My oh my it has indeed been some time since the last update… I suppose I’ll take advantage of yet another rainy day to finally say hey. I wish I could say it’s been due to a lack of free time, but really I just haven’t gotten around to it… Things are going well here, the adventure continues and the rain keeps on a comin’! It has been a VERY rainy summer here in rural Southeastern Paraguay, which has been kinda nice in that I’ve had water in my well since early December and it’s not been too incredibly sweaty. This has, of course, increased the challenges of transportation and otherwise locomotion, however.

Not to be dissuaded, I’ve kept on finding things to do however. Since the last update here I’ve gotten to take a vacation to Uruguay over Christmas and New Years, played a small show with other volunteers and even a solo spot on the radio in Asuncion in December, ran a 10k trail race in a respectable time, saw a cow insemination process first hand rather randomly while making my way through Uruguay (what a Christmas day miracle!), got me a banjo, and walked miles and miles in the muddy red rural roads of my campo town appreciating the squishiness between my toes.

Currently, the well is dry again (so much rain, but the walls appear to have fallen a bit again…), but that’s not getting me down since I’ve got a lot of work happening that is a very pleasant distraction. Thanks to all of you who donated to the school garden project that was completed through the Peace Corps Partnerships program. Over the last few weeks I worked with several of the local parents committee to construct the media sombra/shading and get some of the raised beds constructed. This last weekend I even held my first large scale training in the community at the garden and had 88 families come and participate!!! It didn’t hurt that an NGO (Guyra Paraguay) assisted with the distribution of free vegetable seeds to all participants – universal truth: Free stuff brings people. The training was great though, I spoke a lot in Guarani and gave a demonstration on how to prepare a raised bed, a seed box, seed placement/distance/depth, transplants, and importance of fertilizer/cow poop. The funny part was that it was primarily the women who came to the training and the men who did come mainly sat off to the side smokin their smokes and chatting amongst themselves while the women lined up along the side of the garden to watch the demonstration portion of the training… very similar to my Nepal training experiences, and a good reminder of who these types of activities should be geared towards. They all seemed pretty interested in follow up cooking training events once the veggies are grown – as mentioned here before meat with rice/pasta and mandioca are the staples of the diet and veggies are largely considered secondarily, if at all, thus not a lot of awareness of the varieties of preparation out there. (pictures of all this are to come at a later time with higher bandwidth availability for uploads)

I’m also working on a world map project with the school and have completed the outline and initial painting, waiting for the school year to start to work with the sixth grade class on a geography project and final painting of individual countries. The other teachers seem a bit jealous and want a map of Paraguay, and a map of South America for the 1st/2nd and 3rd/4th grades respectively. Time will tell, as will the availability of the paint…

In other news, the big project with the yerba mate is still being considered for funding, fingers are crossed that we’ll be able to distribute upwards of 50,000 plants and 10,000 native trees for agroforestry systems in May, along with numerous reunions/meetings/trainings leading up to the final distribution – fingers crossed as this would be my thesis. The backup plan for the thesis is in the works now, however, as I’m planning another training for March 5th on how to start small viveros to produce yerba mate seedlings for individual families. With a small corner of the gardens that should be in construction right now (based on the already received seeds) they could produce at least 1,000 or so yerba mate seedlings for planting in their fields the following year. Sounds reasonable enough, just hoping logic doesn’t fail me yet again in Paraguay…

Alright, enough project ramblings… Outside of this I’ve been playing lot’s of guitar, banjo, reading, chasing chickens out of my house (not to mention out of my garden, off my laundry board, off my well cover, and everywhere else they like to go where I don’t want them), machete mowing my lawn weekly due to the regular rains and quick growth, staring, and as always lots of cooking and baking.

Theres lots of random anecdotes I could tell such as seeing a baby being ‘stored’ temporarily at the bus terminal in the back of a yerba mate shack along with all the bags of travelers, or pushing a somewhat crazy ministers Volkswagen uphill for an hour in the peanut buttery/muddy roads to no avail while having to step over snakes and rocks while barefoot no less… But these stories will have to wait for another entry as this entry has already rambled on long enough.

Oima, dale, dale, listo, listo, ciao, ciao, ok (as one of my contacts says regularly before hanging up his phone). Till next time, I hope all is well in your part of the world ;)

ps. Just looked at the stats part of this and still my most frequently viewed post is the one titled ‘streapers and streaptease’ from well over a year ago… what does that tell you about the internet searches, I’m sure they were rather disappointed after reading it