boys so to speak, with the risk of losing 5 thousand guaranies, per game! Its a rough life with my daily expenditure of around 7-8 thousand for my vegetables and rice or noodles, with occasional trips to santa rita to bring back avocado, pineapples, coconuts, and other things you just can't find in the Dos. The avocado led to one of my biggest accomplishments to date here. They usually eat the aguacate with milk and sugar, but I'm getting them used to guacamole. And coconuts too for that matter, which are my staple breakfast food. Get them all ready the night before so all i have to do is lift off the top and drink after my morning Mate (and then obviously smash with my hammer to get at the meat).

New Years was also an excellent experience. IT just a very festive time, and everywhere you go you hear pigs squealing their last squeals (=rico asado), fireworks going off, melon harvests coming in, people drinking clerico (juice of pineapple and melon with chunks of pineapple, melon, watermelon, banana, apple, pear, and watever else, and a bit of red wine and coca cola). It did rain and we lost power christmas day, but when it rains in paraguay its almost always a passing souterly storm adn the sunsets are incredible afterwards, so i always make a point of being somehwere che ikatu ahecha la kuarahy oike la yvy, I can watch the sun enter the land, as they say. After that I return and they're usually like where'd you go, and I say to watch the sun set, and they can't for the life of them figure out why someone would make an activity out of watching the sun go down. Usually afterwards, I cook myself some dinner, without recipes, proportions, or a plan and sometimes its awesome, and others, not so awesome. Although when I cook it is usually better than the bread rolls with old bay seasoning I have had to rely on before, and no longer can because the paraguayans tried the old bay and are obsessed with it (I'm writing McCormack a letter to try and get a few free cases sent down).

After dinner, usually make a visit to play chess, sit and have a little red wine and coke with ice, try and get the brazillians to help me with my portuguese, watch some soccer or a novella. And those times hanging out are just so priceless for me. I already think about how sad it will be to leave them, but try to limit that. Its just nice to chat with someone in their indiginous language about what you think is important in life, what I miss about the states, what their perception of the states is, whats makes a person happy. And that kind of brings me to somethings I have been meaning to mention about the Guarani. The word vy'a. when you say avy'a you're using a word that doesn't exist in spanish or english. You're saying what literally translates as I happy. In english you need the verb is, and in spanish estar, but in guarani the act of being happy is the verb, and I really do think that has had an affect on their general approach to life. The community I am in has lost a generation that has left their children to find work in spain and argentina and is generally very poor, and yet they are so kind, so giving, and the words tranquilopa, omarcha, jaryi, oikopora, ipora (and any of the dozens of guarani words that all mean sweet)are always leaving their mouths. Its an approach to life that is good.

Goings on

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.

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

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