John in Paraguay

[tlhparaguay]

Posters

Poster for my family/personal finance workshop

This post could also be called “Projects”. Most of my projects are courses, workshops, small business consulting, and those don’t lend themselves to interesting pictures—think of a group of people in a classroom or two people talking at a table. All the courses are interactive, mostly sessions where we talk about a technique, practice it, and then the homework is doing it for yourself.

The finance class in the poster at the beginning is an interactive workshop of seven sessions on values, saving, budgeting, managing conflict over money, cooperatives/banks, borrowing money, forming new habits. A neighborhood group and a social services organization asked me to do something on personal finance during my community study. I have been interested in this topic forever and I worked for many years with pension plans and companies offering retirement savings education. Every institution that holds people’s money is continually developing material and tools for budgeting, saving, and investing.

People are terrified about finances. It’s probably second only to public speaking, and an interactive finance class combines both! I did the course for the first time in a night high school, for people who didn’t finish or who work during the day. It has a very diverse set of students: It is very hard (impossible) to come up with a budget example that’s relevant for both a 15-year-old living with his parents and a 56-year-old with six kids and her parents at home! To get people involved and working together, my activities were things like tossing a ball around a circle to complete a sentence. “I’m saving for…” toss, “Young people save for…” toss, “Savings help you…” toss. Or form groups by choosing between savings goals: Emergencies, Personal Use, Future Opportunities. Discuss and make a group presentation on the goal. These kinds of activities make up a large part of my Peace Corps work.

Slide from family finance class

Posters for a community tree planting day, and for the training on planting and care

I’m currently working on a community tree-planting project. Some volunteers in other sectors have goals to establish gardens and tree nurseries. My project is more to help community initiative: getting donated trees, arranging training on planting and care in the first year. This work comes under the “citizen participation” goal of community economic development: leadership, group formation, better group interactions, like setting goals, positive communication, managing conflict. Volunteerism. I worked with a couple of community tree-planting projects in training, so I understood the need for community commitment and involvement: If a tree isn’t protected from cows and watered in its first year, it won’t survive. That requires individual families, community groups, and institutions like schools to participate in the training and commit to the care. Which leads to a big, visible community improvement project. Hopefully as an example for future ones!

Business plan course

My biggest project and the one I started first, more than a year ago, is a youth entrepreneurship program called “Paraguay Emprende”. It’s an annual cycle of teacher training, a business plan course, a national competition and workshop, and consulting and mentoring for new businesses. I am on the national steering committee, responsible for the consulting and mentoring part.

Paraguay Emprende annual cycle

I started planning my class in October 2016 with the person in the City Hall who’s responsible for continuing education classes. (Most of those classes are trades, like baking, cosmetology, soldering.) We began a 15-week course in March 2017, on generating and evaluating business ideas, including a community study; operations, marketing, sales strategy; budgeting, accounting, legal requirements, ethical and socially responsible business practices. Each session analyzes business examples with activities like developing a marketing plan or an operating budget; the homework is to do the activity for your own business idea. At the end, each participating has the components of a business plan in the homeworks. They write it up and make a short PowerPoint presentation in a competition judged by local small business owners. The winners of each class participate in a workshop and a national competition in the capital in August. The national winners, and others who start their businesses, form teams with a Peace Corps volunteer consultant to help with the technical issues the course was about and a Paraguayan business owner mentor who helps them adjust to life as a young entrepreneur and to the business culture. That’s the part I help coordinate.

Common types of businesses are a restaurant, a bakery, copyshop/school supplies/Internet access, landscaping. This year’s winners were a phone app for local businesses, a strawberry farm and distribution business, a vegetarian/vegan restaurant, and a “Farm for the 21st century”, a model rural farm focused on Stevia and milk products.

It’s exciting to see these young people develop an idea, give a passionate presentation of it, and start a new business in their community. The participants in this project consistently impressed and surprised me with their hard work and imagination.

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I made the posters on canva.com. I can’t recommend that graphic design site enough.

[tlhparaguay]

Winter

Moreno (cat) and I were trying to warm up near the brazier on a winter day

I love hot weather. Once I would have said I love the summer, but that was before I lived 25 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. So you must love Paraguay, people say. I do. But, no one told me about the winter. People lied. “There really is no winter in Paraguay.” “It only lasts a couple of months and even then, it will be a little cold for a day and then warm back up.” The reality of the winter of 2016 was two-week periods with lows in the 30s and 40s every day and the highs barely into the 50s. Frost in the morning. Some people will laugh at the idea that this is cold, just as some people laughed that day in 2014 when Bay Area schools were closed because it rained. Just as in Berkeley, where there are practically no storm sewers and they’re clogged anyway and no power because trees fall down in the rain, so here, we have no heat, no insulation, no hot water, only wooden blinds to close the holes in the walls, and nowhere inside to be except in bed. In the morning, you put your feet on the 30° floor to walk to splash 33° water on your face before you sit outside in a polar wind near a coal brazier, one side of you in the wind, the other too close to the 400° coals. You’re wearing two pairs of socks, long underwear, jeans, three layers of shirts and a jacket, but you will never get the cold out of your bones until you go to bed at night in your drafty room and wait sleeplessly, because it’s too cold to sleep, for the day to repeat. For two weeks. Then it does warm up for a few days. Before it’s cold again. The first cold day was April 26. That was the day I traveled back from my site visit. It was also raining. I found a picture of people in coats one night in October. That’s more than a couple of months.

Watching a soccer game on TV in June. We eat, watch TV, hang around outside in all seasons.

The view from my frequent winter position, one side 30°, the other side on fire, turning from time to time, like a rotisserie chicken.

Music on a night in October (and TV soccer). People are still wearing coats.

