A tale of Spontaneous development work

In the Peace Corps there are some projects you plan out meticulously. You pore over calendars and schedules for months and brainstorm a 5 step plan for development or empowerment or education. Other times, you go to someone’s house to sit down for five minutes to drink terere and the next thing you know you are trying to explain in Guarani why the ozone layer is important to a bunch of sixth and seventh graders. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This post is about waste. Garbage. And how we 'dispose' or, to use a term that almost hides the negative part about garbage, 'manage' it. Some fun facts:

-The mounds of garbage south of Chicago near the Altgeld Gardens housing projects were so steep a few years ago that an avalanche of trash was feared. After considering various solutions, a flock of garbage eating GOATS were brought in to consume some of the garbage and make the structure of the mound more secure and prevent a disaster.

-Anyone who has driven out of St. Louis into Illinois has seen the massive mounds of garbage that are located right next to the poor neighborhood of East St. Louis. It’s no secret that landfills are generally located next to poor areas who lack economic and political power. Just imagine how fast a proposal to build a landfill next to oh, I don’t know, Hinsdale, IL would get shut down. It would be a quick case of Nimby, aka Not in my backyard.

The garbage problem of our throwaway culture is obviously more readily observable to someone who lives next to a landfill. In the suburbs, we have trash pickup, recycle, and the problem is easy to push out of our immediate priorities. Out of sight, out of mind. I remember how in one of my undergrad courses at Knox it was easy for our discussion group to gang up on the ‘evil and misleading corporations’ that profit from waste management in the U.S. How dare they put landfills next to poor people, man! Looking back on that discussion, my 25 year old self wants to go back in time and give my 22 year old self a reality slap in the face: If the waste management companies are so evil, then what is your solution, man?

Honestly, where WILL all our garbage will go? As more areas in the world develop a consumer mentality, the problem only becomes worse. Living in rural Paraguay has shown me what happens when the culture of consumerism outpaces the culture of waste management. San Blas got electricity here in just 1998. Cell phones arrived in the mid 2000’s (we skipped over land lines). The town now watches as much TV as anywhere, and as a result people here are exposed to the same adds for Hellman’s mayonnaise and Coca Cola along with other consumer products. (With genius add campaigns specifically tailored to them). And I can guarantee that people here produce less per-year waste than the average American since so much food is consumed fresh. But a cursory glance or walk down the main road makes it evident that managing waste is not a top priority, as one will find it littered with all sorts of plastic, paper and glass garbage.

One of two things is usually done with an empty plastic yogurt container, plastic wrapper for a sucker or other throwaway item here: it is either a) tossed on the ground or b) burned in a garbage fire. Sometimes garbage is tossed into a garbage bucket, but normally that is just to be burned later anyway. The municipality has listed in its job description that it should provide garbage pickup for all of the companies under its jurisdiction, but so far the infrastructure hasn’t reached San Blas. So what SHOULD BE done with garbage here, especially toxic plastic waste that one shouldn’t be burning? The best solution is to build a garbage pit in your backyard and just burn whatever paper or cardboard waste you have.

I say ‘should be’ because in my experience most people burn all garbage, toxic and non-toxic, in a weekly garbage fire behind their house. I haven’t seen a lot of garbage pits in my town. The other day, I am over at my friends’ house and heading to the latrine after a round of terere when I see one of the daughters of the family sweeping garbage into a big pile.

“Are you going to burn that?” I ask her.

“Yep,” She replies.

I notice that there is a lot of plastic in her pile, so I say “You know it’s toxic to burn plastic?”

“Yea, I know,” she goes.

“Well why don’t you dig a garbage pit?”

“Why don’t you dig a garbage pit?” she said in a sarcastic, joking way.

I’m pretty sure she was just joking, but I decided to call her bluff. I agree that digging a trash pit is a fine idea, so she hands me a shovel and I start digging in her backyard. An hour later we have a pit that is about 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide. We then get her little brothers and sisters to gather the plastic laying around her house and toss it into the pit. Peace Corps grassroots development work for the day: accomplished.

Sometimes, I don’t think the words “Burning plastic is toxic” have much weight to whoever is listening to me. It’s hard to explain that the smoke will travel a short distance, probably settle into the ground and seep into the water supply and result in greater incidences of cancer, deformed offspring and reproductive failure. I get a look sometimes when I say that like I am crazy. Even though, tragically, an extremely healthy 19 year old one 2 miles from my town has just contracted cancer. I mean, its good that burning a plastic bag and inhaling the smoke doesn’t make your face peel off or anything but, at the same time its effects are potentially fatal. Yet my friend knew toxic was plastic on some level, but that wasn't enough motivation for her to dig a pit to dispose properly of toxic plastic instead of burning it.

Creating the right incentives for behavior change is tricky, and more-so in a foreign land and language. Motivation for behavior change depends on the effort needed to make that change, and the immediate benefit or threat of the problem being presented. This is where education comes in. An educated population is more likely to take more preventative measures to problems as opposed to reactive measures. And digging a single garbage pit and explaining to one family why it is toxic to burn garbage could be the start of a green revolution in Paraguay.

At least, this is what we volunteers tell ourselves. But hey, you never know.

A big thank you to everyone who donated to San Blas’ school library. Most Peace Corps Partnership projects that are submitted to the internet take months to get funding, and within less than 3 days we made it to the $360 mark. I guess I should have asked for more money, but live and learn. The students of San Blas will be extremely happy to have some new and very awesome books for next year.

It’s late in the afternoon and I’m getting ready to make an exquisite dinner of veggie rice stir fry. My across-the-street neighbor, Ovidio, appears outside my front window and give a few claps, as is the custom since doorbells don’t exist here. I step outside to greet him.

“Come, you did a bad thing,” he says. “Your dog. It’s very bad.” Say what? I follow, and my heart starts pounding harder and faster. My dog Yuyo ('Yuyo is a Guarani word that means 'remedy') is at my other neighbors’ house right now, but I’m fearful that he may have been hit by a truck just like my previous one.

We walk across the dirt road and arrive at young Ovidio’s house. We sit down and he begins to talk sullenly yet rapidly to me in Guarani. I understand about 60% of his words, but the gist is very clear. He is angry at my dog Yuyo, who he accuses of killing not one, but two of his ducks. He brings me a dead duck that he just found, throws it on the ground in front of me and explains the evidence.

Three days ago his mother-in-law saw from up the road a dog attack a duck and was certain, from 100 meters away, that it was el perro americano (the American dog) doing the deed. That was the first duck murder. Today, another one of his flock of ducks was found dead. As a result of his alleged guilt in the first attack, Yuyo is the prime suspect in both killings. “So it looks like we are going to be eating some fried duck tonight,” he says sarcastically.

After hearing the accusation, I am in denial. I feel like a parent after a call from school about their teenager who was caught in the act of some serious misbehavior:

My kid? Sarah? No, no, you must be mistaken. Sarah would never plagiarize. She’s a good kid.

I know, Mrs. Johnson, this is probably difficult for you to accept. The thing is, if you google “Birds of south America” in Spanish, the third link from the top is verbatim the report that your daughter turned in. She didn’t even bother to change the font. She will be receiving a zero and will be reported to honor board. I’m sorry.

That’s not possible. Let me talk to Sarah. This is clearly a misunderstanding.

I still felt that the evidence was a bit sketchy and attempted to do a quick cross examination. So you didn’t actually see my dog kill the duck today? Is your mother-in-law sure of what she saw? How good is her vision from 100 meters? I understand you are upset, but are you sure you aren’t jumping to a conclusion here? etc. Unfortunately I don’t think my Guarani came off as articulate as Perry Mason, because Ovidio was still sure that Yuyo was the guilty party, and his grim face was angrily staring through me.

When you are responsible for the death of a chicken, duck, or other farm animal here, it is customary to pay the owner its cash value. Guilty dog or innocent, I was not about to start a feud with my neighbor. I went back to my house and grabbed the 50,000 Guaranies that the ducks were worth. I came back and handed him the cash, saying again how sorry I was. I also brought Yuyo over, let him approach the dead duck as if he could eat it, and then gave him a disciplinary smack and yelled at him. I figured this would satisfy Ovidio and prevent the behavior in the future, if indeed it were true.

Ovidio, though, still looked as angry as he was when he came to my house. So I said, “Well, he won’t be eating any more ducks, that’s for sure. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

Raising his head slowly, speaking deliberately, he looked me in the eyes and said, “If my dog had killed a duck, I am going to kill the dog.” The clear inference was that I should kill Yuyo.

I diverge from the story for a moment to explain a cultural difference about dogs here. Dogs in rural Paraguay are not “man’s best friend” as they are in the U.S. With few exceptions, dogs don’t do tricks, don’t have collars, aren’t on leashes, don’t have food bowls and are not fed dog food. They roam around different houses looking for table scraps, howl all night (especially when there is a female dog ‘in heat’), camp outside and bark at anything and everything that walks by. One thing they don’t do is kill chickens or ducks.

When I first arrived to here, I didn’t understand why dogs don't hunt chickens all the time. The dogs are starving. You can see the bones of their ribcages. Why don’t they just hunt down one of the 70 defenseless chickens digging for worms in the dirt between the orange trees and satisfy their hunger?

My host-dad Antolin answered my question easily. Laughing, he said, “Oh those dogs don’t kill any chickens. If I find out a dog killed a chicken, we get rid of that dog immediately. It’s done.” Get rid of, of course, means kill. It might sound harsh, but when you are poor and your ducks and chickens are one of your main sources of income, every time one of them dies it is the same as someone taking cash out of your pocket. If a dog develops a taste for live chicken or duck meat, natural selection does not look at him favorably in San Blas.

Back to the action. I am trying to process the fact that my neighbor wants me to kill my dog, who is literally my best friend. Yuyo goes on runs with me, sleeps in my house, and goes swimming in the river with me on hot days. He is the second dog I have raised here after the first one got hit by a truck. I try to explain. “I know this might be difficult for you to understand, but Yuyo is more than just a dog to me, he’s my friend. I’m not going to kill him.” As my lips complete this sentence, I realize how crazy it probably sounds in Spanish to Ovidio that I’m going to let a dog get away with murder.

At that precise moment my grey-haired neighbor Esteban rolls up, unaware of the tense moment Ovidio and I are having. Esteban is clearly in a good mood and enjoying his Sunday afternoon, as the flask in his right hand is almost empty. He asks if we want to join him in his Sunday Funday, then notices the somber, serious mood we are both in. Ovidio quickly fills him in on the situation. Perro americano. Mother-law. Dead ducks.

Esteban processes what Ovidio is saying, then says my favorite Guarani phrase of all time: Ijapueterei.

Literally translated, ijapu means ‘he/she/it is lying.’ The eterei on the end adds emphasis. Instead of a regular lie, it’s a big, fat lie. Add tavy on to that to make ijapuetereitavy if what someone just said was the most outrageous fabrication you’ve ever heard.

“Ijapueterei,” Esteban says emphatically. “That’s a lie. The dog didn’t kill the duck. I saw that duck get run over by a guy on a motorcycle earlier today.”

Esteban picks up the dead duck by its feet to examine it. Sure enough, it has a big, obvious tire tread mark on its back. Ovidio turns to me with an extremely guilty look and gives me back half of the money. I feel like I have just lived through a Perry Mason episode where it seems obvious that the killer is the defendant until the very last surprise witness. Thank god for wandering late Sunday afternoon drunks. I hand Ovidio back some of the money and decide this is a situation for gesture of truce that both of our cultures understand. “I think this calls for a beer.”

All PC volunteers understand that their service is filled with bipolar mood waves of ups and downs. A low can transform into a high within an hour and then reverse again, or a mood can last weeks at time. Me? I’ve had my share of lows and highs, which are noticeably amplified since there are so few distractions in my town. Yea, I can seek out some outlets—playing pick up soccer with high schoolers maybe. But sometimes I can’t help but miss things from back home: my mom’s chicken and dumplings, Wisconsin cheese, and the innocuous but typical conversation with another Chicagoan about how good the Bears’ second string quarterback is looking this year. But here and then you have those ‘Yes! I actually accomplished something’ moments, which are the highs, that make it all worth it.

Sitting here in my school on a sunny but brisk spring afternoon, I’m thinking about the time almost a year and a half ago when I had some sit down time in the ministry of education of Paraguay. A representative with whom the other volunteers and I were chatting said that the ministry would love to equip schools in more remote areas with books, but that often schools in areas where they have never had many books often either a) put the books into a corner and not let anyone touch them so as not to get them dirty or b) the books are soon lost, destroyed, brought to homes and never seen again. My friend asked the obvious catch 22: “How are communities and schools going to learn how to use books if no one ever gives them any?”

When I arrived to San Blas in May of 2010, I found myself confronted precisely by this chicken-egg dilemma. My school had an extremely limited quantity of kids’ books (about 20) collecting dust in the corner, but they were of poor quality. Without a solid selection of children’s books it was difficult to show even the teachers the benefits of integrating children’s literature into their classroom routines, let alone convince the parents of a poor community to use their limited resources to buy children’s books. The bitter irony is that communities like San Blas needs kids’ books the most.

Fortunately over the last year a few things happened that tipped the scales in our favor. First, I read a lot of books out loud in all of the grades. This became an especially effective activity when students started asking their teachers when is Professor Miguel going to be coming in again to read? Remember how hard it is to say “no” to cute 3rd graders who want to do something educational? At the same time, I received a few decent sized donations of books, one from a friend back in the states, one from an ex-pat, and another from an international book aid organization. These donations allowed the library to grow to its current size of about 140 books, or one shelf’s worth. Perhaps even more importantly, the books that we have now are awesome and pique the students’ interest. When I started reading classics like Where the Wild Things Are and The Hungry Caterpillar, all of the students, from kindergarten to 6th grade, started to ask me for more. I would read a book in 4th grade and 6th grade would hear through the walls and come up to me and ask me to read in their class. Sure, ndaipori problema. A little bit harder was to get the teachers to read the books to the kids in my place, but once I told them that if we weren’t using the books I would have to donate the books to a school that would use them, they went with it.

The culmination of all this was last week, when I had a meeting with the parents to discuss “the TRIAL PERIOD for a system of book loaning.” After taking into consideration the concerns of the teachers at San Blas that a school library loan system would only result in a loss of all the books, we decided to take a hard line: For the next month, we will loan books out to kids only from 3rd grade up. If a book goes missing that student has their book loaning privileges revoked. If enough books go missing, the ‘trial period’ will be over and the books will simply stay at the school. Every student, in order to borrow a book, must pass a small test on how to take care of books, delivered by myself. Students from kindergarten through 2nd grade can only borrow books if a parent or relative physically comes to the school to take out a book.

Yesterday was the big day. In 6th and 3rd grade we had very frank chats about how to take care of books and the consequences for not bringing the books back. After the students passed their test on how to be responsible for books, they were allowed to take home one book for a maximum of 7 days. Even I was somewhat surprised at the amount of enthusiasm that students showed in wanting to bring home the books to read.

A straw pole determined that almost all of the students from San Blas school do not have access to books at home. These are the kids most important to reach with school library programs like this. There are no major social problems in the area, like drugs and gangs which prevent some schools in cities from being effective. There are only the hurdles of bilingualism and the lack of a culture of learning not yet in place. So if it’s not there...put it in place. What else are schools for? The jury is out on the effectiveness and sustainability of the program, but the hope is that it will go a long way towards creating a higher student interest level in all kinds of books, increase reading levels of struggling readers, and generally create a culture of learning.

A big shot out to Prof. Dunn, Ann Marie Schafer, my aunt Marybeth, Darien Book Aid and my mom and sister for book/class supply donations. Know that your gifts are being put to good use!

"If you are reading this, your first grade teacher was probably pretty good."

-Socrates

If you haven’t heard the news, the Early Elementary Education Program is gone. At first it merged with the Urban Youth Development program to make the more generalized (or ‘specialized,’ take your pick) program called Education and Youth Development. When Congress decided to cut the Peace Corps budget for this year, our program got the ax. Yep, we got the chop. After my group of EEE volunteers leaves next year, Paraguay will have no more volunteers devoted specifically to Early Ed. Adios. Hasta Luego. Hasta la vista, baby. Personally I’m a little bit salty about the deal. The move forces us EEE volunteers to consider a rather depressing question: “is our sector so unimpactful and possibly pointless that the office decided to get rid of us before all others?” The answer is a resounding “hell no.” The move, however, has made me consider the lack of respect (or at least priority) that is given to early elementary teachers here and in a lot of places in the world. Reading pedagogy, as we call it in the biz, is taken for granted, big time. My work in Paraguay has shown what happens when early childhood development is done wrong, but also the transformation that can happen when it is done right. Hear me out: I would like to demand a little more respect for our elementary teachers.

If you think I’m being overly defensive about the education profession, think again. Consider which majors ‘talented’ college students are advised to choose. The Sciences, business, law, or going into academia come to mind. Elementary Education majors are mocked as outcasts who failed their first bio class and as a result are majoring in ‘singing nursery rhymes.’ One of the smartest/most talented people I have met in the Peace Corps was an elementary education major, and when I asked her about it, she admitted that many times in college people had asked her why she didn’t decide to study something more intellectually demanding than Early Ed. Even as an Ed major myself, I still have it ingrained in me that teachers (especially elementary) are given less respect than other similar caliber office jobs.

Let’s use salary as a gauge of respect. Go look at teachers salaries in the Chicago suburbs on Champion.org right now. A Physical Education teacher of 20 years with a masters who coaches sports commonly might make six figures or close. How much does the all-star 1st grade teacher with 30 students and similar experience make? Maybe half. You see, while the work of the elementary teacher is much less glorious than the work of the high school teacher, a plethora of research shows that formative years in pre-school, kindergarten, first grade, second grade could be much more impactful in terms of intellectual and linguistic development than high school. Not only have studies shown this, but it is just plain common sense: Who is more in danger of dropping out, a first grader who can’t read or a seventh grader who can’t? Trust me, school is way more boring (and embarrassing) for the illiterate seventh grader. But that is beside the point. How did a student make it all the way to sixth grade without learning how to read? The sad fact is that it was (outstanding cases aside) probably a lack of elementary teaching that reaches everyone.

It’s about damn time that we give our elementary teachers some mad props when they do a good job, and make elementary teaching more of a priority. It’s just that early childhood development is easy to brush off as insignificant. The difference between a bad teacher and a good teacher in the early grades is extremely subtle. It is the difference between taking 10 minutes instead of 3 minutes for the daily calendar activity. It is the difference between giving students 5-10 seconds to think of the answer and just saying it out loud for them. It is using word cards and gestures while singing a song instead of just singing. It is singing the ABC song everyday. Still seem trivial? THINK AGAIN. Let’s take a look at some evaluation results.

Last year the reading evaluation I administered in Kilometer 16 school showed that ONE of THIRTEEN kids could recognize a single word. In case you did not comprehend that last sentence because you were in disbelief: 12 of 13 students could not identify ONE word on a list of ONE SYLLABLE words.

This year? 14 of 18 COULD IDENTIFY words. Yea, in case you were wondering, that is a pretty big jump. Pretty, pretty, pretty big.

This was due largely to the ‘subtle’ changes we made in terms of teaching techniques in Kindergarten and first grade: singing the abc song every day, exposing the students to words via word cards, doing a word wall, playing bingo with letters and words. The changes are sometimes so subtle; it’s hard convincing the teachers that they need to consistently do them when I’m not around. I feel like I am the nagging Paraguayan version of the boss from Office Space. Instead of Did you put the cover sheet on those TPS reports? We’re gonna need you to go ahead and DO that. MMMkay?, it’s Did you sing the ABC song yet in kindergarten? Area you doing it every day and saying the sound of the letter along with the word? I’m gonna need you to go ahead and do that. Do mind if I watch your calendar activity and micromanage the way you do it? Are you still having the kids spell out the day and not just asking them for one second and then spelling it for them? While these differences might seem insignificant, they are the difference between learning for all and learning for the top third (who know how to read already anyway).

It’s easy to be bitter and angry at the evil but faceless ‘school system’ when a 9th grader still can’t read. It’s not easy to get Scrooge McDuck style furious at elementary teachers when they skip out on the daily game of vowel BINGO that you suggested. It’s even harder to get angry at the ‘system’ for the fact that elementary teachers don’t get respect. It’s a lot easier to whine about the lack of success students have later on in their school career.

The Naperville School District gets it: they are trying to equalize high school and elementary school teacher salaries. Guess who is going to get the most talented elementary teachers in the years to come?

Reading pedagogy is not rocket science. It is not sexy...well maybe if Jordan Lanfair was your teacher. But it’s also really easy to overlook and screw up. It's the offensive line of education. See: the history of the Bears Running backs. Not every teacher can be Sweetness, and have an awesome classroom in the middle of a system where their profession gets less respect than other more flashy jobs (like high school Spanish Teacher, what what) get more pay, have more fun and get more credit. Not every teacher can play for the Dallas cowboys.

If this post seemed like a repetitive diatribe defending early elementary education and those who teach it, it was. So much money and resources (not to mention spineless rhetoric) is wasted these days on changes that have zero effect or are the equivalent of putting a band aid on a gushing wound (see: remedial programs in high school). Why not focus on what we know works? We so take for granted our elementary teachers, the ones who taught us how to read, write in the lines, and add. Next time you think that an elementary education major is learning how to major in ‘singing nursery rhymes,’ just consider again that one year of implementing basic participatory teaching reading techniques increased mid year word decodification ability from 7.6 % of the class to 77.7 %. So next time you are having a good time, maybe in a restaurant reading a menu or something taking your literacy for granted, make a toast to your 1st grade teacher, or maybe even pour one out. This one’s for you, Ms. Marciniak.

