Parading, San Juan, Campo Communities, and my Birthdday

       On June 13^th I completed 25% of my service. For me, that feels like a huge milestone when I think about everything that has happened in that time. Since I last wrote a ton of things have happened, but for whoever reads this entry I would like you to keep in mind that almost everything I am about to write about has in someway, shape, or form convinced me that 2 years is hardly enough time to enact noticeable changes within my community and beyond.

            On June 12^th Paraguay celebrates Paz del Chaco commemorating the signing of the peace treaty that ended the Chaco War fought between Bolivia and Paraguay from 1932-1935 over the arid, sparsely populated region called the Chaco. The Chaco makes up roughly 67% of Paraguay’s area, but only contains about 3% of its population. Despite being outnumbered Paraguay managed to win the war that was primarily motivated because of oil speculation in the region. As it turns out, the Chaco contains no oil at all and the war, at least from a contemporary perspective, seems to have been fought for nothing other than pride. Despite the history of the war and the reasons that it started, it is still a national holiday that people celebrate, at least in O’Leary, by closing all government offices and holding a giant parade that students, teachers, government employees, and any other body that wants to participate can march in. I was pretty excited to see what the fuss about. Having marched in my share of parades campaigning for local politicians in Cincinnati I was eager to compare my experiences.

            Now parades in America, particularly Memorial Day and the 4^th of July, tend to have big floats, cars, and tons of candy. It comes off as something that is supposed to be fun for both the marchers and the people watching. I was trying to explain what parades are like in the states to a couple of high school kids, Denis and Roberto, over dinner one night. I asked them what they did in the parade? Roberto was much more eager than Denis in explaining that each practices the proper marching steps during the weeks proceeding, and lines up according to their title in the school or institution carrying wither a flag or a sign indicating the name of the group that follows. His explanation of how things were going to happen the next day, to me, seemed very rigid, highly organized, and definitely missing candy. I then asked if it was fun? A simple question that I felt warranted a honest response. Roberto held up his had twisting it back and forward and said “Sí más o menos” (Yes, more or less). Denis on the other hand had a look of mild displeasure after he heard Roberto’s response and simply replied “no.” That had me laughing pretty hard, so I was really excited to see what it was all about the next morning when I went to the parade. When I arrived, I ran into Julio who had a look that can only be described as anguish on his face. I asked him if he liked the parades, and the look I got from him seemed to say “would you like to do this if you had to do it twice a year every year for your entire professional career?” When I thought it like that I saw his point rather clearly. The parade lasted for about an hour, and unsurprisingly started an hour late. Precision was key and the marchers were sharply dressed wearing their finest outfits, as the pictures will hopefully indicate. The thing that made me think that the parade was more hoopla than anything else was when the majority of people would leave after their son or daughter passed by. That indicated to me not too many people cared about the meaning of the parade and just wanted to get it over and done with. I had a great time, and as luck would have it wasn’t the only unique tradition that I would see in the month of June.

Kambás

           On the 22^nd, at my school, the school put on the annual San Juan Festival. It took me most of the day and a good portion of the evening to understand the significance of the festival, so I think the most effective way to tell this story will be to write what I saw then describe the meanings of it all afterwards. I walked over to the school around 8:30. Again, I had no idea what to expect. I noticed that the teachers and some parents were cooking food, a giant 10 meter tall log covered in pig fat, a scarecrow filled with fireworks, a suspended hoop wrapped in oil soaked cloths, and a cow skull attached to a rickety wooden frame with oil soaked cloth horns. Confusion was setting in pretty quickly. As the morning progressed I noticed that a large portion of the 5^th-6^th graders were dressed in frayed clothing with horrifying masks and empty bottles of caña. I learned that they were the Kambás, whose jobs, from what I could deduce, were to run around scaring the all the smaller kids. Around 10, the festivities, or should I say pyrotechnics, started. The first activity was the ring of fire, where the aforementioned oil soaked suspended ring was lit on fire, with a little added help from gasoline, and the Kambás took turns diving through the ring. There was a sack race right before the bull candle where 2 of the Kambás grabbed hold of the wooden frame as its horns were lit on fire and chased everyone around the school. Then someone lit a cloth ball on fire that the kids kicked around until it was extinguished. They broke a ceramic vase that was filled with candy and mandioca flower, which is supposed to celebrate a peasant wedding. Following that they burned the effigy by dousing it in gasoline. It went up in seconds, and thankfully didn’t too much damage to the electrical connection given that it was hanging right next to the electrical cables that provide power to the school.

