My New Day-To-Day

A lot of people have asked me about what kind of house I live in and what have I been doing over the past few weeks? This will be my modest attempt to catch everyone up on all the events that have occurred since my last update. Life for me is pretty much the same with a few minor changes. A week ago I planted my garden, and am currently in the process of trying to grow tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, beats, lettuce, and cucumber. My biggest problem is the chickens. Despite spending what seemed like days trying to fix up this rickety old fence that surrounds the garden using exclusively recycled wood, rusty nails, and random lengths of wire. My efforts yielded some success initially, but it wasn’t until I took the time to chase the chickens around the garden for what seemed like hours that I was able to accurately determine the weak parts of the fence. In spite of those efforts I am never truly surprised when I walk into my garden to see this one particular chicken rummaging through the area that I planted. Luckily to this point I have not noticed any significant damage to my seedbeds, so I have not had to machete any chickens…yet.

My other activities include being dirty, sunburned, and sweaty. I never in a million years thought the sentence “man I cannot wait for that bucket bath tonight” would ever come out of my mouth, but amazingly it did and I am grateful to have it. I still feel pretty stuck in terms of finding things to do on a day-to-day. Recently I have been making a lot of pizzas with Mike, the volunteer who lives in the center of town, to raise money to send some teenage kids to a series of camps sponsored by Peace Corps. We entitled the endeavor Yankee Pizza, and to date we have made and sold about 17 pizzas with the proceeds going directly to funding the transportation for the upcoming camps. My sectors, Environmental Education and Conservation, camp is intended to connect youth from all over Paraguay to discuss environmental issues facing individual communities and Paraguay as a whole. It is the first time Peace Corps has done a specifically environmentally themed camp, so I don’t know how it’s going to go but I am sure it will be interesting. Needless to say cooking pizzas in 100° heat is brutal, but it is a great money making operation.

As for my living situation I currently share a house with a family of 6 people, 1 dog, 40 chickens, a couple of cows, and close to a dozen pigs. My room is small and sweltering hot because of the tin roof and the lack of drop ceiling. My biggest and easily best purchase was a fan that I bought the first day I was here. It is pretty much on nonstop when I am in my room and has probably saved my life to this point. Keeping clean is definitely a challenge though. I have noticed that no matter what I do I always seem to have a thin layer of dirt on all my cloths and the rest of my body that never quite seems to go away even with copious amounts of scrubbing. At least in the case of my family they appear be very clean. The house is swept and mopped every other day, bucket bathing are nightly occurrences, and the dishes are done immediately after meals. The one thing I have noticed though is a general lack of teeth brushing. For as clean as my family seems to be I have not once seen any of them brush their teeth. I find that weird especially because they all have their tooth brushes lined up in rows in the medicine cabinet, and could easily do it but don’t. As a kid I remember not liking brushing my teeth, but I find it amazing that Paraguayans take so much time cleaning their houses and yards yet fail to clean their teeth on a regular basis.

The rest of my house is pretty small for what you would expect a family of 6 to be living in. I feel a bit greedy being the only member of the family who has his own room, but also pretty fortunate. Most of the house has nice tile flooring including the bathroom. The exception being the kitchen, which has brick flooring making it easier to clean up after the chickens raid the kitchen leaving a mess on the floor. There are several sections of the house that were added on after the construction of the original house. One of the walls in my room was formally on he outside of the house before the family built the extra room. I think the nicest part of the housing situation though is the amount of space in the yard throughout the day my family will move around to different spots of the house to sit and drink terere. This probably happens at three different junctures once after the morning house cleaning, once immediately after lunch, and from about 4:30 until dinner. Easily done for about 4-7 hours in a give day. I usually take time to study Spanish or Guaraní during this down time. I find that by sitting and hearing them talk in Guaraní helps me better understand the words and sounds, but it is still hot or miss with comprehending everything. Some days are better then others with regards to language, but an elderly Paraguayan woman paid me a complement concerning my improvement in the language, so I guess I am getting better little by little recently paid me a complement.

