Aleema Sa Libro

Today’s Post: I have read 100 books.

Fireworks exploded and the people of Prettyview downed endless bottles of cidra (hard cider) as I finished my one hundredth book of Peace Corps service – fittingly, it was Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. No, they were not celebrating. In a perversity that belongs in a Dilbert cartoon, my excessive pleasure reading is usually interpreted as “studying.” All the festivities were, of course, a part of arete (the holidays). Yes, Nochebuena and Navidad have arrived with their customary boatload of barbeque, gunfire, and relatives bused in from Ciudad del Este and Buenos Aires to celebrate with the family and ask me how I can bear to forego all the comodidades that they have grown accustomed to since leaving Prettyview.

It is harder for me to maintain my customary cloud of holiday humbug here in Paraguay because arete hardly feels like Christmas and New Year in the northern hemisphere. Really, it feels more like the 4th of July. First of all, the weather is hot and humid: the mid-90s with occasional downpours for weeks. Nobody wants to get anywhere near a fire and the only thing white about Christmas is the sun’s cyclopean eye from about seven in the morning until six or so in the afternoon. And besides, Prettyview is not a terribly observant town and nobody seemed interested in heading out to the nearby municipal seat for services. Customarily, families used to build elaborate pesevres (Nativity Scenes) complete with fruits and vegetables and mbocaya poty (palm flowers) and kids would travel around to pay homage to each one, receiving candy in exchange. But, thanks to global capitalism, that tradition is dying out, to be replaced by Christmas lights, artificial Christmas trees, and images of Papa Noel. Thanks, American economic and cultural hegemony!

The most important holiday traditions pertain to food. Normal Paraguayan party foods make an appearance: Asado (barbeque), Brahma (the national beer), sopa Paraguaya (corn bread trying to go on the Atkins Diet), gaseosa (soft drinks) mixed with boxed wine, and mandioca (could it be any other way?). But the two tastiest arete-specific foods deserve their own explanation. First, comes chipa guazu (the big chipa, which is what I might adopt as my nickname if I don’t eat less chipa my second year in Paraguay). The most diligent of farmers planted avati ky, a moist-kerneled corn, at the tail end of winter. It is just now ready for harvest and everybody wants to buy some in order to grind it up and mix it with pig fat, cheese, eggs, and onions – the principle ingredients in chipa guazu. The whole things is baked in the tatakua (wood oven) and comes out as a wettish bread-cake. Reminiscent of creamed corn, cornbread, grits, hominy, and, weirdly, potato kugel, yet none of these things, chipa guazu is the delight and, due to its health consequence, the bane of Peace Corps volunteers. What is chipa guazu missing? Nothing, except maybe alcohol and sugar. That is why we drink clérico, the second of my favorite Paraguayan holiday foods. Every family makes it differently, but the main ingredients are wine, gaseosa, cidra, and diced fruits (watermelon, melon, grapes, bananas, apples, etc.). If it weren’t so rude to avoid the pig or sheep freshly slaughtered to celebrate ñandejara (literally “our owner,” but can mean either the father or the son – I’m still uncertain about the holy spirit), I would just eat myself into a fat/sugar coma on clérico and chipa guazu alone.

Amid the gorging, Christmas Eve and Day, and later New Year’s and King’s Day (6 January) involve lots of visiting relatives, fireworks, weapons discharges, bathing in lukewarm arroyos and lagunas, and wholesale extortion on the part of Prettyview’s despensa owners. (Ojupima el precio means “The price has just gone up.”) Also Paraguayans celebrate Nochebuena and New Year’s Eve alike, staying up until midnight to welcome in the holiday. Like a good margarita, clérico can be helpful, making the giddy boredom more endurable and the resultant pyrotechnic ejaculations less frightening (Has Paraguay made me less neurotic? In some ways…I now know that the appropriate response to a pig urinating on your foot during lunch is to gently discipline it with said appendage while complimenting the hostess on the newness of her mandioca.)

But with the slow holiday work schedule, I have been having my own fiestas felices, ripping through books faster than a mita’I on asado. My second set of 50 books read in service provided ample delights and frustrations, which I will review now along with a few comments on the “first 100” books (that there may be a second!) read to date.

In an earlier post, I indentified five books (Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, The Cider House Rules, East of Eden, and White Teeth) to which I had awarded a top score of five points in my highly non-parametric and socially constructed Likert system. Perhaps too symmetrically, I add five more books from the second fifty to the list. These are: Collapse by Jared Diamond, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I deeply loved reading each of these books, but feel vaguely embarrassed that, like my previous favorites, each has met with extensive critical and/or commercial success in the broader world.

Despite my best intentions, I did encounter a few disappointments. In my attempts to read books by acclaimed authors whose works I had not read, I sampled Vineland (Thomas Pynchon) and Middlemarch (George Eliot). Both were disappointing. Middlemarch took me two weeks to wade through and left me feeling disdainful of the author and almost every one of her characters. Vineland was technically interesting, but didn’t leave me itching to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow. Tom Robbins disappointed me with Even Cowgirls get the Blues but redeemed himself a bit with Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Lynda Barry’s Cruddy shocked me without engaging me and the derivative page-turners of Philippa Gregory and Terry Brooks left me feeling like I’d eaten too much sugar. The bomb of this batch, A Road More or Less Traveled, is a travelogue of the Appalachian Trail. But I’ll let my reviews do the rest of the complaining.

My statistics continued to show disturbing sexist and Eurocentric trends: male authors outnumbered female authors two to one and only two books were translated into English from other languages. Of those, we can hardly count Thus Spoke Zarathustra as world literature. I did successfully push back my chronological threshold, reading two books (Zarathustra and Middlemarch) written in the nineteenth century. Though only 6% of books in the last fifty were re-read, a full 48% were written by authors whose work I had already read. Still, I made some great acquaintances, including Kobo Abe, Vladimir Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Jonathan Lethem, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, Chuck Palahniuk, and Sherman Alexie.

I continued to enjoy intentional and unintentional threads of continuity among the books I’ve read over the last fifteen months. Leah recommended The Woman in the Dunes after learning that one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, views Kobo Abe as one of his inspirations. I accidentally read Cruddy and The Lovely Bones one-after-the-other, getting my fill of dead adolescent girl narrators. Jackson’s Dilemma, Sons and Lovers, Of Human Bondage, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Middlemarch complemented my earlier glimpses into distinctly English concepts such as disentailments, “trade,” and endless anxiety over proposing to someone who you can’t stand but feel you must marry since 200 a year is not enough to buy your true love sufficient riding outfits. Zadie Smith and P.D. James’s books, on the other hand, provided a more contemporary view of the English. Jared Diamond, Stephen Kellert, and Wendell Barry spoke in dialogue on environmental issues. Nietzsche’s existential advice differed greatly from that of Victor Frankl. Finishing the Lord of the Rings after many false starts during adolescence gave me a sense of accomplishment, although I still can’t stand Tolkien’s poetic interludes. LoTR is also one of four page-turning trilogies I’ve read in Paraguay, along with those by Stieg Larsson, Terry Brooks, and Philip Pullman. Stranger in a Strange Land paralleled my early experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer and “alien.” Like several books of the first fifty I read, My Ántonia, The Lacuna, and House of Sand and Fog also caused me to reflect further on cultural difference.

I’m already well into “the second 100” (number 104 may be read and entered into my spreadsheet by the time you read these words), so without further commentary, I will present my brief comments on books 51 through 100 and again thank all those current and past Paraguayan PC volunteers who have kept our lending library vital.

“The Second Fifty”
Books are listed as “Title (Author) comments”
*Indicates a book I re-read.

