Ahapotama

Today's Post: I'm going shortly.

With one day left before I fly home and py'a mokoi (two stomachs; ambivalence), I contemplate the end of my twenty-seven months of Peace Corps service in Paraguay. My goal is to keep this blog up, make one or two more posts about my return to the States, and then delete the blog. So please savor the final entries of Jake in Paraguay and stay tuned for future literary adventures, including the publication of my humorous memoir, One Jew in Prettyview.

The last several weeks have been packed with milestones and despedidas. My follow-up volunteer's visit was, as previously noted, an important hallmark of the "beginning of the end." Taking her around to meet my friends and work partners, I felt a profound sense of satisfaction. The Peace Corps in Paraguay ideally places volunteers in their sites for six-year (three-volunteer) cycles. I was the first volunteer to complete a full service in Prettyview and shaped my work around the expectation that I would be "followed up." The Peace Corps rewarded and validated my efforts by fulfilling this expectation - all the more because they selected such a qualified, enthusiastic, and professional woman to replace me. Hearing her talk to my neighbors about future projects, watching her play with kids, and working collaboratively with her to plan her own new projects and the continuation of my own work provided the perfect conclusion to my service. It is a delight to see the Peace Corps working as it should, providing long-term support to communities that want to partner with Americans to develop in sustainable ways. I'm not a dad, yet, but I imagine that my feelings on passing the reins over to my follow-up were a lot like the feelings that parents have when they send their kids off to college. I was moved to acknowledge the foundation I left her, but also felt proud of and excited for her as she embarked on her service. I hope that she loves Prettyview as I have and surpasses me as a volunteer in every way!

Then came my first round of goodbyes: to families who live far from me, to people I know in the nearby town of San Juan Nepomuceno (where I buy vegetables and use internet), and to those who, for whatever reasons, I don't see regularly. I visited my host parents from training one more time and, more than ever before, saw how far I'd come from the green, Spanish-speaking aspirante they welcomed into their house in September 2009. Their trust and investment in me is something I can't ever pay back. It was, however, exciting to see the citrus trees we grafted together already sprouting from their new buds, thriving under the excellent care of my viverista dad. The Prettyview elementary school's kindergarten graduation was a good time to say goodbye to my profesor colleagues. I was the kindergarten class's godfather for the second year and enjoyed seeing some of my favorite kids embark on the journey to what will hopefully be a facultad education. These goodbyes taken care of, I did some last bits of grafting at the beginning of the month, and left Prettyview for the last time as a volunteer.

The next week, the last of my official service, was a busy one, full of travel and celebration. I spent a few days in Asunciòn, taking care of paperwork and other chores in and around the office. Then, I headed to my friend Heather´s site, a village near Tobati in the department of Cordillera. We spent the day eating a goodbye lunch (fresh bean guiso with chipa guasu, salad, and watermelon), drinking tererè, chatting with her host family, and napping. Then, after a tearful goodbye, we got a ride to Tobati. From there, we made a 19-km pilgrimage to Caacupè, leaving on the vìspera of the day of the Virgin of Caacupè (8 December) and arriving around midnight. We visited the cathedral and saw the Virgin´s elevated statue, and then slept for a few hours at the house of a Japanese friend of Heather´s (a former volunteer from the Japanese version of Peace Corps, JAICA). The pilgrimage was a special time for both of us. We´d both gone together two years ago to mark the beginning of our Peace Corps service and came together to walk one more time. Additionally, Heather´s best friend in site successfully beat a dangerous eye tumor this last year. She is still a bit weak and Heather and I replaced her and her husband on the pilgrimage, thanking the Virgin in their stead. It also meant a lot to me to be with Heather, one of my dearest friends, as she left her community for the last time.

From Caacupè, we made our way to our cohort´s despedida in the restort town of San Bernadino. Of the 42 volunteers who started together in 2009, 33 made it to the last months of service, and about 30 of us gathered together to socialize, swim, give mock awards and superlatives, and have a great dance party. Temporarily removed from the burden of saying goodbye, I have to say that I felt more relaxed than I had for weeks. The next day, the 9th, was our official swear-out date. We proceeded to the Peace Corps office and, after a brief ceremony and the surrendering of our cell phones, bank cards, and official IDs, ceased to be Peace Corps volunteers. I can´t say that I felt terribly different after swearing out. More than anything, it was strange to be without the cell phone that was such a fixture of my life as a volunteer. After a Peace Corps concert that night, many of the volunteers in my cohort took off to travel in South America or head home. The next morning, I went back to Prettyview to say my final goodbyes.

It was the right choice to go back for a weekend. I spent my time in Prettyview with my parents (Miguela and Gabriel) and my best friends (Andres, Gloria, Eme, Derlis, Aldo, and Natalicio) and said goodbyes to my neighbors and a few families who live close to me. On Sunday, my farmers´committee threw me a big despedida lunch with roasted chicken, sopa paraguaya, and lots of wine mixed with piña cola. Slightly tipsy, I managed a brief speech thanking them and a lot of gruff but emotional goodbyes with the 18 men who taught me most of what I know about farming, dirty jokes in Guaranì, and getting things done without being too pesado. I felt honored that they threw a going-away party for me and appreciated the chance to see them all one more time. Dinners with my favorite families followed and they made some of my favorite Paraguayan foods: beans, chipa, and salads. Sunday afternoon, Andres took me out on a moto ride to our municipality, General Morìnigo, for a beer in the plaza. Though I had already mounted a moto for the first time - not just in Paraguay, but in my life - the day before, this was a real ride. Speeding along Ruta 8 with the Yvyturuzu mountain range in the distance, I could understand why the Peace Corps rule banning motorcycle riding was the target of so much rancor among my fellow volunteers. I just didn´t know what I was missing! And for my last night in Prettyview, Brook, my follow-up, arrived to have dinner with Miguela, Gabriel, their son Hermes, and me. We had roasted duck, freshly slaughtered that afternoon and sopa. It was delicious and I even got Miguela to join me in drinking some beer - an indulgence to which she had long alluded but never succumbed. The next morning, yesterday, I handed over the keys of my house to Brook, brought her to her first host family, and, after a tearful goodbyes and tupanoi blessings from Miguela and Gabriel, I was off on Hermes´s moto with my duffle bag. I felt sad saying goodbye to Prettyview, but delighted to finish my last long-distance bus trip in Paraguay.

So this brings me to my last two days in Asunciòn. I leave tomorrow afternoon for the States and can´t wait to see my family in about 48 hours. I´ve enjoyed my time here and am trying to get as clean as I can in the hotel shower in preparation for Gringolandia standards. There have still been some opportunities to enjoy Paraguay before I leave: swimming in the Embassy pool with some of my buddies from the Environment sector, last bites of chipa and gulps of tererè, etc.

At the risk of repeating myself, I´ll try to sum up how I feel as I leave Paraguay and Peace Corps service. First of all, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer has been unequivocally positive, one of the greatest honors and joys of my life. Representing America and Americans in a positive light; helping deserving people to protect their environment, develop personally, and build better lives; experiencing another culture in a deep, long-term way; and serving both the American and Paraguayan populaces - how could I have better spent two years? Additionally, I have grown so much, personally, through my service. I became fluent in Guaraní and improved my Spanish, practiced as a teacher and applied ecologist, read 175 books (okay, I´m going to finish the 175th on the plane ride home), made friendships that will last a lifetime, and grew in empathy, fortitude, patience, and my ability to nurture and support others. I even ´´became a man´´ (according to Paraguayans, it happens on your 25th birthday)!

As I told my friends in Prettyview, I will return to Gringolandia an adoptive Paraguayan, a lover of Paraguayan culture, and un abogado for the people and the country who gave so freely to me during the last two years. My time in Paraguay convinced me that, though cultural differences exist, people are people. Just like there are good and bad, lazy and hard-working, smart and dull, introverted and extroverted, etc. Americans, there are Paraguayans who also fit these descriptions. This has been a liberating and stimulating confirmation for me, in that it has truly enabled me to embrace the belief that all people deserve and can achieve the best of the human existence. I´ll call this ´´Jake´s weak universalism.´´ Descriptively rather than perscriptively, I will claim that we can understand, cooperate with, and learn from each other, that the things that divide us are not insurmountable.

If I had, somewhat paradoxically, to describe the things I loved most about Paraguay, I would say that Paraguayans often go above and beyond in their hospitality, humility, and willingness to joke around. The Guaranì-Spanish bilinguilism is a fascinating, complex, and enriching facet of Paraguayan culture that also sets the Paraguayan people apart. And as a sometime luddite and romantic, I appreciate the occasional conservativism that refuses to become atavism of the Paraguayan people. Most of all, I will always remain grateful to the individuals, who number in the hundreds, who unquestionably opened their arms, homes, and minds to me as a foreign visitor and, later, an adopted countryman.

I will sign off for now, with my next entry coming from the United States. Thank you to all of my readers from home. Without the support of family and friends, my service would have been either miserable or impossible. Thank you also for taking an interest in Paraguay and Paraguayans and thus helping me to accomplish my work as a volunteer. Avy`aiteta pohechanvoko ñaneretame! (I will be delighted to see you in our country!) And to close, one more of my favorite ñe`enganguèra Paraguaya (Paraguayan adages):

''Jajotopata lata'ipe,'' he'i el burro cavajupe.
''See you later in the little can (of ground meat),'' said the donkey to the horse.

The Golden Chipa Awards

This communiqué will be one of the last to appear in this blog as Jake in Paraguay is soon to become Jake in Phoenix. Due to unfortunate laptop dysfunction, I have not been able to chronicle my last few months as well as I would have liked. However, through the valiant efforts of Peace Corps Paraguay’s technical guru, my computer is fixed and operating smoothly and I can once again take advantage of rainy weather to hole up in my house and type a post. But, a propos to the current thunderstorm, every cloud has a silver lining. The upside of all this was the linguistic treat of hearing a Paraguayan computer technician describe my hard drive as being “al punto de morir” with no irony intended.

So, onward with the last few entries in Jake in Paraguay, as my remaining three weeks in Paraguay come to a close.