This upcoming Thursday is my site presentation at the school in my barrio. What that means is that the heads of my sector will come to O’Leary and bring me the remainder of my luggage, give a brief presentation about the Peace Corps and what my roll as a volunteer will be in the community. My job is to give a brief introduction in Guaraní about myself and what types of projects I am interested in pursuing. The hard part will be getting people in the community to come to the school at 3 pm on Monday. I printed out a series of invitations, and have been handing them out, but I guess we will wait and see about the turnout. I have met a fair amount of people, but am not sure how many of them that I know well enough get them to come. Hopefully the incentive of soda and cookies will tip the balance.

January Heat

It finally rained in O’Leary this past Thursday and Friday much to the relief of thousands of farmers who had planted soy. Paraguay is the world’s third largest producer of soy behind the United States and Argentina, so a bad soy harvest means a smaller economic growth percentage. In 2010 Paraguay’s economy grew a record 14.5%. A large reason for that immense growth was a strong soy harvest, so it will be really interesting to see if the farmers in this country continue to grow soy and finish out the growing season, or rip it out and plant corn, which is more resilient to drought. At the very least it was a quick 3-day break from the sweltering heat, so I think everyone in the area was grateful for that.

The interesting thing about rain in Paraguay is that it functions the same way as snow in the United States. If it is raining the kids don’t go to school, people don’t leave their houses, and the few cars that are on the road seem to drive more cautiously then they normally would. A rain day is a good time to sit around and do nothing, but drink mate or terere and watch the day go by. I think a large part of this cultural phenomenon is due the lack of infrastructure. With the exception of the main cities most of the roads are unpaved and made of compacted dirt or are empedrado (cobbled), so if you are driving your motorcycle around in the rain on a dirt road it is obviously more likely to get stuck or broken. The thing that I still struggle with is that back home even if it is snowing if you have an appointment or meeting somewhere 9 times out of 10 you are expected to be there on time regardless of the weather. Not here though, Paraguay for all intents and purposes comes to a stop on days when it rains especially in more rural areas. My American mentality has yet to accept this cultural reality however, and it seems to me that the days it rains are the days that I am the busiest.

            This past Friday when it was raining the hardest I have seen in a while I hopped on a bus to visit another volunteer for the day in a town called Yguazu. The interesting thing about Yguazu is that there are roughly 200 Japanese families who live there, and several distinctly Japanese features. Supposedly there was a relatively large migration of Japanese people throughout Paraguay who set up colonies with the encouragement of the Paraguayan government across the country to help develop large-scale farms. With the boom of the Japanese economy in the 1960s-1970s many of the original families left, and to this day there is still a large amount of traveling back and forward between Japan and Paraguay, but there are still a good number of Japanese people living and working in Paraguay. Yguazu for that reason has a flare all its own complete with a baseball field, a number of Japanese products in the grocery store, and even sushi. At least for that day I felt like I was somewhere else other than Paraguay.

            I am lucky that I share a site with two other really awesome volunteers who have basically given me a run down of how things work in O’Leary. I have been introduced to a number of really interesting people, and been given countless tid bits of advice about how to approach a variety of projects based on their experiences. Kristin is an Education volunteer who puts on a reading/English camp for students in her community twice a week on Monday’s and Wednesday’s that I have been helping her with. Mike who lives in the center O’Leary has done so many projects and knows so many people it is hard to keep track of everything. Last Monday the two of us went to the town dump. It is basically a wide spread concoction of plastic bags, glass bottles, and other random piles of burned garbage in a big line with an earthen barrier on one side and a dirt road on the other. It was on fire in parts because the people who live next to the dump set it ablaze to prevent the garbage from blowing onto their fields. It was clearly affecting a group of farmers close by, but it seems like a very daunting problem. The municipality doesn’t have a lot of money to fix the problem let alone the expertise to manage a landfill, and given my lack of knowledge of managing waste it was an overwhelming site for sure. Mike and I are both a bit perplexed about how we can help given a lack of funds, but I was reminded by another volunteer who spent her whole career working in landfills and with hazardous waste in the United States that America was in a similar predicament with garbage 50 years ago, so at least there is hope for the future.