51. The Hobbit* (J.R.R. Tolkien) I appreciated Tolkien’s prose more than I did when I was in middle school. Specifically, he goes for maximum detail when it counts while eliding the insignificant.
52. Apocalypse’s Children (Terry Brooks) I read this gripping post-apocalyptic fantasy novel in one day! The writing is so-so, but the characters come alive. Much of the action is set in Seattle and it was fun to recognize parts of Downtown in the setting. Suspiciously reminiscent of some elements of Garth Nix’s Schade’s Children.
53. Collapse* (Jared Diamond) One of my all-time favorite books, I first read it in January 2006. Peace Corps service in an agricultural society definitely enhanced my second reading. I still love the book, but why does Diamond refer to plantation forestry as “agroforestry”?
54. A Road More or Less Traveled (Stephen Otis and Colin Roberts) Two Tennessean high school teachers hike the entire Appalachian Trail. I enjoyed learning more about the AT, but found the writing style in want of editing and the authors’ cultural naïveté offensive.
55. Primary Colors (Anonymous) Titillating and presumably informative about real-world politics. Libby Holden’s character is as much fun to read as Kathy Bates’s performance of her is to watch.
56. Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence) As promised in the scholarly introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers was both less torrid and better-written. The vivid psychological narrative left me feeling that Lawrence’s autobiographical protagonist was pathologically narcissistic.
57. The Toughest Indian in the World (Sherman Alexie) A beautiful collection of short stories dealing with, among other things, identity, grief, and the nature of love. I couldn’t put it down.
58. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche) Nietzsche’s answer to the Bible. Though Zarathustra’s weaknesses include repetitiveness and lack of clarity, the novel-treatise makes up for them through its wealth of shocking aphorisms and iconoclastic philosophy. I felt that books 1 and 4 were more engaging than books 2 and 3.
59. Diary (Chuck Palahniuk) A disturbing page-turner that, while musing on the nature of family and personal choice, also contains instructive tidbits on anatomy, handwriting, art history, etc.
60. Station Island (Seamus Heaney) The second book in a collection of Heaney’s poetry I found. I especially enjoyed, in addition to the eponymous poem, “Making Strange,” “The Birthplace,” and “Changes.”
61. The Boleyn Inheritance (Philippa Gregory) Another page-turning Tudor novel! This sequel to The Other Boleyn Girl (which described the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn) engagingly chronicles the fates of the latter three of Henry VIII’s wives.
62. House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III) Though the characters were engaging, I found this novel too unpleasantly suspenseful to enjoy fully. I was constantly on edge.
63. In the Name of Salomé (Julia Alvarez) Not as well-written or compelling as In the Time of the Butterflies, this fictionalized account of a historical Dominican poet was disappointing.
64. Cruddy (Lynda Barry) This novel was more shocking than skillfully written. For me, its biggest failure is characters who are so incredibly damaged and/or deranged as to become unbelievable.
65. Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) This novel managed to be both beautiful and suspenseful at the same time. Dealing with what could become clichés, Sebold draws original meaning out of the plot and characters.
66. No Logo (Naomi Klein) Klein addresses the rise of the brand, addressing its implications for political activism, labor rights, environmental impacts, psychology, art, education, and global economics. Like The Shock Doctrine, it is comprehensive and instructive, occasionally bordering on tedious.
67. The Book of Ruth (Jane Hamilton) This understated family drama explores the effects of suffering on the human psyche and their passage from generation to generation.
68. Choke (Chuck Palahniuk) A super-disturbing page-turner about abusive parents, addiction, and how to be a good person. Again, I serendipitously paired books; the narrator had a lot in common with the narrator of The Book of Ruth.
69. Jackson’s Dilemma (Iris Murdoch) A muted and enjoyable human drama about contemporary British socialites sorting out their romantic lives. Interesting to me in that the characters seemed lifted out of a D.H. Lawrence novel (shall we dine at the city or the country house?) but were living in the late twentieth century.
70. Watership Down (Richard Adams) An uplifting, Narnia-esque story about personified rabbits that, weirdly enough, effectively deals with the themes of freedom and bondage, courage, and dignity.
71. 1st to Die (James Patterson) A page-turner crime novel with chapters that average two pages in length. Like reading “Law and Order.” Not great, but fun to read and aware of its own limits.
72. The Elves of Cintra (Terry Brooks) The second book in the “Genesis of Shannara” series. More mediocre but gripping fantasy writing. It feels like Terry Brooks wrote a 1200 page monster and arbitrarily split it up into three books.
73. The Gypsy Morph (Terry Brooks) The third book in the “Genesis of Shannara” series. I wanted to finish the trilogy, but felt that the dénouement was ultimately unsatisfying.
74. Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) A shockingly beautiful novel set in a barricaded mansion following a botched political kidnapping. Patchett portrays the characters in with sympathetic, nuanced humanity and charts the new territories of love, art, and language they explore.
75. The Fellowship of the Ring* (J.R.R. Tolkien) Entertaining, but I still can’t bear the poetry and songs.
76. The Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien) After a few false starts, I finally finished the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Ents and Sam’s imitations of Smeagol were especially gratifying.
77. The Haw Lantern (Seamus Heaney) The third book in a collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and my favorite so far. The celebrated long poem “Clearances,” written in memory of the author’s mother, was especially moving, as was the shorter eulogy “Two Quick Notes.” Most of my other favorite poems belonged to a conceptually interesting and well-written group of allegorical poems, in which an imagined location stands in for a non-spatial idea, such as conscience, faith, or the idea of allusion itself! Many were engagingly written as dispatches or reports. Favorites from this batch of poems included: “From the Frontier of Writing,” “Parable Island,” “From the Republic of Conscience,” “Stone Verdicts,” “From the Land of the Unspoken,” “The Wishing Tree,” and “The Mud Vision.”
78. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins) I like Robbins’s ideas and themes, but find his writing to be sloppy and uneven. I understand that there is a relationship between his embrace of the messy joys and freedoms of life and his novels’ structures, but that only excuses so much.
79. The Unsettling of America (Wendell Berry) Berry’s collection of essays on industrial agriculture and its relationships with culture, spirituality, psychology, etc. poise an ideal of low-technology, conscientious, limited-government communitarianism against the dominant discourse of quick fixes, ever-greater productivity, and massive business or government solutions to environmental problems. I am in great sympathy with his ideas, but am also forced to report that his writing is often redundant, overly general, and pedantic, and takes the form of “preaching to the choir” or a scolding depending on whether or not you agree with him.
80. The Favoured Child (Philippa Gregory) I did not find this historical tale (set in an eighteenth century manor) to be as strong as Gregory’s Tudor novels. A page-turner, but lacking in substance.
81. My Ántonia (Willa Cather) A concise and beautiful portrait of first-generation European pioneer families of the Midwest. It was a relief to read this well-structured, elegant novel.
82. The Girl with the Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier) An elegant story with many delights, including excellent verbal depictions of normally visual processes, such as creating and viewing paintings.
83. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole) Ignatius J. Reilly is inimitable as a protagonist. His arcane political beliefs and bizarre personality enable Toole to portray New Orleans and Reilly’s family and associates in a lucid, satirical light.
84. The Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien) I felt that this final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was as good as or better than The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien’s placement of the dramatic climax in the middle of the book was refreshing to me.
85. Perfection (Julie Metz) A gossipy page-turner about the author’s pathologically narcissistic husband’s death and the aftermath. This memoir was fun to read, if not terribly challenging.
86. Middlemarch (George Eliot) I did not enjoy reading Eliot’s account of the romantic and economic tribulations of the middle- and upper-class residents of a rural English town; the novel’s one-dimensional characters struggled with problems no longer relevant to contemporary readers.
87. The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver) Unable to see how Kingsolver could top her previous works, I was hesitant to start The Lacuna. But she manages, again, to produce an intricately structured novel of appealing, passionate characters tackling themes of political and historical importance. What amazes me is that she can still do so without seeming overly preachy or maudlin. Addressing leftist political theory, homosexuality, and Frida Kahlo through a postmodern, epistolary format in a blend of English and Spanish, The Lacuna was basically the kind of book that Kingsolver would have written if, as I have often dreamed, she had offered to write me a customized novel.
88. Vineland (Thomas Pynchon) I was impressed with Pynchon’s rendering of a narrative voice that seemed to be speaking directly out of the culture of northern California, former hippies-turned-government informants/societal dropouts/ninjas in the Reagan years. However, his unsympathetic characters, stream of consciousness structure, and cynical perspective did not appeal to me. Vineland reminded me of depressing Tom Robbins without many chapter breaks.
89. Iberia (James A. Michener) Michener drew on several decades of travel in Spain to compile this non-fiction account describing its major regions and customs. The profusion of edifying histories and anecdotes ultimately make the book worth reading, although, as was the case with the Covenant, its sprawling self-indulgence sometimes makes for boredom. Michener’s social and political commentary has also aged poorly over forty years. The photos and routine cameos of famous people Michener met are bonuses.
90. Gun, with Occasional Music (Jonathan Lethem) Skillfully blending science fiction, noir detective drama, and post-apocalyptic forecasting, Lethem enticed me to keep reading. I couldn’t say if this was because I wanted most to solve the mystery, explore his bizarre posited future, or discover the truth behind strange creations such as “babyheads,” “make,” and “the Office.”
91. Of Human Bondage (Somerset Maugham) Compelling bildungsroman about a young British man. I found the protagonist imperfect but honest, and thus sympathetic.
92. The Best American Short Stories 2009 (ed., Alice Sebold) I found these stories more accessible than some of those in The New American Book of Short Stories.
93. The Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe) An elegant, psychological novel. His style, in turn, reminded me of Kafka and Saramago. Published in the 1960s, The Woman feels like it could have been written fifty years before or after it actually was.
94. Devices and Desires (P.D. James) An engaging but unremarkable murder mystery set in the English countryside against the backdrop of a contentious nuclear power plant.
95. Tooth and Claw (T.C. Boyle) This collection of short stories is loosely structured around themes of humanity’s descent from animals, survival of the fittest, and humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Many of the protagonists are down on their luck.
96. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (Tom Robbins) My favorite Robbins book of the three I’ve read. To me, the narrator spoke with a more authentic voice than most of his protagonists.
97. Seeing Things (Seamus Heaney) Fourth and final book in a collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. I especially enjoyed “Field of Vision,” “Glanmore Revisited,” “The Rescue,” and poems viii, xii, xviii, xxi, xxv, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxviii, and xxxix of “Squarings.”
98. A Postmodern Reader (eds., Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon) A dense, scholarly collection of essays on postmodernism, and especially its relationship with modernism and its manifestations in academia and politics. Readers already familiar with postmodern theory could skip the first two sections and move ahead to the more interesting essays in the latter two.
99. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) A thrilling psychological portrait of an unrepentant lover of “nymphets” which both attempts to expiate its speaker while also telling a story of desire and loss.
100. Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein) This science fiction classic posits the appearance of a Martian on Earth. Beneath the trappings, it’s really a story about social psychology, mind, spirituality, and love. I found the first two-thirds to be better written than the last third.

