Summer dropped into Paraguay two and a half months ago and brought the heat with it. But this lovely country brought us a special treat this year – atwo month drought coupled with clouds that pour seemingly everywhere but here.

The grass has withered thatch-brown but for small standsthat remain verdant. The roads, which stuck like glue after rain, have turnedto dried silt and sand. When it mixes with the sweat on my feet, it paints themslime brown. Fruit crops, especially guava (which should be in season rightnow), have plummeted, both in overall numbers of fruits and individual size.

My well, which was full to the brim a few months ago, hasdropped, week by week. A few days ago, I could see the clay bottom for thefirst time of my time here. And work around Potrero Pucu has all but stopped,except for the chores that are absolutely necessary.

Oh for my high-pressure shower and cool basement back home…

The heat usually drops off at night, but from 11am-6pm,there is nothing to do but stay in the shade and try to stay cool. This is notas easy as in the states, obviously. Sometimes relief comes in lying on thecool pavement of my house, other times, liters and liters of terere infusedwith mint and other refreshing herbs. So I walk through Potrero Pucu in myrolled up jeans, flip-flops, and t-shirt, seeking the shade, a guampa, and someminty terere.

Frustrating as it is, the experience can be sort of bracing.It cuts through the humdrum and the distractions and the silliness. Instead ofspending time focused on irrelevancies, all I can think is “It’s hot. How can Icool down? When will it rain? Please let it rain…” And it’s a lesson inpatience. How can I expect people to want to work on manual constructionprojects or more involved cooking practices if it means they are going to spendmore time baking in the sun, or working over a stifling fire?

So instead of working, we sit, pass the guampa, and sharestories. We’ll get back to work after it rains.

Back in the states, I constantly shuffled between two different names. At home, I was St. John, to distinguish from my father,who we call Sinjin (which is arguably the correct pronunciation of the name).

That continued all the way through my second year ofcollege, when I transferred to UPenn, and everyone there started calling meSinjin. It was less confusing than St. John, apparently.

The fun has continued in Paraguay. When I got here, I took the name “Santo.” This seemed like a perfectly logical choice –it honored my American name, but it didn’t weigh heavily, and it didn’t soundfunny to me like “San Juan” did.

But Santo, without a solidifying second name, lends itselfperfectly to Paraguayan improvisation. Over the last two years, I havedeveloped a whole list of “Santo____”isms.

Henrique is Potrero’s plumber and amateur electrician. He’sa shifty looking character with small eyes and his face is all angles but forthe mole that pops out of his left jaw. He often pauses at Taito’s house for afew moments, and he’ll spout out “Santo Virgen!” Then I’ll get a lengthy littlediscourse about my singleness in Potrero Pucu, and how I need to find agirlfriend.

Then, just as it’s winding down, Taito says something like, “Nahaniri,San-Toro!” (Basically, no, he’s St. Bull, or stud, I guess…) There are thejokes “There’s nothing saintly about this saint!,” or “Ugly Saint,” or otherexamples of Paraguayan ribbing.

Then there’s my host brother, Andres, who calls me SantoLuzardo, after star character in one of the country’s extra melodramatic soapoperas. Nestor calls me Santo Torre Alba (St. White Tower), after anothersoaps star. Hopefully they're good characters - I've never seen the show.

Some people dispense with the name entirely. A civil servantI often see on my bus just calls me “Mister.” (Disconcerting that, reading abook and having someone shout “Mister!” and wave at you… It rolls off thetongue like a bad joke, and doesn’t come close to the poetic ring of “Sir,” or “Señor.”

To my friend Diego, I am just “Gringo!”, shouteddeterminedly and enthusiastically. (This was probably the most annoying.) Andto the cowboys that pass me by on the road, I am just “Americano.” The whole situation used to vex me to know end, until Irealized that Paraguayans do it amongst themselves too. And their nicknames foreach other are sometimes even more interesting, particularly when the names originatefrom Guarani, which causes so many of the names to be based on animals andnature. Some of the names are startling and perceptive, others just silly.

For example, my closest neighbor is a man named Ernesto. He’sa powerfully built block of a man, but he has large, lidded eyes with long,full lashes. He has become “Ña Curutú,” which is the Guarani name for a hawkwith eyes like his.

I’ve written about my friend Taito before, too. But manypeople don’t call him Taito, they call him Taito Teju – “Taito the Lizard.” I’venever understood how he picked that name up, because like Ernesto, he’s asolid, powerful man. Geckos are the last thing he reminds me of.

Ale Gallo “Alex the Rooster,” makes more sense. He’s short, witha small barrel of a belly, and a raspy tenor that carries whenever he explodeswith mirth and sound.

Most of these names are harmless, but I would hate to be “ChicoKure,” which means “Boy Pig,” or alternatively, “Small Pig.” That’s Francisco,a handsome, but short man who teaches English and PE in the high school. Andhis brother Ignacio is “Pajaro Loco,” or “Crazy Parrot.”

A little later today, I will be attending my Close of Service Conference. This is something we do three months before we swear out and finish our service.

So it's been two years, minus a week, since I arrived to Paraguay and the Peace Corps. This one of those moments that prompts even more navel gazing than usual. This is a bit off the cuff, but a few thoughts:

It's obviously been a worthwhile experience. If I had to do it over again, I would. I've received this barrage of experiences that I never would have had I not left the states.

