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This is it - I’m leaving Tacuatí for as far as I can see early on Saturday morning. After two years, I’m scared and relieved and sad and excited. I’m having cake with my host family tonight. Tomorrow I’ll throw a little party for my friends around town with sopa paraguaya (think corn bread, but with cheese and onions - Paraguayans are inordinately proud that this is their best-known contribution to gastronomy), coke, and still more cake.

I’m going to let the kids draw lots for turns at picking and choosing among the toys you kind souls have sent over the past two years - there should be plenty to go around. The semi-salvagable parts of my wardrobe and assorted gadgets are up for grabs to the adults.  And then Liam and I will load the last of my furniture over to his house, and then Opama cheroga. Ndaikoi Tacuatíme.

Above, my bathroom window. Since the climate here is so swampy, there’s more need to let drafts pass than keep them out, and most windows don’t have glass. They made this one by  sinking a bottle crate into the brick wall as they built this part of my house.

The Guaraní word of the day is potí, meaning clean. I don’t think cheroga has been so potí since I moved in.

My friend and neighbor Mary Cinadr has gotten an article published on the Boston Globe’s website. Want to check it out? She’s one of Peace Corps’ beekeeping volunteers, and she’s done awesome work with africanized “killer” bees.

Above, the girl who cat sits for me. A while back, she put on a full-on wedding for her tom cat and my cat. It involved a twenty kid guest list, snacks, marriage certificates, costumery, and scrap-lumber pews assembled on my front porch. The marriage, unfortunately, has been on the rocks lately. But maybe they’ll put it back together - I’m giving both my cats to this family when I leave. 

The Guaraní word of the day is akeké, meaning leaf cutter ant. Which are really cool to watch at work, provided they’re not working on your garden. They like basil.

Not much news.

Wanna see some pictures?

From back: me, Mitra, Nina, Anita, Charlotte, and Barbara.

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Danita feeds a puppy

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Liam Winters and Rachel Newby - oenophiles nonpareil

The Guaraní word of the day is vai vai, meaning “not well” or “poorly”.
- ¿Reñe’é Guaraníme? (”Do you speak Guaraní?”)
- Vai vai. (”After two years, I can understand basic phrases and pick the key grammar structures out of some sentences, but I can’t speak it worth anything. Although I am sure that your dirty old man of a grandfather just said something really nasty to me by the way he’s looking at me and snickering behind his hand.”)

If you use the word vai just the once, it’s an adjective meaning “plain” or “ugly”.

I’m back to our old stomping grounds of Guarambaré this week, where Peace Corps Paraguay trains its volunteers. In particular, all the new volunteers to my project group come in May to spend the winter training, so we’ve got a new crop in class right now. The training contractor, an organization known by the cryptic initials CHP, is big on hands-on, interactive education.

This means a whole lot of bus time to me. This weekend, Liam and I were privileged to host two trainees doing a field visit to Tacuatí. And then today, I was invited to come to Guarambaré a do a session on accounting in Paraguay, with lots of emphasis on lessons learned from actual practice. Because if there’s one thing true in Paraguayan finance, it’s that the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and what you can accomplish with local resources are often not at all synonymous.

It was interesting to look back on what I’ve done, fun to meet the new people, and good to see what all I’ve learned since I came. When all’s said and done, I’m glad to be who and where I am. Dues paid, check. Bus schedule learned, check. Ticket home, check.

Speaking of which, I’ve taken the mail call page down now. I recommend against sending anything else to Paraguay in the time I’ve got left - if you’ve got a letter or a card or such for me, my mother’s home address in Knoxville is the best place for it. If you need to know it, e-mail me and I’ll be happy to tell you.

The Guaraní word of the day is ahata aju, literally “I’m going to come.” But the phrase is actually used to mean something more like “Bye, see you later.” Go figure.

Post-vacation and post-COS-conference, life has been quiet. Since I’ll be the last Peace Corps volunteer to work at my financial cooperative, I’ve been trying to prepare them to operate independently. To that end, I’ve been writing an operations manual for the administrative council and the secretary I hope they’ll eventually hire. It’s turned into a monster project - I’ve got about 15 pages written and at least another 20 to go. Which doesn’t sound like that much, really, except that it’s all got to be in Spanish.

That means that lately my dictionary and I have putting in plenty of quality time. It’s edifying but not in a way that gives me lots of interesting news for the ol’ website. Most interesting thing I’ve done all month is a dinner party for some librarians in the region. The German aid organization GTZ donated a few dozen books a couple of yours ago to a youth group in town. The youth eventually drifted off, but recently the folks at the judge’s office have taken it on themselves to set the library shelf up in their waiting room and try to start up circulation again.

So it was our great good fortune that my friend Rachel and her Paraguayan counterpart Fany were able to come out for dinner and expert advice on how to build a library that’s sustainable and user-friendly. One of the biggest problems they’re up against is reading level.

The current collection is heavy on reference books and weighty classics, so not very encouraging to novice readers. And in rural Paraguay most of the population - adults included - are  novice readers by the standards of developed-world bibliophiles. The good news is that almost everyone in Tacuatí can decypher short passages. The bad news is that very few people get the opportunity to develop the fluency and concentration skills that you need  to read a whole chapter book.

It’s definitely something for me to keep in mind as I write my manual - part of the reason it has to be so long is that I can’t take much background for granted. But on the whole, I’m glad to be in a situation where using very simple language is more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

The Guarani word of the day is moroti, meaning white. Cool moroti markings on the frog, aren’t they?