“Ves, Erik? Estamos subiendo, Paraguay.”

“See, Erik? We are climbing up, Paraguay.”

-Celebrating gentleman to my friend Erik after Paraguay’s shootout victory over Brazil

Dead silence alternates with wild screams of joy and hugs in the well populated mall as the soccer teams of Paraguay and Venezuela take turns shooting penalty kicks. Our group had come to an exposition to learn about reforestation, but there was no way we were leaving early when the Paraguay National team was playing a game in the semifinals. At least one hundred of us stand around watching the game on a big screen. With every Paraguay goal come screams. Venezuela’s made goals produce a reaction from the crowd not totally unlike a human imitating a cat’s hissing. Paraguay’s goalkeeper, Justo Villar, AKA The Human Wall has already shutout one of the most powerful soccer squads in the world in Brazil days before. But with penalty kicks you never know what is going to happen. Everyone is waiting for the same thing: The Human Wall has to make a save on a kick, no easy feat. If he does, Paraguay will win and cement an advance to the championship of the Latin American Cup.

I diverge for an important and revealing subplot. There is effectively one sport in Paraguay: soccer. Soccer is the sport that is played, watched, and obsessed about by everyone in Paraguay, from little munchkins learning to walk and kick a ball to elderly folks talking about their glory days, and 40 year old dudes who still got game. To help you envision how crazy Paraguay gets over soccer, imagine this: Instead of having 4 very popular sports, each of which has a large fan base, the U.S. has chosen just one sport. One sport and everyone is a part of it: there are no baseball, basketball, football, or hockey fans: only soccer fans; one outlet to channel our evolutionary longings to belong to a tribe by to investing in a sports team. This is a fact: there are no other even mildly widespread spectator sports in Paraguay: only soccer. Picture Chicago cerca 2003 when the Cubs ALMOST made it to the World Series, and you are starting to get an accurate picture of the madness that occurs when the Paraguayan national team plays. I wouldn’t doubt that if there were a Steve Bartman who interfered with Paraguay’s team he would have to get plastic surgery and move far far far away. Paraguay has made to the finals this year in the Latin American Cup, and I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone and their mother is going to be watching the final game today and living and dying with every twist or turn the game takes.

So why does Paraguay put so much stock in their soccer team’s success? To understand Paraguay’s underdog nature we have to look at its history. Paraguay used to be the most developed country in Latin America. In the 1800s it had the first train and opera house on the continent, symbols of wealth and status at that time. It seemed to be on the fast track to becoming one of the most powerful nations in South America. Unfortunately, Paraguay’s dictator in the 1860s got greedy and decided to wage war on its neighbors Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay seeking territorial expansion. The war devastated Paraguay: its population was reduced to 100,000 women and 20,000 men, almost all of them under 12 or over 50. You heard right. That’s a FIVE to ONE ratio of men (and boys) to women. Some suspect that Paraguayan machismo is still recovering from this historical imbalance, which resulted in not a few polyamorous relationships, as one might suspect.

After the Triple Alliance war, as it is called, Paraguay developed an inferiority complex as a country. With its families and infrastructure in shambles,it fought an an uphill battle to catch up to the development and industry levels of its Latin American neighbors. Brazil has 200 million people and loads of industry, on its way to becoming a world superpower. Many Paraguayans go to Argentina in search of work, where they are sometimes looked down upon as ‘indigenous’ or ‘less civilized’ just because they are from Paraguay and may speak Guarani. Somehow Paraguay is always getting the shaft. One of the wonders of the world, the waterfall Iguasu, lies on the border between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Which side has zero tourism revenue? Yep, the ‘guay. Look in any South America tourism book. I guarantee you that Paraguay has the least pages of any country. Most of the tourists that I have encountered in Paraguay are the type that love going to places where no one goes. Leading Paraguayan intellectual and journalist Benjamin Fernandez Bogado’s most recent book is titled ‘The Urgent country,” where he basically lists all the things that need to change in the country for it to catch up with other developed countries. And yea,speaking of comparing yourself to other countries around you, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina have three of the most talented, well respected soccer teams in the world.

Paraguay’s freaking amazing soccer team provides it with an outlet to gloat over these other countries. In some ways it is the same kind of gloating that I did towards my friends who are Chicago Cubs fans after the White Sox won the World Series in ’05. That is, I know the fact that the team I support has won it all doesn’t make me a superior person, and most of our jesting is in good fun. But the Paraguay vs. Argentina or Brazil or Uruguay or Venezuela or Chile games have more of a feel of the Olympic hockey games between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war. (An interesting side note: none of these countries have Peace Corps volunteers anymore.) In other words, soccer is more than ‘just a game’ here. Much more. It is a status symbol, and Erik’s friend’s quote is a perfect example of this mentality: “See, we’re climbing up, Erik.” Their soccer team’s scrappy style of play aligns really well with their country’s personality: seemingly against all odds their underdog team manages to pull off victory after victory against teams much more talented and flashy. It is Paraguay’s way to gain respect in the international scene.

Now back to the story. I’m standing surrounded by one hundred or so people, no one’s eyes moving from the big screen. The Human Wall made a save against a Venezuela goal, so Paraguay’s penalty kick specialist just has to drill this goal and it’s lights out for Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. He approaches the ball, kicks left, keeper goes right...

“Goooooooooooooooool!” Pandimonium hits the crowd like we just averted a nuclear attack. A guy and gal next to me make out like it’s New Years, and total strangers are hugging each other and jumping up and down. Chants of “Par-a-guay WoooOOooo” and “He who doesn’t jump is Argentine/Uruguayan etc.” (sounds way better in Spanish, trust me) rip through the crowd.

On the five hour bus ride home, I couldn’t distinguish the college students from the volunteer network I was with from the 50 year old Agroforestry Engineers who were traveling with us. Everyone was so rowdy—they were partying as if... well, as if Paraguay had just made it to the finals of the Latin American Cup. For at least two straight hours on the bus home celebratory beers flowed and the PAR-A-GUAY chants were kept up with impressive volume; at one point people were so gleeful that they insisted I sing them English songs so they could chant along. (After hearing me, and trying once to imitate me, they reverted back to PAR-A-GUAY!). I chanted along, but I could not seem to match the intensity of these guys who poured their heart and soul into every syllable of the chants. Yea, the behavior might normally have been considered a little debaucherous or excessive by some, but who is going to be a party pooper and tell everyone to Please Keep the Volume Down when your upstart country has just made it to the finals of the most prestigious soccer tournament in Latin America?

We’ll see what happens in about an hour when Paraguay faces off against Uruguay in the battle of the ‘guays. It would be Paraguay’s first Cup win since the 1970s (while countries like Brazil have won like they are the Yankees in the World Series.) I love rooting for the underdog.

Conveying the real Peace Corps experience to people outside of it can be difficult. The day to day work is explainable: go to the school, make materials, promote new teaching techniques, etc. Day to day explanations, however, miss what really defines the PC for most volunteers: the relationships built with people. Crossing cultural and language barriers can sometimes make forming meaningful friendships difficult. Nonetheless I have fallen into some wonderful people here. Sometimes when I think about how the people in my life right now often seem like they could be the makings of some kind of zany small town novel, the plot of which would be not unlike the Little House on the Prairie novels, but with motorcycles and electricity and in Guarani. A few of my following posts will attempt to explain a few of the wonderful people I have fallen into, starting today with my host dad, Antolin.

Antolin

Most PCVS have that one person in their community who is their go-to guy to talk to or hang out with. Say, if things aren’t going so well, or you are getting weird vibes from someone in the community. For me since I have arrived here it has been Antolin, my community contact and host dad. Picture a decently well built 50 or so year old who has had his skin an body shaped by a lifetime of working in the fields (without a tractor). His left eye is made of glass, but remarkably looks quite similar to his right. Only a few stray gray hairs infiltrate his still full head of black hair.

When I first got to San Blas I lived in his house for almost 6 months and used to drink mate with Antolin and his wife every single morning. Like a true farmer, he enjoys his mate very strong and bitter. He is the president of the neighborhood commission and also president of the citrus cooperative. He donated part of his private land for the community’s water tank. Antolin attends church more than just about any other guy I know. I have heard a lot of gossip about a lot of people since living in Paraguay, and never, not once have I heard a bad word spoken about Antolin. “That Antolin knows too much how to work,” people say (love how that Guarani translates). Whenever I am over at his house he is working; watching TV and cracking nuts to sell at the farmer’s market, separating cotton from the cotton plant, shearing corn. Almost too rarely does he take a break from working. Antolin doesn’t drink, although I have seen him take a sip or two of wine when he is playing cards. I can tell it is just a tiny taste just for courtesy, though. He speaks Guarani almost all of the time with his family, but luckily for me he also speaks good Spanish after having worked for a while in a larger city of Paraguay in his 20s.

Born and raised in the rural community of San Carlos, which is 3 miles from where he now lives, Antolin has been a farmer his whole life. I can’t imagine the amount of awesome stories he must have, but unfortunately it is hard to prompt him into story-telling mood. I am never sure exactly what to say to elicit these stories from him, and usually our conversations just focus on the present. One night though, he told me how he got his glass eye:

Antolin “I don’t know if you can tell, Miguel, but my right eye, it’s made of glass.”

Miguel “It does seem a bit different. How did you lose it?”

He proceeds to tell me this story using the same tone I would use for say, summarizing what I bought at the grocery store. I don’t mean to infer that he is a boring story teller by any means but that to him, this story wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Antolin: “Well I was in the fields one day harvesting soy. We were in the middle of working when a bug flew in my eye. He got in there pretty good and didn’t want to leave. Well, I finished up the soy harvest that day and by that time my eye was hurting pretty bad.”

Miguel: “Wow did it hurt a lot when it first got in there? Wait did you just say you finished the harvest first???”

Antolin: “Yea, it’s got to get done. By the time I got back to my house it was hurting really bad, so I went to the hospital in San Juan. I kept getting worse, and next thing I knew I was in a hospital in Buenos Aires, and they were taking my eye out. Luckily they had this color.” (points to eye.) “just about the same color as my left eye!” (Taps eye with index finger.)

Miguel: “What kind of bug did you say this was?”

Antolin: “just a little bug. Not sure what kind.”

When Antolin was a kid his dad got bit by a snake while working in the fields. The snake was venomous and, given the fact that there were no hospitals in the area 40 years ago, he died that same day.

The guy has a perpetual smile wrinkled into his face from being in such a jovial mood all the time. If I ever get in a weird mood here I always know that I can head over to his house, drink some terere with him and his family and in a short minute I’ll forget whatever was troubling me.

On numerous occasions, Antolin has said some of the deepest, most profound things to me that I have heard in Paraguay, although unfortunately I can’t remember all of his quotes.

One example of this is when after spending a morning chopping down a vast amount of weeds with machetes in the back of Antolin’s property, we paused to suck the nectar from some oranges. Within 20 feet of us stood the remains of a raggedy old shack. Spitting out an orange seed, Antolin tells me how when he first married his wife Erma over 20 years ago, they used to live in that shack for a couple of years before moving into their current house. “We used to sleep their, tranquil, with no fear of being robbed or anything. If anyone stole a cow, you would report them and they would go straight to jail. So no one stole cows. Of course that was during the epoch of Stroessner (Paraguay’s dictator until 1989). Now we’ve got democracy and you have to watch out for yourself...” Right here Antolin pauses, kind of looks in the distance but the way his eyes were defocusing I thought I saw him looking back in the past. Then he delivered one a quote I will always remember on democracy post-dictatorship: “Democracy is nice, but you’ve got to use it right” (“Democracia es linda, pero hay que usarlo bien”) A lot of people actually looking longingly back on the period of the dictatorship as a time of more stability.

Antolin does not conform to the machismo stereotypes that latino men are sometimes guilty of. At a meeting about reading in the home I was administering at the school the other day for parents of Kindergarteners and first graders, he showed up in his favorite orange colored button down. The only male in a crowd of about 20 female moms, he had my back as he made comments to everyone about how important he thought the work I was doing. The guy’s an all-star.

Still, he’ll throw in comment that catches me off guard every once in a while, like when he commented on the volunteer before me’s boyfriend: “She wanted to bring him back to the U.S. but he didn’t want to go. But Luis sure enjoyed that while he was here.”

If San Blas has a local Renaissance man competition, I have little doubt Antolin will come out on top. Did I mention he’s got nine (well-behaved) kids?

I vividly remember the shocked look on my face in 5th grade when my science teacher Ms. Hewitt informed our class that 36 millions acres of natural forest are lost each year. I was so confused; where were these all these trees being cut down? It certainly wasn’t my hometown of Brookfield, where the only tree I had ever seen logged was my neighbor’s when it began to interfere with the power lines. I just simply couldn’t picture how a quantity of trees this large could disappear. Wouldn’t the world have run out of trees already? Where were these places in that let you cut down a tree without a permit as is required in the suburbs? I pictured an evil greedy old man with a team of bulldozers laughing like Jafar from Aladdin as he devastated huge rainforests for profit. After living in Paraguay for over a year though, it becomes obvious that deforestation is much more complex than I first thought. Although my personal experience obviously does not apply to all situations in the developing world, I feel like it is a good place to start for anyone who might be wondering how such a vast amount of trees continue to be lost each year.

First, people naturally remove the trees to make way for houses, communities, and agriculture. I live in a town called San Blas, where almost everyone is a small sustenance farmer. San Blas was founded in the year 1970, and by talking to the old timers who live here, I have been able to reconstruct pretty accurately the beginnings of San Blas. (Sidenote: those are always amazingly interesting and entertaining conversations. Picture yourself trying to talk to an Irish farmer from the boondocks who speaks English with a heavy accent, then imagine that he doesn’t even speak English but a weird sounding indigenous language. Throw in some whiskey and they start talking even faster, making it REALLY interesting. Yea, let’s just say it’s a good time.)

Picture this in your mind’s eye: 40 years ago, from my town to the nearest large pueblo, San Juan, there was no road, no fields being cultivated, not much of anything really. IT WAS ALL SUBTROPICAL FOREST. There were only FIVE houses in the 12 or so mile horse ride from San Blas to San Juan. The director of my school has told me about how, for him to get from San Juan to his house, he would walk for 4 hours to go there during the week, then four hours back for the weekend, carrying a rifle just in case he encountered any funny business on the walk. From 1970 on, outsiders would move here who didn’t have land and wanted to make a living by farming. Often they would burn the forest to get the land ready for cultivation. The fresh land had never been farmed, so it was easy to sow the fields, with Paraguay’s year round growing season you were ready to produce. Just keep get those big trees out of the way and you are good to go.

Currently there exist patches of trees here and there but are vastly less. We haven’t lost an area of square feet of trees the size of Portugal in just this area, but you can see how this process repeated on a large scale could have an extreme effect on the number of trees in the world, making those seemingly crazy statistics plausible.

The second thing I have learned first hand about deforestation in the developing world is that when there is a lack of ‘honest’ or ‘legal’ jobs, and what’s is more those jobs don’t pay very well, people tend to look for other ways to make money such as illegal logging. Even if there are ‘honest’ jobs that pay decently (i.e. farming) but people see the opportunity to make more money doing something else, they will take that opportunity unless they have a strong incentive not to (such as a long jail sentence that will actually be enforced).

San Blas is a prime example of the above. Not far from my house is a National Park, filled with old growth trees. Except not anymore, because they’ve all been harvested. Some people from my town work there full time harvesting the trees and selling them to buyers in San Juan. Of course they know it’s illegal, but that is beside the point. They also know that if the representatives come to enforce the law and get them in trouble for logging, they can just pay off the law reps. The park rangers have a certain price, and then the departmental public prosecutor representatives have another (much higher) price. Even if every once in a while they get caught, economically they are always going to come out way ahead. After being here for a year and learning about the price of old forest wood and the price of cotton, and the work-money made ratio by doing each of those two jobs, I will just say you can make a hell of a lot more money by just cutting down trees. And in a lot less time. To give you an idea, I can live decently here on my PC stipend, and those guys make at least 4x more than me per month.

This system is ridiculously unsustainable and unfair, of course. How would you feel if you made an honest but modest living by the sweat of your brow, and then continuously saw your neighbor making renovations to his house with the money he was money through illegal industry? My guess is pretty pissed off, at least I would be. Then there is the fact that the trees are going to run out sometime soon. THEN what do you do? Go find more trees in another area?

But here is just how institutionalized the corruption is: last Friday, several people from my area were arrested. I am talking about prominent community members, guys who I like to hang out with. How did they get out of jail? A payment of approximately $600 per head to the public prosecutor and they are free to go. Kind of makes me thing of what Chicago must have been like during prohibition.

I empathize with the people who live here in the boondocks; the reality is that there is a real lack of opportunity for upward mobility for those who continue to live in the rural areas as opposed to the cities. It makes perfect economic sense that they turn to illegal logging to make a living on a lot of levels. However, this is something that clearly needs to NOT happen. A sustainable solution to the problem does not lie in just enforcing the law, but also in changing the attitude of the community toward natural resources via an educational campaign or something like that, and also in enhancing the quality of the local schools so that the students/future workers that live here have the ability to become qualified for a variety of jobs.

One of the biggest disadvantages of illegal logging is that the revenue is not taxable. My opinion is that the powers that be need to make up their mind: either ban logging and enforce the law, or legalize it and tax it and put the money into the quality of the schools. This is a tragedy and huge irony of the 3rd world: in spite of all the primary resources that are taken from San Blas, the schools scarcely have any books or even paper.

So there it is, a little example of how deforesting work on the micro scale. After being here for a year it has become all too normal for me to see trucks going by with ridiculous amounts of wood, or at least hear them at night as they sneak by.

On another, perhaps oppositely related note, it is world environment day, and the theme this year is Forests: At our service. Happy World Environment Day everybody! Hope this post helps you appreciate trees!

Sometimes, in life, you just have to swing for the fences. How else does Barry Bonds hit home runs? (I mean before steroids.) At some point in our lives, we all move to L.A. try to become an actor, apply for a job you probably won’t get, ask the super pretty girl out. Or something of that nature. Finally, of course, we might present a series of professional development workshops to your superintendent for possible use in the whole district that would have high impact in the local school district. Any guesses on which one I attempted today?

Yep, since LA is just a little bit out of my current budget, I had a meeting with the superintendent of my district today. I presented him and his technical team an idea for professional development of elementary teachers grades 1-6. In this presentation, I showed him the results of my reading evaluation from the previous year: 31% of kids in first grade couldn’t read, 25% in second grade. Then, I showed him the positive results from this years work in the school where I am mostly based: all first graders can read. IN APRIL already. From my perspective the correlation with new teaching reading methodologies and was crystal clear. I felt that the positive results that I have had thus far in my school were significant enough to warrant this presentation. Basically my idea was to give monthly workshops based in different teaching reading topics, something that Education volunteers very commonly do. Well, unfortunately my results were evidently not clear enough, or something did not go precisely right in that presentation, because the super did not like my work.

I have been lucky enough not to have many overtly negative experiences in Paraguay, but this was definitely one of them. After my hour plus presentation, I asked the Superintendent and his panel what they thought of the results, the professional development ideas, and what kind of support they would be willing to give me. At this point, the supervisor turns to address his panel and proceeds to say more or less the following: “The Americans from the Peace Corps always come here and do the same thing. They have their four years of special academic preparation, and they think they know everything. Honestly, this idea would not work. This guy will not be able to run workshops. Personally, I think I’ve understood about 80% of this presentation...”

Anyone who knows me knows I am one of the most hard-to-piss-off people around. One of my best friends Elwood will tell you that the only time I have ever been pissed was when he stole my TI-89 calculator and refused to give it back. Well; my fuse was done here. Cultural barriers and Paraguayan indirectness be damned, I could not take this man passive-aggressively and openly ripping on me, while seated right next to me, less then two feet away from me. So I go, as he is speaking: “If you have some to say to me or about me, I much prefer that you say it to my face. I am right here.” At this, he starts to go OFF on me. I say one more thing right as he starts to speak (forget what it was, but it was not anything of note), and get the reply, “See, the problem with you, Miguel, is that you have no respect.”

And I’m spent. I spent the next 10 minutes smiling and nodding as the Superintendent criticized me, my methods, Peace Corps, etc. I wish I could remember the dialogue but I was busy spacing out thinking about other things...

Unfortunately, I think this gentleman had a bad experience with a PCV in the past who tried to work with him (wasn’t an education volunteer). I have heard bad things about this volunteer, even from PC, so yea what he’s saying is probably true, that volunteer didn’t do her job well and it has seemingly soured him on working with us. I understand that these things happen; sometimes PCVs do not uphold the standard of professionalism that is expected of them. He brings this previous volunteer just about every single time I try to work with him. It is unfortunate though, whatever the reason, that this gentleman in question seems almost combative against me, as if I am an enemy of his. As I explained to him privately after the meeting, I think and hope we both have the same goal: all kids read.

So I designed a series of workshops based on the best teaching reading techniques in existence, using my year of experience in the schools here to tailor the program specifically for the teachers here. I hoped that I might be able to reach out to a larger quantity of teachers and have a more rippling impact. And I got a resounding no, we don’t want them. Swing for the fences...aaaaand it’s a big swing and a miss. I’m alright with that, though. At least I got my hack in.