Some include

- butchering pigs and chickens

- living without running water

- living in the middle of NOWHERE

- surviving, and thriving, while often being totally confused

- growing my own food for real consumption

- learning to cope with very fractured and broken people

- learning to LOVE very fractured and broken people

- getting addicted to chipa

- loving the tranquility

- learning Spanish and Guarani

On another note, I remember a conversation I once had with a very wise friend of mine who urged me to get out into the world and go somewhere where my moral and ideological compass would receive totally different inputs than they do in the states. Paraguay has certainly done that too. I'll write more about that later, but suffice it to say for now, Paraguay has given me a much broader lens to look at the world.

Random birdSome nature at the falls...

Monkey!

Tres Fronteras FerryThis is the three frontiers ferry. From this point, you can stand in Paraguay and look out at Argentina and Brazil.

For those of you who didn't know, my parents came down to visit. Again. Anyways, much fun was had. We visited several sites you guys have already seen, including the falls and the jesuit ruins, but also got to go to the Tres Fronteras (the border crossing between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay) and Itaipu Dam (one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world)

Here are a few pics...

A couple of weeks ago I took a trip to Foz de Iguazu, someof the largest waterfalls in the world. (They are certainly the largest in South America, and while Africa’sVictoria Falls are taller, Iguazu Falls pour out much more water.) They liejust an hour or so east of Paraguay’s border with Brazil and Argentina. Unfortunately, I went through torrential downpours, but itwas still an incredible sight.

If any of you dear readers hope to see it some day, I can't recommend the place enough. I stayed and viewed the falls from the Argentinian side, called Puerto Iguazu. Brazil owns part of the falls, but as far as I could tell, all of the prime views and best trails are in Argentina. So here's a goofy photo of me and a couple of snaps of the falls.

Most of you from back home who have been following my blogknow that I studied and worked in Philadelphia for several years before becominga Peace Corps Volunteer. For much of that time, I lived with Tom Gavin (an oldclassmate of my father’s from architecture school) and his wife, Cara. I cannot think of my time inPhiladelphia without thinking of morning coffees with Tom, the extravagantdinners that he cooked up, or the questions he peppered me with aboutPhiladelphia’s streetscapes as we explored them. His generosity of spirit,curiosity and kind-heartedness, were a powerful demonstration about how Ishould interact with people, of what I should strive to be like. I took tocalling him my godfather when explaining my relationship with him to othervolunteers and with Paraguayans.

A month after I arrived in Potrero Pucu, Tom was diagnosedwith an especially pernicious form of brain cancer. And as my experiences withTom defined my time in Philly, his battle with brain cancer came to define mytime in Paraguay a little too. He died last night. I’ll miss him very much.

Taito is one of my closest friends in Potrero Pucu. He lives on a beautiful, lush parcel of land, and he makes his living by raising pigs, farming, and working for other land owners in the area. People respect him because he works hard, and has a gentle, self-effacing humor. He also has several children. The other day I went to visit him, and we were sitting in the twilight when I asked him, “Taito, when are we going to restucco your floor?” “I don’t know, Santo,” he said. “I have a big problem.” That much is true. Taito life has plummeted into Steinbeckian depths in the last year beyond fathoming. About six or seven months ago, Taito’s wife, Celestina, picked up and moved to Buenos Aires with the couple’s two daughters, Lorena, 19, and Andrea, 8. Taito, now in his late 40s, got her pregnant when she was in her late teens, and the two have been married ever since. It was a chaotic marriage, from the gossip flying around the community. Taito was abusive at times, and Celestina frequently provoked him. She certainly resented him, even going so far as telling me how her life hadn’t turned how she wanted it to in front of her husband. (Talk about awkward.) So one day she upped and left, taking her two daughters, first to the pueblo 8km away, then Asuncion, and finally Buenos Aires. That would be rough enough to deal with. But last week, a man in a neighboring community was shot to death. The assailants shot him in the neck and chest three times. The murder shocked everyone – after all, the biggest drama out here is usually a cow getting stolen, and here was a man shot THREE TIMES! But they were even more surprised when the police showed up in Potrero Pucu looking for Ale and Gonzalo – two well-liked local 15-year-olds. Gonzalo is Taito’s son, no less. The victim was one of the wealthy landowners he often worked for. To say the community was flabbergasted would be a bit of an understatement. The police alleged that Gonzalo, Ale, and a third boy had been involved in the shooting, and as information became more forthcoming, it became clear that the police believed that Gonzalo was the principal architect of the crime. He borrowed a rifle from Ale on the pretext of going hunting, went to his father’s boss’s house, and tried to rob the man. But pretty much every family in the campo has a pistol or rifle for self protection. And so the victim emerged from his house with a gun (apparently) shot at Gonzalo. The fact that he is in jail is bad enough. But under the circumstances in which Gonzalo allegedly killed the victim, many people around here worry that the victim’s family will try to avenge his death by killing him in prison, or killing Taito or Gonzalo’s younger brother, Milder. A big problem, indeed.

It was really misty this morning... got some great photos.

Tesho, my host dad, really likes to eat fish.

I find this surprising, since Paraguay is a landlocked country, and can’t haul delicious clams and cod, and other famous marine delights from the oceanic depths. (There are a few tasty fish in Paraguay’s rivers though, namely “merluza.) A roving truck sometimes sells fish, and markets in Paraguari – a city about 30km away) – sell fish, but both cases are cost prohibitive.

Of course, there is a creek about a half a mile from our house, and Tesho is an avid fisherman. But those fish are stubborn little critters, and sometimes he comes home with eight or nine tasty pescas, other times, nothing.

In retrospect, it’s not all that odd that he decided to take matters into his own hands. A few months ago, I noticed Tesho and Andres tearing up a section of earth behind his banana plot.