*****

Though I hope to write at least a few more thought-provoking, intellectually challenging blog posts, I have decided to draw from a more jovial vein in my presentation of this evening’s main event: the Golden Chipa Awards. Given all the superlative categories (Most Surprisingly Hard-working, Most Likely to Teach His/Her Children Guaraní) that outgoing Peace Corps volunteers are asked to vote on, I decided to create my own Hall of Fame, tailored specifically to the realities of my two years of service in Paraguay. Thus, the Golden Chipa Awards. Winners will receive a gold-plated chipa and one of my custom campo foot massages (´´no hay pie demasiado sucio´´), redeemable in a variety of Phoenix and Seattle locations.

Best Chipa: A tie between Mama Miguela (Home-made Category), Chipa Gordo of Coronel Bogado (Bus Category), and Anonymous Fulana who sells Chipa on the corner of Pa´i Fariña and Humaita in San Juan Nepomuceno (Chipa So´o Category)
Yes, I have become something of a chipa connoisseur during my time in Paraguay. My first chipa was purchased on a Salto Cristal bus from Asunciòn to Ybycuì in October 2009 and eaten while, standing up with my neck curled into the overhead luggage rack, I experienced inappropriate touching with five different pelvises. The chipa saved my sanity and I have gone on to eat hundreds in its wake. At its best, chipa is warm, crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside, and complex in its salty-cheesy-doughy flavor. At its worst, it is a flaky rock that squeaks when it hits your molars and smells of rancid pig fat. Chipa comes in many varieties and can be obtained in many ways, but I´ve selected three chipas that really stand out for Golden Chipa awards. My Paraguayan mom, Miguela, made the best chipa casera I have ever eaten roughly two weeks ago. She was ´´feeling dizzy´´ and put an unusually amount of salt in it and, I believe, may have substituted extra ground corn to make up for a paucity of almidòn (mandioca starch). She has high blood pressure and thus replaced lard with margarine. The chipas that she produced were grainy, crusty, and wholesome, and didn´t leave me feeling nauseated after I ate four. Felicidades, mamà. Bus Chipa, a venerable category, was a close call between the powerhouses of the Barrero neighborhood of Eusebio Ayala and the underdogs at Chipa Gordo in Coronel Bogado, Itapùa. The Golden Chipa goes to Chipa Gordo for a lard- and cheese-filled morsel that is all the more appealing because it is sold by heterodox male chiperos. And finally, the Best Chipa So´o (chipa dough stuffed with spiced meat and hard-boiled eggs) category goes to some lady who sells it every blessed morning at the main intersection in San Juan Nepomuceno, Caazapà. After discovering her, I stopped making breakfast for myself on days I go into town. ¿Dos mil Guaranìes cada uno? No hay problema.

Most Sexually Inappropriate Dog: Shaggy
It was a tough race for the title of ´´Jagua Tie´ŷveva,´´ or Most Grosero Dog. Regalo, Miguela´s dog, put in a fine showing. A lifelong celibate incarcerated in his yard by my Paraguayan mom, Regalo becomes very frustrated when a nearby female dog goes into heat. He will sit for hours at the gate, staring longingly into the distance with an erection. He also has a rather bizarre, and perhaps not so innocent, love for licking baby cows. But ultimately, Regalo is just just too clean to win this title, which goes to Shaggy, my buddy Andrés´s dog. I´ve known Shaggy since, as a puppy, he would roll over, get a puppy erection, and urinate everywhere each time that I walked into their yard. His displays of ardor have only been augmented with time, much like the hideous cloud of flies and farts that accompany him everywhere. Shaggy is puerco, and he wins the Golden Chipa. My stepfather has capitalized on Shaggy´s newfound fame to partner with him in the development of a patent medicine for canine erectile incompetence, Shiagra. Shiagra does contribute to improved sexual function in human users, although the side effects of blurred vision, excessive thirst, and ´´soft brain´´ have militated against its widespread adoption.

Best TV Addiction: Glee
Though I managed to read over 170 books and actually get a little work done during my service, I have to admit that I did occasionally use my laptop to mindlessly binge on media passed on to me by other volunteers. It is widely agreed in the Peace Corps community that TV shows are the best way to self-medicate following bouts of elementary school education, all-day tererè marathons, and ´´two-hour´´ bus trips that end up taking eight hours. I mean, if your attention span is too frazzled for you to enjoy a book or some in-house yoga, can you really handle a full-length movie? No, but you can finish Season 2 of this or that program, which you started yesterday after a cow nearly ended your life as a reproductively capable man. Though I enjoyed such delicacies as 30 Rock, Arrested Development, The Office, and True Blood, I award the Golden Chipa for best TV addiction to Glee. I had seen one episode of the high school musical melodrama when I arrived in Paraguay and skeptically accepted a download of the first season. Addiction quickly ensued, and I am now considering the appropriateness of lip-synching a Journey number as I dramatically depart Prettyview next month on an oxcart.

Best Lazy Meal: Popcorn
Gone are the early days of homemade bread and salads. Now, when I cook for myself in Prettyview, as opposed to inviting myself over at my close friends´ houses, I usually eat one of the following meals, more or less independent of normal concerns such as ´´time of day´´ and ´´novelty´´: oatmeal, stir-fried cabbage, bullion broth with noodles and textured vegetable protein, a banana smoothie, or biscuits. I eat these things because they are some combination of tasty, artery-cleansing, full of fiber, composed of ingredients I can carry into Prettyview on my back, or especially warming or cooling, depending on the time of year. But the food that takes the Golden Chipa for Best Lazy Meal is popcorn, my dinner of choice roughly three nights a week. To make Jake´s Peace Corps Popcorn, but some nameless, composite vegetable oil in a pot, add raw, shelled peanuts and popcorn kernels, cover, and pop over medium heat. ´´Accidentally´´ burn the popcorn a little, then uncover, remove from heat, and drench with salt and hot sauce. Eat while watching Glee or reading Harper´s with an erudite little smile on your burning, greasy lips.

Best Green Manure: Pigeon Peas
Pigeon peas, or Kumanda yvyra`i win the Golden Chipa for Best Green Manure. Pigeon peas, which are eaten all over the world, grow on a small tree with a lifespan of up to five years. The plant´s Guaraní name translates to ´´Small Bean Tree´´ and the most obvious of its benefits is the tasty pea-like fruits that the legume produces. They can be eaten green, like peas, or dry, like beans. I planted about fifteen pigeon pea trees in my yard and enjoyed the year-round fruit and shade they produced. Pigeon peas also make excellent fodder for animals and, as legumes, fertilize the soil where they grow. They can provide firewood as they get older and serve as windbreaks and contour lines in fields prone to erosion. Bees love their flowers, which emit a spicy, earthy smell. Thank you, pigeon peas, for being the green manure that everyone can love.

Weirdest Site Visited: Alberdi, Ñeembucu
Jake in Paraguay passed Thanksgiving in Alberdi, the site of a fellow volunteer and winner of the Golden Chipa for Weirdest Site Visited. To date, I have visited well over twenty other volunteers in their homes and reached all but the five northernmost departments of Paraguay (three of which we are prohibited from entering due to terrorist activity). But Alberdi, a town of roughly 8,000 on the Río Paraguay, across from the city of Formosa, Argentina, definitely was the weirdest. As I made my way to Ñeembucu, a department of vast wetlands along the Paraguay tucked into the southwest corner of the country, I was shocked by how poor the dirt road leading to Alberdi from Asunciòn was. The four-hour trip from the capital took me to a prosperous town, completely surrounded by a castle-like dirt levee designed to keep out the river, with few connections to anywhere else in Paraguay. Though Argentines and pesos are everywhere, the town lacks a land connection to the departmental capital of Pilar and is cut off from Asunción when it rains. Really, Alberdi exists as a foil of Formosa, a place where Formosans can come to purchase smuggled Paraguayan goods and then take them back across the river, sometimes in canoes that bypass customs. A mirage in the marsh, Alberdi is unique, yet speaks a great deal to the problems of corruption that militate against development in Paraguay.

Nastiest Parasite: Human Botflies
Yes, there were the 17 chigoe fleas (pique) and the nameless, bacterial ´´foot thing´´ that caused many of my neighbors to cry ´´oñenguai nde py!´´ (your foot is decomposing!), but I must award the Golden Chipa for Nastiest Parasite to Ùra, or human botflies. I had three botflies simultaneously. The two in my shoulder bled constantly, appeared to be boils for almost a month, then each disgorged a white larvae with strange black hairs when I attempted to squeeze out what felt like a lot of pus. Most frustrating was my tendency to bleed all over my sheets at night. I was forced to wash all my bedclothes in the morning and my neighbors probably thought I was wetting the bed. The third botfly, in my arm, died and had to be surgically removed, an exciting moment that landed me in the slideshow used during medical training for new volunteers. Let´s have a round of applause for botflies!

Biggest Triumph: Public Spanking while Publicly Speaking
As much as we tend to focus on technical extension, Peace Corps service is really about building relationships. My supremacy in the social aspect of Peace Corps service really hit me (ha!) when, during a September technical talk on citrus grafting in the department of San Pedro, I was spanked by a member of my audience. Visiting a colleague, I had been asked to do a grafting demonstration for a rather salty women´s committee. The ladies were fond of my precise Guaraní and tendency to retaliate when they made fun of me in a good-natured way. Finally, when I forgot to sterilize my knife before stimulating a graft, one señora accused me of being a ´´backwards witch,´´ owing to the fact that my department, Caazapà, is known externally for witchcraft. When I responded to the woman, who was seated next to me, that she was the witch, she hauled back and spanked my tuchus in front of the whole group. The ensuing laughter sealed the deal on a great technical lesson. Some would consider it a challenge or setback, but I think of my spanking as a high point of service, a moment of acceptance and play within the world of rural Paraguay.

