Work in July

This month we have been blessed with perfect weather.  Although it has still be raining a lot the temperatures have been about 70-80 during the day and cooling down to 50-60 at night.  This weather has just been perfect for working outside and working with my youth.  Below you should see some pictures of some activities with my youth as well as pictures of my new cat Sam.  I received Sam from another volunteer who finished their service so now Sam is living with me in my house although he leaves early in the morning to go outside and doesn't come in until after dark but he is still good company. 

I have also finally completed visiting all of the houses in my community to complete my community needs assessment so will now just be interpreting all of the data and placing it in my book about Yukyry Central.  On Friday started our Winter Break for two weeks so all of the kids and teachers are free from classes for a couple of weeks, even though it doesn't really feel like winter I am not going to complain!  This week I will be headed back to the department of Missiones for a biodigester conference where 5 other of my fellow G mates and I will be learning about the technical aspects of biodigestors as well as actually building one in a community, so will try to have a post about that up later this week. 

This is a picture of my English/Conservation class playing a version of Twister learning colors as well as right, left, foot, and hand in English.  They had a great time playing the game and I had a lot of fun making the board and coloring it in during a rainy day one day.

This is Sam looking out the window which is where I can almost always find him in the evenings.  He likes to duck behind the curtain and watch everything going on outside.

This is just one of the charla papers that I have been making this month since we are on winter break from school to try to get ahead a little bit.  This charla is about trash in Paraguay and the breakdown between organic, plastics, glass, etc.  I’m sure it is very comparable to the US but still very eye opening.

This is a presentation about mulching and the benefits and examples of mulching here in Paraguay.

This presentation is about growing plants in containers since here in my community there is not recycling with plastics and glass so I am trying to encourage people to reuse the materials for other purposes instead of just burning them.  

This is a great picture of Sam one night trying to help me make a charla paper one night sitting perfectly to get his picture taken.

This is a charla about companion planting.  This was something that I had always heard about but had never done but am now trying it out in my garden and having great success.  Although I am not the best artist at drawing vegetables I think I still get the point across.

This is about decomposition times of different materials to try and explain that some things take a lot of time or never decomposes, trying once again to emphasis trash management and the 3 R’s.

Trash or residues?  This charla is explaining the difference between the two as well as the difference between organic and inorganic material.

This charla is about composting with lovely drawing of the layers.  This week in class we actually made a compost pile in my garden and the picture of that is a little later below.  Many people in my community just burn everything including all of the leaves and other organic matter so I am trying to get them interested in alternatives especially emphasizing that they can use the compost to increase crop production.

This charla is about lombricultura, or worm farming.  I have become quite the worm farmer at my house and am just amazed at the amount of material worms can eat and the wonderful compost they produce in such a short time.  The kids seemed too really like this but when I got the worms out for them to touch many didn’t like them, but we had fun none the less!

On Thursday night we welcomed a beautiful new calf into the world they had tied to my flag pole at the house.  It was so fun to see him trying to get up and get used to his long legs and figure out how to lie down.  He is growing so fast and full of energy now running circles around his mom.  Unfortunately the flag pole is one of the posts for my clothes lines so when I did laundry on Saturday and hung everything up the mom decided that she needed to taste my freshly washed laundry.  By the time it was all said and done she tried to eat a shirt and licked just about everything else.  I eventually convinced my brother to move the mom and calf further back for the day while my clothes dried but they all though it was hilarious. 

This is a picture of my class on Sunday with our completed compost pile.  I only had ten students this week but have had a little as 6 and maxed out at 16 so overall a good turnout!