Paraguay Verde- Part 1 (Getting There)

Each year Peace Corps Paraguay in corporation with A Todo Pulmon hosts an environmental camp which they call Paraguay Verde.  This year I took a girl from my community named Romina who is eleven years old and who grew up and goes to school here in Yukyry Central.  This year the camp was held down in Ayolas Paraguay which is the furthest south you can get here right on the border with Argentina.  In order for us to get there when the camp started on Thursday morning we had to leave here on our early morning (5 am) bus to begin our journey.  This blog post is just about the traveling down to the camp itself and I will just be showing the pictures of our journey and explaining as we went. 

We left our community a little after 5 am and traveled into Caaguazu where we caught another bus to Villarrica.  In Villarrica we had a couple of hours until our next bus so we went around and explored the town.  I had been here before when I had my PCV visit my third week in country so I knew my way around a little bit. 

Our first stop was a park in Villarrica was visiting Parque Manuel Ortiz Guerrero which is just a few blocks from the bus station and below you can see some pictures of the park itself.  Also we saw some carpinchos which are a type of animal that lives in both the water and on land.  The last time I was here I wasn’t able to see them but we were able to get up close to them and get some great pictures.  They are very interesting animals and were not afraid of us at all.

 

 

 

 

 

This is a picture of a huge cathedral that we saw in town.

 

This is the municipality building in Villarica.

 

Next we visited the Plaza de los Heroes which tells the story of the battles of the Chaco war and these seven pillars (which you can see in the picture) represents the seven moves of the city to where it has finally settled down here.

This is just a picture of Romina with one of the statues in the park.

 

 

This is a picture of us with our matching hats (in case you didn’t notice) on our long bus ride.

After we had our nice tour of the city (some of which was in a horse cart which Villarrica is known for) we met up with one of my friends who lives close to Villarrica so we got lunch and the boarded our bus to go to Paraguari.  Once we arrived there we had another couple hour wait so we just sat around at a taxi stand talking to locals and eating some wonderful chipa.  Our bus finally came at 4:30 and we got on the bus for our wonderful 4 hour journey down to Ayolas.  We finally arrived at our destination around 8:30 in the evening so we had a long but wonderful day of traveling. 

On Thursday morning we got up and went and visited a wonderful museum that was built in conjunction with the Yacyreta dam.  The museum has archaeological objects, minerals, and examples of the native fauna.  They also had a short video that told some of the history of the dam and area around.  After our short tour we finally met everyone there at the museum and were bussed out to Paraguay Verde which my next blog post will cover. 

First Day of School

Well on the 24^th of February was our first day of school here in Yukyry Central.  I have a very small school that has from first to ninth grade.  After ninth grade the kids have to go to a neighboring community to attend what they call coleigo (which is just our version of high school).  Our school day is split into morning and then afternoon classes with the majority of the classes occurring in the morning with just three grades going in the afternoon.  The first day of school I went with my niece who started school for the first time this year and one of the neighbor girls and Junior, my two year old nephew felt left out so we let him walk to school with us but wasn’t happy when he had to go home (hopefully he will feel the same way in a few years when its actually his turn!)  So the first day of school I just observed in different classes with different teachers to just see how different people run their classrooms and to get to know some of the children.  Over the next few weeks I will be interviewing different teachers and asking how I can help them and figure out the topics that I will be teaching in each classroom this year.  Also we will be starting to work on our school garden soon once it cools down a little bit more.  Below you should be able to see some pictures of the last few weeks.  Enjoy!

 

This is one of our two puppies named Rocky that loves to lay on my reusable shopping bag and loves to “guard” all of my new stuff for my house. 

 

The sunsets the past few weeks have just been beautiful with many storm systems moving around the area it is so cool to sit outside and watch the extreme electrical storms that we have here from a distance.

 

This is my nephew Junior who always has a huge smile on his face and is always running around barefoot and extremely dirty but always laughing. 

 

This is one of the two kittens that we have that for some reason loves to lay on my bed and to lay on my clean clothes.