“We’re building a tajamar,” he said, after I asked him what the two were up to.

A tajamar is a man-made pond. Normally, Paraguayans dig them, or hire a tractor to excavate one so that grazing cattle will have a reliable water source. But Tesho, in his typical ingenious (or crazy) way, decided to dig a fish pond.

First he and Andres dug out a small pond, perhaps 5m x 10m, and 2/3 of a meter deep. However, over the next few months, whenever there was a spare day, Tesho would excavate the pond a little bit more, until it had tripled in size. Then he dug two smaller ponds adjacent to the first. In the next couple of weeks, he will probably remove the berms separating the three ponds.

When he wasn’t digging his pond, Tesho would go fishing. Any minnows became instant pond fodder – over several trips to the nearby arroyo, Tesho must have caught about a hundred fish that he used to stock his pond, now well filled with rainwater.

I mention all of this because the other day, Tesho decided he wanted to have a nice fish dinner. Andres and two neighbors fashioned a net out of a piece of black plastic netting they normally use to shade their vegetable gardens from the fierce summer heat, and hopped into the pond. They trawled the bottom of the pond and within 20 minutes had pulled out six fattened ex-minnows.

...

pics to follow...

It’s cold! I left the states almost a week ago, and it was sunny and warm. Days lasted for 14 hours, the temperature ranged from 60 degrees to over 80, and T-shirts were the uniform of the season. A bit of a shock then to return to Paraguay, which is in full winter mode. I’m wearing a hoodie, a sweatshirt, a jacket, scarf, and wool cap as I write this. What is winter like? Winter is short, between six weeks and two months, but it’s a dreary, damp couple of months. There are no heated buildings in my site, unlike the states – where the nearest café and hot cocoa, or heated bus, or car is just a few steps away. It is a constant chill that makes one feel like he'll never be warm again.

There’s no insulation, and in my case, no hot showers! Brr. When it starts getting chilly, I heat up four or five liters of water in my electric kettle and dump it in the black bucket that I use to wash myself, my dishes and my clothes. Then I hurry over to my outdoor bathroom, and sprint through a two-minute bucket bath, steam filling the small concrete cell. Bath finished, I whip back to my room, dive into my sleeping bag, and shiver. Of course, this is all so much nicer than last year, when I took cold bucket baths (because you know, that’s what Paraguayans do). Antonio – whom I was living with at the time – told me, “You have to take them cold, because you will feel warmer after.” He had a point. After a two-minute, yelp-inducing, cold shower in his house, I did feel more immune to the winter chill. But oh, those two minutes! I’m sticking with my hot bucket baths.

Mba’echapa people! This is just my second day back in site after two weeks stateside. (Probably the best thing about Peace Corps is being able to say, “Oh, when I’m at post…” or “So, what’s happening stateside…” etc etc.) A volcano in Chile delayed me for a day, but I spent a lot of time with my cousins in upstate NY, followed by a trip to Philadelphia, a day in NYC, and a week in the Hub (Boston). While I was there, a recurring question kept surfacing: “What is it like?” Not for nothing was Peace Corps’ old slogan was “The toughest job you’ll ever love.” It’s true. Peace Corps is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is also the most aggravating, infuriating, depressing, boring, wrath-inducing, bewildering, challenging thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never failed so many times in my life. I’ve watched rabbits die, attempts to form commissions wither into nothingness, and I’ve seen initial enthusiasm move into community-wide apathy. While I’m confident people in my community like me and to a certain point, respect me, my status as an outsider, my questionable ability with the language, and I bring this all up because recently, I started a project recently aimed at cultivating local Paraguayan herbs for internal and external sales. “Yuyos” can be any kind of plant, but Paraguayans often refer to them as the plants they put in their mate or terere, especially to treat for different medical conditions. One yuyo might lower blood pressure; another might alleviate nerves, etc. Much of it is psychological, but some of these herbs DO have actual medicinal properties. Shortly before I went home for a visit, I invited a technician to my site to do a charla on how to cultivate some of these herbs. (In this case, it was jaguarete ka’a, a bitter, cactus looking kind of plant.) We ended up presenting to five people, who expressed a great deal of enthusiasm about the project. After all, its zero cost, uses locally available materials, and would pay significantly more than cultivating corn. So it was a little surprising today to be sitting with Ña Dora and have her tell me, “Santo, no one wants to do the yuyo project. It’s really weird and fucked up and it’s just easier to plant corn.” It brings some questions to mind. Did she talk to everyone? Is this an example of typical Paraguayan indirectness? Is she merely prejudiced against the project herself? Why didn’t anyone else say this to me earlier? What should I do now? And in the meantime, as she’s telling me “That was a stupid idea,” I have to keep my cool. “It was just an idea,” I say. “No big deal!” Meanwhile, the mind seethes and rages. “It’s a great project!!!” I’m thinking. And that, my friends, is the frustration of the Peace Corps. On the other hand, shortly before I left to go stateside two weeks ago, I had a completely different work experience. After months of trying to get a school garden built, I, my director, and another teacher ended up building our garden in the space of four days. In the same few weeks, I helped one family improve their garden, did dental charlas with three grades in the middle school, repaired a fogon, and created a fogon project with two other Peace Corps Volunteers to build a new type of fogon with 18 families in our respective communities. It was practically sublime. The toughest job you’ll ever love…

Hello everybody. It’s been a long time. Many of you know about my computer troubles, but for those who don’t, the electricity in my site fried both my battery and my charger about three and a half months ago. Access to the internet has been very spotty, and although I have tried to write in a journal, the times when I have had internet, I haven’t had time to transcribe those entries or do much more than send some emails or upload a few photos to facebook. However, I do have a lot to share with you all, including some successful projects carried out, some work I did in the school, some general reflections about what’s happened up to this point, my visit home, and a couple of entries about Paraguay’s bicentennial.

