Gardening in Paraguay

Staring down at the scarred wreckage of my body, it’s hard to recognize it as my own. As the scar from climbing – in reality sliding down – the Great Wall of China fades from my wrist, it’s being replaced daily by all manner of new marks: the misshapen flap of skin from cutting my finger with my pocket knife, the red streaks on my ankles and flaking skin from desperately scratching mosquito bites, the cracked heels from the combination of flip-flops and pothole-filled red-dirt roads constantly eating away at the soles of my feet. The most recent source of cuts and bruises has been building a fence for my huerta (garden). The problem with making a garden here is not the soil – which is incredibly fertile – or the monsoons and droughts that alternatively nourish and ravage our crops, but the animals. I have many frequent visitors in my yard in the form of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, horses, cows, and even a goat. People in my community often ask me if I have animals. I reply by listing the above animals. When they look me inquisitively, I explain that while I may not, my neighbours do, which means that for all practical purposes, I do. And while I may have learned the correct noises with which to scare away pigs, shooing away chickens and roosters is nearly impossible. Hence, I decided to build a fence.
Now, building a fence large enough and strong enough to guard against the smorgasbord of animals in Paraguay is a lot of work. Let me tell you what my fence has entailed so far: first, I had to obtain material for my fence. I built mine out of takuara (bamboo) because I did not want to contribute to deforestation by chopping down more trees and bamboo is a grass, meaning it regenerates itself. Unfortunately, the man who has a large supply of bamboo lives 2 kilometres away from me (this is 2 km across bumpy, dirt roads). I consequently found a Señor who had a horse-cart to help me bring the bamboo back to my house. He chopped down 30 bamboo poles – each 8-10 meters high –, while I ¨cleaned¨ them off with my machete.
After bringing back the sticks, we spent the day sawing them to size (about 1.5 meters) and then splitting them in half with my machete. For those of you who have never seen this done, it’s a fun process to watch. After positioning and inserting the machete in the middle of one end of the pole, you grab both ends of the machete, thus lifting up the pole, and hit it against the ground until the machete reaches the ground (Kids, don’t try this at home! To be honest, it’s perfectly safe as long as you pull apart the two halves and let the machete fall to the ground). A day’s hard work left me with a veritable mountain of takuara, 435 some sticks in my backyard.
The next step, and this was the hardest one in my opinion, was hoeing almost 300 feet2 of earth, in order to clear it of knee-high weeds. The hard ground, baked by the summer sun and not made any softer by the lack of rain, along with the blistering hot sun beating down on me, made this a miserable task. I was exhausted after only an hour or two. I couldn’t help but marvel at the farmers who do this day in and day out all-year round.
I have spent the past week, with the help of a Paraguayan friend (Always get a Paraguayan friend, they know what they’re doing), actually building the fence. We dug eight large holes into the ground into which we inserted posts. For the posts we used leftover wood found around my yard. We then used long rods of takuara as rails to which we could attach the sticks by tying them on with fine wire.
Staring down at the blisters on my hands formed by days of hoeing and the scratch on my arm from where extremely sharp takuara sliced it, I just wanting to stretch my aching back and massage my sore calves, I feel proud of all the work I’ve put into my garden. Now all I have to do is hoe the area once more, dig raised beds and furrows, build a seedbed, and plant my seeds. I am so ready!

P.S. On a positive note, my calf and upper-arm muscles have never been so toned in my life! Apparently hauling buckets of water out of a well, hoeing hard dirt, squatting over a latrine, and digging a two-meter deep trash pit will build amazing biceps and toned calves. If I’d known that, I’d have moved here years ago!

Pictures of My Huerta

Jopara Guazu

On a recent day trip to buy blenders and computer accessories, my friend exclaimed ¨That was so cool Pooja!¨ ¨What?¨I responded. ¨In that last store, you had a conversation with a woman about hard-drives...in Portuguese!¨ The saleswoman had spoken entirely in Portuguese, while I had spoken Portanhol, a combination of Spanish and Portuguese. Living near Brazil and being accustomed to speaking more than one language on a daily basis, it did not even strike me as unusual that I had negotiated the prices and technical specs of hard-drives in another language. My friend continued, ¨Most volunteers have to learn to speak two languages (Spanish and Guaraní), but you are speaking three!¨ The Paraguayans call their two-language combination Jopara, meaning mixture, but I speak Jopara Guazu (English, Spanish, Guaraní, and Portuguese = big mixture)!

