...and then?

For those of you who don't know, I fly to the states Sunday morning. On Tuesday, I fly to Nepal - a friend from university is getting married. I'll spend two months there and in India. If any you know people in those places, let me know...

- Sinjin.

Goodbye, Potrero Pucu

Last night was my despedida – my goodbye party.

Honestly, I wasn’t really feeling it. I had to spend a lot of money on meat for the barbecue and invite everybody. There were the silly logistics of the thing – I didn’t know who would come, or if the stuff would be enough for everyone.

Nevertheless, Antonio pushed me to do one, and after two years here, why not go out with a blaze of glory (or infamy?)

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So I went around inviting my people – not everybody I would have liked, but as many as I thought I could adequately provide for. I gave Antonio enough cash to buy meat for at least 60 people. I invited teachers, neighbors, even some students.

Then, yesterday, it rained for five hours in the morning. One of those long, soaking rains that turns everything to muck. (And fills up wells, and for which I have been waiting for four months!) And Antonio was stuck in Asuncion.

Hello mayhem. All I could think of were unattended meetings, and two years of equivocations and unfulfilled expectations.

I was so wrapped up with worry that I forgot that things here work out. Not how I would do them, but they work out.

We decided to have the party despite the rain. At 6pm, I pulled on my dress shoes and a nice t-shirt and jeans, and wandered down to the school, where Antonio had arrived a few moments before with my supplies. He, Rubio, and Taito were already hustling about, starting the fires in the grills, prepping meat, and pulling out the tables.

It was one more frenzied cook-fest. While we worked, people started trickling in – Juan Lucas, Peña (that guy I walked 40kms to Itape with last year), my host sister Claudia and her kids. Ina came, and Felix, and Teofilo, and Javier too. A lot of names to my readers, but to me, my community. two PCVs got here too, in spite of the rain.

So finally, we sat down and ate. Not only had people come, but they’d brought a mountain of food. Antonio alone looked like he’d kicked in half as much food as I had bought. Here I had been wondering if there would be enough meat to cover everyone. I probably could have invited 20-30 more people.

There were the little toasts and speeches of course, all of which were incredibly gratifying. But it was what Antonio said that got to me the most. (He said a lot of things, but this is what was most important.) Basically, “Santo, we know that sometimes you felt like you couldn’t do everything you wanted to do. But we really valued your work. And if you sometimes tripped, it was because you were clearing the trail for the volunteers that follow.”

There was more, about sharing and exchanging cultures, and embarrassing and funny stories about my mishaps integrating into the community. But that was one of those moments – “They got it!! They really cared!” 

Paraguayan Asado never tasted so good. And I definitely had it with mandioca.

A flash at the final hour

My home for the last two years has been a brick box 4.5m wide and 5 meters long. The walls are white, but stained, the roof thatch, and the floor, cement. There is a dresser, a bed, a table, a couple of chairs, and a bookshelf.

My clothes are scattered in that beat-up dresser, and there is a backpack and duffel bag on the floor, which within a few hours will be full with all the detritus of my life worth taking back to the states.

I suspect the silliness whirling through my head is the same stuff most PCVs experience. The speed with which these last few days are passing by is unreal.

I’m sad and nostalgic, of course. It’s almost impossible to believe that I won’t wake up to the loud bellows of cattle and harassed squawking of the chickens that have pushed me to the brink of sanity – over and over again – these past two years. It just seems silly that I won’t walk out of this little cement square and find Tesho and his pot belly waiting to have terere, or Ña Dora cooking.

I have spent these last few months filled with frustration and anger at my community, at the procrastination and inability of my friends here to get stuff done. I’ve been angered by what I’ve seen as my personal lack of effectiveness, and by the indifference of people even as I’ve gone to bat for them.

But then, in the last few weeks, people started talking about me leaving and about the new volunteer coming. Little things started coming together, and I realized that how much I would miss the kilometers-long walk from Caballero to my site. I realized how much I would miss just sitting beside some of these people and sharing a laugh over some absurdly stupid joke, or having my 20^th conversation that day about the weather.

And then a few days ago, I walked to Caballero and built a fogon with Alejandra, the volunteer who lives closest to me. While we were walking to the house where we would be working, she asked, “If you could have any other person’s site in your G (the group of 49 people I swore in with,) where would it be, and why?”

That’s when it really hit me. She lives in a beautiful community on a wide plain set below a verdant ridge running westwards. But it doesn’t come close to Potrero. Despite all of the frustration, the difficulty, the insecurity – there’s nowhere else I would have rather spent my two years.