            I also, thanks to Mike, Mikes family, and Kristin, got the opportunity to go swimming and fishing in the large lake called Yguazu that boarders O’Leary. Now I am sure you are thinking wait, isn’t that the name of the Japanese town you visited? In fact it is and it is also the name of the famous waterfall that lies between Argentina and Brazil. The reason for that is because Yguazu means big water in Guarani, so naturally there are many places named Yguazu because of the amount of water in Paraguay. The photos you see are picture of lake Yguazu. The water is bathtub warm and there were countless birds flying all around. It is an absolutely marvelous place, and hopefully will incentivize some of you to come visit in the future.

 As for the fishing I was able to catch three fish all smaller then 6 inches, but considering that none of the other 5 people in the boat caught anything I got a lot of props for my ability as a fisherman. Naturally fishing is pretty much unregulated and the ability to enforce conservation fishing is pretty noexistant, so I got the impression that people take as much as they can get when they go fishing. Fish is not, however, a staple of the Paraguayan diet. The first time I had fish since I have been here was sushi not exactly Paraguayan cuisine, but over the past few years there has been a growing demand for tilapia on the world market as a substitute for many varieties of whitefish commonly consumed all over the world in the form of frozen fish sticks. Tilapia, specifically the Nile Talapia, is a very resilient fish that people particularly in developing countries can produce relatively easily for both auto consumption and sale. I have yet to learn a ton about how the process works, but all you need to get started is a retaining pond dug into the ground that has a small inflow and outflow, a few fish to get started, and cheap food. The rest happens naturally and before you know it you have a supply of tilapia that is quickly and easily produced with minimal overhead. I have heard a couple of people express interest in this topic and have seen a couple of the ponds around the area, so we will see if there are opportunities to work on those projects during my time here.

            It is suppose to get hot again this week, which I am not looking forward to but, at least the rain has brought with it the opportunity for me to start a garden that I have wanted to build since I got here. Today I spent 2 hours dying in the heat hoeing, raking and weeding. After I cleared about a 10x5 foot area my hand were covered in blisters, which indicated to me a job well done. Tomorrow I’ll start to build the seed beds, and with luck Wednesday I can begin planting. I will be sure to inform the world of my progress in the upcoming week, but until then I hope everyone is enjoying the cold weather as much as I am enjoying the heat.

New Years in the Big CIty

Well now that 2011 is behind us I feel like the 2 years of my service has really begun. I spent New Years in Asunción with a couple of my buddies Jimmy and Johnny. In natural American ignorance, a theme of my weekend, we all assumed that because its New Years Eve there were going to be people everywhere, and things were going to be open until all hours of the night. We were half right at least things were open until all hours of the night, but they didn’t open until after midnight. We literally were roaming the streets of Asunción without seeing as much as a stray dog. To be honest I wasn’t totally shocked by this, but was definitely caught off guard by how quiet a city of 3 million people could be so quiet on a holiday like new years. By the time we finally reached a place where we could have a midnight toast we had literally minutes to spare, and to be perfectly honest all our watches said different things so we have no idea when it was actually the New Year. To compensate we had three different toasts. After midnight we were all astounded by the plethora of people that emerged from their various domiciles in droves of hundreds to spend the rest of the night celebrating in all kinds of different bars and clubs. I guess despite our confusion and frustration everything worked out, and it was without a doubt my strangest and one of most memorable New Years I have ever had.

Now I am sure some of you are thinking what kind of city is Asunción? To be perfectly honest I cannot equate it to any place I have ever been to. There is a lot of old architecture and very well maintained government buildings like the Presidents house, the treasury, and the ministry of defense, but there are also extremely dilapidated slums with rampant drug related issues. There are modern shopping malls as nice if not nicer then a number I have been to in the states and high end car dealerships, but every once in a while you see a horse drawn carriage with agricultural goods and people sleeping in the cities well maintained park system. The few tall buildings are spread across the city, which is sprawled out to the point where it is very obvious what is new and what is old. The Peace Corps office is located on the street Mariscal Lopez (Mcal Lopez) named after the famous Solano Lopez the president of the country during the War of the Triple Alliance where Paraguay fought against a unified force of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and came close to winning despite those odds, but I digress. Mcal Lopez is located very close to the grounds of the U.S. Embassy and the House of the President. It is a very nice area with lots of shopping, parks, trees, and restaurants. You head 20 minutes down the road the scenery turns to much taller and older buildings in the central part of the city where the majority of the hotels are. You go towards the zoo and you are next too one of the roughest barrios all of Paraguay if not South America. In many ways the disparity of the different areas of Asunción isn’t unlike other major South American cities. I think what strikes me is how quickly your surroundings change only after 5 minutes on a bus. I almost feel like the city is a giant but easy to complete jigsaw puzzle. There are a lot of pieces, but it is easy to look at and put them altogether because the pieces are so unique visually to the senses. I like Asunción because it is like a puzzle. No matter what neighborhood you go it seems totally different.