It’s just a little sad to me because, from my point of view, I have the knowledge, knowhow, reading techniques, whatever you want to call it, to create a vastly different educational opportunity and environment for students here. Still trying to figure out why, but the powers that be in the area don’t seem very open to new ideas and don’t even want me attempting to present those ideas.

This little story is a pretty good example of the countercurrent volunteers and other development workers encounter in their work. One of the hardest things to deal with in the developing world is seeing a problem, and, from your perspective, being 100% sure of the solution, but being utterly powerless to change it. Tends to happen alot with health problems, environmental stuff, and of course education. Yay for learning about the difficulties of grassroots change the hard way.

On another note, my host mom and sister INSISTED on randomly coming over today to clean my entire house. My sink, stove, and fridge are now spotless. Not to reinforce gender stereotypes, but they did a hell a better job than I ever could have done. They still couldn’t get the family of 3 mice out of my stove though.

“Raise your hand if you have ever pushed your bike home.

Through 6 km of caked red mud.

In the dark.

While carrying three bags of groceries.

With handle bars that don’t point forward.

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.”

I just had a flashforward to me saying the above to a whiny high school class when I am teaching Spanish back in the states. It would be followed by me mumbling something about ‘suburban cream cheese’ (in reference to the students, not an actual cheese reference) and how ‘you kids just don’t know how good you have it. I know you all have really difficult lives, but how about concentrating on this matching worksheet for 5 minutes.’ Hopefully some of my old RBHS students read this.

“Raise your hand if you have ever pushed your bike home.

Through 6 km of caked red mud.

In the dark.

While carrying three bags of groceries.

With handle bars that don’t point forward.

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.”

I just had a flashforward to me saying the above to a whiny high school class when I am teaching Spanish back in the states. It would be followed by me mumbling something about ‘suburban cream cheese’ (in reference to the students, not an actual cheese reference) and how ‘you kids just don’t know how good you have it. I know you all have really difficult lives, but how about concentrating on this matching worksheet for 5 minutes.’ Hopefully some of my old RBHS students read this.

For anyone who wonders precisely what it is like to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, this post is for you. It doesn’t contain any rah rah adventure stories like the time I got drunk on rum with this farmer and tried to convince him that no, the moon is not a ball of water, and no, Columbus did not discover Paraguay. But it is a damn accurate portrayal of the question PCVs often ask ourselves: What do I do when I walk out my door today? Why should I be doing that and not something else? (Hopefully most of us, not just PCVs, have asked ourselves this question at one point or another.)

One of the scariest things for people considering joining the Peace Corps is the uncertainty of where you will be spending two years of your life. You cannot choose your country, and once you get sent to your country, neither can you choose the town within your country. Of course you have some say when talking to your Sector director throughout training as to whether you would like to be in a small rural town, or a larger or medium sized city. But just because you preference a particular setting, say a large city, does not mean you will necessarily end up there. When I was being interviewed over a year ago about what my strengths are and what kind of site I would prefer, I said: 1) I would like to, and would be good at, teaching at a teacher’s college having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree from a very strong education program, 2) One of my main goals was probably going to be to work on raising the literacy interest level, through children’s literature as much as possible, and 3) I have an extremely patient personality and don’t become flustered easily so I thought I would make a good first time volunteer.

Then came the day we found out about our site and how many of my expectations had been met. Of the copious memories I have from the past year, the day I got my Site Information Packet remains very vivid. I opened up the folder and read the following information about my place of residence for the next 2 years: “Number of houses: 75. Number of inhabitants: 500. Electricity: yes. Running water: yes. Number of kilometers from asphalt road: 16.” Well, I thought, looks like I won’t be teaching at a teacher’s college. Also, there had previously been several volunteers in and around the area, so nor was I a first time volunteer.

The PC Paraguay director, though, tells a really great story to comfort us on at this time. He recalls handing out site info packets to two different women, years ago. One glanced at her packet and proceeded to climb up on a chair and dance around and start embracing random people, obviously ecstatic about her placement. The other read hers and began to weep. To make a long story short, the dancing one ended up hating her site and left Peace Corps early, while the one who cried when she found out her site ended up loving it and maybe even wanting to extend to stay an extra year. The moral? When it comes down to it, often it’s not the site that is important but what volunteers do at their site that matters.

(Warning: poker analogy coming up)

I have been in site for a year now, and although Kilometro 16 wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I am damn happy with it. I don’t think I would trade it for any other site I know of; although I am still slightly salty that I wasn’t given a Teacher’s College to easily work with (the closest one is 16 km away—a one and a half hour bus ride—and impossible to get to when it rains). But, that is clearly life. You have to play the cards you are dealt. However, the difference between a poker game and a Peace Corps site is that you often don’t even know what cards you are ‘dealt’ for the first six months to a year you are in site. You are unsure of the community needs, what kind of project they would want, who you should align yourself with, etc. Peace Corps is like some really crazy 2 year long game of poker where the cards only reveal themselves to you after a minimum of six months of intense language and culture study via immersion, and probably some dysentery for good measure. Only then can you begin to play your cards. That is a crazy game of poker that would probably make even O.A.R. proud, you are probably saying to yourself.

After a year here, I am having fun playing this crazy poker game. My cards have definitely revealed themselves to me, and they are decent. But I am in no way sitting on a full house, a straight, or even two pair. I would say I have a low pair, or maybe even just ace high. Basically, I am going to have to bluff the shit out of the people who I am playing against. (Of course, maybe I’ll get a awesome river card and end up dominating the hand anyway.) Here’s why:

A major goal of the PC is sustainability. That is, make the work that volunteers are doing in the schools last after we leave. This makes absolute sense: if I teach one class of students how to read, I will have made an impact on just those 15 students. But if I teach 3 teachers who will teach 30 students per year for 5 more years, I will have impacted 450 students. Multiply the number of teachers trained, multiply the effect. Sounds simple, right?

In theory, yes. But I have been working with 11 teachers from the 3 local schools for the past year, and the results have been less than encouraging. Trying to get teachers (many of whom were themselves taught in a dictatorship) to change their methodology is about as easy as getting my Grandpa to read this blog on the computer screen instead of my Grandma print it out for him on paper (to my knowledge he still hasn’t read it on the screen).

I will give one example of this: Last year in July, I did a reading evaluation to see how many of the 14 or so students could identify words. As it turned out, only ONE of them was able to read me SIX (one syllable) words. (And that kid’s mom was a professor at the high school...so he didn’t even learn those words in school.) A few weeks ago, in April, I evaluated this year’s 1st graders. SEVENTEEN OF EIGHTEEN of the students are reading already. Why the difference from last year? Because I did a word wall with the first grade teacher for two weeks in April. I was so pumped when I shared the results of the reading evaluation with the 1st grade teacher. “They can already read this year! See how well the Word Wall is working?” “Yes they are really learning even Fernando (a kid who seems to rarely be paying attention in class),” was her response.

Seems like things are going well, right? Not totally. Fast forward to two weeks after this conversation. I had been visiting other schools, and in Asuncion, so I had not had time to even stop by the school. I rolled up to the first grade classroom in the afternoon, pumped to see the new progress that my 1st grade teacher had made with the word wall (you add 5 words per week to the wall, so I was expecting to see 10 new words). I say hello, peak my head inside the classroom, and the teacher must have visibly seen my hurt face when I saw that she had not updated the word wall at all, because she instantly said: “Oh I haven’t been able to update the word wall...I couldn’t find any paper.” No paper...what about the paper on my desk... I love my teachers very much, but I almost called bullshit (I mean almost said that out loud, in Guarani) on this excuse this time...ridiculous. My peak into the classroom also had revealed that the students were doing their usual lesson of copying nonsense syllables off of the board for a full hour, which, for most of the kids, is equivalent to copying Chinese characters off of the board because they have know idea what they are copying. And the teacher knows that my methods work...but she won’t change. This one example is typical in my work over the past year.

This has brought me to reflect on my own methodology of teacher training and to question a couple of things: Do the teachers really know that the methods that I am showing them work better than what they are currently using? Maybe I haven’t been 110% clear in conveying this information to them. Getting teachers to change pedagogical practice is by no means easy (not in the U.S., not anywhere). Also, maybe the teachers don’t like the feeling of being “forced” to do some specific activity, much less by a 24 year old hot shot Americano when many of them have been teaching already for 15 years or more. I personally I don’t think it should matter, the teachers get paid to do a job and have a substantially larger income then everyone else in the small town. However, I don’t have the authority to actually ‘force’ them to put into practice what I am showing them. This job is left up to the district supervisor (roughly ‘superintendent’), who is quite frankly useless when it comes to professional development and accountability of teachers.

After the word wall incident where I nearly lost it, I exited the school and took a walk and a step back from all the work I have done this past year and reevaluated where I am and where I want to go. What lasting impressions do I want to leave on Kilometro 16, aside from all of the personal connections and differences I have been making and continue to make? For about a year I have been hacking away at the official Peace Corps Early Elementary Education Goals from grades kindergarten-4th. And yea, undoubtedly I have had some success, as the kids in the school where I am mainly based are reading loads better, and the kids in my host family who I have personally taught to read have obviously benefited from me being around. But for me, that is not enough. The old Thoreau quote struck me as pertinent on my reflective walk: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Improving Primary School is important, to be sure, but what is the root problem that I am trying to strike at? This is what I came up with: Paraguay, especially the rural areas, seems to be stuck in a post-dictatorship intellectual rut (a widely read book published just years ago was called “Let’s shake things up!:Keys for the construction of a new republic). This lack of education and proactive attitude for change affects Paraguay negatively in very real ways. To give one example, very poor Paraguayan sustenance farmers often live right next to Brazilian soy plantations. Brazilian farmers pour pesticides onto their plants and into the ground, potentially contaminating the rivers and water supply and the land for future generations. These Brazilian farms reap huge profits of millions of dollars off of their yields. This money gets brought back to Brazil and in no way helps the Paraguayan economy or public institutions.

(Illegal) deforestation and soil and water contamination in the 3rd world are huge, global issues in this 21st century. All three of these are happening right her in Kilometro 16. So, I thought, is my 1st grade word wall helping to resolve these problems, which seem to be at the root of the Peace Corps purpose in Paraguay? Maybe. More literate kids would ideally be better suited to tackle problems like this, and literacy competency is MOST important in the primary grades. But still, something seemed to be lacking to me in terms of how I am, to go back to the poker analogy, playing the hand I was dealt: small site in a rural area, very few students (and people, for that matter) show signs of intellectual curiosity as I judge it, few people have books at home, access to information is scarce...

This is when I had an “aha!” moment: instead of zeroing in on the problem at the elementary level, why not take a more ‘big picture’ approach to the problems of lack of literacy, disinterest in books and the sparseness of creative community problems solving? Sure, teaching reading in the primary grades is part of the problem, but why stop there? As a PCV, I have the freedom to choose which institutions I want to work with and on which projects, a position in which most people will rarely find themselves in their job. Bureaucratic and specific objectives aside, my job at its core is to ‘make kids read good and do other stuff good too,’ and I have a lot of flexibility as to how I want to achieve this end, as long as I can justify the means in my thrice a year report to Washington, D.C.

So this is my holistic plan for the next year to improve literacy and community involvement in Kilometro 16. Instead of just focusing on the elementary education aspect of things, it focuses on several areas.

1) Professional Development of Elementary Teachers. While not my only goal now, without solid elementary school teachers, it would be hard to sustainably see any of the other goals developing. I am not going to continue sailing along just as I have been doing in this area, though.

a) I will be doing once per month workshops, in which school is canceled on a Friday and I have the teachers’ undivided attention and 8 hours to focus in with them. I will especially use this time to convince teachers of the outdatedness of the board-copying method, and to get them to think about what their vision is of all the things that there students will have learned by the end of the year.

b) All of the model lessons that I do will include pre- and post- evaluations, and I will go over these with the teachers, making sure that the teachers can clearly see the usefulness of the technique that I am presenting. I will strongly suggest that they continue doing the activity/method in question. If they don’t want to do said method I will procure to find out why not.

c) I will get my Kindergarten teachers to teach WORDS and ALL OF THE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET to their students, instead of just the five vowels to FIVE and SIX year olds. They literally do not believe me that this can be done. So my job is two-fold: convince them that yes, it can be done, and then show them the methodology they need to use to do it. I am thinking about making a bet with the K teacher at my main school: If you do all of the activities I show you and the kids still don’t learn how to read by the end of the year, I will make you dinner for a week straight. If they do learn how to read, you have to make all the materials that I have shown you for the next year and continue teaching like this when I leave.

2) Using the local High School students as volunteers to promote literacy. What’s the best way to make some one believe in something? Have them promote the benefits of that something to other people. I plan to make the high school students advocates for literacy and volunteerism. Possible activities: Reading Buddies, World Map Project, giving dental health talks to Elementary school, raising awareness about environmental issues, Waste management project. This is possibly the most important part of my plan, and also the most difficult. Getting the youths age 12-18 involved in literacy and community initiatives will mean that (hopefully) a sense of community responsibility and intellectual responsibility will be instilled and them, and ideally carry over to future generations in the town. This will not be easy, though. I have a very charismatic high school principal who I am depending on help me carry out this initiative. This idea is in the developing stages, and I still need to set specific goals and a way of carrying it out. For now, I am brainstorming ways to make volunteerism attractive to local youths and incentivize them to get involved. This may take the form of exclusivity a la national honor society, or something totally different. Suggestions are welcome.

3) Work with Parent’s commissions to get them to take an active role in their kids’ education. Parental investment in quality of education is such a positive correlation that I would be idiotic NOT to do this. K16 has a long way to go in this area.

4) Bring more materials (books) to Kilometro 16. For this I will probably do some kind of financial help from the U.S. project. There are very few books in the school libraries in the high school, middle school, and elementary school in K16. But, Miguel, you are probably saying, no one wants to read in your town yet. You yourself said it. Why would you want books already? So yea, it is sort of a chicken-egg problem: kids can’t get interested in reading without the books, but it will be hard to get the community to invest in books if they are not interested in them. Personally I think the fact that the students aren’t dying to read books is a bullshit reason to not get books. (Although that is what a member of the Ministry of Education once said to us when asked why they didn’t give more books to schools in Paraguay.) So, this will be the material aspect of my plan, to bring more books and get students ages 5-18 interested in reading those books.

Looking at what I just wrote above, I feel like I have set me goals pretty damn high for the next year. Ho-hum, I just want to create a culture of book-reading, problem solving, and intellectual curiosity in Kilometro 16, a place where my teachers won’t even adopt my clearly amazing word wall. A place where the VAST majority of kids who graduate from high school have never read a novel. Hmmm...Looks like it is going to be a fun year of experience in learning how to motivate people to change their behavior at the most basic level.

But the thing is, I really don’t care if things don’t work out exactly the way I want them to. And they probably won’t. The important thing is that I do everything in my own control to work toward influencing and impacting the people of Kilometro 16 in the most positive way possible. It might be improbable, but it’s not impossible. As long as I am drawing analogies today, the achievement of my goals here might be like improbability drive in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “There was nothing [improbability drive] couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would even happen.” Or to go back to the poker analogy, sometimes the Dude wins a millions dollar pot and it turns out he was sitting on deuce seven that whole time. The point is, in this game I am going all in.

At the very least, if I attempt to do all of this and I fail, K16 will be in the same situation as before, probably better off, as I will undoubtedly achieve at least some of the goals I have put forth. It is kind of the same idea as for teaching words to kindergarteners: if we teach letters and words and the kids don’t learn them, what has been lost? Nothing. And it will certainly be easier for them to learn their words and letters when they arrive to 1st grade if they already have some experience with them. Similarly it will be easier for K16 to arrive at a culture of volunteerism and literacy if they already have books and have listened to crazy Profesor Miguel trying to get them involved for a year.

To put forth a quote from the great one, Michael Jordan: “I have failed time and time again, and this is why I succeed.”

So in sum, I think that somewhere along all the time I was spending in elementary classrooms throughout the past year I lost sight of the big picture, which is to create a culture of literacy and intellectual curiosity in the town, and well, change the world.

Wow, I just reread this post, and it is riddled with Peace Corps idealisticness. Oh well, if we don’t have ideals, how will we make progress? Plus, I am in the Peace Corps. I am allowed a license to be overly idealistic. The toughest job you’ll ever love, baby.

If you read this whole post, I give you props. Honestly, this was as much written for any of my friends, relatives and colleagues who are curious about what I am doing as it was a way for me to articulate my goals for the next year in a way that makes sense.

Go Bulls.

I have a new puppy. After Lukie was hit by a car, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to handle getting attached to another pup and then possibly losing him, but then fate intervened Freud style.

One night about 2 weeks ago, I vividly dreamt that I was back at home in Brookfield and was mysteriously drawn to my backyard where my boyhood sandbox used to be. Approaching the area, I found that a dog had just given birth to 4 black puppies. This dream was so vivid that when I woke up the next day I recounted it to my neighbors over our morning mate.

That same day I headed over to one of my favorite kilometro 16 families to drink some terere. Before we had even started to pass the guampa, one of the daughters in the family asks me: “Miguel, you wouldn’t happen to be interested in a new puppy, would you? Four black puppies were born in our kitchen last night. Holy crap I thought, my dreams have never told the future before. I headed back to their kitchen to take a look, and low and behold they were, four black puppies. This is when I realized that I clearly needed to heed this omen and adopt one a new pup. Six months from now I will probably be on one of those Animal Planet ‘my dog saved my life’ shows.

Clearly the puppy in the picture is not black (mine is the yellow one with white paws and tip of his tail). That is because I chose instead to adopt Lukie’s recently born half-brother (same mother, different father probably, it’s hard to tell around here who the daddy is). I am having some debate right now as to what to name the puppy. Suggestions are welcome. The front-running name right now is Petey. I hope that’s alright with you, Stoj.

“There is nothing more difficult...than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”

-Machiavelli

Machiavelli was right. New ideas are not very readily accepted to those unfamiliar with them. And not only are people who try to introduce a new order of things given a hard time and ignored, but they are shunned; many people of their time consider them to be crazy. It is often not until many years later that they are finally given their due respect. Galileo Galilei, for instance, an Italian physicist who publicly supported the heliocentric view of the earth, was denounced by philosophers and clerics of his day, and put on house arrest. Martin Luther was excommunicated by the catholic church for saying that people should be able to read the bible themselves. One-hundred years ago, the most advanced method of training to run a marathon was to walk long distances. What did people think of the first guy they saw running? Hell, in the 1950s, EVERYONE shot free throws GRANNY style. I think we can safely conclude that people get a little anxious, and are indeed skeptical, when it comes to the implementation of new ideas.

Fast forward to 2011 in rural Paraguay. Profesor Miguel is trying to take the lead in introducing a new order of things in the local schools. Specifically, I attempting to have the kindergarten teachers in the area teach words and all of the letters of the alphabet to their students. Currently, the teachers teach the kids only the vowels a, e, i, o, and u. The whole year. Of. Kindergarten. This boggles my mind. When I was a teacher’s aid Galesburg, I saw even the most troubled kids end the year reading at least 20 words, while the brightest kids could read short books. 5 and 6 year olds minds are simply ripe for the word learnin’! And this lack of teaching words in kindergarten has a reverse snowball effect. The kids start off handicapped alright, so it is no surprise that their are a lot of drop outs and unsuccessful students.

Luckily I am developing some pretty good persuasion AKA psychological manipulation skills in the Peace Corps in order to deal with situations like this. Here is the conversation I had with my kindergarten teacher today:

Profesora G “Miguel, what are you planning on doing in my kindergarten class this year?”

Miguel “Actually, I was just about to talk to you about that. I would like to talk about some objectives for the end of the year.” (Pause, allow this to sink in.) “This is an intelligent group of kids we have this year. I think we can put some high expectations on them.”

Profesora G “Si, son inteligentes. So what is it that you had in mind?”

Miguel “Gladys, I know this is something that you have never done, but I would like to try to teach them to read words by the end of the year. And all of the letters, not just the vowels.”

Profesora G “But the system has always been, we teach them just the vowels in kindergarten. We don’t start teaching the vowels until July.”

Miguel “Yes, but this is a really smart group. I think we should try to teach them a lot more this year. Why not?”

Profesora G “But they don’t teach words in Farinakue and Kilometro 14 [two nearby schools]. The system is to teach just the vowels in kindergarten.”

Miguel “Gladys, I’m going to be honest. I have seen classes, in Paraguay, where kids leave kindergarten able to read short books. I think we can just try this year, experiment a bit, to see how much we can teach them. I want this kindergarten class to be an example for all of the schools in the area. Why not try at least?”

Profesora G “We shall see what we can do.”

What was funny to me was that how she kept repeating ‘But we always do it this way. That is our system.’ Well, I am a messenger to tell her that a new system is needed, one that maximizes kid and human potential. To stay patient, I often place myself in her shoes, and think about the fact that she probably views me and my ideas as quite ‘out there,’ probably much like the first person who said the world was round was viewed by his peers.

In the early 1900s in baseball, the 1st baseman stood on first base, the 2nd baseman on second, and the 3rd baseman on third base. People thought Charles Comisky was crazy when he had his players stand off of the the bases to cover more ground. Oh he was crazy. Crazy like a fox...

Galelio, Martin Luther, Profesor Miguel.

I can now say my name is published in a sentence with historical legends. Gotta love the internet.