Sapucai and the bones of the trains

Sapucai (take your pick on the spelling) - the Scream

The road to Potrero Pucu from Paraguari cuts between two long lines of hills. Ten kilometers before my pueblo of Caballero is the town of Sapucai, which has flourished in the last two years ever since the road that passes it by was asphalted over. The road runs east-west, and in summer the droning whine of cicadas mix with the bone-rattling clatter of 18-wheelers roaring by.

It could be any other Paraguayan campo town but for the workshop and the pint-sized train locomotives scattered about, rusting into decrepitude, a story forgotten and a legacy ignored. But things were not always this way. As with Paraguay’s interaction with the Jesuits, there was a moment of optimism, of a different possibility than the corruption and misguidance which crippled this country for so many years.

A little history though: Paraguay’s first (and maybe most bizarre) dictator, Dr. Francia, took office in 1811. He banned higher education and instituted mandatory interracial marriage. Most importantly, he sealed the country, banning immigration and emigration. These moves forced the mestizo-ization of Paraguay’s population, insuring Francia’s supremacy, but paradoxically forced the country to develop its domestic economy. By the end of Francia’s reign, Paraguay was one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America.

It was at this point that the hombres Lopez (Carlos, and then his son Francisco,) took over and set to modernizing the country. In 1856, they enlisted the help of William Whytehead, an English engineer. Whytehead built the San Roque station in Asuncion, and together they formed South America’s first railway company, “The Paraguay Central Railway.” 

The story goes that Paraguay had the first train, and for a time was the most modern country in South America. Since I started writing this story, I learned that was an exaggeration. 

(The hombres Lopez also brought the country a modern navy, and South America’s first foundry.) Within six years, Paraguay’s train system had laid 45 miles of track in the steamy, subtropical jungle. The first train ran in 1861, a teacup sized screecher named Sapucai, or in Guarani, “The Scream,” for its piercing whistle. It still sits in Asuncion’s central station today.

One of the trains sitting outside the workshop

As the decades passed, the rail-lines snaked south. In 1864, it reached Ypacarai, Cerro Leon, and Paraguari, thirty years later it terminated in Yegros, to the south. Sapucai, completed in 1894, sat a hundred kilometers to the south east. 

Today, the hustle and bustle of the yards is gone. Old locomotives sit forlorn amid overgrown weeds, while cows meander about and cars zip by on the newly paved highway. 

The first day that I visit, it is hot and clear, and the grass glows bright green.

One of my first views of the yards is the old turning table. Like the locomotives, it is decomposing away. The wooden ties between the rails on top are weathered and cracked with age. In the basin below, water puddles with mud and a few stubborn tufts of grass.

Decrepit as it looks, the machinery still works. A friend who has come along grasps a smooth lever arching off one end of the massive contraption, and throws his weight behind it. There is a pause, and then the wheels catch and the massive structure rotates, with nary a sound.

A sign in the middle of the turning tracks comes into view: Ransomes and Rapier, Makers, Ipswich, England.” Most of Paraguay’s rail machinery (and at first, a lot of its human talent) came from England. Sapucai housed them in a gated community of flats called “Villa Inglesa,” a few hundred yards from the work sheds.

Silent inside, but perfectly preserved

The townspeople of this small Paraguayan pueblo have chopped up tracks to serve as fence posts. The chassis of one train sits on long since grass-covered tracks, rusted almost beyond recognition. 

A few yards past, an old railroad crane also rusts into scrap. A sign on one side of the machine says, “Clutches to be out of gear before running crane in Train.” Its boiler has also turned rust brown, and the crane’s main shaft emerges from the thing like a stork’s beak.

Behind the train yards I find my first train, Encarnacion 151. It is an attractive little piece of equipment, painted black, with the Paraguayan flag, a wood hopper attached, looking for all the world like it rolled out of 1875. But in Paraguay, wood-powered engines were used until the lines shut down in 2000.

This is just the exterior of the work sheds. After paying the equivalent of a dollar US, I walk into the old repair sheds, which have been converted into a museum. The site has been cleaned and reroofed, allowing welcome sunlight to stream into the workshops, but other than that, the place has sat virtually unchanged for the last 150 years.

David Martinez Zayas leads me around the sheds. When he isn’t teaching math at the Sapucai’s high school, he sometimes leads tours at the museum.

Some old tools

The train station has been renovated for about a year, David told me. “Everything was black and dark,” David said. “We had no support from the local township, even less from the department capital.”

Now, after receiving funding from a local metallurgical company, it looks less like a museum than a perfectly preserved workstation.

