Since I left you

It really is amazing to me the change since I first got here. I remember the first morning I went out to the front yard of the retreat center just after dawn and just listened to the sounds, smelt the air, tried to figure out the trees...
The first six months I or so I had this persistent sense of wonder at just about everything I saw here. After I moved into my house and started to have more time to myself and to get into my homey habits this began to wear off. The breakup with Johanna, the receipt of a computer for my 25th birthday (a wonderful gift from my father), doldrums of my first summer in Paraguay started to blunt that sense further. I was reverting to my old self in some ways, which was satisfying also, because I found that I still mostly liked who I had been.

I fell in love with the campo life. I fell in love with the ease of mind, the casual beauty of daily life, the sense of disconnect from the rest of the world. I fell in love with Claudia, too.
In the crazy heat of the summer I made the mistake of acting on a feeling, began a romance with her and consequently had to leave behind the place and people I'd come to love.
I continue to count Claudia as one of my closest friends, but the relationship wasn't able to stand up the distances and lack of a future which my relocation to Natalio imposed.

I came to my new site demoralized, angry, confused. I've yet to really pull myself up out of this hole. I've made a lot of progress. It comes and goes. The worst thing is a closed off-ness in my soul which colors everything I think and feel about this second year of Peace Corps service.
I'm really trying to open back up. When I think about what things were like before and why they're different now I need to appreciate that the most important thing is in me, not in the circumstances. And that I can change it.
I wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer for long time. People always told me that I would be a great Peace Corps volunteer. It felt a little like my whole life was leading up to it.
It is a habit of mind, it is luck, it is determination to get out the door and give things another shot. Today was a good day for me. Paraguay in general had a bad day, with intense rains and flooding in several parts of the country. Many homes destroyed, a few deaths.
But I met a couple of interesting people at the radio station, had a good on-air chat with the host Yanina about the summer at the library, worked in my garden and yard, cleaned and sharpened my tools. I planted the rosemary plant and a mysterious tropical shrub that I bought on Tuesday, when I decided that I will be staying in this house. I love and have missed the smell of fresh rosemary.

It is really something being gone for so long. I have thought maybe it was a mistake not to try and visit home after the site change or to ET (early terminate) and cut my losses. That would have felt like a mistake also. I am haunted by hypotheticals; it is best to stare them down and see my choices through.
And I marvel at how new and weird everything which now feels humdrum used to be. I think I will have been glad to have forced myself to experience being away so long and to know what that feels like. What is significant about it is how far back the chain of remembered feelings I have to go to get to that morning I left mom's house with a fever and her car bit the dust on our way to the airport at 4 in the January morning.

my fb status update for today:

1. It hardly rained at all here in Natalio, just a Seattle-drizzle
2. "damnificado" (left homeless due to some kind of disaster) is a scary word
3. new word of the day "raudal" (torrent)
4. really glorious sunset tonight
5. check out this video

and:

recommended reading

A fellow PCVolunteer in Paraguay whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting wrote an article which was featured in the Huffington Post at the beginning of the month. It's a good read and breaks down some of the internal logic that is constantly going on as we volunteers think about what it is we're really doing here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-katcoff/peace-corps-guilt_b_2059161.html

here's a picture of a cute kid:

furthermore

I am happy to announce the completion of my PeaceCorpsPartnership grant.

The principal reason that I ended up in Natalio is to work with the new public library. This library is the outcome of years of effort by various library commissions and Peace Corps volunteers, going back to 1990.
Lizzie Greer, my predecessor here, and the commission succeeded in constructing a new building for the library in the center of town, in addition to securing book donations from embassies and NGOs. The library opened in June of this year.
Before she left in July we worked together on the paperwork for a PCPProposal to help equip the still largely empty library. In August we sent out requests to friends and family for donations and I am thrilled to report that as of last week the entire $1,400 has been spent on Spanish and Gauraní books and locally produced furniture for the Municipal Public Library of Natalio.

The books were purchased in Asuncion by Felicia Lopez, the vice-president of the commission, and the furniture was built by Ernesto Delvalle, husband of another of the commission members. The books are mostly published in Paraguay, the rest are published in Latin America, and have a heavy focus on Paraguayan authors. We purchased approximately 150 books of many types: young fiction, classic fiction, poetry, theater, history, sociology, psychology, economy, education, law, math, biology,  anthropology, several books in Gauraní and several about the language itself.

