Che areko heta vistakuera iporaiterei che sitiope

(I have many very pretty views in my site)

Bathroom Construction

Text to follow...

Tesho

"Do you want some chicle?"

This is the question Cristobal always asks me right before he pops a pinch of chewing tobacco into his mouth, then shakes and laugh when I tell him "Another day."

He understands very little Spanish, so I've been forced to learn Guarani on the fly. But his good nature, humor, and kindness translate even when I haven't the slightest idea what he's saying.






He stands a few inches under six feet. His skin is weathered like rough tree bark, and splotchy from a lifetime of exposure to the vicious Paraguayan sun. He likes to walk around bare chested, and his belly proceeds him by several inches, stretched tight and wobbling like a human pendulum.

I am writing this piece in late August, so it is the beginning of a new planting cycle. After a month of relative inactivity, "Tesho," rises at 4am, sometimes even as early as 3:30. He gulps down a liter or two of mate infused with chamomile, and then walks a kilometer to his chacra.

On a recent trip there, he climbed the freshly charred hill to plant mandioca and maiz. There are a myriad of chores: Some days he hacks away at the saplings that have taken root, other days he harnesses his two oxen to plow the field. On still other days, he spends hours hoeing the ground into a crumbly dust instead of the iron-like tierra common to Paraguay.

Though I have lived with five families so far, TeSho's is the first one that relies almost exclusively on farming for its subsistence. (Teofilo is a bricklayer, Antonio is a teacher, others have been cowboys or store keepers.)

Like many here, Tesho's family is complicated. He lives with Na Dora, a brazen, feisty, and defiant grandmother with a mouth that would put even the most macho Paraguayan man to shame. TeSho, in his mid 50s, had 4 daughters with Na Dora (who had four or five children during her first marriage.) Her first husband has since died.

Two of Na Dora's grandchildren live with her - Andres, 17, and Rodrigo, 15. Andres rises before dawn to work for other nearby farmers, while Rodrigo spends his time with his head glued to both of his cell phones (One for each of the two major phone carriers) as he texts away.

At midday, (for Tesho, already 8 hours old), he returns to the house - built room by room over the years as money and resources allowed - painted a brilliant white that seems to amplify the glare of the noon sun. After lunch, he walks back to the chacra to put another four hours of work in, or he tends to chores around the house.

His day ends around 8pm with a cup of sweetened milk or mate and a piece of bread. He's got to sleep, after all - he'll be up in just a few hours.

random thoughts

The Food Post.

I've touched on food in my posts here in the past, but I my experiences of the past few days has made me decide to devote an entire post to the issue right now.

It's easy to find just about any food in the States. Flavors range depending on location, culture, and national origin. Case in point, every major city has a Chinatown, a couple of great Indian restaurants, excellent Italian, and a bunch of Irish Pubs.

In Asuncion you could PROBABLY track down most of those, if you tried hard enough. But out in the campo, food options start to get pretty homogeneous. A Paraguayan lunch - the main meal - generally consists of peeled and boiled mandio (cassava or manioc state-side), then a guiso (rice or noodles with pulverized vegetables and meat or beans), and a salad (lettuce and tomato bits with lemon and salt), IF the owner of the house has a vegetable garden.

Galletas - little loafs of bread - or coquitos - sort of like bland crackers - are usually in abundance, and you drink them with a milk drink of some kind in the mornings.

There's also mbeju, a sort of fried pancake made of almidon (flour made from mandio), cornmeal, and cheese. It's really yummy.

And on the list of food I DON'T like, there's tortilla (not like mexican tortillas, these are deepfried slabs of flour and cheese), mondongo (cow-stomach soup), and enrollado (diced and sliced pig head mixed with vegetables rolled up and fried in pig skin.

For other bread options, there are sopa - sort of a cheesy cornbread - and chipa (little bread loaves made with almidon, truly yummy).

Empanadas abound, but that's a whole separate entry. In general, one can expect to eat tortilla, galleta, and guiso on a daily basis. (Would you like some starch with your starch and oil? Yes please!)

Luckily for me, almost all of the houses I've stayed at have had great cooks. Sometimes we'll eat the same food over a few days, but it's almost always been tasty.

Also interesting about Paraguay are its food myths. I think I've touched on this before, but Paraguayans have very strict ideas about what combinations of food one can eat. For example, you can't mix spicy and sweet foods, spicy food makes you horny, eating mango or watermelon with anything will give you extreme diarrhea or potentially kill you, etc.)

On the other hand, I'll sometimes get asked "What's the most common American food?"

And I don't really have an answer. In the states, I'll explain, some people eat meat, some don't, a lot of people eat too much, we have two big meals instead of one, and in my family at least, we eat a lot of vegetables.)