The Mecca of Chuchiness

The Intimate Lives of Strangers

I was sitting next to a beautiful pool, in a wealthy suburb of Asunción, discussing the tourist sites in Europe with a Paraguayan who’d returned from a whirlwind sightseeing tour. The next day, I watched the latest gossip about American celebrities on the E! Channel – straight from the U.S., in English –, while listening to my Argentine friend talk about the problems with her previous cable-provider. Yesterday I returned to my site, where the thrilling thought of having an inflatable pool in my backyard is tempered by the reality of the excruciatingly-slow process it would be to filling it bucket by bucket, with water from my well; where only one channel comes in clearly on television, two, if we’re lucky. Usually I spend my days in Asunción lazing around, enjoying the air-conditioning of a decadent three-story house, located within a gated-compound resided in by multi-millionaire bankers and U.S. Embassy staff, while my friends’ children attend classes at the American School. After these visits I return to my wooden campo house, crawling with insects and teeming with vermin, the tin roof that traps heat making the inside even more unbearable than the 40° outside would suggest. In Asunción, I’m served tea throughout the day, biscuits and snacks, by empleadas (maids) who live in the same towns where my fellow Peace Corps volunteers work. Sometimes I feel more comfortable hanging around the kitchen, chatting with them in Guaraní, talking about life in the campo, than discussing the challenges wealthy Indian housewives face living in Paraguay. On some level, I feel like they are more “my people” that the Paraguayan elite who I probably have much more in common with. In no way am I criticizing any of these groups of people: the Paraguayan businessman with origins in the interior of the country, made rich by working for global MNCs; the Argentine living in Paraguay who only knows the challenges of life in a cosmopolitan city; the Indians who have never experienced poverty – moving from Bombay to Asunción –, coping with raising their children in a different country and the lack of a cultural social-support system; the empleadas who leave the poverty of the campo behind 5 days a week for the prestige and pay afforded by working for a wealthy family in a wealthy city. Each group inhabits its own universe, a separate orbit intersecting intermittently with other orbits, but still its own self-contained universe, largely ignorant of how the people in other universes live. Somehow, I’ve been given the opportunity to inhabit all of these universes, if only for a brief time.
Travel, unlimited access to media and entertainment, the comforts of a three-story house, these are luxuries that I’m grown up accustomed to, mere slices of the universe that I’ve inhabited thus far. In spite of this upbringing, my universe is now expanding to include the faceless mass of the underrepresented, the ignored, and the powerless poor: their worries, their problems, their needs. In choosing to live poor, I am making those very people my own, or rather; I am becoming a part of them. I am becoming a part of their community: their hopes, their aspirations, their births, their deaths, their birthdays and weddings. Their illnesses, the cycles of debt and depletion, the quincianeras, the official unions under God, the not-so-secret affairs and broken marriages, the joys of new life, the life-threatening accidents, the lifting of hope and the grinding despair, these all touch me in a way that I didn’t think the lives of strangers could. Maybe this is a reason I feel more at home here talking to Paraguayans about life in the campo than the problems of the city I only know from monthly visits to the Peace Corps office.
How am I able to transcend the immense socio-economic gaps among groups and, in fact, inhabit several different orbits at the same time? The key for me is the ability to accept a new culture, with all the connotations that word suggests: to consent to a new culture; to agree to a new way of life; sometimes to tolerate, even endure, alien beliefs and inedible foods; but above all, welcome new perspectives with as little judgment as possible. The willingness to strike up a conversation in Guaraní, to compliment my hosts on the richness of the Paraguayan food they’ve prepared, bland by the ordinary American sense of taste, excruciatingly boring to the refined Indian tongue; to relate to them on their level, within their realm of experience; and above all, an adaptable sense of humor mostly aimed at myself. And so I’m able to relate to the rich Paraguayans who, although they have left lives of poverty behind, have not left their culture behind, who although they may not share the lives or fates of common Paraguayans, embrace their language; the Indians who know all too well what it is like to leave their country and their culture behind; the Argentine who searches for someone to share her love of world music with, and the empleadas who long for someone to converse with in their native language. My determination, and sometimes stubborn insistence, to speak in Guaraní, even though I’m much more comfortable with Spanish, secured me an open invitation to my friends’ cousins’ house, after only meeting them once. It’s also prompted my friends’ empleadas to extend invitations to stop by their houses in the campo anytime.
Still, even living amidst poverty, I will always be different, marked by my years of living in one of the wealthiest countries of the world. As much as I try to deny my former life of privilege, there will always be a gap, in knowledge, in access, in the ability I have to return at a moment’s notice to the land of opportunity and riches. Consider my salary, although I make minimum Paraguayan wage I am relatively lucky: I do not have 8 children to feed, I do not have to work and sweat all day in a chacra (though I am planning on it) to make enough money to feed my family, I am not at the mercy of wildly fluctuating world prices. Though I may live in the isolation of the campo, I can always escape to the (at-times) glorious chuchi-ness of Asunción with a variety of foods, cable TV, and out-of-season vegetables and fruits. I am very, very lucky.
Nevertheless, Paraguayans continue to invite me into their homes and lives as in I am the one who needs help and taking care of, not them. And for this, above all I have to thank Paraguayan hospitality. How is it that one family after meeting me only once, felt the need the second time I visited to treat me to an expensive dinner and gift me with several new ao po’i shirts? Or that the Indian family, since the day I have met them, has looked after me like one of their own, taking me to nice restaurants and movies? Or that my neighbors in the campo, lacking enough money to properly feed their families, but concerned about the money I would have to spend to buy expensive vegetables, have on more than one occasion sent me home with bags of fresh fruits and vegetables? I’ve had offers as considerate as sending a son 2 km to my house with a bottle of fresh cow’s milk to offers as extravagant as constructing an additional room to a house, so I wouldn’t have to pay the expensive monthly rent on a house of my own. Even during day-visits to friends’ houses, I am offered a place to eat, to shower, to take a nap if I so desire. And so, as my very own country has become a stranger to me, so have strangers become my own.