Biggest Failure: Mosquito Breeding Pits
I award myself the Golden Chipa for Biggest Failure. Little did I know that my improved trash management plan for our local secondary school would go so awry. After directing the seventh grade to dig three trash pits (one for plastic, one for metal, and one for glass), I was chagrined to find that the students and teachers still heaped everything together in a huge pile and burned it when the pile became unsightly. But I was mortified to be accused by the town nurse of creating mosquito-breeding pits and thus favoring a Dengue outbreak the school. Well, at least I now have a practical example of the idea of ´´unintended consequences.´´

Best Care Package Item from Home: The Stranger
Though I cherished the many letters, books, magazines, food gifts, and mementos that my friends and family sent from home, the gifts that I consistently enjoyed the most were copies of the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger that my former roommate Lenore sent. Always titillating and alluring, calling me back to the plentiful eccentricity, natural beauty, and sweaty Capitol Hill dancing of my favorite city, The Stranger made me nostalgic and contented at the same time. It was a relief to know that Seattle was waiting for me at home and fun to vicariously experience the town´s cultural life from afar.

Best Surprise from Home: Ellis´s Wedding
When I was in Asunciòn in May 2010, one of my two best friends, Ellis, told me that she was going on a second date with a guy she had recently met. When I contacted her again in August, she informed me that they were engaged to be married the next year and asked me to be her best man. I neither expected that I would visit the States during service nor that I would do so to be in the wedding of someone so close to me. Ellis surprised me, but in a great way. My trip home ended up being personally sustaining and practically efficient and gave me the opportunity to celebrate and share with Ellis and see much of my family. Ellis beats out Barak Obama´s Nobel Peace Prize, the English-language publishing of Haruki Murakami´s epic novel 1Q84 in English, and virtually everything Lady Gaga has done since September 2009 for this Golden Chipa.

Best Non-surprise from Home: Mom
I did enter Peace Corps with a few expectations, and one was that my mom would support me all the way. In this, I was no way disappointed. Critical acts of completely unsurprising but nevertheless deeply appreciated mothering included visiting twice, sending me regular packets of mail and news items, calling me every week, psychoanalyzing me on the phone when I was down, helping me submit paper components of my grad school applications, keeping a list of books and movies that I need to catch up on when I go home, and staying up to date enough with my daily life to ask questions like ´´Did Gloria get over her toothache?´´ and ´´Is that the same family that invited you to eat pig head last month?´´ without prompting. I award the Golden Chipa for Best Non-surprise from Home to my fantastic mom.

Favorite Recuerdo from Paraguay: Guaraní
I´m not big on souvenirs, but I will stuff my suitcase with a few recuerdos from Paraguay: a leather guampa that Chris gave me for my birthday, several kilos of yerba mate to fill it with during important post-service mate sessions, a wool blanket my friend Lauren´s mom wove for me, a Selecciòn Paraguaya soccer jersey, and some polka CDs. But the best thing I will take home from my service is a mastery of the Guaraní language. I´ll brag a little and report that, in my final language test this month, I scored a Superior, the highest of the ten language rankings used by Peace Corps, in Guaraní. I was told by the Peace Corps Paraguay librarian that nobody has reached this level for the last ten years, giving me the confidence I previously lacked to tell Paraguayans, ´´Añe´êkuaama Guaranìme´´ (I know how to speak Guaraní). Bizarrely, my language test results also suggested that I now speak Guaraní better than Spanish, in which my score, a nine out of ten, remained unchanged over the last two years. As I always tell Paraguayans, it has been an honor for me to learn Guaranì. Their language has been a gift Paraguayans have shared with me and its incredible richness will always stay with me. There´s not much more to say than the frequent comment ´´Guaraní heêve ñande rembepe´´ (Guaraní is sweeter on our lips). I gladly award the Golden Chipa (´´Chipa Omimbiva´´) to Guaraní as the Best Recuerdo from Paraguay,

Best Life-saver: Mosquito Net
This was another close call. The electric hot water kettle, though it duplicates the work of a wood fire or a gas stove, can´t be beat in terms of the swiftness and cost-efficiency with which it heats water for mate, food, or baths. And the cell phone, for all of the ways I could find to hate it, has been invaluable in helping me to keep in touch with my family and, through regular calls and texts with other volunteers, with my sanity. But the mosquito net carries the day when it comes to Best Life-saver. Taking the place of a fan, various toxic and foul-smelling mosquito repellents, and, in times of emotional stress, an ersatz womb, the mosquito net is the most guapo of home comforts. ´´Avy´aite che mosquiteropype´´ (I´m very happy inside my mosquito net).

Best Paraguayan Family: Mine!
One of the hardest elements of leaving Prettyview is going to be saying goodbye to the people I have considered family here: Miguela and Gabriel (my workaholic, over-protective, immensely loving parents), Andrès and Gloria and Eme (my best buddies and confidantes), Derlis (my trusted ally and Peace Corps contact), Aldo (my intellectual companion and fellow traveler in spicy food and philosophical discussion), and Natalicio (my role model as a father and husband and probably the person who would smuggle me out of Paraguay on his motorcycle in the case of anti-American riots while Miguela and Regalo created a distraction). It will be equally hard to say goodbye to Neri and Julia, my original host parents near Guarambarè, who taught me Guaranì (and continue to tell me I need to practice more!), guided me through my Paraguayan infancy, and set me on the right path to be a good volunteer. I know that most of us feel that our Paraugayan families are special, but I would like to give everyone in mine a Golden Chipa.

Happiest Ending: Brook
I really do owe a foot massage to the last Golden Chipa recipient, my ´´follow-up´´ volunteer in Prettyview. Brook came to visit me last week for five days and I couldn´t be more delighted that she will be taking my place when I head home next month. She is an awesome person: friendly, open, humble, curious, talented, intelligent, and motivated. She was very receptive to continuing with my ongoing projects – already established agroforestry systems, ongoing educational programs, rabbit raising, and work with farmers´ committees – as well as starting her own projects, such as a youth group and cooking and gardening classes with women. I am personally glad that she is following me up rather than the reverse. She would be a tough act to follow. She brings a world of experience and a lot of practical optimism to Prettyview and many of my friends already love her. Best of all, she wants to stay in touch, so it will be easier to find out about life in my village than it would be if I were followed up by someone who wanted me to butt out. Brook´s assignment to Prettyview is really one of the happiest endings I can imagine for a wonderful two years in Paraguay.

Aikema Escuelape

Today’s Post: I learned a lesson (Lit: I entered the school.)

With just two and a half months until Jake in Paraguay becomes Jake in Gringolandia, our retrospective theme continues. I can’t really wallow in nostalgia since the first two volumes (of a four-volume set, in press under the tentative title One Jew in Prettyview) of my journal presently reside in a desk drawer in Phoenix, Arizona. Yet memory serves, and today, the theme is: misconceptions from my first months as a Peace Corps volunteer and their subsequent correction.

Una Delicadeza. It took me a long time to accept that my place in Paraguay was not the kitchen. For my first few months living with host families, I routinely inserted myself there, offering to peel mandioca, to wash dishes, and even to cook. Rebuffed, I contented myself with learning about Paraguayan cooking. In my first week, my host mom in Guarambaré announced to me that she was going to make tortillas. I eagerly watched her every move.

Moving to a new place is nothing if not a way to forcibly heighten your awareness of the world around you without resorting to drugs or spiritual training. Everything is new, and thus, possibly, worthy of attention. If you stick around long enough, you will begin to ignore the commonplace. This desensitization is often lamented, but it’s really quite a gift. Do you really want to spend the rest of your days attending to the specific color of the walls in your house? Or the way that your neighbor’s dog or elderly aunt barks every morning from seven to nine? It is best that these ambient stimuli recede into the “not worthy of interest” realm of sensation and make not even a mark on our long-term memory.

But to move to Paraguay is to become, temporarily, highly attentive, to have no cognitive filter. I assumed that tortillas were a delicacy, possibly one cooked to celebrate my recent arrival. How lucky I was! When I could have been writing in my journal or writing in my journal or even writing in my journal, I was present to watch my host mom make tortillas, an opportunity I might never have again. For good measure, I memorized the recipe and recorded it in my journal.

Oh, Jake of 2009. If only you knew how many tortillas Paraguayas you would eat and how much you would come to dislike them. To make a tortilla Paraguaya, combine flour, eggs, milk, and salt to form a batter akin to that of a salty, unleavened pancake. It is optional, but certainly not necessary, to dump in cheese, rice, cornmeal, lettuce, green onions, ground meat, or other condiments. Then deep fry the batter to make a salty, crispy, deep-fried pancake. Serve them with mandioca. Tortillas are easy to make, full of calories, and, superficially, “tasty.” The American equivalent of feeding your family tortillas for dinner is perhaps a cross between taking them out to Wendy’s and cooking Kraft macaroni and cheese. I don’t wish to disparage the tortilla. But imagine a foreigner watching you intently and clearly memorizing everything you do as you empty a violently yellow cheese packet into a cooling saucepan of elbow noodles.

¿Qué día es el novenario? I’ve written about novenarios (or “ñembo´ehápekuéra´´), one of my favorite traditions in Paraguay. As the Spanish name implies, a novenario is a nine-day mourning ritual observed after someone dies or on the anniversaries of his or her death. Some people also hold novenarios in honor of saints’ days. In Prettyview, novenarios generally are held between four and five in the afternoon. Attendees gather in front of a shrine of the recently defunct or the revered saint and pray a series of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. (I have to say that the phrase “fruto de tu vientre” sounds even stranger to me than “fruit of thy womb.”) I attended my first ñembo´ehápe shortly after arriving in Prettyview. The mother of one of the town’s nurses had died and my then-host parents are very close to the family. I was looking forward to learning about a new aspect of Paraguayan culture. Yet getting to the novenario proved very confusing for me.

I felt awkward about barging into a service for someone’s mother, not yet aware that novenarios are foci for little children, the elderly, and other socially marginal community members, many of whom constitute a core of mourners enticed by the meal usually held on the ninth day of prayer. Besides, my Guaraní was still mediocre. So I followed my host dad around all afternoon the first day of the novenario. As the sun set, I asked him when we were going. He told me that the ceremony was over. Irritated and mad at myself for letting the opportunity go by, I ate my tortillas and went to bed.