Here are some photos of the first fogon Franco and i rehabbed. enjoy...

So for all of our readers, it's just a couple days shy of my halfway point - that is, a year and six weeks - of my 27 months down here.

This means that a whole new bunch of aspirantes (trainees) are on the ground in Paraguay ready to save the world (mis pesimas muchachos!), and are going through their training period right now. My bosses sent out four of the aspirantes and one of their trainers to my site for Long-Field-Practice. The basic idea of it all is that trainees spend a week living with Paraguayan families in a rural community working on projects with seasoned volunteers (hi).

Anyways, I'm happy to say it was a roaring success.

We built a fogon for my host mom, Ña Dora. I haven't talked a whole lot about my attempts to start commissions in my site, but I've basically gotten nowhere on that front. Anyways, I bought some bricks, Peace Corps bought the stove-top and oven, and the trainees, I and a volunteer named Franco constructed the oven. ...Of course, there's a larger debate here about how I shouldn't be doing work like this unless the community itself is willing to work to get these items, but I'm tired of pushing and pushing and getting nowhere.

And the bottom line is that I'm sick of the fact that my host mom - who has taught me, suffered my ignorance and clueless gringo-ness, who has shown me a mountain of kindness and generosity - has had to cook on the ground hunched over a smoky fire for the last sixty years. So I'm saying its rent and calling it a day......The trainees - Riso, Jenny, Eric and Emily - did a fantastic job. They spent their time integrating with families, they worked really hard, and they all had freakishly good attitudes, despite two having diarrhea.

They also worked on two charlas, which they gave at the elementary school on their last day in the community. I've got a feeling I'll be getting the question "When are your friends coming back???" a lot for the next couple of months.

...

To top it all off, Franco and I built a brocal around my well, which means that cow poop will no longer be able to (potentially) run into said well during really heavy rainstorms.

A few months ago, I decided that it would be an interesting experiment to try to start breeding rabbits with my neighbor, Ernesto. My thinking behind this was pretty simple: in Potrero Pucu, folks generally raise cows, pigs, ducks, and chickens. Other livestock is around and available (goats, sheep, even ostriches) but nowhere near the community. So raising rabbits seemed like a way to promote another kind of meat (which has value in its own right) as well as a way to promote creative thinking, and since rabbits are fairly low maintenance – seriously, they eat just about anything besides parsley – they’re a cheap and additional source of protein for people down here. Sounds reasonable, right? Heh. Rebecca, a volunteer nearby – and our resident rabbit whiz – came out to my site and helped me build a rabbit hutch, and brought some rabbits to help me start my project. Two of them were pregnant. This was an opportunity, but also a problem, as the babies were born before I or Ernesto’s family were really ready for them. The leverets fell out of their hutch several times, and even though I made some adjustments, all the babies ended up disappearing or dying. But rookie mistakes, right? This is Peace Corps. We adapt. A few days later, one of the rabbits escaped out of the top of its hutch, which hadn’t been fastened properly. This was annoying, but also not catastrophic. Benito (my host brother) and I made a second hutch and tightened up the first hutch. We’d made them out of fresh bamboo, which had loosened as it dried. Still, the hutches seemed to be working, even if they weren’t Frank Gehry masterpieces. This wasn’t the Chuchi Corps, after all. What did it matter if the hutches didn’t look super pretty, as long as they adequately housed the rabbits? Rebecca found me a stud rabbit to impregnate the two remaining females. Everything seemed to be cruising along. Then, a few weeks ago, a crushing wind – the strongest I’ve yet experienced in Paraguay – came through our site and knocked the hutches over. The male rabbit decided that Liberty was more valuable than an easy life of indulgence or readily available carrots and, embracing that most American of traditions, bailed. ( So much for those hutches being ugly but structurally sound) So now there were only two… But they were supposed to be pregnant, so no big deal, right? Despite the fact that there was no longer a stud rabbit, we’d momentarily have up to 16 rabbits. I went to Asuncion earlier this week confident that the issues had been resolved – after all, the hutches were secure, reinforced, the rabbits seemed healthy and well fed. Of course, when I returned to site on Wednesday, my host brother Andres casually remarked that one of the rabbits seemed to be a little sick. Its eyes were pink, he said. This turned out to be a classic Paraguayan understatement. I found the rabbit shuffling miserably in its cage, basically blind. One eye was shut with what looked like conjunctivitis, lost in inflamed pink tissue. The other eye was a gasp-inducing mess of pus and blood that trickled to its mucous clogged nose. Even breathing seemed to be difficult for the little creature. In a hurried phone conference with Rebecca, I learned that the disease was probably one of two ailments, both lethal and highly contagious. So I dispatched the bunny and burned its body, hoping it hadn’t infected the one. Remaining. Rabbit. I should add I’m generally not a negligent pet owner. I’ve owned cats, hamsters, taken care of dogs, etc. I also worked at a zoo for two years – I’ve helped care for scorpions, snow leopards, groundhogs, and skinks! But rabbits, man. … Joking aside, it’s been an instructive, embarrassing, and disheartening little snafu. It’s also a good case-study of the pitfalls that PCVs can face. I approached the whole experiment with a laissez-faire attitude, that my neighbors would do a decent job caring for the rabbits and only need occasional oversight. But they weren’t proactive about telling me about problems, and had different attitudes about what constituted decent care for the rabbits. The creatures got enough food, but Ernesto didn’t upkeep the cages until after a rabbit had escaped. So if you’re going to do a project in this kind of environment, you can’t take a hands-off approach to it.