 

This is a picture of the two girls and Junior walking to school on the first day.  Notice the cute uniforms and long socks!

 

A picture of all of us on the first day of school.  I also am wearing my new owl earrings!

 

 

A picture of Rosio in the morning before she heads to school.  She is always hanging out in the hammock with her two kittens (then they escape to my room and lay on my stuff).

Heart Healthy Food in Paraguay- Sopa Paraguya

Yesterday and today I have been in Caaguazú with my host family celebrating my host mother’s sister’s (so I guess like my aunt’s) 70^th birthday.  We came into town yesterday and cooked up a storm all day getting ready for the party.  The pictures below take you through how to make Sopa Paraguya which normally sopa in Spanish is a soup but here is a sort of corn bread.  This is not the first time that I have helped make sopa here but this is the largest scale that I have helped make it at.  Enjoy the pictures and recipe.

Step 1: Get a lot of pig fat like 2 kg and add it to a laundry wash bin, and mix very well.

Step 2: Add 2 dozen eggs.

 



 

Step 3: Add one slab of 2 kg of cheese, but make sure you have two more to add later!  This is the cheese that I help my family make every day and usually we are able to produce 2-3 kg per day so we have been saving up for this.

 

Step 4: Add 6 kg of corn that has been dried, boiled, cooled, and then ground into flour. This is corn that we had picked and then dried, and then taken off the cob.

 

Step 5: Add 4 liters of a liquid.  I’m not sure what the English name for it is but it is the milk substance that is left over in the container when we make the cheese that we usually feed to the pigs but saved this week.  Also later on she said we needed more liquid so we added about one more liter of fresh milk and ANOTHER liter of vegetable oil (in case we didn’t have enough with all the pig fat!)

 

 

Step 6: Stir like crazy, my mom said this is what makes it the best sopa is to stir a lot and she says it’s a good arm work out.

Step 7: Add about a cup of salt, my mom doesn’t use measuring cups or anything just keeps adding things, tests it and then says what it needs more of.

 

 

 

Step 8: The other 4 kg of cheese left from step 3.

 

 

Stir for about ten minutes, taste and then get your pans ready to go.  Every time we make sopa we have to visit a banana plant and cut off the leaves and put them in the pan to keep the sopa from sticking to the side.  You then pour the batter into the pan and then cut the banana leaves down because you don’t want them to burn too much in the outdoor oven. 

 

We had six large pans of sopa by the time we were done.  We had to walk it all over to the neighbor’s house because they don’t have an outdoor oven here. 

 

So after an hour getting that prepped (which we started before we started making the sopa, we had to get rid of all the hot coals and then put in the pans in.  We covered both entrances and let them cook for about 20-30 minutes and then pulled them out.   

 

 

The finished product!  I have no idea how many calories one piece of this has but with 2 kg pig fat + 1 L vegetable oil+ 6 kg cheese and everything else we probably don’t want to know.

Also before we left home in Yukyry Central we went on a little killing streak with our farm animals and here when someone has a birthday you give them gifts just like the states.  Here though you give people dead animals so we came with a small pig and chickens.  The meat my mom had worked on in the morning and just let sit in the salt and lemon juice all day.  After the sopa was done we restarted a fire in the oven and let that go for about an hour while we took the sopa out, cut it up, and then put meat in the pans.  So by the time it was all said and done we had one small pig, and about 9 chickens that went into the stove.  It doesn’t take meat very long to cook in the oven because it is so hot and cooking from all sides but it turns out wonderful. 

 

 

This is a picture of a very upset mother chicken because it was after dark when we were trying to cook the meat and she was trying to put her chicks to sleep but we kept interrupting them because she put them right next to the stove and we had to keep disturbing them to go back and forth but I was just amazed by how many chicks (9!) she could fit under her wing and around her.

 

 

 

This is a picture of my mom on the left followed by her sister and then me.  Also Paraguayans don’t smile very much but I love the picture because my mom isn’t smiling at all, the sister is a little bit, and then I have a huge smile on my face. 

