Hey everyone! It's been awhile since I sent out a mass email update to friends and family now that I'm not getting stung by killer bees or using a machete to kill venomous South American snakes with my neighbors on any given average day. But I wanted to let you all know some big news in my life:

Adrienne and I are getting married!

We are thinking about doing a small wedding with family in Seattle sometime next Summer. I thought I would tell you the old fashioned way - by slow, archaic email, rather than over any of these new-fangled social media site contraptions that are out there ruining the youth.

Winter living Colorado is good. We've been able to do some skiing/snowboarding, snowshoeing and hiking, even made an attempt at snow camping. We both work a lot and enjoy what we are doing, but try to have some fun and spend time with friends when we can. In June, we have week-long trip to Guatemala planned and I'm excited about going back to visit friends and see other parts of the beautiful country.

I hope all of you are happy and well, and want to hear more about what is new with you. If you are ever in the Denver area, please let me know and I'd love to meet up! Email or call anytime, or I guess you can send me something on Facebook too. Just no requests to play Farmville, please. Unless you can work virtual bees or kill cyber snakes on there, I'm not interested. Miss you all!

Peace,

JD

Thank you to all the troops who served in the Iraq War. Let's reflect on healing this Christmas season.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. -Hemingway

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. -Einstein

The EPA announced recently that fracking (hydraulic fracturing) may be to blame for polluting groundwater in Wyoming. People who live near fracking operations are reporting nasty chemical smells coming from their faucets, livestock getting sick, and if you haven't seen the videos of people lighting the water from their kitchen sinks on fire, then you need to go over to YouTube and watch them. Fracking for oil and natural gas may a new hot button issue, and in light of my last post on listening to what people we may disagree with have to say rather than writing them off as hypocrites, I wanted to ask anyone who cares to comment to help clarify one of the arguments in the debate about fracking. It has to do with the EPA wanting to prevent fracking in an attempt to kill jobs. It's a thought that comes up in Republican debates often, that we need to shut down the EPA because they kill jobs in the US.

Now it very well could be that there is a huge liberal socialist conspiracy bent on stopping economic growth and allowing government organizations to control everything in our lives. Let's assume this isn't the case, although maybe it is, and let's break down the idea that the EPA wants to kill jobs. My understanding is that politicians do whatever makes themselves look good so they can stay in the public's favor and get reelected. In our current economic state, one of the most effective things a government entity can do is tell us how many jobs it is creating. Again, assuming there's no conspiracy, my bet is that there is enormous pressure on the EPA and other regulatory agencies to NOT restrict any growing industry that might possibly create new jobs, unless however they are seriously concerned about a public health or safety risk. In the case of fracking, it seems the EPA is weighing the options, and they may be more concerned about people getting sick, and then getting mad at their politicians for not protecting their drinking water, than they are about restricting the natural gas industry. If they were just making up all of the findings and fracking is completely safe, then wouldn't it be in the EPA's best interest to promote fracking like crazy? Then they could let everyone know how friendly the EPA is to the natural gas companies and how they are helping to create all kinds of new jobs. This says to me, that the science is worth looking at, and that is where the debate should be. It may be that their study is bogus or flawed, but I don't think it's logical to accuse the EPA of wanting to kill jobs, unless I'm missing something. I'll leave it there because I'm particularly interested in what people have to say. Why would the EPA want to kill jobs? What incentive do they have?

Last week marked 18 weeks of continual harvest and the end of the Summer CSA season. The boxes were overflowing with fresh, healthy veggies! Check out the Harvest Totals page at the farm's website to see what went into each box.

We are currently attempting the farm's first ever Winter CSA! Our first boxes went out yesterday and hopefully the temps won't drop too fast so we can have many weeks to come for Winter harvests out of the hoop house.

Thanks for stopping in and I hope you are enjoying the Fall!

It seems that the whirlwind of Summer is dying down. The hay barns are slammed full to the rafters, the winter squash is off the vines and boxed away for the cold, and the hoop house is wrapped in plastic and Winter greens are sprouting in the beds. I'm no longer bringing in buckets and buckets of summer squash beans, and tomatoes, although they are still producing nicely. This is our last week for the Summer CSA. 18 weeks of healthy, local produce! The Winter CSA starts the week after and the goal is to go for another 12 weeks with cool weather crops. See the previous post for lots of pictures. Enjoy the last days of Summer! Peace!

beetsAlmost every afternoon and evening for the past couple of weeks we have gotten torrential down pours. This means the garden has exploded (especially the weeds!) This week we started picking the first beans and summer squash. CSA members received beets, chard, and snow peas, and we continue to pick lettuce and turnips each week. If you want to see what people are getting in their boxes, check out the Harvest Total page here.

The hoop house is almost done and will be ready to cover with plastic this fall. The cherry tomatoes and cucumbers will need to be trained up strings attached to wires on the ceiling in the coming weeks.

In addition to the CSA and the hoop house construction, we are opening the farm stand whenever we have fresh goodies. This week you should see some chard, beets, and fresh basil for sale.Hopefully you are enjoying the Summer (in between the afternoon storms!) and have lots of fresh, healthy veggies to eat. Check back for more news from the farm and have a great week! Peace!

salad mix

baby winter squash

beets inter-cropped with basil

farm stand

snow peas

snow peas with melons

collard greens with arugula

beets with arugula

lady bug larvae

cabbage with beans

beans

garlic and cover crop with cherry tomatoes

honey bees on shallot flowers

rainbow swiss chard

Tomatoes being staked

Tomato weave with twine

Spinach pizza

CSA boxes

Accidental picture, drinking terere on the road :)

Cherry tree under row cover

Stacked potato buckets

First patty pan squash fruit!

Busted water pipe

Turnip greens being weighed

Onions inter-cropped with lettuce (and weeds)

Farm stand is open!

Happy Summer! The days are officially getting shorter until next year, but they sure aren’t getting any cooler any time soon! Things are busy as always here on the farm. Thursday marked our 4th CSA harvest boxes going out, and we officially opened the farm stand today with fresh produce for sale.

You can see in the pics some of the prep work for getting the harvest out, the tomatoes are staked, the cherry tree is under row cover to (pathetically) try to keep the birds away, potato buckets are stacking up higher as they grow, and some of the first squash fruits are setting! Summer is here!

Thanks for checking out the blog and I hope you are enjoying some fun in the sun! Peace!

Counting Crows - “Round Here” (1993) and The Beatles - “Let it Be” (1970)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAe3sCIakXohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0714IbwC3HA

These two songs and their artists contain almost all of the elements you need to understand your typical Peace Corps Volunteer: mellow, attempts at being profound, dreadlocks (see the lead singer of Counting Crows and you’ll know how at least a handful of Volunteers in the group show up on their first day), guitars, open-minded religious references, and The Beatles. But what these songs mean for me are sing-a-longs. One of the most uplifting and memorable parts of my Peace Corps service was getting together with Volunteers and singing music. We were fortunate enough to have many talented musicians in our group and thanks to John, Jesse, Nina, Andy, Emily and others, we always had someone to lead us in a tune. Whether it was a campfire in the countryside, a long draining group training event, or New Years Eve in Montevideo, as long as somebody in the group had a guitar, we had no trouble sitting in a circle, drinking tereré and thinking of songs to sing.

“Round Here” became my routine wake-up song for some reason. Something about this song motivates me to get out of bed and get moving. I would let it blare on the tiny speakers on my One Laptop per Child computer as I made oatmeal, got dressed, and got ready to make the rounds around the community looking for someone to work bees with me, or take a walk around their fields. Hearing John sing it late at night with a full moon and unbelievably brilliant stars overhead… still gives me the chills just thinking about it.

“Let it Be,” beyond the obviousness of needing those lyrics to get me through a lot of the tough days, was the first song I learned on the harmonica. It became a great way to pass rainy nights when rain was pounding on the roof so loud that I couldn’t sleep. Singing “let it be” in the dark became a mantra that kept me from going crazy as drops of water, dripped, dripped, dripped, onto my bed and all over my leaky house. And lastly, as clichéd and cheesy as this may be, I think it rings true in the hearts of most Volunteers and although we may laugh about it, we at least hold on to some hope that maybe it’s true: “And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.”

A good friend in Peace Corps told me, “you can only write what you know” and “we write so that other people will know us better.” We did a lot of writing during our 2 years in Paraguay, usually as a way to let friends and family back home know we were OK, sometimes just because we had a lot of free time, and sometimes as a form catharsis. Another Peace Corps friend, Marcy, started writing short reflections focused around a particular song that was important at a particular point in her life. I am completely stealing her format (although she did tell me I could) and will start periodically posting stories featuring songs that served as the background for many important parts of my life.


I always feel the need to ask myself whenever I post anything, “Why am I writing this and sending it to people?” or put in another way, “Why should people waste their time reading what I have to say?” I guess like my friend said, I write so that people will know me better, as well as to entertain, and hopefully inspire you, the reader/listener, to do some reflecting of your own on the music in your life and share it with others. Music is one of those almost universal things that humans do everywhere. The music in our lives can tell us a lot about what kind of people we are. I think it can also be a bit of common ground for us to relate to people who may seem different from us. I would love to hear some of the songs from your life, what stories go along with them, and what they mean to you. So with that long introduction, I’ll start with the first post in this series:

Green Day – “When I Come Around” from the album Dookie (1994) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmJxtgmsqAE

Music for me started with my older brother. I suppose that’s probably how it starts for most of us with older siblings. I remember when my brother bought his first CD player. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. No more eaten cassette tapes, no more fast-forwarding and rewinding to songs that I used to record off of the radio. Seriously, I used to record the local Top 40 station whenever I heard a song I liked come on. Sometimes I would even just let it run and record an hour or so of the radio, commercials and everything. And then I would listen to that recording over and over again. Like most Top 40 stations, I probably could have just kept listening to the live feed and would have heard those same 6 songs every hour anyways, but there was something cool about those tapes and swapping favorite recording sessions with friends who were home doing the same thing. But with that CD player, you could skip right to the beginning of any song on that shiny disc. No more guess work on when to press Play. Whoa.

