Che Rembiapokuèra Pora

Today´s Post: My Good Works

Happy 2011 to the readers of Jake in Paraguay. It will be an exciting year to spend in Paraguay, as the country turns 200 on 14-15 May and the Peace Corps turns 50 on 1 March. Che aka raku apensaitegui pèarehe. (My head is hot just from thinking about it.)

It has been over a year since I swore in as a volunteer on 11 December 2009 and my ´´close of service´´ date is less than a year away (9 December 2011). So, with the arete (holiday) season over, I´m starting to count down instead of counting up. One thing that has become obvious to me this month is the degree to which it is critical that PC volunteers spend an extended period of time in their communities. Looking back, I would say that every month of my time in Prettyview was essential as preparation for the work that I have done so far as a volunteer. However, most of the entries in my work journal took place between mid-August and mid-November. In part, this is attributable to the springtime burst in activity that also affects my neighbors. But the truth is that I needed a good eight months to build relationships, become accustomed to life in Prettyview, familiarize myself with the technologies and practices I would be disseminating, and begin implementing my work plans. I cannot imagine going home now. The year ahead will see much of my work reach its first stages of permanence or visible ´´success,´´ although most projects won´t really bear fruit for decades. I´m glad I have the year ahead of me to build on ongoing projects, take advantage of ´´do-overs´´ (especially as a teacher), and start new projects that a follow-up volunteer in Prettyview may be able to consolidate after I´m gone.

So this is a post dedicated to answering the question: what do you do? My faithful readers know that I read a lot, cook, eat chipas, battle pigs in my garden, scrounge around in the dirt for tree seeds, and teach myself scholarly Guaraní neologisms in order to impress Paraguayans. But what about my actual projects - the work that I describe quarterly in frighteningly detailed evaluation spreadsheets for my jefa and her jefes in Washington?

Viveros. My favorite project is one I call ´´viveros familiares´´ - family tree nurseries. Though each vivero is different, they start off with tree seeds that I have either collected or received from the Instituto Nacional Forestal in San Lorenzo. Collecting tree seeds is often frustrating and often fun and I have learned the importance of testing their viability before enraging my socios and socias with bad seeds. With a family - the more people involved the better - I either plant the seeds in a raised bed (a parcela) or in plastic or recycled containers (macetas). The family cares for the vivero for about two months as the seeds germinate. Tree seeds are especially challenging in this regard because they germinate slowly and non-uniformly. Also, there is very high seed mortality, especially for trees with papery seeds. So, instead of seeing thousands of uniform seedlings sprout up in neat lines like new lettuce or carrot plants, families end up with about twenty to a hundred trees popping up over several weeks. It is often unexpected and several families have simply assumed that nothing was happening - despite my warnings - and dug up their viveros.

When the seedlings have reached a few inches in height, it is time to transplant them to macetas. This has been a difficult part of the process, with lots of seedlings mysteriously shrivelling up afterward. The macetas then need to be watered throughout the summer and are generally ready to be transplanted after two or three months. The ultimate goal of the vivero project is to capacitate families to produce their own tree seedlings for use in reforestation, tree plantations,
or agroforestry systems. Agroforestry, the use of trees alongside conventional agriculture or animal production is what excites me most. I´ve only started agroforestry systems with one contact so far. Francisco (´´Chico´´) and I transplanted about thirty trees from his vivero. Some form a lindero, a line of trees that will be pruned for firewood, along one of his sugar cane fields. The other trees were interplanted with his yerba matè. Like chocolate and coffee, matè is an understory species that grows well when shaded. So the trees will eventually provide shade for the matè and also produce environmental benefits and even lumber for Chico and his family. I am excited about this start and look forward to developing agroforestry systems with other families in the future.

Abonos Verdes. I have done some limited work in abonos verdes or ´´green manures´´ extension over the last few months. Abonos verdes are basically like field crops that don´t (primarily) produce food, but instead cover and enrich the soil in a field between the rows of field crops or in fallow fields. By preventing weed growth and improving soil structure, abonos verdes replace burning and plowing, two practices that are destructive of soil physical and chemical properties. Most are legumes, fixing nitrogen and adding back organic matter lost through previous cultivation. My favorite abono verde, Cajanus cajans, known as ´´pigeon pea´´ in the States and kumanda yvyra´i in Guaranì, grows as a small tree with a lifetime of up to several years. Usually, kumanda yvyra`i only reaches a couple of meters in height and it is often pruned or cut back. In addition to enriching the soil, pigeon peas provide leaf and seed fodder for animals, edible seeds for humans, shade, firewood, and soil coverage. It is the abono verde that keeps on giving. Often, I focus on small-scale abono verde extension, harvesting some seeds from one farmer´s fields and giving them to families that haven´t yet tried them.

Educación Ambiental. As discussed in an earlier post, I have been much more involved in teaching than I ever thought I would be before arriving in Paraguay. I ended up regularly teaching during the Science and ´´Technology and Work´´ segments of 4th, 5th, and 7th grade. I also taught ad hoc science lessons on ecology, plant biology, trees, and soil to the older students in the colegio. A lot of my work was touch and go since I had never taught primary or secondary school before. We are currently on vacation until February and I look forward to teaching in a more systematic way this coming year. Until then, I am holding a weekly environmental camp for ages 8-14. Tomorrow morning, Prettyview´s first-ever summer camp will convene at my house for games, songs, art, mini-lessons, and, of course, snack and fútbol. I am really nervous about the number of kids coming and about discipline. To compensate, I am inviting a different volunteer or volunteers to visit Prettyview each weekend to help me. I will keep the camps up until the week before school starts, when I also hope to facilitate a teacher training in environmental education strategies and activities.