Judas

Greased Poll

            The icing on the cake was the poll climb where the kids try to shimmy up a 10-meter poll that is insufficiently stuck in the ground to try to claim the prizes of candy, chips, and soda. Sadly, the kids were unable to climb the poll despite climbing on top of one another for the better part of an hour. Instead, the shook the poll down and swarmed after the candy. While all this was going on the parents were making food too sell and watching the festivities. I have to say that I have never seen anything quite like it, and kept thinking to myself the whole time what a crazy tradition this is. To make things crazier, nobody seemed to know exactly where the traditions started or the exact reason for the celebration. I was able to deduce a few things about the celebration by going online and asking a few of the teachers at the school, but I am still quite in the dark as to how it evolved into what I witnessed the other day. Through those inquires I figured out that the celebration has something to do with St. John’s Day and the summer solstice, but because Paraguay is in the southern hemisphere that doesn’t quite make sense. I did figure out that the burning of the effigy is supposed to be Judas, but that was the only thing I could get consensus on from Paraguayans. In the evening I went to another San Juan Festival at the big elementary school in town. It was essentially the same thing except with a lot more people and a lot of booze. Instead of having candy on top of the poll they had caña and money. People were pretty drunk, especially the Kambás, so it had a very different feel than the one at my school. If your interested in reading more there is a good Wikipedia article in Spanish, but can be translated into English if you use Google Chrome as your web browser, that explains how the Guarani customs and culture here has made the San Juan festival in Paraguay: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiesta_de_San_Juan#Paraguay.

Land Bridge

            Changing subjects completely, I recently had the chance to go out and visit the site of my friend Jimmy Henderson. Jimmy sector is crop extension and he lives in a very small rural community, campo in Spanish, called Zapallo (Squash). Unlike Jimmy, I live in sort of a semi-campo site. It’s not a city, but I have easy access to supermarkets and most enmities. Jimmy lives about 3 KM of the main highway that forces anyone visiting him to cross a land bridge, which depending on the amount of rain, is submerged for about a 150 meter distance. I have visited Jimmy twice since I moved to O’Leary. The first time I had to walk about 5 meters across a submerged log with all my stuff on my back to get to the end of the dock. That was during a huge drought, so the bridge was mostly above the surface. However, with the winter came the rains, and despite the local municipality’s best efforts to make a more stable bridge, Mother Nature had different plains. Always an exciting trip while I was walking there I had a couple of kids ask me how to say Mickey Mouse in English. That question got me thinking about the differences between Zapallo and my barrio in O’Leary. Both sites speak a lot of Guaraní, and both are close to the highway, but despite how close they are to each other geographically, only about a 10-minute bus ride and an hour walk, the level of development and the town identity are utterly different.