“It’s amazing you can just go see all this rusty machinery that looks like you could just go and use it,” said one of my friends who came along to check the place out.

The rails came to Sapucai for its natural resources, David said.

“The technicians chose Sapucai for its wood and water, which wouldn’t dry up,” David told me. (The workshops draw water from a natural spring that sits on top of some of the nearby hills that ring the town. The gravity fed well was Paraguay’s first running water system.)

At first, Paraguay relied on outside help to run its trains. Then, it decided to run the show in house.

 “If something was broke, they [the engineers] would have to send it to England. Finally, they said, ‘No. we can’t depend on England, we have to be able to repair things here.’”

The extent of the railway, from Asuncion south, and east towards Iguazu Falls

An old list of fares

Many of the people who used to work at the junction still live nearby. While I was in Sapucai, I visited a few. The first former worker of the ferrocarril that I talk to is Antonio Bacilides Belarga Lopez Gimenez, a former carpenter. I arrive at his house on an early Sunday morning. He comes to meet me from his chacra, where he was working. He is wearing macintosh rain boots, and billowing brown pants that would better fit him if he gained 40 pounds. But he has an easy smile. His shirt is plaid, and a straw hat crawls down over his ears.

Lopez, 73, started working for the railroad in 1974, and continued there for 23 years.

He is slow to talk about the train, and we are at cross purposes, talking in Guarani and Spanish while I try to convert it all to English. But there are small snatches of pride in the conversation that point to what it must have been like, an institution of regularity and semi-modernity in a country that, at the time, was anything but.

“The workshop was the biggest in Paraguay. It was the lung of the railway,” he said. “Here, we made 

everything and sent it to the other stations [in Asuncion and San Roque.]”

“There wasn’t other [reliable] work,” he said. “And there, they paid monthly.”

Now, the asphalt road links the town to the capital. But until just two years ago, the only ways to reach the town were through the train, or a 25km dirt track from the town of Paraguarí.

“When it rained, buses wouldn’t come,” he said. “But the train never failed.”

There was the everyday rhythm of the place. A huge clock hung at the train yards. Every morning, it let out a blast an hour before work started. The workers shifting in their beds, drinking down maté and cocido. A second blast, half an hour before work began, and then they are hustling out of their houses to get to the yards, the clock whistling twice more as the beginning of the work day approached.

Those were the things that mattered, the memories that remain, he said. I asked him what he liked best, and he without even thinking, he said, “My favorite thing was eating breakfast with my brother and my friends in the mornings.”

At 11:25, the clock would whistle again, and they would have five minutes to lay down their tools and wash their hands before lunch. Then, an hour break, followed by four more hours of work.

The trains pulled out of Sapucai at 6 every morning for Asuncion and at 3pm for Encarnacion. When he talks about it, Lopez gets downright wistful.

“It was like a big party. People went to sell things, they went for curiosity.”

And then the party ended. At the end of the 90’s, the rail service began getting cut back. Mario Gonzalez also worked at the junction. The trains hadn’t had any substantive modernization in the 140 years it ran – it still was using wood powered trains and steam powered workshops. The rail infrastructure was pretty much the same as had been used in the past, and began to wear out. When a gas powered train carrying 60 wagons came through from Argentina, it went straight off the rails, he said.

“They couldn’t handle the weight or the velocity of the train,” Gonzalez said.

There was talk of restoring and rejuvenating the line, he said. The king of Spain visited, and pledged millions for the project, but it never materialized. Japan was also interested, allegedly. “But they didn’t want to give money because of the corruption [here],” he said.

“Political interest is what damned it,” he said.

As in the states now, the train transported freight at significantly cheaper prices than the truckers. “It was only half as expensive as trucks!” Gonzalez said. The massive (relatively) effort put in to create a transnational train system went to waste, and now rails, stations, and locomotives around the country lie derelict, disappear under the weeds. And so a national treasure sank into oblivion. 

It's not a bad metaphor for the country as a whole, this beautiful place which has until recently suffered through so many mishaps.

A former Volunteer just posted this on Salon

This is a pretty gripping account of one PCV's trials in Paraguay when a relationship went south. You might find it interesting

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/03/my_peace_corps_nightmare/

So, a quick note on my follow-up

In a little over a week, I will leave Potrero Pucu for good. I'll be heading stateside for a day, before flying to Nepal and India for two months. (With an option for more!)

More important than that, however, is that I have a follow up. Her name is Amy, and you can see the hand off below. (You can tell she's new because her skin doesn't look like peachy, sun baked leather, and because she still radiates enthusiasm and naivete!)