After 3 days though the noise, heat, and stress of the transportation system, which is made up of a totally privatized fleet of busses circa 1980-1989 in style that all have specific routes, but no clear numbering system or helpful map to direct you which bus you need to catch to go where. To illustrate my confusion the bus numbers that I ride most frequently are 12, 16.2, 30, 31, and 41 they all go to similar places but there is no bus numbered 2, 3,4,6,8, 9 or 16.1. I still don’t understand how it works, but I guarantee you one thing that there is a system in place, but the numbers of people who understand the rationale behind the weird number system are few and far between. Yesterday I had the joy of riding several of these obscurely number vehicles to the national post office in the hopes of getting a package sent by Mom on November 28^th. The package center, or should I say the boarded up warehouse that looks like and abandoned train station had no knowledge of my package, but offered a glimmer of hope that it would be at the correro central (Central Post Office), another office located about 10 minutes away by bus. By pure chance while my buddy was getting a package of his own did I notice on the had written ledger, not computer, that my name was directly above his, and my package that contained a cornucopia of chewing gum and socks of all shapes and colors had been found after sitting for 3 weeks in the captivity of the Paraguayan post office. The cost for liberation was a modest 1 mil (20¢ US). I was feeling relieved that I had figured out the postage system and along they way rode 3 random busses and spent time in three distinctly different neighborhoods along the way.

To this point early on my service I feel extremely gratified when I accomplish those small tasks that we take for granted in the states like getting our mail. After my weekend in Asunción I felt tired, hot, stressed, but satisfied that I was able to brave the bus system, the different cultural aspect of New Years, and the vastly unique neighborhoods to obtain my package from home. Thanks Mom and Dad the gum is a big relief.

Christmas and Beyond

This Christmas was arguably one of the more memorable Christmas celebrations I have had to date. For the first time since I arrived in O'Leary it was overcast with potential for rain, naturally it didn't, but all the same I was excited at the potential for a rain to cool everything down. Needless to say Christmas and Christmas Eve was a time to relax and spend time with the family. Iris, my host mom, had her mother and Sister come stay for a few days, so the house was full of people 8 in total. In Paraguay the actual celebration of Christmas is done at midnight on Christmas day, and the celebration takes place during Christmas Eve night. The evening was spent enjoying a few adult beverages, a big asado (BBQ) consisting of both pork, sausage, and beef along with a healthy amount of mandioca all in all a pretty standard feast. When the clock struck midnight on Christmas day everyone embraced and said "feliz Navidad" to each individual member of the family then it was time for gift giving. I thought it would be a good idea to load up on gifts for the entire family and ended up giving them all candy bars for starters followed by a deck of Spanish style playing cards to Julio, my host Dad, as incentive to teach me truco, a popular card game in Paraguay, a bunch of fireworks for Mathias (age 10), a plastic truck for the 3 year old Damian, a deck of regular playing cards for Nazareth (12), and a candle complete with lighter for Iris. In return I was given this rather form fitting set of boxers that say blackjack on them complete with a Chinese style dragon on one of the legs. I later found out that boxers are normally expensive and that it was a very generous gift, so with that being said I am thrilled by my pair of Christmas underwear without a doubt the nicest pair I have ever received for Christmas.

