Hello Once again from the south side of things (at least as it likely is relative to the majority of those who may find themselves reading this). It’s been quite a while, not sure where I should begin. Since the last post I’ve gone on a good vacation to the Iguazu Falls in the triangle area between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (Though Paraguay doesn’t really have much for a view…). Was a great time and a good trip for Leah’s birthday! I’ve got lots and lots of pictures of falls and rainbows. Good times good times, but it all seems so long ago… All the way back in late May!


Since the vacation I’ve spent a fair amount of time back at site working on gardens and viveros with some neighbors and a fair amount of time in the school garden making a lot more raised beds in preparation for a lot of transplanting that is going to take place once the lettuce and lots of other veggies are big enough. We’ve got a lot of variety coming up and I’m planning for the summer plantings later this month. We’re going to be doing a lot of tomatoes, peppers and other warm weather veggies. I wasn’t so sure about how limiting the winter would be here, given that we got here when it was 100 degrees every day for soooo long, how could it possibly get too cold to grow tomatoes??? My first attempt in my own garden was less than successful – though that may have been due to insufficient manure in a formerly super-compacted trash pile that is my backyard. By this time next year though, that areas going to be full of good stuff!

In other news, we celebrated the ‘dia de arbol’ on June 18th down here by planting about 50+ trees around the school grounds. The previous volunteer planted about 250 of them around the school, so ours were more accent points around part of the soccer field, trash hole, and in front of the bathrooms. It was a lot of work digging all the holes and prepping them with some abono, but it was worth it once it finally came to planting time! Next on the work list of events is my still waiting for the delivery of the 9000 trees, hoping for a delivery by the end of July… In the meantime, the vivero guys that I work with will be filling hundreds of thousands of poly bags to prepare for transplanting the yerba mate (ka’a) seedlings that they started in March. Transplant time will be in early August, and most of them have at least 20,000 seedlings expected. It’s a fairly long, laborious process of filling each poly bag with soil and lining them up in the vivero beds. One by one, one handful of soil at a time in a small 1/4 (more or less) liter poly bag. My hands (and consequently everything else I own) are destined to be stained red from the soil for next few weeks!

What else… The big news in Paraguay has been futbol. For those who don’t follow it, Paraguay had a fairly decent showing in the World Cup this year and actually made it pretty far. I got to watch the first game in Encarnacion from a little bar on the side of the road with a small 14″ tv and a crowd of about 15 to 20 people. Traffic nearly died on the streets in the middle of the afternoon on a Monday. School teachers were a bit upset that they still had to have class, but that didn’t seem to stop them from watching the game. We sat about 3 blocks from a school and we heard the kids screaming every time Paraguay had a shot, or any good play. When the scored their only goal in the first game we heard waves of cheering floating across the city like the wave of roosters crowing in the morning in my site. It was a lot of fun and couldn’t help but feel fortunate for being here at this time. I also watched a few games in my site with different families in my community, also a lot of fun and pretty cool to get so many invites from my neighbors and people I still don’t know so well to come over to watch the game on their TV. One of my contacts actually bought a TV just so that they could watch the world cup (doesn’t sound like that big of a deal I realize, but it was a big deal for this friend to do so!). Unfortunately, however, the end has come to Paraguay’s championship dreams. I was in Asuncion this weekend to watch the game on Saturday, as were a lot of other volunteers here to celebrate the 4th of July holiday at the embassy. The city was all dressed in red and white jerseys, and the energy was unbelievable! Uruguay had won on Friday night so there was a lot of celebrating then, then Argentina lost on Saturday morning so there was a lot more celebrating (there seems to be a bit of a rivalry and animosity with Argentina here). Then the big game. Traffic was non existent in the city, only people on foot and crowded into bars and the downtown plaza where they had the game on a jumbotron setup. I chose the bar scene, just in case it got crazy as it did earlier in the week when they won against Japan. The game was tight, and not the blow out that people were afraid of. The tension built all through the game and you could feel the collective crush when Spain got their only goal towards the end of the game… Time ran out and there was a moment of silence and realization that it was over until the people at our bar and all the areas around us started cheering anyway. Paraguay doesn’t get to have a lot of reasons to celebrate national pride on a global stage, and it was obvious that the country was pretty pleased to have made it this far. Though it would’ve been so much fun to see the town explode after a win, it was still really cool to see the whole build up and see the pride that was still there even through a loss.

In other news, we had our in service training this past week. This was the 6 month in site mark and so it was time to bring one of our contacts from our communities to the training to learn about agroforestry, gardening, worm farming, community building, organic agriculture, natural (safe) pesticides etc. it was a pretty good training and I’m excited to get back to my site to start adding a worm farming section in the school garden, redoing our compost pile, and building some almacigoes and a shade structure in the corner to at least show what the ideal way to garden is with limited supplies. There are a number of families without gardens, and those that do have them could really benefit from some of these types of changes, but just aren’t aware of them. So I’m hoping that the school will be an ideal demonstration area since most of the community events happen there (meetings and trainings and such). My contact and I are also going to be doing the same things in our home gardens to help with demonstration and practice.

Yes indeed, nearly nine months have passed sine the adventure started in Miami. It seems now to have long ago stopped being a vacation, and more of just the day to day reality. It’s the moments like the paraguayan futbol game, a vacation to the falls, long late afternoon walks where you don’t make it to the destination before the sunset and you’re left to step carefully under the very dark starry sky on the awkwardly riveted dirt roads that make me remember the adventure feel of my time here. Its a strange fun reality! Hope this finds you all happy and smilin! Til next time