counterclockwise

Tacuati. Population around 2,500 in the pueblo and a few thousand more in the surrounding campo. Located in the northern part of the Department of San Pedro. Forty kilometers from Horqueta, 80km east of Concepcion, more or less ten hours from Asuncion. Another Peace Corps volunteer in town, a woman working in elementary education, and still others in communities ringing Horqueta. Electricity and running water. Spotty cellphone service. Dirt roads. Noncommercial Internet access. Neither the most nor the least developed site available. A follow-up assignment, building on the work started by previous volunteers. A new but hardworking co-op. They grow cotton, soy, and sesame up there.

I’m pleased. Can’t hardly wait to meet the people I’ll be working with and get a first-hand look at the place.

Pictured above is the Temple of San Buenaventura in Yaguaron, or at least a small part of the artwork. The whole thing is vast, grand, and ill-suited to depiction in snapshots. It was built for the Franciscans two and a half centuries ago, and excepting some gold leaf on the Bernini facsimile altar, is decorated entirely with plant dyes fabricated by the indigenous Guarani people.

It ties in nicely with today’s Guaraní word, which is porã. The closest dictionary equivalent in English would be lovely - it can apply to visual appeal or to less tangible kinds of goodness. However, porã lacks the fussy and effeminate connotation that’s been attached to lovely over the years.

This past weekend, I went to the Expo in Asuncion. This is like a state fair, only on a national level. They’ve got farm animals and equipment, international pavillions, carnival rides, a midway, and cellphone spokesmodels in an arms race of come-hitherism. Good times, good times. And so much the better that it’s held in midwinter. Even with an approaching cold front, I was developing my connoisseurship of Paraguayan ice cream.

And lomitos arabes, what the Paraguayans call a gyro. And beer. And empanadas de conejo. It’s up to you whether you want to follow that last Spanish term down the rabbit hole - the answer might not appeal to the squeamish.

Today’s Guaraní word is tapiti, meaning rabbit. The above photo was taken during Long Field last week at a local ranch.

The past week, we’ve been away from our training community for Long Field Practice. I went to visit Volunteer J in her community of Valenzuela, some two hours from this site. She’s doing some great work with a very motivated, very well-organized women’s group. The socias of AMUR have classes on gardening, leatherwork, embroidery, English, computer skills, rug making, and all kinds of domestic improvement projects. They’re also installing a new Internet cafe and contemplating a bakery.

Valenzuela is a good ways out in the countryside, but it’s uncommonly developed. The main roads in town are cobblestone and graced by the odd Mercedes. They’ve got electricity and running water. The farms are different from my training community. Here, we average around 1-2 hand-worked hectares per family. Valenzuela has more industrialized agriculture - lots of sugar cane, pineapple, and beef cattle. Valenzuela also has a larger population of foreign expats, mostly German and Swiss.

The end of Long Field marks a major milestone in our training schedule. We’ve finished Week Seven out of eleven in total. At the end of next week, the eighth, we get our site assignments. Can’t hardly wait to find out where I’m going.

The Guaraní word of the day is ñande. Or ore. These are both different ways of saying we. Unlike English and Spanish, Guaraní differentiates between the “we” that includes the listener and the “we” that does not. For example, if I were to say that we went to Valenzuela (”Valenzuelape ore rohokuri“) I would use the exclusive ore form because you, the listener, were not around for that trip. But if I wanted to say that we read my website (”Ñande jaleejepi che sitio“) I would use the inclusive ñande form.

We took an early morning this Thursday and visited the famed Mercado Abasto, the trading post through which most of Paraguay’s produce passes. At 7 am, the day’s action is almost over, but it was still an impressive sight.

Paraguay is a garden. It’s possible to grow everything but apples and wine grapes here. My training community is big on lettuces, herbs, and sugar cane. Other areas boast cattle ranches, onions, squashes, watermelons, tomatoes, pineapple, carrots, bananas, citrus fruit, peanuts, strawberries, mandioca, tobacco, cotton, corn, and soy. Add to that the imported stuff, and you could keep a gourmand happy for quite a while.

In Asuncion, at least. Only a few staples are available in the campo. You never see lettuce or herbs in stores in my community, for example. If you don’t have a farm connection, you don’t get them. But I do have a farm connection, and I try to bring back something exotic every time I take a field trip.

The Guaraní word of the day is radio so’o. Literally, it means “meat radio”. Figuratively, it’s one of many terms for gossip. Instead of standing around the water cooler, Paraguayans pass word of mouth at slaughterings.

So I’ve got this file on my USB keychain labeled “slow news day”. When nothing particularly post-worthy has happened for a few days (as was the case last time I went online), I pull out an item of general cultural interest.

You shouldn’t tempt fate that way; she might just hand you some excitement.

Before going to the cyber, I bought a birthday cake on behalf of the group for a party we were going to attend. After I left the cyber, I happened to meet a neighbor at the bus stop, chatted for a minute, then attempted to board the Ruta 1 express. The bus driver was an idiot. He floored it while we were still climbing the stairs. My neighbor scraped up his arm, I fell, and the cake went flying. It landed upside down on the floor in about thirty pieces. There was nothing to be done for it - the bakery was closed, the party started in less than an hour, and the last express bus was leaving the stop.

All I could do was go home sulking and try to clean up before the party. So imagine my disgruntlement to get back to my host family and discover that I had left my USB keychain (and all my other keys with it) back at the cyber. There is no other key to my bedroom door, and no way in without busting through a deadbolt. Some people have got all the luck, huh?

