La tembiurehe (about food)

So, I'm reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. A review quoted on the cover of the book from The New Yorker says "The scope and the exlanatory power of this book are astounding", which I agree with. The book is not really about guns and steel, and is only sort of about germs. It's actually  about the rise of agriculture and plant and animal domestication and geography, and how it's not all random and arbitrary. There are a limited number of plants and animals that could have been and that have been domesticated in the world. There were only a handful of areas where this domestication was achieved independently and then those crops and animals were spread to other areas. Geography also determined the level of isolation of early agricultures, denying most non Eurasian societies the benefits of plants and animals that had been domesticated in neighboring regions.
It's related to the fascinating story of a few crops that Pollan tells in "The Botany of Desire" but expanded. Each and every domesticated food comes from somewhere and is tightly bound up with the history of the people that lived in that area.

So it's got me thinking about the foods that are avaliable here. South America was one of the few places in the world where agriculture arose independently. The Guaraní and Tupí native american peoples practiced agriculture in modern Brazil, Paraguay, Urugauy and Argentina. They obviously never reached the level of organization of the Incans, but one of Diamond´s theses is that food-producing societies benefitted greatly just by being able to adopt plants that were domesticated by thier neighbors, since the number of domesticable plants in any one area is generally very low.
Of the foods that are commonly eaten here many were domesticated in the Americas. Mandioca is of course the starch staple. Corn (domesticated in Mexico) is featured in many traditional foods: greasy cornbread (sopa paraguaya), gooey cornbread (chipa guazu), cornball and meat soup (boribori) and chipa (to which I have not yet paid proper tribute). Of the vegetables I can buy in most stores: tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and onions; only onions were not domesticated in the Americas. Peanuts were domesticated by the Tupí-Guaraní and are commonly eaten, roasted así no más, or as a peanut brittle style desert. Squash and beans (both domesticated in Mexico) also for parts of the traditional cuisine, but beans seem to have a stigma attached to them. Most folks don´t like to admit they eat beans.
Tonight I went up to visit Lizzy and talk about our grant application to buy books for the library. Her host mom served me a bowl of locro for dinner which is a stew whose orgins are pre-colombian. It´s made with a white, fluffy kind of corn and beans and meat.
I live in a highly productive agricultural region of the country, but mostly the crops produced are for export or for non-food purposes. In this area soy (China), sorghum (Africa), cotton (both Old and New World), corn (Mecixo), and tung oil (China) are grown especially. This land used to be part of the Atlantic rainforest, but in just the recent decades it has become the agricultural heartland of the country.
We take for granted the wonderful diversity of the plant and animal products avaliable to us, and I appreciate Diamond's book for getting me to think about the implications for farming peoples stuck with limited, or no, local varieties of plants appropriate for domestication. I also appreciated his explanation of how agriculture arose at first; gradually and without anyone knowing where things were leading at the time. It´s the first time I´ve been able to wrap my head around how people and thier plants could undergo the huge changes, in behavior and physiology respectively, necesary for the rise of agriculture.
Other South American domesticates
Eastern SA: mandioca, peanut, rubber tree, pineapple, yerba mate
Andes: lots of potatoes, sweet potatoes, lima bean, coca, tobacco, pumpkin, llamas, guinea pigs
Shared with Mexico: corn, tomatoes, beans, amaranth, guava, cocoa, cotton, dogs
Just Mexico: turkey, squash, papaya

the facts of life

There is a lot that I don't get around to mentioning in my longer posts, details of my life that I take for granted now but that are not taken for granted in the states.
First, an announcement: We opened the first ever public library in town on the 1st of June! The space is still a bit empty but we are working on getting more donations. Lots of kids have been coming in to check out all our lindo books and play around with the basic programs we have on the computers. I'm working the lunch shift, 11-1, which is fine with me. That's when a lot of kids come in, just after they get out of class in the morning. The librarian works 8-11 and 1-3.
I've been building nice warm fires in my version 2.0 woodstove. I built it in my kitchen out of bricks and a metal chimney and cooktop. It was a pain in the butt getting firewood, but I finally got the guys at the yerba roastery to sell me some of thiers. I don't understand why that was so hard, I must not know the right people yet.
The woodstove has been great this last week as it froze 3 nights in a row and was cold the rest of the time. A warmer rainy thing has come in, but we're still just beginning winter, and I am now 3 degrees latitiude further south (like going from Bellingham to Portland) than I was. Most volunteers and Paraguayans don't have any proper heat source in thier homes, which drives me crazy. Electric heaters are fairly common, but they just don't get the job done to my satisfaction. Fire and chimneys are pretty ancient technology, and since winter happens every year it seems like it would be worth the time and investment to build some damn fireplaces/woodstoves. The rich often have chimneys on their houses but I'm pretty sure that is just an ornamental thing. I have never seen smoke rising from one.

