Hakuite!

Today´s Blog Post Title: It´s Really Hot

Greetings from what should be (mercifully) the last month of Paraguay´s summer. In full acknowledgement of my status as a Phoenix, Arizona veteran, I admit: it´s darn hot. Yesterday, we had the first rain storm that Prettyview has seen in three weeks and prior to that, the temperature hovered in the upper thirties or low forties. As everyone says, ¨HAKU!¨

As I head toward my fifth month in Paraguay, I feel optimistic. Life in Prettyview now seems more normal to me and I think my second bout of culture shock is at an end. One of the best aspects of this has been making friends. Most people here are friendly and welcoming, but I can now say that there is a small group of people, mostly former host families, whom I can go to hang out with. Tereré is almost always on the agenda, and I´ve also shared a number of delicious meals. This weekend, I even joined my contact and his brother for that perfect Paraguayan evening treat: pineapple-flavored ´´gaseosa´´ and boxed wine. I´m not sure if they bought my story about how nobody in the US mixes wine or beer with their soft drinks.

My first Paraguayan birthday was calm but good, featuring visits from friends, plenty of clothes-washing, and my favorite breakfast: revido. Revido is an Argentinian dish that is basically a ball of flour, water, and salt that is lightly fried in oil until it comes part into pieces (like scrambled eggs). People here tend to take it out to the fields with them or have it delivered by mita´i (a child) for breakfast after doing an hour of hoeing, etc. Anyway, even though most people here seem to think of it as something you eat so you can keep hoeing, I love revido, especially with a cup or three of sugary cocido to wash it down.

So, the topic of this blog post is the explication of a few odds and ends that I realized may seem mystifying to those of you back in the States. It´s a random assortment of topics, but I think that they merit some brief discussion.

G´s. Peace Corps Paraguay has a rotating stable of around 200 volunteers working in the country at a given time. Three times a year, one segment of this population leaves and is replaced by a new group of volunteers. These volunteers are all from the same projects. For instance, every Spring, a new set of agroforestry, crop extension, beekeeping, and environmental education volunteers are sworn in and the volunteers who have served for two years in those projects are sent home. The volunteers in the health, economic development, and education sectors are on a different schedule. The people who all enter service together are known as a ´´G.´´ In this case, the letter stands for ´´Guarambaré,´´ where we are trained. My G is G-31, the 31st group to be trained since the training center moved there. Since there are three cycles a year, the last batch of agroforestry volunteers to be trained are G-28 and the ones that my group replaced are G-25. Most volunteers are closest to people in their own G, but their is also a special relationship between volunteers in ´´Sister G´s.´´ For instance, the G-28 volunteers can mentor us, give us advice on our service, and help out with projects. We´ll presumably do the same for G-34, and G-37 will replace us. One of my fellow G-31 volunteers likened it to high school classes. Usually, there are three classes in each project group: the newbies, the mid-service volunteers, and the near-graduates. So that´s a perhaps excessively long explanation of how service is organized here in Paraguay. But at least now you know what a ´´Sister G´´ is.

Despensas. One way in which Paraguay´s consumer economy differs from the present-day U.S. economy is in the prevalence and importance of despensas (also called almacénes). These are small, family-run food and consumer item stores. Though they are present in the cities and the campaña (the countryside), they are especially important in the latter.

It´s hard to describe how important and ubiquitous almacénes are to, for example, Prettyview. For a town of only a few hundred people, there are probably over two dozen despensas of varying size and activity. The most basic almacén here sells, among other things: coquitos, eggs, oil, flour, salt, sugar, matches, alcohol, gaseosa, conserva (tomato paste used extensively in PY cooking), carbón (charcoal), maté, caramelos and other sweets, candles, etc. Some are also carnicerías, selling meat bought from families in town or from distributors. Bigger almacéns sometimes have specialty goods: hardware, yogurt, produce, clothing. There´s definitely a continuum from a shelf in the front room of someone´s house to a semi-supermarket. In Prettyview, there is a big almacén in the center of town, with about four smaller ones clustered around it and a lot of little ones in the outlying barrios. Supply and demand don´t seem to touch almacéns, which can operate next door to each other without (seemingly) causing ill feelings or market saturation. Bookkeeping is rare and management is generally seat of the pants. A big truck with despensa-ready goods comes to town a few times a week and sells supplies to each almacén. Occasionally, almacénes sell locally produced goods (honey, cheese), but, for some reason, this doesn´t seem to have caught on.

The way people here use almacénes is different than American grocery shopping as well. (Keep in mind that you need a moto or, like me, endless patience and bus fare, to get to the nearest supermarket.) Food goes bad or attracts ants fast, so most people don´t keep tons of food sitting around the house. Rather, many households make multiple purchases a day from their nearby almacén. Often, a mita´i is sent with change to get a bag of coquitos or three eggs. I have been given weird looks for buying more than a kilo of flour, for instance. Why not just come back and get more when you need it? Used to keeping my grocery shopping down to once a week, I´m finding myself slowly adjusting.

Almacénes and despsensas represent a supply chain and a way of buying food that differs so much from what most of us are used to. I wonder if American general stores served a similar role in rural areas during, for instance the nineteenth or early twentieth century. As it is, I´m adjusting and getting used to the endless opportunities for gossiping and inquiring about what others are cooking that the daily almacén visit offers.

Abonos Verdes. This is the Spanish translation of the (I think) confusingly named ´´green manure´´ crops. Green manures are a technique used the world over, but many Americans, isolated from the way food is produced and especially from small-scale agriculture, don´t know much about them. Essentially, a green manure is a crop that you put into your field not with the primary expectation of eating or selling it, but with the expectation that it will suppress weeds, enrich your soil with organic matter, improve soil physical properties, and/or reduce erosion. Many green manures, like Leucaena sp. and pigeon pea, are in the Fabaceae family, meaning that they fix nitrogen. This means that they are generally not dragging huge amounts of nitrogen out of the soil and can be managed to amend the soil with valuable organic nitrogen.

The promotion of abono verde use is central to the work of agroforestry and crop extension volunteers in Paraguay. Paraguay is a relatively small country and recent commercial agriculture has been driven by cotton and then soy booms. Other crops commonly grown here, such as sugar cane and corn, can also slowly annhialate the soil. Poor soil conservation practices, including repeatedly burning fields (with no fallow period), plowing with the slope, and constant hoeing (which disrupts the cover of organic matter over the soil) have made the problem worse. The sandy soils that prevail in Prettyview and other parts of the Oriental region are also poor at holding on to organic matter. As a result, many agricultural experts treat soil conservation as the top priority for extension work in PY.

There is, generally speaking, a summer and a winter abono verde season. We are heading into the planting period for winter abonos verdes and I want to try to get some farmers in my community on the bandwagon. The Spanish NGO that works here has already distributed a lot of abono verde seeds, but without much follow-up, it seems like implementation has been minimal. The most commonly used combination here involves planting corn and then, after it has grown tall enough, interplanting it with Mucuna puriens, a climbing, nitrogen-fixing vine that eventually scales the corn stalks. After harvesting the corn, you flatten the whole field and let frost kill the mucuna. What remains is a rich cover of corn and mucuna detritus. You can then practice no-till agriculture, letting this detritus suppress weeds and sowing a new crop directly into it. The abonos verdes I´m going to start with are sunflower, lupine (there´s a variety that grows here - reminds me of Seattle!), and pigeon pea (a summer abono verde, but it´s frost tolerant and can be planted as late as February). I´m planning on doing some experimental lines with farmers this year and seeing if it catches on.