Ahapotama

Today's Post: I'm going shortly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Golden Chipa Awards

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Oleeha

Today´s Post: The Reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Itujama la Cuerpo de Paz

Today's Post: Peace Corps is Old

Just a brief and belated post today to celebrate 1 March 2011: the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corps. Read President Obama's proclamation here. It is an honor to be in service as we celebrate fifty years in the good work of building international friendship and improving quality of life for those who are in need.

Other important events include my mom and Ben's visit and my attenandance at Shakira's first ever Paraguayan concert appearance. But more on that later. I'm off to turn in a grant application and get some tree seeds from the Instituto Nacional Forestal.

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!

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.

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.

Aleema Popa Libro

Today’s Post: I’ve Read 50 Books

(I promise to write a post about our trip to Brazil...but I do have my priorities.)

When I was getting ready to finish my last quarter at the University of Washington, my advisor Ivan cautioned me not to be “one of those volunteers who reads 200 books but doesn’t get anything done.” My first thought was “He’s darn right” and my second was “Maybe I’ll be the kind of volunteer who reads 200 books and gets something done.”

On 2 July 2010, I finished my fiftieth book since starting the Peace Corps. This commemorative blog posting is probably the most inevitable one I’ve written yet. Forget: “I made it to Paraguay alive,” “I swore in as a volunteer,” or even, “Sometimes, being in the Peace Corps is hard.” I could have been captured by the Ejército Pueblo Paraguayo and kept in a cage for two years or eaten by capybaras and I still would have found some way to claw inexorably toward my reading objectives.

In between the many hours spent paging through trips to and from Asunción and early-morning solo maté sessions, I managed to keep a running log of all of the books I’ve read so far, as well as an Excel spreadsheet tabulating important data about each books. That I now have this information to share with you is a tribute to the fact that I have a laptop with me but no internet as much as to my borderline compulsive personality.

Let me just say that the last nine months (24 June was my anniversary) of Peace Corps reading have been a joy. I’ve fallen in love with books again in a way that recalls other such periods of infatuation: my Uncle Rob turning me on to Star Wars novels (at the time, the longest books I’d ever read) and the start of a lazy summer of pleasure reading in Oberlin come to mind. In Paraguay, books have been my only English-speaking companions for days on end, my only link to a cosmopolitan world of ideas that sometimes feels far away. I have felt terrified when my stockpile has run low before a trip to the Peace Corps Office and succored when a particularly good novel has helped me wait out a rainstorm. (And confidential to my mother: I’ve never wanted a K----e.)

I will also add that the Peace Corps Paraguay reading library, allegedly run entirely by volunteers, is one of the best services that the institution could offer to us. The cost must be miniscule, but my Peace Corps service would be completely different without it. I am very grateful.

So what has my note-taking and subsequent data analysis (thanks, Excel!) revealed about my reading over the last nine months? Some salient points follow:

First, I should note that from 24 September through 11 December, I was in training and thus had little time for reading. I still managed to plow through over 1000 pages of Richard Hofstadter’s masterpiece, Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, but, in the narrow accounting of my book list, this shows up as less than one book read. Furthermore, I only brought three novels with me for my first month in Prettyview. Such folly! I tried to see this as a time to savor every page, but really it was just an unproductive exercise in frustration. I was re-reading my green manures extension manual by the time I made it back to the capital in mid-January to resupply. After four books in the first three-and-a-half months, I emerged from my bookworm chrysalis. Soon, I was plowing through pages as well as fields of mandioca.

What was I reading? 84% of my selections were books I had never read before and a full three quarters were written by authors whose work I had never read. Two trilogies (His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman and the new blockbusters by Stieg Larsson) comprise the 12% of books I read that belong to series. (For me, reading a series in the Peace Corps is a fraught experience: you had better check out all of the books in the set lest the last one end up in a beekeeping hut in Alto Paraná for the rest of your service.) 7 out of every 10 books I read were novels and 2 out of every 10 were non-fiction (including memoirs). Short stories and poetry made up the difference. All of my selections were in English, though 16% were translated. Slightly over half of the books I read came recommended to me by at least one person, including a few recommendations that I’ve had knocking around in my brain for years.