Two more things about the incredible mud here: you can use it, mixed with sand, to lay bricks. This is what my woodstove is held together with actually.
also: it turns white dogs orange, which is amusing.

I bought a hat! It's a blue paperboy style hat with ear flaps that button below the chin.
I've got a rockin' compost pile now that I've got a yard that chickens do not enter. It's a little weird to live where there aren't chickens running around everywhere. I'm going to plant a for real vegetable garden this spring.
I got a camera! Lizzy sold me one. So I'll have to start taking pictures.
Since I got to Natalio I've had a sitemate, Lizzy Greer, who got a 2 month extension to help see the library through to the opening. So she's been in Paraguay since January 2010 but is going home at the end of the month. There aren't any other volunteers within at least an hour's travel from here. I do miss Hannah and Leah, my San Pedro neighbors, and I wish Lizzy the best of luck in North Carolina.
My house has a tile floor! It's a squash soup and terra cotta checker board pattern. I want to have a dance party.

Asuncion - part 3: Buses

I'm sipping my lemon ginger honey tea which is delicious and which I will be happy to drink a whole pot of tonight. I get the lemons from the neighbor's tree which mostly grows over my back yard, the honey I bought in Nueva Germania from a woman whose brother and step-father had been out hunting for it in the woods, and the ginger root I buy at a little asian goods store in Mercado 4 in Asuncion on the street where the Chinese restaurants and the Paraguayan herb vendors are. You can't buy ginger from one of the Paraguayan vendors, though they have a root called yerba brava that looks and smells similar.

I was in Asuncion last week for "Mid-Service Training" which involved "training" and informational sessions and doctors and dentists check-ups. It was the first time our whole training group has been together since last September. It was great to see everyone, now so comfortable and confident as Peace Corps Volunteers, happy in thier sites, doing great work. When we all met each other 15 months ago we were nervous, optimistic, and so completely in the dark about life in Paraguay. The change since then is enormous, and we tend not to even be very aware of it ourselves.

I spent extra time in the city to be able to see my girlfriend, who works as a cook in a business which is run out of a large home. She lives and of course eats there too, which is great because she is able to save so much of her wages to send home to her family.

When I am in the city I do not stay in, but rather travel repeatedly around the big triangle formed by the hotels, restaurants, and bars of old town, the PC office in the new part of town, and mercado 4 and the bus terminal which are in the beating heart of the city and where there are some of the better asian restaurants. This nearly daily journey I made almost exclusively by bus, which is as good a symbol for chaotic, uncomfortable, and vivacious Asuncion as I can think of.

These buses run circular routes through the city and then out into the suburbs, like comets which come in close to the sun and then slingshot out into the blackness for a few hundred years. The fare is 2,300 guaranies (like 70 cents) which is great if you just need one bus but adds up quickly if you have to change or get on the wrong bus; there are no free transfers. The buslines are private companies that are required to charge the same fare to be able to operate in the city limits. The line numbers sometimes include decimals and letters. I can't ever remember if it is the 16.8 or the 18.2 that I need to take to get from the terminal to the office and since I'm only in town every so often I tend to learn the line numbers only temporarily. The best way is just to look at the landmarks that are scrawled on signs displayed in the front window. As you learn the way traffic flows around town you become able to make educated guesses about which way a bus will be going based on the displayed landmarks. These are vague descripions at best though and more times than I can count I have been conveyed all about the city or god-knows-where in the suburbs before getting up the ganas to ask someone if I'm on the right bus. I now make it a personal rule to always ask the driver when I get on.

The buses are the loudest, jerkiest, hardest metal glass wood (!) and plastic boxes that you will ever willingly put yourself in, outside of a theme park. The engines roar, the bus lurches as the driver changes gears, black smoke billows as you climb hills, and so many people of every walk of life subir and bajar as you (hopefully) approach your destination. Many of the times when I am most struck by the unlikliness of my being here have been on the buses. Sitting alone or standing crushed together with 50 people you don't know, one has a moment to think about an experience that is at once so intense and bizzare and uncomfortable and at the same time so normal and (kind of) beautiful.