Why the lies?? To be fair, everyone in Paraguay said it was the first real winter in five years. The active volunteer memory is about two years. And it was an unusually harsh winter, the worst in more than ten. I had seen, on a what-to-pack list on a blog, “Sleeping bag. Don’t bring a 40° one; it’s not enough.” Mine is 20° and it was my most prized possession all winter.

For those who laughed, it’s also true it’s hard to be prepared. You’re always coldest in places where the cold can’t kill you. I’ve never been cold in the winter indoors in Boston or Toronto. But I lived 11 years in a Berkeley house with no insulation, windows that didn’t fully close, and no heat in most of the house. We’d cluster around a floor heater in the hall to the bedrooms and when anyone needed to go to the kitchen, they’d say “I’m heading out there if anyone needs anything.” It’s just that I had thought that nightmare was behind me.

I couldn’t write about it then; it was too close. But this winter hasn’t been bad. There was frost a couple of times, but it really was just a day here and there and most weeks the lows were in the 60s. It’s September now and we just had a little bit of cold at the beginning of the week. Every time now, we all say, I hope that was the last. I hope. Today the high was a beautiful 92. I can’t wait for December and 105 (“feels like” 115, aka heaven). I do love Paraguay.

January 4, 2017, the day I got back from Christmas vacation, in my back yard

[tlhparaguay]

Animals

Animals in the chacra, a small family farm

The squawking and crowing is constant, day and night. I don’t even hear it any more—yesterday someone said “I always know John joined the conference call when I hear the roosters.” So I guess they’re not constant everywhere. I don’t know who invented the myth that roosters crow at dawn. They do only because they crow each hour and minute of the day.

But chickens are the animals I have the most different view of. They seem very smart and social. I love watching the mothers train their chicks to scratch and how they lead them around the yards for the first weeks.

Mom and her chicks on my compost pile

They seem to eat everything except citrus fruit.  I just throw all food scraps in the yard for them. They especially love banana peels. I’ve never seen an animal run faster than a chicken across the yard, tripping over itself, when I throw out a banana peel.

This guy wanders all over the house like he’s the boss

Chickens at a kid’s birthday party and insouciantly wandering past the grill

Every few days a couple of roosters pair off in my backyard. They spend most of their time staring at each other and then suddenly one attacks.

All the birds climb into trees at night

Cows are the next most ubiquitous, 24 hour munchers of grass, trees, bushes. I’m sometimes startled leaving my house to find a couple eating my bushes. They also like hanging out on the roads, which provokes a lot of complaints about accidents. We’re not allowed to drive cars and our lack of skill in dodging a cow when you come around a curve fast on the highway is one reason. (One that didn’t get dodged by a truck made for the stinkiest day in my first month.)

Highway out of my town to the east

On a walk at the end of the day

Less happy cows at the dump, where I went to take pictures of the trash fires

Pigs on the loose are less common. Just as I was surprised by the intelligence of chickens, I find pigs unexpectedly stupid seeming. The little ones are more curious.

Dogs are everywhere. Apoplectic barkers in fenced yards with “Ferocious Dog” signs on the gates, cowering strays in the streets, the occasional small pet of an upper-middle class family.

I’m also fascinated by how they all live together. Cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, Guinea fowl, turkeys, geese, cows, horses, pigs, goats all roam around and together with little conflict. I can’t believe the cats don’t eat the chicks and the dogs don’t eat the cats. Another animal myth of inter-species hostility. Almost all the fighting is within species, chickens pecking each other once they are independent of their mothers, dogs fighting, cows pushing each other back and forth with their heads, cat fights at night.

Animals wandering around the kitchen

Huge hideous toads only come out at night or when it rains a lot

Other animals prefer the night too. Once I got up in the night to go to the bathroom, which is outside the house. On my way back in, I noticed a huge tarantula on the back door that I had missed on my way out. I didn’t have the presence of mind to get the camera before I shooed it away, because I was trying to make sure it ran out into the yard and not into the house.

Feeding time for the birds at the chacra

[tlhparaguay]

San Juans

San Juan in Villarrica, the nearby big city

June 24 is the feast day of John the Baptist. The night before has a long tradition in Europe as a midsummer celebration with bonfires. Here there’s also a big municipal celebration with fire, traditional foods and games, a comic rural wedding.

There’s also a season of smaller San Juans from late May to early July, where local institutions, including all the schools, use them as fundraisers: you pay a small fee to enter and buy tickets for the food and games. I went to four or five last year and this. These San Juans are a lot like Christmas parties in the US, spread through December and even into January. More broadly, the San Juan season is a lot like our Christmas season. There’s a two-week winter break in the schools in late June-early July. When there’s a week of warm weather after it gets cold in the fall, it’s called a “veranillo de San Juan”, a little summer of San Juan, a yearly reference like our Indian summers. It’s a season of festivity and light in the cold and dark.

The traditional foods include patties of mandioca, beef, and greens, mandioca empanadas, grilled pork kebabs, mbeju, and “caburé”, chipa dough molded on a stick and baked over coals.

Neighborhood San Juan in my town. Left: caburé; right: pork kebabs

Villarrica food preparation was on a larger scale

There’s a brass band and traditional dances. (At some point in the evening someone will approach me to explain the activities, make sure I’m eating the food and to talk with satisfaction about small town life and how they keep the traditions alive, even though the youth of today would prefer to be on their cellphones.)

The traditional games for adults include climbing a tall greased pole and walking over burning coals in bare feet. The kids’ games are pin the tail on the donkey, knock down a set of blocks with two pitches, shoot balloons with a BB gun, and a sort of soccer game with a ball of rags that’s on fire(!).

