Home sweet home for the next two years will be in the district of Caaguazu. My nearest significant cities are San Jose de los Arroyos and Valenzuela. Serafini is an agricultural community of about 50 houses or 250 people with a lot of sugar cane planted for sale. The majority of the community is subsistance farmers with mandioc (casava), peanuts, and corn planted as the main consumption crops. Soil conservation and planting home gardens are the main resons they asked for a volunteer and there is interest in reforestation, as well.
There is a super guapo or hardworking family that is my contact and has said that I can live with them for the first couple of months in site, if I want. This family is one the few with a home garden and also has an orchard with native Paraguayan fruit trees!
My site has electricity (only one of the 41 people in my group doesn´t) but no running water. My town is only about 5 km from paved road and I should be able to get into Asuncion in about 2 and a half hours! So I will be pretty hooked up while still living the ¨campo¨life.
I´ll get to actually visit my site next week and meet my contact that is from the hardworking family. Then I´ll be back in my training community for two more weeks before swearing in on December 15 and heading out to my site a few days after as a volunteer. More information when I actually visit my site.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
Paraguayan History and My Future
Saturday, Nov 10 Carlos de la Sobera gave a guest lecture to all of the current Paraguay Peace Corps Trainees. Carlos is a teacher at the American School in Asuncion and general history buff who lived in the US for 16 years and could, accordingly, lecture in perfect English.
Carlos gave an empassioned, wonderfully informed lecture on Paraguayan history that really helped me put some of Paraguayan culture into context. THe most shockingly vivid part of his lecture dealt with the Triple Alliance War of 1865 to 1870. Many of you reading know of my general disinterest in history, especially war history, and Sr. de la Sobera was able to convey info about this time period and its lasting effects to me in a way that captured my attention and I will always remember. THe Triple Alliance War was an invasion of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay into Paraguay that was provoked by Brazil invading Uruguay for no politically viable reason and PY sticking up for UY. Unfortunatley, UY had a coup that put an anti-PYan into office and left PY allyless. What started as a drastically unfair war turned into genocide in Paraguay with Paraguay loosing 75% of its population in 5 years. From a pre-war population of 400,000 men and 400,000 women in 1862 Paraguay was so devistated that in 1972 (two years after the war ended) there were only 155,000 women and 20,000 men ( yes twenty thousand). Of these men 5,000 were 0-9, 5,000 were 10-14, and 10,000 were 65 or older. These are the people who carried the burdon of repopulating a country. Paraguay was not able to acheive equal gender populations again until 2002. Before the Triple Alliance War Paraguay was experiencing political stability and unity unknown in other South American countries and that unity was followed by absolute destruction; a fact that (combined with many years of dictatorship only ending in 1989) has affected people´s willingness to form groups and left people generally distrustful in many situations in PY.
But on a more personal note, I just got back from 5 days in the campo visiting another volunteer with half of the agroforestry group. I bought a hammock from my campo host mother who makes them, got to visit a wetland and island in the middle with tons of birds, snails, howler monkeys, and parrots, and ate honey directly out of the hive!
On Wednesday I get the big excitement of learning where my site is going to be!!!! Or as my very philosophical technical trainer likes to say, I will have earned a site. More on that once I learn more. Now I´m off to prepare a talk about tree resources Paraguayans have in their yards for tomorrow. The catch, it´s in Guarani!!!
Carlos gave an empassioned, wonderfully informed lecture on Paraguayan history that really helped me put some of Paraguayan culture into context. THe most shockingly vivid part of his lecture dealt with the Triple Alliance War of 1865 to 1870. Many of you reading know of my general disinterest in history, especially war history, and Sr. de la Sobera was able to convey info about this time period and its lasting effects to me in a way that captured my attention and I will always remember. THe Triple Alliance War was an invasion of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay into Paraguay that was provoked by Brazil invading Uruguay for no politically viable reason and PY sticking up for UY. Unfortunatley, UY had a coup that put an anti-PYan into office and left PY allyless. What started as a drastically unfair war turned into genocide in Paraguay with Paraguay loosing 75% of its population in 5 years. From a pre-war population of 400,000 men and 400,000 women in 1862 Paraguay was so devistated that in 1972 (two years after the war ended) there were only 155,000 women and 20,000 men ( yes twenty thousand). Of these men 5,000 were 0-9, 5,000 were 10-14, and 10,000 were 65 or older. These are the people who carried the burdon of repopulating a country. Paraguay was not able to acheive equal gender populations again until 2002. Before the Triple Alliance War Paraguay was experiencing political stability and unity unknown in other South American countries and that unity was followed by absolute destruction; a fact that (combined with many years of dictatorship only ending in 1989) has affected people´s willingness to form groups and left people generally distrustful in many situations in PY.
