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.