Peace Corps Paraguay has had many legendary tales unfold in the 40 years it has been in Paraguay; and as volunteers we hear many of these stories. Some seem so crazy that it’s hard to believe they are real: tales of Paraguayan-American love and heartbreak, some pretty shocking violence, and others about PCVs who lost their marbles at some point during their service and went a bit crazy. One of my favorite pieces of folklore about PCVs gone loco is as follows. Though you may not believe it, Tale From the Vault #1 has been corroborated to me by several very separate sources:

Tale #1: Girl attempts to murder cow after cow eats her last pair of underwear

Laura was a volunteer in a rural site in the late 90s. As per norm in Paraguay, she would hang up her clothes on the barbed wire outside her house after washing them herself. This system worked great for drying most of her clothes with one tragic exception. Her neighbor’s cow, who grazed around her yard, had a remarkable proclivity for eating her underwear. The cow would eat no other clothes; he preferred only her undergarments.

Laura attempted to remedy the situation. She made a clothesline and strung it between two trees, but the only sunny spot around her house was the barbed wire. And this was her house, dammit. Laura was living here for two years and had the right to put her clothes out to dry where she pleased, she thought. The cow wouldn’t continue eating her underwear; it was probably just a phase. She talked to her neighbor and told him to please tie up the cow on days when she was drying her clothes. She returned to put her clothes on the barbed wire to dry. With a few isolated exceptions, this system worked fine for about another month. That is, worked fine until one fateful day.

Laura had her just washed all of her clothes and hung them up to dry. Her neighbor had tied up his cow, but Laura was vigilantly watching her clothes as they slowly dried on the barbed wire, just in case. Right before lunch, one of her friends walked by:

Friend “Hola Laura, we go to my house for lunch. Ja’úta la ryguasy fidéore. We will eat chicken with pasta.” Laura’s mouth started to water at the possibility of eating chicken...she had been eating only rice for the few days.

Laura “No puedo. Amaña che aohina. I can’t, I watch my clothes dry.”

Friend “ Estas loca, mujer? Are you crazy, woman? Jaha cherogape. We go to my house.”

Laura “Pues...jaha sapyaite. We go for a little while.” Invitations to eat chicken were few and far between. Plus, passing up the invite could even be offensive. But the sun was out right now...she would leave her clothes out. She wouldn’t be gone long. Besides, the cow was tied up at the moment.

Laura arrived back at her house with a belly full of rico pasta and homegrown chicken. What she saw, was the end of a massacre, the cow the assassin and her underwear the victim. The cow, in his mouth, had just taken the very last pair of her underwear into his mouth and was now slowly chewing them just as it would chew grass. As she stared down into the mouth of the cow chowing down, her eyes caught flashes of the hot pink fabric, and sometimes the white lining. Those were my favorite pair. With the calm of Michael Jordan lifting off for a jump shot after juking Bryan Russell in the finals (no sir that was not a pushoff, you know what I’m talking about), she walked into her house to grab her weapon. Laura knew what needed to be done.

* * *

John, the American expat who lived in the nearby town of San Juan, heard his phone ring and picked it up. He did not recognize the voice on the other end.

Voice “Senor Juan, come quick! Your compadre, the americana Laura, está loca! Quiere matar mi vaca! She wants to kill my cow! I can’t hold her back!”

John “Laura, the volunteer towards Pindo’yu? Dios mio. I’ll be there shortly.”

John knew where all of the volunteers in the area lived and within about ten minutes he was able to make out to Laura’s site. The scene to which he arrived was, well, quite the scene. The first thing he noticed was a white and black cow that seemed to have streaks of red blood streaming down its back. 20 feet, away, scissors held high above her head, Laura was literally being physically held back from attacking the cow by her neighbors as she screamed in alternate English, Spanish, and Guarani:

Laura “YOU STUPID COW, I WILL KILL YOU. THIS IS THE LAST STRAW. YOU WILL NOT EAT ANY MORE OF MY UNDERWEAR. TE VOY A MATAR. JA’UTA ASADO ESTA NOCHE. WE ARE HAVING A BARBACUE TONIGHT, PEOPLE.”

But like the Chicago Bears’ offensive line, her neighbors couldn’t hold her forever. As John got out of his jeep, Laura broke free from the grip of her holders, and made a run for the cow again, sticking the scissors in the cow’s back again The wound was not even close to fatal for the cow, and the Paraguayan crowd that had formed around her was clearly more in shock from watching this gringo’s breakdown then from the damage being done to the animal. Laura stood next to the cow, uttering incoherent babblings at a very loud volume. John approached her.

John “Hey Laura, it’s me, John. You O.K.?”

Laura “Do I look freaking okay? This cow just ate my LAST pair of underwear. I HAVE HAD IT!” She broke down and started to cry. “I just, this has been a rough week for me...can you go pick up my boyfriend Nick and bring him here?”

John brought Nick, and luckily he was able to calm her down somewhat. Though I’m sure the Paraguayans in her site had a hard time looking at her after that without picturing a scissors in her hands. Everyone has their breaking point, and I totally can see where this girl was coming from, especially as a volunteer in the 90s. Nowadays, we volunteers all have cell phones, electricity, most have laptops. The experience of the Peace Corps Volunteer has drastically changed. If I am having a bad day because a cow has eaten my underwear, I can easily call one of my friends and complain about my shitty day, no problem. We laugh about it, it’s off my chest, problem solved...in most cases. I can blog about it. Hell, I can even text my mom back in the U.S. And I am one of the more isolated volunteers. Back then though, if a volunteer was having a bad day, or bad week, we sometimes turned to less constructive ways of dealing with our stress, evidently.

And yes, Laura made it through her two years without leaving early.

Keeping with the theme of PVCs battling with animals, my next post, unless I get lazy, will be:

The Epic Battle Begins: Miguel vs. the Pigs (and no I don’t mean cops)

THE DRAMA IS HEATING UP IN KILOMETRO 16!!!

About a week ago, my dog, Lukie, got hit by a car and died. I’m not a fan of emo blog posts, so I’ll just say I was a little broken up about it. When he was born and I adopted him last July, I promised myself I wouldn’t get attached since I knew the logistics of bringing a dog home after Peace Corps are a little complicated/still not sure where I’ll be living after PC etc. But this summer the little guy and I bonded, and just recently I made the decision in my mind that he would have to come home with me. People around town were absolutely flabbergasted by all the tricks he could do: Eguapy (sit), Mba’e la porte (shake, but much more colloquial Guarani sounding), Speak, Lie down (those I taught in english), Eka’u (roll over, but Eka’u literally means ‘get drunk.’) Many people had never seen a dog do tricks, and they always put forth the typical amazed reaction, with a widening of the eyes and saying: “Miguel, demasiado letrado nde jagua”, which translates funnily as “Miguel your dog is much too scholarly.” Damn right. Also funny to me was that Lukie would never do tricks for anyone else; only me. I think it had something to do with my unique accent when I said the commands (in Guarani and English as well). Many a time, after hearing Lukie ‘speak’ when I told him to, my neighbors would launch into hilariously fruitless attempts to get him to speak again themselves: “Lukie, eespick. Eespii Lukie.” Lukie would respond by lying down and licking himself.

Lukie was even allowed to come into classes where I was teaching and everyone thought it was completely normal. Also, they aren’t too nice to the dogs here (I have never seen a trained dog, and they often hit the dogs if they are misbehaving/begging for food), but Lukie could do whatever/go wherever he wanted. Once one of my friends saw Lukie begging and slapped him. So I go, “Miguela, Que haces a mi perrito?” (what are you doing to my dog?). And she goes “oohhh No sabia que era tu perro. Lo siento, aca lo voy a dar algo de carne” (OMG I’m so sorry Miguel. I didn’t know that was your dog. Here, let me give him a little something to eat.) And with that she gave him a HUGE piece of meat (very generous, meat is expensive).

So it’s somewhat sad/weird not to have the little guy around anymore. My host family is already asking me if I want another puppy. Right now I’m not sure if I can handle the responsibility of raising another pup in general, let alone the fact that I will be continuously be comparing him to how awesome Lukie was.

On a lighter note, many things are awesome about Paraguay right now:

-Oranges and avocados are in season. I live in an orange grove. Two of my friends have giant avocado trees. Let the fruit fiesta begin.

- My current girlfriend, Shakira, (at least that’s what I tell everyone in my site, believe me when I say it never gets old) performed a concert in Asuncion last Tuesday, her first concert ever in Paraguay. In case there was any doubt, the woman knows how to sing/dance/perform. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the backstage access I thought Peace Corps Volunteers would be entitled to.

-After getting my account filled with over a milllon Guaranies (the local currency) at the beginning of the month, I promptly blew it all on some shopping therapy in the local supermarket (Shotout to Megan and Nika for their middle school project). I bought a ton of veggies and fruit, a cutting board, peanut butter, sunscreen, really strong Brazilian instant coffee, and goodies for the St. Paddy’s Day celebration this week, you know the necessities. I now have fridge full of food that will last me about 2 weeks, and less than $10 for the rest of the month. There are 3 weeks before the next payday. Hopefully I get lots of dinner invitations in March.

-I went for my first hour plus run since I’ve been in Paraguay this morning. Asuncion marathon in August? Maybe just the half.

-I had this weird line of discoloration on my stomach, so I went to the doctor and got it checked out. I was worried it could be a rash, maybe dengue, you know? Something that could kill me, or worse. The doctor says it is a LEMON JUICE stain. I was relieved to hear the diagnosis, but has anyone ever heard of that???

One of the first days I was at my school here in Kilometro 16 back last May, the Kindergarten teacher asked me if I would show her students a new game. As the resident Peace Corps “Elementary Education Expert,” I felt obligated to oblige her. I decided to go with the old classic, Duck, Duck, Goose. How can you go wrong with Duck Duck Goose?

As I organized the kids in a circle and started explaining the rules, I realized that I didn’t know the Spanish word for “Goose.” I continue explaining: “And you walk around like this and touch each person on the head and say duck, but for one of them you must say...” All I could picture was a pig running around in my head, and before I knew it, pig (chancho) had come out of my mouth (just the word, to clarify). And so it was willed that the children of Kilometro learned Duck, Duck, Pig instead of Duck, Duck, Goose.

I haven’t thought much of that incident until today, when I heard some kids (third graders) playing Duck Duck Pig. They are STILL PLAYING EXACTLY THE WAY I TAUGHT THEM. And THIRD graders this time, not even in the grade I taught the game. Duck Duck Pig is clearly catching fire here. Kind of made me think about Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point phenomenon. Some things are simply destined to catch on due to human nature...digital watches in the 70s, big fat hair and crazy socks in the 80s, hush puppies in the 90s, and the interwebs in the 00’s. Clearly we are only just in the year 2011, and have 9 more years to go in the decade. But I think it may be written that the 10’s are all about Duck Duck Pig, at least in Paraguay. For all the other PCV’s who read my blog, you heard it first here: volunteer Mike Dooley invented Duck Duck Pig (Pato, Pato, Chancho) in May of 2010. When you hear kids in the schools playing it, make sure they know to whom they must pay homage.

“Miguel, in Paraguay, in Kilometro 16, one lives well. I have my cows, my crops, my little house, my wife, on the weekends drink a beer with my friends. I know everyone in this town and most of my family lives right around here. Every day, yes I work hard in the fields, but I do it at my own pace and when I am done, I sip some ice cold, rich terere. Some people might want to move somewhere else, but I am happy here, very happy.” - Florencio, my 50 or so year old neighbor

In a lot of ways, I could not agree more with Florencio. On the beautiful days here, I feel like I am living in a tropical paradise. I go play volleyball with friends, walk through the town and say Hi to damn near everyone. People seem so content, almost everyone knows each other, and everyone works enough but is sure to take their leisure time. I eat fresh mangos from the tree 15 feet from my house, and maybe go swim in the crystal clear river nearby my house to cool off. Life is good.

Still, some aspects of life here, are undeniably 3rd world. One that strikes me the most is the lack of quality healthcare. Allow me to diverge for a second for a revealing subplot:

One day when I was 9 years old I accidentally shoved my arms through a glass window while chasing my friend Ryan. My left arm escaped damage, but I tore a gash of skin on my forearm about a foot in length extending from just beyond my right palm to four inches from my elbow. I distinctly remember being surprisingly calm and collected as the blood spurting out of my wound made Ryan’s dinning room look like a scene from a horror movie. Matter of fact-ly, I asked his mom, “Mrs. Moul, do you think I am going to die?” as she tried to put pressure on the cut with blood streaming out. I was dead serious, too. I thought that was the end. But then the ambulance arrived about one minute later, I went to the hospital, was sewn up with 40 stitches by a University of Michigan surgeon, and came out with nothing but a pretty badass scar witch I occasionally use to tell tall tales of some crazy fishing accident if I get bored.

I rarely think about this story anymore, but the other day it reoccurred to me when my 12 year old host sister Delphi broke her left arm and had to be taken to the hospital by her dad. She was in serious discomfort, and so her dad and she went to San Juan, a 30 minute moto ride from Kilometro 16. The medical building in the city of over 5,000 is clearly inadequate to deal with a seriously broken appendage, so they had to proceed to the capital of the department, a city called Caazapá, about an hour away from San Juan. They arrived to the Caazapá hospital at 7:30 p.m., but it turned out that the doctor who operates on broken bones had just left at seven and would be gone for another couple of days. They then proceeded on to Asunción, the capital and biggest city in Paraguay. There, they were finally attended to, 6 hours or so after the incident. She was operated on, the doctor made a mistake, and she ended up having to go in to have the bone reset again a few hours after the first operation.

Delphi’s incident made me think about all the things I took for granted when I had that little incident: an ambulance arrived within single digit minutes of a 911 call, I was taken to a renowned hospital where I had an extremely competent doctor attend to me, I was given anesthetic so I didn’t have to feel my arm being sewn up, I had follow-up in the hospital so my wound didn’t get infected, etc. My host-dad Antolin and Delphi had to take motorcycles over an hour and a half of half dirt, half concrete roads to arrive at a hospital that MIGHT be able to attend to Delphi, only to find that the only doctor who could help her was not in. Then, the went to Asuncion, and the only reason they were about to make it to Asuncion that night was because Antolin had a political contact in the area who was coincidentally headed to the hospital in Asuncion that same night with a truck (Do you want to ride 4 hours at high speed on a moto with a broken arm?).

I can’t help but suppose what might have happened had her emergency been more urgent than a broken arm, like mine was. My host dad’s dad died when Antolin was 7 years old; he was bit by a venomous snake and died within hours, unable to make it to a hospital. A neighbor of mine here, in his 60s recently contracted a mysterious sickness (fever was all I heard) and died rather suddenly. I thought of the time I had pnuemonia (which can kill you within 72 hours if not diagnosed but if you have penicilan you are cured almost immediately) misdiagnosed on me. And then thankfully an expert looked at the x-rays and prescribed me the right medicine, or I might be dead already.

To sum up the sitch in my barrio in Paraguay: There is no ambulance. Well, there is technically a truck that is 'supposed' to serve as the ambulance, but non one will pay for gas for it, so the ambu never gets used. When I was interned for two days in the local hospital with intestinal dysfunction, I literally had to walk across the street to the pharmacy in my agony and BUY MY OWN INJECTION. And the "bed" I slept in? It was a hard metal cot with a sheet over it. I had to pass through the maternaity ward one time to go to the bathroom (another small detail: the toilet wouldn't flush and there was no toilet paper), and wow did I ever feel sorry for the mothers giving on metal cots. On another note, NO ONE in my neighborhood wears glasses for seeing long distance. I’m no ophthalmic technician (Mom you can weigh in here) but mathematically it doesn’t seem possible that a town of 500+ people could have not one person with a single problem with their vision. More likely almost no one in my neighborhood has been to the eye doctor, ever. Literally, I often have difficulty explaining to people the fact that I am nearsighted and thus need to wear glasses all the time; they don’t understand.

So I can’t help but contemplate my life had I been born in Kilometro 16:

1) I would probably be considered blind with my 4.00 prescription in each eye.

2) I might have died from blood loss, or at least have been substantially maimed from my forth grade window experience.

3) There is a good chance I would have died a painful death from walking pneumonia when I was 21.

Well, on the other hand, I have NEVER seen a glass window here. And the temperature doesn’t drop below freezing so it would be harder to contract pneumonia. And vision??? Who really needs that, it just makes us more superficial right? Maybe I’d be happier without it, with my mango tree, avocado tree and daily swims in the river. Indeed, in many ways the grass is greener in Kilometro 16. Just as long you don’t have to go to the hospital.

On February 10 (so last Thursday) all of the volunteers I arrived with and I celebrated our one year in country anniversary. It’s weird to be now, sort of the seasoned veteran volunteers in the Corps. Talking with one of my friends who got here at the same time I did, we found it interesting how, yes, we have changed a lot, but not in the way we necessarily expected to change.

Allow me to explain. There is a very notable difference between volunteers who have been here for over a year and those who are just arriving. Newly arrived volunteers, often, still have the naive perception that we will march into our site and fix many of the problems of our host community as we enjoy our two years and teach every kid to read, enjoy & embrace the local food for 2 years, be best friends with all of our community, always be understanding and patient with respect to cultural differences, etc. I can say that I did for quite some time.

But after a year in Paraguay trying to fight for grassroots change and be extremely patient with everyone, you start to rethink some things. Should I really accept every dinner invitation to eat straight pig fat, or ‘cow mystery stew’ just so I can become more integrated culturally? At some point, I guess right around one year for a lot of volunteers, there comes this realization that yes, while we are here as grassroots ambassadors for the U.S. and to help people and learn their culture, this is also two years of our life. Do I want to spend two years in my mid-twenties eating every mystery (and often unhealthy) meal put in front of me just to please the locals? After a year, it becomes a lot easier to refuse offers: Miguel, do you want some coffee with 4 spoonfuls of sugar in it? No thanks. Pig fat boiled in oil? Please no. Maybe some fried greasy flour? Maybe later. While these things might seem like no-brainers to refuse, its often a poor person who is offering you the best they have and you don’t want to offend them.

So like I said, the newly arriving volunteers are gung ho about everything, and it’s almost a little cute. “Oh this meat dish? It’s so good!” We’ll see how they sound a year from now. It’s refreshing to see, and makes me feel in the words of Ice Cube, like a ‘vet ballin’ on these rookies.’

Thinking back on my own naïve perceptions of coming to do development work in rural Paraguay, and how I felt at the beginning of service, I feel some things beginning to wear on me. My time in Kilometro 16 has, and continues to give me, though, an appreciation for being a citizen of the U.S. I appreciate so many things: not having to kill multiple tarantulas daily in my house, having A.C. when it’s hot, heating and insulation when it’s cold, having access to fast internet and skype, not having to walk next door to go no. 2 b/c of my lack of bathroom, not having to take a bus an hour and a half just to buy some vegetables, etc. Upon arrival these things were novel and rustic to me. Not only did those things not frustrate me, but I actually embraced them. (‘Oh the cold showers are such a fun rush in the winter!’) But I would be lying if I said I don’t doubly enjoy the hot showers I am able to take when I am staying in a hotel in the city now.

So there it is. Education PCVs do very little in the summer months and therefore we have too much time to think during January and February, so there is more time to become a little frustrated, a little stir crazy. (It’s kind of like being on welfare: getting paid by the government and doing nothing.) The school year starts back up next Wednesday though, so I’ll be busy again and that is good so I can realize once more how much work there really is to be done here. (Read: previous post “Why I am here”).

If this post sounds cynical, it’s not meant to be. I have some mad teacher workshops planned for something new around here called “Classroom Management.” Hopefully I can get the teachers to put away the switches and the whips and use some psychological tactics. (Although I have only seen one teacher use a whip).

Sorry for the lack of posts this past month. I know my WhichGuayNation fans are disappointed; don’t worry, there will never be a month’s lag in between posts again. But seriously, you try typing on a computer (or doing just about anything besides sitting in the shade and complaining about the heat) when it is 110 and humid out, as it has been for the entirety of January.

“Everyone is being so Paraguayan today WTF” - Text I impulsively sent to one of my volunteer friends last Saturday

Paraguay, in the last week since I’ve been back, has been so unbelievably, well, Paraguayan. For my non-peace corps volunteer readership, allow me to brief you on the cultural qualities of Paraguay to which I am referring:

1) Indirectness/refusal to be upfront in personal situations (especially when backing out on commitments)

2) Weird superstitions about things/foods that can kill you when combined

3) Eating ludicrous amounts of meat

4) Unwavering in their hospitality toward visitors.

