Delayed post

Here are some photos of the first fogon Franco and i rehabbed. enjoy...

Long field, and a win!

So for all of our readers, it's just a couple days shy of my halfway point - that is, a year and six weeks - of my 27 months down here.

This means that a whole new bunch of aspirantes (trainees) are on the ground in Paraguay ready to save the world (mis pesimas muchachos!), and are going through their training period right now. My bosses sent out four of the aspirantes and one of their trainers to my site for Long-Field-Practice. The basic idea of it all is that trainees spend a week living with Paraguayan families in a rural community working on projects with seasoned volunteers (hi).

Anyways, I'm happy to say it was a roaring success.

We built a fogon for my host mom, Ña Dora. I haven't talked a whole lot about my attempts to start commissions in my site, but I've basically gotten nowhere on that front. Anyways, I bought some bricks, Peace Corps bought the stove-top and oven, and the trainees, I and a volunteer named Franco constructed the oven.

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Of course, there's a larger debate here about how I shouldn't be doing work like this unless the community itself is willing to work to get these items, but I'm tired of pushing and pushing and getting nowhere.

And the bottom line is that I'm sick of the fact that my host mom - who has taught me, suffered my ignorance and clueless gringo-ness, who has shown me a mountain of kindness and generosity - has had to cook on the ground hunched over a smoky fire for the last sixty years. So I'm saying its rent and calling it a day...

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The trainees - Riso, Jenny, Eric and Emily - did a fantastic job. They spent their time integrating with families, they worked really hard, and they all had freakishly good attitudes, despite two having diarrhea.

They also worked on two charlas, which they gave at the elementary school on their last day in the community. I've got a feeling I'll be getting the question "When are your friends coming back???" a lot for the next couple of months.

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To top it all off, Franco and I built a brocal around my well, which means that cow poop will no longer be able to (potentially) run into said well during really heavy rainstorms.

Dead rabbits

A few months ago, I decided that it would be an interesting experiment to try to start breeding rabbits with my neighbor, Ernesto. My thinking behind this was pretty simple: in Potrero Pucu, folks generally raise cows, pigs, ducks, and chickens. Other livestock is around and available (goats, sheep, even ostriches) but nowhere near the community.

So raising rabbits seemed like a way to promote another kind of meat (which has value in its own right) as well as a way to promote creative thinking, and since rabbits are fairly low maintenance – seriously, they eat just about anything besides parsley – they’re a cheap and additional source of protein for people down here.

Sounds reasonable, right? Heh.

Rebecca, a volunteer nearby – and our resident rabbit whiz – came out to my site and helped me build a rabbit hutch, and brought some rabbits to help me start my project. Two of them were pregnant. This was an opportunity, but also a problem, as the babies were born before I or Ernesto’s family were really ready for them.

The leverets fell out of their hutch several times, and even though I made some adjustments, all the babies ended up disappearing or dying. But rookie mistakes, right? This is Peace Corps. We adapt.

A few days later, one of the rabbits escaped out of the top of its hutch, which hadn’t been fastened properly.

This was annoying, but also not catastrophic. Benito (my host brother) and I made a second hutch and tightened up the first hutch. We’d made them out of fresh bamboo, which had loosened as it dried. Still, the hutches seemed to be working, even if they weren’t Frank Gehry masterpieces. This wasn’t the Chuchi Corps, after all. What did it matter if the hutches didn’t look super pretty, as long as they adequately housed the rabbits?

Rebecca found me a stud rabbit to impregnate the two remaining females. Everything seemed to be cruising along.

Then, a few weeks ago, a crushing wind – the strongest I’ve yet experienced in Paraguay – came through our site and knocked the hutches over. The male rabbit decided that Liberty was more valuable than an easy life of indulgence or readily available carrots and, embracing that most American of traditions, bailed. ( So much for those hutches being ugly but structurally sound)

So now there were only two… But they were supposed to be pregnant, so no big deal, right? Despite the fact that there was no longer a stud rabbit, we’d momentarily have up to 16 rabbits. I went to Asuncion earlier this week confident that the issues had been resolved – after all, the hutches were secure, reinforced, the rabbits seemed healthy and well fed.

Of course, when I returned to site on Wednesday, my host brother Andres casually remarked that one of the rabbits seemed to be a little sick. Its eyes were pink, he said.

This turned out to be a classic Paraguayan understatement. I found the rabbit shuffling miserably in its cage, basically blind. One eye was shut with what looked like conjunctivitis, lost in inflamed pink tissue. The other eye was a gasp-inducing mess of pus and blood that trickled to its mucous clogged nose. Even breathing seemed to be difficult for the little creature. In a hurried phone conference with Rebecca, I learned that the disease was probably one of two ailments, both lethal and highly contagious.

So I dispatched the bunny and burned its body, hoping it hadn’t infected the one. Remaining. Rabbit.

I should add I’m generally not a negligent pet owner. I’ve owned cats, hamsters, taken care of dogs, etc. I also worked at a zoo for two years – I’ve helped care for scorpions, snow leopards, groundhogs, and skinks!

But rabbits, man.

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Joking aside, it’s been an instructive, embarrassing, and disheartening little snafu. It’s also a good case-study of the pitfalls that PCVs can face.

I approached the whole experiment with a laissez-faire attitude, that my neighbors would do a decent job caring for the rabbits and only need occasional oversight. But they weren’t proactive about telling me about problems, and had different attitudes about what constituted decent care for the rabbits. The creatures got enough food, but Ernesto didn’t upkeep the cages until after a rabbit had escaped. So if you’re going to do a project in this kind of environment, you can’t take a hands-off approach to it.

More photos

These are a few random photos that I like but haven't uploaded yet.

Vacation with folks

These pictures are from my parents' visit down here, and the week we spent in Buenos Aires. I'll post more text later.
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UPDATE

My parents came to visit Paraguay in early February. They spent a couple of days in Asuncion (making the obligatory trips to the few museums we could find that were open) before heading to Potrero Pucu with me.

They spent the week in the campo with me, eating tallarín, drinking maté and terere, and getting to know the tranquilo lifestyle of Paraguay.

That chair you see above was the "presidential throne" of Mariscal Francisco Solano Lopez, one of the most infamous presidents of Paraguay (and the one who was in power during La Guerra de la Triple Allianza" - the War of the Triple Alliance, in which 8 out of 10 of Paraguay's male population died in action.)

The Brutalist style cement building is the National Library in Buenos Aires. And the multicolored buildings in the last shot is el Caminito in a neighborhood of Buenos Aires called "la Boca."

Brazil and new years

I spent the new year in Brazil with my friends Rodrigo and Konstanze, who I used to work with at the Philadelphia Inquirer. We spent our time in southern Brazil, in Rio Grande del Sol, then in Santa Catarina, (which is a little bit north) in the town of Garopaba, and then in Florianopolis.

For the first few days of the trip we visited several waterfalls (see photos), and then in Florianopolis we spent most of our time on the beach. (I had to make a quick stop at a health post thanks to an infected cut on my foot). The two photos of the boats are from Florianopolis; we bought oysters from local oyster farmers (shuckers? cultivators?).

Brazil, or at least southeastern Brazil was amazing, a complete contrast to Paraguay. It was much more modern, much more developed. And it had beaches.

I will say that Paraguay's got them beat on the maté front though. Brazilian yuerba (yerva in portuguese) is green and extra fine, it clogged the bombilla, nor was it as tasty as Paraguayan yerba. Sorry Rodrigo!