            The further off the highway one goes the more Guaraní you are likely to hear. Where I live people speak a good mix of both, so I can get by on either, but in Jimmy’s site it is Guaraní or bust. People really struggle with Spanish, and it was quite challenging to talk to people there during my visit. The reason I went in the first place was to help him with an art camp at a very small school that sits on the banks of a gorgeous lake. I was in charge of balloon art and mask making. It was shockingly difficult for me to explain in words what I wanted the kids to do, so I just showed them. Other activities included macaroni art, bench panting, and leaf tracing. It turned out to be a great day, but it is very evident that the location of the school and the community limits its accessibility to resources. They get supplies and learning materials months after they are supposed to and sometimes not at all. People grow their food, build whatever they need to build, and are pretty self-reliant. The richest guy in town seems to be the police officer because he has the nicest house and is the only one who drives a car instead of an oxcart. Despite it’s poverty, Zapallo is easily the prettiest place I have been in Paraguay. There are rolling hills that flow into a stunningly expansive lake. There are fruit trees all along the main paths of the town, and fields that seemingly go on forever. I could sit here and knit pick about the problems of the town, but I think it is important to recognize that while there are many places like Zapallo throughout Paraguay that have many challenges with isolation, lack of resources, and general poverty, it is those places that most effectively illustrate the identity of the Paraguayan landscape. It amazes me how dissimilar it is from my home in O’Leary despite the proximity. Then I think that just 20 years ago where I live now was probably a lot like Zapallo and that the only difference was the influx of commerce associated with the international highway that flows through O’Leary. If that road had somehow gone through Zapallo, wouldn’t I have been writing the same thing just with the towns reversed? I think this is the first time in my life that I have been able to see how economic development impacts communities in the developing world first hand, and the rate in which it happens is quite amazing.

            To change subjects completely again, on June 19^th I celebrated my 24th birthday, the first one I have celebrated in Paraguay. I had the pleasure of having the celebration during my 6^th month training secession that Peace Corps calls Project Design Management (PDM). I have to be honest when I say that I was not looking forward to celebrating my actual birthday during PDM. I really struggled trying to find someone who wanted to go, and when I finally did I was already mentally worn out before we even left. Essentially, PDM is a way for volunteers to demonstrate to a community contact the steps in making an idea into a reality. I was able to take my good friend Claudio, who is a 17-year-old high school student who is going to graduate in November. Aside from being one of the few kids his age in my barrio, he is highly motivated and very hard working. Together the 2 of us went to a Peace Corps sponsored library workshop, and in the month since have been planning to put a small community library at the school that I work at. Although we had already done our own project design for the library, it was really nice to have the chance to show Claudio the step by step process of recognizing an opportunity, identifying the needs, ways to involve the community, the implementation, and the evaluation that goes into many of the projects that volunteers do. That in and of itself was a rewarding enough present for a birthday, but it is a bit boring and if you know me at all you’ll know that I wasn’t about to be content with a good feeling for my birthday.

            Over the previous few weeks to make things a bit more fun for my birthday I had encouraged all my friends who wanted to buy me something to make sure that every gift given was bought on a bus. That may seem like a ridiculous request except for the fact that Paraguayan busses are regular convenience stores with everything from fresh fruit to DVD’s on sale. While riding busses I have seen cooking oil, socks, fingernail clippers, CD’s, toys, books, cookies, glass bottle soda, sandwiches, porno, and scolding hot cocido all sold. There are many theories as to why so many items are sold on busses, but the answer that I seem to find the most believable is that people selling things on buses can buy goods wholesale avoiding taxation to then resell on the busses for double the wholesale price, but cheaper than a supermarket that has to pay tax on all goods. It makes the busses a regular black-market for daily household needs. True to my request all the gifts I got were purchased on a bus and included: a child’s toy helicopter that has wheels and a handle attached to a plastic stick that you push along the ground its tongue to stick out, a plastic dog whose head bobs up and down when you move it or touch it’s head, a half eaten pastry, a small bottle of caña, and a pack of cookies. All the gifts were wonderful in their own special way and I couldn’t have been happier when everyone at the workshop sang Happy Birthday first in Guaraní, I didn’t understand a word, and then in English. It was a great birthday and has been a crazy couple of weeks. Upcoming I have a presentation about the library to give in front of the parents commission at my school, a potential biodigester project that would create sustainable fuel for a local farmer, and a 4^th of July celebration in June, so look for another update soon.

Living Poor

            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 21^st 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 5^th 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 5^th and 6^th 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.