It is true that my perception of the past few days might be a little altered from the last few months I’ve spent in Paraguay; after spending a few weeks in the U.S. I feel slightly more acute to some of the happenings going on here. But still, here are some of the things people have said to me/have happened to me in the last few days (For bonus points see if you can guess which quality I’m referring to before making it to the end of the bullet point!):

-Two high school students signed up to walk door to door to me to talk with local parents about sending their kids to summer reading camp. One of them mysteriously came down with a toothache the night before and the other sent me a text the morning of saying she had a ‘personal problem’ she needed to deal with. I saw her a couple hours of later and she was hanging out with a boy in her front yard. And when I asked the other one the next day how her tooth responded, she was initially very confused, and after 5 seconds of thinking responded ‘ohhhh yea. It’s fine now.’ (1)

-9 a.m. Saturday: I happen to be walking by my friend Toro’s house where my host family has just killed a cow. They are having a 9 a.m. barbeque, straight chowing down on fresh meat. “Come eat breakfast Miguel.” I walk up, “No, sorry, I already ate some oatmeal I’m good.” “Nonsense. Here, come eat this.” As I sit down and look at the food in front of me, I realize there is no way I can possibly finish this bowl of what can only be described as mystery cow parts soupish. And there is a LOT OF IT in this bowl. I eat all I can fit into my stomach, about half of the meat maybe, before coming up with some excuse for not eating the rest of it (I have gotten really good at giving excuses to get out of things). I think the one I used was “Pero ndaipori espacio en serio” (“Seriously, there is no more room” (3, 4)

-12 noon Saturday: I realize I am about two miles away from my house and will have to walk back to my house to eat. I really do not want to walk 2 miles in 100+ and humid weather while the Paraguayan sun destroys my Irish skin. As if on cue right as I am having this thought, the senora in the house I am visiting (I have never met her before) insists very strongly that I stay for lunch (invite is too soft a word for how hard she thrust her hospitality at me). I fake resistance to see if she truly wants me to stay. It’s clear I will probably offend her if I don’t stay. (4)

-1 p.m. Saturday: After lunch at the same senora’s house, I nonchalantly say one of my favorite Guarani phrases for when the food coma sets in after lunch: ‘Che pila’i’ (literally, ‘my battery little’). Señora Teresa doesn’t suggest, but forces me to take a nap in her son’s bed, and in spite of my resistance puts the only fan in the house directly on my for the duration of my siesta (turned out to be 2 hours…ipuku). (4)

-7 pm Sunday: After my dinner, which included a glass of milk to top off my meal, my family busts out the watermelons. (Watermelon is not eaten by the slice here, but cut in half and eaten with a spoon.) I grab a spoon and start to dive in to a half of one, when my host brother stops me: Whoa Miguel didn’t you just drink milk? Yes... Watermelon and milk don’t mix. You’ll die.” YES. You'll die is the exact translation of what he said to me in Guarani. Not it’ll make you feel bad, but YOU WILL DIE. This is also the case when one mixes grapes and watermelon. I still haven’t died though, I guess I am immune because I am a diplomat. (2)

Like I said, maybe my sense of Guay culture is heightened right after spending 3 weeks in the states this December. Or maybe the summer brings out the best in the ‘guay. Whatever the reason, all of the stereotypes that us volunteers good-naturedly poke fun at have been super resonant here in Kilometro 16 the last few days. And I love it! I easily embrace the hospitality, but even things that could be slightly annoying like the meat and the indirectness turn out to be hilarious with the right attitude.

In other news, I’m getting a fridge, hopefully by the end of this week. So mom you can rest easy, I’ll be eating like a high school wrestler trying to move up a weight class in no time. I’ll also be putting a sink in my house and installing an outside shower, maybe even with warm water! Looks like I’ll still be using my neighbors’ latrine for a while though...

United Nations Millennium Development Goal 2.A.: “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling”

But does that really matter if they aren’t learning anything in the schools?

[note: this post is slightly lengthier than normal, I realize. But I think it is quite informative if you are interested to know exactly what I am doing in Paraguay, and more generally, the real ‘change’ or work that the Peace Corps does.]

John F. Kennedy, in order to answer a call from the youth of America who wanted to help people in other countries, created the Peace Corps in 1961. Or so the legend goes. Since then the PC has been met with criticism from abroad and the U.S. alike. It has been called a tool of United States imperialism, furthering U.S. interests abroad under the guise of ‘peace.’ In the widely read book Lies my Teacher Told me, James Loewen says emphatically that the greatest benefit of the Peace Corps is the intellectual growth of its volunteers. Before joining the PC one of the factors that almost deterred me was that I did not want to feel like I was imposing myself on a community in a third world country that did not want me there. Fortunately, this is not the case in Kilometro 16. I feel that as an Early Elementary Education Advisor I will be of great use to my community in the next year and a half, and this post will explain why.

At the end of the school year, I administered basic reading evaluations to Kindergarten through third grade classes in the three local schools, and the results were a little bit frightening, at least for me. None of the kindergartners could identify even a single word. Of 35 first graders, 24 were able to identify at least 5 words, but of those 24 only one was able to respond to questions after reading a first grade-level reading passage. In second grade, of 29 of 36 students were able to decode words, but of those 36 just eight were able to correctly answer at least 6 of 10 questions to pass a comprehension test on a First grade level reading passage. And finally in 3rd grade, just 3 students couldn’t decode any words, but of the other 25 students, just 14 were able to answer at least 6 of 10 on a first grade test, a figure that would have been lower if I considered the fact that one of my teachers was basically giving the students the answers to the questions.

Let me reiterate: no kindergartners can read a single word. That’s 5 and 6 year-olds, who are extremely ripe for the learning by developmental standards. A forth of 1st graders can’t read, and almost no first graders can read a short paragraph and summarize it. Less than a forth of 2nd graders can read and summarize. And finally approximately half of third graders have that skill. And I have tried to get even 5th graders to write original pieces, albeit a 3 sentence letter to their friend, which is done with great difficulty. In the U.S., to juxtapose, when I was working in a kindergarten classroom I saw a little 5 year old write an original paragraph and who was able to read short novels, while even one of the kids who was a little bit further down on the learning curve was able to recognize 20 words by the end of the school year.

This lack of literacy in the primary grades is extremely concerning for several reasons. Many students, as a result of poor early elementary instruction, still either can’t read at all in 4th grade and beyond, or else they can pronounce the words but do not think about the meaning of what they are ‘reading’ and thus comprehend almost nothing. Writing skills are sub,sub-par as well. Far behind their age level standard once they reach junior high and high school, many will drop out, disillusioned with school in general. Or they just come to class and sit quietly, understanding nothing, just to hang out with the pretty chicas (seriously!). The majority of students graduate high school never having read an entire book.

Why the lack of literacy? Bilingualism is probably the biggest reason. Almost all students speak the indigenous language Guarani in their homes. At school, however, the materials are all in Spanish, so students are taught to read in Spanish before they even know how to speak it—not exactly in sync with the latest teaching reading methods. And then the materials that the schools do have are meager at best: a few reading textbooks (never enough for all of the students somehow) and a school ‘library’ consisting of about 15 kids books. Additionally, Paraguay is just 20 years removed from a dictatorship, and many of the teachers still, out of habit (and b/c of the lack of materials), teach with methods that were in use back then. Understandable, since it is the way they were taught. But unfortunately, these teaching methods do not function very well for a majority of the students.

One of the most frustrating parts about my job is that I know exactly what could be done in the schools so that all kids, every single one, would be able to read. And trust me, if I could come right out and start openly critiquing teachers to improve them, I would. But that’s not how things work around here. So my most difficult task next year will be communication with and motivation of teachers. I have my work cut out for me for the coming school year in Paraguay. First, convince the teachers that a problem even exists—that they are not fulfilling the potentials of the students. I must do this in such a way that does not damage their egos too much, which is like walking on broken glass in the indirect culture of Paraguay. Second, I have to persuade the teachers that I have the knowledge to impart to them that will help students learn better if the teachers would only try my (from their perspective) ‘out-there, drastically different’ teaching methods. Then, I have effectively train teachers in said methods so that they will use them even when I am not here any more.

Paraguay’s literacy rate is listed at 95%, although even optimists doubt that its ‘functional literacy’ (ability to read and write meaningfully, more than a signature) is that high. If in the next couple of years I can put even a fraction of dent in that number I will be happy. Having said that, I think something becomes clear: whatever the original reason behind the creation of the Peace Corps, the fact is that it allows its volunteers to do worthwhile work abroad. And yes, let’s face it, PCVs get a lot of personal and professional growth from the experience. But no, I don’t buy the argument that sharing the latest and greatest teaching reading pedagogy with teachers in a recently democratic country is a furthering of U.S. imperialist interests.

On another note, I just killed a 5 foot long snake in my house. See y’all next week!

“We must not cease from exploration. And at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

-T.S. Eliot

During the first couple of months I was in Paraguay, everything seemed surreal. I would note every little tiny detail of everything that I saw or that happened to me and it was the most incredible thing ever. I.e. the time I stopped on my way to somewhere and watched carpenter ants carry leaves many times their size for a solid ten minutes. Or when I went nuts because I saw a firefly with a totally different light pattern then Illinois fireflies. Or when I laughed for about 2 straight minutes at the descriptive language for describing a cold beer in Guarani, which translates as: “This beer is nice and cool like a Penguin’s butt.”

‘Culture shock’ is the commonly used phrase to describe this adaptation process to a new culture. After several months of immersion, culture shock typically wears off, as it has for me. I am at home in my environment again, in my own element. Things in my day-to-day that I would have, at the beginning of my experience, deemed ridiculously journal-worthy often don’t even get a second thought now. This weekend I had a realization that I have become desensitized to a great many things after living in ultra-rural Paraguay for more than 7 months. So, in case I forgot, here are six signs (taken this past weekend) to remind me that I am still in the Peace Corps:

1. Saturday morning is extremely rainy. You realize this means this means that you will not be able to go into town for at least 3 days if not more because of the road conditions. Instead of reacting negatively, you celebrate the joyous fact that you will have a morning to read the classics and do yoga without interruption from neighbors randomly stopping by to hang with ‘the Americano.’

2. Water is dripping into your house in at least 7 different spots. Instead of getting upset you congratulate yourself on how much foresight you had to put your bed in the ‘dry corner’ of your hut.

3. You have an intestinal disturbance that clearly would have been ‘Kaopectate’ worthy back in the states. As you squat in the roofless latrine during a storm, being downpoured on, your only reaction is to chuckle about how smart you were to bring dry TP with you in a plastic bag.

4. When you come to a recently formed river cutting across a road, you are already knee deep before you realize you just took off your shoes to wade through muddy water. (I remember my denial the first time this happened: “well there has got to be some way around this thing…nope there aren’t too many pedestrian bridges in Paraguay”) You just have to embrace bare feet in the boondocks.

5. You are overjoyed to walk into a neighbor’s house and find them watching an (extremely) mediocre Wayne Brothers movie, let alone when in English, dubbed into Spanish. In this particular case the contraband film, obviously pirated, filmed in a movie theatre, is “White Chicks.” It may be the Waynes bros, but hey, it’s a relief from the usual 7 hour epic Chinese kung-fu flicks that everyone is always watching.

6. The highlight of your day is figuring out that you can leverage your machete against a tree in such a way that you will be able to split bamboo with maybe 400% more efficiency. So genius.

By the same token that I have been come desensitized to Paraguayan life, its going to be interesting to note what I think of Brookfield when I get back a week from Tuesday after having been gone 10 months. Trains? Snow? Chipotle burrito? Irish Times, and Guinness on tap? Chinese food? Wisconsin cheese available in a store near you? Two story houses? Indoor Heating? Hot showers? I’m going to feel like a tourist in my hometown.

It is common in Paraguay for Peace Corps volunteers to be accused of either being in cahoots with the C.I.A., coming to secure Paraguay’s giant aquifer (2nd biggest in the world) for the U.S., or, my personal favorite rumor, we are here to “find the gold” that is allegedly all over this country (I have my eyes peeled, haven’t seen any still). The Peace Corps Paraguay country director was even recently asked, on a very mainstream radio station, if indeed the Peace Corps Volunteers were spies for U.S. interests. Personally, I have only been accused once of being a spy to my face, and it was by a very drunk Brazilian who was babbling nonsense to me one night, so I didn’t have to take that accusation very seriously. The only true suspicion I have stirred thus far up is with the local chainsaw-ists, who think I am going to ‘report them’ (whatever that means in Paraguay, there is no one honest I could report to even if I wanted to) for cutting down and selling the wood from the national forest preserve.

The rationale for the Peace Corps being a 2 year commitment as opposed to 1 year is because in isolated areas where locals aren’t used to Americans, it may take a year just to build the trust necessary to truly be able to start initiatives that will result in sustainable change. For the last 7 months I have built up a supreme reputation in Kilometro 16 as being what I will call a ‘really solid dude’ in my community. I go work in the fields occasionally which earns the farmers respect, I drink terere with old women, I have close relationships with all of the local teachers, know a ton of the kids names at the school, don’t do anything shady, play soccer with the high school kids, etc. My trust bank here is pretty big.

But what would life in tranquil, rural Paraguay be without a little drama? The ‘wikileaks’ story has caught fire in the Paraguayan mainstream media. Turns out the U.S. government asked the Paraguay embassy to find out if Hugo Chavez financially supported Fernando Lugo when he ran for president in 2008. This has substantially increased the number of times the ‘spy’ topic has been broached in conversation in the last couple of days, even here in rural Paraguay. Every time it is brought up, I do my best to convey with some suavity that, yes, the U.S. government, like any government, has good programs (i.e. Peace Corps) and some questionable, polemic ones, like all of the C.I.A. operations in Latin America in the 20th century, and yes, wanting to know everywhere that Chavez drops a nickel. Although a slightly awkward subject to discuss with Paraguayans, the wikileaks conversation is something that I think is important to have. I feel better if I talk to people here face to face about it instead of them just mentioning it behind my back. Lucky for me, my well stocked trust bank will probably ensure that anyone who knows me here will not believe that Profesor Miguel could be a spy, in spite of whatever classified documents appear on wikileaks. Or would they? My argument with people is often: honestly, if I were a spy, I would be doing a pretty bad job wouldn’t I? Teaching kids in primary school how to read? I suppose maybe they think that is my cover. But honestly, I think the U.S. would have found a more competent spy. I don’t even speak fluent Guarani yet…

When I show my 5 year old host brother Fernando a drawing of a raccoon, which he has never seen, he calls it a dog. He also calls a squirrel a dog, and any animal he is unsure of is a dog. Overgeneralizing is what kids do when they are first figuring out what everything is in the world around them, but it is also used by adults. As the lightest skinned, bluest eyed, lightest brown hair, tallest and clearly foreign person around in within about a 30 mile radius, I am consistently running into people who stereotype me, or who have difficulty understanding my behavior and my motivation for living in Paraguay for 2 years.

Frequently, probably more than a 100 times in the last 9 months, I have had to explain myself, what are you doing here, are you a spy for the U.S. government, etc. If the person who I am talking to has heard of the Peace Corps already it makes the conversation go smoother, but that is not always the case. There are a lot of Mormon missionaries in Paraguay, so if a Paraguayan has seen missionaries before, they assume that since I look like them and talk funny like the Mormons I must be part of some religious order. No, Peace Corps is not religious and I am actually prohibited from promoting religion, I tell them. They are never satisfied by whatever I tell them next, which most often is along the lines of “Actually I am working in the schools in the boondocks here collaborating with teachers sharing participatory teaching methodologies so that all kids will learn to read in the primary grades.” Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue in English, let alone Spanish or worse still in my mediocre Guarani. Whoever I am talking to, after this statement, typically eyes me bewilderedly at best, downright suspiciously at worst. You must be a spy. Did you come here for the Gold? Or for the Aquifer? (Paraguay is home to the 2nd biggest aquifer on earth). For some reason moving abroad for two years to promote the word and convert people is more plausible to them coming to work to train teachers and do community development. In other words, people have difficulty fitting me into their world schema.

Another example: everyone assumes that I know all of the previous volunteers that were in my site, even ones from a really long time ago. I can’t even count the number of times someone has asked, ‘do you know Bren??’ (the volunteer that was here around 1996). No, don’t know him, I was in 3rd grade when he was here. There are 300 million people in the United States, and I’m facebook friends with about 700, and he’s not one of them…

My favorite generalization happens when I bring a novel to the elementary school, which is pretty often. As I sat at a desk outside during recess reading The Associate, I was confused by a question one of the students asked me: “Are you reading the dictionary?” “Why on earth would I be reading a dictionary?,” was my initial confused reaction. But after being asked this question by lots of kids and some adults too when they see me reading a big book, it finally hit me as to why: most of the kids have never even SEEN a big fat book aside from a dictionary. They don’t even have newspapers in my town, and the school hardly has any books. A “library” is a foreign concept to most. So it makes sense why they shouldn’t understand how addicting the latest John Grisham novel and that I have to carry it around and read it whenever I get a spare moment.

A cliché part of the Peace Corps, and a part that I indulge in, is just sitting around with nothing to do some days and reading lots of books. My host family, though, is confused by my behavior when I decide to spend an entire Saturday morning just lying in my hammock reading for pleasure while my host-dad and host-brothers are out working in the fields, planting crops, getting dirty and doing clearly measurable work. Again, none of them being avid readers, it is hard to convey to them that reading a mystery novel to me is just like watching a movie, but in my head… Riiiiiight. Sounds like someone is going crazy they say to me. What are you really doing there, reporting to the C.I.A.? Or worse, they just assume am a lazy bum who does nothing. Nde Kaigueeehina in Guarani. They are much more comforted when I spend the day working on my garden, like I did today, doing tangible, measurable work that they are familiar with. I walked over to their house to borrow a hoe, shovel, and hammer, and they must have said 3 times, ahhhhh going to work on the garden are we. Thataboy. And when I came back with my hands and feet caked with mud to return the tools, they looked took one look and said again, ahh working in the garden. Yep, you got those py ky’a (dirty feet). You’re so hardworking. Hows that coming along?

Then later tonight, I brought over a book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, if you were wondering) to flip through while I was hanging out before we ate dinner, fresh chicken stew.

“Miguel, are you reading the dictionary?”

I glanced at my watch as I walked through the doors of the Paraguayan Ministry of Education and Culture in downtown Asuncion. My digital told me 8:49, which meant I was eleven minutes early for my appointment. I was quite pleased with my arrival time, given that it had been somewhat of a late night out with a couple of my favorite fellow peace corps volunteers that I hadn’t seen for a couple of months. In order to look professional I donned olive green khakis, a blue anti-wrinkle shirt, and the only tie I brought with me to Paraguay. A hot day but I didn’t want to take chances. Nothing was going to get between me and making sure my host community would qualify for the ministry’s program to build a new fully equipped kindergarten classroom of which it is in dire need. Oh, little did I know. 9 months in Paraguay and still naïve. I was about to get my first solid dose of old fashioned do-nothing, inefficient bureaucracy.

Strolling through the lobby on my way to the elevator I saw the first warning signs: 5 to 7 employees sitting around, doing absolutely nothing, obviously still on the clock. But when I made to Sr. Alfonso’s office is when the real fun began. I had the appointment with Sr. Alfonso, but evidently he was still out and would be back ‘soon.’ There were two ‘secretaries,’ at least I think that’s probably what their job title would be called. And I don’t have perfect gaydar, but I’m pretty sure the male secretary was hitting on me. He had curly black hair and was in his late thirties, and about 5 minutes through our conversation he proceeded to whip out a digital camera and take pictures of me which he said we ‘for the monthly publication.’ The middle aged lady sitting next to him rolled her eyes in a sort of smiling but obviously embarrassed way and said ‘He’s lying. He’s definitely not the photographer for our monthly.’ Walking past me a couple times he friendily patted me on the shoulder, the hand lingering juuust a bit too long. Luckily I became distracted by another office worker who used to be a kindergarten teacher who proceeded to amaze me by her knowledge of reading pedagogy and we talked about nerd teacher topics for a while.

Distracted by what someone so obviously adept at teaching was doing in bureaucracy, almost an hour passed. Finally around 1030 Mr. Alfonso finally saw me, but it turned out what he was really doing was talking me to see someone else more important who could actually help me. What? Why did I not just go directly to her office. Arrrgh.

We get to her office, which is a few blocks away, and low and behold she is not there. Mr. Alfonso talks to one of the lady’s two secretaries, who is sitting at a desk doing nothing, and obviously knows nothing as well. Mr. Alfonso is bumbling a little bit with what to do so I take the lead.

“Ok, when tell the director be back her and free?”

Turns out she is at a meeting right now, and, um, might be back around 1230 (this information took about 2 minutes of dialogue to squeeze out). Are you sure? Yes, he says. Ok, here is my name and number. Please call if anything changes.

Riiiiiight. Keep dreamin’ kid. I get back at 12:30. Same office, same two secretaries, still with literally nothing in front of their desks? What are you doing?

“The director is not here. Hmmm can you come back at 2:00? Or maybe 3:00?”

Anyone who knows me knows I am a patient person. Probably one of the most patient people around anywhere. But even I have my limits…I managed to filter myself, realizing that I, an American, have different cultural standards, quality standards, etc. I was beginning to fume, but what came out was a watered down version of what I was thinking:

“Listen, no, I can’t come back later. I have a lot of errands to run today. And I have a question for you all. What would you have done if some poor person from the boondocks spend his own money to get here after you SPECIFICALLY TOLD HIM TO COME on a certain date to talk about the possibility of a program request, and then he got here and you had organized NOTHING for him? Would you feel bad for making an already poor person pay for an expensive bus ticket in to Asuncion only to find out that he had wasted his money?”

I realize I was shooting at the messengers. The two ‘secretaries’ in that room are obviously not at fault for the inefficiency of Paraguayan Bureaucracy. But that’s precisely the problem: NO ONE is at fault. Almost everyone is just apathetic; the system is what it is.

My rant along with my obviously irritated mannerisms managed to get the female secretary moving out of the room, I wasn’t sure to where. I walked over to behind the desk of the other guy, and tried to make friendly conversation. “So, what do you do here?” “Not much.” At least he’s honest.

About five minutes later the female secretary comes back with another woman who she says will attend to my kindergarten room request. She tells me her title and it doesn’t sound like she is even close to the Director I actually wanted to see.

I state my case, show her the application, the pictures of the broken down school with no divider between kindergarten and 2nd grade. Have you ever tried to teach in a second grade class while you can hear screaming and singing kindergarteners all afternoon? I have. It sucks.

After listening to me for a solid 5 minutes. She looks at the application again and says to me: “Listen, this program is closed now. It’s been closed for a couple of years. Have you tried requesting money from the local government?”