My already fragile sanity teetered a bit closer to the brink the next day when I encountered several elderly women heading to the nurse’s house for the novenario. Why would my host father have lied to me? Maybe I misunderstood him and got the day of the novenario wrong? But sweaty and dressed in bright yellow shorts, I was ill-prepared to go pray over a dead stranger. I had missed the novenario – two days in a row.

I’m not sure how many days passed before I realized that novenarios last for nine days. At least I no longer felt as though I were trapped in some sort of recursive hallucination. (Nor did I know that feeling trapped in a recursive hallucination is a not uncommon side effect of cultural adjustment.) When I finally did get to the novenario, sweating profusely through my collared shirt and slacks, I was greeted by the nurse’s brother, visiting from Ciudad del Este and attending his mother’s funerary prayers, that day at least, in a tank top and a bathing suit.

I learned many things about ñembo´ehápe culture over the next two years. I spent my first one in a state of visible empathetic mourning for the family of the deceased, but soon learned that only the most heinous and premature of deaths call for this. Rather, it is even expected that guests alleviate the sense of loss by joking around and gossiping, right up until someone begins wailing or passes out from grief. Or that it is much more shameful to turn down an invitation for the usually quite generous final lunch than it is to take advantage of a death in the community to score a free meal.

Novedades. A common greeting in Prettyview is “Ha mba’epa nde vallepe” (And what’s up in your neighborhood?). The standard responses range from “nothing” to “nothing novel” to fulfillment of the implied request for gossip, no matter how trivial, about people who live closer to you than to the person to whom you are speaking. But it’s also acceptable to say, simply “tranquilopa” (total tranquility).

The pace of life in rural Paraguay belies the fact that, as is the case everywhere and in all times, things change. Even in Prettyview, you can’t step into the same arroyo twice. But I, and I would imagine, other outside observers, are often tempted to interpret the lives of the rural poor as somehow static or eternal. If this has ever been true, it is certainly no longer so. When I arrived in Prettyview, I imagined that I was being imported into an environment that would be more or less the same when I left. I was wrong. Two years later, new neighbors have moved into the house next to mine; the staff of the primary and secondary schools, health post, and police station have changed; genetically modified cotton, cloned eucalyptus, wireless internet and smart phones have arrived; new denominations of money have been printed; neighbors have been born, died, divorced, and recognized children born out of wedlock; families have immigrated and emigrated; and the mayor (and dominant political party) of the district has switched. I recently looked at some of the maps I drew when I first introduced myself to all the families in the community. Of the roughly 125 houses I visited, a good 15% have either been knocked down, significantly renovated, abandoned, or inhabited by a different family than lived there on my first visit. Yes, Prettyview is probably changing faster than ever before due to greater connectivity with the wider world. But it’s impressive to consider that life here has probably been, to some extent, like this since the village was first founded 90 years ago, and most people still know as many names, faces, and places as they do.

Stereotypes come easily to foreigners because our cultural and linguistic separation and lack of history in our new homes keep us from appreciating the nuances that give rise to unique identity. My initial undersensitivity to the reality of change in Prettyview was one assumption that, paradoxically, it took me quite awhile to discard.

Chanchos. I love Paraguay and many Paraguayans. There is, in fact, only one thing I hate in Paraguay: pigs. Chanchos, kurékuéra, swine – whatever you want to call them, I want to see, but preferably not hear, them all slaughtered. Let’s declare Prettyview a no-pig zone, make tons of chorizo, freeze most of it for later, and get on with life.

My hate affair with pigs began in training. There weren’t too many porkers running around my host community near Guarambaré because, in an urban setting, the danger of theft or accident is high. Most people kept their pigs in chiqueros and my family didn’t own pigs. The only pig I knew belonged to my friend Brian’s host family. This pig, which spent its days tied up along the path we took to get to another friend’s house, squealed incessantly and writhed around as though possessed. Unused to the behavior of pigs, we assumed that it had a porcine mental illness.

Upon moving to Prettyview, I became involved with pigs in ways that I never dreamed of. Since they are mostly confined to concentrated animal feeding operations (not endorsed by Jake in Paraguay) in the States, I had never lived close to pigs before arriving in Paraguay. As a sometime vegetarian and “lightly observant” Jew, I generally did not eat the foods that pig flesh yields. This was all about to change.

A first observation: Brian’s family’s pig was not any louder or more apparently insane than a normal pig. Pigs can be quiet and “cute,” but, especially when hungry, their default behavior includes grunting, screaming, squealing, rooting around violently, chomping, kicking, running in strange and unpredictable directions, and eyeing their human masters as though evaluating a frontal attack. When a sow (even the word is horrible) is ready to breastfeed her ravenous piglets, she simply flops over on her side and lets them violently suckle from her somehow pornographic teats. I am in no way offended by the sight of a woman breastfeeding her child. But when a sow passes in front of my house these days, I generally leave my washing for a few minutes and go inside. What ensues if I don’t flee always feels so…violating. Anyway, the screaming, usually worse around mealtimes, is only slightly more atrocious than the basal level of grunting that a foraging pig produces. I now interpret this grunting to mean “Let’s see what delicious things you have planted for me to feast on.”

My early mistake about pigs in Prettyview was to view them as a force that I could possibly vanquish. Here, most pigs are free range, which means that they are home for breakfast and dinner, but spend most of the time inflicting ecological damage on Prettyview and psychological damage on me. Pigs have destroyed my garden at least four times and killed hundreds of tree seedlings in my vivero. They have similarly prejudiced every school garden and over half of the family tree nurseries I have worked in. For my first year in Paraguay, I though the response to this was to make stronger fences, encourage neighbors to pierce their pigs’ noses with wire (this precludes foraging), gossip about especially negligent pig owners, and excessively grind my molars together, then eat an entire tray of biscuits. I would frequently chase pigs out of my yard and even stabbed a juvenile pig with a machete. (I am not sorry.)

This, however, was my erroneous journey into pig samsara. I became so immersed in hating pigs that I was blind to the underlying reality. To paraphrase Jesus, who, famously, had his own history with the animals, the pig will always be with you, but Jacobo will return to the United States after two years. I needed to learn to go beyond ignoring pigs and accept that they are simply too economically valuable and, if cooked properly, delicious, for the people of rural Paraguay to renounce them. As much as I wish that the environmental destructiveness, huge appetites, and noise pollution that pig raising entails were sufficient to dissuade farmers from allowing those little oinkers to see the light of day, pigs are part of Paraguay.

Since accepting this, I have had a wider variety of pig experiences and reached a new state of pig tranquilidad. I have enjoyed eating pigs, whether in my host mom’s chorizo or tasty but always digestion-inducing crackling (chicharrones). A salty, well-spiced pig stew hits the spot on a cold day. And nothing makes chipa, chipa guazu, or reviro taste better than some pig fat. My higher blood pressure and mandioca belly aside, I haven’t suffered too much from eating pigs. Now when I hear snuffling, I don’t grab my machete and start screaming “KUCHI!” I just take a deep breath and hope that the next time I hear that particular pig, it’s sizzling on the parilla.

Etc. My time in Paraguay has of course entailed a multitude of cultural adjustments and lessons learned. Don’t ever try to use the cajero automático on the days that teachers get paid. You can buy three kilos of flour at the despensa, but be prepared for everyone to think you’re a hoarder. Don’t be a punk and reveal why you really came after only thirty seconds of tereré. Water and the weather can be hot, but if you are, it means you are sexually aroused. Nobody wants to hear you opine that without its stellar goalie, the national soccer team wouldn’t have won a single American Cup game. Yet wearing a “Selección Nacional” t-shirt, speaking Guaraní, and lustily slurping your mate really will make everyone fall in love with you.

Yet these lessons were mostly the result of instant feedback. What I’ve come to appreciate in these waning days of my Peace Corps service are the things that required the fullness of time to be revealed. They aren’t obvious to brief visitors to Paraguay or to somebody who is not paying attention. They will be, more than photos of me on oxcarts or the (fictional) baby I am taking home, my “recuerdos de Paraguay.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a novenario to crash.

La Oleeha

Today´s Post: The Reader

This is the third and final article I submitted to the internal Peace Corps newsletter. It does repeat some of the content I´ve already written about in Jake in Paraguay, but I decided to post it as a sort of retrospective.

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Though the title of this essay may suggest an illicit love affair with an older, illiterate war criminal, the romance that I would instead like to illustrate is my personal literary journey during a year and a half as a PCV in Paraguay. Though I hope to continue reading through my G’s COS in mid-December, I’ll focus here on my progress up to the present moment, a passionate journey through over 150 works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I offer you, my reader, the vicarious joys of the savored text as well as some concrete recommendations to take with you to the library the next time you are in the office.

When I was in training, an outgoing agroforestry volunteer told me that, for volunteers, Peace Corps is one big book and garden club. Looking back, I have certainly enjoyed the opportunity to share recommendations with fellow volunteers and to have long-distance book club time, thanks to our unlimited nine minute and 50 second phone call privileges. I encourage new volunteers to make the most of the reading opportunities that Peace Corps service allows. Take advantage of other volunteers! There are plenty of duds in the library, and a recommendation from someone with similar taste is a better bet than a novel picked out at random. Also, keep a list of your literary conquests. The list can be as simple as handwritten titles and authors in a notebook. Or, you can follow my lead, keeping a Microsoft Word document with a list of books and brief synopses and an independent Excel spreadsheet with 15 parameters, including date of release, genre, and numerical rating (I used a five-point scale).

What did my compulsive data gathering reveal? Of the first 150 books I read in service (roughly between 15 December 2009 and 31 July 2011): 8% were re-reads, 10% were translated into English, and 40% were page turners. Half came recommended from a friend or family member and 7 out of 10 were novels. The statistic that I am most proud of is that 95 of these books were written by authors whom I had never read before, including luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Salman Rushdie, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Chuck Palahniuk, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, Somerset Maugham, Richard Yates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pearl Buck, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

Beyond the numbers, I also found great satisfaction in pursuing intertextual discourses between the works that I often haphazardly obtained through random library raids, loans from friends, and gifts sent from home. Below, I’ll explore a few longitudinal themes that showed up in my reading.