One of the early CDs my brother had that I remember listening to over and over again was “Dookie” by Green Day. It was cool, it was rebellious, and being a pre-teen, it let me feel like I had at least something in common with my cooler, older, teenaged brother. I didn’t really understand most of lyrics on the album. I didn’t know what a “user” was and certainly didn’t identify with that side of the music, but something about being an average, strait-edge, middle class white kid in small town USA made me wonder if being just that was really OK. There was this big scary world out there, so messed up and dangerous and I really didn’t want any part of it, but at least through my brother’s CD player, I could feel like I understood a little bit about it. I wasn’t a punk rocker, druggie, or in any way a rebel, but for some reason this song sticks. Maybe Green Day was telling me something before the chorus: “You may find out that your self-doubt means nothing / You can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right.”

Thursday we sent out our first CSA box! Members received turnips, radishes, broccoli raab, salad greens, fresh tarragon and fennel, purple spinach, arugula, and all the full shares got some rhubarb as well. We hope everyone enjoyed their produce!

The farmstand will continue selling bedding plants, mostly tomatoes and peppers at this point, for a while longer, and we will also start selling extra produce as the harvest comes.

The weather turned hot too fast and it seems that Spring has passed us by. The weeds are coming on strong. Thanks to all of our working shares for putting in their time!

That’s all for the blog this week. Check back for updates about the upcoming boxes and more news from the farm! Have a great week!

Hello everyone! As you can see in the photos below, the hoop house for the Winter CSA is coming together. No, all this rain did not wash up a whale skeleton and leave it in the garden. Those ribs are the main structure for our future unheated greenhouse. A huge thanks to Neil and Jeff for all their work on this.

Also, the farmstand is open for business (most days) :) We are planning to be open Tuesdays-Saturdays 12-6pm. Currently we have bedding plants for sale at $1 a piece of 6 for $5. As more produce starts coming, we will offer veggies for sale as well. Just check for the "Open" sign out front.

Kaylin visited this past weekend. We toured the Celestial Seasonings tea factory, the Coor's Brewery in Golden, had some sushi, played some softball, and walked around Boulder. I'm glad she was able to come see where I live and hope she had a good visit. That's all for this week. Thanks for checking out the blog! Peace!

As you can see, the first bright red, crispy radishes are just starting to be ready. All this rain has been great for the garden, but not so much for opening the farm stand. If you are looking for bedding plants to take home with you, just be patient and the next sunny day, we will put the "Open" sign back out front and there will be lots and lots of tomatoes, eggplants, basil, squash and pepper seedlings for sale.

Also, if you have been out by the garden recently, you will notice a significant addition. No, we are not building a miniature St. Louis arch or advertising for any fast food chains, but thanks to Neil and Jeff, we are starting to construct the high tunnel! This will be an unheated greenhouse for extending the growing season and harvesting veggies throughout the Winter. We hope to have the skeleton for the hoop house up in the coming weeks and will then cover it with plastic when the temperature drops in the Fall.

So that's the news from work. As for myself, things are good. I'm keeping busy and enjoying life. Kaylin is coming to visit this weekend so hopefully the weather clears up and she likes Colorado. Congrats to her, mom, and Adrienne on graduating this past week! Now it's off to bake some bread, drink some maté, and watch the rain come down. Peace!

Climbing temperatures mean that the seedlings took their first plunge outside of the greenhouses. We began setting out the transplants last week to harden off and get acclimated before we stick them in the ground. This will help reduce the shock, speed their recovery and hopefully lead to the plants producing fruit sooner than they would otherwise. However, Spring weather is still unpredictable and Tuesday night brought us temps back in the 30′s along with some much appreciated sleet and rain. The plants were happy to stay back inside by the heater on those cold days and nights.

Jill and Justin also went to pick up some more alpaca manure from a nearby farm. Alpaca manure breaks down in the soil faster than horse or cow manure so it is easier for the plants’ roots to absorb the nutrients. Llamas and alpacas contain multiple stomachs so it is also more digested and less likely to contain unwanted weed seeds or pathogens. We also soak the manure in water to make a tea and water the transplants to keep them growing and healthy. In the pictures you can see Jill sitting in the truck on the phone while Jane (the farmer who graciously gave us the manure) skillfully maneuvers her tractor to dump the manure in the truck bed. You can also see our brilliant idea to quickly unload the manure from the truck bed using bailing twine. Yes, the twine snapped and we ended up unloading the bed with a shovel anyways…

And lastly to report, we set out some of the tomatoes under walls of water earlier this week. This cold wet weather may be too much for them, but hopefully they will survive OK. The walls of water are basically sleeves of plastic filled with water that stand like a teepee around each plant, acting like a little greenhouse for each individual plant. The idea is that the sun heats the water during the day, and it radiates that heat throughout the night to keep the tomatoes from freezing. Some of these tomatoes already have blooms so if they make it through, they should have a head start on producing ripe fruits!!

That’s all for this week. We hope you are staying cool/warm depending on the day. Make sure to stop by the farm stand for some bedding plants to take home with you! They are selling for 1 dollar each, or 6 for $5. We will post the “OPEN” sign out front when they are available to purchase. Thanks for visiting the blog and see you next week!

Climbing temperatures mean that the seedlings took their first plunge outside of the greenhouses. We began setting out the transplants last week to harden off and get acclimated before we stick them in the ground. This will help reduce the shock, speed their recovery and hopefully lead to the plants producing fruit sooner than they would otherwise. However, Spring weather is still unpredictable and Tuesday night brought us temps back in the 30′s along with some much appreciated sleet and rain. The plants were happy to stay back inside by the heater on those cold days and nights.

Jill and Justin also went to pick up some more alpaca manure from a nearby farm. Alpaca manure breaks down in the soil faster than horse or cow manure so it is easier for the plants’ roots to absorb the nutrients. Llamas and alpacas contain multiple stomachs so it is also more digested and less likely to contain unwanted weed seeds or pathogens. We also soak the manure in water to make a tea and water the transplants to keep them growing and healthy. In the pictures you can see Jill sitting in the truck on the phone while Jane (the farmer who graciously gave us the manure) skillfully maneuvers her tractor to dump the manure in the truck bed. You can also see our brilliant idea to quickly unload the manure from the truck bed using bailing twine. Yes, the twine snapped and we ended up unloading the bed with a shovel anyways…

And lastly to report, we set out some of the tomatoes under walls of water earlier this week. This cold wet weather may be too much for them, but hopefully they will survive OK. The walls of water are basically sleeves of plastic filled with water that stand like a teepee around each plant, acting like a little greenhouse for each individual plant. The idea is that the sun heats the water during the day, and it radiates that heat throughout the night to keep the tomatoes from freezing. Some of these tomatoes already have blooms so if they make it through, they should have a head start on producing ripe fruits!!

That’s all for this week. We hope you are staying cool/warm depending on the day. Make sure to stop by the farm stand for some bedding plants to take home with you! They are selling for 1 dollar each, or 6 for $5. We will post the “OPEN” sign out front when they are available to purchase. Thanks for visiting the blog and see you next week!

This past week we set out plastic 5-gallon buckets by the garden to grow some red potatoes. After chitting them in the window sill, we cut off the eyes and stuck them in some rich compost/dirt mix in the bottom of the buckets. As they grow, we will keep adding dirt and burying the plants, stimulating them to keep growing upwards. At the end of the season, we will dump them out and the buckets should be full of delicious spuds!

It continues to warm up out there and we are adding more and more seeds to the beds every week. So far we have several successions of leafy greens and root crops, different varieties of summer squash (including Patty Pans!), winter squash, and tomatillas. Yum! By the end of this week we hope to have some tomatoes set out under walls of water to protect them from any cold nights we still have ahead of us.Also, keep your eyes peeled for the signs out by the road for when the farm stand opens. We will be selling tomatoes, peppers, basil, squash and melons that you can take home and plant in your own garden! Have a great week and enjoy the Spring weather!

These past few weeks have brought some much-appreciated precipitation! Everything is sprouting and we continue to keep planting successions and filling up the rows.

We will also start selling transplants from our greenhouses soon. Look for seedlings of basil, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, melons, and different varieties of squash out in the farm stand in the upcoming weeks, probably when it gets just a little bit sunnier and warmer. These will be in coir (coconut husk fiber) cups and ready to stick in the ground when it warms up!

As for me, life is good. Adrienne and I enjoyed a nice weekend of playing around at a climbing/bouldering gym, walking around Boulder, and a sushi dinner for Easter. The rain/cold canceled our camping trip to the mountains, but there will be other weekends to do that.

That is all for now. Thanks for stopping by the blog and I hope you have a wonderful week! Peace!

Worms!Weed barrier and row cover

Getting recycled coirSome people walking around the property have stopped to ask, “Why are those black tarps on the ground?” and “Why are those white sheets over the rows?”

Well, those black tarps are weed barriers. They help shade out the weeds, as well as block the sun to keep the soil underneath moist. We will plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, basil, squash and beans in the holes cut into the woven fabric and hopefully they won’t have to compete for space with weeds.The white sheets are row covers. They float over the crops to help diffuse sunlight, keep off pests, and also to help reduce water loss due to evaporation. Although it may be nicer to look at growing crops rather than these long pieces of fabric, they really do help the garden stay healthier, reduce water use, and cut down on labor.

So what is coir? Those white tubes weighting down the row cover on the sides are filled with coconut husk fiber. Although there aren’t any palm trees growing coconuts anywhere around here, we salvage these coir bricks from a commerical tomato grower. They use them as a hydroponic medium to grow their tomatoes and then throw them out every year in a big pile. We have gone and reclaimed them not only to use as weights for our row cover, but also incorporating the coconut fiber into our beds. It helps with water retention and eventually the coir will decompose, adding nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Coir can hold more than 5 times it’s weight in water! It is also being used as a replacement for peat moss, which is usually harvested from bogs and swamps at an unsustainable rate. Coconut trees grow and decompose very quickly, making coir easy and economical to produce.