These are a few random photos that I like but haven't uploaded yet.

These pictures are from my parents' visit down here, and the week we spent in Buenos Aires. I'll post more text later.

I spent the new year in Brazil with my friends Rodrigo and Konstanze, who I used to work with at the Philadelphia Inquirer. We spent our time in souther Brazil, in Rio Grande del Sol, then in Santa Catarina, (which is a little bit north) in the town of Garopaba, and then in Florianopolis.

Sorry for the long silence everyone. I'm posting some photos of Christmas activities and I'll post other photos from my trips to Brazil and Buenos Aires next. The FN stands for Feliz Navidad...

I'm not quite sure when Christian, 27, first invited me to go on a pilgrimage. But, in the spirit of "Why not," - in which I've also learned how to help cows give birth, eat raccoon, and kill pigs - I agreed. I assumed we would go to the shrine of the Virgin of Caacupe, the main site of pilgrimages in Paraguay. But Itape, located about 40km east of Potrero Pucu, is closer, and (more importantly) walkable.

The night we left, I packed a couple of soggy empanadas my host mom had cooked up for me along with some lukewarm tea, and a swimsuit. I caught a few fitful hours of sleep, and at 11pm, trundled down to Ña Veronica’s house, where Christian and Hugo, 25, were sharing a few beers before we set out. The air was humid but not hot, one of the reasons that many Paraguayans make their pilgrimages by night. We decided to hike along country roads to Yvytymi, and travel from there along the new highway to Itape.

We traveled without incident over the first few hours, bullshitting and slurping down the tea I’d brought. The the sky was clear, the moon so bright we didn't need the flashlights we brought. We passed through the flat campo of the department, passing a couple of diminutive rivers, pungent stands of eucalyptus, and a little over an hour later, the pueblo of Yvytymi, 8k east of Potrero Pucu.

The moon set about an hour after we passed at Yvytymi, the stars and the occasional 18-wheeler became our only illumination. I saw Orion (which is always prominent in the skyline here), the Pleiades cluster, the Southern Cross, and what could have been Gemini, though I have no real way of knowing. My knowledge of astronomy includes a report on Orion I wrote in 6th grade, the zodiac calendar, and a childhood fascination with Greek mythology.

So we walked, and walked, and walked, calves knotting, feet blistering, knees tightening. I almost started sleepwalking at one point, until I found myself face-down on the cement, scraped up, and suddenly very much awake. "Do you still have my bombilla?" Hugo asked. (I'd been carrying his Terere thermos)

And so we kept walking, pausing only once for a few minutes to gulp down the empanadas and tea I'd kept stowed in the bottom of my backpack. To the east, the sky lightened over a series of immense sugar-cane fields, mist collecting at the bottom of the foothills in the distance. Cane-workers popped out of the rushes to watch us pass by, faces haggard, calves cramping, weaving slightly with drowsiness. Finally, we saw a sign – Itape, 4km. More fields of cane, and the cool dampness of night gave way to a pleasant, then itching heat. An hour later, 7.5 hours after we left, we stumbled into the backside of Itape. We paid a boatman 5mil to ferry us across the river in a battered carnelian skiff, and arrived at the shrine of Itape.

I climbed the hill next to my house, took a few snaps. Enjoy!

Several volunteers came to my site recently to help me start raising rabbits with one of my neighbors. We used bamboo and wire for the cages. Special thanks to Becca M and her boyfriend Clemente, who brought the rabbits. That last picture is of us tattooing said terrible beasties. Pictures, thousand words, etc...

Yea, it’s been a while. A lot has happened in the last couple of months. I finished my census and community study, and recently had my in-service-training. Other notable events include a trip to Encarnacion to celebrate Thanksgiving with other Peace Corps Volunteers, and a visit to the Jesuit ruins (also in the same area).

Pictures to follow

The “listicle” is a journalistic convention used to tie up space without doing a whole lot of work.

Top 10 Lists are a good example. Still, they’ve got their uses, so I figured I’d do my own listicle –

“Paraguay was the first place I…”

Ate, in no particular order:

- mandioca

- mandio chyryry

- cow neck

- fox

- tripe

- cracklins

- pig face

- cow head

- Deep fried tortillas

- Chipa

- Mbeju

- Blood sausage

- Deep fried corn cakes

- Joint of cow

- Homemade cheese

Paraguay was also the first place I:

- Rode on an oxcart as a daily means of transportation

- Cleared land with a machete

- Was accused of being a spy

- Nearly severed my toe with an axe

- Saw monkeys running around free

- Got bit by a dog

- Took terere (but not maté – that was something I did stateside)

- Saw a toddler joyfully jump into cow pies

- Played piki volley (volleyball with your feet)