We also had a wonderful mariachi band show up for a performance.

Overall it was a wonderful day full of working hard cooking and getting ready for the big party but all of the food turned out wonderful and everyone had a good time.

Heat Wave in February!

Well the last few weeks have been very tranquillo here in my community.  Mainly due to the fact that it is too hot and no one wants to actually do anything.  Every day so far this month has been over 100 degrees!  My schedule pretty much just involves getting up early and going for about an hour walk in my community and just saying hello to everyone, coming back and sitting under the shade tree for the rest of the day with my host family.  I have also been spending some time on Google Earth looking at my community and how it has changed over the years, the last picture was taken in 2009 and even since then there have been a lot of changes.  I have also been working on getting my interviews ready so I can begin those over the next couple of weeks once I get PC to look over them and help me with my language.

I have an interview written up for the teachers at my school so I can see who is interested in working with me and what types of things they might be interested in me helping with.  My big project for this school year is going to be getting the school garden cleaned up and running again.  I also have another questionnaire that I will be going over with all of the students in my school to get to know them as well as to just get a baseline about what they might already know about the environment/conservation so then I can give them the same survey at the end of the year with the hopes that they learned something!  The last interview that I have been working on is for every house in my community which is called our community needs assessment to see what projects people are interested in and what environmental problems they see with their community and what they would like help with.  School will be starting for us around the 24^th of this month if everything goes as planned and I am anticipating working in the school 2-3 days per week.  Also there is just one school in my community for everyone and have different classes in the morning and afternoon.  So if any of you teachers have any tips out there for teaching in a school let me know because not only have I never taught in a school before I will now be teaching in a different language, which I am a little bit nervous about.

The other excitement that I have had a couple of weeks ago right after my site presentation involved a wonderful little insect larva that decided to call the ball of my left foot home.  I am not all that familiar with all of the wonderful insects and such down here yet so for a few days it just looked like a blister so I was treating it as such.  Finally though I asked my host mom about it because it just didn’t look right and it began to hurt pretty bad.  She doesn’t have the best eye site for that sort of small object so she called her son over and he started freaking out about it telling me that it is pique (a sort of flea) that lays eggs in your foot and that usually they never get this big because they all know what to look for (small black dot) and they usually remove it before it gets too big.  I had to remind him that I am not familiar with such things and no one had ever told me about it.  He was too freaked out to try and remove it so we got the other older man that lives with us to take it out for me.  Fortunately after about ten minutes digging in my foot he was able to get it out but he used his knife that he carries with him every day to do everything with but he assured me he had cleaned it that day.  I was just amazed at the size of the flea larva and disgusted at the same time that it came out of my foot.  I took some pictures of it once it was out so you can see those below.  So now that I know what I am looking for I spend time every afternoon looking at my feet and getting rid of them before they burrow into my foot because I would prefer to not have to dig any more out.

Since we are in the middle of the summer right now we have had some beautiful flowers in bloom, which you can see below.  I have also begun to see many different flocks of birds that are on their migration including many different parrots.  Other than that it has just been very dry here and we have only really had one rain event the past few weeks where we had a strong storm come up and dropped a lot of rain very fast and then was gone again.  I have been enjoying everyone’s pictures of the snow and ice that you all have been getting at home.  I hope that you all have a wonderful week and happy valentine’s day! 

The wonderful larva I got out of my foot.



Some pictures of a wetland/grassland just outside of my community.

I think we might have a problem with erosion in my community.

A mother bird guarding her nest.

What all of the roads in my community look like most of the time about 6 in or so of very sandy soil, if I close my eyes and walk it feels like I'm on a beach just minus the cool breeze and water.