I imagine that I am not the first volunteer to derive special pleasure from reading books set in Paraguay, in other Latin American countries, or simply in rural settings. My encounters with Paraguay itself were sparse. I highly recommend the English translation of Augusto Roa Bastos’s Son of Man that is floating around. Set in Paraguarí around 80 years ago, the story reveals many almost eerie links to the present. Replace trains with buses and leprosy with presión alta and you can imagine many parts of the novel unfolding around you in contemporary Paraguay. John Gimlette’s At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig also, lamentably, made my reading list. This unfortunate chimera of Eurocentric history and petulant travel writing hardly deserves its current position as the only recent, general interest, non-fiction, Anglophone writing about Paraguay. However, until something better comes along, we are stuck with it. I was surprised and tickled by my third, minor brush with Paraguay: a brief excursion toward the end of Jonathan Franzen’s much-hyped Freedom. Other books set in rural settings, and often in the first half of the twentieth century, also made more sense to me when read in the context of my small village in Caazapá. Putting down John Steinbeck’s East of Eden or a collection of O’Connor’s short stories, I could draw from my own surroundings to imagine early twentieth century American landscapes of cornfields and oxcarts.

Narratives of cultural difference and dislocation meant more to me as a PCV than they would have in the States. As an English-speaking white person who had lived my whole life in the United States, I was not used to being an outsider when I arrived in Paraguay. Books such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land encouraged me to compare my own experiences as an American living in Paraguay to the (factual or fictional) experiences of protagonists adapting to new norms and roles, whether dictated by nationality, race, religion, or, in the case of Heinlein, degree of Martian-ness. Generally, my experience of these books was richer than it would have been in other reading contexts, and the wisdom I drew from their characters’ journeys helped me to be a better volunteer.

I drew heavily from science fiction and fantasy genre writing and cleaved toward the postmodern in my selection of books. (Re-)reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, two rather derivative trilogies by Terry Brooks, and occasional works by Heinlein, Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Justin Cronin provided me with my fair share of elves, dwarves, aliens, talking animals, technology gone right and wrong, vampires, zombies, angels, and gods. Postmodern literature filled different needs. David Mitchell’s intricate and fragmented plots, Haruki Murakami’s magical realism, and the critical framework provided by A Postmodern Reader (give it a try…but maybe intercalate each essay with some lighter reading) challenged me in ways that yet another quest to find or destroy a magical artifact could not. I found myself turning most often to epic fantasy and iconoclastic experiment when I needed an escape. There has been little I have enjoyed more on a rainy day than to disappear into the comforts of Middle Earth or the jarring discordance of postmodernity.

The impressive quantity of books available in our library gave me the opportunity to pursue several discrete literary themes. You can find a copy of at least three books addressing the Trujillo dictatorship: Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (listed here in descending order of preference, at least by my lights). Woolf’s Orlando and Eugenides’s Middlesex both featured gender-bending (and -breaking) androgynous protagonists. And much to my eventual boredom, countless characters spend entire books batted to and fro by the cultural constraints of Elizabethan through Edwardian England. From Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and really all the way through Ian McEwan’s Atonement, generations of fictional Englishmen and women agonized over entailments, being thought of as “trade,” inheritance, yearly incomes, country homes, titles, gambling debts, gossip, the comportment of servants, and the importance of decently aged domestic furnishings. Many of these preoccupations seem rather artificial in today’s liberalized, globalized world, but I’m sure they have their contemporary equivalents.

As much as it was amusing to identify post hoc the foregoing trends in my reading, what still leave the most indelible impression on me are the “top 20”: the best individual books that I read over the last year and a half. My choices are generally not all that daring; most of the top 20 are already the objects of critical praise, financial success, or both. However, in the spirit of recommending some excellent books, I’ll bring this literary idyll to a close by briefly recounting my favorite Peace Corps reads:

American Gods (Neil Gaiman): intellectual fantasy fun; Gaiman’s representations of mythological beings seem more naturally “human” than many authors’ human characters.

Beautiful Evidence (Edward Tufte): changed the way I think about the presentation of visual data.

Bel Canto (Ann Patchett): masterfully interposes stillness and motion, violence and peace, elevation of form and of function. I especially recommend this novel for lovers of music and language.

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky): intensely psychological and a little nuts; takes awhile to read, but worth it.

The Cider House Rules (John Irving): stood out from Irving’s sometimes hackneyed work as a profoundly humane, politically charged story.

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell): my favorite new read from Peace Corps service, a masterful book-written-as-fugue in six voices and six genres.

Collapse (Jared Diamond): a must-read for anyone interested in the political implications of sustainability.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole): deeply cynical in a way unlike anything else I have ever read.

East of Eden (John Steinbeck): a classic that seemed surprisingly contemporary to me. Steinbeck’s themes are still relevant today.

Freedom (Jonathan Franzen): Franzen’s first book in the ten years since he wrote The Corrections. Sometimes heavy-handed, Freedom redeems itself through thematic complexity and vivid characters.

Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Richard Hofstadter): impossible to describe fully even after reading it – a mind-blowing work of non-fiction that addresses the idea of self-reference and intelligence.

The Good Earth (Pearl Buck): a humane story of China’s transition from its agrarian past to modernity.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami): a fascinating binary tale that comes crashing together in its final pages; both intellectual and emotionally charged.

The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver): I was shocked that Kingsolver managed to pull off a novel peopled with seemingly inimitable historical figures such as Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky. But she did.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov): a titillating and disturbing tale that only becomes more so when you move beyond judgment and take the narrator’s perspective at face value.
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides): an epic American story and deeply personal novel of development.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman): amazing non-fiction writing that combines ethnography, history/historiography, and journalism.

The Untouchable (John Banville): a gripping drama narrated by a flawed but ultimately sympathetic protagonist.

White Teeth (Zadie Smith): a love note to the collision of cultures, identities, and politics typical of contemporary life that skillfully skirts caricature and schmaltz.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami): the first book I read on starting service and perhaps my favorite novel of all time. There is nothing I can really say about it except that you should take it home if you see it.

Good luck hunting down these selections and please pass them on, even if you don’t agree with my assessment of their value. The thought of somebody else possibly enjoying a book you despised should be enough to overcome the desire to cast it into the nearest active tatakua (an urge I had to suppress vis-à-vis Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook). As a final exhortation, I hope that you will follow me in savoring the joys of reading during service: the reassuring weight of 10 or 20 books crammed into your hiking pack for that five kilometer walk home, the smell they exude after being hoarded in your moist house for a month, the exotic pressed insects that generations of volunteers have deposited inside them, and the comfort of the printed, English word amid the most disorienting of host families. These are joys that a K----e (I refuse to write it out) or other electronic reader cannot give you. We are lucky to have a fantastic collection of flesh-and-blood (or rather paper-and-ink) books to read and more free time than some of us know how to dispose of. So take advantage, and let yourself get lost in a good book.

Ñe´ênguéra Avañe´ême

Today´s Post: Guaraní Expressions

This is the second of three articles I wrote for The Kuat, Peace Corps Paraguay´s occasional internal newsletter. I hope to have them published in the last edition to come out before I leave the country. That they may serve as nuggets of wisdom for newer volunteers! My introduction, reproduced below, explains what this post is about

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You say it best when you say it in Guaraní. Here are some useful Guaraní idioms, ranging from the common expressions that every decent Guarambaré host family shares with its aspirante to some more exotic gems that I´ve encountered in Caazapá over the last two years. Eaprovechana, che ra´a.

He ne rembiu!
Food Expressions

Heterei naiñakâi! = How delicious! (Lit: It is barely a body; it has no head.)

Dios se lo paguemante = May god repay you. (Use this after finishing your food or if someone won´t let you pay for a gift.)

he´ê = sweet (he´ê azucár) or salty (he´ê juky)

(a)mohe´ê = to sweeten or salt (Ex: Amohe´êta che ryguasurykue.)

(i)pytâ = well-done, golden brown (Lit: red)

(i)morotî = still raw, doughy, not fully cooked (Lit: white)

(i)peky = green, fresh (used in reference to legumes, Ex: Ha´use la kumandapeky.)

(i)piru = dry, hard (used in reference to legumes, Ex: Emoko´ê pe kumandapiru embopupumboyve chupekuéra.)

hi´aju = mature fruit

hi´aky = immature fruit (Ex: Ndahi´ajúi la naranja; hi´akynte.)

pa´i ruvicha = potato (Lit: the Pope)

tajao = broccoli

hu´itî = cornmeal, or foods derived from it

(i)pýra = raw (Ex: Voluntariokuéra ho´usejepi la verdurakuéra pýra.)

týra = whatever food, whether it is bread, mandioca, etc. used to scoop up and accompany food

Ambyasy. Nda´ukuaái la chúra/hyekue guasu/hígado. = I´m sorry. I don´t eat chura/long intestine/liver.

Ikatupa ha´unte michimi pe tykue so´o´ŷre. = Can I just eat a little of that broth without meat?

Mba´epa heise…
Confusing Idioms

Hevi(kua)ja = a guest who overstays his welcome (Lit: Something that sticks in the ass[hole])

(Che)akâraku ___re = to be enthusiastic about (Lit: To be hot-headed about, Ex: Che akâraku las abonos verdesre.)

(che)py´aguasu = to be brave (Lit: to be big-stomached)

(che)py´a mokôi = to be ambivalent (Lit: to be two-stomached)

(che)ry´e raku = to be unlucky (Lit: to be hot-boweled)

(che)po remói = to be lucky (Lit: to have itchy hands)

(che)po tavy = to be awkward (Lit: to have stupid hands.)

Ñakyrâkuaru = light rain, a sprinkle (Lit: cicada piss)

(a)pleitea = to try, to make an effort (Ex: Persona A: ´´Ndevale, che ra´a.´´ Persona B: ´´Apleitea.´´)

(a)liga = to obtain (Ex: Aligase la temity ra´ŷi che comitepeguarâ.)

(che)arrieroporte = done in a way typical of a man (this can mean earnestly, shoddily, or in a genial, embracing way)

(a)pena ___re = to be bothered by something, to mind something (Ex: Oky pero napenái hese.)