Kids’ fireball soccer at my neighborhood San Juan

Dark masked figures run through the crowd

The first year, everything was new and I never knew what I was experiencing until it was over. No one explained what was happening because everyone already understands. The second year, I almost always know: the annual rituals of a small town do not vary much. I have a picture of the cycles and I know that when I’m at the first school party on a Thursday night in May where kids are playing with fire, it’s San Juan season and there will be many more parties.

[tlhparaguay]

Food

The Paraguay version of “as American as apple pie” involves mandioca. Mandi’o in Guaraní. It’s a root vegetable that’s native to this area, although now it’s a staple crop in the tropics around the world. I had never knowingly eaten it, or even heard of it, before I came to Paraguay. In other countries, it’s called cassava, yuca, tapioca, and of course I have eaten cassava leaves, breads made with yuca flour, used tapioca in pie fillings, but I don’t think I ever ate the root.

Nothing I can say could exaggerate its presence and importance. There is always, always a plate of mandioca on the table (photo at beginning). Every morning, people peel and boil the roots in their family plots on the edge of town and bring them in. We eat it all day and what’s left is cut up and mixed with the rest of the day’s leftovers to take back to the farm for the pigs.  I eat it every day, usually multiple times and I now cannot imagine many foods without it, especially grilled or fried food. Mandioca flour is used to make fritters and savory cakes.

The second staple food is beef. My host mother doesn’t believe in eating beef every day, so we only have it 3-4 times a week. (That’s at least 20 times as often as I ate beef in the US; it might be 100 times more often. It’s not that I was a vegetarian, but I almost always chose pork, or chicken, instead of beef. Or fish, duck, rabbit, or crocodile. All of which are eaten here, but sadly, much less frequently than beef.) In my family, several days a week we have beans or chicken, sometimes pork, in the place of beef, beef, beef.

The rest of this post is about a normal day’s menu. It’s not about barbecues and grilling, traditional foods only made at holidays or festivals, baking, food preparation, raising and slaughtering animals, how people eat and meal etiquette, fishing, or tropical fruit. All those topics need their own posts.

You don’t eat breakfast first thing in the morning. Since that’s 4am for a lot of people, that makes sense. You just drink mate tea (Paraguayans) or coffee (me). Mid-morning, you eat some fried food like fritters, eggs, fried mandioca, fried mandioca-cornmeal cakes. The fritters are made from a mandioca flour, egg, milk, and scallion dough and are called “tortillas”. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked if we have tortillas in the US. Yes and no, right. We do have unrelated things called “tortillas”. We also have fritters, but they’re not made with mandioca flour. People develop a more and more pitying look as they understand that we don’t have the exact Paraguayan tortilla. More than one person said “I wouldn’t want to live in a world without tortillas.” (Me neither.) The cakes of mandioca flour, cornmeal, and cheese are called mbeju. I never had anything much like it before here, but also delicious. If there’s a fried egg, you just saw it laid a couple of minutes before and you know its mom. It’s all washed down with cocido, a tea made by adding hot coals to a mix of sugar and yerba mate to caramelize the sugar and toast the mate, then add water and pour it through a sieve.

Top: mbeju with cocido (mandioca in the background); bottom: tortillas with mandioca

Lunch is a soup, stew, or noodle or rice plate with the beef. (Or with beans or chicken in my family, or sometimes with pork or fish.)

Clockwise from top left: beef stew with rice; beans and squash; chicken with noodles; different type of beans

Less common special lunches that I love. Top: tripe (mondongo); bottom: cow feet with beans

The small, late dinner is fried food like eggs, mandioca-egg-cheese scramble (super delicious), empanadas. There are many types of cornbread, usually also including mandioca flour, and sometimes variations on pure mandioca-flour breads: chipa (cheese bread), sopa (made with mature corn that is fine milled and with onions), chipa guasu (made with fresh corn; the best versions are like a melting corn soufflé). All are awesome when they’re just made and in a family, they rarely last long enough to be eaten any other way. And the plate of mandioca, like a bread basket, in the middle.

Clockwise from top left: mandioca-egg-cheese scramble; beef empanadas with ground mandioca shell; liver; beef with eggs

[tlhparaguay]

First months in Mbocayaty

Community Maps

The first few months in our communities, we’re supposed to listen and learn. We’re all supposed to do that and not start big projects for the first three months. The idea is that we should not jump into work until we know what the community wants and needs. I heard of and saw some jarring examples in training of development projects that gave people what they “should” need and failed because people didn’t want it, didn’t actually need it, it wouldn’t work in their climate, with their plants and animals, culturally. Or it fell apart when the development workers left: they said “if you’re working alone, you’re not working.” Always have a local partner; better if the partner is actually the leader. And so on.

And in my case, I had no other option. I’m the first volunteer in my town and I’m not working anywhere (school, cooperative, cultural center, etc.). I wouldn’t have known what to do. So I spent three months talking with people. I interviewed people in the town hall, health center, police department, cooperative, a house of nuns, farmers market, school district, agricultural extension, neighborhood committees, youth groups, small businesses, families, and hundreds of individuals. The most revealing thing I did was a community mapping exercise with 35 groups, including every 7-12 grader in all the schools and a night school. (The picture at the top shows 20 of the maps.) I told them a little about the Peace Corps, economic development, me and then asked them to draw a map of their community. It could be the whole town, just the center, their neighborhood, their rural section. What’s there, what’s missing; what they use, what no one uses; the resources and the needs. It was very open to avoid me suggesting the answers and so a lot of needs were things I probably won’t directly address: a factory to increase employment, a university to draw students and so the ones here don’t have to travel to neighboring cities to study, paved streets and lighting, trash collection. I also learned as I walked around, bought food, toothpaste, furniture, an iron, a cable conduit, caulk and paint, a winter coat and long underwear, and wine. I started to pay bills.