Well, that is all for this week. We have the 2nd succession of planting in the ground and finally got some rain! The radishes and snow peas are already sprouting and soon there will be growing plants under all that row cover. Have a great week!

It was a busy week in the garden. Almost all of the raised beds are prepped and ready for plants, seedlings in the greenhouses are getting bigger, and the weather is snowy one day and 65 the next. It must be Spring!

This week we were able to seed some snow peas, spinach, flowers, kale, beets, lettuce, carrots, radishes, and other cool weather crops. We will continue planting successions every week so that we can have a continuous harvest throughout the Summer.

If you stop by the garden you will see the white row covers set out over the beds. These help to maintain the moisture in the soil and shelter the plants as they grow. This week we will be setting out the black weed barrier to aid us in the quickly approaching battle with the unwanted, less-edible plants.

We hope you have a wonderful week and hope you are enjoying the warmer weather as much as we are!

Things are picking up quickly here on the farm. The raised beds are looking great for planting, and our tomatoes, peppers, basil and eggplant are growing nicely in the warm greenhouses. They still need some time before we can turn them into delicious pesto and salsa…

The drip irrigation system is all set up and fighting off the dryness we have had to help soak the ground. Signs of green outside are popping up every day. Trees are starting to bud out and some weeds are already taking root. We should be able to start putting out row cover this week and maybe even direct seeding some carrots, beets, radishes, leafy greens, snow peas and turnips.

As for me, I had a great weekend. Adrienne's parents were in town visiting so I got to meet them. Friday we had dinner here at my place, followed by a delicious dinner at Adrienne's on Saturday, and my first experience at a Thai restaurant (I already ate the leftovers if that says anything about how good it was). We also toured the Avery beer brewery, played a game of Euchre, and had a great send off breakfast this morning as her parents loaded up and headed back home. They are such wonderful people and I am so glad they were able to stop by for a fantastic weekend. You can read about all of their adventures on the road at http://olallabay.blogspot.com/

Finally, I just want to say I'm glad my sister and her friends are all OK after a terrible car accident on their way back from Spring Break. We should all use an experience like this to remind us to live life fully and consciously as much as we can. In the words of an old Hanover College Wake Up and Live T-shirt I found buried in a suitcase, "We pledge to be people of peace. To wake up each morning with an open mind towards all who cross out path, to live simply, and love fully."

Happy Spring! I've been enjoying being able to work outside and do some physical labor. The farm is busy and slowly starting to turn green. In addition to sprouting seeds in paper towels and moving them to the seed flats, we have been getting the ground loosened up to start planting in a couple of weeks. It has been terribly dry the past few months so we hooked up the drip irrigation system to saturate the ground. Once it was moist, we were able to start breaking the clumps of clay into smaller pieces, mixing in compost, llama manure, and recycled coconut fiber. Over time, we will keep adding organic material and the soil should get easier and easier to work each year. In the picture, you can see the unbroken blocks of coconut fiber (coir) on the right and the ones on the left already incorporated into the raised beds.

Biointensive methods recommend minimum turning of the soil in order to conserve the natural processes and biota that live beneath the surface. Earthworms, nematodes, and millions of bacteria are working hard to naturally improve the soil for us. Using heavy mechanized tillers disrupts their work and although it may make the soil easier to work this year, in the long run, we would be damaging future crops by aggressively turning the soil over. Instead, we use what is called a broadfork or U-bar.

This handy tool makes it easy to loosen the ground so water and organic matter can be mixed in with the raised beds. I enjoy being able to listen to podcasts and the birds singing while working with the broadfork. There is no noisy motor or smelly fumes and after a week of jumping on the fork, you won't need to go to the gym!

That's all for now. We should be able to start planting cool-weather veggies in a couple of weeks! Hopefully we will get some rain!

Here are some pics from my first week on the job:

https://picasaweb.google.com/justindomingus/March2011#

Highlights include skiing, mandio chyryry, a 2-humped camel named Fein, and some of the activities on the farm so far.  Have a good week!  Miss you all!

Peace,

JD

"Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy"

Colorado mountains are... rocky!  After a long drive through 6 states, I arrived safely in Colorado.  This past weekend I went snowboarding with Adrienne at the base of the Continental Divide and met some of her friends from school.  Needless to say, I am sore today!  Tomorrow I will have my first meeting with my boss and visit the farm where I'll be working.

So that is all I will send for now.  From here on out, I'll try to shift these posts to more of a farm and food update and keep you updated with what kinds of work (and hopefully harvest!) is going on out here.  As always, let me know if you'd rather not get these emails and you can always read them at http://domingusj.blogspot.com

Have a good week everyone!  Peace!

JD

"Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation." -Elizabeth Drew

It has been about 2 months since I swore out as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I think time goes just as fast here in the US as it does (sometimes) in Paraguay.  Since I have been back, I took a quick trip through Indiana to visit some friends and made a round through Hanover and Madison.  It was great to see people, and sorry if I missed you.  Mostly, I have been enjoying spending time with my little niece.  Playing with her has been a good way to transition back to life here as well as a chance for reflection about the past 2 years.  Keeping the quote which opened this post in mind, if you want to hear me ramble about Paraguay, I will be talking at church in London on Feb. 13th, showing some pictures, etc.  You can always call or email me if you want to hear more or have questions.

So what's next?  Well, in a couple of weeks I am driving out to Colorado to start an internship on a small CSA farm.  It runs for the season, from March to November.  I will be working in the gardens and learning about managing a produce farm.  Several people have asked if I will continue posting/emailing/blogging/whatever this is called, and my usual response has always been that there are much more interesting things out there to spend your time reading, but if you want to continue getting updates from me, I'll try to keep them coming from time to time.

For now, thank you to all of you for your support and encouragement, with Peace Corps and in general.  You all are inspiring to me in so many different ways. If anyone will be in the Colorado area this year, let me know and we should meet up!  I hope all of you back on this side of the globe are staying warm and enjoying the Winter!  To people back on the southern side, stay cool, drink some tereré for me and I miss you!

After leaving Paraguay, my good friend Adam and I rented scooters and rode across Argentina for about 3 weeks.  If you want to hear more about our little adventure through South America, you can watch a video and see pictures of the trip at http://scooterstobariloche.blogspot.com/

All of my pictures from Paraguay are posted at these sites:

https://picasaweb.google.com/domingusj

https://picasaweb.google.com/justindomingus

You can find almost all of my email posts and updates from the past couple of years at: http://domingusj.blogspot.com/

Thanks again and have a great weekend!

Peace,

JD

Hey everyone!  I am out of Paraguay and officially on the road with my friend Adam from the Peace Corps.  Here are some highlights of the trip:

So mom already knows now although I am sure she isn't too happy with it, but we rented 2 scooters (Honda Elite 125CC) in Buenos Aires and rode over 1000 miles  to Bariloche.  It took us about 6 days and we stopped in Bolivar, Bahia Blanca, and Neuquen on the way and stayed with some couchsurfers.  In Bariloche, we climbed some hills, saw beautiful vistas, including one that is supposed to be on the National Geographic Top 10!  We rode down to see Mount Tronador (Thunderer!) and saw the black glacier and heard them cracking and grumbling (thus the name).  Then we hopped a bus to Puerto Varas in Southern Chile and hiked up to the base of the Osorno Volcano and visited some rapids.  Today, we attemped to climb to the peak of Volcano Villarrica in Pucon.  We suited up with snow gear, ice axes, and helmets, but the wind nearly blew us off the mountain and it was leaking sulfur gas from the cauldron, so nobody was allowed to hike to the top.  It was a little disappointing, but we still made it pretty high after about 3 hours of tough climbing and saw other volcano peaks as we sat and ate lunch above the clouds.  Tonight, we might relax in some natural hot springs, and then early tomorrow we have to get a bus back to Bariloche, and then hop back on the scooters and scoot the long trip back to Buenos Aires.  I fly back to Ohio on Christmas Eve and am getting excited!  I will leave the update there.  Here is the link to the pictures up until Chile (none from Chile are posted yet): http://picasaweb.google.com/amont86/ScootersToBariloche#

Hope you enjoy and I will be sure to post the rest soon.  The trip is going great, Adam and I are getting along fine, and I am ready to get back on the road and start making my way back to the US.  Hope you all are having a good Winter!  Talk and hopefully see you soon!

Peace,

JD

Here are some pictures from the despedida weekend, and my last few days in site.  I had to post them on a separate picasaweb site because my first one filled up!   http://picasaweb.google.com/justindomingus/LeavingSite# - Last week in site http://picasaweb.google.com/domingusj - Link to my other photos   Off to Argentina on Monday!  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and I will do my best to keep you all posted while traveling.  I'll be home around Christmas and look forward to talking more with you all then! Peace, JD

11-18-10

"I thought that poor people were somehow better, more honest, and more alive than people with money, not realizing that the absence of money in a society built around it could be as corrupting as money itself." -Moritz Thomsen, Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, 1969

Maybe I should have read this book about one of the early Volunteer's experience in Ecuador in the 1960's before I signed up, although it probably wouldn't have made me think much different about my service at the time.  There is a big difference between knowing something because you read it in a book, or hear it from someone else, and finding things out for yourself.  I have learned that (much too slowly) working with my neighbors in Paraguay over the past 2 years.  I just wrote out one of my long, convoluted reflections on life and Peace Corps service and all of that nonsense and then realized, it was all pretty boring.  So I erased it and figured I wouldn't try to mash out any insightful epiphanies today on this little keyboard.  It's too hot outside anyways.

Today my follow-up will be arriving in site for about a week visit.  That officially means I am the old Volunteer from Ybartoy, La Colmena and Ivan, starting in December, will move in to take my place.  I have met him a couple of times already and I think he will be a good fit here.  We have the weekend to get him familiar with people, find housing with families, and also put together a big cookout for Sunday afternoon.  It will be a despedida/bienvenida (goodbye/welcome) party for us and the community.  This past weekend I went to a despedida for a guy in my group.  We killed a pig, duck, chicken, and even ate a 3-feet-long lizard that his neighbor's dog caught.  It tasted just like lobster!  Seriously!  All that meat, along with sopa (corn bread), mandioca, greasy noodles, and cake fed about 40 people with plenty of leftovers.  The plan for the party here this weekend is to buy a half of a cow to butcher, and roast that up with sopa, mandioca, rice salad, and a cabbage salad.  If it doesn't rain, I imagine about 40 people between my neighbors and some of the nearby Volunteers might show up.  We need the rain, but hopefully the party will still happen.