Closed? And for 2 years. Well that’s fantastic. Why in god’s name did they invite me down here. Again, ready to burst but not wanted to come off as the jerk American, I try to come up with something not angry to say. “Have you ever tried requesting money from the local government at the end of the mayor’s term? I mean, he hasn’t even paid his own employees for 5 months.”

“Yea….I can take this folder and hang on to it if you like, just in case something comes up.”

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the whole reason I was here was because the Ministry had mysteriously lost the application from my school two years ago. No thank you, I’ll hang on to the app, which will probably be more useful as extra kindling if we have one more cold streak in November. Besides, the folder it’s in is quality.

Fuming angry at the Ministry after this encounter, I call my community contact to complain. He tells me, “Calm down Miguel. Remember, we’re in Paraguay.” And not one of the several to whom I retold this story found it surprising. Corruption is institutionalized here. And with corruption of course, comes its awkward cousin inefficiency, which runs wild in Paraguay.

I don’t mean for this account to show Paraguay in a negative light. At least not Paraguayans. They are all wonderful, nice people. But only 20 years removed from a dictatorship, it obviously has some ground to make up. But hey, we’ll get there, remember Chicago during prohibition? (Or right now.) C’mon.

Nonetheless, does anyone have the number of a reputed efficiency consulting firm? The Bobs are pretty good I hear.

Today we are going to do a little perspective-building for all my loyal blog readers that still check whichguayagain for some reason (hey Mom and Dad!). Imagine, for a second, that after college you have joined the Peace Corps. What does this mean for you, exactly? Well, instead of putting your approximately $140,000 private school diploma to use at a decent job in the city, where you can continue your Eurotrip motto of ‘live fast and die young’ a la Tim Maier and enjoy the Chicago nightlife and Cubs games, and maybe even start to pay off some of your student loans, you take a different path. You decide that a better idea is to go live in one of the 76 countries in the world which are friendly enough to the USA that it is able to give some volunteers three months of training and stick them in a marginal area to try and work towards bringing some more opportunity and dignity to the people of that country/area. Lucky for you, you are an education volunteer, and education volunteers more often than not get placed in ‘larger’ towns aka towns that have not all dirt roads.

On site selection day, you realize that it was a bad idea to entertain even the thought that you would have a concrete road in your town or even a brick one when you look at your information sheet: you have been selected to ‘beautiful kilometer 16. Number of houses: 75. Population: 400.’ Incidentally, Kilometer 16 is named for the number of kilometers on a sandy dirt road you must travel on from the ‘town’ in order to get there; when it rains heavily you cannot leave for days.

The day after site selection day you meet your community contacts. You have two: Vicente, the director of the school where you will be doing the majority of your work, who is dressed so 70s its like he’s straight out of Starsky and Hutch, button down shirt with a bit of chest hair popping out of the undone buttons at the top. The other, Antolin, is the president of your site’s local parents’ commission, and he has the salt-of-the-earth seasoned look, the callused, strong hands that only can come from a lifetime of manual labor. After being introduced, you head outside for some air with the two and strike up one of those awkward first conversations (translated from Spanish and a little bit of Guarani into English):

You: So, anyhow, how many kids do you all have?

Vicente: Me, I just have four. You should ask Antolin.

You: Now I’m curious. Antolin, how many creaturas do you have?

Antolin: Nine.

You: Oh wow.

Vicente: You’ll be living in Antolin’s house. (watches for my shocked reaction, laughter ensues)

(sidenote: Kids translates into Paraguay Spanish as criatura, which is a lot closer to creatures then the English word, and cracks me up every time I hear it)

Arriving at Antolin’s house, his earlier estimate of nine kids seems like it can’t be right; there simply have to be more, judging by how many people are streaming in and out. Or maybe it is an optical illusion, a sort of tazmanian devil effect occurring because the kids are always moving to make it seem as if there are more. (In fact, at one point during my homestay there were as many as 15 people total sleeping in the house…there are 7 beds.)

My contact Vicente was quick to think that I might want to move out and into my own diggs as soon as possible, which wasn’t completely true. For the most part I came to enjoy the bustle of living with a large family. But nonetheless, this is how Vicente and I’s conversation went about my house (takes place last May):

Vicente: Miguel, it looks like there are no houses to rent in the area, but don’t worry, because we are going to build you a house.

Profesor Miguel: Are you serious? Won’t that take a while and cost a lot of money?

Vicente: Not at all Miguel. We’ll cut down some trees, use some recycled brick, some old roof, it will take no time at all. When do you want it by?

Profesor Miguel: (Some part of me in my head was saying ‘recycled brick…old roof…is this a good idea? But of course I say) Sounds awesome. How about by July?

Vicente: Absolutely. In fact, I guarantee it will be done by July, probably June.

End of May: No work on casa.

June: I pick a spot with Antolin for the house, but no work starts. I start to get worried, but keep my calm, because I understand that Paraguay is a tranquilo country where things get down at their own pace. Oh did I mention the World Cup is going on during this month? And there is no school when Paraguay plays in it? And in general, everyone just sits around watching all the games, which go from 7:30 am until 5 pm?

July: Still no work by the beginning of the month. But I get back from my 4th of July weekend at the Embassy to find a once weedy area now cleared for building. AND Paraguay has been knocked out of the world cup. Vicente’s estimate still looks optimistic though.

July 12-13: In a shocking turn of events, we put up the frame and the roof in less then 8 hours total work one weekend. I am still not quite sure how this happened, but random people from the community kept showing up to hammer for a bit and then would leave.

July 19-20: Antolin and I work one weekend and put up the brick base around the house. The next weekend we nail the wood to the frame, and it actually looks like a house from the outside. With the world cup now firmly out of the way, I am sure that my house will be done within weeks.

Beginning of August: Curveball is thrown at me: with the end of winter here, August marks the beginning of planting season in Paraguay, which means there is little time to work on the house since time must be spent planting seeds in the fields (my family plants by hand, does not own a tractor like some of the local families). Hey, I understand; my house can wait, but planting cannot. Still, a little bit gets done here and there on my house, mostly on the weekends, sometimes by me and sometimes by one of my six host brothers, who are all super-adept at anything having to do with building, from the 19 year old on down to the 5 year old. Just give them a hammer, nails, sometimes a chainsaw, and watch them go.

Now when I agreed to have a house built for me, I was naïve and did not realize all of the “little” necessities that go into turning a completely undeveloped area from scratch into a liveable space, as basic as my new house is. In the end it was quite the experience. For anyone who is interested in building their own house someday, here is a list of the various jobs that were completed from mid August-ish thru the beginning of October:

-windows, doors framed, hung

-holes in roof patched with tar

-running water pipe put in with one fossit (still no inside sink)

-brick floor put in

-locksmith puts in lock

-small table built

-shelf built

-electricity put in

-iron bars made for windows

The highlight of all these jobs was undoubtedly watching my 19 yr-old host brother David shimmy up the already dangerously shabby-looking wooden electricity ‘pole’ (looked like a piece of wood that had been rotting on the ground for a few years) across the street from my house to connect, without rubber gloves, the copper wire from the grid to my residence (oh, those gloves aren’t worth it, way too expensive, he says). After nearly having a heart-attack myself while watching David flirt with electrocution, we managed to start an electrical fire in my house, at which point he finally submitted that it might be a good idea to get an electrician to finish the job.

On October 13, a Wednesday, I put the final touch on my house, a steel inside door lock, and I was ready to move in. My host brother Gordo and I threw together a small table quickly, and I already had a shelf made, so that was it.

As I sit writing this right now, I am in my Walden in the woods house in the middle of the orange orchard with my 3 month old puppy, Lukie. I am finally able to use my laptop again, and indeed am using it to type up this blog post, which I will paste via the magic of the memory stick in a few days when I am in town.

My house is far from furnished, however. I have just one outlet, one lightbulb (not a lamp, a lightbulb), and a lot of my stuff is hung up on nails around the place. I still need necessities such as: a stove, pots and pans, a refrigerator, a sink, a shower, a latrine, a fan…probably more. Nothing is painted still. Whatever; I don’t really care. I have recently set up my hammock, and wow, I forgot about the glory of hammocks.

Some Peace Corps Paraguay volunteers walk into situations where they have furnished apartments and pay no rent. One of my good friends has a place with about six rooms, talk about luxury! I definitely feel like I am getting the full stereotypical ‘Peace Corps’ experience though. And honestly, the location could not be sweeter. I live right next to an awesome family who loves me and still cooks all of my meals, I’m in an orange orchard, I am making my garden right next to me...

Well thanks for reading y’all. Hope everything is good back in the states and I should be able to post more regularly from now on since I have access to my comp now. I’ll be back in the states in mid-December, hope to see as many people as I can!

Wow, so I just realized it´s been over 2 months since my last update. Its been a while but no worries this next update is going to be just the remedio the doctor ordered for all of my extremely loyal blog followers who will soon start to settle into their post-summer work grind as august ends, and as I continue to live it up abroad.

Ohh. Ouch. Sorry if that hurts Tim and Connor but I had to throw that little jab at ya´ll who are in the ¨real¨ world. Just so that everyone doesn´t get TOO jealous, let me talk for a minute about what I mean when I say ´living it up,´ as I feel that my definition is alot different from that of many people. For the last 2 months, I have not updated my blog, yes about one third out of laziness but two thirds from the fact that I live in a place 10 miles from the nearest computer, and when it rains I cannot leave my house without wellies, which I don´t own and have not seen anywhere here for sale. So I have been, for much of the time, camping up in my house with the other 12 or so (number fluxtuates) people who are living there when it rains, heading to the fields to help out my family with machete-ing down various crops before planting season, learning to drive an oxen cart, being patient with the fact that I have no personal space (look at the pictures of the 4 kids sitting on my bed, that is everyday) that many americans my age are so used to, gotten used to being sans computer and youtube, having no work to do (school was on break for July), and still was not speaking the language that most of the people speak at in the home in Paraguay, Guarani. And throughout all of this I have been getting to know my town pretty well as PCVs are supposed to, in order to do community needs assessment. I would estimate that I have been to almost half of the houses in my town to visit and sip some of the local cold (and delicious, I might add) tea, terere.

Yes, after much reflection over these past two weeks I have come to feel that my life right now has elements of the 1998 hit movie The Truman Show . In the movie, Jim Carrey plays a man whose entire life has actually been a reality TV show. My life is similar to that movie now in that, when I head to my village, I take on another persona. I become ¨Professor Miguel,¨ speak Spanish and Guarani, listen to purely reagatton music, and generally am the man, since I am the only example of of an Americano that anyone from my town has ever seen, so I wouldn´t want them to get a skewed impression of what we are like. Luckily this is not hard for me. However, there are those trying times that I peace corps volunteer goes through, especially those who are placed in the boondocks like me. To bring what I am saying to life a bit more, check out this video, from a typical Saturday in my house. After over 3 months living where I am, I am over culture shock, but I can still remember the bewilderment I felt when I first got to my house. The video begins with my host-dad cutting meat from a cow that we had recently butchered. He is doing so on our lunch and dinner table. That table will not be sanitized before we eat lunch. I have gotten sick several times over the last couple of months (including two days in the hospital with explosive diarrea, sorry if thats TMI). Coincidence? Probably. Hopefully the upload works. If not I am putting it on Facebook.

August 22, Folklore Day in Paraguay

As you might not have guessed by the subtitle of this post, last Friday August 20th, we celebrated the Day of Folklore in Kilomter 16, my town (we just decided to celebrate it earlier to have it on Friday of course). A little background on Kilometer 16, before I get into its folklore traditions. In 1970, the place where my town now is was completely forest, as far as the eye can see. In 1971, about 6 houses sprung up around the area, and eventually a road was trailblazed. The forest was (probably) either burned or cut down to make farm land and farm animals. When people first moved here, they brought a few cows or chickens and made there fortune that way, there were no schools etc. So 40 years ago the people built these houses out of a special kind of hollow green reed, with straw roofs. Now, every 22nd of August-ish, the local high school holds a contest to see who can remake the best house in the old style, as well as perform traditional Paraguayan dance and song. The party then concludes with a great big regaton dance fest in which all of the town takes part.

I was mostly hanging out there with my community contact and the principal of the local school where I do most of my work, Vicente. They tell Peace Corps Volunteers to take their cultural cues from the people who are in your same position, aka if the principal who is a male is drinking at a social funcion you should have a beer with him in order to fit in, but if the town drunk asks you to have some cane liquor alcohol with him at 7 am on a Sunday (this has happened to me) before church, you should politely refuse. This was a night where, everyone seemed to be making merry. And I will say that I have held back, in general, at social funcions of this kind in my delicate effort to make the right impression. This was a funcion where my principal refused to let me partake in conversation with out a can of the local brew, Brahma, in my hand. I kept saying no thank you but then he kept handing me one, even if I hadn´t finished the beer I had in my other hand, which in turn made me look like I was double-fisting. So I decided the best remedy was just to keep pace with him and the other principal, and the professor from the teacher college who was also attending.

Inevitably this led to my first local appearance on the dance floor in Kilometer 16. This was important, because I had to put to rest all of the rumors that were starting to circulate about how ´el americano no sabe bailar,´or in english, ´the american doesn´t know how to dance.´ I can´t think of anything that could be much more damaging to the reputation of Americans in Paraugay if the perception of host country nationals is that we do not know how to adapt and dance to the local reagaton hits, while at the same time dominating when it came to any american dance song that I had heard a million times. It was more or less the paraguayan, outdoors version of Station, quite a sight to see. Combined with the fact that I got into an argument with an drunken Brazilian community member who insisted that I was a spy, and that I had better buy a community center for the town because I am a rich american if I wasn´t a spy, yea it was a pretty good night.

Some pictures of my site are finally up. Thanks dad for sending me the camera. Check the link to the right to have a looksie.

Papa Miguel

I´ve just missed the one bus that goes back to my little pueblo Kilometro 16, so looks like I will be spending a little more time in the bigger ´city´ of San Juan this afternoon. Luckily, my friend Toro (translates as ´Bull,´ I don´t think the name works in English like it does in Spanish) is coming into town later with his truck and will be able to give me a ride back. This whole transportation situation would be a lot easier if the PC just permitted me to ride motorcycles (even 7th grade girls ride to class on them), but for now they are still prohibited. The bicycle I have is nice, and its a great workout to ride 16 km on sandy, hilly roads like sand dunes to get to town. The problem is that I arrive to wherever I am going with a shirt full of sweat, even in the dead of the Paraguayan ´winter.´ Being from Chicago I still have a hard time believing 70 degree weather during the day can happen in the middle of winter. I can´t imagine how things will pan out with the bike in the summer, when temps are 100 and humid.

A big shotout to all the fathers out there for fathers day. Yes, I´m sure you are dying to know, they do indeed celebrate fathers day here in the Guay. It´s not as big as mother´s day, but nonetheless is celebrated. Yesterday night I happened to find myself at the fathers day party of a gentlemen who has 19 children. Let´s just say we did indeed eat buffet style. Also notable is that the mom schooled me in billiards after we ate.

Saturday my host family and I did some more work on my house-to-be. Did I mention that it is in the middle of an Orange Tree Orchard? If I did already, I apologize but being from the suburbs of chitown I am overly-estatic about the fact that I will be able to reach out my window and grab oranges off trees. Unfortunately, there is no avocado tree (my favorite fruit of all time or possibly second to michigan blueberries) nearby. I am in talks with people to have one transplanted to within reaching distance of one of my windows, and it looks promising.

Which brings me to a point I´d like to make about Paraguay. The people are so nice and accomodating it is often outrageous when I take a step back and think about what is actually happening. I was having this discussion with one of Fransisco´s (the dad of 19) kids yesterday night. He was wondering if people would be as accomadating to me as the town of Kilometro 16 has been to me in the last 2 months. I explained that I wasn´t sure; it is quite a complex question to be sure. My response to him was that the U.S. is a huge country, and I guessed that people in rural areas in the U.S. similar to the one I am in in Paraguay would also tend to be very accomodating. He wasn´t very satisfied with my answer, however, tending to believe that his town was the most hospitable, more than any town in the U.S. would be.

Now Paraguayan hospitality has to be up there in the top 10 in the world, and having said that YES I realize that I have only been to about 10 of more than 200 countries in the world. But here hospitality is ridiculous. It is over the top. Here are some examples. #1 I have already had at least 3 chickens and or pigs killed specifically to make dinner for me at various houses, which I had no saying in whatsoever. #2 I have to be extremely careful about what I say in front my family bc if I say something it is likely to become reality. I mentioned in passing that my favorite food here is chipaguasu (its kind of like cornbread but not cornbread) to my family. Days later, they made chipaguasu and they continue to make it about once every week or two weeks. It is usually more of a once everyone couple of months food, kind of expensive to make. I have also mentioned in passing that I like a certain flavor of terere (cold tea) and now everyone consistantly prepares it for me. This happens as well with most things that I talk about, sometimes just to make conversation. #3 reason I can walk up to any house at all in the neighborhood, and even if they do not know me, they will put up a chair, bust out some terere, and often invite me to stay for a meal afterwards. #4 My community is working together to build me a HOUSE.

The list goes on. I feel very lucky to be where I am in a place where people are very nice and whatsmore they are pumped to have an education volunteer trained in pedagogy to work in the schools. I´ve already begun teaching English classes in the high school twice a week, and hopefully I will start getting more work done in the elementary schools as far as material making goes. Tomorrow and Wednesday I am off to visit two nearby elementary schools and meet with the teachers and observe classes.

Oh yea and Paraguay plays again in the World Cup next Thursday. It was madness when they played and won last Sunday morning (in accordance with my previous assertion that futbol is the national religion of Paraguay, church was canceled for the morning world cup game) and surely it will be even moreso this Thursday, since if they win they qualify for the 2nd round, and they are in good shape to do so having tied and won the first two matches of the round. I really can´t exagerate the amount of energy that Paraguay puts into the World Cup. Literally, the last 15 minutes of the news are devoted COMPLETELY to the World Cup (no other sports beside soccer) and mostly to Paraguay´s preparation for future matches. There are only 3 channels here, but rest assured that every single game is broadcasted live here, the govt was smart enough to assure that all classes could view the game.

House update: roof is up. And we laid some bricks for the foundation. Pics...I hope theyll be coming soon who knows though.

So, yes, the World Cup has arrived and I´m in Latin America in a country that indeed is playing in the world cup, which makes for an exhilirating experience. Soccer, for various reasons, has not become so popular in the U.S., but here in Paraguay it is more or less the national religion. To back that statement up I will say that I went to church a few Sundays ago here, and I estimate that about 25 people came. I went to the local soccer game a few hours later and I think about 300 people were there. And now with all of the madness that is the World Cup having started, the excitement in Paraguay is hitting the fan.

Allow me to make an analogy to the U.S. sporting scene. Imagine, for a moment, that Dan Elwood is President of the US of A (I would move to South America). For those of you who aren´t familiar with this living legend, his first order of business is to dissallow all other sports aside from college basketball. In addition, he decides to make the March Madness tournament just once every four years, to pump up the excitement of it. This is a little bit like what Paraguay is like right now...Soccer, or ´football´ as those elitist Englishmen call it, is largely the only sport played all over Paraguay, and it is played by all social classes equally. When Paraguay had their first World cup match this past Monday afternoon, school was effectively canceled because teachers knew that about 2 students would show up, so it wasn´t worth it at all to try and have class. Everyone was huddled around their TV sets watching the game, as was I. And in case you didn´t catch Maier´s prediction come true, they tied the 2006 World Cup winnner Italy in a dynamic performance. Honestly, I´m truely impressed with the talent Paraguay puts up for the Cup. The national population is about 7 million, yet I take them in a game over the US.

I gave my first workshop yesterday in the schools here. We made some primary school alphabets to put up in the classroom and shortly I will be showing the teachers how to use them to improve pedagogy via songs and more participatory activities.

What up Yall,

So it´s been too long since I´ve last posted, that´s for sure. I´m hoping this blog won´t turn into an Elwood where I rarely post updates. However, the last month it has been slightly difficult to get to the internet cafe to update. A lot more has happened than I will be able to say in this post. Anyhow, here we go.

I have decided that I got pretty lucky with my site placement, and these reasons I´ll tell you why. I believe I described a little bit in the previous post the sort of family I am living with but what I didn´t say was how lucky I am to be living there...My community and my family are way happy to be having an education volunteer in their town. They have had other volunteers in the previous years, so they are familiar with the peace corps but they have never had a volunteer who is going to work in the schools so they are happy to have me. So happy, in fact, that my entire town is rallying to build my house. That´s right, I am having a house built. And at very little cost. It is going to be an amazing place, right in the middle of an orange tree orchard. Plus with some banana trees behind it. Just last Saturday we started building it, and already we have the frame ready to go, just need to add some roof and some walls and the concrete floor and its all done. Now when I say house, I do just mean a 4 by 6 meter shack basically. With running water I hope, but probably not a shower. I think it will have a gas stove so I will be able to cook to my hearts delight though, which will be fun. I mean not that I haven´t been enjoying the Paraguayan cuisine, but they tend to eat very few vegetables, on average about zero per day, so my greens intake has greatly dropped here. Anyhow I am looking forward to my walden in the woods hut in which I will be living for two years. Pictures of the construction process to come. Hopefully.