Personally, I have decided that Jiffy or Skippy peanut butter and dark bars of solid chocolate are quintessentially American foods.

When I lived at home with my parents, my dad often (after much armtwisting by this sugarfiend) brought home chocolate, but usually just basic bars of dark chocolate. Actually, often it was Dark Milky Way Bars, but when I came to Paraguay, it was those simple, straight forward bars of dark chocolate that I missed most.

When I visited a volunteer during training, I discovered the other food that I came to crave - creamy processed peanut butter. (Who knew??)

You can put it on pancakes, in oat meal, you can eat it by the spoon full, mixed with nuts and raisins, even in hot milk for a little protein blast. And its filling, and (sort of) nutritious.

Here in the supermarkets in Paraguay, one can find mountains and mountains of intriciate, layered cookies. There are drink mixes, M&Ms, rich yogurts, and it's even possible to find solid bars of chocolate. (Though not the really dark kind.) And there's one store I've found that sells peanut butter, though they add a lot of sugar.

So there it is, people. Our new national foods - dark chocolate and mashed-up peanuts.

What have I been up to...?

When I first joined Peace Corps, every little thing was new, so there often felt like there was a lot with which I could update my blog. However, as my service progressed, particularly towards the end of my fourth month in training until now, I was making the same motions over and over, none of which seemed particularly newsworthy. Still, after receiving an irate email from a precocious certain someone demanding to know if I had died, it occurs to me that I should perhaps provide you all with an update.

I've just completed my 6th month in Paraguay. In my first three months, as most of you already know, I stayed in Santo Domingo, where I received my training. Then, three months ago, I moved to my site, which is called Potrero Pucu. (Again, most of you know all this, but its been a while.) I began quickly, teaching compost workshops, building veggie gardens with a few of my families here, starting to get to know my community, and also starting my community-wide health census.

About seven weeks in, I moved to a neighboring community called Potrero Naranjaity, where I lived until just recently. I was staying in a very nice house with three rooms, a modern bathroom, room to raise pigs, horses, and also grow a vegetable garden. There were also loads of fruit trees. P Naranjaity was about a kilometer and a half from the center of Portero Pucu - not all that far, but it increasingly felt like a different world. The houses, like the one where I was staying, were almost all better equipped than Potrero Pucu's houses, and several families owned cars or had running water.

I decamped from there and moved in with another family back in Potrero Pucu. It doesn't have running water, and it's a much poorer family. On the other hand, the view outside my window is incredible. Also, perhaps more importantly, this family doesn't really speak Spanish, so in the past week I have learned more Guarani than I have in all my previous training in Paraguay.

Besides whipping along with my Guarani training, I and other members of my G had our Reconnect - a week of meetings and workshops at the three month mark to kick-start this next phase of our service. I've trucked through about 37 of my 50 censuses, begun the world map at our local school, and a few days ago I hauled about 2000lbs of sand to the school to help them renovate their bathrooms.

I also went pig-hunting (My family had a sow run free and give birth in the wild), and have been little by little recovering from that ankle sprain. Looking ahead, I'll be finishing up my census, finishing the world map, and starting between one and five groups or commissions. the goal (as I see it from the information I've gathered in my census) is that we need to start a Fogon Commission, a Running Water Commission, and a 2-4 woman's groups. (Woman's groups can work on anything from cooking classes to production depending on what they want to focus on.)

It continues to be an incredibly rewarding experience, though certainly trying and confusing.
There's a lot more to say on this, but another volunteer in my G summed it up better than I could.

"I arrived in site with high hopes determined to not get bored or depressed and determined to at least start every project that was needed. Now I’m not writing this to say that I’m bored and depressed and not getting anything done… but sometimes I feel that way. I moved into this community knowing my two contacts and their families and also knowing that part of my job is to meet everyone here and explain who I am and why I’m here and figure out what it is they really need. My idea of what work is has changed a lot and some days if I spend a good few hours visiting with people, I consider that work, even if most of the time I sit in silence listening to other people talk (which is usually the case)... I usually get up between 6 and 7, depending on how long I feel like sleeping in and typically spend the morning drinking mate (hot terere), helping out with preparing breakfast and lunch and cleaning up a little bit, do some laundry, and sometimes I do a little reading...

The thing about my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it usually sounds more exciting on paper than it really is and people telling you that you will have hard days or be bored is a lot different than the actual experience. ... " ---> You can see more on her blog ----> http://www.alisonpatt.blogspot.com/

My experience as a volunteer is a bit different than Ali's (guys deal with a whole different mindset here), but in general, it's been three months of lowering expectations, integrating, and just getting used to things.

More to come shortly...

oye...

Updates forthcoming (I promise!):
Some photos of houses around here.
Another couple of interviews with people from Potrero.
What I've been doing the last couple of months.