I somewhat unsystematically gave each book a ranking between one and five. 90% of books received scores of 3 or greater, corroborating my sense of satisfaction with my reading choices. Only one novel bombed out with a rank of one: E. L. Doctorow’s City of God. I almost hate to mention this book in my blog, since I hold the superstitious belief that doing so might somehow boost its Google prestige or whatever. I’ll have to consult with my brother about that. Anyway, City of God was a pretentious and too-little-too-late stab at post-modernity that, disturbingly, tarted itself up with Holocaust references and boring musical pastiche. I expect that its publication had Saint Augustine of Hippo rolling in his grave. I awarded fives to GEB:EGB and four others: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami), The Cider House Rules (John Irving), East of Eden (John Steinbeck), and White Teeth (Zadie Smith). Given the acclaim that greeted each of these books following their publication, I guess you could say I wasn’t in uncharted critical waters.

Three out of every 10 books included what I believed to be strong post-modern elements of structure and/or content (although it may be un-post-modern of me to distinguish between the two). 34% of my selections were “page-turners.”

Whom was I reading? Perhaps problematically, 72% of the books I read were written by men, 52% of authors were Americans, and 70% were from predominantly Anglophone nations. The issue of nationality and ethnicity is certainly tied up in the fact that I only really read English-language books for pleasure. Perhaps I could enrich my inner life by reading more in Spanish, but I have to do that every day for work and reading in English currently constitutes one of my great escapist pleasures. Revealing a trend in my literary tastes that I was already aware (and ashamed) of, my spreadsheet also indicates that while 44% of my choices were first published in the 21st century, the other 56% were all published in the 20th. The oldest book I read was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I am currently working on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, so I’m hoping that I can begin the next stage of my journey by “going under” in the late 1800s. But I must admit that I’ve always enjoyed contemporary literature most and probably won’t be reading too much from the 19th century (or, for that matter, earlier ones). And I am trying not to think about what it means for my spreadsheet if I finish the bible I have been reading since February.

In a more impressionistic sense, the books I’ve read over the last nine months have provided a satisfying, and occasionally appropriate, backdrop to my life in rural Paraguay. Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos’s Son of Man takes place in rural Paraguay in the 1930s. Many details from the historical novel seemed like they could have been plucked from my daily life: chiperas selling their wares at train stations (instead of the bus), mandioca fields and endless rows of sugarcane, Catholicism and folk customs vying for prominence, and a tortured relationship with Paraguayan ciudadanos and foreigners alike. May political questions from that era also remain unresolved. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and William Faulkner’s Light in August led me to believe that the post-Reconstruction American rural South and post-dictatorship rural Paraguay may have quite a bit in common. Though there are notable cultural differences, East of Eden, Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, and Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits also were somehow reminiscent of my current environment.

Linear regression suggests that at the current rate, I may not reach 200 books by December 2011, but I’m not too worried. Quality matters over quantity and I think my advisor will understand.

I currently have about 30 selections piled up in my house in Prettyview, waiting for their turn in the 51-100 bracket. I’m trudging through Zarathustra (which, like reading the bible it was meant to parody, is both beautiful and, at turns, inscrutable) and eyeing Tolkien’s The Hobbit. A trio of George Eliot novels and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest bide their time, my insurance against a broken leg, two months of strikes closing Ruta Dos, or any other such disaster that would put me in the position of needing a good book.