Time to finish cleaning up the house and take the laundry off the line.  In just about 5 weeks, I will be headed home!  I will try to send another email before I head off to Argentina.  Peace!

10-21-10

The new Argiculture Volunteers are in Paraguay and have started training so I have been busy helping with that the past few weeks.  They will get their sites in November and we will be on our way out of here!  It is exciting but also crazy how little time is left!

My neighbor came over today to go check on a baby cow across the road that got bit by a venomous snake.  We tried to catch it, but even with a bad limp it ran way from us. Then we went to where he said the snake lives and started digging up around it's hole at the base of a tree.  I wasn't thrilled about trying to catch a venomous snake after seeing that cow's swollen leg but my neighbor said he wanted to catch it and pull the fangs out so it couldn't bite anybody.  Have I ever said that my contact is a complete bad ass?  I wasn't too disappointed when we didn't find it.

I built a trellis on the north side of my house for some mburukuja (passion fruit) and loofa sponge plants to climb on and shade the house.  The sponge plants grow faster than anything I have ever seen.  I swear you can actually watch them grow up the poles.  I'll take a picture before I leave in a month or so and I imagine my entire house will be enveloped by these sponge plants.

La Colmena is hosting the first ever 10km race on Oct. 30th! I think most of the participants will be Volunteers, but hopefully some Paraguayans will give it a try.  This is a pretty new idea for them I think.   I was training a little, but then got busy helping out the new Volunteers and haven't been hitting it as hard as I should.  But hopefully I can run the whole thing and finish before they close the course.  I imagine they will pass out terere and mandioca to the runners instead of Gatorade and bananas.

Speaking of the race, I should go on a run and try to do some last minute training.  The whole community thinks I am nuts.  Well I think digging for venomous snakes is nuts.  Hasta la proxima!  Peace!

09-30-10

This past week marked 2 years in Paraguay for me.  Today, the new groups arrive in country to start their training.  That was me 2 years ago.  Crazy.

I bought my plane ticket home. A friend and I will be flying from Buenos Aires on Dec. 23, arriving on the 24th as long as the transfers go smoothly.  Adam and I will leave Paraguay around the 1st of December and head down to Argentina to do some traveling for about 3 weeks before we head home.  I'm excited to see everybody so let me know if you will be around Ohio for the holidays.

We have had some crazy wind storms the past couple of days.  The tiles on the ridge of my roof blew sideways the other day and rain dumped into my house for about an hour, soaking everything inside.  I fixed it that next morning and wired them down, only to have it happen again the next day.  The wind snapped the wire and blew them off again.  Luckily my roof is still in place.  I guess I could see it all as the cup half full: that wind sure makes it easy to dry everything out.

I guess that is all for now.  Just figured I would say hello and share when I am coming home.  Enjoy the Fall up North and drink some apple cider for me.  I'll be sipping ice cold terere for y'all as the days warm up.  I attached a pic of my neighbor kids in the garden.  The little girl is wearing the dress the women's group at church back home made and sent down.  Until next time, keep it tranqui-pa.

Hey all, Just thought I would send a quick email with a link to some pics from vacation.  A couple of other Volunteers and I rented a car in Salta, Argentina and drove all around the Northwestern region up near Bolivia.  We had a great time: saw some salt flats, beautiful mountains, drove on some crazy windy cliff-side roads, did some wine tasting, ate huge steaks (and chicken, llama, rabbit, goat, lamb, pig, and maybe some horse meat too), bathed in hot springs, and more!  Check out that pics at: http://picasaweb.google.com/domingusj/SaltaArgentina#   Hope everyone is having a wonderful September.  Talk to y'all soon! Peace, JD

08-22-10

Last December I selected the song "The Final Countdown" by Europe as my backtone on my cellphone.  Volunteers get about 10 dollars a month automatically added to our Peace Corps phone plan and since we never end up using all those minutes, we can waste that money in the form of annoying ringtones, or in this case, a backtone, so when someone calls me instead of your traditional boring ring, they get to rock out to "IT"S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!" and that awesome beat that follows.   I picked the song exactly 1 year before our completion of service date, and the countdown is approaching.  Not that I am really counting down the days or anything, life has been good pretty good lately.  The garden is full of veggies, bee work is starting up again, everything is starting to grow a little faster, and the temperature is rapidly climbing.

It seems Paraguayan Winter is on its way out and the very few days of enjoyable 70-degree weather are almost gone.  It is getting hot again and that means the ice cold terere sessions are starting earlier in the day and lasting later into the afternoon.  Soon, nobody will be drinking hot mate in the evening, and only the hardcore early birds will drink mate in the early morning by the fire.  It has been dry lately, almost a little bit of a drought.  Unfortunately this is also the season farmers burn their fields and it has caused some nasty forest fires around this area.  One farmer was burning his cow pasture and it accidentally spread to the hillside and he burned away a huge hunk of the forest on the mountain.  Pure foolishness.  Slash and burn agriculture is still very much the standard way of growing food for I would say most of the farmers around here.  They burn back the dry grass every year so new grass comes through, but it very quickly destroys their soil and eventually their fields get filled with more and more woody weeds and grasses that the cows won't eat.  So, they go look for another patch of land to cut down all the trees, burn away what is left and leave it for grass to eventually seed itself so the cows can graze, or they plow it up and plant their corn or mandioca.  Most of the fields in this area are on a hillside so they lose a lot of soil to erosion and in just a couple of years a field can get depleted to the point where no more crops will grow.  Off to cut down another plot of forest and start a new field.  You can see how deforestation quickly becomes a big problem.  One thing I have been working with some of my neighbors on lately is to mark out contour lines in their sloped fields so they can plow against the slope instead of with it, and thus reducing erosion.  We are also planting some semi-permanent barrier lines with trees and shrubs in some fields to help hold back the soil.  Anyways, that has been keeping me fairly busy the past couple of weeks.

Today, in honor of the first really hot day (the mid 90's), I cut my hair, put away all my Winter clothes, and swept out the house.  Afterwards, I sat down to an icy cold pitcher of terere.  And since terere is soon to become a regular part of the day, I figured I would talk a little bit about it for those of you who might not know what I am talking about.  Terere is a cold drink of yerba mate tea.  Yerba mate is a type of tree native to Paraguay and the leaves are harvested, smoked and ground to make a dried chunky powder used for terere (iced) and mate (basically the same as terere but with hot water instead).  It is a stimulant very similar to caffeine in tea or coffee and very bitter at first, but the taste grows on you quickly.  The yerba is put into a cup called a guampa, which means "cow horn" in Guarani, and the tea is sipped through a metal straw with a filter called a bombilla.  Guampas are usually made of wood, metal, or some are still the traditional hollowed out cow horn.  Next, the water is prepared in a pitcher with lots of ice and often times various leaves and roots for flavor and medicinal purposes.  Different types of mints, lemongrass, and citrus leaves are popular for their refreshing taste on hot days.  The first pour of infused water is slowly soaked up by the dry yerba mate and it looks like an invisible person is actually drinking the first pour.  This is attributed to Santo Tomas (for the Spanish word "tomar," to drink) and some say it is bad luck to drink from the bombilla before Santo Tomas has taken the first turn.  Another pour of water goes into the guampa and then the server often drinks first to clean out the bombilla from any chunks of yerba that the straw didn't filter out.  This first sip is the strongest and sometimes the server will spit out the first pour or two.  Then, once the water runs well through the bombilla, the guampa is filled and passed to the first person, usually to the left.  They drink until the water is gone and the straw starts to slurp.  The guampa is passed back to the server to be filled again from the pitcher and then it is passed to the next person in the circle.  When someone has had enough, they say "gracias" to the server when they return the guampa indicating that they are satisfied and the server can skip them from now on.  A session of terere can keep going round and round, sometimes even the pitcher has to be refilled, until everyone has said "gracias" and the server is done.  So that is terere and it is difficult to understand Paraguay without it.  I recently read a cute poem written by an anonymous Paraguayan describing the importance of terere to their culture.  Here are some translated lines from the poem:

"In Paraguay, nobody drinks terere because they are thirsty...

Terere is exactly the opposite of television,

It makes you converse when it is with someone, and it makes you think when it is by yourself...

It happens in all houses.  In the rich and the poor...

Yerba is the only thing that every house always has

Always, in times of inflation, hunger, with democracy or no, in whatever hardship or bad circumstance,

And if one day you don't have yerba, a neighbor will give you some without hesitation.

Yerba is never denied to anyone...

Put simply, terere is a demonstration of values...

It is respect for appropriate times to speak up, and to listen while another is talking and vice versa...

This is the only country where the decision to leave childhood and begin being an adult happens on one particular day.  It has nothing to do with wearing long pants, getting circumcised, going off to college, or living away from your parents.  Here, it starts the day that we choose to drink terere, by ourselves.

It is not coincidence.  The day a boy drinks his first terere with nobody else in the house, in this moment, he has discovered that he has a soul.

None of us forget the day that for the first time we drank terere by ourselves..."

Hope you enjoyed that!  It is a little cheesy, but I think you get a good idea of how important terere is to Paraguayans.  I will leave it there for now.  This week I am doing a presentation on Top-Bar beehives and trying to eat up the beets, carrots, and swiss chard in the garden before it all goes to seed.  Send me an email anytime and I will do my best to get back to you.  Have a great week and hope to hear from you soon!  Peace!