Book Chuck!

Check them out!

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit - Daniel Quinn

A New Earth - Eckhart Tolle

Is this your 1st or 2nd time?

One of the great things about being in Paraguay is having friends respond to you telling them, "It's official, I have girardia" by asking you "Is this your 1st or 2nd time?"

P.S. For those of you who don't know what girardia is (no wories, I never did before being here), girardia is a microscopic parasite that lives in your large intestine and is accompanied by such lovely symptoms as sulphuric-tasting burps and yellow diarrhea.

A Paraguayan Christmas

Merry Christmas! It doesn’t feel like it though. Somehow the 40 degree weather and the lack of constant, in-your-face Christmas commercialism (which I’m sure exists in Asunción, but is limited out in the campo) did little to foster my Christmas spirit. Not to mention, k-chak-a Christmas songs didn’t enthuse me in the same way that Christmas carols usually do. It’s way too hot to be Christmas! Let alone no snow, there are no winter coats or gloves or ice-skating or bare trees or biting winds that make me want to run inside for a hot cup of cocoa or sit in front of a warm fireplace. It’s quite the reverse here, and I’ve actually spent the past few weeks trying to escape from the heat: turning the fan on full blast, lying outside in my hammock, sprawling on my bed below my hot tin roof and cursing the gods above for the miserable heat, running to the río every chance I get.