(che)gustahaícha = as (the subject) likes it (Ex: Peiporavoke peteî fecha pendegustahaícha.)

(i)deprovecho = useful (Ex: Ideprovecho la kumanda yvyra´i.)

Ivale péa
Handy Guaraníete

(a)ha´anga = to imitate (Ex: Aha´anga ka´i.)

Aguyje ejuhaguere = Thank you for coming.

(che)koygua = timid or shy like a young child

Avy´a nderechavo = I´m happy to see you.

(verb)karia´y = to (whatever) a lot, impressively (Ex: Okykaria´y, che ra´a!)

(a)po´i ___re = to cease, slough off, or stop something (Ex: Hetaiterei atererema. Apo´ita hese.)

(a)jepe´e = to huddle around a fire or brazier

(a)ñeñuvâ = to cover oneself with a blanket, etc. for warmth

(a)momba´eguasu = to value

ñe´êngatu = a chatterbox

Tereho porâ! = Take care! (Lit: Go well!)

apyka = chair, bench (if you use this word, many people will assume you speak amazing Guaraní)

okê = door (same comment as for ´´apyka´´)

reindy = sister (of a man)
ryvy = younger brother (of a man)
ryke´y = older brother (of a man) kyvy = brother (of a woman)
kypy´y = younger sister (of a woman)
ryke = older sister (of a woman)
(As with ´´apyka´´ and ´´okê,´´ using these words to refer to your family makes you seem like you speak excellent Guaraní.)

Tañañemongeta´i´mi
Conversation Pieces

Jarýi! = Great! (Lit: Grandmother!, Ex: Persona A: “Mba’etekopiko.” Persona B: “Jarýi!”)

Ani chene! = Don´t tell me!

A la pinta! = Oh goodness!
Haihue! = Oh goodness!
E´a! = Oh goodness!

Nderasore! = Whoa! (Lit: A corruption of “nde rakore,” which is grosero. Nderasore is safe for most occasions.)

Haku la yvy. = trouble, a bad situation (Lit: The earth is hot.)
Ipo´i la piola. = trouble, a bad situation (Lit: The rope is thin.)
Hendy kavaju resa. = trouble, a bad situation (Lit: The horse´s eyes are on fire.)

(Che)tolongo = to be a moron

(a)ñe´e rei = to speak in a derivative, foolish, or insincere way. (Ex: Oñe´ereinte pe mitâkuimba´e.)

media naranja = significant other, lover
kichiha= significant other, lover
corazonjára = significant other, lover
(all gender neutral, for use by volunteers of all sexualities!)

radio so´o = gossip (Lit: meat radio)

Mba´epa nde vallepe. = Tell me the gossip about your neighbors. (Lit: What’s up in your neighborhood?)

ñandente apytepe = just among us

Ha´ente = I´m just saying…

(Ai)me ___ndive = to be in agreement with or to support someone (Ex: Aime nendive.)

Toje´e oje´ev.a = Say what they will.

Ñe´enganguéra
Adages-Dichos

´´Jajotopata lata´ipe,´´ he´i el burro kavajupe. = See you further up the creek. (Lit: ´´See you in the little can,´´ said the donkey to the horse.)

´´Problema tapere,´´ he´i la pruebera. = Watch out. (Lit: ´´Problem in the road,´´ said the soothsayer.)

´´Eñemboi, eñemboi!´´ he´i la oporo´useva. = ´´Undress, undress!´´ said the one who wanted to have sex. (Grosero)

“Cada uno con su gusto,” he’i la kurejuru oipyte va’ekue. = To each his own. (Lit: “Everyone has his own tastes,”said the one who sucked from the pig’s mouth.)

“Algo es algo,” he’i la tîsyry ho’uva. = Better something than nothing. (Lit: “Something is something,” said the one who eats his boogers.)

Problema ha bigote ñandente jacrea. = Problems and mustaches are our own creations.

(Che)hory jagua ruguaícha. = To be as happy as a dog´s tail.

Chemoingema escuelape. = (S)he taught me a lesson. (Lit: I got sent to school.)

Tata’ŷre tatatî nopu’âi. = Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. (Lit: Without fire, smoke doesn’t rise.)

Necesdidad ñanembovale. = Necessity makes us capable.

Nderechavo poste jepe oñakâity. (Lit: On seeing you, even a post nods its head.)

Nderechavo horcón tuja jepe hoky jey. = I’m happy to see you. (Lit: On seeing you, even an old beam buds again.)

Nderechavo buey tuja jepe okambu jey. (Lit: On seeing you, even an old ox breastfeeds again.)

Producción Forestal Sustentable en Prettyview

Today’s Post: Sustainable Forest Production in Prettyview

I was asked to submit a narrative about my recent project with a farmers' committee for use in a Peace Corps newsletter. Here is the English translation of what I wrote! I know I am patting myself on the back a little, but couldn't resist the temptation to double dip and use the essay for Jake in Paraguay.

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The town of Prettyview’s soccer team is still called “Club Ferroviario” (“Club Railroad”). Its name represents the importance of the railroad to Aba’i, which used to go through Prettyview until its closure at the end of the previous century. The people of Prettyview relied on the railroad to pay salaries, carry crops to market, and to bring passengers and workers in need of room and board. Now, sources of work and income in Prettyview are scarce. There is no longer an earning to be made from the sale of mandioca flour, corn, sugarcane, or other crops that can be produced without many inputs. Cotton is profitable in some years and those with sufficient land and money can still invest in ranching. But the future of Prettyview as a village of small farmers is insecure. Members of virtually every family work in Asunción, Ciudad del Este, Argentina, or Spain, and the vast majority of each class finishing 12th grade leaves Prettyview in order to study or work.

There are other problems in addition to a lack of markets. Most land holdings in the region are deforested, the norm in many parts of the Atlantic Forest of the Alto Paraná. The soil in many areas is depleted due to deforestation, burning, erosion, and the repeated planting of crops like corn and cotton. Without many resources beyond their land, the region’s farmers are vulnerable to the advances of industrialized soy agriculture and large-scale ranching. Their economic effects (extirpation of small farmers) and ecological effects (total homogenization) would constitute the end of Prettyview as a town of small, independent farmers and their families.

Fortunately, there is reason for hope: the collective commitment of groups of small farmers to a trajectory of sustainable development. I can tell one story that represents this trend.

During the 1990s, a group of farmers founded the Comité de Productores Santa Cecilia. For various reasons, the committee remained without much organization or drive during the following years. Its members obtained recognition from the local municipality of General Higinio Morínigo and DEAG (the national agricultural extension agency), but there was insufficient commitment to the group to improve the members’ chances as small farmers. In the spring of 2010, the committee renovated its charter, launching a new era for those involved. Strengthened by training and assistance from the Spanish NGO Acción Contra el Hambre and the renewed commitment of its elected officers, the committee was recognized by the department of Caazapá, opened an account with the Banco Nacional de Fomento, and, most importantly in my opinion, instituted a fine for absences at meetings and communal work days.

As a volunteer in the Peace Corps Agroforestry Extension project, I took advantage of the rebirth of the committee to offer my assistance. I attended meetings, worked with committee members in our communal corn field, and gave educational talks on agroforestry and bio-intensive gardens. When Acción Contra el Hambre’s project was completed in the summer of 2010, the committee had already initiated a chicken raising project with PRONAC (an office of DEAG) and had met with a representative of the nearest cooperative, Cooperativa Capiibary in San Juan Nepomuceno, in order to discuss the establishment of citrus plantations and other types of orchards to produce fruit for sale to Frutika and other national buyers.

Around that time, the committee members started to ask me about the possibility of requesting funds from the Peace Corps in order to do “a project.” Cautious due to my desire that this not end up an unsustainable gift of resources to the committee, I responded that we could seek resources from various sources, including Paraguayan NGOs. I guided the committee en participatory activities in order to design a sustainable, practical project. The idea that we developed was a sustainable forest production project. The committee members were most interested in plantations of citrus trees, eucalyptus, yerba mate, and, with a little support from me, native trees. In the following weeks, each of the 18 farmers designed his own proposal and consulted with me in order to request an adequate number of trees.

There were some setbacks. The cost of the thousands of grafted orange trees that the committee wanted to request would have exceeded 70 million Guaraníes, and, therefore, we reduced the number of citrus trees ordered to 5 for each family and changed the focus of the project to yerba mate, eucalyptus, and native plants. Then, the organization from which we originally requested funds experienced a delay in its evaluation process for applications. At this point, my Peace Corps supervisor, Eli Cabrera, suggested that we split our application in two parts: a request to A Todo Pulmón: Paraguay Respira (a national reforestation NGO) for native trees and another request to ECPA (a U.S. government fund administered by the Peace Corps that supports climate change adaptation and mitigation) for the citrus, yerba mate, and eucalyptus seedlings.

We succeeded with A Todo Pulmón and ECPA. On the 8th of July, we bought 7,700 yerba mate, 5,277 eucalyptus, and 100 citrus seedlings from various tree nurseries in our region with ECPA funds. The next day, 4,333 native trees (Peltophorum dubium, Tabebuia heptaphylla, Parapiptadenia rigida, Anandenanthera colubrina, and Cordia trichotoma) bought with funds from A Todo Pulmón arrived in Prettyview as well. The committee members, their families, and I worked the whole weekend in order to unload, count, and distribute the seedlings. The 17,410 trees remain now with their new owners and the majority of the committee members have begun to plant them.

Representatives of Cooperativa Capiibary and A Todo Pulmón were key to the conclusion of this stage of the project. Eng. González of Capiibary helped us to develop our budget, guided us in technical matters, and managed the purchase and delivery of the 17,000 trees. Also, his passion for economic development and environmental sustainability in our region will continue to strengthen the integration of Prettyview’s small farmers in a local web of sustainable production. Eng. Brehm of A Todo Pulmón helped us acquire a quantity of native trees that, due to their long rotations, will amplify the beneficial environmental and economic effects of this project in the future.