- Drank water directly from a hole in the ground

- Washed my clothes by hand

- Killed, cleaned, and cooked a chicken

- Killed a pig

- Pet a capybara

- Used a hammock for a bed

Tesho and I were sharing mate, passing the guampa back and forth in the shadows of the kitchen, an attached hut with a smoke-blackened thatch ceiling, an open fireplace and its ash-encrusted pots, and a wooden table that held a motley array of bowls, pans and enamel cups. “Santo, you should make some mandio chiryry,” he said. “Ok,” I said. “Are you going to eat it if I make it?” “Yea, I’m hungry,” he said. Mildly perplexed, I skipped out of the kitchen to look for Na Dora, who was grinding corn with her daughter and granddaughter for chipa later in the week. “Na Dora, Tesho wants me to cook some mandio chiryry,” I said. “Can I make some?” The three women traded looks and started giggling. That should have been my first clue. “Ok Santo, I’ll help you,” Na Dora said. Men cook in many parts of Paraguay. There are even men in Potrero Pucu who I’ve seen slinging knives while grilling asado, or whipping up some pasta for the mid-day meal. But I have been eating with Na Dora and her family for the last month. The most they’ve seen me cook was American style coffee. Confidence is not at its highest, even for a dish like mandio chiryry – souped up hash browns made with egg, meat, cassava root, and green onion. Still, my experience here has taught me that a “why not?” policy is the best way to go, if only to entertain my Paraguayan friends. I started washing the green onion. Na Dora stood to the side, all mother hen, not even trying to resist giving instructions.

“You have to peel the tomato,” she said.

In the half-light of the single bulb in the room, I couldn’t see the frying pan. The stomach-grabbing giggling started when I poured just a few drops of oil into the pan. In Na Dora’s family, the cooking experience of the men is limited to boiling water and pouring hot milk. “No, not like that!” she yelped, reworking the chunks I’d just cut up, before dissolving in a high pitched fit of giggles that made her lean against the table for support. Her 14-year-old granddaughter was just as carbonated. Tomato puree, meat, and water all goes into the pan, then the mandioca and a few pinches of salt. “Use the other salt!” Na Dora said, hobbling over to the fire and chucking a fistful of the stuff into the pan. “It better be good,” she said. “If it isn’t good, you have to eat it all.” We finished a few minutes later. Na Dora’s daughter and granddaughter refused to sample the stuff, and (after all that!) Tesho put it aside after a couple of nibbles, looking for his chewing tobacco. But Na Dora gave it a try. “It’s not that bad,” she said. The next day, she wandered over to my house while I was working on my new vegetable garden. “Santo, come help in the kitchen!”

I'm out in the campo. There's a lot of time to read, especially when it rains. I've read about 25 books since I came to Paraguay and I recently hauled eight more books back with me from Asuncion.

First up: City of Thieves, by David Benioff. Benioff is the writer behind the adapted screenplays of Wolverine and The Kite Runner. He's also written The 25th Hour and a collection of short stories.

In City of Thieves, Beniov meets Kolya -a Russian soldier - in jail after getting arrested for swiping a knife and some cognac from a dead German paratrooper's body. Instead of shooting them, a Russian general sends them scouring the city for eggs, which he needs for his daughter's wedding cake.

Tragicomic mayhem ensues. This much-touted (I swear I've seen copies of it everywhere) book lives up to its reputation. Cannibals, partisans and a deadly female sniper all enter the fray. Whether expounding on a character's intestinal troubles, the protagonists' problems with a misidentified chicken, or creating the small and painful vignettes of clueless love, Benioff puts his screenplay writing talents to good use here, producing taut, giggle-inducing mirth.

But what is it about the Russian side of World War Two that makes for such interesting reading? I've read and watched countless stories about the Western side of World War Two: dozens of movies from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan. Novels like Night Soldiers show that other side of World War Two which never got covered quite as thoroughly in high school history.

That's all I got. Up next: The Boxer Rebellion.

The thing that surprised me most was how long it took for it to die. The squealing had already started when I got there. Teofilo had collared his 4-month-old-pig with an old piece of cord, and was in the process of pinioning it to the ground with Ramon, my floppy-haired, 19-year-old neighbor. He probably would have kept if for longer, but it has started eating his chickens’ broods, and really, who needs an excuse to eat pig?

I spent the first few minutes getting in people’s way. Eventually, however, Ramon sat on the pig’s shoulders, his hands locking the creature’s snout to the ground. I sat on the pig’s middle, and Teofilo immobilized its legs.

Then Teofilo handed me a knife, a cheap, but nasty looking curved piece of work. The pig squirmed and squealed, and I could see the whites of its eyes. I passed the knife to Ramon and said something like, “vos – no quiero.” (You – I don’t want to)

And so Ramon stabbed the thing in its chest and twisted it around a bit to give the blood some time to drain out.

“Tiene que sangrar, o el carne no sirve,” Teofilo told me later. (Basically, “The blood has to drain, or the meat won’t serve [for eating].”)

But perhaps Ramon hadn’t stabbed hard enough – the pig continued to squeal and kick. It felt very much alive, very much afraid, and not at all interested in dying. Perhaps Ramon hadn’t hit the actual heart - Teofilo and I both had to stab it before it finally stopped kicking and screaming.

Finally, we put it across two 2x4s, where Teofilo poured scalding water across it and Ramon and I scraped its hair off with dull machetes. The burned skin and scorched hair smelled like wet dog. Teofilo roped it up to a low-hanging branch, and cut off its hooves. We flayed the skin, which Teofilo’s family would use to make chicharron – pork rinds.

We removed the organs and entrails next. The long ropes of intestines seemed to go on forever, and the grass-filled stomach felt like the skin of a new basketball.

Finally, he hacked apart the creature’s backbone. The vertebrae let out a crack, as hack by hack, they split apart. All that was left of that frightened, squealing pig was two sides of marbled pork.

Then we ate liver.

Here's the work we've done on my mapa mundial. Enjoy.