08-05-10

My new Peace Corps project has apparently become CouchSurfing (couchsurfing.org).  After getting back from vacation in Argentina (the rest of the vacation was much more tranquilo than that crazy day in Buenos Aires), I have had a steady stream of random visitors at my house.  The first set was 2 guys from Georgia (the state, not the country) who were passing through Paraguay on their summer vacation.  One was headed to Montevideo to study a semester abroad in Uruguay.  We had some great conversation, visited my neighbors, introduced them to sopa paraguaya which my host family graciously prepared for us, and then I sent them on their way, off to visit another Volunteer in another part of the country.  The next was a girl from Seattle who is going to college in Colorado.  She was doing an internship with a micro-finance organization in Paraguay for the summer and came out to see what Peace Corps Volunteers do.  We really hit it off and had a great weekend.  Then a group of 3 girls came from Australia and New Zealand, also just traveling through Paraguay.  I have never seen people carry so much stuff on their backs or so much stuff fit into my little house, but somehow, we all managed to cram in and I think they enjoyed visiting this community. I don't know what my neighbors think with all these random visitors coming and going, but I can't imagine trying to explain the concept of CouchSurfing to them, haha.   It has been fun hosting people, hearing their travel stories, and sharing my experiences here in Paraguay.  I don't have much to offer people in my little wooden house, but the food will be good, you will stay dry (unless the wind blows while it rains), and the mate tea will be hot and plentiful (as long as the power doesn't go out).

Other than that, Winter in Paraguay has been been tranquilo como siempre.  The days are still short, although getting longer so I think activity is slowly but surely getting prolonged during the day.  Kids got their 2-week Winter break from school extended another week because 65 degrees constitutes as a snow day in this country and then this week, the first one back, the teachers conveniently decided to go on strike, so no class again.  I guess Winter isn't over yet.

There is a wedding this weekend between 2 Volunteers who served in this area a couple of years ago.  They rode their bikes around South America for awhile and now are coming back to his old site to get married and all the Volunteers around here are headed out for the wedding.  My friend, another Volunteer from Ohio got ordained online and is doing the wedding in Guarani.  2 or 3 pigs are being killed, a truckload of beer is being delivered, should be a blast. 

Well, I should get moving on.  Stay cool/warm depending on which side of the globe you are reading this from.  Send me an email anytime.  Hope all is well with you!  Peace!

Hola from the capital of Argentina! I am on vacation for about a week with some other Volunteers and so far it has been wonderful.  I stayed with some CouchSurfers in Santa Fe for a couple of days, learned a lot of Spanish slang and cuss words and just enjoyed hanging out with some Argentine college students at their apartment and walking around the city.  Then I came down here to BA to meet the 2 other volunteers who came in from Paraguay.  Today was a pretty hilarious tourist day, so much so that I came back to the hostel and wanted to write about it before I take a nap and get ready to go out for some steak and wine tonight.  This day would make a perfect montage sequence in a movie so cue some corny, cheesy movie montage music...

The morning started off normal, waking up in the hostel, eating some breakfast and then heading out with our beat up Lonely Planet guide for the walking tour.  I wanted to see the modern art museum but it was closed so we just walked around in the part of town where the famous tango dance was born.  According to the guide book this area is very ''bohemian,''  which I am beginning to think means a bunch of hippies with dreadlocks playing Bob Marley music on their iPod speakers and selling jewelery made of shiny wire and colorful gem stones in the plaza.  So that's the first scene in the montage...

The girls I am traveling with happen to like looking at every piece of aforementioned wire/gem stone earrings made by said hippies, so I got bored and took off on my own.  I wanted to go to the other side of town to see the Fine Art Museum and decided it was a good, crisp day to walk, so I just started hiking.  I walk really fast so cue fast walking movie montage music and imagine me bolting through crowded city streets, man on a mission.

I stroll through the plaza where all the government buildings are, grab some roasted peanuts from a street vendor and stand on the balcony where Evita (or I guess Madonna) sang ''Don't Cry for Me Argentina!!!''  Keep walking...

Onwards to lunch where I get a huge piece of meat and some french fries, sitting alone in a huge fancy restaurant with very few people except. There are 2 tired-looking tango dancers in the street and they keep dancing although nobody is watching.  They look miserable and I sit and eat lunch wondering why they are dancing.  Cue fancy classical music for a nice dining scene where I eat my steak with a napkin tucked in my shirt collar, fork and knife working away.

More fast walking music and crossing countless city blocks, plazas and fountains, stopping to jump in a family picture in front of a big statue of a guy on a horse (''Who is that tall white dude in our Christmas photo?'')

Cross more plazas, stop to appreciate a nice piece of architecture, maybe share some cotton candy or an ice cream cone with a cute little laughing kid (I envision we would probably both be laughing about something very funny or watching a street performer), and then continue towards the art museum.  Finally I get to the museum, run up the big steps, and then you see me in deep thought, contemplating some work of modernist painting of a fork or a circle or a naked lady.  Why does every other artist paint a naked lady anyways?

Leave the museum and head onwards through the artisan stands, quickly gazing at more wire and gem stone jewelery, half expecting to find the girls giddy about how much cooler this jewelery is than that other place this morning...

I'm tired now, but the hostel is back on the other side of the city and who knows how many photo montage opportunities I could get myself into so I look up from my huge, complicated unfolded map, shrug at the camera, laugh again at that joke with the cute little kid with the ice cream cone, and start walking as the corny music starts up again...

The Uruguay/Germany World Cup game is going on so I stop in at random cafes to watch bits of the game.  Imagine me, the tall white dude in the back, cheering with all the Argentines when Uruguay scores a goal.  Back to the street where I get caught up in a parade for Argentine Independence Day.  It was almost as cool as getting up on the float and singing ''Twist and Shout'' in the streets with all the construction workers dancing and everything like on Ferris Buehler, but not quite that cool.  But I still got to march in a parade and wave at people like I was supposed to be there.  Mind you, I stick out a little since I am wearing a bright red shirt with a brighter red hat and everyone is wearing the national color of Argentina...sky blue, not anything close to bright red.  I am also over 6 feet tall, much taller than your average South American.  (''Who is that tall white dude in the Independence Day Parade?'')

After the parade, I continue towards the hostel, and get caught up in a Gay Rights protest.  I was really just trying to cross the street, but the protesters blocked the road so imagine me, bright red shirt, in the middle of people wearing rainbow clothing shouting at TV news cameras demanding equal rights.  (''Who is that tall white dude in the gay rights march?'')

Now if you think that is a funny image, keep reading.  2 blocks from the hostel I start to see ticket scalpers yelling in the street and people selling posters of some Argentine teenie band who look like NSYNC back when I used to listen to their CD with my sister, or maybe what I imagine High School Musical is like.  Apparently there is a concert tonight.  3 city blocks are completely shut down from screaming girls ages 7-14 with painted faces waving big pictures of Javier or Toni or some blond South American pop singer who might actually be one of the Backstreet Boys who escaped down here to try his boy band career over again.  There is me, bright red shirt, 6 feet tall, trying to wind through the masses of these girls waiting for tonight's concert, all accusing of me of trying to cut the line.

I guess the montage would conclude with that image.  Probably with one of those transitions where it goes to black in a closing circle around my face and the music fading out.  Yea, best day in Buenos Aires I could have imagined, haha.  Tomorrow we are headed further south for a couple of days at the beach.  It will be cold so no swimming but I plan on drinking a lot of yerba mate, going on some runs, and taking some naps.  It has been a good vacation so far.  Back to Paraguay later next week.  Happy Independence Day Argentina!  Hope all is well back home!  Peace!

 

Hey all, just a quick update.  We had a 4-day long workshop just outside of the capital in the Chaco on Sustainable Agriculture and Agroforestry this past week.  I got to bring my neighbor and I think he really liked it.  We heard presentations on different farming techniques that could help benefit rural farmers in Paraguay and got to see some demonstration gardens, fields, and orchards.  My neighbor wants to go back and put in a small irrigation system in his garden based on what he saw at the workshop and I think he is more excited about planting trees.  It was a good, productive week. Paraguay plays Slovakia in the World Cup tomorrow morning.  I am going to stick around in Asuncion for a day to catch the game on TV and then head back to site.  They tied Italy in the first game so hopefully tomorrow they can get a win.  The US team has two ties so far.  I guess I really only care about soccer every 4 years, haha. I posted some pictures of the parade in La Colmena for Mother's Day, PYan Independence Day, and the anniversary of the founding of La Colmena.  You can find them at: http://picasaweb.google.com/domingusj/ParadeInLaColmena# It has been a warm winter, much warmer than I remember last year.  Things are going well.  Just a few more weeks until 4th of July celebrations back in the capital and then off to Argentina for vacation.  I should get going for now.  Hope you are all enjoying the Summer!  Peace!  

06-03-10

Good morning all.  This morning's sunrise was amazing!  But one of the many things Mrs. Bird taught me in 2nd grade is "Red sun in the morning, sailors take warning."  Looks like rain in the West.  (It did end up raining yesterday afternoon, she was right!) We don't really need it since it rained most of May, but I guess the weather does what it wants.

I spent a long weekend in the capital for our bimonthly meetings and also worked on the Kuat some.  I am trying to get a complete PDF archive of all the editions back since the 70's so they could be available for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers from Paraguay for the 50th anniversary of the organization.  It was fun to hang out with other Volunteers and I even got to meet some of my friends' parents who are visiting Paraguay.

The garden is rocking.  I have lettuce, swiss chard, radishes, carrots, beets and tunips.  Soon I will have cilantro, onions, garlic chives and parsley.  Tomatoes, basil, pigeon peas and peppers after that.  My cabbage and broccoli are getting devestated by little green worms.  I've got a batch of homemade insecticide cooking in the sun so hopefully I can still get some kind of a crop.

My recent reading list has been varied.  I finished a book of short stories by Kingsolver (in response to 9/11), got into The Kingdom of God is Inside You by Tolstoy (about pacifism), and started The World is Not for Sale (about farmers against junk food) and Pioneer Naturalists (how different plants and animals of North America got their names, Cooper Hawk and Queen Anne's lace, for example).

