Hello once again from the Freedom of the South, Libertad del Sur. Today marks a moment of supposed personal success, the presentation and meeting portion of this project is done. It’s kind of a bittersweet ending to this story of rural economic/environmental development work. I’m reminded of what I was told by the previous volunteer in my site when I first visited this community, ‘you offer a hand, they’re taking your whole arm’. I write this mainly for my friends and family who may be curious about what I’m doing, (easier than emails) but obviously it’s open to whomever’s interested. Of course, the views expressed are my own, and don’t necessarily represent those of any other individuals or organizations mentioned here. But this is a morning when I can’t help but reflect on the value of what I and others try to do here.

A big part of what I’ve been doing here started with the idea of PRO COSARA, ‘lets start small independent viveros in this community and give native trees to everyone.’ This is just one of the projects of PRO COSARA. If you haven’t looked them up yet from my mentioning of them in other blogs you can at procosara.org. You can even donate there if you’d like to, they do a lot of great work in the surrounding communities that focuses on preserving the San Rafael Reserve, one of the last remnants of the otherwise 90% deforested (in Paraguay) Atlantic interior forest (Bosque Atlantico Alto Parana – BAAPA).

The viveros received materials necessary to produce professional quality trees and nearly all produced more profitable native yerba mate seedlings. Through distributing the free native trees, I received a lot of requests for yerba mate last year. Yerba mate is a plant that is consumed as tea (when hot it’s called maté, cold they call it terere). Yerba mate is a significant part of the culture in this country/region, and is pretty profitable for small farmers due to fewer required inputs financially and labor wise. So I started looking for funds to buy yerba mate from these viveros and give it to the rest of the community of poor rural campesinos to promote agroforestry systems. Thanks to Fondos de Conservacion de Bosques Tropicales Paraguay, who donated the necessary funds for the project organized between PRO COSARA and the Peace Corps, with a lot of technical help from individuals and organizations such as the Cooperativa de Las Colonias Unidas, WWF, Todo Pulmon, PAS/PY, and SEAM.

With all of their help, the project provided 3 trainings of 2 hours each talking about the importance of reforestation here, the problems related to local water supplies and the overall risk to the Guarani Aquifer, as well as topics such as sustainable agriculture, agroforestry, viveros, and yerba mate production. Attendance reached up to 72 individuals from the community in the trainings at the highest, and 47 as the lowest turnout due to light rain in the morning of the first training. A final meeting was held with representatives of WWF, Fondos de Conservacion de Bosques Tropicales, Peace Corps, Guyra Paraguay, Pajarito (local yerba mate company), Productores Ambientales, the Municipal office of Alto Vera, and even a reporter from the Ultima Hora. Attendance waned during this final reunion during a chilly morning to 37 individuals, including some of the official representatives.

To this point, 32,000 yerba mate plants have been distributed that were produced locally from the viveristas in my community worth 25,000,000 Gs. ($6,500 U.S.). We’re bringing another 24,000 plants in later this week to total 56,000 plants total with a minimum 6,000 native tree seedlings to come in the following weeks.

Success? Who knows, depends how you measure it. This has been a pretty boring blog to this point, very dry and informational I realize. I feel the need to lay the groundwork for the other side of it. There’s lots of questions about this kind of work in a situation like this. Is it valued by the community to ‘regalar’ or gift plants like this? Does it encourage a ‘hand out culture’? Were the required meetings and trainings heard, or was attendance just a crappy way to spend their Saturday but a means to receiving something of value for free? Will the message be heard that there is strength in numbers as a community united in trying to develop a market for a more sustainable crop? Or will the focus be on the variable quality of the plants provided, where some received very hardy seedlings and others received some that were less so?

A high hope personally from this was community attendance at the final meeting with so many representatives of important organizations present who have been behind the scenes trying to promote and fund development work in the community for the past several years. An underlying theme of all the meetings was thinking forward to what is next, the final conversation was to be with the community and these organizations for what else can be done in the coming years. The fact that there were only 31 members of the community who showed, and only 20 who stayed through the whole meeting makes me question the value.

Perhaps it stems from coming from a culture where instant gratification is more common in work. You have a task, you accomplish it and results are usually seen pretty quickly. These plants will hopefully be in the ground soon and that is great. The fact that so many people at least showed up throughout the trainings was surprising to me, and I am very pleased with that. It will be 4 years until the first worthwhile harvests, and I hope that they are cared for and maintained well until then as was taught by the ingeñeros from the cooperativa. I hope that people will start thinking more in terms of the value of preserving the environment and the importance of biodiversity. But that is a tough one to measure. I have to take the continued presence of the 20 individuals as a positive sign, as there are at least 20 people who really seemed to appreciate it all and take something away from it. I hope that they appreciate the presence of those individuals who came from very far away in Asuncion to attend this two hour meeting on a Saturday in this very rural community.

There’s always the choice of listening to the loudest voices, in my case those who will publicly denounce your project because their relative received small plants while someone else picked up their own plants of the highest quality, or you could let it go as a minority view of the loud individual. Yes, she said that the project discriminated against other campesinos and we should have made sure that everyone received equal sizes and vigor of plants. She hasn’t even received hers yet, and she is commonly denouncing certain individuals in the community – one of whom picked up his own plants in the project. Again, does this sound like someone who appreciates the overall messages and that they appreciate the help that they are receiving? So many questions… I suppose the lesson is you gotta at least try, it may not go perfectly, you may sound like an ass in a foreign language, but we do what we can and accept that not every plant is going to take root, but celebrate those that do. It’s tough being your own toughest critic sometimes, although that lady is a pretty fierce competitor for the toughest critic title

In other news, the rats are getting bigger these days in the shack. The past three nights my piles of rat poison have disappeared overnight and replaced the next morning. Hoping I find them in obvious places in the coming days and not hiding/dying in a corner somewhere or in my dresser. I killed my fifth one the other day with stick, though I have to admit this one seemed a bit slow due to the rat poison.

The cold is setting in and its getting down to the upper 40’s at night. The public running water project is coming along and the trench in front of my house is dug and the pipe is down. Now they just have to finish digging the remaining 60 some odd houses over 4 km or so. Wishing my well wasn’t dry cuz it’s gonna be a while before that water’s a runnin.

Vacation plans are in the works. Looking forward to some South American travels in December and daydreams are shifting from viveros to hiking the Andes and wandering aimlessly for a while. 6 months to go, probably about 3 till I mentally check out.

This has been a long update, but also an end to a fairly significant portion of my experience over the past year. Lots of reflection and such going on this morning…

I hope you’re all well and happy and enjoying your Sunday
Cheers!