Terere with my host mom in the yard with two of her grandchildren (aka “host nephews”)

I had informal conversations with many people and families over “terere” in the afternoon: that’s like summer afternoon iced tea on the porch. Terere is iced tea: iced water infused with yerba mate. There are no porches, though, and there’s a thermos for the ice and water, a specific type of cup and straw and there’s only one that’s passed around. There’s an etiquette about who pours the water, who gets to adjust the straw if it’s getting clogged with the yerba, what you say when you don’t want any more. But other than those differences, it’s iced tea on the porch. Slow conversation. Long silences. Laconic gossip about passersby. Where you learn what people think is really going on.

All this was also “community integration”. Integration is essential to understand the community and have people to work with. It’s also supposed to make me safer. And it leads to a small social life and more happiness. The most important and rewarding part of that for me is my host family: I had the tremendous luck to get a great family. And a numerous one: there are more than 40 people in my family in Mbocayaty and others who visit frequently. A common Peace Corps question is when you knew you were integrated. I knew at my birthday in my host family last year, when I had been in Mbocayaty a little less than three months.

My first birthday in Paraguay, in 2016, with my host family in the yard. We’re all laughing because they just sang Happy Birthday in English and Spanish and I thought they were done, until they started the third version in Guaraní.

After a few months, when I had written my community study, I went back around to all the groups to present a summary of what I had learned and a list of proposed projects. I had told them I would share the information and conclusions of our community mapping and conversations. I explained how I arrived at the project ideas as the intersection of 1) the community needs and resources, what they told me, 2) the Peace Corps Paraguay objectives and plan for community economic development, focusing on citizen action, entrepreneurship, and employability skills, and 3) my experience and qualifications. The main projects are a workshop on how to write a business plan, sessions on family and personal finance, improving how trash is handled (stop burning trash, more recycling, start municipal trash collection) through developing a citizen group. More generally, help groups work better by setting goals, improving communication, managing conflict. And help set up a library. A year later, I have done some of those and begun them all. (Each one should have its own post one day!)

[tlhparaguay]

The Site: Mbocayaty (weeks 8-9)

It was Fabri’s seventh birthday the weekend I stayed in his house for my site visit, so I wasn’t the only guest: he has about 40 uncles and aunts (both of his parents have 10 siblings and their families joked they could each put together a soccer team). How many cousins? Laughs and “we lost count a long time ago.” 11 of us slept in the three-room house Saturday night with many others at grandparents and some of the uncles and aunts.

I’ll be living the next two years in Mbocayaty (bo-ka-ja-TUH, where the UH is pronounced like the vowel in “should”). It’s in the department of Guairá in the center of the eastern part of Paraguay. It’s a small town with about 4000 people and another 1600 in close rural areas. That’s not a small site, but I feel like it’s small enough to meet everyone and work with the whole community. It’s also close to Villarrica, an important city, so a supermarket, bank, and stores are less than an hour away. Villarrica is not a large city, like Asunción, Ciudad del Este, or Encarnación, but it is a favorite of many and a cultural center.

I’m very happy about the assignment. We had three interviews with our sector directors over the previous three months, beginning in week 1, although I didn’t know about “site selection” when they started. After the mentor visit and field practice and meeting many current volunteers, I had a lot better idea of sites, including the dimensions of rural (“campo”)/developed, Asunción and Central/”interior”, new/follow-up volunteer, school/other institution. (Another is youth focus, but everyone in Paraguay works with a lot of youth, given the demographics and need: 50% of the population is under 25 and there’s a widespread sense of an opportunity to change the country by supporting this generation that can be taken in the next 10 or so years or lost forever (!). Example: Fabri is an only child; most of those 40 uncles and aunts have 0-3 children, not 11 like their parents.) But despite what I learned, I didn’t have a preference and I only knew a few of us who did. I threw myself on the mercy of the program director (in a long-winded way—I got around to saying that in my last interview after explaining how great it was to have learned so much, but I thought they still had the best sense of where I could contribute).

Mbocayaty is on a major highway and there’s a cute developed center for two blocks off that and then it’s unpaved roads and countryside. It’s beautiful. There’s a range of hills to the south that you can see from everywhere in town and that include the highest point in Paraguay (2762 feet—Paraguay is pretty flat).

The house I stayed in is on the edge of town and this is what you see out the front door.

Monday I walked around and took a couple of pictures. (I didn’t take many during my stay—I didn’t feel like it was a great way to introduce myself.)

I got back to all the chickens standing still in front of the house, something semi-surreal that I’ve never seen again—normally chickens forage widely and are constantly running around.

I also visited grandad’s chacra (like a small farm) a few times to get food for the barbecue and birthday party on Sunday: bake chipa and sopa (another delicious Paraguayan cornbread, despite its name) in the wood-fired oven, crush sugar cane for its juice.

I also visited a few schools, but the trip included a weekend and the main point was to start to get to know the community to return in less than two weeks!

[tlhparaguay]

Training and trees (week 7)

The last week like this. Language every morning, technical training every afternoon: family finances, types of financial institutions (banks, credit unions, pay day loans), youth job skills/assessment/confidence/leadership. Small business consultations! I’ve been interested in that since before I applied to the Peace Corps. It sounds like it’s hard and if you manage to do much, it will be later, after you have built strong relationships and credibility.

We also had some visitors who talked about secondary projects they have done:

-          Teaching English. Almost no one wants to teach a big English class, but many of us will have to because that’s what our community prioritizes. Some people find creative ways to link it to other projects: teach English (with some strong conditions on attendance, homework, etc.—we all know about low-impact language teaching) in exchange for each student donating an equal amount of time to community projects of their choice. Can be clean-up day, help in a community center, ….  