I'm extremely pleased with my bosses for putting her here. She's 26, and the daughter of missionaries. She lived in Mexico from age 4-18, so she speaks perfect Spanish and will have a much easier time communicating right off the bat, and she can start getting the Guarani going immediately. She's excited to follow up on fogons and working in the schools in my zone, which is also great news.

Like all guapo volunteers, Amy has a blog, and she's been posting about her experience going through training, and getting ready to swear in as a Volunteer (which will happen on April 20th). She'll arrive at Potrero Pucu on April 24th, and be dividing her time between PP and Pirayuvu, a community of 35 houses about three kilometers north of mine.

If you want to keep following the news and happenings in Potrero Pucu, check out her blog at http://aheimberger.blogspot.com/.

CONGRATS, AMY!

So you were in the Peace Corps... What did you do?

At the end of Service, Peace Corps Volunteers have to write a DOS - a description of service. It's the only official document that we take with us saying what we did. I have, for your enjoyment, copied and pasted mine below. It's in legalese, so beware...

Description of Peace Corps Service

St. John Barned-Smith

Republic of Paraguay 2010-2012

After a competitive application process stressing technical skills, motivation, adaptability, and cross-cultural understanding, Peace Corps invited Mr. St. John Barned-Smith to serve as a Rural Health and Sanitation Extension Volunteer in the South American nation of Paraguay.

Pre-service training

Mr. Barned-Smith began an intensive 11-week Pre-Service Training on February 10th, 2010, in Guarambaré, a small agricultural town located 45-minutes south of the capital, Asunción. The training program consisted of preparation in language and technical skills, common area studies, health, and safety and security.

Training program included:

• 157 hours of formal Language training of spoken and written Spanish and Guaraní. 
• 98 hours of area studies (the history, economics, and cultural norms of Paraguay as well as personal adjustment, safety and security, and health training).
• 182  hours of technical training including: dental health education, parasite prevention and education, nutrition education and cookstove promotion, HIV/AIDS awareness, reproductive health, latrine construction and garbage pit promotion, protection of water sources, health census design, community mapping, community study techniques, and promotion of health commissions/groups
• In addition, as part of the language and cross-cultural component of the training program,   lived with a Paraguayan family for 11 weeks.

Description of Primary Projects/Activities

On April 30th, 2010, Mr. Barned-Smith completed training and was sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He was assigned to Potrero Pucú, a community of ab0ut 40 houses located in the department of Paraguarí, roughly 100 km southeast of Asunción.

A first-time Volunteer, Mr. Barned-Smith served as an ambassador to Potrero Pucú and the area around it. He was the first American to work with the community as a Peace Corps Volunteer in approximately 30 years. In addition to his health and sanitation work, he spent a significant portion of his service teaching his community about the role of Peace Corps and about the United States, as well as sharing Paraguayan culture with Americans. This included making inroads with community leaders and individual families, and also helping expose the site to American culture and prepare it for work with future Peace Corps Volunteers.

After his arrival at site, Mr. Barned-Smith conducted a community-wide health census of Potrero Pucú. The census, which he later shared with the community’s neighbors’ commission, demonstrated that the majority of the adult inhabitants of Potrero Pucú suffered from high blood pressure and similar conditions caused by factors like lack of exercise and poor nutrition and cooking practices. Throughout his service, he worked to address these problems through cooking classes, exercise camps, and the promotion of cookstoves, which made for safer and healthier cooking environments for the community’s women – many of whom cooked on the floor in smoke-filled kitchens.

Mr. Barned-Smith also focused on basic health education with the community’s youth at Potrero Pucú’s grade school and high school, and a grade school in the neighboring village of Pirayuvu. He taught students from kindergarten to 11^th grade about a variety of health topics, including dental health, parasite prevention, hygiene, nutrition, and self-esteem and life skills classes. He implemented a tooth-brushing program, and helped the school design, build and cultivate a school vegetable garden.  Mr. Barned-Smith also promoted parasite prevention and instructed over 150 elementary school students and teachers during World Hand-Washing Day on the importance of proper hand-washing. He taught students and families how to make homemade soap and construct hand-washing stations.

A central theme in Mr. Barned-Smith’s service was nutrition and physical fitness.  He cooked regularly with approximately 15 Paraguayan families, where he emphasized the use of healthier and cheaper ingredients such as soy or home-grown vegetables instead of Paraguayan staples like meat or imported produce.  He worked with five families to build gardens or work more effectively in gardens they already had. He also helped promote aqua-farming and other protein sources as alternative.