I’m very fortunate to live with kind people. Ña T pulled out all the stops to get me back into town before the cyber shut down for the night - businesses here are rarely open past 7 PM. She found me a ride in a cousin’s child’s farm’s truck, sent along a trustworthy neighborhood teenager to babysit, and got the surviving gift to my friends attending the party. I did make it into town in time, I did recover my keys, and I am very grateful.

Got me to thinking, though. If the bus driver hadn’t knocked me and the cake over, I just would have gone straight to the party. I wouldn’t have discovered my missing keys until much too late to do anything about it, and we left for a field trip early the next morning. Some people have got all the luck, huh?

So about that field trip. We went to visit a volunteer, K, at his site. He talked a little about his co-op, their projects, and future plans. Nice. We were all a little disappointed, though, that the trip kept us from participating in a birthday pig slaughter at one family’s house. Pigs are considered really fine eating here. You don´t serve pork chops for just any old Tuesday. But we bore up alright under the disappointment. We concluded the lecture and then split up to our overnight hosts’ homes.

Another trainee and I had just sat down in the foyer, and were looking forward to a long, awkward evening when I heard a funny bird noise. They were guinea hens, and the family’s daughter offered to show them to us. And as we stepped into the backyard, she casually mentioned that they were about to slaughter one of their pigs. We got front row seats from stringing it up in a tree, to slaughtering, to debristling and skinning, to butchering. We didn’t eat any of it, but it was definitely a more interesting way to spend the night than talking about the weather. Then we got up at 4 am and went through the process again, this time with a different family and a cow. The other trainees are jokingly calling us angels of death now.

We spent the afternoon in the Ybycui Parque Nacional, one of very few Paraguayan spots allotted a place in the Lonely Planet South America guidebook. We saw a few waterfalls, and did a little wading. One of us went swimming - even though it’s midwinter the water was tolerable that day. I managed to fall in the creek and soak my jeans up to mid-thigh. Good times, interesting memories, and a crying shame nobody got a picture of my capsizing, which was probably quite a sight. 

The Guaraní word of the day is akã, meaning head. I’d lose my akã if it weren’t bolted on so tightly. But I have made some changes to my key chain to save me from having last week´s problem again. First and foremost, I´ve detached my USB key from my room key. And second, I´ve attached the USB key to a really funky ring I´ve got. Now, every time I plug it in, I also put on the ring. Hopefully, it´ll work better than a piece of string around my finger.

Recently, a cousin (Michael T, for those of you keeping score at home) asked me what kind of wildlife I’d seen out here.

The answer is fairly little. I’m living on intensively cultivated land. Every last square meter has a human purpose. I’ve seen lots of birds of course: parrot green ones, citrus yellow ones, sapphire blue ones, ordinary-looking sparrow analogues, and what I could have sworn was a mockingbird. I’ve also seen a few of Paraguay’s giant toads, known as kururu here, and some semi-tame rabbits. A neighbor in my training community has a pet monkey on a leash in his yard, and I’m told that there are wild ones around somewhere in the countryside.

No, I have a much closer relationship with the domestic animals around. They have dogs and cats here, but it’s culturally inappropriate to give into American-style puppy love – these are burglar alarms and rat killers only. There are free range chickens getting into all kinds of trouble. Our host mothers spend a substantial portion of energy on shooing them off the patio furniture and containing the guano.

At my house, we have a trio of ornery pigs in our backyard, a mother cow, and her calf. This is pretty typical for the area. Some families have small schools of tilapia thriving in the reservoir ponds that water their fields. When the fry get big enough, they’re all netted out, killed and cleaned on site, and then sold for export. Horse and ox carts are a regular site, even along the main highways. I’ve also seen a few goats and sheep, and one profoundly unlikely flock of turkeys.

At the agricultural school last week, there were giant hogs, but the average small farmer in this part of Paraguay doesn’t raise them. The Peace Corps is encouraging bee keeping operations in several places, particularly citrus-growing communities.

Today’s Guaraní word is kure, meaning pig. Pictured above is one of the ones living in my host family’s back yard. He’s got the prime sleeping spot under a disused oxcart that’s been passed down through the generations.

Well, as you can see, my website is back up and running thanks to adept tech support from wordpress.org and install4free.wordpress.net, the same heroes who got me started here. I should point out that the problem had nothing to do with wordpress. I tried to use my hosting company’s photo gallery tool for some friends, but all it really did was wipe out the settings for my domain name.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, I’ve been busy. Life in our training community continues as normal (and isn’t it funny how quickly the strangest things become normal?) while we push our borders out a little further out into Paraguay. This past weekend included a trip to the fabled Chaco region and another to the equally fabled Hotel Chaco in Asuncion.

The Chaco trip was a field trip to the Escuela de San Francisco Asis. It’s a really nice technical high school, offering degrees in agriculture to its students. They learn very progressive farming and animal husbandry techniques, as well as a bit of business management. It was a cool tour and a nice introduction to the western half of Paraguay, where few volunteers ever spend much time.

The Asuncion trip coincided with the American Embassy’s annual Fourth of July party, of necessity celebrated on the first of the month. We all got very long, very hot showers; we saw the sights; some of us took in the nightlife; and after that most of us were well enough to take in a little dietary variety. The Hotel Chaco has a good breakfast - fruit, yogurt, and other gourmet comestibles.

The Guaraní word of the day is Paraguay. No, really. That’s what Asuncion goes by in its mother tongue. It’s pronounced a little differently (Pah-rah-gwah-oo) in this context, which makes it possible to distinguish the country’s name from the city’s.