-          Geography

-          Tree planting. This is a favorite of many—see below!

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On Friday, I went to a friend’s host mom’s 60th birthday party. There were mariachis.

My friend is Mexican and, well, you could call that performance a mariachi interpretation. My host mom’s daughter made the party dress and I went as her guest. The three of us:

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We worked on trial projects throughout the first months to learn processes of municipal organizations and get feedback. David and I worked with trees. There is an ecological park where we lived in Villeta with walking paths, small soccer canchas and play structures for kids, and a plant nursery. From the first weekend, we went running, played soccer (there’s a picture in week 4), and met people there.

(Also the picture at the beginning.) It was unlike anywhere else in any of our communities and we were curious about how it happened. About 15 years ago, the city of Villeta was thinking of selling some empty fields on a then dirt road at edge of town. Don Epifanio lived in the neighborhood and he organized people to build a park on the fields, to pave the road and plant trees along it. A typical Villeta road vs. the avenue today:

David and I learned about those projects, about the nursery, worked there, and help with a tree planting at a school on the weekends.

There was little record of the impact of don Epi’s initiative and the neighborhood committee’s work, so we also made a presentation on it that we hope can be reused in sessions on composting to show the impact of citizen action. (I took the pictures above for it.)

Planting trees is important in Paraguay. There has been massive deforestation (and it’s still going on). Local and international organizations here will give us trees to plant. But you have to have community support and a plan or it won’t work. 1) You have to choose the right trees for the location and purpose. 2) The neighbors have to water them for a long time or they’ll die. 3) If you don’t protect them from cows, they’ll be gone by the end of the first day. You dodge cows (and evidence of their recent presence) everywhere you walk. I watch them eating wherever I am:  sitting in front of my house, waiting for the bus in the city.

Trees are something everyone in the community sees now, later when they and their impact are bigger, and others will see after we’re gone. It’s easy to get 50 trees. If you have a strong case, you can get 1000.

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[tlhparaguay]

Santani (week 6)

We went in groups on a “Long Field Practice” to visit a current volunteer, staying with families in the community (mine was great again!), learning about the volunteer’s work and life, and doing a couple of sessions in institutions where they work. I went to outside Santani in San Pedro, a northern department.

Daniel, our host volunteer, lives and works in a semi-rural community outside of Santani and we visited a community center, two schools, and a neighborhood where he works with a woman’s committee.

My family has a big house with the same kinds of open spaces as the one in Areguá and an outdoor kitchen. But they also have a big family (seven and there were always visitors), so I shared a room with the sons (and a visiting aunt was in with the daughters).

(A side note. This was the second Paraguayan family I stayed with that included a respected woman without children or husband and I was starting to think more about the stereotypes I had of Paraguayan society and the advice about integration we had gotten. It had begun even in the application process, but once I got the invitation to Paraguay, there was more advice and even requirements for our behavior so that we could integrate into a traditional society and be effective as development workers. No visible tattoos or piercings. No facial hair for men. Don’t tell people if you’re not religious. Don’t tell people if you’re not straight. You won’t have friends of the opposite sex. I think that advice is 100% warranted and I think we agree: we didn’t come here to express ourselves and we want to be effective. But it also led me one false step further, to expectations about Paraguay that are not really accurate. In our experience of the training communities, our families, other places we have visited, and stories of other volunteers, Paraguay is not homogenously machista, socially conservative, religious, or unaccustomed and hostile to LGBT people. Varied family structures, roles, and appearances are everywhere. In the first few weeks, I may have said “it was all lies!” a few times. But now I have a hard time remembering why I was surprised. This is not the first time I’ve lived in a different country. (Or a different culture: I grew up in North Carolina but lived in Berkeley more than half my life.) The advice wasn’t bad. You can easily alienate yourself if you put your cultural values ahead of knowing and working with people.)

In addition to the places the volunteer was working, we played soccer with neighborhood kids, had a pizza night with everyone (in my house!) where we also met a lot of other high school students in the neighborhood, and visited the volunteer’s house. He has a bigger (or crazier) heart than most of us:  he has about 20 cats—he adopted abandoned ones that showed up, including ones dumped on his doorstep. And he paid for their medical care and sterilization, which had a seriously destructive effect on his finances.

One point of the trip was to practice something we’ll be doing; we gave talks at a school and to the women’s committee (picture at the beginning—I’m not in it, because my talk was at the school). Daniel has two main projects with the women’s committee. First, help them get water. The neighborhood where we stayed has water only part of the day: about 4am-2pm and 5pm-11pm. But the women’s committee neighborhood has no municipal water at all. They haul it in, from streams below them or in big bottles. (I’ve been a lot places that have 20L bottles in the kitchen for drinking, but where there is non-potable running water for showers, washing clothes, dishes, etc. This is not that.) The main road to the neighborhood is dirt and is often impassible when it rains, making the water situation even more difficult. Working to help them get water is a classic high-impact development project:  they know what they want, but they may not know how to register their committee, their request, what parts of the government or other groups can help them, how to negotiate with surrounding areas, etc. Technical help with realizing their objective can change the daily lives of their families:  it’s hard to do all your homework and work a demanding job if you have to spend a lot of your life hauling water on foot.

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On the trip back, we stopped in Caacupé, the destination of the largest pilgrimage in Paraguay every December 8. In the Basilica of the Virgin.

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[tlhparaguay]

Weeks 3-5

I just posted three weeks at once, again! I’m still struggling with bandwidth and time to get this up, but I’m aiming to move to weekly.

I also found out my site for the next two years on Tuesday! Mbocayaty, in the department of Guairá. It’s a town of about 5000 people, not far from the city of Villarica. I’m heading there today for a five-day visit and will move permanently in three weeks. The details will be a different post!

