At
the suggestion of my site mate Kristin, I recently started reading a book
entitled Living Poor A Peace Corps Chronicle by Moritz Thomsen. I had no idea who Moritz Thomsen was until I
managed to get a copy of his book at the Peace Corps Technical library in
Asuncion when I was there last week. I’ll be sure to get into the book in
detail a bit later, but I wanted to start off by saying that this book is
unquestionably the most accurate account of a Peace Corps Volunteers experience
that I have come across to date. If you had to classify the book I would say
that it is sort of a biographical account of this man’s experience as an
Agriculture Extension Volunteer in the small costal community of Río Verde
Ecuador from 1965-69. Moritz Thomsen was a 48-year-old, single, farmer from
California who one day decided to join the Peace Corps. Admittedly, there are
many differences given the 45 year time period since the start of his service
and mine, including the training, way more intense back then, how one finds a
site, they basically were given a region and told to go find work on their own,
and the ability to communicate. For some those might seem as though the
experiences in no way could find commonality with all the 21st
century technology that the average volunteer now has access too, but what
makes this book remarkable is how despite the different country, language,
climate, resource availability, and time period his interactions with people
and the struggles he faced when trying to live in his community have uncanny
parallels with my own situation.
Peace
Corps Volunteers, in most situations not all, today have significantly more
assets at their disposal than the volunteers that came before, but if you put
aside all the bells and whistles of the current times and boil the job down to
its most fundamental levels one finds that the people to people interactions
are still the foundation of any successful service. The support of a community
and the need to depend on the people around you transcends when you served or
where you served. I think that all volunteers struggle to enact real mentality
changes and living practices regardless of ones contact to the outside world.
This is not because the areas where many of us live are in community’s that
have not changed drastically for long periods of time. The habits, customs,
economic climate evolve over time, but extraordinarily slowly. Getting people
to change those habits or try something new is something that will always be taken
with a grain of salt by the people within because the whether you are a first
time volunteer in your site or a 5th you are still a foreigner that
has never lived in that community or in most cases that country. How am I
suppose to know what’s best? I realize that comes of sort of cynical, but those
are the fundamental challenges that I struggle with on a day-to-day basis. Each
culture and community has his or her own identities within the context of the
society at large. Juan E. O’Leary is just one example of a small community like
Río Verde. Granted the level of poverty is drastically different, but the
engrained ideals and internal struggles are astonishingly similar.
There
is a particular scene in Living Poor
that has stood out to me recently given my current work in the school garden.
Basically, Thomsen wants to plant gardens in people’s individual houses so they
diversify their diet and get essential nutrients that their daily meals lack.
The people of Río Verde subsist, when they are unable to get anything from the
sea, on plantains, yucca, rice, beans, or potatoes. Not a lot of nutrients in
those foods. Thomsen decides to plant a garden in his house, in the dry season,
to demonstrate how easy it is to do. He gets into trouble because he runs out
of water in his rain barrel and is forced to purchase water that is brought
from another place. He rations his water and is able to get the garden going
successfully, but despite all that he is still stuck in getting people to
follow his example. Thomsen writes, “to my disappointment there was no rush to plant
a garden after mine turned out so beautiful. The sad fact is that hardly anyone
liked radishes, chard, or squash.” He goes on to describe a particular garden
that he helped start with a school out in the jungle:
"The problem was that most of the
vegetables were strange to people. The radishes were like tennis balls…The
eggplants were enormous, but no one knew what they were for…The summer
squash, too, had reached its peak a month before and was now quite inedible.
The string beans were dead and drying on the vines. I argued with Oswaldo [a
school teacher] for five minutes about the necessity of harvesting the beans
when they were young and tender, but when he realized that the whole bean was
suppose to be eaten he simply refused to listen to me. ‘This is a civilized
country,’ he told me ‘Here we only eat the good part, the heart of the fruit’”
After I read those passages I could help but reflect on my
gardening situation. While the idea of starting a garden is far less crazy here
than it was in 1960s costal Ecuador, I frequently run into the same
problems with when to plant my own garden. I tried to plant a garden during the summer. I was
told it wouldn’t work not only by Paraguayans, but also by Peace Corps, but I
didn’t care, I just wanted something to do so I could show the people around me
that I wasn’t totally useless. Needless to say, the garden was an utter
failure. The few things that came up died because of the heat, and no amount of
water could fix that. It was a classic example of how I thought something could
be done easily, but proved to be much more difficult than I expected. For
Thomsen, he tried to start gardening projects shortly after the success of his
garden with people in the community, but like the scorching summer sun here,
the rainy season in Ecuador washed all the gardens away. People told him this
would likely happen, but he didn’t believe that it couldn’t be done because of
a bit of rain.
I
also find the struggles he experienced with getting people to try new foods extremely
challenging as well. Here in Paraguay, like in Ecuador, yucca, or mandioca as
it is known here, is a principal foodstuff that is served with every meal.
