Insert bad bee pun here!

After living in Serafini for three months I just learned that one community member not only has bee hives but actually manages them for increased honey production! The week after next (next week nothing will get done becuause it´s Semana Santa- Saints´ Week) I am planning to go out to his hives and help him collect honey and next spring he will help me set up a hive of my own near my house!!! I am really excited to learn about beekeeping after the couple of days I spent practicing working bees in training and hope to work to improve Paraguayans´knowledge of apiculture, too.

Che Roga Pyahu (My New House)

I am officially moved into my very own house down here in PY! My community has been very understanding about my desire to live alone and last Saturday I had eight Paraguayans cutting the grass in my yard with machetes! I am living in plain sight of three other houses and LOVE all of my neighbors. I have use of one room for my bedroom, a hallway, and more ¨rustic¨ back room. I have electricity and the house is brick with a tin roof insulated with straw. I share a well with one other family but have my own latrine. People have been great about helping me to get everything that I need for my house and helping me set up; I´m borrowing a bed and mattress, chairs, and a little table and have been given sheets, silverware, a cooking pot, and dish towels. I plan to buy and electric burner here in Asuncion this weekend for cooking and have started the search for a used refridgerator but know that I may not find one in my price range for quite some time (if ever). I feel very safe in my house and have had tons of people visit me there- I finally am starting to feel like a ¨real¨ Peace Corps Volunteer.

Work has actually been keeping me really busy lately! I will be buying seeds later today here in Asuncion for pretty much my whole community and spend a good part of next week distributing them and teaching about planting in seed boxes to transplant later. School will start up here soon and I hope to do some work in the local schools.

I got two months worth of mail when my boss visited last week and want to thank everyone back home for keeping me in touch. As I settle in I promise to work more letter writing into my new schedule!

I had a woman in my community who was super worried because since I spend a lot of time outside my freckles are becoming more obvious. She was convinced it was a disease that was spreading and asked if I had seen a doctor about it. I am the closest I will ever be to tan with all of my freckles congealing! But don´t worry, I am being sun-responsible, I promise since Peace Corps pays for my sunscreen! Thank you to all of you diligent tax paying citizens at home!

Speaking of taxes, I won´t have to pay a cent of income taxes as a Peace Corps volunteer since I´m making less than Paraguay´s minimum wage. Really the minimum wage only applies to Asuncion, but it´s good to know that they really do keep us to a standard of living commensurate with the communities we´re living in. The ranch hand on the cattle ranch across the street makes more than I do monthly!

I´ve taken the first steps to live alone and have been given permission to use one room of a currently vacant house. My decision to move was precipitated by several people telling me they are afraid to visit me in the house I´m currently in because the Senora is too direct and abrasive. It is really important to me that people feel they can talk to me and luckily there is a place available for me. The house is really close to two of my favorite families in my community and they are really excited to have me move by them. I´m working on finding the necessities for living alone, a bed, something to cook on, and stuff to cook with, in addition to a fan. I think that I will be able to borrow almost everything I need from a woman who just remairied and moved in with her new husband, leaving her old house completely furnished! I might be able to get a fridge and gas stove from her!!!!! It will take a lot of work to clean up the house but we have a work party planned for next weekend. I probably won´t move in for another month or two but it´s nice for me to know that I will have my own place.

My boss from Asuncion will be coming out to my site on Wednesday and I´m busy planning a big meeting for him to explain more about what Peace Corps is and what an agroforestry can be. I will also get a big backlog of mail from the office in Asuncion (almost two months worth!) and my bike! There´s some debate as to if I will get my cell phone, or not, but if I do I will disperse the number and if not I´ll pick it up in Asuncion on Feb 15 when I have a trip in planned.

I´m back on my Regina Spektor kick and have found the first verse of her song On The Radio to be very appropriate for my current situation

This is how it works
It feels a little worse
Moral is down a bit as I start to see some of the deeper problems of soil degradation and general health and sanitation in my community.
Than when we drove our hearse
Right through that screaming crowd
After living in Madison it is kind of a shock to walk here in Paraguay where right of way goes to the biggest thing moving across the street, sidewalk, or lawn.
While laughing up a storm
One thing that I actually can understand here is laughter and luckily the people in my community have great senses of humor!
Until we were just bone
Until it got so warm
That none of us could sleep
I´m feeling the heat induced insomnia this time of year. Luckily I have a fan in my room but I can´t open the window at night because that would indicate that I want the ¨jakare¨ (Guarani word for crocodile used to refer to men who visit women via open windows) to visit me.
And all the styrofoam
Began to melt away
Here styrofoam doesn´t have a chance to melt away before the chickens eat it.
We tried to find some worms
Actually I´m in search of some California reds myself right now ... I want to start using worms to make compost and encouraging Paraguayans to do the same.
To aid in the decay
Compost piles were the focus of the meeting I led this week and next week I´ll be visiting houses to start compost piles with each family that wants one. Luckily for those purposes, things rot amazingly quickly in the heat and humidity we have here.
But none of them were home
Inside their catacomb
A million ancient bees
Apiculture, another project I want to do some work on. There´s one farmer in my community who has a bee hive but he doesn´t have a smoker or mask and claims that the bees are really angry so I´ll hold off on that until I can find the appropriate equipment.
Began to sting our knees
Mosquitos are more the worry as far as stings go. Luckily, I´ve spent time in Manitoba and Alaska so the mosquitos that they have here seem like nothing (and don´t carry malaria, or West Nile for that matter)
While we were on our knees
Something called All Saints Week is coming up or has started, I really need to figure out what that is ...
Praying that disease
Would leave the ones we love
There are some pretty serious health problems in my community and their treatment ranges from medicinal weeds to curiously popular injections. Praying for diseases to leave is also very popular and I have been asked to pray for several sick children.
And never come again

I´m in Caacupe right now waiting for a meeting with the other volunteers in my area of the country. After the meeting I´m going to visit another volunteer´s site to get a feel for her work and community! Work is going well and I actually got out into a farm field yesterday and hoed with a Paraguayan farmer after building a fence with him for a garden!