[tlhparaguay]

JOPA’i (Week 5)

This was a full week of training with no travel. A lot was youth programs, including “Youth Action” on leadership development for high school students and a more general course, “How to Plan my Life” on careers and financial planning. There was also an interesting one called “He for She” that works with boys to understand how their lives are affected and constrained by gender role expectations. There are also programs for girls on leadership, but that positive approach for boys generated a lot of enthusiasm. (It’s a UN program: http//:www.heforshe.org.)

Most of these programs are done over a couple of months in twice-a-week sessions at high schools, municipalities, and other sites. “Youth Action” is an important component of our Community Economic Development sector (=my sector) and volunteers who lead a program can select two participants to take to a multi-day national camp called JOPA (pronounced HOPE-ah—it stands for “Jóvenes for Paraguay”,  ”Youth for Paraguay”). It’s exciting for the participants, many of whom have never left their communities or met young people from other parts of the country. There’s a YouTube video. (I hope that’s the right one—I don’t have the bandwidth to view videos. You can also search for JOPA Paraguay.)

JOPA is one of several youth camps and Saturday we went to an all-day event that featured follow ups with a couple of participants in three: JOPA, an all-boys sports (and values) camp called “Campamento Deporte y Vida”, and an all-girls leadership camp called “GLOW”. (There are videos on the second two if you liked the JOPA one.) The day was at an orphanage where a volunteer lives and we had a lot of activities with the kids and helped them paint a play structure. It was inspiring day, where we got to see the impact of the programs we worked on during the week.

[tlhparaguay]

Semana Santa (Week 4)

Easter week was a big deal, although not in the way I had expected. I didn’t a very specific idea, but one of my big questions about life in Paraguay was about being in “the most Catholic country in Latin America,” about living in a country that is more pervasively religious, at least than the Bay Area: 90% of the population is Catholic and 10% Protestant. I’m still trying to figure that out. This week was a concentrated version: Easter is a big public and institutional set of events, but most of us saw little to no personal religious observance.

Friday night of the week before, we waited a long time for the bus from Guarambare to Villeta because the street was blocked with a Passion play parade.

That turned out to be a very misleading start. Palm Sunday there was a huge go-cart race all morning in Villeta. We played soccer and after a while some barefoot kids joined us big Americans with shoes. That unfairness is the only thing that kept them from slaughtering us.

The holiday starts on Tuesday afternoon, when everyone shops for the traditional foods. Schools are closed and everyone is off from Wednesday, when people make chipa (mandioca and cheese bread like the Brazilian pão de queijo, but it also has cornmeal and anise, so it’s better!). Peace Corps does not have Wednesday off (!), to allow us to participate in making it in our communities. We shopped on Tuesday and baked it in backyard clay ovens fired with wood.

(I really like chipa, which is not true of every traditional Paraguayan dish.)

Thursday is the big family meal day—a feast of grilled meat. This is where Easter comes in: the meal is supposed to be a recollection of the Last Supper. People are surprised we don’t do this in the US! It was like Christmas family dinner for us—no one mentioned Easter.

Friday is the deadest day of the year, when everything is closed. But I went on a pilgrimage in the South in San Ignacio, Misiones, called Tañarandy. It begins at a chapel called Capilla de la Dolorosa where at dusk, a statue of the Virgin is carried a mile along a road lined with torches to a huge corn and squash altar made by the Paraguayan artist Koki Ruiz. The altar is on a hillside above a pond with an island Golgotha. There’s a lot of singing by regional groups of Estancioneros (has to do with stations of the cross, but I think all they do is sing).

It was pretty cool and moving. It had also been raining heavily and the Camino del Cielo from the chapel is dirt. I’ve never been in a mud fight, but now I know what your clothes look like after one.

[tlhparaguay]

Areguá (Week 3)

This week we all visited our mentors, current volunteers around the country, to get a real experience of their lives, what they do, and to understand the community institutions they work with. I visited a lot of places: I interviewed a small business owner, a credit union manager, a priest in the parish office, the principals of two schools (sat in on sixth grade at one), three city hall managers, employees at two cultural centers, the municipal library, the department government offices, and an art gallery owner.

I also found something close to Northern California in the town and my host family. I had heard of Areguá before I visited: It’s a small city east of Asunción, famous for its picturesque location on the shore of Lake Ypacaraí, its strawberry festival, and artisanal pottery industry. I stayed with a woman who works with an arts and culture organization (and the Peace Corps) to show short films to kids at rural community centers, teaches, and runs a commercial kitchen out of her house with locally soured vegetarian food (in meat-crazed Paraguay!) and whole grain bread twice a week.

Like in most houses here, indoors merged into outdoors and the buildings were all connected by covered areas—with plants, the table we ate at, hammocks—where you spend most of your time. (Unusually for here, this house was also full of books.)

I met her sons, 17, 15, and 9. Paraguay is a youth-heavy country where more than 50% of the population is under 25. Talking with those articulate kids about their interests and future filled me with hope for Paraguay and the possibilities for the Peace Corps youth programs we are learning about.

When I wasn’t working and eating roasted vegetables lasagna, eggplant milanesa, and homemade bread, I saw some of broader Areguá. At the end of the first afternoon, I hiked in the Cerro Kõi national park with vistas over the town and lake and unusual rock formations.

I ran in the mornings through the artisanal pottery center to the beach.

On my last night, the nine-year-old said “I don’t want John to leave.” He stole my words.

