Hola everyone,

 So this is my second attempt at writing this blog post, the first one got translated to Spanish on this computer and I couldn´t get it back! {Insert your favorite spanish curse word here}

 All is well in the Campo Paraguay, its been a while since I´ve updated this thing, so not really sure where to catch up. Its crazy to realize that I´ve been in my site now for three months, time is flying! So what have I been doing???

 This week included my official site presentation. My boss from the Peace Corps came to my site and spoke about the Peace Corps, what a volunteer can and can not do, as well as who I am. I invited quite a few people, but this is the soy harvest time so it was tough for a lot of farmers to get to the meeting at 10 am when i held it. But my primary contacts in the community showed up as well as the professors and directora in the school. It went well and seems like everyone is pretty happy to have us here .

 What else have I been working on. This is tough to explain since my job description includes hanging out with people, drinking tea, building viveros, planting trees, working on the school garden, establishing my own residence and fumbling through two foreign languages… Where does my day actually start and stop?

This is a picture of a vivero that is owned by one of my contacts. We´ve been planting a lot of hte yerba mate, which is a tea that is drunk hot in the morning as ´mate´and cold in the afternoon as ´terere´. This is one of the most common products in Paraguay, and a staple, if not absolute necessity in the country. This was expanded by about four times the size since I got here. He is looking to double it from here so he can have as much as 50,000 tree capacity! I´m just hoping that it is over 2 meters tall in the new half, at this point, I have to duck while walking around in here!

In this picture are two plots that have about 30,000 potential seedlings of kaá-yerba mate. The seeds were laid and covered with the straw to hold the moisture. The media sombra-shading is necessary to protect from the hot Paraguayan sun. These were planted a few weeks ago and will take a few more weeks to emerge. This is pretty similar to the other two viveros I´ve been working in and likely what the others will look like when they get established. Right now there are 4 others in the community who are looking to get in on the project that is funded by a local NGO. So far I´ve only had my camera in the town for a few days, so I haven´t gotten to take too many pics.

Heres my latrine from far away, made from used pieces of wood, so it´s a bit of a hodgepodge, but it stands on it´s own with no shaking and seemingly little risk of me falling through the floor!

The back of my shack with my laundry line. The new looking wooden box is my shower-bucket bath facility. At some point, after they dig my well deeper so I actually have my own water, I may get a pump so I can have water running into my house and maybe even a shower instead of a bucket and a pouring bottle! The cleared out patch of brown at the bottom of the picture is my soon to be garden, again waiting for the well and some fencing to protect from the neighbors many chickens that don´t respect invisible property lines, or idle threats of their safety…

And here is my kitchen and half of my living room. I bought a new oven and have made a couple of loaves of bread already. I made the two tables on either side of it. You´ll notice my blue and yellow hammock in the upper right corner, great for all my trees in the front yard!

And here is my bedroom and living room. I made the table and the chair thats behind the fan. Mosquito nets a necessity and the guitar is a good friend!

 And some of the carpentry skills on my not so cleaned up-organized dresser thing. It even locks and mostly keeps the mice out! All this took about two weeks or so, in between hanging out and drinking tea of course.

And heres the frontyard view. Its about 5 by 6 meters and only a few years old. There is a cement floor, which is kind of nice for the area, and a tile roof that mostly doesn´t leak! It backs up to a soy field and in the front yard there are a bunch of tung trees (ever heard of tung oil?). There are also some banana trees that I´m about 2 weeks from harvesting. There are also about 5 peach trees, one mora fruit tree, and a couple of other natives. Across the street is a huge soy field that is foreign owned, if you smell something funny in the air don´t breathe too deep cuz they´re probably spraying something again…

This coming week I am planning to build the tablons-seed beds with the kids at the school and hopefully plant the next week. We´re going to plant lettuce, tomatoes, onions, beets, turnips, and I´m putting in a few other things that I hope  to hold cooking classes for later on in the year such as brocoli and cauliflower. I´ve been working with a couple of women making soap and shampoo and such informally, and they´ve expressed interest in gardening projects to get more families to have gardens and want to try out the vegetables I´ve been talking about planting. They want to know how to cook a lot of them! The isolation of the area gives very little opportunity to exposure to different styles of cooking and foods in general… There are a lot of women especially who have never (or maybe only once a year) gone the 40 kilometers to paved roads. They´ve asked how we can form a women´s committee to maybe get some funding for projects like cooking, sewing, gardening, or other crafts production. This has been a great group to somehow manage to get involved with, it all just started with me mentioning I want to make shampoo with some ingredients I found in Encarnacion. Anyways, that rant started with the topic of the school garden, heres a picture of it with some of the orange trees that were planted by the previous volunteer. It looks a bit rough right now, I just finished cleaning all the 3 to 4 foot tall weeds that had taken over! This Sunday is more cleaning and building the seed beds for the first grade class that can´t quite operate the shovels so well as the big kids! Thats the bathroom-latrine in the background.

 Hmmm, what else? That´s about all I have the time-patience to write at the moment, and I´m out of pictures. And you´re probably thinking theres something better online you could be reading about now anyways, so… For now I wish you well and will update with more pictures when in Asuncion next week.

terrehoporaite (guarani for go with good tidings… more or less)