You probably don't come here for current news blips, but that oil spill sounds crazy.  I haven't followed it but saw the video this weekend of all that oil spewing out.  Hopefully BP will pay for it and we will use it as an opportunity to finally get away from oil.  Also, Guatemala got hit hard recently.  First, Pacaya (the active volcano Dad and I climbed) exploded and then tropical storm Agatha brought more havoc.  Lots of craziness in the world.  I did hear a stat that said half of US households have donated money to relif efforts in Haiti after the earthquake.  That is impressive.  Go US.

As long as it doesn't rain, I am going to run into La Colmena today.  I think I'll try the new hippie fad: barefoot running.  Apparently it is better for your joints and back. I need to go to town to check on citrus tree seedlings for grafting mandarins and oranges.  I am doing a workshop this month on soil improvement starting with terracing, worm composting, and green manures.  Then, in July I want to do a presentation on grafting fruit trees so if I get the plants now, they should be ready to graft at the end of July.

OK, enough news from Paraguay.  Keep it tranquilo and drink some terere this Summer if you get a chance.  Peace!

05-23-10

May has been a pretty slow month up to this point.  We had a week of rain which felt like a month and a few cold nights, but not as cold as I remember last year.  Things slow down a lot in Winter here which is sometimes hard to take because compared to the pace back home, it always seems slow in Paraguay.  Here is a brief list of what has been going on:

-harvested radishes today, the first harvest from the new garden.  Turns out, I don't really like radishes all that much but they are pretty good in stir fry, soup, and sliced thin and fried like potato chips.

-almost done reading Sherlock Holmes.  Good read.  Movie was OK.

-yesterday I helped with a worm composting workshop in another Volunteer's community and am hoping to start some worm composting bins here with people in my site as well.

-weekend presentations on different Agriculture and Beekeeping themes are dying out. Less and less people each week.  Oh well.

-now addicted to Podcasts, specifically This American Life, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Left Right and Center, and How Stuff Works.

-short days mean lots of sleeping.  Somedays I get up at 6 am, and get into bed around 7 pm.  It gets dark around 5:30 and there just isn't much else to do.

-been doing some running, mostly to town which is about 5 km away.  Feels good.

That's about all for an update, although I'd be a little worried about you if you are looking here for some excitement.  Like I said, things have been slow lately.

This leaves lots of time to think.  Now this entry will turn philosophical, contemplative, a little whiny, and mostly useless for most normal people.  But here is someting in particular that has been on my mind lately: being simple, being frugal, being comfortable, and/or being jaded. 

I like to think that I live simply, or try to at least.  Maybe not so simple by Paraguayan standards (I am writing this on a laptop), but probably simple by the US standards.  My house is small, I don't have nice furniture, you may have seen pictures of my pathetic bathroom, and I eat simple meals.  Everyday that I am in my site I eat oatmeal for breakfast. Prepared the same way.  Everytime.  I drink yerba mate every morning.  With the same herbs for flavor (cinnamon and mint leaves).  Everyday.  The hilarious thing is when I go to the city and can splurge and eat literally whatever I want, I still wake up and actually crave that boring oatmeal.  I even took some with me once to the city to finish off a box and made it with the hot tea water on the breakfast buffet at the hotel.  No lie.

I am usually frugal, or thrifty, or maybe cheap as some might see it.  I use the entire roll of toilet paper, and sometimes, if I forgot to pick up more in town, I even unroll the cardboard tube and use that.  I hang on to several little pieces of soap when they are almost gone and then mash them together and use that soap clump for washing my hands.  I don't peel potatoes.  Why should I?  The skin tastes good to me.  Sure it makes for lumpy mashed potatoes, but they taste good and are probably better for you.  And I don't have to peel them.  I don't peel carrots.  Why should I?  They taste the same to me.  I write To-Do lists or shopping lists on the backs of scrap paper.  Then compost the paper when I'm done.  I pee on my compost pile.  It seems like a waste if I don't.  I don't ever burn or overcook my food because I like to unplug my electric stove as soon as I think its done.  Sometimes its not done but I eat it anyways.  Doughy pan biscuits not cooked on the inside taste OK to me.  The funny thing is I don't even pay for electricity so it's not like I am saving money by doing this! 

But most of the time, I feel perfectly comfortable.  And I don't think I am a slob.  I sweep my floor, change my sheets (sometimes), wash dishes, put things away after I use them, etc.  My house is generally neat and tidy so I don't think any of this is really rooted in laziness, although it might be.

So I ask: Is any of this "frugalness" or my desire to live simply in anyway connected to low self-worth or not having enough self-esteem?  Sometimes I don't let my rice or beans cook all the way because I think they are good enough for me, even if they are a little (or a lot) firm.  If it is just me eating these meals, then they don't need to be fancy or nice.  This is where I am starting to wonder: Maybe I don't value myself very much.  I don't splurge on nice things for myself, but I also really don't think I desire them all that much.  I feel and know that I am extremely priviledged with the lot that I drew in life.  I have nice things, more things than I need actually.  So much so that I don't really value the things that I have and I don't enjoy at all acquiring more things.  I look around and see my neighbors on the other side of this issue.  They have to do laundry every other day because they don't have enough clean clothes to go any longer than that.  I can go almost a month without washing clothes and that doesn't necessarily mean I wear the same shirt or underwear 5 or 6 times before I wash it, although sometimes it does.  Should I just start giving my things away until I actually start to feel what it is like to be lacking something?  A little scary voice inside tells me that my neighbors wouldn't appreciate these things either.  Maybe secretly I believe that I deserve these things, but I don't think that is true. 

On another note, I wonder if I have become a little too jaded.  I don't appreciate good things.  Sometimes I make a big, nice complicated dinner for myself and I still just woof it down in 10 minutes.  I don't feel any better or more satisfied than when I just eat popcorn, which is quite often, for dinner.  I know that effort has a lot to do with it.  I am afforded the luxury of a steady salary here so I can eat popcorn or oatmeal without growing it.  One thing I could try is relying more on my own work for my food.  I know for a fact that then, I would appreciate it.  I would also be a lot skinnier.  Although today, I ate radishes.  The first radishes of the year and the first fresh food from the garden.  I even left the electric skillet on long enough to bake radish chips.  And I salted them which I don't usually put much salt or spice in my food because I don't really think that extra flavor is worth it.  They were OK.  I'm jaded.

So, finally in this little, or long, ramble, I realize most all of this self-doubting is due to my shelter from the real world.  All you real adults out there who know what it takes to get through the day probably laugh or maybe would love to see the day when you have the time and freedom to be in this situation I find myself in.  Eventually, I will be done with school, Peace Corps, and all these other things that I can find to delay my entrance into the real world and I will start to understand what it takes.  Sink or swim, I will have to.  This blog will shut up, Facebook will go away, and I will fill my time, like most people, with doing the necessary things to get by.  Until then, I guess I should just enjoy the downtime, try to learn to appreciate what I have, learn to take time to do nice things for myself, and in sum, grow up.  Then, I can be an adult and tell kids how lucky they are and that they shouldn't waste their time rushing to grow up.  That's enough for now. Like Ferris said, "Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

And finally, an interesting clip from an old song:

"Oh happy who thus liveth! Not caring much for gold;

With clothing which sufficeth to keep him from the cold,

Though poor and plain his diet, yet merry 'tis and quiet."

Elizabethan Song Book ca. 1588, stole from a book of quotes gathered by Helen Nearing

Peace!

Posted some more pictures of the house: http://picasaweb.google.com/domingusj/SettlingInAtNewSite   In the capital for the weekend working on some projects and maybe playing some harmonica at a concert tomorrow night.  I think we are going to play the Juno song "All I Want Is You" but I have some special lyrics in Guarani.  Should be a rockin' time.  Miss Y'all!  Peace!

04-11-10

Hola from the past! Paraguay finally got around to changing their

clocks back an hour for the Fall today. That means basically that it

is like we went back in time and I could start writing this at 12

o'clock, spend a half-hour doing it, and I would finish at 11:30.

Daylight savings is wierd. Not that it really matters all that much

what time it is here because things don't really run on an hourly

schedule. It is generally more some part of the day, either morning,

midday, afternoon, later in the afternoon, or simply just "some other

day" when things are planned.

Everything is going great with me. Friday we had a house-warming

party for my new house and we grilled up half a cow for all the people

who helped. The week before the party we worked hard getting the yard

looking good and finishing up some details. So first let me say, I

realize that a lot of my emails come off a little smug or cocky when I

talk about working bees or helping farmers or whatever and you should

know up front that most of what I do isn't really that cool. But with

this house, I feel pretty dang good about how it is turning out. In 3

weeks, we chopped down the trees, milled them into boards and slapped

them together into a house. We poured a cement floor with sand we

lugged in an donkey cart from down the road, cut posts and put up the

wire fence around the yard, hooked up electricity, and then the ox

cart showed up to take me and all my junk to move in. That is pretty

freakin cool to me. Since then, my neighbor and I dug a 130-meter

trench (425 feet) with a pick axe to the other side of the road and

ran the water pipe into my yard. We still need to run another 30 or

40 meters to hook up a sink out back for washing clothes and dishes.

My days of squatting on the ground washing everything in buckets with

a cup are almost over! I got my fridge brought over and it is now

making ice for these last few weeks when it still gets hot enough in

the day to drink cold terere. Soon enough, we will be drinking hot

mate around the clock. I went into the woods and cut some bamboo to

lug back and made my little outside shower room for bucket bathing,

and my outhouse. If you haven't seen the pictures of it yet, that

rickety structure made of scrap wood with the hole in the ground is

the bathroom. I carved "Tranquilopa" into the wood to remind anyone

who has to use it that "it's all good." I finished lining the hole

with bamboo to make retaining walls and put a cement floor set on cut

tree trunks over the hole. It is a little exposed to the elements,

but it is pretty cool to watch the sunset and take a dump. The water

table is kinda high here and even though we get clean running water

from a reservoir up on the hill, I don't like the idea of my letrine

leaching into the aquifer. I may end up building an above-ground

composting toilet with my neighbor if he likes the idea and would

actually use it to put compost back on his fields after I leave. For

now. the temporary bathroom and shower room are built, water is

working and almost hooked up to a sink, the new garden is sprouting,

the compost pile is cooking, the trees we transplanted are growing,

and all is tranquilopa in the new house.