Tajaiporavo

Today’s Post: Let’s Vote

After trying to find a better way to begin this post, I will just start off by saying that in many ways, politics, both domestic and international, constitute the bête noire of Peace Corps service. I could be guilty of exaggeration, but to me, there are few other issues so central to who we are as volunteers but so little discussed.

Perhaps this is for good reason. In 1971, President Nixon separated the Peace Corps from the U.S. Department of State and in 1981, President Carter made the agency completely independent by executive order. As a volunteer today, I can conveniently tell Paraguayans that the Peace Corps is managed separately from American diplomatic or military endeavors in their country. Our office is separate from the Embassy and it is forbidden for us ever to serve in military intelligence in our countries of service. This is critical. From its inaugural year (1961), the program´s volunteers have been accused of participating in intelligence activities on behalf of our government. The bright line between the U.S. Peace Corps and other agencies of the federal government operating internationally permits me to sincerely note that my only objectives are those mandated by the Peace Corps: technical assistance and intercultural exchange.

Volunteers are also asked to refrain from espousing domestic political views in any official capacity – thus the disclaimers that many of us attach to our blogs. The institutional atmosphere at Peace Corps is studiously apolitical. And why should it be different from any other government agency? Apoliticism steers the Peace Corps away from corruption and ideological programming and creates an environment that is comfortable for American volunteers and staff regardless of their politics.

Likewise, we are instructed, for very good reasons, to avoid Paraguayan politics. Political partisanship is forbidden. Our invitations to serve in Paraguay even suggested that we leave at home all garments of the colors of the two major political parties: red for the Colorados and royal blue for the Liberales. Volunteers serving in 2008, when sitting President Lugo was elected, recall heightened security measures surrounding his election. He was the first Liberal elected since the 35-year reign of Colorado dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and nobody was quite sure how the notoriously finicky first handover of power from one long-dominant party to its rival would turn out. Staying clear of Paraguayan politics makes us safer as volunteers and, less importantly, also makes us more effective. It is critical that volunteers be able to live and work with Colorados and Liberales alike. And besides, the salient issues of Paraguayan political party identification are so foreign to the interests of most volunteers, it would seem pointless to pick sides.

Yet the studied apoliticism of Peace Corps and its volunteers, though sensible, is, to me, a sort of winking, willful silence. Let’s put aside the amusing (to me) reality that volunteer political affiliation rates probably approximate those of Nancy Pelosi’s district more than John Boehner’s. It comes down to the universally fraught connection between policy and politics. The U.S. Peace Corps is a body authorized and governed by U.S. policy. Officials at each level of the extensive hierarchy stretching from the agency’s director in Washington down to country-level Associate Peace Corps Directors (APCDs; they are our closest superordinates as volunteers) promulgate policies directing volunteers how to do our work. These policies include necessary banalities such as safety and vacation regulations as well as the potentially more controversial rules on, for instance, condom distribution (we can’t give them out, but we can be present while someone else does, as long as we have lived in our communities for at least six months). Behind every such policy lurks politics.

I am being too obvious by discussing condoms and contraception. Volunteers’ support of condom use and family planning would probably be contested by many Americans and host country nationals alike. But what about the more subtle, but still relentlessly political questions behind our priorities as volunteers?

Formally, I am a volunteer in the Agroforestry Extension project of the Environmental sector of the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Main goals for my sector include: capacitation of farmers to improve soil management, utilization of agroforestry systems, and preservation of threatened ecosystems; working with committees, governments, and other social groups to enhance their sustainability; and consciousness-building aimed both at students and their teachers. I happen to think that all of these goals are worthwhile, but the discourse of sustainability that underlies them is not universally accepted. At its best, sustainability takes the form of sustainable development, which enhances quality of life as well as environmental conservation. But perhaps struggling families in my community don’t need more trees or environmental education. Maybe they need income, job skills, and industrialization to help them achieve the basic levels of education and healthcare that many of us take for granted in the United States. Perhaps my warnings about climate change and habitat destruction are a red herring, deterring community members from spending time and energy enhancing their quality of life in other ways.

Decades of ineffective development work in Paraguay and many other nations beg further questions. Volunteers in my sector as well as others (Agriculture and Community Economic Development, for example) often work with communities to develop local industries or commercialize agricultural products. By doing so, are we simply importing capitalism and dependence into areas that formerly have been self-sufficient, if impoverished? Are we inviting unintended consequences of increased pollution and consumerism and eroding traditional ways of life? I am currently working with a farmers’ committee in my community to petition funds for mixed plantations of eucalyptus, citrus, and native timber species. My goal is to encourage committee members to convert degraded farm and pasture land into plantations. But what if some want to cut down native, second-growth forest to plant the new trees? I won’t be able to stop them.

I believe deeply in my work as a Peace Corps volunteer and in the models of development work espoused by the Peace Corps in Paraguay. I think that if development work can be done well and sustainably, the type of small-scale, sustainable projects that we are encouraged to promote here are the closest I’ve ever seen people getting to that elusive goal. But this certainty doesn’t erase the fact that the objectives we promote and the policies that govern us are produced through politics and operate in a Paraguayan political context.

Peace Corps work runs afoul of Paraguayan politics surprisingly little. Imagine what Americans would say if a foreign government sent volunteers to poor or underserved communities in the U.S. to support environmental conservation, community organizing, comprehensive sexual education, and political transparency. On the contrary, Paraguayans are generally “tranquilo” about our presence here. I am happy to say that most people in Prettyview support the work I am doing and view it as important, at least to my face. Nurses, teachers (profesores), local NGO representatives, and other community leaders have often been among the most supportive. But other volunteers tell stories of entrenched political machines that resent interference and appeals for transparency, or, at the least, of corruption and lack of interest on the part of municipal governments and other institutions. My assessment is that the Peace Corps in Paraguay has done a good job of operating in a way that is aligned with dominant political currents in the country, rather than fighting for inappropriate changes. If this is a conscious objective of the Peace Corps in Paraguay or elsewhere, then it is a deeply political one.

This brings me to the political events of recent months, an eclipse with the United States and Paraguay playing the roles of the celestial bodies. In the first days of November, both countries held major elections. In the United States, the 2010 midterm elections brought into play every seat in the House of Representatives, 37 Senate seats, 38 governorships, and 46 state legislatures, and many municipal positions. Paraguay’s system is somewhat different. The President, Senators, Diputados (like Representatives), Governors, Mayors, and City Councilors all serve terms of five years. Unlike the American system, where positions in the Senate as well as state and municipal government are up for election somewhere in the country every two years, Paraguayan elections are nationally synchronized. In 2008, all currently serving politicians above the municipal level were elected. There have not been elections since then, and this year marked elections in every part of Paraguay for lists headed by an intendente (mayor) and including aligned candidates for consejal (city councilor). In 2013, officials at the level of the departamento (like the state) and the national government will be elected.

Governance of most municipalidades in Paraguay was contested by a candidate from the conservative Colorado party and the Liberal party. In some cases, candidates from smaller parties such as the liberal Frente Guasu and/or conservative Movimiento Patria Querida joined the fray. The parties’ primaries occurred around the time that American primaries did earlier this winter (or summer, in the North). In some municipalities, the various progressive parties fought it out, so that some municipalities had no Liberal candidate and all of the leftist voters were united under the banner of an aligned party, which fielded a consensus candidate.

Also unlike U.S. elections, Paraguayan municipal elections are organized into lists. Voters select a list, headed by a candidate for mayor. If the winner carries a large majority, a commensurate number of councilors from his or her list will serve with her. There is no voting for individual consejales.

U.S. and Paraguayan elections were a mixed bag for me. I’ll be circumspect and say that I was happy with the outcome in Prettyview, where the protégé of the current, unresponsive mayor was defeated by his challenger from the other major party. In a Jerry Brown move, the new intendente actually held the job for a term some years ago. I plan on making a trip into the municipality (about nine km from Prettyview) to formally present myself later this year. I was less happy with the outcome of American elections. Though my paper absentee ballot from Maricopa County never arrived, I did get to vote. By dint of numerous applications, hours of internet time, and some costly postage, I both mailed a federal write-in absentee ballot (printed off the internet) and faxed in an Arizona ballot delivered to my e-mail inbox in an unexpected eucatastrophe on Election Day. My receipt of an e-mail confirming the ballot’s tabulation by the Maricopa County Elections Office was cold comfort: not a single partisan candidate I supported won his or her election. My new representative in the House made waves prior to the election by claiming that our current president is the “worst president in history.” Move over Buchanan, Hoover, and all the Gilded Age executives in chief! At least hunting didn’t become a constitutional right in Arizona – another minor consolation.

So ends another political season and my musings on the hidden politics of Peace Corps service. I did do everything I could leading up to the Paraguayan and American elections to encourage my neighbors in Prettyview and my fellow volunteers to vote. Even when we don’t like how elections turn out, nothing could be more important in terms of our responsibilities as citizens. Often to the detriment of our civic life, modern democracies frequently require, much less ask, so little of us. And there are many, including participants in the demagogic Tea Party, who believe even less in the old standards of civic virtue. My attitude is that we should vote “early and often” while it’s a duty permitted us.

La tekove ha la mano

Today’s Entry: Life and Death

1.