***

The First Fifty: Jake’s Paraguayan reading list through 2 July 2010

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

1. Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Richard Hofstadter) One of the best books I’ve ever read. GEB is a non-fiction exploration of the ways that small parts give rise to conscious wholes through an examination of the work of the three eponymous thinkers, as well as number theory, artificial intelligence, computer programming, psychology, molecular biology, Zen Buddhism, music theory, and linguistics. I read all of this but the last 100 pages or so during 3 months of training and then finished it in March 2010.
2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle* (Haruki Murakami) My favorite of Murakami’s works and among my favorite novels.
3. The Golden Compass* (Philip Pullman) First book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, which I first read in 8th grade. Still good, but less mind-blowing now that I have lost my virginity and read Nietzsche.
4. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant) Retelling of the second half of Genesis from the perspective of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter. Very well-written and moving.
5. The Subtle Knife* (Philip Pullman) Second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy.
6. The Amber Spyglass* (Philip Pullman) Third book in the His Dark Materials trilogy.
7. Infidel (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) Fascinating non-fiction account of Ali’s life in a number of African and Middle Eastern states and Holland, including her embrace and eventual repudiation of Islam.
8. Collected Short Stories (Flannery O’ Connor) Excellent and haunting, especially when read in a society that occasionally resembles O’Connor’s American South.
9. Empire Falls (Richard Russo) I enjoyed reading this novel, but did not really see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. Nothing terribly complex.
10. The Cider House Rules (John Irving) Made my top five list. I loved the characters and the exploration of moral ambiguity. I also felt that the novel was an excellent period/cultural piece.
11. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie) I did not enjoy reading it terribly, but understand its political importance and its status as an early postmodern work. It did become easier to read as I went.
12. The House of the Spirits* (Isabel Allende) Still one of my favorite novels.
13. Son of Man (Augusto Roa Bastos) Fascinating to read this account of Paraguay in the years leading up to and during the Chaco War – many aspects of life have not changed 80 years later. It’s hard to know how I would have appraised this book if I weren’t living in Paraguay while reading it.
14. American Fuji (Sara Backer) Though a lightweight novel, this was fun to read and I actually think about it from time to time, maybe because I am also a long-term foreigner, like one of the protagonists.
15. Ordinary People (Judith Guest) I enjoyed this novel, which deals with psychological illness and grief in an understated and thus not too devastating way.
16. Long Way Gone (Ishmael Beah) This memoir by an Oberlin grad was brutal and starkly written. I would have appreciated a little more political or historical context since I didn’t take much away other than the story itself.
17. City of God (E.L. Doctorow) The worst book I’d read in Paraguay as of 9 months in. The author goes for postmodern but the result seems like a self-conscious shamble through “been-there” territory. I actually found the “musical” passages unreadable, like some of the poetry in Tolkien.
18. Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) I loved this book as much as Plath’s poetry. There’s not much more to say about it than that it deserves its reputation.
19. History of Love (Nicole Krauss) A beautiful and touching novel, but I’d be curious to know how, if at all, Krauss and husband Jonathan Safran Foer think HOL and his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are related, thematically. Also: do they ever get competitive when their work overlaps?
20. The Crazed (Ha Jin) This well-written novel left me with a lot to think about, esp. the contention that while suffering may ennoble the unusual person, it actually destroys most people.
21. The Other Boleyn Girl (Philippa Gregory) The writing is a little pandering, but I found this work of historical fiction to be sexy, fun to read, and at least somewhat historically edifying.
22. The Covenant (James Michener) It took a long time to make it through, but this historical novel taught me a great deal about South African history. What would otherwise be pacing problems were overcome by changing central characters every chapter.
23. On Beauty (Zadie Smith) A well-written novel, although I thought the ending was a little botched.
24. Man’s Search for Meaning* (Victor Frankl) Gave me inspiration in my work and in my hopes for love, just like when I first read it.
25. The Savage Dectectives (Roberto Bolaño) It was sometimes difficult to get involved in this book given that many central characters were very unsympathetic, but I thought it was excellent if viewed as a sort of literary and cultural history of a certain group of Mexican writers.
26. A Year in Van Nuys (Sandra Tsing Loh) Though the author occasionally delivers hilarious moments, I ultimately thought this book was too insubstantial and lacked direction.
27. By the River Piedra, I Sat Down & Wept (Paulo Coelho) Though enchanting in a Pablo Coelho sort of way, I wanted this to be more substantial; I finished it in less than a day.
28. The Shrine at Altamira (John L’Heureux) Compared to Ordinary People, this other realist novel about a family with problems seemed both more gruesome and less psychologically interesting. But it was still a good read.