The party went great and I think all 14 people who attended ate way

too much. I had 2 Volunteers over and the 3 of us slept in my little

2x4 meter house (which the one Volunteer from the city revealed her

true feelings about my house being kinda like a nice tool shed). The

next day we walked into La Colmena and went with a group of about 15

Volunteers in the back of a truck to a nearby nature reserve where

there is a georgeous waterfall and swimming hole. It was just a

little too cold to enjoy the swimming, but we did all get in, climb up

the rock face and jump into the deep pool below the falls. Overall,

it was an amazing weekend.

I guess that is all for now. More work in the garden and getting the

yard cleaned up this week along with planting some trees with my

neighbors, and maybe some last-of-the-year honey harvesting. I will

try to post some more pictures when I can. Hope all is tranquilopa

back home! Peace!

Finally, an update and finally, pictures of the new site and house. I

still need to run the water pipe, hook up the sink, put on some

flashing to block out the rain and get the garden going, but the fence

is up, lots of trees are planted, and I am getting settled in well.

It took us 3 weeks from actually cutting down the trees until the

walls were up and I moved in. Check out the pics at

http://picasaweb.google.com/domingusj/NewHouseInLaColmenaPics

Things have been busy, mostly finishing the house, but also working

some bees every now and then. People are harvesting some honey now so

that is always fun to see. Fall is here so that means the worst of

the miserable heat is over hopefully and gardening season is rapidly

approaching.

I am in the capital now for the weekend working on our newsletter

publication. There is talk of some of the other Volunteers in my

beekeeping group getting together and going salsa dancing tonight. I

don't know how to salsa dance but I've heard it basically involves you

trying to step on your partner's toes and they reciprocating and doing

the same to you. Step forward, step backwards. Over and over and

over again. Sounds riveting. It's a wonder why I don't care for

dancing.

Other than that, not much else is new. I have a new niece, Naomi Beth

and sounds like she is great. Can't wait to meet her! Also, to

answer the approximately 78 inquiries I received, No we did not feel

the earthquake that occurred in Chile. Heard a health care bill

passed back home. Hope people aren't killing each other over it

already. So in the words of Red Green, "until next time, keep your

stick on the ice."

02-26-10

The Argentines wore me out. Seriously, they will go out to dinner

with their family at midnight and come home at 2 or 3 am. We caught

an early bus one day and at 6 am and people were still sitting at

restaurants, having DINNER! Craziness. But I had a great trip.

Highlights include the Buenos Aires zoo, the botanical gardens, the

art museum, seeing a movie in English, eating good beef and wine, a

day at the museum in La Plata, meeting up with some cool Couch

Surfers, and a day at the beach (a cold day) in Mar de Plata. I think

we spent most of the time on a bus, but it was worth it. We stayed in

hostels and with couch surfers so it wasn't too expensive. I went

with another Volunteer who is leaving Paraguay soon and she took lots

of pictures so I will try to steal them from her before she leaves and

post them online.

I am back in site now and have been working on my future house. It

probably isn't the best thing that this late in my service I am

spending time working on a house, but whatever. We cut down 3 or 4

trees to make the posts, beams, and joists. The entire thing is being

made with a chainsaw. We mark lines on the trunk with a piece of

string soaked in black oil and the chansaw guy cuts the boards like he

were using a circular saw. Today we finished cutting all the wood and

Monday we will start lugging it all out to the site in an ox cart and

digging holes to set the posts. Hopefully it will be done in a week

or so and I can move in sometime in March.

It has been cool the past couple of days so hopefully the heat is done

with for the Summer. It was a hot one.

I guess that is all for now. Sounds like it has been a rough Winter

up there for y'all. Hopefully things will warm up soon. Hope to hear

from you soon! Peace!Quick update (March 5) - house is coming along. Ill try to send pics

soon. Should be able to move in by the end of next week hopefully as

long as it doesnt rain.

Greetings from Asuncion. This weekend I took a trip up north to

Concepcion to visit another Volunteer. Her mom is down from Hawaii

and her town threw a big party for her arrival. We got to experience

some amazing Tai food while listening to Mitra and her mom speak Tai.

"Sevoi'i (which means "worm" in Guaraní) crap?" or something like

that, means "How are you?" in Tai.

So now I am back in the city and getting ready for another trip… to

Buenos Aires! An opportunity just came up to go to Argentina with my

friend Mandi this Thursday! It was totally unexpected, but my boss

said it was no problem so I think I am going to go. We will visit the

zoo, the natural history museum, and spend a day at the beach in Mar

de Plata. We are taking a bus down on Thursday and will be back

Tuesday so it will be a quick trip, but I am looking forward to it.

The new site is going well. I enjoy being able to ride my bike into

La Colmena and the people are nice. They are currently working on

building a small house for me and should be done in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile I have been living with my contact and his family. It will

be nice to have my own place again and do my own cooking. The town

has an agriculture committee and the members collectively work on

raising tilapia so that has been fun to learn about aquaculture and I

can go fishing any time I want and consider it working hard, haha. We

make dough balls with flour and water and fish with cane poles. I

want to try putting a spring on the hook to keep the dough on better

like Dad showed me when we went carp fishing one time and see if it

catches more fish. When a buyer comes in a truck on the weekends we

get out big volleyball nets and 2 guys wade back and forth in the

ponds to scoop out the big ones and I run around with my leather

beekeeping gloves to untangle them and throw them in a bucket. It is

pretty fun. Other than that, I have been harvesting some honey with

people, getting ready for garden season and getting settled in to the

new site.

On Monday mornings the Volunteers in the La Colmena all get together

and do a radio show in town and I think they have a website where you

can listen live online. I will let you know when I figure out the

website and if it works. You can hear us jabber in Guaraní and

Spanish about whatever topic we get on for that week.

In parasite news, I picked out 2 bot fly larvae the other day from my

inner thigh. I think these little flies bite and then lay their eggs

under your skin. They like dark, damp spots so you usually get them

in private places. It was basically just popping a pus-FILLED, or

purulent sack (this in reference to a previous typo I made describing

another parasite experience in my foot) and pulling out the little

worm. Kinda like a splinter that wiggles, haha. Sort of interesting.

My neighbor pulled one out of his dog about the size of a quarter!

Thankfully I got to these when they were still tiny.

Well, back to "work." I guess I don't really have anything to do

today except pick up kits for making homemade detergent for the

women's group in my site. Then I just have to start planning for my

trip to the big city. Peace Corps is a hard life, haha. Hope you all

are staying warm up there. It was 115 degrees here last week! Peace!--

http://domingusj.googlepages.com/

Hello again,

I am all moved out of my old site and back in Pilar for now. A truck

from Peace Corps is supposed to come later this week and take me to my

new site in La Colmena. After talking to some of the other Volunteers

up there, it sounds like it may be easier to send letters to:Justin Domingus, PCV

4470 La Colmena

Paraguay, South AmericaBUT, if you happen to send a box or package you can try this address

but the post office might not let you. It might be easier to send it

to our office in Asuncion at:Justin Domingus, PCV

Cuerpo de Paz

162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López

Asunción 1580, Paraguay

South AmericaThanks for all the emails and support! Hopefully the move and

transition will go smoothly. I will do my best to keep you all

updated. Have a great week! Peace!

Here is my new mailing address in La Colmena:Justin Domingus, PCV

4470 La Colmena

Paraguay, South America

Hola! Greetings from hot, rainy Paraguay. I am currently stuck in

Pilar because of the recent storm. Roads are washed out and I

probably won't be able to get back to my site until Friday. But, asi

es la vida. Such is life. However, this common frustration of not

being able to easily get back and forth from site in the middle of

nowhere may soon be ending. Next week, I might be packing up and

moving to another part of Paraguay. There is a small town right

outside of a city called La Colmena (the beehive) where another

Volunteer used to live and recently went back to the States for some

personal reasons. La Colmena is the first Japanese colony in Paraguay

and there is still some Japanese influence in the area. People in a

small town just outside the city are apparently interested in working

with another Volunteer and on friday, my boss offered to let me move

there. Work has slowed down in my site and there is a possibility of

a pretty bad flood coming for the Parana River. We already had one

recently and several families near me lost their fields, animals, and

even houses. It never quite reached the town where I live, but it got

close and the upcoming surge of water is supposed to be higher than

the last. Some people are already preparing to leave and therefore,

aren't really in the mindset to be thinking about Peace Corps type

things. There isn't really much I can do there. So the slow work, on

top of the flooding, plus some recent housing problems in my current

site has all added up to me probably moving, and maybe as soon as next

week. Nothing is for sure (nothing ever is in Paraguay), but it is

looking more and more likely. It is a little daunting to think about

starting over again at a new place with new people and everything, but

at least I have some form of communication skills one year later so

that should help me get adjusted. Actually, I visited the Volunteer

who used to live there before she left so I already sort of know the

area and some of the people there. It is really beautiful - one of

the few places in Paraguay with some elevation. Rolling hills and

high rock faces. I will send more details when I can. But I am sure

for at least the next couple of weeks I will be busy with the

transition and trying to get settled in. I will try my best to stay

in touch.

Hope you are all keeping bundled up and warm back up north. I miss

you and think about you all! Jajohechta.

Feliz Año Nuevo! I am back in Paraguay after a long and relaxing trip

to Uruguay (which is also located in South America for all of you

playing along at home). Punta del Diablo was great; nice beaches,

helpful people, very relaxed. The big group rented little cabins near

the beach and a couple of us stayed in a youth hostel. The people who

ran the hostel were really wonderful and I ended up having a big lamb

feast on Christmas Eve with them. After Navidad, we went to

Montevideo and hung out until yesterday. There is some beautiful

architecture in the capital and for a big city, it is also pretty laid

back. Highlights of that trip include museum hopping and lunch at the

Mercardo del Puerto where we ate asado, which basically just means a

pile of roasted meat the size of your head. People love their beef

down here. We also went to the Mercado for lunch on the 31st and

there was a huge cider/champagne fight in the streets at noon.