Rice, beans, corn meal based foods, and in recent decades pasta are also
staples. It is very rare to eat something that is immediately recognizable as a
vegetable. In all the soups, pastas, and rice dishes the vegetables are cut up
so finely that you need a microscope to find them. They are also not used in
abundance, 1 tomato, 1 pepper, half an onion, 1 carrot are the norms if people
have them at all. There are salads, principally made out of cabbage, but they often add copious amounts of mayonnaise that greatly diminishes the
nutritional value. Eating an uncooked carrot is unheard of; making a salad like
we would eat in America is crazy. I know kids hate their vegetables no matter
where someone is from, but here the same seems to go for everybody. People know
it is important to use vegetables, but cannot seem to implement them in new
ways.
This
past weeks gardening activity I did at the school was a prime example of what
Thomsen talked about. I was able to get a series of vegetable seeds about a
month ago from a national newspaper called ABC Color. They give packets of 10
types of vegetable seeds to schools that write a solicitation letter. Most of
the seeds are things that are commonly grown or eaten, like carrots, tomatoes, and
onions, but there are a few like radishes, broccoli, and cauliflower that
people simply don’t know anything about. On Friday, I spent some time with both
the 5th and 6th grades going over what broccoli and
cauliflower are and they ways we can eat them. Nobody, including the teachers
had any idea how to eat in or foods you can use them in. The funny part is that
the parent’s commission planted every single vegetable seed they were familiar
with, with the exception of a few I asked them to save, and left the broccoli
and cauliflower seeds alone to have me plant. I can only imagine what we are
going to do when they actually come up, but something tells me that they won’t be
the most popular vegetable grown in the garden.
My
experience with the garden is just one of the analogous parallels that I have
found within Thomsen’s book and my own experience. Another one that struck me
recently is related to physical health and diet. Modern medicine has grown
leaps and bounds since Thomsen lived his experience. In O’Leary there are
multiple pharmacies with easy access to whatever medicine one needs. We are not
limited by location, nor are we extremely isolated like some of my other
volunteer friends are in their sites. With that being said, I still marvel at
people’s general well being. Ever since motorcycles became affordable and
abundant the obesity rate in Paraguay has grown exponentially. People are
eating the same foods in the same proportions, but are no longer forced to walk
to work, the store, or wherever. You can just hop on the moto and go. While
this is great in terms of the flow of business and general economic growth it
has profound impacts on individuals health.
Thomsen tells the story of a young
baby girl who is the daughter of one of his closest friends. She is constantly
sick, and is severely malnourished. He is constantly harping on the importance
of improving her diet so she can get the nutrients she needs to be healthy.
Specifically, if the family made and fed her orange juice, she would be able to
maintain a steady degree of health. The famil,y instead of listening to Thomsen’s
suggestions, would feed her natural herbs when she fell ill rather than
treating the blatant malnutrition problem preventatively. I have run across this
same problem with my contact and friend Julio, who I lived with my first 4
months here.
Julio is overweight. He knows it, I know it, and his wife and
kids know it. Therefore it is no surprise that he has high blood pressure, high
cholesterol, and heart problems. During the first month I was in O’Leary I went
on a trip to Cuidad del Este, Paraguay’s second largest city, to visit the
regional hospital for government employees. After taking a cat scan the
cardiologist told Julio that he needed to lose weight immediately to lower his
cholesterol. He immediately started to walk around the house at night for about
a half an hour, a task that left him very winded and exhausted by the end. I
continued to live with him in the months after he went to the doctor, and would
occasionally comment on his diet as a contributor to his health. I would
suggest cutting back on the oil in the cooking, stop drinking soda at meals,
and limit your portions. The response back was normally a blank stare. I did
notice that he was loosing some weight, but I couldn’t tell if it was a result
of him working construction jobs for a month in Cuidad del Este, or if it was
because of a new diet and workout regiment. I wanted to believe the later, but
I knew it was the former.
Once school started he went back to
the way he was before. Despite the fact that the school is a 2 km walk that can
be done in 20 minutes he was still always on his motorcycle. I noticed no real
changes in diet, and sure enough he got really sick recently prompting the doctor
to prescribe more medication with a reemphasis on diet and exercise. If he made
some simple changes in how he lived like walking to school, or being more conscience
about his diet, he could probably resolve the majority of his health problems.
This realization could be said about almost anyone anywhere in the world that
struggles with obesity. However, the difference here is that, unlike in America,
ones options are limited by the resources available. People are not accustomed
to diet and exercise regiments seen in America. Going for a jog is weird,
eating a salad with just vegetables is crazy, and walking to work when you can
hop on a moto is insane. These are just some of the societal differences I’ve
noticed. Obviously malnutrition vs. obesity is quite different and is a product
of the times, but the individual’s responses are similar. Long-term
consequences are rarely visualized and the way people seem to look at their
problems is almost exclusive viewed in the present. I hope Julio realizes that,
but it is also a learning process for me. I guess it is just tough seeing a
friend go through all that when the situation is very preventable.
Needless
to say reading Living Poor has had an
indelible influence on how I think about my challenges of late. I just cannot
seem to get over how much of what he wrote is somehow reflected in my own
writings and experiences. It has really made me think about the work I am doing
and the people I am doing it with. I’ll be sure to write a bit more about my
recent work in the next update, but until then I encourage anyone who wants to
read a great book that tells it like it is to pick up a copy of Living Poor A Peace Corps Chronicle by
Moritz Thomsen.
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