  

The furniture built is one large bookshelf and four benches, which are useful for sitting on while removing muddy shoes before entering the building, and also for seating when whole classes come to visit.
¡Mil gracias para todos que contribuyron! A thousand thanks to everyone who contributed!

As long as I am here (until April 2013) I will continue to be able to accept donations to buy more books for the library, which can be sent to my paypal account with a note attached. I give my Boy Scout word of honor to see your money end up in the hand of a Paraguayan bookseller and a lovely new book in the hands of a kid.

And here's the furniture:

 




Go well!
Que se vayan bien

doldrums

It's been a difficult few days, though I can't easily say why. The anxieties of my now-foreseeable end-of-service are compounding my existing dissatisfaction with my life in Natalio and the work I've done here. The work in the schools I've done has been fine but disorganized and not fully developed, meanwhile my work with the library has become very frustrating.

The school year is coming to a close and getting things done during the summer in Paraguay is difficult. The month of December was a complete wash last year in Nueva Germania. I'm not sure how things will be here down south, but I am hesitant to try very hard to organize anything before New Year's. Furthermore, my motivation and ingenuity for creating and organizing classes or clubs or events is at this point very low. It takes a lot of inspiration, intuition, organization and optimism to have even a chance of putting a successful activity or event or summer camp. I am in awe of the many beautiful projects my fellow volunteers have been putting together; I have not felt I have it in me.
I've been talking to people: Jonathan, Nicole, Claudia, my dad, my boss, Felicia the vice-president of the library commission. I'm grateful for their support. I'm not even sure what's wrong exactly - I tend to periodically wind myself up and then despair about everything. I'd like to be home now, but there's not so much time left to stick out here. The time I have left though is dominated by summer vacation and will not be productive in the traditional sense. I am already planning the workshops and activities I want to do with the schools and the library once life gets moving again at the end of February. I suppose I ought to be grateful to miss a dreary North-West winter.

my house is pretty funny-looking, huh?

I hate all these regrets and complaints I've built up. I want to smash them all and look at Natalio with fresh new eyes. I'd like to be overwhelmed and amazed and elevated again by the crazy-blue sky and the towering clouds.
I sincerely wish that there were some other volunteers nearby that I could visit to help me keep an even keel. To visit and do simple, boring Peace Corps things: cooking and washing clothes and watching movies. When I go out a-visiting it invariably becomes a grand romp which leaves me exhausted and broke and further estranged from life in my site.
What is more distressing is the conviction that all sites are essentially the same, a Peace Corps volunteer makes lemonade, or they do not. Dissatisfaction with a site is merely failure to find the way to make it satisfying. In Peace Corps there's not really such a thing as success or failure either of course, every volunteer has many successes and failures, but even so.
Even so.

The simple trick to summer anyhow is to relax. I suspect that my 24/7 internet access, which I enjoy compliments of my neighbor's unprotected wifi network, is not helping in this area.
Sorry for the griping. Let us hope that it has been helpful to vent.
It appears that Paraguay has beat Guatemala 2-0! Bombs are exploding in the street and overhead

avañe´ê

Today!: was the 2nd International Congress of the Guaraní Language, in my very own town of Natalio.
This was an unexpected thing. It was sort of like a college symposium crossed with your standard Municipal acto cultural (traditional music and dance performances) and a boring MinstryofEducationandCulture workshop on top.
Speakers came in from Missiones, Argentina and Sao Paolo, Brazil to talk about the language. So it was kind of a big deal, but only kind of.

Teachers from the local schools performed a couple traditional dances in between lecturers.

I certainly didn´t understand a lot of what was going on. My Guaraní skills probably peaked last summer in Nueva Germania, or possibly while I was still living with the Alonso family the winter before. Since moving to Natalio I spend less time with families and neighbors and most of the people I do know are perfectly comfortable speaking Spanish to one another, a diferencia que el norte. There still is plenty of Guaraní going around, but I have really not felt the need to continue studying it, as enriching as I´m sure that would be. I´ve been making some efforts to hold my ground at least, and practice saying what I still remember. Seeing 7 Cajas (which I really meant to write a post about) and visiting Ana´s site last month partially inspired me to start working on my Guaraní again, but even so the general trend has been atrophy of my never great Guaraní skills.

So, it was somewhat embarrassing to conduct a short interview today with a videographer who was documenting the event. It ended up being mostly in English, but some of it was in Guaraní. I´m really bad at figuring out what people are saying when they ask me things in Guaraní, which is not so good for interviews, or most conversations really.