During the last month, I worked in the fields of seven members of the Comité Santa Cecilia. We cleared brush, dug holes, and planted trees. The farmers with whom I worked are: expanding existing plantations of yerba mate, eucalyptus, and citrus; starting new plantations of these types; laying the groundwork for a variety of agroforestry systems; planting eucalyptus in order to make windbreaks; and restoring deforested habitat. Each committee member has already donated some trees for the yard of the committee’s new locale. Also, they are beginning to discuss the future of the plantations as an integrated system of economic development. They are talking about a factory for processing yerba mate in Prettyview and the collective sale of eucalyptus logs.

I want to highlight two stories that, more than anything, assured me that our project deserves the descriptor “sustainable.” One morning, I planted yerba mate with a pair of families: a son-in-law and father-in-law and both of their sons. While we transplanted the 800 trees that we planted that day, I noted that we were working in a recently harvested cotton field. I was delighted by the transition of the field: from cotton – genetically modified, exotic, annual, sprayed with herbicides, a heavy feeder, an export crop with an unstable price – to yerba mate – natural, native, perennial, an agroforestry species that builds the soil, a locally consumed crop with a stable price. Those families have had to buy cotton seed every year, spray the field with glyphosate, and sell their harvest at risk of economic loss. In the future, they will depend on their yerba mate plantation as an investment that pays every year without many inputs or environmental disadvantages.

My other story is of my work with my Peace Corps community contact in Prettyview. He is a 30 year-old man who now manages his family’s lands. He regrets that his father chopped down all of the forest on their holdings. This decision, and the similar decisions of their neighbors, changed the Arroyo Morotî (“White River”), which runs through the fields of Prettyview, from its original color to a cloudy brown. One of my contact’s dreams is to reforest the riverbanks of the Arroyo so that it may again run clear and free of run-off from the fields. Together, since my arrival in Prettyview, we have slowly planted native trees of our own production along its banks. However, by the time the present project started, we had only reached a quantity of about 50 trees, more or less. With the trees provided by A Todo Pulmón, we have the opportunity to restore a large tract of the Arroyo Morotî.

The dream that I have for Prettyview, and that many members of the Comité Santa Cecilia share, is of a more secure future for the small farmers of Prettyview. In this future, there will be opportunities to support a family through the cultivation of citrus, yerba mate, eucalyptus and native tree logs, passion fruit, and other ventures consistent with the preservation of the soil and the reforestation of the region. Buyers will come to Prettyview and pay fair prices for the agricultural products of the community. Natural resources will serve as the base of this economic security, motivating the protection of the environment. It is a vision somewhat different than the busy railroad station of the last century, but it’s worthwhile, given the changing world that confronts my adopted Paraguayan community.

Aleema Sapopa Libro

Today’s Post: I have read 150 books.

With a crowd of milestones looming ahead, I can’t resist taking a moment to celebrate this most personal one: the completion of my 150th book. I finished Ian McEwan’s Atonement after 19 and one half months of Peace Corps Service, for a rough mean of 2 books a week since I swore in as a volunteer in mid-December of 2009.

The last 50 books in my literary journey have been my companions through hot and cold, boredom and titillation, and journeys through three countries. I turned to them when I felt socially over-stimulated and intellectually under-stimulated. I forsook them to watch every episode in the first six seasons of The Office and to read numerous Time and Harper’s magazines (not to mention a few issues of People). I read them in bed by cell phone flashlight and sitting on a terrace in the middle of a maize field in Peru’s Cotahuasi Canyon, but more often than not, sitting at my table in Prettyview with my feet propped up and a bowl of soup or oatmeal at hand.

Though I continued to discover new authors (Virginia Woolf, John Banville, Jon Krakauer, Pearl Buck, Barbara Tuchman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Elizabeth Strout, Chinua Achebe, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-Rae Lee, and Ian McEwan), I also went on binges, reading a collection of Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness), several books by Margaret Atwood (the best was The Year of the Flood, her sequel to Oryx and Crake), everything I could get my hands on by David Mitchell, and yet another mediocre fantasy trilogy from Terry Brooks. I found two more books by my beloved Haruki Murakami and read more by Ann Patchett, whom I had discovered earlier in service.

A number of my selections in this most recent batch were easy, throw-away reads. I can’t say that How to Raise a Jewish Dog did very much for me on either a spiritual or a literary level and towards the end, reading more Terry Brooks just felt degrading. On the other hand, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Atwood’s Surfacing, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient all struck me as quality fiction that failed to leave much of an impact on my memory.

As usual, I encountered several bombs. The only book that I re-read in this recent set of 50 was John Gimlette’s At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. I despised this history/travelogue of Paraguay when I read it before beginning Peace Corps service and I only found it more loathsome after living in Paraguay for a year and a half. Unfortunately, Gimlette’s haughty, Eurocentric, poorly edited, and often factually questionable account stands out as one of the non-fiction works written in the English language that exclusively deal with Paraguay. Paraguay deserves a better English-language chroncicle than the Inflatable Pig, and, though I do not consider myself a prime candidate for the job, I can’t help but feel moved to write it when I consider Gimlette’s work. I have less to say about Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, an unlovely mess that, given the critical acclaim it garnered on publication, must have aged rather poorly. The book clearly began as a turgid, complex literary experiment that unfortunately yielded a (feminist, socialist, psychoanalytical, literary) theory-laden, self-conscious parable with wooden characters struggling mightily to fulfill their creator’s ambitions. The resulting story felt imprisoned by its own structure and was thus slow and unpleasant to read. Guilty of very similar sins was Aldous Huxley in his creation of Island, a utopian sequel to the excellent Brave New World. Again, theory and allegory barely animate two-dimensional characters and the ideology has aged very poorly. Dialogue was almost embarrassingly poor and some of the spirituality-related bromides were less comprehensible than my most dysfunctional Guaraní-language conversation.

Another more positive “event” in my recent reading was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I had become disenchanted by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in July 2006, but was ready to give Dostoevsky a chance, especially after receiving several recommendations of The Brothers. Though the epic tale of transgression, judgment, punishment, and redemption took me awhile to read my way through, I can’t recommend it enough to other readers.

I’ll save further commentary on The Brothers for its entry below and for my customary list of the 5-Star books of the last 50 I read, those masterpieces that stood out in terms of artistic achievement, readerly delight, or both:

The Untouchable (John Banville)
The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
The Good Earth (Pearl Buck)
American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
Beautiful Evidence (Edward Tufte)
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

A full 20% of the books I read in this recent group merited a rating of 5. These included, as usual, some critical and commercial blockbusters as well as some lesser-known works that I recommend most highly.

Though my efforts were often facilitated more by chance than design, I did manage to develop some continuing thematic discourses among the 150 books I’ve read as well as christen some new ones. Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat was my third (and least favorite) account of the Trujillo dictatorship. The Good Earth and Things Fall Apart complemented past reads in their description of life in rural, agricultural societies. Likewise, Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Spirit Catches You, The English Patient, and Middlesex captured feelings of cultural difference, dislocation, and blending familiar to me as a Peace Corps volunteer. Inflatable Pig, for better or for worse, is written about Paraguay and a character in Freedom briefly visits. Middlesex and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando both dealt with gender and sexual fluidity and indeterminacy; for fun, I read them back-to-back. Brooks’s trilogy, American Gods, The Year of the Flood, and Justin Cronin’s The Passage were all forays into beloved science fiction and fantasy realm.

In terms of black-and-white parameters, my taste in books has not changed much over time. Though I have progressively re-read fewer books and sought out fewer Anglophone authors, the following statistics have not changed terribly over the last 19 months:

Of the 150 books I have read to date,
8% were re-read,
Over two-thirds were written by male authors,
58% were written by Americans and 90% were written in English,
39% were written after the year 2000 and 97% were written after 1900,
7 out of 10 were novels and 2 out of 10 were non-fiction,
Almost one of every three was, in some way, postmodern,
Half came recommended,
63% were the first book I had read by the book’s author,
39% were page-turners, and

Every single book that I have read since beginning Peace Corps service was enjoyed, tolerated, or, occasionally, despised, in the form of a paper-and-ink book: a true book, and never a K----e or one of its brethren.

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Books 101-150
Books are listed as “Title (Author) comments”
*Indicates a book I re-read.
Unless otherwise noted, all books are listed in the order I read them.