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I learned a lot about the development issues and partners we have been studying. (One of our case studies had been about the strawberry industry in Areguá, including expanding beyond fresh fruit in season to preserves and to mangos.) I heard about the kinds of classes credit unions offer to help small pottery and agricultural businesses, about the church accompanying displaced populations, about innovate teaching methods that led to repeated success in math Olympiads. There is a long memory of the Peace Corps in Areguá: the training center was there 25 years ago. There is also a long memory of projects. There are many historical successes and ideas for further collaboration in culture, developing tourism, education innovation.

There are some big tradeoffs and lessons: national vs. local initiatives; individual volunteers’ and partners’ ambitions vs. roles organizations need filled now; exciting projects in environment (compost, better trash disposal) that sometimes faded when the volunteer left.

Many of these lessons come down to one big issue we talk about all the time in case studies and examples of current volunteer projects: contributing to sustainable change.

But the immediate impact of a lot of the work is clear. A city clean streams program or a photography club at a high school affect people who participate and others who will be the community in the future.

On the last morning, we showed short movies at a community center.

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One night during the visit, the power in our house went out, which is why the picture of all of us at dinner at the beginning was taken in candlelight. The water also went out, but that didn’t have much impact, because they have a big tank to supply them through a couple of days without municipal water. (I had wondered what that brick tower was!) With no power in the neighborhood, we could see the sky better and I learned something I hadn’t known about the Southern Hemisphere: the moon waxes and wanes from the opposite side! In the Northern Hemisphere, after the new moon, the crescent starts on the right and after the full moon, the shadow starts from the right. Here, it’s from the left! Who knew!

[tlhparaguay]

Week 2

Note on the first three posts: I’m putting them up at the same time. My internet here is pretty good—I can read mail every day—but it wasn’t enough to upload a blog with pictures. I figured out how to do it this week and will space them from now on (I’m aiming for one a week once I catch up). But if you’re starting here, I suggest you go back and read posts one and two first.

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There are chickens and cows in the yard and I go to sleep to the songs of hundreds of frogs and wake up to dozens of roosters crowing. Everyone has a cellphone and kids on the bus are playing Grand Theft Auto on their iPhone 6s. (On the same bus people are hanging off the outside of.)

It’s a commonplace how portable technology has transformed the developing world. And my friends who were in the Peace Corps in the 1980s weren’t posting blogs or having FaceTime with their families on the wifi in their village’s plaza. But major infrastructure, like roads, and living conditions are not like the US and change in a dizzying way within a few blocks. It can take a lot of time, money, and, mostly, cultural entitlement to cross that small distance. This week, we went in pairs to Asunción for a day to figure out how to navigate the transportation and investigate the kinds of places we will work with. Chelsea and I went to the Mercado San Lorenzo to look at kinds and prices of laptop computers and then to a business incubator at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción.

The UNA campus:

(The second picture at the start is the “Shopping Pinedo” mall near the campus. . The food court wasn’t the most impressive part—the Pinkberry-like yogurt place and the Nike store that had my exact running shoes beat it. But the assemblage of American fast food was the most jarring difference.)

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On Saturday morning we made a community map, breaking Villeta into three areas and walking the streets in groups. We marked stores, schools, playing fields, cooperativas (credit unions), businesses, churches, to start to understand how the community works, whom we could work with, what the needs might be. I already know this town better than Berkeley! You can walk to work by a lot of places without thinking much about them.

The first picture at the beginning is a street near my house in Villeta. Here’s another, and part of the Plaza.

Supermercado on my street:

One final thing I did in Villeta on the first weekend: a parade of dancing and drumming groups. Carnival King and Queen, and first dancing group:

Backstage, behind the bleachers we were on:

[tlhparaguay]

Week 1

What surprised me the most about training was the icebreakers. Some are to get to know each other better, some are a mini-example of the type of work we are doing or teaching, some are just to wake people up/give an energy shot during long days of presentations and work. Some of the many we have done:

-          A list of one useless fact about each of us. The first to find the person for each fact wins. Examples: “I know if you can swim to Ocracoke Island”, “If you live in Phoenix, I may have helped you with your drugs”, “I know where fighting blue hens go to get their eye care”, “I was living in France when the San Francisco earthquake struck”. (This was more fun and confusing because the list was compiled from our resumes before we got here and not all the facts were true.)

-          Divide into small groups and draw a personal flag with quadrants for these things:

o   Your proudest achievement

o   Something you like about your culture

o   A personal value

o   A hero of yours

Explain your flag to the other members of your group. (You also get a bamboo skewer to tape to your drawing so you can wave your flag.)

-          Put up big pages with questions on things we have learned or are about to learn (about the Peace Corps, Paraguay history, Paraguay and US economic and social statistics, …). Divide into groups with the answers on cards and have a relay race to match all the answers first. (This is the activity in the picture at the beginning. We were outside the windows to the main training room waiting for our runner to tag the next person in.)

A lot of them are corny, but so they work. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since the training shares a lot with corporate workshops and team-building offsites I have done in the last 15 years. We have had sessions on principles of adult learning (participation in course design, take responsibility for your learning and objectives, relationship between teachers and students, …) and the same ideas are clearly behind those approaches and, from what I understand from the rest of the volunteers, changes in university education since I was in school. There is also a “learning by doing” element in a lot of this, since we will soon be teaching a lot of it.(!)

One of the exercises was a classification into four learning styles. After a survey to figure out our dominant style, we grouped by that and had a few minutes to put together and perform a skit on our type. My corporate parallel is the great management training at my last company, where we were mapped onto four communication styles (why is it always four?) based on a questionnaire and feedback from colleagues.

The big areas of training:

-          Language. People speak Spanish in Paraguay, but the country is unique in Latin America in that almost everyone also speaks Guaraní, an indigenous language. In other countries, indigenous languages are confined to specific, usually very rural groups. Language is the biggest single component of training and language immersion is a part of why we all live in separate families and communities during training, even before we go to our individual sites.