Summer School

I just wrote this for my VolunteerReportForm. I sent it to the EYD Program Manager, with whom I will have a PTIP during MST. acronyms!
This class ran from 1/3/12 - 2/9/12



One of the things that I found most upsetting about the school in my site was the way many students got left behind. They never learned to read well and with such a reading and copying based curriculum they weren't able to keep up, and they never received any remedial help unless their parent's enrolled them in private lessons with Prof. Hilde (who is quite good). These students get stuck in third or fourth grade and repeatedly fail to pass until they eventually give up and drop out as 14 year old fourth graders. It is strikingly inefficient and also heartbreaking.

My feeling was that a little extra effort targeted to students that start to fall behind could be enough to cement their basic reading skills and build their confidence, so that they would be able to advance again with the rest of their class. I decided to offer a special reading class, targeting these students with a high risk of dropping out early. I would teach it myself and though it wouldn't be sustainable in the sense of training local educators I thought that the example would be valuable and more importantly the positive effects of confidence and increased abilities for students (if the class was a success) would be long lasting and worth the effort.

In my service so far my chief problem had been getting people to take my free classes or clubs seriously. Attendance would collapse after the first few meetings. I knew if an optional summer school class was going to have any chance of succeeding it would take a lot of effort before hand to promote it to the parents and to establish it as an important opportunity to be taken seriously.

During the school year I had performed two diagnostic tests  and while they showed a disappointingly high amount of random variance I was able to see which students were unable to read and had failed to improve during the year. I used this information to select 30 some students from the third and fourth grades to invite to attend my class. I typed up formal letters of invitation to the parents in the correct Paraguayan style and handed them out after a short speech at the school on the day parents came in to collect grade-books. The letters had a detachable section to be returned to me before the start of the class with "sí, mi hijo/hija va a assistir" or "no, no va a asistir " check boxes to be marked by the parents.

Ultimately about 10 of the invited students attended nearly all the classes, which were Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8-10am. I was going to have separate 3rd and 4th grade classes, but we ended up combining them because we had so few from 4th grade. The class went well. Though it took some preparation, much of the work had been to find the right students and to get the letters right to convince their parents to make them come to my class. I'm glad I got the preparation right, for once.

In my new site in Natalio they have a Nivelación class and a special Profesor de Apoyo, the function of both of which is to help these students which start to fall behind. Now after seeing this in Paraguay I wish even more I could help implement in Nueva Germania

The rain and the mud.

One of the cultural dissonances we experience here is our attitude towards the rain and the mud which it spawns. I think our national attitudes towards these common phenomena, which are of almost no concern at all to us in the States, show us something about how our level of development affects our daily lives.
I.
When it rains, it pours.
Paraguay's weather is like that of the mid-west in that it is far from the coast and prone to thundersorms. They can arrive with great fanfare and speed but move on just as quickly. When a really big rainy system moves in the sky just opens up with water in a way that almost never happens in the Pacific Nothwest. Back home the rain is drudgery, here it is exciting, not least because it means no one has to go to school (more on that later). Folks don't go out much in the rain. I have many times been scolded for going out in the rain, even with an umbrella. As a Seattleite I've got some pride about my comfort with moisture.
"But you'll will catch a cold!", they say. These is not a valid concern in the States. If it were, the Northwest would be laid low eight months out of the year. One doesn't worry about getting sick in the brief period of exposure between leaving the heated house and getting into the heated car (even if you have to wait 5 minutes for it to heat up). In December 2010 when I was ringing bells for the Salvation Army I would be completely bundled up, as I had to stand outside all day, but I would see people get out on thier car and come into the store in a T-Shirt with the temperature in the 30's.
In Paraguay most people don't have a car, they have motorcycles, and thier houses are generally not heated. The lack of even basic fireplaces causes me great distress. I hate being in a cold house. It could also be hazardous to my health if I come in wet from the rain.
II.
The mud which follows the rain has some supernatural quality to it. It has powers that render analogy with my past North-American mud experience irrelvant and even absurd. Mud affects people's daily lives in Paraguay in a way that is inconcievable to those raised in the USA. After it rains the chief consequenceit is that the land of this country is transformed into a red-purple oozing chaos which takes days to subside.
The color of this clay-soil is what you first notice. Red-orange in the North and purple-black in the South, the coloration is attractive but it is potent, it stains. Clothes, walls, hands, feet, toe-nails in Paraguay are all highly susceptible to its dye. Last August I was told I had "pretty feet". They were white from being in socks all winter, but before long I was wearing flipflops everyday and my toes and soles of my feet were orange, not to mention cracked and dry, just like everybody else. There is no school on rainy days. Volunteers like to joke that it is because Paraguayans melt in the rain, but the truth is that kids usually wear white shirts as part of thier school uniform but which will be near impossible for thier poor mothers to clean and then dry if the kids are allowed even go down the street in them.
This speaks to the another aspect the of mud here, its omnipresence.  Most streets are not paved. Towns will have cobble-stone streets (some rural highways are also cobble-stoned) which are a bumpy pain in the ass most days, but thier value is seen after it rains when they are compared to the impenetrable slurry of the dirt roads. Cobble-stone roads are not a legacy of colonial Paraguay; the government continues to stone more roads, because anything is better than the molten nightmare of the dirt road after it rains.
Volunteers that live several kilometers down a dirt road will get either trapped in site after it rains or will be unable to return for days until the roads harden again. Walking just a few feet across dirt will layer the soles of your shoes in the stuff, which is amazingly difficult to quitar. In the States you would expect that one would want shoes with traction, some good waffle-stompers, when it is wet outside, but here, to the extent that it even makes any difference in the face of such a mightily sticky substance, you want a shoe with a flat sole to give the mud as little as possible to attach itself to. Otherwise you will be carrying half a kilo of the stuff with you wherever you go including into your house.