Apart from his work promoting gardening and healthier food preparation, Mr. Barned-Smith also worked extensively with Paraguayan families to make their cooking environments safer and healthier. Many Paraguayan women cook over open fires. Mr. Barned-Smith promoted the use of brick cookstoves, or fogones, which allowed the women to bake their foods instead of relying on frying as their main style of cooking. The cookstoves also enclosed the fire and lowered the amount of smoke present in the kitchen, thereby helping reduce burns and respiratory infections. During his service, Mr. Barned-Smith constructed (or helped construct) 16 cookstoves.

Mr. Barned-Smith also worked to improve the quality, affordability and efficiency of the cookstoves built by Peace Corps Volunteers and Paraguayans. Mr. Barned-Smith and other volunteers in the department of Paraguarí designed more efficient and economical models of cookstoves, and used a grant from the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas to construct these models in rural Paraguayan towns throughout the department.  The cookstove reduced the amount of smoke present during the cooking process, and used (in some cases) 40% less wood than older models. He also helped produce an instruction manual for the design, which was incorporated into Pre-service training.

By the end of his service, 20% of the families in Potrero Pucú were able to cook with more healthy stoves through Mr. Barned-Smith’s efforts. Mr. Barned-Smith also promoted the use of cook stoves in the neighboring community of Pirayuvu. Working with a group of neighborhood women, he created a health committee and supported it in its goal to raise money to build cook stoves in approximately 15 houses throughout the community.

Mr. Barned-Smith worked extensively with Potrero Pucú’s residents to bring running water to the site, only half of which had access to reliable running water. During his time in Potrero Pucú, Mr. Barned-Smith helped lay and repair piping that supplied water to half of the community’s houses. He also supported the commission in fundraising and at its meetings.

Mr. Barned-Smith also hosted a series of sports camps at his community’s school and worked with other volunteers in other sites to teach local youth about American sports and promote physical fitness. In Potrero Pucú approximately 50 Paraguayan youth learned the fundamentals of American football, baseball, and Frisbee in workshops over several months.

In addition to his work in Potrero Pucú, Mr. Barned-Smith assisted in Peace Corps Rural Health and Sanitation Pre- and In-service trainings.  During these sessions, he trained incoming volunteers on nutrition, soap making, gardening, and cultural adaption.  He hosted trainees at his site four times over the course of his service, focusing on cultural integration, teaching, and nutrition. He also helped win a grant from The United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to train approximately 25 Paraguayan youth as HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention outreach workers.

Description of Secondary Activities/Projects

Although officially assigned as a Rural Health and Sanitation Volunteer, Mr. Barned-Smith worked on a variety of secondary projects.  Mr. Barned-Smith educated Americans about Paraguayan culture and life through a variety of methods – the most important being his blog, www.sinjininparaguay.blogspot.com. (THAT'S YOU GUYS!) A journalist by training, Mr. Barned-Smith shared stories and photos about his work, the people of his site, his travel experiences, and the challenges and adventures of his service. During his two years in Paraguay, Mr. Barned-Smith’s blog received close to 9,000 visits from 86 different countries. He wrote several articles for stateside newspapers and blogs concerning Paraguay’s history and culture, including The Philadelphia Inquirer. (COMING OUT IN THREE WEEKS...) On a visit home, he also gave presentations on Paraguayan culture and Peace Corps’ mission.

In an effort to promote more sustainable and profitable agriculture, Mr. Barned-Smith hosted a workshop in Potrero Pucú on the cultivation of natural Paraguayan yuyos, or herbs.

Mr. Barned-Smith taught English as a Second Language classes during his service to the community’s teenagers.  He used the classes to increase the students’ knowledge of the language and American culture by sharing food and stories from the United States.  Mr. Barned-Smith organized activities to raise cultural awareness of the United States with members of the community as well. Outside of the school, he celebrated holidays such as Thanksgiving with foods traditionally consumed by people in the United States. 

Mr. Barned-Smith also helped the students of his school construct a World Map. Over the course of several weeks, he taught geography and mapmaking, which culminated in a wall sized map that adorned one of the school’s exterior walls. He also helped paint two other maps in other volunteers’ communities.

Language Skills

Mr. Barned-Smith achieved an Advanced High competency level in Spanish during his service and used Spanish in his work at school, with his colleagues, Paraguayan community contacts, and in daily life.  In addition, Mr. Barned-Smith achieved an Advanced Low competency level in Guarani, Paraguay’s indigenous language spoken by more than 90% of the country. As with Spanish, he spoke Guaraní regularly while traveling, teaching, shopping, and communicating with members of his rural community.

Mr. Barned-Smith completed his Peace Corps service in Paraguay on April 15th, 2012.