But on a more personal note, I just got back from 5 days in the campo visiting another volunteer with half of the agroforestry group. I bought a hammock from my campo host mother who makes them, got to visit a wetland and island in the middle with tons of birds, snails, howler monkeys, and parrots, and ate honey directly out of the hive!
On Wednesday I get the big excitement of learning where my site is going to be!!!! Or as my very philosophical technical trainer likes to say, I will have earned a site. More on that once I learn more. Now I´m off to prepare a talk about tree resources Paraguayans have in their yards for tomorrow. The catch, it´s in Guarani!!!
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Ka´a: the life-blood of Paraguay
Also known as yerba or Ilix paraguayensis, ka´a is consumed regularly across the Southern Cone. While the whole region drinks yerba mate, a hot tea made of yerba leaves, drinking terere is unique to Paraguay.
Drinking terere or yerba mate requires a whole ¨team¨ of equipment. Guampas are the traditional cups used to serve yerba and are still often made of cow horns. You use a filtering metal straw called a bombilla to drink (something that I haven´t mastered with the boiling hot yerba mate without burning my tongue). Also necessary is a thermous or thermo. It is necessary to have seperate ones for mate and terere (I´m not sure why) and the terere ones are often pimped out with leather.
If you ask a Paraguayan about the advantages of ka´a you´ll get a laundry list of responses (of varying accuracy) including that it´s a diruetic, reduces obesity, decreases cholesterol, increses muscular endurance, is non-addictive, and includes Iron, Magnesium, Potassium, Calcium, Sodium, and Phosphorous. Luckily I like terere because it is a huge part of the culture here!
We´ve been really lucky with the weather here so far. We had a bit of a hot spell last week where you couldn´t do anything without sweating and it was hard to sleep but since Friday it has been cool enough at night to need a blanket and during the day we are mostly in the shade at class so no problems there.
Next week we´re all off for Long Field Practice when our agroforestry group will split into two groups to visit actual Peace Corps Volunteers. Three other volunteers, a language teacher, and I will be going about an hour and a half south of where we now are for our visit. We will all be staying with different host families and then doing everything from teaching about cooking with soy and still having Guarani class to touring a wetland that they are trying to develop into an ecotourism site. It sounds like it will be crazily busy but it´s the closest we´ll get to being volunteers before we swear in in December so I´m really excited.
The following Monday is a milestone in that we will receive our site assignments. Once this happens I should be able to have a much better idea of what my life will be like for the next two years while still having no idea what-so-ever.
I´m half way done with training already and excited and nervous that I can see the end of the training wheels period approaching.
Drinking terere or yerba mate requires a whole ¨team¨ of equipment. Guampas are the traditional cups used to serve yerba and are still often made of cow horns. You use a filtering metal straw called a bombilla to drink (something that I haven´t mastered with the boiling hot yerba mate without burning my tongue). Also necessary is a thermous or thermo. It is necessary to have seperate ones for mate and terere (I´m not sure why) and the terere ones are often pimped out with leather.
If you ask a Paraguayan about the advantages of ka´a you´ll get a laundry list of responses (of varying accuracy) including that it´s a diruetic, reduces obesity, decreases cholesterol, increses muscular endurance, is non-addictive, and includes Iron, Magnesium, Potassium, Calcium, Sodium, and Phosphorous. Luckily I like terere because it is a huge part of the culture here!
We´ve been really lucky with the weather here so far. We had a bit of a hot spell last week where you couldn´t do anything without sweating and it was hard to sleep but since Friday it has been cool enough at night to need a blanket and during the day we are mostly in the shade at class so no problems there.
Next week we´re all off for Long Field Practice when our agroforestry group will split into two groups to visit actual Peace Corps Volunteers. Three other volunteers, a language teacher, and I will be going about an hour and a half south of where we now are for our visit. We will all be staying with different host families and then doing everything from teaching about cooking with soy and still having Guarani class to touring a wetland that they are trying to develop into an ecotourism site. It sounds like it will be crazily busy but it´s the closest we´ll get to being volunteers before we swear in in December so I´m really excited.
The following Monday is a milestone in that we will receive our site assignments. Once this happens I should be able to have a much better idea of what my life will be like for the next two years while still having no idea what-so-ever.
I´m half way done with training already and excited and nervous that I can see the end of the training wheels period approaching.
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