29. Confederates in the Attic (Tony Horwitz) This non-fiction account of revisionist Confederacy worship in the contemporary South was mostly valuable to me as a Civil War history lesson.
30. The Metaphysical Club (Louis Menand) I loved the topic (the birth of American pragmatism) and the historical tidbits, but there was something wrong with the way this was written. The narrative flow was bad down to the sentence structuring and ordering, and the organization was mediocre. Still, it was fascinating enough to recommend itself.
31. Light in August (William Faulkner) I had always heard that reading Faulkner was so difficult as to be hard to enjoy. This was not the case with LiA. My favorite aspect was the lush descriptions of both the characters’ emotions and of the story’s physical setting. It was interesting to compare Faulkner’s work to Flannery O’Connor’s short stories in terms of style and content.
32. Field Work (Seamus Heaney) The first book in a collection of Heaney’s poetry I found in the PC library. The poems therein were generally accessible and lovely, if often muted. Favorites included “Oysters,” “A Drink of Water,” “Casualty,” “The Guttural Muse,” Glanmore Sonnet V, “The Skunk,” “Homecomings,” “A Dream of Jealousy,” and “The Harvest Bow.”
33. Little Children (Tom Perotta) I saw the movie adaptation of this novel several years ago and found the film to be equally enjoyable, sexy, and morally ambiguous. However, the novel’s ending is both more complex and less disturbing!
34. The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (ed. Ben Marcus, 2004) This collection contained a number of stories I enjoyed and a few I did not. Style varied widely. I think the opening story, “Sea Oak” by George Saunders, might be my favorite. It made me laugh so hard, even the second time I read it. Marcus’s introduction is also thoughtful.
35. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut) Very well-written, with sympathetic characters, a great moral tone, and lots of pithy observations about human behavior.
36. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) A masterly novel with powerful psychological and spiritual themes. I was impressed with its contemporary feel, given the age in which it was written and set. It also felt more personal than Grapes of Wrath.
37. White Teeth* (Zadie Smith) Better than On Beauty, especially in its wider scope. I still loved this book, which manages to revel in endless, satisfying detail while retaining a sense of its overall theme and structure.
38. Paddle to the Amazon (Don Starkell) A non-fiction account of the author and his son’s successful trip from Winnipeg to Belem, Brazil in a canoe – easy to read and gripping. I would never have picked this up, but a friend recommended it. I’m glad I forced myself, out of courtesy, to start it!
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence) Incredibly erotic and fun to read story. I’m not sure if Lawrence’s critique of modernity holds up today, but it is definitely intellectually interesting.
40. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) A fantastic contemporary novel. I especially enjoyed the use of Dominican slang and the historical footnotes.
41. In the Time of the Butterflies (Julia Alvarez) One of the most beautiful and affecting novels I have ever read: the tale of the Mirabal Sisters’ resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship. Though I didn’t consciously choose to do so, I borrowed this book and Oscar Wao at the same time. Butterflies deals with Trujillo-era DR, but from a closer temporal and spatial perspective rather than from the perspective of Dominican immigrants to the U.S. in the post-Trujillo era.
42. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig) An allegedly autobiographical story of a father and son interwoven with the father’s philosophical treatise. I have to write that I ended up respecting this book even if I didn’t like it all the time. I didn’t like the narrator/author’s voice or personality much and did not buy all of his philosophical arguments. However, he offers too many important and thought-provoking insights for me to discount the book. I also enjoyed the last portion, when the two narrative lines merge, the most. The divide, which prevails for much of the book, seemed artificial to me.
43. Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane) I read this thriller right after seeing the movie in Asunción. It was gripping and well-constructed, but nothing mind-blowing.
44. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson) First book in the (now blockbuster) trilogy. Gripping and well-written with excellent characters and a gratifying left-wing perspective.
45. The Girl who Played with Fire (Stieg Larsson) Sequel to TGWTDT, excellent.
46. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Stieg Larrson) Concludes the Larrson trilogy, impossible to put down.
47. Irish Girl (Tim Johnston) David Sedaris publicized this collection of short stories. I thought they were well-written but not outstanding or as “dark” as he claimed.
48. Refuge (Terry Tempest Williams) A seminal work of feminist-environmentalist literature. It is easy to relate to the author’s travails and I appreciated her linkage of the “natural history” of the Great Salt Lake with the “unnatural history” of the effects of nuclear testing on her family.
49. The Value of Life (Stephen R. Kellert) A summary work on the psychological and social value of the natural world, as demonstrated through his and other’s empirical research.
50. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim* (David Sedaris) Hilarious, especially the essays about the author’s brother, although it doesn’t crack me up quite as much as Me Talk Pretty One Day.