-          Cultural integration. This is another part of living with host families. We learn to live the way we will in our sites, in similar communities—how the day is organized, how to make food, use the bathroom (!), dress, interact, take the buses, buy things, talk about things (neighbors, weather, work, politics, religion, …), expectations about behavior, social and gender roles, drinking terere, siesta. (More about all of that in future posts.)

-          Technical. Development, how to work with community resources, make presentations, work with youth and adults.

-          Health. Diet, diarrhea, mosquitos, dengue. Emotional health and resiliency. STDs. Alcohol (a lot on alcohol).

We have 11 weeks of this training, interspersed with a few trips:  one-day community resource hunt in Asunción (week 2), four-day visit to a current volunteer (week 3), four-day small group “long field practice” (week 6), final site assignment and five-day site visit (weeks 8 and 9).

So far, it’s very fun. I am working as hard as I ever have—every waking moment is class, family and community integration, language study, homework, team building.

But I don’t want breaks yet (and it takes a long time to get some things done, like taking the bus home from the training center, which is in another town).

And I’m very thankful for some benefits. By far the most, that I already spoke Spanish when I got here. Most of us did, although I have talked with people who had to communicate with their families in sign language the first night. I don’t want to think too much about some of those logistics about bathrooms and food. We are in small groups for language study and I’m in one with the native speakers, so yay for those years of Spanish immersion and Mexico! We can do 100% Guaraní.

Second, I have had zero health issues and Paraguay is not that hard to live in for a developing country. You can drink the water! I can wear contacts! There’s no malaria! (Those of you who have taken anti-malaria medication know what that is so great.)

[tlhparaguay]

Week 0

Sitting in front the of my house with my host mom. We spend a lot of time watching the people go by.

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We’d find out that our training schedule calls it “week 0”.

On Monday, February 22, I packed for the next two years in the morning before the flight to Miami. Tuesday, 43 new Paraguay Peace Corps met in the airport Holiday Inn for “staging” training. We flew to Paraguay on Wednesday, in a 17-hour trip via Panama, arriving at the unlovely hour of 5am. We filled the back of economy in our brown Peace Corps Volunteer tshirts and were already a little giddy from anticipation, lack of sleep (a lot more sleep deprivation would come), and the childhood regression of large group planned activities. Thursday the giddiness was peaking and the emotional and physical crash of the next step was beginning as we and our 4500 lbs of luggage pulled into a Jesuit retreat center for another day of preparation before jumping into our Paraguay lives. The place was so much like retreat centers on the SF Peninsula and in Marin and I had to suppress a hysterical giggled as I contrasted our hot, enervated state with the calm beginning of a retreat weekend in the cool Bay Area. Friday, we again hauled the luggage (the wrong stuff, too much) to our training center for the next three months. And that night, we met our host families and went to our new homes to sleep—week 0 was over and we were ready to start. (Well, it was almost over: Paraguay works 5 ½ day weeks and we had classes Saturday morning. Isn’t that like the 19th century!?)

It had been like a long volunteer cleanup day (everyone wearing the same tshirt!) during a work team-building offsite with logistical elements and the noise level of sixth-grade summer camp.

I really did pack Monday morning before I left, but that sounds more dramatic than it was. I used to say that I could pack for any trip in 20 minutes, whether it was for a weekend or the rest of my life, after so many years of traveling for work. But I had already sent almost everything in my house to long-term storage, so I just had to get everything I had left into bags. It was a struggle—one bag weighed 53 pounds!—but I mostly made it.

Tuesday, we all met: “Peace Corps Paraguay G49”, 43 volunteers in Community Economic Development and Community Health who are going to Paraguay at the same time. In the day of “staging” before we left on Wednesday, we learned about Peace Corps expectations for us, and our expectations, hopes, and fears for the next two years. I was very comforted when I found that we mostly all feel the same: we’re afraid of getting sick, being isolated, not having an impact and are excited about being part of new communities, learning a new culture and languages, meeting friends we will keep, and making a difference in individual lives and communities.

Tuesday night most of us go to South Beach in Ubers and take over the bottom floor of a Cuban restaurant. One table:

Some of us go to beach to see the Atlantic for the last time in a while (in some cases also for the first time).

Getting to the airport and checking in on Wednesday took two buses and a couple of hours. Our carryon luggage and guards.

After our 5am arrival in Asunción, Paraguay:

The retreat center:

We played soccer in the afternoon.

That was an early mistake we would repeat:  in Paraguay, people take a siesta, or at least rest, or at least only move slowly in the afternoon. They don’t play soccer or go running.

Friday night I was overwhelmed. I was adjusting to my new house (and new bathroom). I had not slept a full night since Saturday, we had moved almost every day, and we still had class the next morning! I seriously wondered if I was going to be able to make it. Our final sites will be even more basic than where we are in training and we’ll be alone.

I would feel better by late Saturday, but there was one more challenge. After the morning classes, I walked around town. There was almost no one on the streets except for the occasional motorcycle. There were three people in the plaza. I felt like I was in a ghost town in a Western or zombie movie. When I got back and asked my family, I learned that only a crazy foreigner would walk around during the peak heat on Saturday, when they and everyone else was lying down in the dark with fans on full. I got more laughs when I tried to nap at 7pm before going out to the carnival parade at night.

Here’s one reason I felt better:

During training, I’m living in Villeta, a small city on the Río Paraguay. That’s Argentina on the other side.

I was also comforted on Monday when I learned that everyone else also hit bottom on Friday. I wondered if the training did week 0 this way deliberately, so that emotional mean reversion would guarantee that we were all ecstatic and motived in week 1. I was.