special red dirt in Nueva Germania which is better than sand on dry days, worse on rainy days

So, you stay inside when it rains. I have been doing a lot of that lately, and have also become well aquainted with where the roof of my new house leaks. Fortunately, and for reasons I do not understand but which must be related to said rain, I have more water coming to my house lately and am now able to take a proper shower, provided I wait until about 10pm to do so.

Fall is here, back to school

It has gotten distinctly autumny here in the last few weeks. You notice it especially with the time change. I hate how easily we are fooled by the artificial hours the clocks and governments give us, but there it is.
Autumn is the time to be in school. It feels right. The golden light in the late afternoon and sweaters and jackets and new books and pens. (I can tell that we are going to be friends...) And the crunchy leaves and smoke in the air. There's no pumpkins or wild red and orange leaves on the trees, but I can fill that in with my imagination.
I went in to the school here today and yesterday to start getting to know the teachers and observe thier classes. It is easy to do and totally important for my work, if a little tedious. Once I know what different classes and teachers are like it is easy to think of the little things that would be helpful to introduce. I can also gauge how receptive different teachers are to new ideas.
This school so far appears to be more advanced than my beloved EB 236 in Nueva Germania. Two of the classrooms I've sat in so far were covered with didactic materials and educational posters. One profesora in particular was also using many of the little tricks we've been taught to show teachers here; she says that Lizzy, the volunteer I'm following up, taught her a lot and it shows.
Another classroom was more like the norm I've come to expect, and although the teacher was involved and the students well behaved the walls were barren and dirty. Sitting there as the students copied a non-sensical fable about a dancing bear and a monkey and a pig I was first hit with longings for a clean but cluttered, interesting, engaging and well lit american classroom, and then for the rooms in Nueva Germania which also looked depressing but I didn't mind anymore because I knew the teachers and the students. I suppose I will be able to get to that place again here if I let myself.
I went into Asuncion last week for a workshop by the Ministry of Education about the use of Information Communication Technology in the classroom.  It was at least interesting and succeeded in getting me thinking about the subject, while the other volunteer in attendence and I were able to share our experience with ITC with the Parguayan teachers. Then Friday there were commitee meetings at the Peace Corps office; CoCuMu (culture and art I think), Jopara (diversity), Trash, Libraries, Seed Bank, Gender and Development and several others. I only went to the Library meeting this time around. Saturday morning was the National Volunteer Action Council (nvac) meeting which I also didn't go to, but I did happily attend Ahendu, the concert that night which featured both PCV musicians and Paraguayan acts. All these PC events happen three times a year, every time a new group of volunteers swears in, and their preceeding group swears out. I swore in exactly a year ago and so our "sister" (same sector, one year advanced) "G" (for Guarambare, where we were trained) was swearing out and for the first time I had to despedir (saw farewell) volunteers I knew well.
The event was a lot of fun and at a great venue, just across the street from the presidential palace in a bar/cultural center/museum in the oldest part of town. It helped me to start getting my head back in the right place about Peace Corps and my commitment to service in Paraguay.
I'm in my new house now, which is about twice as big as my old one, has a cool checkerboard tile floor and is much safer, though it has its own drawbacks. It recieves very little natural light through the two windows (which are both under awnings) and only recieves water for part of the day. The water that does come does not have enough pressure to reach the shower (which theoretically can have hot water). It gets up high enough to fill up my toilet tank in the middle of the night, which means I only have one good flush a day. The knee level spigots get water most of the day and so I fill up may various buckets and basins from there.
I have built and alternative shower using a metal garden watering can and a set of ropes and pulleys. With this I can juntar cold water with the lower spigot, pour in 2 liters of boiling water from my jara electrica (I guess we call that a hot pot?) and hoist it up above my head for about 90 seconds of bliss. Of course, if my house had a latrine (which is very common in rural Paraguay) and a bathtub (I've never seen one in this country) I could poop and bathe in ease with the water pressure as it is. Ah well.