I finally have my bike here which means I can ride the 16 km to town to use the internet and whatever else I have to do in town. I rode in today and its quite a pleasant ride, expect for the bumbyness of the dirt road that I have to endure. And its way bumpy, plus I have to watch out for motos that come up behind me and sometimes clip me pretty close. Its nice to have the bike though and not have to depend on the daily bus.

Things continue to go well though. My Guarani is getting better, although I still dont understanding alot of the conversations happening in my everyday life. For example, all of the negociations surrounding my house take place in Guarani, and I am usually standing around when they take place. However, I understand very little of what is said. Usually, I end up just helping to lift whatever needs to be lifted after this is communicated to me via gestures, and just continually reinterate to my host-dad that I want to make sure the door frame is tall enough that I do not have to lean my neck down every time I enter my house--my only request.

In the schools this week I will probably be starting to do some participatory activities, making alphabets in the school and other materials of which they are in neccesity. I could go on a very long rant here about what I will be doing in the schools but I will hold back. For now. Until next time, go Hawks.

And what I week it has been! I am in the town of San Juan sitting in an internet cafe, known in Paraguay as a Cyber. It is around 9 am right now, and the principle reason for my journey into the town today is to find myself a Jacket. Contrary to what I thought after the first 3 months of constant sweating in Paraguay, it actually does get somewhat cold here. Although it doesn´t freeze, the temperature during the night can get as low as 6 degrees celcius (too lazy right now to figure out the fahrenheit for yall), which is pretty damn cold when you have walls with holes in them. And with the cold just setting in the las few days, and me only having my Knox College Cross Country hoodie (Represent, woot woot!) to keep me warm, I´ve been freezing my cohones off here in Paraguay.

So, in order to get to the town of San Juan from my tiny country area known as Kilometer 16 (you know your town is small when it is named for how many kilometers it is from the nearest town), I had to take a 1 and a half hour ride on a bus over a bumby dirt road. There is only one bus per day, and it leaves at 6 am and comes back at 11 am. So I am a bit limited as to my options of when to go to the town until I have my bike here. But it´s all good, bc the bus is fun; and I always take a little bit of hot mate for the ride. Today I met an 84 year old lady who was taking the bus into town, and she gave me a little backround on my town, like the fact that in 1970 when she moved to the town, there was literally nothing there. Anyhow, she seemed really happy when I told her it was my own Grandpas 85th birthday tomorrow. I love talkative older ladies.

So I arrived in my site last Tuesday, and since then I will admit I think I´ve been experiencing a little bit of culture shock to say the least. Mostly I´ve just been going to the schools to observe classes and see in what I will be helping the teachers. Friday though, we had a rain day, so I stayed home and had my first chance to work on my family´s farm. Basically for a couple of hours I macheted some weeds. It was actually a pretty solid workout, and also hilarious bc my 5 and 6 year old brothers had little machetes and were out working right next to their dad doing the little they could. It kind of made me think of when I was little and would take a pretend lawnmower out when my dad mowed the lawn, except that these kids have real super sharp machetes. Gotta put em to work, I guess.

The house where I am living is a blast and I feel that I got pretty lucky with how nice everyone is. I have 10 siblings: Fernando, 5, Arnaldo, 6, Gricelda, 8, Delfi, 10, Antonio, 11, Milciades, 14, Norma, 16, Agustin, 18, David, 19, and another one who lives in Buenos Aires whose name I do not recall right now. And needless to say it is a madhouse. As of 6 am everyone is up and doing chores, milking cows, herding cows into the pasture, making food, etc. But in the afternoon and night there is very little to do; I showed them crazy eights last wednesday and since then we have played probably around 12 hours total of the game. If I sit by myself in my room they will come stop by and kind of look at me until I ask them if they want to play crazy eights and then they get all crazy excited, its supercute. Even my 5 year old brother knows how to play the game which is pretty cool considering his kindergarten teacher hasn´t even started teaching him numbers and letters yet. They also get a huge kick out of the way I shuffle and do the bridge. I have been trying to teach them but so far to no avail. The other night I also decided to teach them the numbers in english from 1 to 10, and afterwards my house became a madhouse of people yelling one tou free four fiv seex seven eixs nine ten, which I found absolutely hysterical. I feel like I might regret this decision sometime in the future when I get annoyed with this yelling, but right now they are all so supernice I want to try and teach them some english.

As for Guarani, I am learning all I can by osmosis and listening to people especially the kids, but its become apparent that I´m going to need to find a tutor, at least for the first few months here. It is getting a bit frusterating to hear people talking all the time and have little idea what they are saying, except for when they address me directly since they do that in Spanish. Alright well I have to get going to buy my jacket and catch the bus at 11 am. Happy belated mothers day to all the moms and moms to be out there!

Hey everybody. Sorry again for the lack of updates the last couple of weeks, but its been an action packed period. Life is good right now. I've been in Asuncion for the weekend with the rest of the other 46 volunteers from my training group, as kind of a transitionary period from ending training and moving out of our host family's houses to heading to our respective sites where we will all be spending the following 2 years. There has been a lot going on lately so this is going to be just a stream of consciousness post, we shall see where that takes us.

The swearing in ceremony where we take our oath as official volunteers took place in the American Embassy here in Asuncion. Maybe an arbitrary distinction but nevertheless throughout training it is something the PC continuously reminds you of, and it is nice to finally be an official volunteer and get the monthly stipend. The American Embassy here is high class, they even managed to get the address 1776. The The U.S. ambassador to Paraguay attended the ceremony as well so that made us all feel important. She gave a little speech, which honestly was dwarfed but one of the most amazing speeches I have ever heard in person by our volunteer speaker. In addition, after the ceremony, there was some of the most delicious chocolate cake that I have ever eaten in my life, no exageration. Top 5 for sure.

After we became official volunteers we were finally given cell phones, which was awesome after not having them for 3 months. I mean, in our training community if we wanted to talk to each other's houses we had to do it old school (cerca 1990) style and simply walk to the person's house and ask their host parents if they are home. Some of you may know I am personally a fan of doing without excessive modern convenicences but I take back everything I have said about cell phones. They are awesome. And after a 3 month period of no cell phones us PCVs definitely abused them a little bit this weekend, but I'm okay with that.

As part of the finale as we ended training there was a talent show. And I am proud to say the Early Elementary Education group came out on top against some pretty stellar competition. In order to explain the greatness of our act I need to give some background. When PCVs go to the our sites, some of the major work that we do is helping educate kids on how NOT to get worms. Something like 90% of Paraguayan kids get worms or other parasites, which is obviously outrageously high, and much of it is due to lack of education on how worms are contracted. One of the big things we do to educate kids is sing this song in Guarani which is to the tune of London Bridge and translated comes out "I have my shoe, shoe, shoe/And I'm feeling good, I don't have worms/And I'm feeling good"...and it continues with other such phrases. So, for the talent show we decided to spice up the song a bit, and invented the "I have my shoe...REMIX!!!" (In Guarani it is "Areko che zapatu"). I will hopefully be able to post the video either on the blog or on facebook but it is quite a spectacle. It features myself and 2 other dudes from my EEE group throwin down some mad lyrical flow, and we had the luck to have a professional beatbox in our group who strikes up a kickin beat. We even used giant mandioca roots as microphones. The lyrics we came up with are a mix of English, Spanish and Guarani:

I see you playin' futbol after school

Maaan why you ain't wearin no zapatu? (zapatu=shoe in Guarani)

Yo listen up all you little mitai (matai=little kids)

You don't want to quedar with that chivivi (=get diarrehea)

We're education and we're here to say

You gotta wash your hands, every day

And while we're at it can't you see

We're doin' participatory activities

And promoting gender equality

'Cuz we don't like our ladies with sevo'i (sevo'i=worms in Gua)

You know what you necesacitas?

You need some Goshdarn Zapatillas (shoes)

That's right big booty I'm lookin at you

Why you ain't wearin no Zapatu?

Now when I say "Sevo", you say "I"

Sevo I Sevo I

And when I say Zapa, you say 'tu'

Zapa Tu Zapa Tu

Now Papa Miguel's gotta pass the mic (Papa Miguel is my rap name)

To my brotha Rikzilla come and say what you like

(My buddy throws down probably my favorite line of the song right here):

Listen to the Rikman (his rap name is Rikzilla)

I'll give you the scoop

Giardia's no joke son I'm talkin' frothy poop

You don't get it from kissin'

So Stop Drop and Listen

Heed my advice or from your butt you'll be pissin'

No drip from the anos

When you lava los manos

So cuidate every day

Keep your poop sano

Now when I say Frothy you say Poo

Frothy Poo Frothy Poo

And when I say Lava you say Po

Lava Po Lava Po (Wash your hands)

Thanks ya'll for listenin' to our charlita (talk)

You can pay us back with a cervecita (beer)

That's Triple E

with Anne Marie

Comin at ya from Naranjaisyyyyyyy

It might seem a little graphic at points, but it is indeed parasites result in awful consequences for kids such as bad diarrhea, you can't really sugarcoat parasites. And it is a problem in the classroom b/c kids who are consistently sick tend to have a lot of trouble paying attention in class, which is part of our mission in Early Elementary Ed in Paraguay..Anyhow, This song was a first place winner in the talent show so represent EEE (Early Elementary Ed). (Take that SWAG.)

Tomorrow I head to my site where I will be spending the next 2 years of life! It's excited although it will certainly be weird to be away from all the friends I've made during training and be out on my own so to speak. One of the weirdest things is transitioning from interacting with other PCVs in English to conducting your daily routine soley in Spanish and Guarani. Well that and getting used to my host dad cutting an enormous chunk of raw cow with a tablesaw on the same table that you will be eating lunch on in an hour or so. Oh and not to mention using bags of cotton as couches. And actually a million other things. But indeed I got a really good vibe from my host family when I visited, so I am more excited then nervous about finally heading there and starting my 2 year service. It's going to take a bit of getting used to though. I mean, my entire town is on one street a little less than a kilometer long. If you want to try and googlemaps it, google 'san juan nepomuceno paraguay' and scroll 16 km to the east. Yea you won't see much, but that is indeed my life for the next 2 years.

Well I'm off to spoil myself with some filophals in the city, hasta la proxima!

It´s been awhile since my last post, sorry about that. Some of it has been due to the lack of internet access, and also to the fact that I´ve been ¨busy¨lately, slash I´ve been sitting around with Paraguayans drinking lots of terere and assimilating into the culture. Anyhow, I did finally find out where I will be for two years! I am in a tiny rural town of about 400 people or so called Sant Blas. It is 16 km from the nearest ¨city¨of ten thousand people, although as I found out yesterday, the 16 km bus ride ends up being about 2 hrs because it is on a bumpy dirt road. And if it rains, forget about it. So as we say in Peace Corps spanglish, my site is super-campo, or super-rural.

My site is awesome, though. For the past five days, all PCVs went out to visit their future sites, and mine did not dissapoint. Honestly, I could not have picked a better living situation if I could have created it like create-a-player on hangtime, for all of you out there that played that marvalous sega game. I will living with a family that runs a farm and owns about 20 hectares of land, with a variety of crops including cotton, soy beans, grapefruit trees, pear trees, orange trees, and several others. In addition, they own about 10 cows, several oxen, 4 horses, 6 pigs, 100 or so chickens (although it was down to 99 after we ate lunch last Saturday), and there are about 6 to 7 dogs who roam about the house at any given moment. Oh and I almost forgot there are 9 kids ranging in age 4 to 19 living in the house, whichy means no I will never be bored. Everyone is hilarious...although it took me a good 4 days to get all the names down. Also this week, since I am super rural I experienced the glory of a cold shower at 6 am, which is a pretty good way to wake yourself up. Also, I don´t have a toilet, more of an oversized keyhole shape in the ground. Yes, pictures will be forthcoming at some point.

Aside from my living situation, I found out a great deal of what I will most likely be doing during my 2 years here. In general, I will be trying to create slash bring in more materials to the schools here, as well as give workshops to all of the teachers here on topics such as how to use didactic materials and involve students more in the learning process. Be it for a lack of materials or a lack of pedagogical knowledge, often times school for kids here consists of the kids just copying stuff off of the board instead of critical thinking, which I am going to try to work on through bringing in better activities for math and reading. I might also be teaching a class in the teacher college in the adjecent larger town, and teaching a little bit of English in the high school or middle school.

So, a couple of funny stories from the week. First, my friend in town slash the principal of one of the local schools took me all around town to visit all the schools in the area. And in one particular school he took me to visit, the professor was not there for the day (for the freshman class). Miguel, do you want to give a talk to the class? he asked me. I said sure, what like 5 or 10 minutes on American culture? And he said well, more like 2 and a half hours, the teacher isnt here today so maybe you could teach the class. So yea, ended up in a class of 24 freshmen teaching them random stuff off the top of my head for 2 and a half hours, including some English and some creative writing. Honestly I could have done whatever I wanted for that time and they would have loved it I feel like.

Second little story. So, I was unpacking my bags yesterday night after the 8 or so hour bus ride home. I take my shoes out of my backpack, which are in a plastic bag, and notice that one shoe seems to weigh slightly more than the other. I look in my left shoe, and low and behold, a huge toad is wedged into the toe area, laying on its back. It had made the 8 hour bus ride with me from my future site to my training site. I yell to my 11 year old host brother and host mom to come and look as I freak out, assuming that the toad is obviously dead from being tossed around on a bus and being enclosed in a plastic bag for 8 hours. Laughing hysterically (because I had of course told them my previous toad story), my host mom and brother stare at it deciding what to do. Abel grabs it, and tosses it on the ground, where it lays on its back for about 15 seconds, starts to wiggle, eventually hops off to start a new lineage far away from its hometown. I don´t know what it is about the left shoe of my TEVAs, but toads just love it.

Needless to say it was a weekend filled with surprises. I realized definitively that I need to learn Guarani this weekend, because too often my family would talk in Guarani and I would hear jibberish jibberish jibberish...MIGUEL! followed by a lot of laughing and pointing at me. I cant let this continue going on for two years. In general though, most people in my town have heard of the peace corps and seem excited to have a volunteer around for the next couple of years, which is good news for me, as long as I can get used to the cold showers...which are going to be pretty rough in the winter, as the temp keeps getting cooler.

Jajecepilla va´era! Or, in English, I have to brush my teeth! This was the basis of the song that two other volunteers and I were singing with elementary aged-kids in Guarani this week. We taught some kids who had never before used (or probably seen for most of them) toothbrushes. But I am getting a little ahead of myself. Allow me to properly set up the week.

This past week was practicum week, which meant that I went with two other trainees to visit a volunteer at their site. We were tapped to go to one of the most rural sites. After about 2 hours of driving on Monday morning from Guarambare we met up with a dirt road that we followed for several miles before reaching our community, a small town of about 750 people. It has two elementary schools, one which is more near the ´center´of the town and another which is way out in the middle of nowhere. We would be working at both, giving dental health talks to all of the students from both schools, and helping to set up the library which the volunteer had started. I would be staying with a family whose parents speak Guarani, while I speak very little Guarani. This indeed led to hours of entertainment at the dinner

table, where I had to resort again to smiling and nodding, something I

haven´t done since I was first studying abroad in a Latin American

country in Buenos Aires long ago. I used all of the words I knew, and

even found out the exact quantities of their animals: 75 chickens, 10

pigs, 12 cows and ox´s, and 2 dogs. Yes it was fun for everyone.

Anyhow, after about 9 hours of rain Monday night and Tuesday morning,

school was canceled for Tuesday. Yes thats right we have snow days in

Chicago they have rain days in Paraguay. At first I thought it was

just a cop-out not too have school, but when I walked to the school to

work on the library with the kids gone, I found out why. In order to

arrive I had to wade through a recent formed river. I attempted to

long jump the river in parts, but this only ended up in my getting my

shoes wet. I then resolved to just roll up my khakis and take off my

shoes to wade through huck fin style.

The rest of the week we gave about 12 different talks on dental health

and helped with the library. Thursday was the highlight, when we

showed the kids at the super isolated school (no running water in this

one) how to brush their teeth and they were all holding the

toothbrushes like flutes or cigars or something, definitely not like

toothbrushes though. The first class was drooling a lot once we got

about 1 minute in to the brushing, and we realized it was because we

forgot to tell them that they should spit out the excess paste.

Overall this was one of the coolest things I think I´ve done so far,

pictures hopefully will follow sometime.

A funny story from Thursday morning, as I went to put on my shoes at

630 in the morning before heading to school, a huge toad jumped out of

one of them. I screamed like a little girl and nearly had a heart

attack, which caused my host mom to rush into my room speaking rapid

fire Guarani. I said the broken Guarani equivalent of`` I have frog

in shoe´´ and she laughed harder than I think I have heard anyone

laugh since I´ve been here.

So life is alright here right now, we find out about our sites in

about a week and a half. Next week is holy week, which means a little

bit of vacation and seeing out they celebrate in our little town.

Hope everyone is good,

Mick

I´ve had some requests for my mail address so here it is:

Mike Dooley PCT

Cuerpo de Paz Centro de Entrenamiento

162 Chaco Boreal c/ Mcal Lopez

Asuncion 1580, Paraguay, South America

This will be permanent, except that once I am a volunteer the heading will change to ´Mike Dooley PCV´(I will be a volunteer whereas right now I am technically a trainee). Not a big deal really.

Next week I am going to live with a family that speaks only Guarani. This should be interesting, especially if I have to communicate to them any symptoms of the recent illnesses I have been experiencing. I have self diagnosed myself with a skin parasite, and possibly Giardia. These might sound bad but honestly they are pretty common around here. My immune system is in pretty good shape so I should be able to fight them off without a problem.

So the talk around here lately, or in Spanish the chisme, if you will, has been about where we are going to be placed for our two years of service in the Peace Corps. We find out in about a week and a half, and I´m the stereotypically nervous but excited. I could end up in the Chaco desert or a tropical paradise, who knows.

Sorry for the brevity of this post but I´m gonna roll out of this internet cafe soon as I´m feeling a little bit under the weather. Hope everyone had a proper St. Patty´s Day.

Today marks just over one month of time that I have spent in Paraguay. And the other day as I sat in my front yard on the corner beneath my mango trees sucking out the juice of a grapefruit (also from a tree in my yard) as I watched my chickens running around, I decided that I have already begun to take a lot for granted in this country which I am fallin in love with. So, I made a list of about ten things that I thought were strange but that I now take for granted, and passed it around to most of the other PVC´s (Peace Corps Volunteers, this will be the last time I write out this abbreviation), letting them vote for their favorite four and add a write in nomination if they pleased. The results are below:

#10 Learning that chickens sleep in trees.

#9 Getting stared at wherever you go. Yea, there aren´t many gringos around these parts. The whole town notices whenver we go anywhere, its kind of ridiculous.

#8 The use of brooms to sweep away animals (out of a house, away from a fire, etc.)

#7 Throwing food scraps anywhere on the ground. Not that this one is necesarily unique to Paraguay, b/c I did this in rural Ireland when I was there as well. But I remember the look of confusion my host mom first gave me when I asked her what I should do with my banana peel. Tira en la calle!! she said. Throw it in the street!! She said this as if I had just asked her what country I was in. Since that moment i´ve had a blast...grapefruit peels, lime peels, whatever! Tira en la calle! It´s biodegradable anyway!

#6 The number of people that can fit on a bus. If you read my last post, you already know that the collectivos here are crazy crowded at peak hours.

#5 Cows being loaned out as lawnmowers. My mom here does NOT own a lawnmower. Why, when the vaca from across the street will gladly spend the day munching on some fresh grass that is our front lawn? Problem solved.

#4: Trash Fires. I have a ziplock baggie full of garbage from my first month here. I think I minimized my amount of trash pretty well; however, I have been wondering what to do with it. This morning I woke up and it smelled like a plastic factory was burning. I think I have my answer to what I am going to do with that plastic baggy...yea they burn a lot of the trash here, at least in my specific area.

#3 Ice in Bags. Now this doesn´t mean ice CUBES in bags, but rather, little clear plastic bags are filled with water, frozen, and then broken with a hammer when the ice is needed. I have not seen one tray of ice the whole time I have been here. Personally, this is my number one. I love ice in bags; it cools your drink off so much more efficiently. Already planning on bringing this one back to the U.S. in a couple of years.

#2 Saying ´Adios´ instead of ´hola´when passing people. You how in the U.S., sometimes when passing someone you say ´hey, hows it going?´ and then that person actually stops to talk to you, and an awkward conversation ensues? Worry not about that in Paraguay. If you don´t want to have a conversation with someone when you are walking by, you just say ´adios!´ and keep on rolling. Goodbye! Problem solved. I love it.

#1 Families of five riding on motorcycles. I am not surprised at all that this is occupying the #1 spot. EVERYONE and their little brother rides a motorcycle in Paraguay. My little brother here is 11 and rides one locally. I regularly see three people riding one, usually families. Five is the most I have seen or have heard of anyone seeing, and it included a baby, a couple of toddlers, a mom and dad. Sadly, very dangerous too, and moto accidents are one of the number one causes of death in the country.

So, there you have it, probably not as riveting as one of Lettermen´s lists but interesting nonetheless. Now, I would like to respond directly to some questions that people have been posting:

Q: Does Abel have a group of neighborhood friends? It seems like it'd be tough for him to stay busy all the time.

I am pretty sure Abel is related to 40 percent of my neighborhood so he has a lot of friends relatives to chill with. Honestly he stays busy though. school in Paraguay for him goes from 7 am until 11 am, and he spends the rest of the day playing soccer and working out.

Q: Also, why are Bolivian bus ceilings so short--do bolivianos top out at around 5'7"?