I woke up at 5:30 one morning several weeks ago to the sound of the town church bell ringing continuously. This was new to me. Normally, the bell only rings to announce Sunday morning services or a surprise visit from the local pa’i (priest). I didn’t find out why the church bell had been rung so early until I ran into my 17 year-old neighbor crying in her front yard. A young man from Prettyview, whose brother is one of my neighbor’s colegio classmates, had been killed in Ciudad del Este the night before. His body had been brought home to Prettyview early the next morning.

2.

Death is one of the stations of life that I haven’t had much cause to experience yet. My father’s parents have both passed away, but I had lived across the country from them my whole life and was not present at either of their funerals. My mother’s parents, who I am closer to, are still alive and I have been lucky enough never to have had a close relative or friend die prematurely. Therefore, the events that unfolded last month in Prettyview were the first time I had closely experienced death as an adult.

For a few reasons, I was fairly involved in the various death rituals. The 20 year-old who was killed in a motorcycle accident (the leading cause of mortality in Paraguay) was the brother of Miguel, my fourth grade buddy who hangs out at my house and helps me in the garden. Miguel is very interested in planting trees and really won my heart over when, looking through a Time magazine I gave him, he pointed at a picture of Jake Gyllenhal and commented Ha ha’e katu la protagonista (And he is, maybe, the protagonist). His family also lives close to me. Even though Prettyview is a small town, it definitely is split into neighborhoods. Especially since women generally don’t leave their homes much, the relationships between neighbors are usually quite strong. I should also admit that I participated in part for the somewhat shameful reason that I was curious and wanted to immerse myself more deeply in the communal observance of death than I had done previously in Prettyview. (I was frustrated at the beginning of this year by language problems – I couldn’t understand what was going on and when it was happening). And finally, I wasn’t the only person eager to show up and support the family of the deceased. This was undoubtedly a tragic death, and Prettyview seemed to respond much more strongly than when the elderly or the sickly have passed away.

3.

The inevitable aging of my grandparents and other family and friends have made me think a lot about death, and specifically the difference between a sad death and a tragic one. I hope that all deaths are sad for at least someone. But not all deaths are tragic. Though we often forget it, dying is a part of life. If we have had enough of life, either in quantity, quality, or both, leaving it does not need to be tragic. But Prettyview’s most recent death was a tragic one.

4.

Life in Prettyview begins in the local Puesto de Salud (Health Post) and very quickly gets sanctioned by a baptism and guarded by godparents and, typically, lots of siblings, aunts and uncles, and extended family. When life ends, the first step is the vela or velorio – the wake. The body of the deceased is prepared and placed in his or her coffin and guarded for the day prior to the funeral. Somebody must stay with the body at all times, and, during the daylight hours, dozens of people may be present to mourn, comfort or distract relatives, and watch over the casket.

The next morning, the family and mourners proceed to the cemetery. Prettyview is lucky to have its own in a pretty, sparsely populated area on the outskirts of town. Cemeteries, even those in poor, rural areas, seem more opulent and elaborate here than their counterparts in the United States. Families often have a mausoleo, a brick building ranging in size from that of a small doghouse to a large crypt reminiscent of those that wealthy and ancient American families build. The houses are all plastered and painted in different colors. Cemeteries are much more colorful and, I think, more beautiful, than our somber ones. When a person dies, the family mausoleum is dug up from behind for the burial and then plastered over later.

5.

Death is hard to negotiate in another country for many reasons, including language barriers. I had to learn the Guaraní for “my condolences” (Chemba’e mbyasy). I also learned that the Guaraní word for “to bury” is ñoty, which is deployed normally to mean “to plant.” The familiarity of the term made me feel incredibly sad when I was invited to go with Miguel’s family to plant his brother in the ground.

6.

After a short service and burial at the funeral, family and neighbors go home and prepare for the ñembo´ehape (prayer gathering). This custom, called the novenario in Spanish and observed in many other Spanish-speaking cultures, begins the day after the funeral in Paraguay. Every day for eight days, mourners gather around 4:30 or 5:00 at the home of the deceased’s family to pray. In Prettyview, most people arrive early and sit in circles. Men and women are usually apart, with kids of various ages in their own small groups. The family often sits on their porch, crying or talking. Behavior for others is often much more lax than an American funeral. Small children may play games or sports and adults may laugh or gossip. Of course, everyone tererés. I think that this is in some ways a courtesy to the family, a way to give them insularity and privacy – and perhaps some levity – in their grief.

At the appointed hour, everyone files into a room where an altar composed of many steps leading up to a photo of the deceased is displayed. The steps are usually covered in cloth, candles, artificial flowers, photos, religious artifacts, statues, etc. A cross from the mausoleum is also present. The mourners begin by singing a religious song and then, led by an appointed cantor, move through a set litany of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. I stand in the back, clasp my hands, and remain silent. After the prayers have ended, the mourners return to their chairs and the family passes out small cookies and candies to each person present. On the ninth day of the novenario, the prayers are said closer to midday and the family feeds everyone a big meal. It is not unusual to feed hundreds of mourners in Prettyview, a town of no more than 800.

Following the last ñembo´ehape, the mourners take the metal cross from the altar and convey it back to the mausoleum, where it is shut into the front doors or windows of the structure. This is the end of the death rituals for neighbors, but it is customary for some families to continue mourning for months or years. Certain colors of clothes, playing of music, and other expressions of happiness are forbidden for periods of time that vary with each person’s relationship to the deceased. Miguel is not allowed to wear blue, green, or yellow for six months.

7.

This recent death in Prettyview was, for me, the occasion of some of the most unalloyed human suffering I have ever seen with my own two eyes. No parents should have to bury a child in their twenties, and no sibling should have to say goodbye to a brother or sister so young. Even though I had never met the young man who died, I cried thinking about how I would feel if my own twenty-one year-old brother were to pass away.

I won’t discuss all that happened at the wake, funeral, and novenario out of respect for the family involved. However, one big difference was the acceptance of loud screaming and crying. In the United States, even very distraught family members attempt to “hold themselves together” when a loved one dies. Our culture seems to glorify a few silent, controlled tears. The wild keening and moaning alongside neighborly chatting and gossipping I witnessed here seemed to be much more honest and cathartic than the way Americans often comport themselves at funerals – a muted anguish for almost everyone involved.

8.

It is Spring now in Prettyview. The vegetation is budding and sprouting, with almost indecent growth after it rains. Everyone is involved in the planting of summer’s mandioca, peanuts, corn, and beans – and, with some encouragement from the local Peace Corps volunteer, green manures and trees. It is natural and clichéd to think about life renewing itself at this time. Yet coming into contact with death in Paraguay has in some ways made this time more special for me. It brings to mind one of my favorite of Hannah Arendt’s incidental comments, her definition of mortality in The Human Condition as movement ´´along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.´´

Che Peteiha Ary Paraguaype

Today’s Post: My first year in Paraguay

Did you know that the word for “inevitable” in Spanish is inevitable? This is one of the discoveries I made today while playing my favorite language game: extend your Spanish vocabulary by exploiting Latin cognates! If you are a shameless know-it-all and your English vocabulary and Spanish grammar are good enough, you can play as well. The translation of sentences such as “postmodern discourse offends my sense of the linear progress of history” may seem daunting at first, but you don’t really need a dictionary to grind out El discurso postmoderno ofende mi sentido del progreso lineal de la historía. How learned you will sound! And even if you err and say linear instead of lineal like I did when I first translated the sentence, most listeners will understand you. No matter if occasional mistakes, such as relevante instead of pertinente, occur. This strategy, the linguistic equivalent of watering down the milk, can be very effective.

But what’s truly inevitable is this blog entry, a retrospective on my first year in Paraguay.

I left Arizona on 22 September 2009 and arrived in Asunción via Miami and Sao Paolo two days later. From the 24th until 11 December, I lived with my wonderful host family in a suburb between the towns of Guarambaré and Itá while being programmed for optimal Peace Corps service. I’ve already written about what happened during these first months: cultural adjustment, intensive language class, and technical training. Looking back, some of the most important aspects of training included building friendships with the other agroforesters and G-mates, putting together the rudimentary building blocks of Guaraní, and dealing with social malfunctions in a supportive and insular, if gossipy, environment. I fondly remember filling macetas with my host dad at his nursery, 5:30 AM matéhape while watching Maitei Paraguay (a Guaraní-language news program), baking apple pies for our DIY Thanksgiving, giving and receiving back rubs during recess, eating my first bus chipa, and being told that when Brian and I walked to class together, we looked like a mother hen and her pollito, respectively. Less enchanting were the multiple-egress stomach flus, hours of as-of-yet-uninterpretable Guaraní small talk, días de práctica, and PACA tools (if you know what the last two items in this list are, you know too much). But our group made it to be sworn in and on 15 December, I left Asunción for Prettyview.

Paraguayan volunteers are supposed to spend our first three months in our new communities living with host families. I’ll be frank and admit that I moved out on my own a month and a half after moving to Prettyview. “Why, Jacobo, would you flaunt the rules in this way?” you might ask. The answer: constipation. The month and a half I spent with three host families, including some I liked, was definitely the hardest part of Peace Corps service for me. Privacy and control over eating, exercise, hygiene, etc. shrunk to a minimum. And, unable to secretly feed myself fiber like I did during training, I began to feel, well, rather uncomfortable. I had a few bowel movements in late January that deserve indictment by the International Criminal Court. I did get to build some relationships that have proven among my strongest in Prettyview, but I ended up wishing that I had just lived with one family for my whole “three” months instead of switching families every two weeks, as we were encouraged to do during training. But, like any policy, the PC Paraguay rule about host families can’t be perfect for everyone. And that is why I decided to bend it.