"Do you want some chicle?"

This is the question Cristobal always asks me right before he pops a pinch of chewing tobacco into his mouth, then shakes and laugh when I tell him "Another day."

He understands very little Spanish, so I've been forced to learn Guarani on the fly. But his good nature, humor, and kindness translate even when I haven't the slightest idea what he's saying.

He stands a few inches under six feet. His skin is weathered like rough tree bark, and splotchy from a lifetime of exposure to the vivious Paraguayan sun. He likes to walk around bare chested, and his belly proceeds him by several inches, stretched tight and wobbling like a human pendulum.

I am writing this piece in late August, so it is the beginning of a new planting cycle. After a month of relative inactivity, "Tesho," rises at 4am, sometimes even as early as 3:30. He gulps down a liter or two of mate infused with chamomile, and then walks a kilometer to his chacra.

On a recent trip there, he climbed the freshly charred hill to plant mandioca and maiz. There are a myriad of chores: Some days he hacks away at the saplings that have taken root, other days he harnesses his two oxen to plow the field. On still other days, he spends hours hoeing the ground into a crumbly dust instead of the iron-like tierra common to Paraguay.

Though I have lived with five families so far, TeSho's is the first one that relies almost exclusively on farming for its subsistence. (Teofilo is a bricklayer, Antonio is a teacher, others have been cowboys or store keepers.)

Like many here, Tesho's family is complicated. He lives with Na Dora, a brazen, feisty, and defiant grandmother with a mouth that would put even the most macho Paraguayan man to shame. TeSho, in his mid 50s, had 4 daughters with Na Dora (who had four or five children during her first marriage.) Her first husband has since died.

Two of Na Dora's grandchildren live with her - Andres, 17, and Rodrigo, 15. Andres rises before dawn to work for other nearby farmers, while Rodrigo spends his time with his head glued to both of his cell phones (One for each of the two major phone carriers) as he texts away.

At midday, (for Tesho, already 8 hours old), he returns to the house - built room by room over the years as money and resources allowed - painted a brilliant white that seems to amplify the glare of the noon sun. After lunch, he walks back to the chacra to put another four hours of work in, or he tends to chores around the house.

His day ends around 8pm with a cup of sweetened milk or mate and a piece of bread. He's got to sleep, after all - he'll be up in just a few hours.

The Food Post.

I've touched on food in my posts here in the past, but I my experiences of the past few days has made me decide to devote an entire post to the issue right now.

It's easy to find just about any food in the States. Flavors range depending on location, culture, and national origin. Case in point, every major city has a Chinatown, a couple of great Indian restaurants, excellent Italian, and a bunch of Irish Pubs.

In Asuncion you could PROBABLY track down most of those, if you tried hard enough. But out in the campo, food options start to get pretty homogeneous. A Paraguayan lunch - the main meal - generally consists of peeled and boiled mandio (cassava or manioc state-side), then a guiso (rice or noodles with pulverized vegetables and meat or beans), and a salad (lettuce and tomato bits with lemon and salt), IF the owner of the house has a vegetable garden.

Galletas - little loafs of bread - or coquitos - sort of like bland crackers - are usually in abundance, and you drink them with a milk drink of some kind in the mornings.

There's also mbeju, a sort of fried pancake made of almidon (flour made from mandio), cornmeal, and cheese. It's really yummy.

And on the list of food I DON'T like, there's tortilla (not like mexican tortillas, these are deepfried slabs of flour and cheese), mondongo (cow-stomach soup), and enrollado (diced and sliced pig head mixed with vegetables rolled up and fried in pig skin.

For other bread options, there are sopa - sort of a cheesy cornbread - and chipa (little bread loaves made with almidon, truly yummy).

Empanadas abound, but that's a whole separate entry. In general, one can expect to eat tortilla, galleta, and guiso on a daily basis. (Would you like some starch with your starch and oil? Yes please!)

Luckily for me, almost all of the houses I've stayed at have had great cooks. Sometimes we'll eat the same food over a few days, but it's almost always been tasty.

Also interesting about Paraguay are its food myths. I think I've touched on this before, but Paraguayans have very strict ideas about what combinations of food one can eat. For example, you can't mix spicy and sweet foods, spicy food makes you horny, eating mango or watermelon with anything will give you extreme diarrhea or potentially kill you, etc.)

On the other hand, I'll sometimes get asked "What's the most common American food?"

And I don't really have an answer. In the states, I'll explain, some people eat meat, some don't, a lot of people eat too much, we have two big meals instead of one, and in my family at least, we eat a lot of vegetables.)

Personally, I have decided that Jiffy or Skippy peanut butter and dark bars of solid chocolate are quintessentially American foods.

When I lived at home with my parents, my dad often (after much armtwisting by this sugarfiend) brought home chocolate, but usually just basic bars of dark chocolate. Actually, often it was Dark Milky Way Bars, but when I came to Paraguay, it was those simple, straight forward bars of dark chocolate that I missed most.

When I visited a volunteer during training, I discovered the other food that I came to crave - creamy processed peanut butter. (Who knew??)

You can put it on pancakes, in oat meal, you can eat it by the spoon full, mixed with nuts and raisins, even in hot milk for a little protein blast. And its filling, and (sort of) nutritious.

Here in the supermarkets in Paraguay, one can find mountains and mountains of intriciate, layered cookies. There are drink mixes, M&Ms, rich yogurts, and it's even possible to find solid bars of chocolate. (Though not the really dark kind.) And there's one store I've found that sells peanut butter, though they add a lot of sugar.