I also met a group of teachers from Posadas, Argentina, which is just across the river from Encarnación, the captial of my department. I talked with them during the lunch break. It was such a thrill to meet people that weren´t Paraguayans or Peace Corps volunteers! I can see Argentina from almost anywhere in town, it´s just 10km away, and I listen to Argentine Public Radio, but I´ve never been over there (except for 8 hours to see Iguazu Falls with dad) and I´m consumed with curiosity about our mysterious neighbors. From Paraguay, Argentina seems so rich and functional and developed, but not so intrinsically foreign as Brazil. They speak Spanish, albeit with a funny accent, and thier history is tightly bound up with the history of Paraguay. The histories of Itapua and Missiones are particularly close, both being initially settled (by Europeans) as part of the Jesuit region of the Paraná.

I´ve been working for some time on a geo-historical animation of the colonization and foundation of Paraguay. It´s not done yet (I´m up to about 1700) but I will certainly post it on the blog when it is. I am very happy with the work. It is all really part of an effort on my part to understand how Paraguay came to be the way it is.

The Guaraní legacy is one of the most interesting and fundamental features of Paraguay. If I look at a map of Brazil, there are places in the far North-East that I can translate from Guaraní. They covered a huge area, but Paraguay is the only part of their former lands where the language survives and flourishes. There are Gauraní speakers in northern Argentina, and some in Brazil. I imagine there are also some in Uruguay and perhaps Bolivia.

I have been very curious about the similarities and differences between my side of the river and the other. The provinces of Corrientes and Missiones share with Paraguay the legacy of the Guaraní, of the Jesuit missions, of Spanish colonial government and then of Latin American independence. Corrientes and Buenos Aires are just two of the cities founded by colonists from Asunción.
How did all the land south of the river end up on such a different course?
How much of the similarity remains?



I have been meaning to visit the other side of the river for months, and perhaps now that the school year is drawing to a close I´ll make it happen. I need to request permission 10 days ahead of time, and have itinerary information including phone numbers for each place I will stay (my Peace Corps phone won´t work). At the very least I will travel through Argentina and Uruguay before returning to the states. I would very much like to check out Urugauy. I´ve been imagining it as kind of like Paraguay, green, tranquil, mate-sipping, but with functioning government institutions... and beaches.

well gosh darnit

Hey, guess which country I live in! Guess which country I come from! They're the two orange ones!

Here's the economist's article about Latin America from their special report on inequality

breaking fast

"The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us, and, for an house at least, some part of us awakens which slumbers all the rest of the day and night."  - Henry David Thoreau

Breakfast is the most intimate meal because, as Thoreau reminds us, in the morning our souls are still glowing a little bit from the hours spent dreaming. We have yet to put on all the stuff that separates us from each other.

So I like breakfast. I like to eat it with other people. Being able to walk to a cafe is really my definition of urban living. My favorite part of a night of drinking with friends is breakfast the next morning with the survivors. My favorite part of living with Americans were big breakfasts with pancakes and bacon and coffee. The best part of living with a host family, I think, is that hot cocido in the morning. The coquitos/galletas are not so great. But the intimacy, and the cocido, while you watch the silly morning news broadcast is really special and really Paraguayan.

So I'm very happy that this morning I found a nice place I can go to (it's on my block of course) in the mornings to drink good hot cocido and watch the news and talk to Sandra (or possibly her sister Sofia). They run a hotel and restaurant and sell tickets for one of the two local bus companies, and have helped me in the past with movie-night fundraisers for the library. Who knows, I may even be able to find a newspaper to read. The cocido comes with a nice big homemade Paraguayan tortilla, which is not at all like a Mexican tortilla, but is yummy and greasy.

Cocido is a slightly mysterious yerba mate based beverage traditionally made by burning yerba and sugar with hot coals, adding milk, and straining out the burnt yerba and charcoal. There are various less hot-coal intensive ways of making it with varying degrees of efficacy. It ends up like a pleasant English breakfast tea and you usually eat it with these awful little stale bread balls, which are deceptively known as galletas (cookies).

I've been feeling pretty good the last couple of weeks, which has motivated me to really be more proactive about finding families I can spend time with. A good volunteer spends more time with families and Paraguayan friends than they do on facebook. A good volunteer would be better integrated with their community by this point  regardless of the circumstances of the site placement.  When I complain of boredom or loneliness I am just expressing failure to integrate with my community. With summer doldrums coming on I had better get to know some families or I am really going to be banging my head against the wall.

One cup at a time.