Site Presentation

Last week on the 22^nd I had my site presentation.  This involved my bosses coming to my site from Asuncion to explain to my community what PC is, what my role as a volunteer is, as well as talked about what they should expect of me, as well as what is expected of them. My boss did a great job just explaining to them that Paraguay is a completely different culture than I come from in the US and to be patient with me with language but at the same time to treat me as they would any member of the community.  It was a great hour and a half presentation with many members of my community and I had twenty five different community members showed up which I was very pleased with.  I visited and hand delivered about 50 invitations to every house in my community but I was extremely pleased with my turnout! 

Everyone was very interested in learning more about me, as well as PC, and many are very excited about the next two years.  Many people are just so shocked that I am going to be here for two years and they don’t understand how I can leave my family and friends in the US to come here.   I explained that it is very hard but that my community here is my new group of friends and I still do have everyone back home supporting me and that I do talk to my family about once a week.  Also I was very lucky and had two current PCV’s also speak at my site presentation and just talked about the projects they have worked on.  I served juice and cookies/ candy when the site presentation was done and everyone LOVED that, so I told them that at all of my events I will have some sort of snack, so hopefully I can incise them to come to my events with food!

Once the presentation was over we went to my old host family’s home for a wonderful lunch and then PC looked at my two different housing options in my community.  Unfortunately they didn’t approve the house that I really wanted but I understand their reasoning mostly because since I am the first volunteer in the community and a female safety and security is their number one concern, which is should be.  The house I really liked was great but unfortunately the closest neighbor was across a corn field and wasn’t visible from my house.  So the house that I did get approved is right next to my first host families house and is a beautiful small but nice house.  It is also a pink house which I am just trying to forget about, I don’t think they will let me paint it though so I guess I will just get used to it.  So over the next week or so my bosses will be working out the fine details (rent costs, responsibilities, etc.) so when I find out more I can let you all know.  It sounds like I will be trying to move in the first part of March so I will be sure to take some pictures as soon as I can. 

The new host family that I am staying with through Feb. 10^th has been so amazing; I for sure prefer a 6 year old girl and 2 year old boy any day over 3 tween females!  They have brought a lot of laughter to my life and I am learning that it doesn’t matter that I don’t speak the language the best because they don’t either but we can still have a wonderful time playing together.  So I have included some of the pictures I took of them so far.  This weekend I also attended a 6 year olds birthday party so I have some pictures of that below. 

I have now been in Paraguay for 4 months now and honestly the time has flown by.  I am having a wonderful time down here and it just seems to be getting better and better as I get to know my community more and feel more comfortable with my language skills.  Over the next couple of weeks I will be finishing up and starting to conduct my community needs assessment which is just a long series of questions that I have written up to see what projects and information my community is interested in.   

This is one of my two bosses explaining the technical aspect of things.

This is my wonderful boss Eli who is Paraguayan herself explaining more about PC and cultural differences.

Above is a picture of Nari who is also an environmental conservation and education volunteer in Caaguzau (the largest closest city to me) sharing her experiences.  She has been here one year already and will be leaving this December.  Below is Ted who is currently the closest volunteer to me about 5 km away but he has been here 2+ years and is actually leaving in late February.

This is the pet parrot at my new house who loves to eat little candies every afternoon.

One of the two adorable kittens that always amazes me that they are comfortable enough to sleep like that. 

The two year old little boy named Junior drinking terere.  He is just always full of energy and can always bring a smile to my face.

This is a normal afternoon for us.  Nika is my host mom and the two children are her grandchildren. 

This is the six year old girl Rosie with one of her two kittens who are her favorite activity and best friends.  She has such an imagination and is constantly talking to the kittens and other animals like they are her best friends.  Also she grew up in Argentina so she speaks very good Spanish so I can easily communicate with her since the others speak Guarani.   

 

Below and above is some pictures of the birthday party.  As normal with PY culture the top pictures is with the boys at the party and below the separate pictures with the girls.  Also the last picture is the normal food for a birthday party which is two hot dogs with mayo on top and soda.  I just explained to my host family that I don't even eat hot dogs in the US and I don't here either, luckily there are always hungry dogs around to take care of them for me!