So there it is, people. Our new national foods - dark chocolate and mashed-up peanuts.

When I first joined Peace Corps, every little thing was new, so there often felt like there was a lot with which I could update my blog. However, as my service progressed, particularly towards the end of my fourth month in training until now, I was making the same motions over and over, none of which seemed particularly newsworthy. Still, after receiving an irate email from a precocious certain someone demanding to know if I had died, it occurs to me that I should perhaps provide you all with an update.

I've just completed my 6th month in Paraguay. In my first three months, as most of you already know, I stayed in Santo Domingo, where I received my training. Then, three months ago, I moved to my site, which is called Potrero Pucu. (Again, most of you know all this, but its been a while.) I began quickly, teaching compost workshops, building veggie gardens with a few of my families here, starting to get to know my community, and also starting my community-wide health census.

About seven weeks in, I moved to a neighboring community called Potrero Naranjaity, where I lived until just recently. I was staying in a very nice house with three rooms, a modern bathroom, room to raise pigs, horses, and also grow a vegetable garden. There were also loads of fruit trees. P Naranjaity was about a kilometer and a half from the center of Portero Pucu - not all that far, but it increasingly felt like a different world. The houses, like the one where I was staying, were almost all better equipped than Potrero Pucu's houses, and several families owned cars or had running water.

I decamped from there and moved in with another family back in Potrero Pucu. It doesn't have running water, and it's a much poorer family. On the other hand, the view outside my window is incredible. Also, perhaps more importantly, this family doesn't really speak Spanish, so in the past week I have learned more Guarani than I have in all my previous training in Paraguay.

Besides whipping along with my Guarani training, I and other members of my G had our Reconnect - a week of meetings and workshops at the three month mark to kick-start this next phase of our service. I've trucked through about 37 of my 50 censuses, begun the world map at our local school, and a few days ago I hauled about 2000lbs of sand to the school to help them renovate their bathrooms.

I also went pig-hunting (My family had a sow run free and give birth in the wild), and have been little by little recovering from that ankle sprain. Looking ahead, I'll be finishing up my census, finishing the world map, and starting between one and five groups or commissions. the goal (as I see it from the information I've gathered in my census) is that we need to start a Fogon Commission, a Running Water Commission, and a 2-4 woman's groups. (Woman's groups can work on anything from cooking classes to production depending on what they want to focus on.)

It continues to be an incredibly rewarding experience, though certainly trying and confusing.

There's a lot more to say on this, but another volunteer in my G summed it up better than I could.

"I arrived in site with high hopes determined to not get bored or depressed and determined to at least start every project that was needed. Now I’m not writing this to say that I’m bored and depressed and not getting anything done… but sometimes I feel that way. I moved into this community knowing my two contacts and their families and also knowing that part of my job is to meet everyone here and explain who I am and why I’m here and figure out what it is they really need. My idea of what work is has changed a lot and some days if I spend a good few hours visiting with people, I consider that work, even if most of the time I sit in silence listening to other people talk (which is usually the case)... I usually get up between 6 and 7, depending on how long I feel like sleeping in and typically spend the morning drinking mate (hot terere), helping out with preparing breakfast and lunch and cleaning up a little bit, do some laundry, and sometimes I do a little reading...

The thing about my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it usually sounds more exciting on paper than it really is and people telling you that you will have hard days or be bored is a lot different than the actual experience. ... " ---> You can see more on her blog ----> http://www.alisonpatt.blogspot.com/

My experience as a volunteer is a bit different than Ali's (guys deal with a whole different mindset here), but in general, it's been three months of lowering expectations, integrating, and just getting used to things.

More to come shortly...

Updates forthcoming (I promise!):

Some photos of houses around here.

Another couple of interviews with people from Potrero.

What I've been doing the last couple of months.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks.The highlights include a move to yet another house, a VERY sprained ankle, learning how to lay brick as I help one of my contacts renovate his house, and honest-to-god-cow poking.

I posted Paraguay's Pechugon commercial below. One of the other ubiquitous sounds of the Mundial is Shakira's "Esto Es Africa," the official song of the World Cup. It's on every cellphone, every radio, every MP3 player. The Spanish and English versions are posted here.

Spanish

English

We're all watching the world cup down here, pretty much daily. In Paraguay, one of the companies sponsoring the Albirroja (The red and the white, the colors of the national team) is Pechugon - a chicken seller. This ad gets played constantly on TV. Enjoy!

Some of these are older, some newer. Either way, they're photos I like that I haven't been able to put up yet.

Also, Paraguay won today!

I got to tour one of my neighbor's land with him. We took the horses. This means fun photos for you guys.

Today, in flagrant disregard to vegetarians, PETA, and hippy-dippy vegans, you're going to learn how that chicken goes from feathered flapper to delicious caldo de gallina. That's right people. Sinjininparaguay: Culinary dispatch!

You'll want to pick a hen, or gallina, that's already started to produce eggs. They're fatter, apparently, and if they have any unlaid eggs inside, you can eat those too.

Wring its neck. Avoid the spontaneous and energetic wing flapping. Easily accomplished by hold it by its legs.

Submerge in boiling water. Then hang from a tree and pluck its feathers. This only takes four or five minutes.

Continue by dismembering the chicken - first remove the head and neck, and rip out it's gullet. Then cut out the wings and drumsticks.

At this point, things get messy. Cut the body open, remove the kidneys, liver, belly fat, lungs, and heart. Then pull out the intestines - they're bright yellow!

Cut the bird into sections, cook.