Everyone got soaked in this massive outdoor party as we celebrated the

New Year. The worst part was when the cider dried and we had to walk

back all sticky and gross, haha. But anyways, after a short flight, we are back in Paraguay and ready for one more year. I am

probably headed to site tomorrow and will need to get my garden and

fields back in order and ready for the late summer work. So until

next time, know that I am wishing you all a wonderful 2010 and I can't

wait to see a lot of you when I come back in December! Peace!

Merry Christmas everyone!  I hope you are enjoying the holiday season and nobody is getting trampled at your local WalMarts.  Christmas really isn't that big of a deal here, not in the sense of buying gifts and making big plans.  It seems like people just want to spend time with their family, stay home, and pass the holiday quietly.  The kids get their shoes filled with candy from the 3 kings on January 6th and they come riding on camels, not reindeer.  I am starting to see some things creeping in though, like people hanging pictures of Santa Claus on their door, feeling obligated to buy everyone something, and yes, even in the middle of the freakin' swamps, a few of my neighbors have put up Christmas lights.  All the images of a cold, snowy Christmas with St. Nick all wrapped up in a big red coat just don't make sense here when it is 110 degrees outside. This Christmas I will be hanging out on the beach in Uruguay with several other Volunteers, relaxing, enjoying some good seafood, and taking a much-needed break from Paraguay (although I am sure we will be drinking lots of terere, I made sure to pack my guampa and some yerba).  We will be out on the big town in Montevideo for New Year's so watch for us on TV if there is any coverage of the countdown to 2010 in Uruguay. That is all for now.  I miss you all and hope you have a great holiday.  See you in 2010!


--

http://domingusj.googlepages.com/

12-06-09

One year ago today I arrived at my site to start my 2 years of

service. Today was, in some ways, much like my first day here, but

also very different. I realized that today was a good example of a

productive day for me at site in the Peace Corps now that I am settled

in so I thought I would write it down to reflect on what I do in a

typical day. I get questions from people back home like what do I do

all day, so I figured I would share. Most of you will probably find

this completely boring and useless information, but maybe one day it

will be enjoyable for me to come back and read what I did during my

short time in Paraguay.

I woke up around 6:30, probably about the same time I woke up last

year for the first time in my site, however, this time I was in a

house by myself and not living with my neighbor Carlos. I made my

everyday breakfast of what I like to call Oatmeal Completo, "completo"

because it has a little bit of everything: powdered milk, a spoonful

of pre-prepared ground and toasted soy, corn and rice, honey,

sunflower seeds, almonds, cinnamon, bee pollen, raisins, dried

bananas, toasted sesame seeds and last but not least, the instant

Quaker oatmeal. Add boiling water, stir, and enjoy the very

different, but somehow complementary, textures and flavors. Wash it

down sip by sip with half a thermos of hot mate tea and it makes a

good breakfast. I set the dishes aside to wash later and then headed

outside to look at the garden. The past month I have been busy

traveling and the weeds were letting me know it. I pulled out my dead

tomato plants and broccoli, uprooted weeds until I could see the dirt

once again, and then planted some sun hemp as a cover crop and green

manure. Once the garden looked somewhat like a garden again, I

grabbed my hoe and headed out to my demonstration plot to clean up the

rows, transplant some trees I started from seed, and replant my pigeon

peas that the neighbor's horse chomped down the day before. I chatted

with some neighbors as they passed on the road, explaining for the

20th time that no, the green manures I planted are not drugs, yes you

can eat them but that isn't the point of them, yes, I know how to hoe,

yes, it is hot outside but no, I don't mind, and no, we don't drink

terere in the US. By the time I had finished, it was getting close to

11:30 so I stopped for lunch. I washed up with a bucket drawn from

the well, filtered some drinking water, and started making lunch. I

cut some green onions and garlic chives from the garden, pulled the

last couple peppers and tomatoes, and made a big omelet to eat with

leftover cabbage salad from the day before. After washing up the

dishes, it was time for siesta and I knew that I should take one since

it was going to be a late night, although I normally don't like to

sleep during the day. I slept for about an hour, and then went out to

another field I have been working on to hoe up the weeds and get ready

to plant more peanuts. I hoed for an hour or so and then had to quit

because I had promised Blas, the 12-year old neighbor boy that we

would revise the beehive we had captured last month. It took us

awhile to get the smoker going because of all the humidity and it

always takes Blas a long time to get suited up because he wants to

make sure there are absolutely no holes where bees could get in and

sting him. After tying and retying the string tighter around his

gloves and pant legs, we went out behind his house where we had set

the beehive. We quickly found the queen which made Blas really happy

since he had never seen her before. Everything was fine with the bees

so we headed out and I sat and drank some terere with Carlos. We

casually and very slowly discussed the Expo Fair in town that was

starting that night, our plans to go, which way the wind was blowing,

if it would rain or not, and once again, yes you can eat the green

manures I am planting but that isn't the point and finally, the same

question I was answering over terere with Carlos one year ago today:

no, we don't drink terere in the US. When the pitcher was empty, I

excused myself to go take a warm bucket bath (after one year I have at

least learned to set my water out in the sun so that it is good and

hot), and get ready to go to the Expo in town.

Carlos' old red Datsun truck (I secretly call it ''the Pesadilla'', or

''the Nightmare'' because it always has so many problems) needed some

convincing and eventually pushing to get it started, but sure enough

it did and I jumped in the back with Blas and a couple of other

neighbor boys, bouncing around all the way to Villalbin. Last year I

went to the Expo with Carlos and his family in very much the same way.

We bought our dinner from a vendor (croquetas, empanadas, and

marinera, all some variation of breaded and fried beef), sopa (dense,

greasy corn bread) and a can of Brazilian beer to share between us.

The music had just started so we found seats in the rickety makeshift

grandstand that creaked and groaned whenever the crowd shifted. It is

a miracle that the whole thing doesn't collapse and kill everyone. 3

different bands played what sounded to me like the same 3 polka songs

over and over again, yet the Paraguayans loved them more and more each

time. Next was the cowgirl beauty contest where five 16-year old

girls wearing too much makeup strutted around on horses in front of

the judges. After lots of whooping and whistling from old creepy men

who had daughters or even granddaughters the same age as these girls,

they crowned Miss Expo 2009 and the polka music started again. The

Master of Ceremonies with the wireless microphone constantly chimed in

and reminded the crowd that they were at the "Hermosisimo,

Espectactular Expo Feria Artesania 2009 de la Asociacion de Ganaderos

de Villalbin en el departmento Ñeembucú, Parrrrraguaaaay, el mejor

pais del mundo" and that polka is the most beautiful and spectacular

music of the homeland and all the world. Based on the extremely rare

shows of enthusiasm from the Paraguayans, I think they believe it.

Off in the horizon, lightning started to flash and eventually the

grumbles of thunder came in over the blaring sound system. The main

event, the bull fight, hadn't even started yet, but the sky was

looking more and more threatening. Carlos whispered something to his

wife then tapped me and said we had to leave because it was going to

rain. Don't get me wrong, I was having a good time, but I jumped up

faster than any of them to get out of there. We walked back to the

truck, pushed it backwards out of the parking spot since reverse

doesn't work, and then tried to get it started again. The Nightmare

never fails. Just like last year at the Expo with Carlos, I was under

the hood with my cell phone flashlight trying to hotwire the truck and

not burn my fingers. Finally the engine sparked and all 12 of us

piled in and sputtered along, leaving the Most Beautiful and

Spectacular Artisan Expo Fair 2009 put on by the Association of Cattle

Herders in Villalbin, Ñeembucú, Parrrraguaaaay, the best country in

the world. (Throw in one last drunk cowboy whoop:

"wwwhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuu!")

It is about 20 kilometers from town to the smaller town where I live

and sure enough, the truck broke down almost exactly half way on the

way back. The sky flashed and churned, one of the most beautiful

lightning shows I have ever seen under the darkest sky and brightest

stars you are likely to find in the world anymore. I got caught

spending too much time staring at the sky with my mouth open and not

enough time under the hood with Carlos trying to hotwire his truck

again. Unfortunately, the battery died trying and so we were back to

push starting. It was about 1 am at this time and my language skills

and patience were running thin so I had a hard time explaining "dump

the clutch, or ''give it gas'' in Guaraní. After an hour or so of

swatting mosquitoes, commenting how bad the mosquitoes were, and then

pushing, giving up, and starting all over again, another neighbor with

more mechanical skills than any of us showed up on a motorcycle and

was able to get the Nightmare jump started. We made it back in second

gear around 2 am and I fell into bed and went right to sleep. Happy

one year anniversary in site.

After one year here, lots of things have changed. I sound less like a

2-year old when I try to talk to people, and have progressed to maybe

a 5 or 6-year old (on good days). I have some kind of productive

work. I have a garden, several demo plots, I am more or less living

alone, I cook for myself, I know most of my neighbors and I think most

of them know me, or at least know of me. My ideas about Peace Corps

have changed and although I won't go into them here, maybe someday we

can talk about them in person over mate or terere, depending on the

weather. One year later, this place doesn't quite feel like home and

I'm not sure it ever will. Most of my neighbors are great people and

I am sure I will miss them more than I know, but deep down, I do not

think I belong here. I am not rooted to this place like my neighbors

are and I don't know if I could ever have such a deep sense of where I

come from and what I am as people in this community do.

I recognize that many things I said here may seem critical of Paraguay

and its people, but I say them only half-joking and half as a way to

release stress. I have learned so much this past year, mostly about

myself, but also about Paraguay and what it means to live in the

middle of nowhere. I know more now than when I started that I would

not be here if it wasn't for all of the support I receive from back

home. For now, the countdown begins and every day from here on out

may be the last time I live a day like today in Paraguay. Some days

it will certainly be a countdown to the end, but not always. Most

days I am sure I will be trying to keep busy, doing some variation of

the things I did today. So here is a big thank you to everyone for

your support this first year and hoping next year is at least as good

as the first. I hope life is treating all of you well and you are

fulfilled in whatever you find yourself doing. Until next time...

jajotopata.