Friday, December 2, 2011

Thanksgiving in the Summertime

It is summer once again in Paraguay. School is out, the crops are growing and it is getting real hot real fast. Since my last post I have changed houses and moved to the other side of my community. My current house is a modest structure that faces some beautiful pasture land and backed by fruit trees. I had to vacate the old place because the house owners decided to leave Buenos Aires early and restart their lives in Paraguay (About 10% of Paraguay’s population works abroad mostly in Buenos Aires, Spain, and the Northeastern US and send their income back to their families in Paraguay). But the change has been nice, while moving was a little stressful especially considering all of the activities I had going on and only recently returning from a vacation, the outcome has been a tremendous improvement in my happiness. So after a couple of trips in a horse drawn wagon loaded with all of my possessions I was officially moved out of my old house and into my new rustic residence. The best way to describe my current house is as a fixer-upper. When I first moved in there was no electricity or running water and full of coriander seeds. Luckily I happen to be fairly handy and I got the electrical problem fixed and then I started with the plumbing which involved replacing old broken plastic pipes and then adding a couple taps, one inside and the other outside. The neighbors were very impressed and they now want me to do a little plumbing in their house! My neighbors, Ña Ramona and Karai Amarilla (Mr. Yellow), are the best part of my new house. They have adopted me as their son and describe me as a son that fell to them from heaven to their visitors. They are both in their late 60’s and extremely respected in the community. Ramona is the community medicine woman and gets several visitors a day looking for her natural remedies. Mr. Yellow is a farmer who still works out in the field just about every day. They are super kind and invite me to eat at least one meal a day with them as well as to use their refrigerator as my new place does not have one. They are also in love with my dog and my goat and feed them 2 meals a day. This has been a great relief to me especially while travelling or working away from the house. They do all this essentially in exchange for my help around the house and homemade breads. My new home has also come with several roommates: two toilet frogs, one tarantula the size of my hand, 2-3 giant toads, the occasional kitchen lizard and a young family of doves above my porch (I have already killed my wasp roommates/guards). The houses location has put me about 1km further from most of my work commitments but also to a sparsely populated pocket of the community which results in spectacular stars and quieter mornings.

With the end of the school year came the end of my English Class and Computer Classes and looking back at the numbers it is amazing to think that I introduced some basic English to about 30 students and computing basics to some 130 kids. I never thought I would be teaching so much when I came to Paraguay as an Environmental Education Volunteer, but it is my belief that as a volunteer it is important to work towards the needs of the community instead of working towards a set of premade goals. This past week I was a proud teacher and was able to give out 70 Certificates to one of my schools where I have taught computation for about 6 months. Certificates are a big deal in Paraguay and are essentially diplomas that show the holder has received some sort of technical training. The kids were super excited and the school principals and parents committee through together a little ceremony with food and drinks and picture taking while I made a power point presentation showing everyone the work that the kids had done over the past few months. After I got up and said a few words they even asked me to come back and teach more next year and possibly 2 days a week to cover other areas such as working in the garden as well as an English course. It is hard to commit to those things right now but I will see where the next year takes me. Now that summer is here I plan on continuing one of my computer courses for a few more weeks and then throw together some summer camps and get back to working in the fields with the farmers. I currently have 25 watermelon plants in Karai Nelson’s field that we are taking care of together and I recently obtained a bunch of Moringa seeds for my old host family that I will help with in directing the planting and maintenance (Moringa is currently a huge deal in PY and is mainly used as a medicinal herb in terere but in other parts of the world is described as the miracle tree as it acts as a green manure, cures all sorts of diseases and provides an excellent source of nutrition). The price of seed in Paraguay has skyrocketed from about $60 to $300 for 2 lbs. Just insane but since the seeds are so hard to come by people are willing to pay that price and the current potential for income is huge with people raking in lots of money from trees they planted only a year ago. I just hope that the moringa bubble isn’t on the verge of popping for the sake of a lot of people. I am also working with a women’s group who is about to receive a bunch of special egg-laying chickens that will produce a high quality egg that can be sold to local markets. The other project coming back into the picture is bee-keeping which I am sure my family will be super excited about. I have about twice as many farmers who want to start working with bees now and need help capturing a wild hive. Hopefully, I don’t have any incidents as bad as last year and if I do I will be sure not to post pictures on facebook. My first one will be tomorrow and possibly 2 more next week. At least I will get some free honey out of it!

In Paraguay, Thanksgiving is an unknown holiday that we crazy Americans celebrate.  Yet at the same time one that they can appreciate as for us it is a time of sharing with family and being thankful for what we have and the people that we have in our lives. So to celebrate a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers congregated in a small town called La Colmena (a town with a large population of Japanese) and celebrated Thanksgiving first by going to a beautiful waterfall way of the beaten path and spending the day cliff jumping and lounging around drinking wine and sharing with friends and then going back to town and having a Japanese food feast provided by the hotel. The next day we all travelled to another volunteers site and prepared our own more American style feast and spent most of the day chopping, baking, grilling, and drinking. The result was more food than 40 Americans could eat and an opportunity to share Thanksgiving with the community and going to various neighbors houses with heaping plates of food. It was a great time and a wonderful way to pass a holiday where all of us were missing our families back home. Tragically, after another Thanksgiving gathering in a different part of the country another volunteer was killed in a car accident. This terribly sad event has shocked all of us who knew her as well of those who did not and all of our thought and prayers this past week have been with her family back home in the States.