A few days before my 24th birthday, I moved into my own house. Thus began a significantly more comfortable period from February through late May. I finished visiting all of the households in Prettyview and tentatively began my work as a volunteer. I started teaching 5th grade every week and soon added 4th and 7th grade classes. I built my garden and did my first large-scale citrus grafting. I tried to get involved with the three local farmers’ committees and a Spanish NGO that does development work in the region. I planted my first five viveros (tree nurseries) and vaccinated some chickens. Still, work felt slow, inefficient, and aimless. I wasn’t sure what projects to focus on and never really felt busy or productive. I also lacked a lot of self-confidence. But socially, I was very happy. I continued to deepen my friendships and make new ones, especially through work, holidays, and sharing food. By the time my parents came to visit, I felt settled in Prettyview.

After getting back from my vacation in mid-June, I began my current Peace Corps epoch: something like “maturity.” I have been very busy this winter and spring, with a recently completed English class, sex education classes with a local nurse, and ad hoc lessons with other grades supplementing my normal teaching. I kept on vaccinating chickens and transplanted trees out of my first viveros. Prompted by an in-service training I attended with my contact, I started a series of gardening extension talks with each of the farmers’ committees. The warm weather and my extensive seed gathering since I arrived in Prettyview have also enabled me to establish fifteen more viveros (with another few on the way this week – it rained and the moon is in the right phase for tree planting). This is my favorite Peace Corps project: planting tree seeds with families in order to produce seedlings that can ultimately populate agroforestry systems or plantations. The arrival of spring has also been an opportunity to plant green manures with farmers as they put in their first summer crops.

This brings me to the present. Work is satisfying and often complicated, with too many opportunities for me to take advantage of them all. Some of my shorter term projects, like the English class and growing broccoli in the colegio garden, have wrapped up successfully, increasing my senses of self-efficacy and self-competence. I cherish my friends and “family” in Prettyview, who come close to fighting each other for the chance to have me over for tereré or a meal. I get to communicate with my American family and friends plenty through phone calls, letters, and e-mail, which makes being apart easier to bear. The other agroforesters and my friends in other sectors have also made for a supportive community when pigs break into the garden and then classes are canceled for “Day of the Child.” Contrary to my pre-service fears, I actually have a dating life, even if nobody in Prettyview knows about it.

Looking back on the last year helps me to understand how “right” it is for me to be where I am now. Living in rural Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer is the fulfillment of some of my lifelong dreams. Most of all, it brings to mind the picture book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, which was my favorite bedtime story until my mom perfected her interpretation of Marcy from It´s the Easter Beagle, Charley Brown! (you had to have been there). Miss Rumphius is the story of a girl who decides that she needs to do three things in her life: travel the world, live by the sea, and make the world a better place. As she matures into an adult and then an active senior, she travels all over, lives in a house by the sea, and overcomes a back injury before deciding that, to make the world a better place, she will spread lupine seeds all over her town. Yes, her goal is ecologically problematic and raises critical questions about invasive species, as dealt with in a previous blog post. But I met the eponymous Miss Rumphius at a young age, when spreading lupine seeds in order to beautify one’s town seemed like a great way to improve the world. So let’s put aside question of “benevolent spinster or eco-terrorist?”

My feeling of belonging in Seattle did once or twice made me think of “the lupine lady,” for isn’t a sound just an extension of the sea? But it wasn’t until I’d lived in Paraguay for awhile that I understood how much I had always hoped to live up to Miss Rumphius’s example and to what extent I am doing so now. It all came together when I was standing outside my friend Nato’s field, inspecting the miniature parcel of green manures that his wife and I had sown together in April. The rows of palmate leaves produced white flowers in the winter and have now set succulent seeds, which we’ll harvest to plant next year once they have dried out. The species of green manure is, of course, white lupine.

When I think about the year ahead of me, I have the best possible wish, which is to want more of the same. I suspect that familiar challenges – attendance problems, organizational inefficiency, corruption, poor planning, and linguistic or cultural barriers – will continue to obstruct my plans. And I’m sure that some new obstacles will raise their heads. But I feel that these obstacles can be overcome, especially when I think about the more diffuse effects of my projects. Americans and Paraguayans alike are often addicted to quick, visible, discrete outcomes. We find it hard to think about benefits (or costs!) that stretch into the future, that resist concrete depiction, or that float indeterminately between categories (work and leisure, environment and economy, learning and doing). But the most important societal changes do exactly that. I hope that my best work inevitably meets this description: defying easy quantification and lasting long into the future.

Karai Strangegrossman, tea, Mba´eíchapa aprende kuri ahejahangua ajepy´apygui ha ahayhuhagua la ka´akuéra invasadorape

Today’s Post: Dr. Strangegrossman, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love invasive species

I want to take you back a year, to my final months in the United States. At first, garden seeds seemed like the perfect thing to take with me to Paraguay. Seeds are compact and light and it was rumored that certain spices would be hard to find in my new home. Why not grow my own chili peppers? But I was persuaded against the idea by my ecologist friends in Seattle:

“So I think I’ll just bring a few packets of hot pepper seeds.”

Silence. Then one ventures, “But aren’t you afraid of introducing…exotic microbes into the soil.”

Another friend elaborates, “Even if the seeds are of high purity, they may be carrying fungal spores, or soil bacteria!”

So, to avoid contaminating Paraguay’s delicate ecosystems, I left the seeds at home.

I should take a moment now to explain some frequently misinterpreted terms. “Native species” are those groups thought to have evolved in a given region. “Exotic species” are species that have been imported from other regions; they may be harmless, or, if they have been around for awhile, “naturalized”. “Invasive species” are a particular group of exotics – those that wreak environmental havoc after being introduced to a new place. In Seattle, for example, Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is a native species, apples (Malus domestica) are a harmless exotic, and Himalayan blackberries (Rubus armeniacus) are an invasive exotic.

Exotic species cause billions of damage yearly in the United States alone. Numerous examples abound: animals such as zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha), plants such as purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and various morning glories (Ipomoea sp.), and a host of fungal and microbial species. The spread of these invasive species is one form of “biological pollution,” one of the frequently understated outcomes of globalization.

Invasive species constitute a problem for several reasons. By displacing native species, they can diminish biodiversity and outcompete native species. They can reduce the quality and quantity of ecosystem services that humans depend on, either directly (like new pathogens preying on bees) or indirectly (like Phragmites grass making waterways impassable). And they can effect wholesale landscape change, covering grasslands with shrubs, turning wetlands into terrestrial systems, introducing fire into local disturbance regimes, altering rainfall by affecting transpiration, and converting passable fields and forests into walls of non-native vegetation.

As an ecologist and an environmentalist, I abhorred invasive species and vowed to fight them. At Oberlin, a significant component of my field job was attempting to control reed-canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea) and cattail (Typhus sp.) infestations. At the University of Washington, I volunteered at restoration projects where the biggest task was often pulling up Himalayan blackberry and ivy (Hedera helix).

Thus I was shocked to arrive in Paraguay where many exotic and even invasive species are…accepted! Paraguayan yards and gardens are a mishmash of species familiar to Americans. The spider plants and bougainvilleas that we may have to keep inside grow outdoors here, alongside hydrangeas and roses. The tomatoes, peppers, green onions, and potatoes that we plant at home could easily come straight from a Paraguayan garden. My first host family kept dahlias and my current yard is covered in pear trees. But many of these cultivars are harmless exotics that would hardly thrive if left to their own devices.

The fun, however, doesn’t end there. Invasives abound and many are consciously planted by those guardians of the environment…Peace Corps volunteers. So what follows is the story of how one Dr. Strangegrossman learned to stop fearing invasives and started to encourage Paraguayans to plant them. It’s a story of how a confused young ecologist went from carefully dusting himself for grass seeds before leaving the Sky Harbor airport to asking his mother to load up on some Mammoth Russian sunflower seeds before coming to visit. It’s a story of the following invasive species and the Americans and Paraguayans who love them:

Bamboo (species in Bambuseae), which slowly takes over native forests and forms dense clonal “trunks” that defy any efforts at removal, is critical to rural household economies. Bamboo, or takuara/takuarilla is used to make fences (especially for gardens), sheds, screens, tools, posts, roofs, and furniture. It is sometimes sold to be made into paper pulp. Most households have at least one takuarilla tygua (bamboo stand) and the areas without takuara are often hard-pressed for building materials. The alternatives, tree wood and bricks, are often expensive and scarce. Takuara is easy to work with and grows fast. Most families use a variety that produces smooth, large-diameter trunks. But crowding Paraguayan forests and my yard are some other less useful varieties, including a small-diameter one that spreads until it becomes impassable without a machete and a cruel, spiky variety that is impossible to touch or cut without inducing scratches. Normally, bamboo spreads aggressively through vegetative reproduction (a hallmark of invasives), but every few years, all the bamboo in a region goes to seed and then dies, giving the species a chance to spread out over larger distances.