I´m not sure, but my Paraguayan friend told me told me they did, so I am inclined to believe her.

Q: What's the Paraguayan news like? Who are the celebrities? What are today's top stories?

I have no idea what the Paraguayan general news is like. I have not seen a newspaper in my neighborhood, and my host mom does not watch ANY tv, so therefore I am not exposed to any news. We don´t even know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, let alone the political situation. Honestly, news here is very, very local and gossipy. People like to hear the news about their own town. For example, when I got stranded in a town one over from mine and couldn´t get home until 4 am last Saturday because of the lack of busses, my entire town new this before I woke up Sunday morning. As for celebrities, Soccer players are the most well known icons. Perhaps Paraguay´s best player, Salvador Cabañas, got shot in the head while at a bar in Mexico and this was pretty big news.

Q: Mick, Fiona and I read in Guinness book of Records that Paraguay consumes the most tea. It probably ain't Lipton's? What kinds? There must be tea shops the way we have coffee shops? But that is coffee bean country, no?

The tea that they are talking about is most likely terere. It is consumed cold, and is a great way to rehydrate on a hot day if you have been working in the fields, or just hanging out with your friends and want something cool to drink. Terere is such a big component to Paraguayan culture that in the future I will probably devote a whole post to explaining the nuances of it all. Coffee isn´t very popular here. There are few coffee shops, whichy did indeed surprise me as well when I got here since we are so close to Brazil. I guess Paraguay is just ouside of coffee bean country.

The picture link to the right now works. That´s all for today. Hasta la proxima,

Mick

The days have been going by pretty quickly the last week or so. Training has been consuming a vast amount of our time, as we have been getting ready for workshops with Paraguayan teachers, studying a lot of Guarani, and also trying to spend as much time integrating in the community as possible. There have been a lot of very interesting happenings, and I think my next post is going to be a top 10-er, that is the top ten most shocking things about Paraguay that I already have started to take for granted. So everybody can look forward to that, I am still refining my list until later in the week though. For now just a general update.

Last Saturday I went into Asuncion with a few other volunteers and one of their host sisters, who served as our guide and made sure we didn’t get lost in the sprawling Paraguayan capital. We had decided on a day which would include comforts of home, feeling that we had earned it with all the community integration that we have been doing lately. We decided on watching Alice in Wonderland and going to Pizza Hut. In order to get to the movie theater in Asuncion from our little rural area just outside of Guarambare, we had to take 3 separate buses for a total of around three hours roundtrip. In Latin America the bus is called the ‘collectivo, and the colectivo experience is pretty unforgettable. Collectivos are more or less similar to city buses say, in Chicago, with a few exceptions. First of all, in the rural areas you can just flag down a collectivo anywhere on the road; there are no designated stop areas. Quite convenient, actually. It is not uncommon for a person to live 2 hours outside of Asuncion and take the collectivo to get to work each day. As you might be guessing, this leads to long, crowded colectivo rides with standing room only, and obviously there is no AC, that is just a given. So yea personal space is somewhat sacrificed. And sometimes they can get downright dangerous, like yesterday for example. I was the last of our group of 5 to squeeze my way onto an already sardine-like packed colectivo, and ended up kind of riding on the bottom stair for a few minutes. The door was open and I’m not gonna lie I got kind of a rush and it was a bit scary. Don’t worry I had a bar to grip though, so the actual possibility of my falling out was pretty slim. The funniest part, however, was when I finally walked up the stairs and stood on the bus for the next hour. Evidently this particular bus had been purchased from Bolivia, and as a result had been constructed with lower ceilings (or maybe high floors). To be precise, the height of the ceiling was around 5’8”. I am 6’2”. There was no way for me to quite lean or sit, so I had to bend my neck at a 45 degree angle for duration of the ride. This was hilarious to all of the other PVCs and I indeed got a great view of the tops of everyone’s heads for that ride. Definitely one of those times when I had to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.

In other news, throughout the last couple of weeks I have taught my host brother crazy eights or ochos locos and B.S., or mentiroso. Crazy eights is a riot to play with my host mom and brother because abel just hoards the eights and my host mom consistently forgets that you can put down a card of the same number instead of the same suit, and also confuses hearts and spadesn, so Abel and I have to look at her cards and tell her what to put down. She still wins a lot though, it’s pretty impressive. I have went on a few runs here, which are pretty picturesque. Also I played soccer last week with some Paraguayans. They way the play is the everybody on the team needs to throw down a one mil coin, (equivilant of about 30 cents maybe) and if you win you get another mil and if you lose you lose your mil. Then everybody heads to the tienda to split a 1.5 liter of cocacola between 12 people.

On another note, I finally busted out my laptop in my room today in order to write this post, save it on a flash drive, and then bring it to the internet café so I can copy and paste my post. So I am sitting in my room at my desk, and my host mom keeps peeking through the crack between my door and the wall with one eye, infinitely interested in what I am doing. I did my best to explain to her that it was ‘digital’ or something along those lines. We do not even have a phone in my house here…yea we’re a little old fashioned around here. Needless to say I think she was flabergasted. I’m starting to get used to the lack of technology myself as well, I actually feel slightly spoiled typing and listening to music on my computer machine.

I am throwing some pictures up today, which can be found on picasa via the link to the right. Earlier today I tried to take a few pics around my house and property, so enjoy. Unfortunately uploading is extremely slow here so I had to pick and choose a few key pics until have a better uploading sitch. Today marks about 3 and a half weeks of being here in Paraguay, but all of the PC trainees agree that it feels like we have been here for at least twice that time. I already feel myself not being surprised by things that floored me when I first arrived, like making ice in plastic bags instead of treys and seeing families of 5 on motorcycles. Also, my little chicks have been growing a ton in the last week, and in fact they have stopped following their mother around which was a little sad. They are still cute though, no worries. Also pardon my lack of english language skillz today, I am starting to forget English with all the Guarani and Spanish being thrown my way. Hasta la proxima!

This past weekend, all the PVCs (peace corps Volunteers, I have been asked to clarify ackronyms at least initially) in my training group were sent out to spend Saturday, Sunday, and Monday with a volunteer who is already set up in their host community work in the field. As luck would have it I was sent to the most desolate and isolated of all regions of Paraguay: the Chaco desert. Pictures will be forthcoming, but first allow me to note that the Chaco desert covers about 40 to 50 percent of the land area of Paraguay, while only 3% of the population chooses to reside their. The north area has a variety of wildlife including crocodiles and Toucans, and there are still nomadic tribes that roam the area who are not documented as citizens and have little contact with the rest of Paraguay.

I arrived there at night, after an 8 hour bus ride, so the climate was actually quite comfortable and there were a lot of stars to be seen. During the day however, it was blazing hot and evidently last summer the temperature reached an astounding 50 degrees Celcius, or 122 Fahrenheit. So then it will probably not come as a surprise that the one volunteer in this area is about 500 kilometers to the nearest other volunteer (most are 25 km). Needless to say, during the day we did a lot of terere drinking, sitting around, and cooking, taking it pretty easy. The volunteer I stayed with expalained ´Paraguayan time´ to me, which is the fact that if you want people to show up to your house for dinner at 8 pm, you have to tell them 7 pm. That is not an exageration at all. Personally, I think I could get used to Paraguayan time.

The visit gave me a good view into a lot of the responsibilities that I will have as a volunteer in the future. Some of them I had thought of, but in addition it looks like I will be doing a lot of grant writing for funds, proabaly coaching or organizing a sports camp in some capacity, and working with elementary teachers to give them more participatory methods for teaching their students.

This will be a short post because internet time is limited. I promise I have some solid posts coming up on the things about Paraguayan culture that I have found surpring, since I´m sure that´s something that will interest all my loyal blog readers. Hasta luego until then.

After having been in Paraguay for not even two weeks, I feel almost like I have been here for a month. I guess time is easily misconstrued in an unfamiliar place. I´ll try to hit the major points of the week with this post although there have been a ton.

Last Saturday, unbeknownst to me until about 8 pm and I was expecting to eat dinner in the house, my Paraguayan mama took me to her Grandson´s birthday party slash Asada. An asada is just a party with a ton of meat at it. Upon getting there I had a pretty good conversation with my host-uncle named Raul in which he explained to me his entire philosophy on life, which is ´why so much?´. I on a good role with my Spanish, and when some more people got there he invited me to play this crazy card game called ´truco.´ At this point everyone began speaking Guarani, and as a result I still do not understand the rules of truco even after playing for about an hour and a half. I think it is something like bridge because you play it in partners, but who knows. After that came the meat of the party, which was unlimited slabs of cow, I´m not sure which cut it was but it was good. The guys who I was eating with got a pretty big kick out of my estimation that the meat we were eating might cost like 20 dollars per plate in a nice restaurant in Chicago. And they insisted that I eat several slabs of it. Needless to say I had some slight gastro-intestinal problems for a couple days after that as my stomach tried to remember how to digest South American meat.

That was Saturday, Sunday was spent recovering from the discoteca the previous night and just sitting around my house, siesta-ing, and drinking load of terere. At about 5 I got up the strenght to head over to my friend´s pool, where another PVC and I succesfully taught Sharks and Minnows to the kids, which was a blast and the kids loved.

This week has been the first of getting into a daily routine. For me this includes getting up around 7 (well first around 5 when the roosters start crowing but I eventually fall back asleep) to go to Guarani language classes until 1130, eating, then heading back to school from 1 until 5 for educational studies ´technico´ classes. Basically we sing elementary school songs in Spanish, which sometimes feels a little ridiculous but is fun. After that I usually play soccer, study, head to my uncle´s pool, or some variation of those three. Dinner is around 8 and usually turns into a sit and chill session until 9 or 930 after the food has been eaten, and I head to bed after that, maybe read a bit and go to sleep.

A couple of nights this week I played my eleven year old host brother in Connect four. I beat him the majority of the times, but he is pretty competetive and keeps getting better. We also started a reading club this week, and 15 people came which was a pretty good turnout. The other PVCs and I interspersed games with reading. Another first impression notable is that there are soooo many moto´s driven here. If I had to guess I would say about half of all traffic is a motorcycle of some sort. Even my 11 year old brother drives one locally.

So overall, besides the fact that I sweat through a couple of shirts a day, life is good. The pace is wayyyy slowed down compared to the city of Chicago or even the suburbs, which I like. It´s amazing how much time I have spent just sitting around this past week watching the traffic go by and talking about the heat and/or rain. This coming week we are going to Asuncion, and next week we will all be visiting a PVC somewhere in Paraguay.

Tim and Paul, thanks for the questions. I will look into the bundles of hundreds and typical food situation. I am going to tenatively say that if you put the hundreds in a teddy bear and sewed it shut it might make it. Don´t quote me on that though. As for your question Tim, lots of meat, and also fruit. I will get you a more specific answer in a week or so.

On a final note, my older host brother just asked me my favorite American food and I explained to her the greatness of the Chipotle burrito. They don´t have burritos in Paraguay except for in the big cities, and actually ´burrito´translates directly has ´little donkey,´which definitely does not accurately describe the contents of a burrito. I know sometimes in the U.S. we think of Latin America as a whole, but burritos are definitely a mexican, not paraguayan, food. Oh and it is 97 degrees here right now, feels like 107. That is all.

So this is the first post from Paraguay, and rest assured I have a mountain of things that I could write about, and I really don´t know where to start. It is Saturday afternoon right now and I am in an internet cafe in Guarambare attempting to download skype, which will give me some time right now to write a post. This is going to be stream of consciousness so bear with me.

We arrived Wednesday afternoon to Paraguay around 1 pm local time, where we were met by PC people at the airport. They transported us to the PC headquarters in Guarambare, where we had a few quick bits of orientation as well as host family interviews. At about 4:30 pm we drove to a smaller very rural town outside of the city where I met my host family, which is a 68 year old lady and her 11 year old grandson. When I got the sheet that said I was living with a 68 year old, I didn´t know what to expect, but she is defintely a young 68, like the type you could expect to find dancing till 2 am at the local shindig.

My house is quite simple, and includes just 3 rooms, her and her grandson´s bedroom, my bedroom, and the kitchen. I didnt know quite what to expect as far as how formal things would be and stuff (if I should keep on khakis and my nice button shirt, possibly even for dinner) but when we ate outside for dinner, my 11 year old host-brother was all about being comfortble in soccer shorts and no shirt (it is ridiculously hot here, even at night) so I joined in by throwing on a v-neck ribbed t shirt, which made the heat a little more bearable.

Shower is pretty primitive, up until this morning I was not aware of the fact that I had hot water, and I then realized that in 100 degree heat why would I even need hot water? So I have been taking cold showers, which I enjoy. Basically there is a cement outhouse, probably about 6 feet by 6 feet with a toilet for doing business, a mirror for shaving, and a showerhead to the side of the toilet from which water falls, and it is possible to get a little water pressure if I keep turning the knob to the left, but then the water heats up (the pressure and heat are on the same knob), and it gets really hot, which is not desirable when it is hot out.

I will be doing most of my training in the satellite school for education, which is literally a stone´s throw from my house. I am the closest volunteer to it. As a matter of fact, I got myself into a bit of a pickle the first night at dinner when I spent about 3 minutes trying to explain the English idiomatic expression, and Kuke (my host mom) and Ibel (brother) kept trying to understand me. Obviously there was a lot of smiling and nodding going on through this conversation. Eventually I gave up and tried to drop it, but they made me keep explaining. I´m still not sure if they got it or not.

Two days ago, on the way home from the city, somehow two other volunteers and I managed to miss our stop. Long, long, long story short: what should have been a 5 minute bus ride turned into a 3 hour adventure. At one point, we used a phone from a local that we met to call our host moms, and so by the time we finally made it home I´m pretty sure the whole town knew about our little mishap on the busses, because a 12 year old girl that only one of us vaguely knew walked up to us and told us that everyone was looking for us and that we should come with her. Thank you small town Paraguayan hospitality. When I got home my host mom acted mad, but then laughed about it. We have been joking about ´the bus occurance´ for the last couple of days.

Other than that, things have been awesome thus far. I have to add some pictures soon because it is very hard to describe what it is like here just in words. At my house we have 3 chickens, one hen who wakes me up every morning, and about 8 little chicklets. The house is surrounded by a couple of mango trees, banana trees, a lemon tree, a grapfruit tree, and yea even a couple of non-fruit bearing trees.

The other night there were about 30 guys huddled around a tv the size of a normal computer screen watching a soccer game. They went crazy every time something happened in the game. Yea, it looks like I´m going to have to get into soccer here.

The internet cafe I am in is starting to crank this crazy techno music so I can only assume they are transforming it into a discoteca pretty soon, so I am out. Miss everyone, and hope you all are doing alright in the snowstormy weather!

It is Sunday afternoon right now, and my bags are mostly packed except for a few odds and ends. Strangely if there is any one group of similar items that is taking up the most space, it would be not socks or pants or shirts, but books. I think I brought about 15 of them, which I guess makes me a slight nerd, but hey, I’m going to need something to fill the hours with down there.

First and foremost I would like to thank everyone who came to the going away party that my parents had for me last Saturday. It was great to see friends and family one more time before leaving, and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. I think my parents counted about 60 people total, which is quite a lot considering the size of my house. The notes that people wrote were very thoughtful, and I have put them all safely into a binder to be taken them with me and read when I am in South America and need inspiration. So thank you again everyone who came out and congrats on finishing all of the beer except for approximately 9 Budweiser bottles (way to go, Marty). No worries though they will be taken care of at tonight’s Superbowl party.

The party was a week ago Saturday, and for the past week I have been surprisingly busy, meeting up with various people for social lunches and dinners, saying goodbye and trying to take my Mom's advice and put on some storage weight before I get to Paraguay. Highlights of the week include Tuesday, when my cousin Jake and I attempted to explain to Grandpa Miller that Google is so awesome because the algorithm that they use to order websites in a given search is the best of all the search engines. This was comical, as he still refuses to read emails on a computer (my Grandma has to print emails and give them to him for him to read them). I also explained the concept of a ‘web log’ or blog to him, which was not quite as difficult. I hope me having this blog gets him to start using the internet. And I hope that I similarly hold out on technology for my hypothetical Grandkids, those spoiled brats. I mean who knows what kind of crazy stuff they will have in 2060.

In my attempt to be as American as possible this past week in order to savor the flavor of this great country, I even ordered MGD on tap at Palmers, which has 36 beers from around the world on tap a couple of nights ago. Followed by a Budweiser bottle. This is rare for me. My friend Pete said it would be more American to have Keystone light, and I agreed. Maybe there will be Miller and Bud in Paraguay, but I am going to bet dollars over donuts (shotout to my cousin Jimmy for telling me about this awesome expression) that there will not be Keystone Light.

The peace corps requires that volunteers bring two pairs of eyeglasses if they need them, so I had to purchase an extra pair this week. I picked them up yesterday, and the rectangular black frames make me look (and feel) like a hipster when I am wearing them. All I need are pants that are a bit snugger and some PBR and I think I’ve got it. It figures that the contacts that I ordered Monday (which the lady said would be in by Saturday at the latest) aren’t going to come in until probably Tuesday, a day after I leave. Looks like I’m going to be a hipster quite often in the near future.

When I was having lunch at my Grandma and Grandpa’s in Downers Grove the other day, my Grandma gave me what I think is a solid idea. For this post I am going to request that if any of my loyal blog readers have a question about anything Paraguayan they just leave the question in the comments box below this post (or send it to me if you want) and I will try to respond to them in future posts. I mean, even after doing a fair amount of research on Paraguay I still feel I have a largely rudimentary grasp on what life is actually like there. And what better way to get those questions about Paraguay that you are dying to know the answer to than to ask someone who is experiencing the country first hand! Well, maybe not dying to know, but you get the idea. My Grandma led things off with the question “Do they have movies in Paraguay?” which, although basic, is something I could not give an answer to and be 100% sure about it. Well of course they have movies in the big cities, but how widespread is cinema there? Does Paraguay make its own cinema or watch American Movies? So think of some good questions, and I will do my best to answer all. Don’t worry Grandma, I will get on yours first no matter what.

I just checked the weather in Guarambare, the city where I will be doing my training. It is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The “realfeel’ temperature when I arrive on Wednesday is supposed to be 120. Yea, it’s going to be hot and humid. I’m sure I will be needing a lot of B list ‘it’s so hot jokes’ in the near future so I’ll just quote my 3 year old cousin Ava for now: Are you kidding me?

Oh and I almost forgot, my staging is in Miami, where I'll be getting into the airport tomorrow around noonish. In light of the location of the Super Bowl this year I will be sure to let everybody know about any athlete or other celeb sitings. Take care everybody, next post should be from Paraguay.

In the last couple of months, friends and family have found out that I am going to the Peace Corps and they want to know, where are you going? So I tell them: Paraguay. Reactions vary, and I can see that some people can picture in their head exactly where Paraguay is on a map, whereas others aren't so sure, and ask for clarification. Anyway this first post is kind of a test post anyway, I wanted to get the blog up and running before I left the country. So for now I will give a little background on the country and what I am doing.

The Peace Corps allows its volunteers to preference a geographic region, say, Africa or Eastern Europe or Asia when in the process of signing up. So when I requested to be sent to Latin America, I had no idea to which country I would be sent. I remained unsure until last November, when I finally got a letter from the PC giving me my country of service: Paraguay. I knew a few things about Paraguay, like that it was a landlocked country north of Argentina, but I needed to learn more. Luckily I own an Onion World Atlas (which my sister stole for me in last year's Miller grab bag, long story which won't be told here). The Onion Atlas was able to tell me everything I needed to know: "Paraguay is a nation widely known for not being widely known, and legendary for being a country in South America. Oh, and it has a dam." All exaggeration aside, the Onion has a point. If you surveyed 100 random Americans, how many of them could tell you the different between Paraguay and Uruguay? I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess not many. Of all of the countries in South America, Paraguay is one of the least visited by tourists; and not once have I seen Paraguay featured in the cultural section of a U.S. Spanish textbook; it seems that only more well-known places like Mexico, Spain, and Argentina are explored. So the Onion's synopsis of the country really isn't far off: in general people do not known much about Paraguay. Well, loyal blog readers, prepare to have your mind blown in the next couple years as you learn about the real Paraguay through the eyes of a PC volunteer.

"Early Elementary Education Adviser" is my official title for the next couple of years in the Peace Corps, although that seems like a very broad area to me. I have been in contact with one of my college buddies who has been doing education-related things in the PC for 6 months in Honduras, and he tells me that there is often a good deal of flexibility as to what a volunteer can do once on site. So bottom line, I'm not sure if I'll be organizing a library or teaching classes every day. The work will be done on sort of an 'assess and match needs' basis. I've already been told through several emails from PC people that we have to be flexible, so that's fine with me.

My plane is scheduled to depart at 9:15 a.m. from O'hare Airport (don't worry Dad I double checked it this time, definitely not Midway) on Monday February 8th. All of the PC Paraguay volunteers report to Miami for a day of orientation and paperwork before departing the next day on a flight bound for Asuncion, Paraguay. Once we arrive in Ansuncion, all 50 of us will be transported to the city of Guarambare, which is an hour from the capitol. There, we move in with a host family and begin our approximately three months of training. After the three months are up, we head to our respective towns where we will be spending the next two years trying to accomplish some positive change in our areas of expertise.

February 8th is 12 days from today. Until then I have no job or commitments except to pack my bags, make final preparations, spend quality time with friends and family, and last but not least finish watching all the episodes of Entourage I can download in order to max on American culture before I go. Should be fun.