So that was my Christmas experience complete, good food, tons of fireworks, and good cheer all around. The days since have been a lot of the same activities, chilling in my hammock, eating a diet consisting of exclusively carbohydrates, and wondering around the community. However, after spending two weeks in site I have started to notice a number of interesting characteristics of the community, and have started meeting a number of really cool people. Since I have arrived I have been trying to ask about gardens, their maintenance, whether people have them, and what types of things grow then. The day after Christmas was the first day I realized that my family had a garden. When I asked them about it their response was more along the lines of a "duh we have a garden." After that exchange of blatantly obvious comments I inquired if it would be at all possible for me to start my own mini garden in a vacant part of their 10x30ft garden. Much to my joy the answer was yes, but conditional upon the next time it rains to make it easier to work with the soil. Naturally it has still not rained, and has not rained since I arrived 2 weeks ago, but at least I have started asking the right kinds of questions while marveling in the irony of the lack of vegetables in my diet while a garden complete with vegetables exists in the backyard of the house I live in.

I then started asking if gardens were common in the community? My response from most of the people I have talked to is no, but the people I talk too all have gardens, so I must be missing where the people who don't have gardens are wither that or I am just super lucky with whom I talk too. Something interesting that has come up as a result of my inquiry. First, why would you maintain a garden if you could just as easily run down to the supermarcado and buy vegetables? That seems like a fairly obvious realization that I didn't come up with independently, but makes perfect sense. Just because someone grows corn, mandioca, wheat, yerba mate, or other commonly used crops for auto-consumption doesn't mean they want to grow everything. It takes time and patience to garden and if your day is jammed packed with tasks like caring for animals, watching after children, hand washing laundry, and cooking where is the time to maintain a garden? Just because you are a farmer doesn't mean you grow everything. That is what it is like in a lot of cases in the United States and it is like that in Paraguay as well.

Drinking terere is a daily activity in Paraguay. People put in all kinds of medicinal herbs to help with whatever ails them. Growing a yerba mate plant, the primary component of terere, is not hard, yet it is still not a common practice for families to grow their own plants for the simple fact that it is a process to take the leaves and produce the end product. It is the same reason smokers don't grow their own tobacco who had the time to go through the whole process from start to finish? I think my whole point is just because a culture has a lot of agriculture doesn't mean that they grow everything or have time too. Not sure why that sounds so profound to me now, but it is. I think looking forward it will be interesting to see why certain people grow certain things and why they don't grow others. I'll have to wait and see as time goes by, but so will everyone who is reading this blog. Happy New Years to everyone look for another update at the start of 2012.

Beating the Christmas Heat

Well it is without a doubt the hottest holiday season I have experienced in my 23 years of existence. We are averaging about 37-41 degrees Celsius and for those of you keeping track at home that is hot and tipping upper 90s low 100s. To add fuel to the already sweltering inferno my new home has the unfortunate honor of being on a street that does not have running water when it gets too hot. I am faced with this strange dichotomy of living in a home that lacks consistent access to water something that is definitely a developmental goal for a developing nation while at the same time having the ability to hop on the family’s computer to use the Internet at my leisure. In fact the other day I helped my community contact take a photo from an album of pictures he had taken when he was younger, scan it onto their computer, and create a Facebook account. At the same time I had to go out to the well that has a small trickle of water that the family uses for water to fill a bucket in order to clean myself.

As I think about my particular predicament I marvel at the day-to-day lives of the people in the community. Everyone has various amounts of animals that include chickens, cows, pigs, dogs, horses, and sheep. At the same time everyone has cell phones and in most cases they have 2 because of the different cell phone providers there are in Paraguay. Today for example I saw wood being used as the primary fuel source to support the fires of my host families brick building business they have behind the small amount of land they use to cultivate mandioca a staple of the Paraguayan diet. I also saw my 12 year old host sister hop on a motorcycle with her 10 and 3 year old brother without helmets drive down to the corner chop to by a 2 liter bottle of coke-a-cola. It amazes me to see how there are 21^st century technology like satellite TV, cell phones, and computers coupled along side traditional farming practices of ox drawn plows, horse drawn carts, and extensive manual labor.

For me my days are spent trying to beat the heat by drinking copious amounts of terere (yerba mate served cold in a cup or hollowed out animal horn drank through a bombilla or metal straw), laying around in my hammock reading, trying to explain to people around the community what I am doing here, and trying my best to learn 2 languages at the same time. Needless to day some of those tasks are much harder then others. I live right of the main road that connects several communities to O’Leary. Since it hasn’t rained since I have been here the dust the huge trucks that drive through carrying mainly agricultural goods kick up enough dust to blind a man, but all in all life is good. I miss everyone back home especially this time of year and would love a phone call, (+595-985-682-272) email, or even a letter for my Christmas present. Until next time wishing you and yours a happy holidays and hope to hear from some of you soon.

