Acuna Batata

My life in Paraguay as a peace corps volunteer. Check out pictures here http://www.flickr.com/photos/donjulio/ And this blog does not represent anything official from the Peace Corps.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Uh huh.

I never got to see the head get severed.

My contact flaked out on me. At the last minute, she called and said there was not room in the truck she rented for me. I don´t exactly care to go into why I think she ditched me, it doesn´t matter. What goes around comes around. She is a vendor in a market. I brought her lots of business. She sells trendy crap to my American friends. She sold things to my friends.

...

Okay well I have tried three times to write an entry for y´all and I erased them all. I am trying to keep this blog based on inspiration and frankly I don´t like anything that I´ve written. I at least wanted to say that I never made it to the festival incase anyone was interested.

Headed back out to site, so take care everyone!!

Monday, April 17, 2006

Picture

5
5,
originally uploaded by Don Julio.
This is why I stay here.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Severing the Head

After the last posting I headed back to site rather stressed out. The night before, I couldn't sleep because I was too frustrated over the situation that I face with very conservative farmers. Then I got back to site and found something rather surprising which did a bit to change my mood for the positive. Something small, yet to me, incredibly important. But first I will preface it by explaining a little bit more about my work.

The first project that I started was a rabbit raising venture. Rabbits can help generate income, diversify diet, and their poop can be used to make home-ade fertilized soil. I built a rabbit cage out of local materials; bamboo, left over chicken wire, and spare wooden posts. The cage rests upon brick worm beds, which the last volunteer built. The rabbit poop falls between the bamboo floor and then the worms eat it, turning the poop into very good soil. I bought two adult rabbits, one male and one pregnant female for about $8 which is really rather expensive. I started this project with my money to make an example for my community to see with the hope that they would incorporate it into their farms.

When I came home from my last trip out of site, I came home to find our rabbit population had doubled. My host brother with his coconut money, bought another mother rabbit and a load of baby rabbits. Now there's about 12 rabbits. This might seem a very small step, but to me it means a lot. My 17 year old host brother took his own money and made an investment in a project that I started.

The rabbit house is still incomplete. They are at a constant risk of mosquito borne disease because there is no protection, they are in open air. We even lack a roof for them, so when it rains really bad, we divide the rabbits up among us and they sleep on our floors. Thankfully though winter is approaching so there will be fewer and fewer mosquitoes during the coming months. And a supply of old ceiling tiles just turned up because the family is doing some house renovation.

Some future projects with small animals include quail and egg-laying chickens. Quail are not really utilized by small farmers here in Paraguay and as far as I know no agriculture volunteer has worked with quail. My boss asked for a detailed report on the quail project for our technical library. So I'm really excited about that. I can buy two quail for one dollar and they are laying eggs after one month. And we can use their poop to make good soil for the garden. The egg laying chickens could really turn out to be a money maker, no one around us has any serious chicken projects so we could dominate the egg market.

It's small steps like these that will help my host family to have more options. A little bit of money down here goes a very long way.

I have started to develop a long term project, which is really cool because it gives me something to do (!!!) and it would be big. Big like 6 years of Peace Corps in a community should be. Basically what I want to do, through fund raising here and back in the States, is bring irrigation to the farmer's fields. As they are now, they might spend $1000 to buy cow manure, seeds, and spend weeks preparing soil and planting a cash crop yet be 100% dependent on the rain for water. But that's not all I want to do. I couldn't just bring in money from the outside, dump off lots of pipe, and leave. Instead I want to develop a year long series of lectures on sustainable agriculture and make attendance and practice criteria for acquiring the pipes. To get the pipes, the farmers will have to come to the lectures and practice what we talk about. The end goal would be a community of farmers practicing sustainable techniques who produce more crops of a higher quality while giving back to the land as much as they take from it. That way their children have a better future and will not inherit degraded soils to be split up amongst the children.

If that fails, I will probablly not stick around at my site for two years twiddling my thumbs wishing I had an organized community which wanted to work.

Okay. That's the work side of it. I'm doing well, I've made some really good friends so far and have changed quite a bit. Throughout college I wanted to work in development. I wanted to know poverty. I'll never know poverty but at least now I am here seeing it. And not just that. It's amazing to be outside of the states, not just traveling around, but sticking around long enough in one place to really learn about it. It's only been six months which is very very little but it has changed me none the less. If anyone of you is considering joining the Peace Corps, put the politics aside and take the time to experience another way of life. Development wasn't even in the original goals of the Peace Corps.

In the middle of this month I'm off to the Chaco region of Paraguay to go to a three day indigenous Indian festival. I have made a friend here in Asuncion, an artist who sells her own and various indigenous crafts at a small market. She is constantly going out to the Chaco to visit her friends and has invited me to go with her. This particular festival is to celebrate "severing the head" of outside cultural influence (namely religion). There are plenty of missionaries here in Paraguay representing different sects, and have been for a long time. So this festival is a revival of traditional culture. I have no idea what to expect. But I'm guessing that I will enjoy it. If my site plummets down the tubes, I will try to arrange a site change to go live with a group of native Paraguayan Indians. There are quite a few different groups of Indians and of different languages spoken out in the Chaco. Though while the Chaco takes up nearly 50% of the territory in Paraguay, it holds only about 3-5% of the population. It's hot out there and there is little to no infrastructure.

Well thats all for now, thanks to everyone who gives me support because sometimes this is just really hard.

Oh and why is this blog called Acuna Batata? Acuna is the name my community. Batata is Spanish for sweet potato. And maybe you might remeber the song from The Lion King sung by Timon and Pumba? Timon and Pumba appear from time to time on the small little TV that the family has, so we started singing Acuna Batata.