Leucaena (Leucaena leucocephala) is a Central American tree and darling of agroforesters. A legume that grows fast and withstands cold and hot temperatures alike, leaucaena produces abundant animal forage and useful firewood, all while fixing nitrogen in the soil. Agroforesters frequently tout leaucaena as a multi-purpose tree, especially in “cut-and-carry” forage systems: farmers regularly prune the branches and foliage off leaucaena grown in rows and then transport it to waiting animals. This has the added benefit of preventing leucaena from doing what it does best: producing seeds. Left to its own devices, leucaena flowers and fruits all year long, producing thousands and thousands of small brown seeds, encased in pods that easily break open when dry. Today, many people in Prettyview have at least one tree in their yard - the result of gifts from previous extensionists. Most don’t know what it is called or how to manage it, but simply comment “hetaiterei hi’a” (it fruits a lot). The prevalence of unenclosed animals in Prettyview, which I normally lament, has kept the tree from becoming a true pest. Grazing kills immature seedlings before they can fruit. But I’ve already planted a number of leucaena seedlings with families who want to use it as a fodder alternative to sugar cane and grass, so I guess I’m doing my part.

Velvet bean (Mucuna pruriens) or “mucuna” is one of the more commonly used green manures in Paraguay. The insatiable climber is a nitrogen-fixing legume with lush, three-part leaves and large, white seeds. Ideally, one plants corn and then, after it has reached chest height, plants mucuna next to it. The mucuna climbs up the more mature crop and, by the time the corn is ready to be picked, it is covered with mucuna. The mucuna eventually overwhelms the corn, pulling the now-dead stalks to the ground. Then, frost kills the mucuna, leaving behind a mat of dead mucuna and corn stalks, which suppresses weeds and enriches the soil. But what if a mild winter fails to kill the mucuna? Or if it flowers before the frost and its owner doesn’t use a rollo cuchillo (a rotating series of rolling blades pulled by oxen) to kill the plant before itt sets fruit? Some plants may survive to bud anew and mature seeds sprout as soon as the winter comes to an end. Mucuna unmanaged can climb and kill trees and become just as much of a weed as the plants it suppresses. One of my friends has given his fallow fields over to it and invited me to harvest a few bags of mucuna seed. Even trying to vacuum up as many pods as possible, I left behind many, ready to reseed the field next year, and perhaps cross on over to that block of extant forest for a little ride up to the canopy. Nevertheless, I plan on handing out mucuna seeds at my next gardening charla.

I don’t have much to say about the loofah plant (Luffa sp.) because I refuse to have anything to do with it. Certainly, this vine in the squash family produces natural loofahs, a perhaps appealing alternative to synthetic sponges. But each zucchini-like fruit is filled with seeds, which innocently fall out of the sponge as it is dried, cleaned, and then used. The plant itself can pull down a takuara garden fence (invasive versus invasive!) or climb up a tree trunk and compete for light. Although once I run out of leucaena and mucuna seeds, I may get to work on a small business plan for locally produced Prettyview loofahs.

And then there are the gray areas. Hovenia (Hovenia dulcis) is an Asian import, a pretty relative of the pear and apple that starts fruiting in the summer and, as of the following spring, still bears viable seeds (the fruits dry up and fall off the plant, but each contains one to two sweet-smelling, indestructible seeds). Hovenia may be on the way to naturalization. It is a common species in many stands of otherwise native trees and some native species seem capable of competing with it. It loses its leaves in the winter, a holdover from a colder climate, putting it, potentially, at a disadvantage against other, native evergreens. When Hovenia is so widespread, is there a problem with planting more of it? What about the sunflowers and marigolds my family brought from home? A marigold I planted in my garden last fall survived the mild Paraguayan winter unscathed whereas, even in Phoenix, marigolds often emerge from the winter as desiccated piles of brown dust. Are those special “California Reds” – worms meant especially for lombriculture – going to escape and compete with native earthworms? It’s an invasive species truism that you never know the effects until after you’ve introduced the species.

But really, not all invasive species are spread by Peace Corps volunteers. Many of them were here already. One of the reasons that Paraguay has taught me, if not to love invasives, then at least to give them a chance, is that they are so essential to many Paraguayans’ livelihoods. After all, aren’t most crops really just spoiled exotics, one step away from invasiveness? In some ways, the quest for better crops, horticultural varieties, and trees is the quest for a more perfectly invasive species. No natural enemies or diseases? Resistant to drought, heat, and cold? Capable of engineering its own environment through nitrogen fixation? Allelopathic to avoid weeds? Frequently produces lots of large, easy to disperse seeds all throughout the year? Can reproduce vegetatively as well as sexually? Fast growing? Produces lots of organic matter? The same qualities that make plants especially desirable to humans often help them to survive in diverse habitats. Add to this a lax attitude toward biosecurity at Paraguay´s borders, and the country is ripe for an invasion.

The prevalence and lack of anxiety over invasive species in Paraguay also raise uncomfortable questions about relative environmental priorities. Though invasive species can be economically costly, it is hard to generate much concern for the problem when making ends meet requires so much time and energy. A potentially invasive species that puts food on the table (or can be used to build the table itself) is even less likely to encounter opposition. Biological pollution is no more a problem of the affluent than most other environmental issues that are frequently portrayed as such. But it´s a challenge for Peace Corps volunteers and other environmental educators to communicate the issue in a compelling way.

Especially when we keep planting leucaena!

Aipota Nde Yty

Today’s Entry: I want your trash.

Last weekend, I bought my first pack of cigarettes. In the previous twenty-four years of my life, the only time I’d even touched a cig was to dissect one during an anti-smoking lesson in middle school and in the course of picking up littered butts. But I am now the owner of a 20-pack of “Kentucky” brand cigarillos. How did buying it feel? Two experiences come to mind.

The first is a shameful and sweaty night at Oberlin’s Mudd Library. It is my sophomore year and my Dutch visiting Statistics professor has interpreted my offhand criticism of The Bell Curve as a profound desire to deliver a brief presentation on the topic in front of the class. I could use the extra credit, but am now horrified at the thought of touching, much less reading, much less checking out a copy of the work of pseudoscientific racism that, up until now, I had despised in blessed naïveté. After removing several works of The Bell Curve criticism from adjacent shelves, I slip the book itself into my pile with the spine pressed against my chest. Checking out my selections, I pray that the student librarian reads the situation correctly: “One work of right-wing pedantry plus 10 excoriating responses equals just another curious mind.” On the way home, I picture myself in confirmation hearings for the position of EPA czar. My college library lending record has been leaked to the press! A furor erupts. The binding feels hot against my sweater.

And at the same time, buying cigarettes was reminiscent of the more commonplace, and thus somehow worse, sense of furtiveness I used to experience in the States when buying a quart jar of Smucker’s Red Raspberry Preserves. Does the cashier know that I will eat most of it straight out of the jar with a spoon? And if not, why is she giving me that accusatory glance? And really, who needs toast?

I did as much damage control as possible, explaining to the owner of my favorite álmacen why I needed cigarettes, asking her to keep our secret, and then hiding the box in my house. But I eventually had to take the next step, opening the cellophane, gingerly sniffing the box´s sweet odor, and then slitting open 10 cigarettes and dropping the enclosed tobacco into boiling water. All of this, in preparation for charla dos in a series of four gardening workshops I am doing with the three agricultural committees in Prettyview. This second meeting is all about pest control: crop association, organic ant repellent, and tomato traps. The last item consists of a plastic bottle with holes poked around the top. You fill it with a mixture of boiled cigarette butts and tomato juice and suspend it from the posts used to tutor tomato plants. Insects that prey on tomatoes are attracted to the juice, fly inside the trap, and then die (though much more rapidly than their human counterparts) when exposed to the nicotine in the cigarettes. I like the trap idea because it selectively targets only the bichos* that threaten the crop, rather than all insects, and because it elegantly takes advantage of secondary metabolites.

Secondary metabolites, also called secondary compounds, are chemicals plants make that, while not implicated in essential physiological function, play roles related to defense against pathogens and predators. It is hypothesized that they spun off from chemical components essential to photosynthesis, respiration, etc. and the plants that produced high levels of these mutant compounds displayed a competitive advantage against plants without them. Secondary metabolites are distasteful, debilitating, or deadly to plant pathogens and predators. They include caffeine, nicotine, theobromine, tannins, latexes, and many other compounds that humans love to eat, drink, smoke, and otherwise exploit. One reason behind the human love affair with secondary metabolites adapted to ward off bugs is that we have much larger bodies. The small amounts of caffeine that we consume in the form of coffee leave us buzzed. The amount of caffeine that an insect ingests while feeding on coffee plants is proportionally much larger and probably doesn’t encourage a repeat experience.

My recipe for tomato traps actually calls for boiled cigarette butts rather than cigarettes. But I went ahead and spent the 25 cents for a pack of fresh cigarettes. The reason is: I’m tired of asking Paraguayans for their trash.

***

Who knows what I will be remembered for in Prettyview? If I had to guess now, I would imagine that the dirty connotations of my name, a particularly catchy children’s song I taught all the students from prescolar to sexto grado, and memories of how “fat” I was will probably linger longest after I am gone. Forget the trees planted and the moments of deep cross-cultural exchange. Did you see how long he would talk on the phone to his family in Norteamerica? But I also think that my neighbors, perhaps somewhat rightly, will remember me as a scavenger.