…made glorious summer by this son of York.” Shakespeare, Richard III.

So the sun is setting on my Peace Corps service. I’m in the big city this week for my Close of Service Conference, where we start to gamely tackle the mountain of paperwork and decisions it takes to go from the developing world back to the United States. See the new, shiny link to my resume over there on the right? It is but the tip of the iceberg.

Which is apt enough. For the first time this year, we’re having premonitions of winter. Can’t say I’m discontent, though. Not about the weather and not about the prospect of going home. It’s all welcome change.

The Guaraní word of the day is kavaju, meaning horse. It’s an adapatation of the Spanish caballo. Like all pre-Colombian Americans, the Guaraní didn’t have horses until escapees from Spanish herds started settling South America’s grasslands.  But the Guaraní seem to have taken hold of the concept and stuck with it. Walking through Tacuatí, you routinely see kavaju pulling farmers’ carts or hitched up in front of businesses.

My landlady’s pig recently had a litter. This is her first - only two piglets, which is a little bit of a let down for the family. Pigs are expensive to raise, and for a sow to justify her boundless appetite, she needs to keep the family ankle deep in pint-sized porkers. But these two (a big male and a slightly runty female) are growing fast and should be ready for sale in a few weeks and the barbeque pit in a few months.

Although pigs will continue to put on weight until they get too massive to stand, the Paraguayan tradition is to roast them luau-style just as soon as they get big enough to feed everyone at your next party. Traditionally, there was never any good reason to grow them up to the bacon-producing boulder size that US butchers prefer. The power lines to Tacuatí are younger than I am by several years and the lights sometimes go out for freezer-liquifying days a time. So frozen meat hasn’t quite caught on out here. And this hot, swampy climate doesn’t lend itself well to curing and smoking processes. So for all that Paraguayans do love pork, you won’t meet very many connoisseurs of chops, ham, and bacon.

The Guaraní word of the day is kamby, meaning milk. These kure’i sure know their business, and that business is kamby.

I’ve decided to fold the Ahecha pages I was maintaining into the main page content.

Not much to report in site. My banking coop continues to struggle, but is one of perhaps ten financial institutions on the face of the planet wholly unaffected by the present economic crisis.

We’re trying to put together a little workshop for the managers of Tacuatí’s recently resurrected library.

And I’m working with a gentleman in one of the outlying companías to try and bring in a new beekeeping volunteer sometime around December of this year.

The Guaraní word of the day is kava, meaning bee. The little local honeybees are pretty nifty - tiny, ink black, and stingless. But they live in itty bitty little nests, produce about a drop of honey per year, and don’t really lend themselves to development projects. But we’ve got no shortage of Africanized (so called “killer”) bees to make good the lack. Peace Corp’s intrepid beekeeping volunteers help local communities capture hives, manage their needs, harvest the honey, and sell the new product.

The Ahecha photography project is drawing to a close. We’ve returned the cameras, developed the best photos from the more than 5,000 taken by our students, and held a little exposition in the lobby of the town court house. Now it just remains to do a photo swap with another project community. Then, if all goes well, some of our kids’ photos will be shown at the national exhibit in Asunción.

Want to see our favorites? I’ve put them up recently on Ahecha’s Flickr page. Click on over and take a gander.  The Flickr page is for a limited time only. Try the dedicated page on this website, instead.

The Guaraní word of the day is poteí, meaning six. These poteí mita’iguera really did us proud with their work. But they’d giggle if you said that to them. Your modern Guaraní speaker tends to prefer Spanish for numbers over 5 or below 1.

Let’s have a little break from youth photography, shall we?

I’m in Asunción for the next few days. In the original plan, I was going to take a morning bus in, print out the Ahecha photos we’ll be showing in our in-site exhibition, and leave that very same evening. After all, these little excursions are expensive, and I was just here two weeks ago for my routine performance review.  But then it turned out that I needed at least one night in town to get the photos developed. OK…

Then it was my friend Danita’s 26th birthday. Aside from the fact that Danita is just an all-around wonderful person, she was going to rent an ox-cart (!!!) to bring friends out to visit her site. Who can say no to a thing like that? So sign me up for two nights out of Tacuatí.

Then it resolved that I could get the most expensive parts of this trip (viz, my bus fare and hotel room) reimbursed if I participated in the administrative staff’s annual planning and budgeting workshop. And that’s been an interesting experience. But it does require an extra night tacked onto my trip.

And then this very afternoon, like a stupid sun-addled tourist, I lost my wallet somewhere between the Peace Corps Paraguay office and the USAID facility where we’ve been having the workshop. So now I’m in town for yet another extra day while I get my most important cards canceled and/or replaced.

I’ve been looking at the weather reports now, and it seems at least possible that after all this resolves, I’m still going to be rained out of site until approximately the heat death of the universe. Which — in a place as hot as Paraguay in the summer — seems like a very long time indeed.

The Guaraní word of the day is hake, meaning “Look out!” Hake señorita! Your wallet fell out of your purse! But thankfully, it was the day before pay day, not the day after so there was very little cash inside. Also, I don’t carry my passport or other important documents pertaining to my northern hemisphere life there. Also, I keep an emergency back-up stash of money in my mailbox in the office. And most importantly, this has happened to hundreds (if not thousands) of scatter-brained, kumbayah-curdled volunteers before, and the PC/Paraguay staff has recovery process down to a fine art.