First Day in Site

Well after what can only be called an epic weekend spent at the Zaphir Hotel in the heart of Asuncion it was finally time for me to gather my 40 odd pounds of luggage, navigate the crazy buss system of Asuncion to the main bus terminal, and head off to Juan E. O’Leary. It was crazy saying goodbye to everyone that I have spent training with mainly because we won’t all be together again until the end of April for what the Peace Corps calls reconnect.

Throughout training we have been given a wide variety of recommendations from other volunteers all over the country, the training staff, and Paraguayans about what to do the first few months in site. Naturally, there is no cookie cutter strategy for community integration especially considering no matter where we go in Paraguay we stand out simply because we look different. Essentially the goals are to accomplish what we call a needs assessment for our individual communities. In my case I am a first time volunteer in Barrio Imaculada Concepcion in Juan E. O’Leary, but not the first volunteer to by in O’Leary by any means. There are currently 2 other volunteers who work in the education and community economic development sectors in different barrios. I am the only and the environmental education and conservation volunteer to be in O’Leary in any capacity, so I am kind of stuck in this weird limbo as a volunteer technically being a first timer, but there are a lot of people in different areas of the community who have been and who are currently in contact with Peace Corps Volunteers.

From what I have gathered in my first day here and from the time I spent here in late November Peace Corps has had and currently has a strong presence in the center of O’Leary, but no so much in the peripheries particularly the schools in the outlying barrios. The boarders of the different barrios are by no means completely clear either, and I still have no idea how many families live in my barrio or what many of them do for a living, but from what I have seen so far there is a lot of agriculture and a lot of brick making.

It is probably going to be the hottest Christmas of my illustrious career as a human on this planet with temperature getting well over 100°F. I now have my self phone and consistent access to the internet, so if your interested in actually calling and talking to me that is an option in Peace Corps Paraguay 2011. I would also love to get emails and Facebook messages, and please feel free to ask me any questions. Ciao til’ next time.

Completing Training and Swearing In

Well I just went through the last step in becoming an official Peace Corps Volunteer by taking my oath for swearing into service. The ceremony was really nice and included a contingency of several very important people including the U.S. Ambassador, Peace Corps Country Director, the Governor of the Department of Central, and the mayor of Guamabare, the town where we had our training center. We took out oath of service and many of the family including Nilda were showing some tears.

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of experiences. Last time I wrote I mentioned that I was doing a visit at my future site of service Juan E. O'Leary. The town is relatively large by Paraguayan standards, and main community contact is the area director of the 7 schools in the municipality of Juan E. O'Leary. I learned a ton while I was there, but most importantly I got a good sense of the types of projects I could be doing that include a garden and library project with the local school of preschool-6th graders. Obviously that whole process will take a lot of time considering I still have a long way to go to feel confident in Spanish and Guarani, but the next few months will for sure give me plenty of time to practice and improve my language skills.

Thanksgiving was spent at the house of the U.S. Ambassador on the compound of the U.S. Embassy. It might have easily been the fanciest Thanksgiving meal I have ever participated in complete with servers in tuxedos, a beautiful series of gardens, a pool to swim in before dinner, and a little bit of the Packers vs. Lions game. Overall, life is pretty good training wrapped us nicely and I completed all necessary competency exams for security, technical training, language, and medical. I would for sure be lying if I said everything is going to by smoothly moving to site. Over the past 10 I have accumulated roughly 30lbs of training manuals and books of various sizes that have taken up a significant portion of my limited space, which is going to make my 4 hour bus ride to my new home challenging to say the least. Thankfully I can store the large quantities of winter clothing that I brought right in time for the hottest part of summer, but still I now have much more stuff then I had when I arrived.

For now my plan is to spend the weekend until Tuesday in Asuncion mentally preparing for the weekend, probably getting McDonalds, and relaxing as much as possible. I also have a new telephone number, but bare with me as I figure out how to get it to work. Check Facebook for the details on the phone. Peace until next time.