Paraguay has a big trash problem. Capitalism and all of its inorganic garbage have arrived without the attendant advances in waste disposal, recycling, or even the understanding that old batteries and cans won’t turn into abono (fertilizer) with time. Even relatively humble rural families produce plenty of dirty ules (plastic bigs), candy wrappers, cans, and glass bottles. Most simply form a big pile and burn it all, while some bury the waste in a pit. Nowadays, digging a new garden entails turning up trash from the last few years a few inches under the soil’s surface. Given this, I have tried to work reuse of old materials into my projects. Milk, wine, or juice cartons become macetas (plant containers); plastic bottles become hand-washing stations; cardboard boxes become didactic materials; and ules become small cold frames over seedboxes. But begging for and carrying around all this trash sometimes makes me look a little eccentric. I usually don’t know whether it is better to explain why I am stuffing things into my pockets or to quit without further incriminating myself.

To be fair, I also lust after organic yty (waste). I have been trying to encourage the creation of aboneras (compost piles). Animal rekaka, yvyra raka rogue, tembi’u yty, tainimbu, and ryguasu rupia pire (that’s animal feces, tree leaves, food waste, ashes, and eggshells, respectively) are all useful. Since, as a single-person household without animals, I don’t produce much, I often ask for gifts. Again, my behavior begs the question: Is it best to explain to Doña Vargas that I want her cow feces to do a compost project at the colegio or should I just let her fill in the blanks? My most bizarre moments occur when I borrow my neighbors’ wheelbarrow and take my shovel out to collect cow patties in the road. Part mendicant, part streetsweeper, and part organic gardener, I gather the neighborhood’s cow crap.

Really, begging for cow manure makes me feel like a character in Purple, Green, and Yellow, a picture book by Robert Munsch my mom would read to me and my brother as kids. The protagonist uses a series of markers to draw increasingly realistic “cow plops.” Something about the way my mom would say “cow plops,” (emphasis on “plops”) a phrase I had never heard before, was enough to send us all over the edge into uncontrollable laughter. Having become something of a cow plop connoisseur myself, now, I feel as though things have come full circle, as they so often do with feces.

Perhaps the most understandable object of my newly found magpie (or packrat?) instincts is seeds. Since arriving in Prettyview, I have labored to build up my collection of tree seeds, especially. As new species go into flower, I begin ingratiating myself with the owners of particularly accessible or fecund specimens. My favorite seed tree is an yvyra pyta (Peltophorum dubium) that, due to some past trauma, dips its crown to within a meter of the ground – perfect for one seed-hunting Jacobo. Seeds obviously have value, but I know that my sometimes miserly attraction to them has defined me in a few families’ eyes. Nevertheless, nothing feels better than collecting a big bag of tree seeds and taking them back to my midden, I mean, house.

Thus I embrace my inner hoarder and hope that my Prettyview friends will look back fondly one day on the American who wanted their trash.

*My dictionary defines bicho as a small animal, a bug, or an insect. Paraguayans truly aprovechan (take advantage of) the word for all it is worth. Bichos here may be as small as microorganisms (bicho’is, or “little bichos”) or as big as weasels, armadillos, capybaras, and, once, a deer. For an American used to interpreting bicho as “an insect,” it takes some time to get used to the full usage of the word in Paraguay. I am also frequently reminded of my brother’s difficult-to-interpret Spanglish cry of ¡Qué Bicho!

Hongsahína. Mba’epa jajapo va’era.

Today’s Entry: It’s getting chilly. What should we do?

I generally enjoy talking about the United States with Paraguayans. As noted in an earlier post, doing so is one of my three main responsibilities as a Peace Corps volunteer. One of the hardest aspects of American geography, and thus economy and culture, to communicate to many Paraguayans in Prettyview is the size and heterogeneity of my country. The weather report for Asunción is often slightly incorrect for my region, but not by much. Paraguay is roughly the size of California with a population of six million. There are certainly ecological gradients and regional distinctions, but it’s not uncommon for all of eastern Paraguay (where almost everyone lives) to simultaneously experience the same weather system. Thus, my answer to the very frequently asked question “what is the weather like in your country right now?” always begins, “pues…”

First of all, I try to explain that my family lives in the hottest, driest part of the country, resembling the Paraguayan Chaco but with a huge population, air conditioning, and fewer Mennonite colonies. I tell them that the extreme southeast is more like Paraguay in terms of its climate and that the northern reaches of the country are ro’yiterei – very cold. The many Paraguayans living in Argentina often see snow during the winter, so I can use that as a reference point to explain American snowstorms and “White Christmases.” I still don’t know if everyone quite believes me that a single country could contain so many different climates, and coasts on two oceans to boot.

And then there is the matter of the hemispheric reversal in seasons. I always say “just add six months to the date here and that is what it is like in the U.S. right now.” At least that is how it seems to me. Christmastime in Paraguay felt like Fourth of July in Arizona: barbeques, fireworks, and the possibility of heat stroke at 7:00 PM. Likewise, the smell of wood smoke in the crisp Paraguayan air at the end of June made me nostalgic, if not for the “holiday season,” then for my customary antagonism toward the holidays. “Humbug” doesn’t mean as much on June 25 as it does on December 25.

Paraguay does have a winter festival that calls to mind Christmas, Chanukah, and their pagan antecedents – all spawned in the global North. El Día de San Juan (San Juan Ára in Guaraní) falls on midwinter´s day, 24 June, although Prettyview celebrated it twice – once on the Saturday before at the escuela and once on the Saturday after at the colegio. I attended both nighttime celebrations, although I had to leave the latter early due to literal ants in my pants (I must have stepped on their nest on the way there). Even at a somewhat raucous festival, twitching around and swatting your crotch and behind is not recommended for already conspicuous foreigners. Especially when the central theme of the Day of St. John is…fire!

The San Juan celebrations were a little hard for me to understand, in part because explanations were often given at night in a big crowd and treated topics that were themselves, well, unusual. I understood the basics: traditional dancing shows performed by the little kids, moms selling freshly made, warm foods, and lots of standing around and talking, with the maté or caña (cane liquor) flowing depending on who was gathered together. I liked the food the most: empanadas, kavuré (chipa dough molded around a wooden dowel and cooked over a charcoal brazier), mbeju mestizo (a dry pancake made of corn flour and mandioca flour – thus “mestizo” – with cheese and oil and then flipped in the pan), and kocido. But my comprehension dwindled as the games and flames grew more intense. Apparently, many of the San Juan fire games are no longer practiced as they once were. But Prettyview still makes an attempt. The Juda Kai (Burnt Judas) is a mannequin representing Christ’s disloyal companion, with a cow skull as the head. The Juda Kai is set on fire and then…carried around? I couldn’t figure out the point of the game, other than the vague terror of watching a Georgia O’Keefe painting catch on fire and start running around. Pelota Tata (Fire Ball) is similarly themed – a soccer game that gets hotter than Shakira’s Waka Waka dance for the World Cup. There were also vague murmurs of fire walking, but I didn’t see any of it.

Other games didn’t entail setting anything on fire, but most did feature a prize. The kamba is a person wearing torn clothes and sometimes another skeletal cow head who runs around acting scary. Another game consists of a greased pole with a prize at the top, waiting for the mita’i who can scale the tower despite the lard. There were sack races and even a strange free-for-all that reminded me of a reverse piñata: a horde of kids used their hands to root around in the dirt for buried prizes.

I normally don’t like Paraguayan parties – in part because I try to avoid the caña and can never hear well enough to communicate adequately. But the San Juan festivals, like Independence Day and Semana Santa, were an important window into Paraguayan life and culture. And the atmosphere did remind me of American elementary school fall festivals – with parents and kids alike huddling together in the chilly evening to stay warm through food and games.

What else are we up to in Prettyview now that it is hongsa (chilly) to ro’y (cold)? Life hasn’t changed too terribly much; winter in Paraguay is like winter in Phoenix with more rain. The days are quite short, so field work and errands are generally completed between 6:30 and 5:00, a far cry from the 5:00 to 8:00 daylight of the summer. Most families still have to go to the fields, even though there is a relative lull in the agricultural calendar. It’s not safe to plant until the danger of frost passes and not much is ripening, other than oranges. Weeding is also less necessary since plants don’t grow quite so fast at this time of year. The mandioca shoots are usually already in storage for planting starting this month. But the daily consumption of mandioca and (for families with cows) sugar cane requires relatively frequent trips to the field. I’ve seen a lot of farmers repairing fences, doing other construction jobs, etc. during their down time. Washing and cleaning still march on, too, and I feel sorry for the unfortunate mothers and sisters who can’t wait, like I do, to do the laundry on warmer days.

I’ve heard that we may not see any more frost, which makes the Paraguayan winter seem about a month long. It was extremely cold in early July and I admit to lots of time spent añeñuahína (huddling under a blanket) and aka’ayhína (drinking maté, or ka´ay). It was raining, so I wasn’t the only one hiding in my home – people generally stay out of the rain, especially when the temperature is near freezing. My happiest times were spent at my neighbors’ house. Their oldest son was home from college for the winter break and, with the two oldest of his sisters and the eldest’s baby, we drank maté, rojepe’ekuri (huddled around a fire or a charcoal brazier [bracero de carbón]), watched telenovelas, and ate chipa guazu straight from the oven. One afternoon, we had sweet mate (ka’ay he’ee), which is made with milk instead of water and plenty of sugar or other sweetener. It’s delicious, although certainly not as healthful as unsweetened yerba teas.