Moving on up to the East side

What is a Peace Corps volunteer without a community? Basically nothing.  It's an oxymoron, like a designated hitter in the National League. Homeless, bored, homesick, but most importantly without purpose.
I have a new community now but it continues to be a struggle accept that and to begin again the long process of getting to know it. A Peace Corps volunteer without a community is nothing; the greatest part of our job is just becoming a part of the community. My job right now is to be outgoing, to seek out unknown people and explain to them in my goofy spanish who the hell I am and why I am here of all places. On the plus side, I am by now pretty good at this. My Spanish is better than last year and I've done the same basic introductions and explanations a thousand times. It's practically automatic. I think I can also read Paraguayans better, the things they do or don't say.

What's lacking is the motivation, the ganas. But I think I am beginning to find the threads of continuity from my service so far. Even just living here, though I have not done much else, I am starting to feel a little like a Peace Corps volunteer again. From which the motivation to make something of my time will flow.
It is probably very hard to comprehend why it's been such a shock for me to move from one site in Paraguay to another. The mostly it comes from the quality of the connections I had made with people in Nueva Germania and the suddenness and completeness with which I had to leave them behind. A few of the kids are on Facebook, but saldo (phone minutes) are scarce, and I doubt I will be able to go back and visit, so it really is goodbye forever. Except I didn't even get to say goodbye.

The other aspect though is the great difference between Natalio and Nueva Germania. They are on opposite ends of the country from one another and pretty well exemplify the two sides of Paraguay.

Natalio is in the SE of the country, just 10 km from the border with Argentina. It is between Encarnacion and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay's most prosperous, and most economically active cities respectively. It was all forest until the mid 20th century but now it is all highly productive farmland. There is a yerba factory in the town and the surrounding country is covered in a patchwork of huge, mostly soy farms with Cargil and Alpa silos. According to my father this kind of countryside resembles Ohio. The dirt is nearly black. There has been a fair ammount of German and Ukainian immigration here, more recently and in greater numbers than in Nueva Germania. From all of this comes a greater general prosperity and level of economic activity, but most importantly a greater connection and awareness of the world beyond the community.

Something I came to love, and felt that it was just what I'd been looking for in Peace Corps, was the extreme remoteness of Nueva Germania and San Pedro in general. Even though it is closer (5 hours) to Asuncion than Natalio is, the last 27 km of the highway have only been paved for about 4 years and generally people have fairly little knowledge of other areas. Many have indeed been to Asuncion to study or work, but many have not, especially the older generations. Living there on the edge of town with the huge river flood plain just a block away I delighted in the beauty and the bizarreness of it all. I really felt that I was on a plane that was just slightley elevated or somehow skewed from the rest of reality. It was stifling at times but it really came to be a home were I was popular, I lived well and I felt that I a purpose.

Also there was water pressure, unlike in Natalio. I have been learning the art of bucket bathing, which is practiced by so many of my fellow volunteers, but which I had not so far experienced.
I am already feeling the PC volunteer in me beginning to reawaken after a diffcult two months. I have previously thought to myself how excellent the Peace Corps structure is, arriving in a community fresh and new and confused but excited, and then how the work just develops naturally. I hope that process can happen again, though I am neither fresh or new.