Unexpected projects

While I have planted some trees so far in my first month as an ¨agroforestry¨ volunteer by far the majority of my time is spent in other endeavors. I have ended up using some skills that I didn´t really anticipate being useful here in Paraguay. For example, bacteriology lessons have come in handy in my recent yogurt making and all of the stained glass work I did in high school helped me last week when I made drinking glasses out of wine bottles. Lately I´ve been knitting a lot and after teaching one of my friends to knit I mentioned that bamboo knitting needles are popular in the states. Her mom overheard this, walked over to a pile of dry bamboo-like plant that they grow here and started paring it down with a machete. Once she had a desirable diameter we used broken pieces of glass from our glass project to shave the needles down and make them even. Now I´m experimenting with knitting plastic bags to make tougher shopping bags for when people come into town to shop.

In the lines of more ¨technical¨work I´ve started a series of meetings to prepare gardens with the families in my community. We´re hoping to buy seeds together to get a better price and next week I´m going to demonstrate how to make compost piles and then start them with every house that wants help. Right now it´s too hot to actually plant vegetables without complicated, expensive shade structures so we´re planning for March when people usually actually get seeds in the ground. I´m also planning a plantation with Don Ramon, the farmer I¨m living with, for wood for his grandkids´houses. The amazing thing is that here in Paraguay you can actually harvest wood for construction from 8 or 10 year old trees!!!!

I´m off to make peanut butter with a family that just harvested a quarter hectare of peanuts! I hope it turns out!

Settling In

I´m more or less moved into my new house in rural Paraguay and the days are starting to get some sort of rhythm after my first week in my site. In addition to the standard, I don´t know what to do and am supposed to integrate into this community walking around and talking to people, I actually got to do some pretty productive things for my first week. I spent all day Tuesday in San Jose (where I´m currently using the Internet) in the DEAG office (the governmental agricultural extension agency). There are 4 technicians there who could be a great help to me and are already working with an agricultural committee in my community to plant green manures to improve soil health. It was good for me to hear the tecnicians giving advice in Guarani and interesting to see who came to the office (not many people) and why. On Wednesday I dove right in and did some mango grafting with my host dad, Ramon. He had the root stock ready to be grafted and knows how to graft. I was glad that I could at least add something to the process by insisting that we clean every knife and implement and resanitize between plants. He understood why we would want to do that but had never sterilized before when he did grafting. I hope that we have a higher success rate than he usually has to reinforce the lesson. I´ve also gotten to meet some really friendly neighbors and go to a meeting of the agricultural committee where I was actually able to offer resources that they wanted and were excited about (access to green manure seeds in the Peace Corps Office).

So, yeah I´ve been busy but had plenty of time to be ¨tranquilopa¨as well. With Christmas and new year coming up it´s hard to talk too much work with people and I´m excited to see how the holidays go down in rural Paraguay!

It looks like I´ll be able to have pretty regualar access to the internet here and should be able to keep my blog up! However, still waiting on the phone and probably won´t get it until February when I head into Asuncion- more on that when I actually pick it up.

Enjoy the holidays and snow!

To the Trenches and Back

5 days to swear in and counting!

I bet you thought that almost three months when I left the US I was going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, well, that´s not exactly the case. I have spent all of my time in Paraguay up to this point as a Peace Corps Trainee attending classes and being evaluated against prestablished competencies. On Friday, December 14, I have been recommended by the training facility to be sworn in as an actual Peace Corps Volunteer and begin my two years of sevice. After a day in Asuncion to gear up I´ll head to my site and try and stay there for the next couple of months minus runs to the pueblo 4 km away.

Speaking of my site, I spent 5 days visiting to get a feel for what it´s like and be better able to plan for specific projects that I may be doing there. I visited every one of the 51 occupied houses in my site during that time and got to know a couple of girls about my age who aren´t married and don´t have kids!!! Overall the visit went really well and I am really excited to get back there. Some of the projects that people expressed interest in were home made pesticides, home gardens, nitrogen fixing green manures, nutrition information and cooking classes, and planting trees for living fence posts. One man in my site has a bee hive but no smoker so I hope to help him actually manage his hive. The family that I will be living with is great and they have plenty of extra space so I won´t feel like I´m imposing. They even have an electric oven so I will be able to bake!!! I will have to do a lot of explaining what Peace Corps is since I am the first volunteer in my site but I am excited to get to explain that to people.

I´m going to miss my host family here close to Asuncion but they said I can visit them when I go into Asuncion and plan to at some points.

When I actually swear in I will change from a PCT to PCV on my address and will use mailbox number 116 (see address changes on the sidebar). I will also have a phone and people can use Skype to call me for cheap or send me text messages on the internet for free, I´ll include the site when I send out my number via e-mail next week. If I forget to include you and you want my phone number, just e-mail me.

Soooooooo close!