101. The Untouchable (John Banville) This fictional account in the voice of one of the “Cambridge spies” – the former schoolmates who infiltrated British intelligence prior to and during the Second World War to spy for the Soviet Union – presents all the best of historical fiction. The characters are compelling and the setting conveys a historical period without being heavy-handed. The book’s protagonist is psychologically fascinating and, though flawed, sympathetic.
102. The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood) This sequel to Oryx and Crake, set in the same post-apocalyptic future, manages to be provocative and fascinating, if sometimes awkward in its occasional moral pedantry and Atwood’s made-up “hymns.” I hope a final book in the series follows.
103. The Glass Castle (Jeannette Wells) This successful journalist’s memoir of her childhood and adolescence spent surviving the shockingly negligent behavior of two narcissistic, selfish parents is engaging, if not terribly deep.
104. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje) The fragmented, impressionistic story of several lives coming together in an Italian villa at the end of the Second World War read like poetry slotted into a novel. I found it a little disappointing given its reputation.
105. Midnight Cowboy (James Leo Herlihy) Behind its sensual veneer, this bildungsroman portrays the paradox of its protagonist’s spiritual growth through his failure to become a “cowboy” hustler.
106. After the Quake (Haruki Murkami) Elegant, moving short stories dealing with a variety of psychological topics and featuring Murakami’s typical magical realism.
107. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates) Excellent portrayal of a relationship falling apart as a 1950s couple attempts to escape their unsatisfying suburban existence. To me, the outstanding elements are Yates’s natural and realistic portrayals of conversations and internal trains of thought.
108. Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer) A post-mortem of the life of Alex McCandless, whose decision to seek the path of asceticism and immersion in nature led to his death in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer is sympathetic to his subject, but I ultimately felt disenchanted with McCandless’s treatment of those who cared about him and his (to me) irresponsible ideals.
109. The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison) Morrison’s characteristic willingness to unapologetically and naturalistically portray her characters thinking and acting in ways that many authors hide or sensationalize enables her to portray this novel’s characters in a humanitarian, but honest way.
110. Island (Aldous Huxley) Some critics have classified this fictional portrayal of Huxley’s ideal society as the utopian counterpart to Brave New World. I found it incredibly disappointing. Every character spoke as though he or she were a pious, cranky Huxley on his soapbox. Plotting was incidental to the author’s pedantic aims. And worst, Huxley’s pet ideas in the realms of spirituality, health, political philosophy, and social planning have aged poorly. Written far later than Brave New World, Island seems unself-conscious and heavy-handed by comparison.
111. Surfacing (Margaret Atwood) Atwood’s story of a young woman reclaiming agency in her own life while investigating her father’s disappearance was, like other books of hers I have read, meticulously crafted and both intellectually and emotionally stimulating.
112. The Easter Parade (Richard Yates) A panorama of a New York woman’s life from the thirties to the early seventies. Though this novel, like Revolutionary Road, portrays the existential torments of suppressed middle class (sub)urbanites, I enjoyed reading The Easter Parade more; the plot was both less suspenseful and more organic. There were also a number of interesting parallels between its protagonist and Margaret Atwood’s from Surfacing.
113. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (Richard Yates) An excellent collection of short stories in which occasional moments of optimistic poignancy leaven Yates’s more typical portrayals of suffering and disillusionment.
114. Simple Murders and Good Bones (Margaret Atwood) Atwood’s short vignettes in this collection cover a lot of ground. Though sometimes trenchant or fanciful, they ultimately seemed too light. There was little to demand my attention in a sustained way.
115. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing) A mediocre novel of ideas with a few excellent passages and a number of almost unreadable ones. Lessing’s turgid, endless meditations on communism, psychoanalysis, and the relationships between men and women swamp the book’s plot and any attempts at characterization.
116. The Patron Saint of Liars (Ann Patchett) An unchallenging but emotionally gratifying story about biological and adopted family. Fun to read and well-written.
117. Numbers in the Dark and other Stories (Italo Calvino) A number of Calvino’s stories and other short works selected from his life works. I enjoyed the early “fables” more than the later, more conceptual short stories.
118. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) An epic tale of an aristocratic Russian family in the mid-nineteenth century that blew me away by dint of its psychological and spiritual profundity. Though sometimes exhausting, The Brothers is a masterpiece.
119. The Narcissism Epidemic (Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell) A timely if somewhat shallow and overly “pop” account of the social context of American narcissism. I thought the text and supporting graphics could have been better edited and more cohesive.
120. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) A fascinating novel written in the form of a fugue with six voices: the diary of a nineteenth century American notary traveling in the South Pacific, the letters of a sensuous and dissolute British composer living in Belgium between the two world wars, a crime thriller set in 1970s northern California, the early twentieth-century autobiography of a justifiably misanthropic British publisher, the recorded confessions of an enslaved Korean clone in the late twenty-first century, and the oral history of a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian goat-herder of the distant future. Each voice is fascinating when taken apart and together, they form an intricate, engaging puzzle.
121. McTeague (Frank Norris) I would recommend this novel set in late nineteenth century San Francisco both for its vivid, engaging setting and for the story’s historical value as a prescient piece of realist fiction that, to me, anticipated Steinbeck by several decades.
122. How to Raise a Jewish Dog (Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman) A silly “instructional” book about how to use guilt and praise to raise your dog as though it were a Jewish child.
123. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman) An intimate cultural anthropology that addresses the relationship between allopathic medicine and non-Western culture as it crystallized around an epileptic Hmong girl, her family and community, and her medical providers in 1980s California. Unusually moving and easy-to-read for non-fiction.
124. At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig* (John Gimlette) Though it is notable as the main instance of recent, English-language travel writing on Paraguay, Inflatable Pig disappoints deeply. Paraguay deserves better than to be represented to the outside world by the author’s confusing prose, Eurocentric obsession with expatriates, and his hodgepodge recombination of straight history and memoir. I first read this book before arriving in Paraguay and can now attest that many of Gimlette’s observations are as shallow and erroneous as they seemed before I had set foot in the country.
125. Running with the Demon (Terry Brooks) Another mediocre but titillating fantasy novel by Terry Brooks.
126. The Ghost Map (Steven Johnson) Though superficially a social history of cholera epidemics in nineteenth century London, Johnson’s page-turner unfolds into a meditation on urban sustainability , paradigm shifts in medical thought, and the nature of genius.
127. Freedom (Jonathan Franzen) One family’s peregrinations through the American nineteenth and twentieth century ground Franzen’s discourse on freedom, both positive and negative, and its consequences. The result is a profound psychological study and novel of ideas that even includes a brief trip to Paraguay!
128. A Knight of the Word (Terry Brooks) Sequel to Running with the Demon…also mediocre.
129. Angel Fire East (Terry Brooks) Third chapter in my second Terry Brooks trilogy of service. Angel Fire East actually overcame the two first books in the trilogy, approaching, at least, an artful style.
130. The Good Earth (Pearl Buck) A moving chronicle of a family’s fortunes in the years leading up to the industrialization and political transformation of China. The beautiful portrayals of the life of the rural poor were edifying and also struck a chord with my experiences in Paraguay.
131. The March of Folly (Barbara W. Tuchman) Tuchman identifies folly as obvious, recognized, and preventable action in contradiction to self-interest and details the folly inherent in the fall of Troy, the Papacy’s failure to preempt the Reformation, Britain’s loss of America, and the Vietnam War. A well-documented and well-reasoned take on political decision-making.
132. American Gods (Neil Gaiman) Superb fantasy writing that addresses the role of mythology in contemporary culture. One of the surprising triumphs of the book was the degree to which Gaiman overcomes shallow characterization, a frequent bane of the genre. Even minor and fantastic characters seem to act with natural motives and limitations.
133. Babbit (Sinclair Lewis) Disturbingly, Lewis’s satire of post-World War I conservativism and conformity remains relevant in today’s era of mass culture and material prosperity. Sometimes a little slow, but I became more involved as the eponymous protagonist began to implode.
134. The Feast of the Goat (Mario Vargas Llosa) A historically faithful retelling of the end of the Trujillo era. To me, Vargas Llosa’s documentary style provided a complete but sterile account less compelling than In the Time of the Butterflies or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
135. Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout) A technically interesting novel-in-stories that reveals the inner lives of the eponymous protagonist and her family and neighbors in a small town in Maine. The tone is muted, yet moving.
136. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell) An enchanting, character-driven historical novel set in a Dutch trading outpost off the coast of Nagasaki at the turn of the nineteenth century. Worthy both as a novel and a window into the medicine, economics, maritime culture, and politics of the time as practiced by both the Dutch and Japanese.
137. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) This brief, moving account of the rise and fall of a Nigerian tribal leader depicts pre-colonization customs as well as the social and personal dislocation attendant on subjugation by the British.
138. Life of Pi (Yann Martel) A novel of ideas that doubles as a story of spiritual and physical survival.
139. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt) The author’s charming and informative ethnography of contemporary Savannah, Georgia turns into an account of true crime after one of his contacts commits murder.
140. Beautiful Evidence (Edward Tufte) Tufte draws on texts from two millennia and dozens of technical and artistic fields to present the principles of effective visual representation. Reading this book changed the way I think about data, illustration, and visual communication.
141. number9dream (David Mitchell) I didn’t enjoy this novel of a young Japanese man’s quest for self-discovery in modern Tokyo as much as I liked Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Still, taken by itself, the story is well-written and the protagonist, sympathetic.
142. The Passage (Justin Cronin) I couldn’t put down this genre-busting, epic tale of survival, love, and mortality set in the western United States following a vampire apocalypse.
143. Hero (Perry Moore) Moore rewrites the young adult superhero novel with a gay teenager as his protagonist. Fun and light to read, this story is also important as a counternarrative to the homophobia typical of mainstream comic book discourse.
144. The Geography of Bliss (Eric Weiner) The author explores the possibility that human happiness may be determined by geographic and cultural setting. A combination of travelogue and pop psychology.
145. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami) A fascinating bifurcated tale. As the protagonist’s conscious mind narrates a dark crime mystery set in the dystopic near-future, his unconscious mind intercalates a tranquil story of a mirrored utopia set in a bucolic town at the “end of the world.” Murakami not only pulls off the required plotting, but also fills the tale with conceptually challenging ideas, three-dimensional characters, poetically beautiful prose, and compelling conflict. There’s even an understated political message for the finding.
146. Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides) Part Greek epic, Shandyean memoir, bildungsroman, American legend, and genealogy (both Nietzschen and biological), this stunning novel traces the family history and personal metamorphosis of Cal(liope), a male hermaphrodite raised as a girl in the suburban middle class. A perfect culmination of relevant and engaging themes, historical and scientific veracity, enjoyable and credible characters, and a plot with plenty of dizzying precipices.
147. Orlando (Virginia Woolf) Another sexually ambivalent epic, this one chronicling the unusually long and bisexual existence of Orlando, an English noble(wo)man whose youth, adolescence, and early adulthood stretch from the Elizabethan Era to modernity. Sometimes rather slow to read, the text is laced with incisive social commentary and humor that keep the reader engaged. The tale is also impressively progressive given its historical provenance.
148. The New Kings of Nonfiction (Ira Glass, ed.) An engaging collection – my favorite essay by far is David Foster Wallace’s meditation on right-wing talk radio. But why this title given that two of the contributors are women?
149. Native Speaker (Chang-Rae Lee) A gripping and humane drama that unflinchingly forces its characters and reader to consider the meaning of ethnic identity and nationality, especially through the lenses of language and physical presence. Beyond its political engagement, the story of a Korean-American private detective is also a humane and realistic story of the ambivalent relationships that abound in families.
150. Atonement (Ian McEwan) A story of transgression, punishment, and, yes, atonement, with World War II’s buildup, execution, and aftermath serving as the setting for each. Searing and tragic, but the tale’s eventual unfolding feels somewhat gimmicky.