While swilling my way to Type II Diabetes at the neighbors’, I discovered my new favorite telenovela: Soy Tu Dueña. This saucy and titillating epic is set in the (American?) Southwest, at a ranch called “Los Cáscabeles” (The Rattlesnakes). The ranch’s owner is an emotionally abusive but strikingly beautiful young woman, scarred by her former fiancé, who left her at the altar. I don’t know much else about the story since I’ve only watched two episodes, but I especially enjoyed the protagonist’s (antagonist’s?) fights with every other character. At one point, she slaped her own cousin in the face and evicted her from Los Cáscabeles, prompting the latter to stare at her in the eyes from about three inches away and scream “¡eres deMENte!” Later, the Dueña was bitten by, of course, a cáscabel (rattlesnake), and her muscular, good-natured neighbor arrived to suck the venom from her leg, wrap the wound in his shirt, and whisk her off on horseback to the puesto de salud. He was later slapped in the face for his trouble, although some flirtatious comments may have played a role in upsetting la Dueña. This is the kind of theatrics that makes the novela genre so vital. However, I only got a little taste of Dueña. The weather warmed up and I got back to work, much to my neighbors’ disappointment. I think they liked watching me react to all the slapping.

So with that, I’m sending all my best wishes from the Paraguayan winter. Bring your long underwear and guampa and you’re set until summer begins, allegedly, as in Arizona, a few days after the last frost.

Update: Since I initially wrote this, Spring started! It still gets chilly and the nighttime low recently dipped to 4° C, but the days are often warm enough for a t-shirt and shorts! I especially enjoy the smell of orange and lemon blossoms in the air. The sweet scent reminds me of the orange tree out by the patio at home and brightens my mood when I notice it. Meanwhile, Prettyview agricultores are playing a dangerous game, with some families risking a disastrous frost by planting tomatoes and mandioca.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Peace Corps service doesn’t have to end after the typical 27 months. Some volunteers extend in their countries of service to work in the Peace Corps office or carry out special projects. Others may extend their service in other countries where their skills are transferrable. Some former volunteers even re-join the Peace Corps to perform short-term assignments in areas stricken by disasters. I have decided not to let my Peace Corps service end in Paraguay.

I didn’t want to mention my application to prolong my own Peace Corps service until I knew its outcome. But I’m in Asunción now and, having checked my mail, can say, “it’s official.” Here are copies of the two letters that I received:

15 July 2010

Dear Jacob,

Congratulations! On behalf of the Lunar Desk of the U.S. Peace Corps, I formally invite you to serve from January 2012 to January 2022 as a Lunar Peace Corps Volunteer (LPCV). We understand that making the choice to undertake LPC service is a tough one. But should you accept this invitation, I think you’ll find that your ten years on Luna comprise an opportunity for personal growth, enriching professional experience, and, of course, the chance to strengthen U.S.-Moon ties through intercultural exchange. We at the lunar desk feel confident that we are offering you the chance to live the LPCV motto: “the toughest job you will ever love…on the Moon.”

Enclosed is a brief outline of your LPCV service invitation. Recruiters and faceless functionaries at the Lunar Desk compiled this invitation just for you, personalizing it on the basis of a disjointed 30 minute-long Skype interview, your 23-page internet application, your medical exam, and a suite of lovingly optimized algorithms. Please read the prospectus carefully, complete the “check for learning” post-test in #2 pencil, and call or e-mail us to accept your invitation within 72 hours after first reading this document (we are watching).

Best wishes and see you on the Moon!

Cordially,

S. R. Martinez-Martinez, M.A.
Under-liaison of Recruiting
Lunar Desk
U.S. Peace Corps

Lunar Peace Corps Service

“The toughest job you’ll ever love…on the Moon!”

Dear Prospective Lunar Peace Corps Volunteer (PLPCV) Jacob,

You may be excited to read this letter, but take a minute to imagine how I feel writing it. My Peace Corps journey began 12 years ago, when I was a Pastry Extension volunteer serving in Bhutan. After thousands of croissants and 17 months of cohabitation with a yak, I returned to the States and said “yes” to the joys of a career in the Washington-based Peace Corps bureaucracy. It was seven months ago that President Barack Obama personally tapped me to serve as the first Planetary Director (PD) of the LPC. At this moment, I am strapped in and preparing for blast-off into the future of the U.S. Peace Corps.

As part of our first cohort of LPCVs, you will be serving alongside 23 carefully selected (I’ll bet you didn’t have to give blood samples when you applied for terrestrial Peace Corps service!), young men and women. Each of you will have been invited on the basis of outstanding technical skills, the willingness to learn about lunar culture and languages (or the lack thereof), and the psychological mettle required to stand 10 years of almost constant isolation and aesthetic sterility. I will, naturally, serve alongside you as your PD, but the support doesn’t end there. Our central office, located at the core of Base Camp I, will feature an ample staff: two carefully chosen Assistant Planetary Directors (APDs); a full-fledged Peace Corps Medical Office (PCMO); a sassy but wise recreation coordinator; and a team of dedicated clerical, security, and maintenance robots.

During the congressional hearings that authorized the multi-billion dollar budget for the LPC, our supporters fielded a number of questions that continue to come up as PLPCVs talk to their families, friends, and lovers about their upcoming 120 months on Earth’s largest natural satellite. “Isn’t the Moon uninhabited?” “Can idealistic young people with liberal arts degrees really make a difference on the Moon?” “Is this really what the U.S. Peace Corps is all about?” We promise that the information offered below will answer these questions as well as igniting your passion for what one U.S. House Majority Leader called “space exploration meets diplomacy beyond America’s borders: a most bizarre yet strangely appealing mixture of two of President John F. Kennedy’s visions for the future.”

LPC Sector Descriptions

1. Environment
Sustainability is the new War on Terror and Congress insisted that environmental concerns constitute one of the two pillars of initial LPC programming. And with no atmosphere, soil organic matter (or soil!), or native (or exotic!) biodiversity, the Moon is arguably a better locus for environmental work than anywhere on Earth! “Atmosphere Development” volunteers will focus on small-scale, community-based projects designed to build an atmosphere that retains greenhouse gases and excludes ultraviolet light while “Biological Extension” volunteers will work with interstellar NGOs to jumpstart pedogenic and evolutionary processes alike. But Sustainability isn’t all about science; our experiences on Earth have proven that economics and culture play a role, too. Thus, “Sustainable Development” volunteers will cultivate ecotourism and green business opportunities for terrestrial markets.

2. Education
Yes, the moon is uninhabited. But even in totally inappropriate settings, education, especially of children, is the cornerstone of development work. “Distance Learning” volunteers will use the telecommunications nexus available at Base Camp XIIb to provide classes in conversational English, cooking with soy, typing, basic bookkeeping, HIV/AIDS awareness, and small business development to audiences in upwards of five neighboring solar systems. Meanwhile, “Early Childhood Education” volunteers will work with the offspring produced by the first cohort of LPCVs to craft the basis of a utopian society based on Skinnerian psychological principles and the recently revised FDA “Food Pyramid.”

Your project assignment will be Biological Extension.
Your community contact will be: "Rufus," AKA γ-Class Incubator Robot #484 (specialties: real-time Polymerase Chain Reactions and binary haikus)

Life on the Moon

Technical Training. Bamboo, salvaged nails, and cow feces constitute the higher-technology elements of the development projects that many terrestrial PCVs undertake. Obviously, pre-insertion technical training will be necessary for LPCVs. Inspired by repeat viewings of The Matrix, we have partnered with the NIH to install a digital input/output jack into the nape of every future LPCV. Through this new orifice, you will receive training in Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) tools, basic robot languages, zero-gravity construction, cooking with dehydrated ingredients, and organic moon gardening (one of the upsides of the moon’s paucity of life is…the corresponding absence of garden pests!).

Moving In. In keeping with our commitment to immersion in local communities, we have scheduled orbital insertions of each volunteer in one of 24 beautiful lunar valleys, ridges, deserts, and antipodal wastelands. You will be required to locate and live with host families for the first three months of LPC service – just like your terrestrial counterparts. Finding them will be the first challenge of your LPC tenure!

Volunteer Behavior. First and foremost, LPCVs will be development professionals. This means keeping your spacesuit clean and presentable, avoiding airlock breaches, and remembering that while updating your blog through your neck jack may be fun, it doesn’t get us any closer to building the first lunar troposphere. On the topic of professionalism, we do expect some fraternization among volunteers to occur. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that each LPCV will be a fertile male or female between the ages of 19 and 25 with no medically detectable physical infirmities. However, though we cannot, per the United Galaxies Declaration of (Non-)Human Rights, forbid you from becoming involved with visiting Martians and/or Venusians (depending on your sexual orientation), we discourage it. Half-human offspring, no matter how adorable or freighted with hope for the future of all races, will be sent to Earth to be raised by celebrities.

In Conclusion

On behalf of the whole LPC office and the Washington Lunar Desk, I ask you to think about the previous 10 years of your life on Earth and compare them to what the next 10 years of your life could be…on the Moon. Seeding a hostile environment with life. Passing months without seeing another human being. Learning about lunar cultures (or at least robots) and sharing our American culture with them.

Lunar Peace Corps: the toughest job you’ll ever love…on the Moon! We’re waiting for you, Jacob. See you on the Moon!

Celestially,

B.Z. Jaspers, L.M.T.
Planetary Director, Earth’s Moon
U.S. Peace Corps

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Note: The gentle parody above reflects my twisted sensibilities and underlying love for the U.S. Peace Corps alone and, like the rest of this blog, does not reflect the policies or attitudes of the terrestrial or lunar U.S. Peace Corps.