Cìtrico Injertado. Grafted citrus is in high demand in Prettyview. The theory behind plant grafting (injertos) is that, within groups of related plants, you can perform a graft: a plant surgery that fuses the tissues of two plants. There is no mixing of cells or genetic tissue; as in an animal tissue graft, one organism simply hijacks the tissues of another organism. In the U.S., apples, pears, citrus, stone fruits, etc. all come from grafted trees. (Bananas are a notable exception, since they are all clones of the same plant and thus are identical to one another.) If you plant apple seeds in your garden, the trees that grow from them will probably produce undesirable (to humans) fruit that does not have the consistency, sweetness, and appearance prized in the mother tissue. This is adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint, but annoying from a prissy frutivore´s standpoint. Thus, we prefer to clone desirable tree genotypes through grafting.

The simplest tree graft includes two parts: rootstock (pie) and budstock (brote). The roostock should be of a variety that produces strong, disease-resistant roots that will survive well in the orchard. The budstock should be of a variety that produces fruit you want to eat or sell! In an American apple orchard, the rootstock may be one variety of apple and the budstock another. In Paraguay, two major types of grafting prevail: mango and citrus. Mango grafting consists of grafting the large-fruiting Brazilian mango budstock onto the small-fruiting common Mango rootstock. We don´t do mango grafting much here in Prettyview because it gets too cold in the winter most years for mangoes to fruit successfully.

Due to physiological similarity among the citrus, you can graft between varieties of orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit, and tangerine (called mandarina here) or between the various types of fruit themselves. The most common citrus grafting set-up is to use as rootstock Limon rugosa, a tough, hardy lemon variety with large, yellow, bumpy fruit. Then, either grapefruit or early- or late-fruiting orange budstock is grafted on to it through a bud-graft. Basically, you cut an inverted capital ´´T´´ into the lemon plant´s bark on the side of a pencil-thick sapling and stick a bud from the orange or grapefruit tree inside of the teepee-like doorway it forms. If the graft is successful (mine work out about 20% of the time), then you cut off all the remaining lemon buds and the orange or grapefruit takes over, using the lemon plant to feed it water and nutrients, but otherwise suppresssing its host´s growth.

The people of Prettyview are crazy about grafting. The process takes over a year to produce a grafted plant, which will then fruit after three more years. So I just have to trust that people will take care of the plants we grow from seeds and graft together. It´s kind of daunting, but the enthusiasm around the project keeps me going.

Comitè de Productores. Though the farmers´ committee I work with has been around for about 12 years, it has really only begun to meet regularly and take on significant projects in the last few months. An NGO that works in Prettyview helped the committee to get recognition from various state agencies and eased it into some initial fundraisers and a partnership with the national agricultural extension office that resulted in each socio`s family receiving 100 high-quality chickens (both ponedoras for eggs and paradoras for eating). But the NGO´s project in Prettyview is now over. Enter Jacobo.

Peace Corps volunteers in my sector often end up working with committees because, simply put, they are one of the few environs in which Paraguayans systematically cooperate to achieve socially beneficial ends. During the Stroessner dictatorship, membership in organizations unaffiliated with the dominant political regime, as well as meetings between more than a couple of people regardless of the purpose, were illegal. In the post-Stroessner era, officially recognized comitès have emerged as one of the ways that the government delivers benefits to citizens. Basically, after decades of ´´tea partying,´´ the Paraguayan government is slowly taking responsibility again for core concerns such as health, environmental protection, and economic development. But for the time being, committees are a bridge between underserved citizens in the campaña and the city and their well-meaning but often overwhelmed government.

I go to my comitè´s meetings and try to work with them in the field on our two hectares of collectively farmed corn (a fundraiser that probably has the previous regime´s more conservative elements spinning in their graves). It is a little intimidating. The comitè is comprised of 17 men, ranging from their twenties to their sixties. It is a pretty macho, all-Guaranì environment in which I often feel a little bit out of place as the over-educated ingeniero forestal whol can`t handle a morning of cutting brush with a machete or, for that matter, a swig of the bottle of caña that gets passed around at our 9:30 AM Sunday morning meetings.

Still, I have delivered some educational charlas and am currently working with the committee on an application for funds to buy thousands of trees, allowing each socio to establish several hectares of grafted citrus, yerba matè, eucalyptus, and native species agroforestry plantations. If it is successful, it could lead to the afforestation of 40 hectares, màs o menos, of land and the creation of a new source of commercialized agricultural for 17 families. My inner Marxist is ambivalent about the latter benefit, but he doesn`t get to make too many decisions these days.

Proyectos segundarios. In Peace Corps parlance, ´´secondary projects´´ are work unrelated to your project assignment, which is, in my case, Agroforestry Extension. Since much Peace Corps work in rural Paraguay is, on some level, related to environmental issues or agriculture, a lot of my work can be described as ``primary.`` My biggest secondary projects have been teaching English after school and teaching sex education to the 7th through 12th grades of the Prettyview colegio. I found both of these projects gratifying and look forward to more secondary projects in the coming year, especially education-related ones. Facetious secondary project ideas also include: wetter cakes for Paraguayan parties, The Prettyview Jogging Club and Anti-Pig Utopian Society, ´´What is a Jew?´´: a lecture series, Jake´s great (South) American novel, the complete works of W.B. Yeats translated into Guaranì, and high-fiber, vegetarian chipa-making.

As some of my more time-conscious neighbors have noted, nde arema (you´ve been here awhile). It´s true, but che areta avei (I´ll also be here awhile) ha che kyre`y (and I´m ready to work). Here´s to a productive and happy 2011!