With all these weather distractions, Christmas snuck up on me this year. All of a sudden, it was Christmas Eve. I wanted to celebrate Christmas the traditional Paraguayan way, with a family, so I went to the house of mamá’s (my host mom from training) mother who lives a little outside of the capital to celebrate Christmas the traditional Paraguayan way. Christmas and New Year’s are opportunities for big family gatherings here. Usually families will spend one holiday with one set of parents, and the other holiday with the other set. The house was full of all 7 of mamá’s sisters, their husbands, and their kids. The custom is to stay up until midnight. So we spent the time chatting, chowing down on sopa paraguaya, and preparing clerico, the traditional drink of Christmas and New Year’s in Paraguay. Clerico is very similar to sangria, it’s a fruit salad with wine. The Paraguayans remove the skin and dice all sorts of fruits, squeezing the juice out and putting them into a bowl. They then add wine and soda and leave the concoction to marinate for a few hours. Our clerico consisted of the current seasonal fruits, pineapple, green and purple grapes, plums, peaches, mangos, apples, pears. The only thing we were missing was melon (not watermelon…Paraguayans believe that if you mix anything with watermelon, you’ll die. I’ve been attempted on more than one occasion to invite them over to my house for tereré and watermelon).

At 11:30, we finally commenced our feast with all the traditional Paraguayan foods: sopa paraguaya, chipa, chipaguazu, asado, ensalada de arroz, and tarta de verduras. The radio was playing in the background so that we would know when it was midnight. At midnight, we toasted with cider and soda. Everyone kissed me on the cheeks and wished me “Felicidades” like I was part of the family. I felt lucky to be a part of this family-oriented Christmas celebration. Then the really fun part began and the kids and I set off fireworks. We lit rockets and then ran, screaming, in the opposite direction. There were cries of “Nde rasore!” (darn/damn it!) as we threw mini sticks of dynamite and they jumped about, exploding near our feet. It was just like July 4^th in the States.

Christmas morning, we had a breakfast of clerico (mamá had made me special clerico with just soda…even the kids will drink it with wine). Papá even added cider to his (there’s nothing like alcohol first thing in the morning!). We spent the day chilling in hammocks outside and drinking tereré. We napped, ate leftovers from the night before, napped some more, ate some more, and drank more cleric. There might not have been snow, and it have been hot as all hell, but it was a day with spent with family, eating, drinking, and sleeping, and for me, that’s what Christmas is all about!

Trapped

I was trapped. I was standing in a chakra (farm field) of some crop or another. Behind me was a banana chakra, dense with rows of banana plants, and in front of me was the río. To my left was a tiny little camino, leading God-knows-where. And there was a man grabbing me.
Let me explain from the beginning. I had gone out running that morning, an activity viewed alternatively as inexplicably weird and as super-guápo by my community. I ran down 2a línea, one of our main street (in so far as you can call dirt roads “streets”) and a road populated by houses on either side, many of them belonging to my friends. I ran until the end of the road and then journeyed down a camino to the right, thinking that it would lead me to 1a línea (the two líneas are connected on the other side). This being the Paraguayan campo, it led me into the world of banana chakras. One camino led to another and, somehow or another, I lost my way. I was lost in a maze of banana chakras. Now if you’ve never seen a banana chakra, let me tell you something: they all look the same. It’s very hard to identify one from the other. I once visited my friends’ field with their younger brother as my guide. The next day I returned the next morning on my bike and it took me an hour or two to find the same field because I couldn’t remember which camino to turn onto and all the trails looked exactly the same. Banana chakras are also very dense, meaning that it’s very easy to get lost within them. This is the reason that I usually don’t visit banana chakras by myself.
Anyways, I made the mistake of turning down the wrong trail and was lost by this point. A man riding by on a motorcycle stopped and asked me where I was from. This might unnerve some of you back home, but this is an everyday occurrence for me. While walking down the street, I often have men on motos stop and offer me a lift. Most of the time, it’s a well-intentioned gesture, as they don’t want me to walk 10 kilometers in the heat. Other times, it’s just because they want to stop and stare at the norteamericana walking down the street. I always kindly refuse, telling them that Peace Corps doesn’t allow me to accept rides on motos, and continue on my way. So this man stopping was not at all out of the ordinary. Neither was the fact that he was leering at me and telling me over and over again, “Sos una mujer muy linda. Muy linda” (“you’re very beautiful”). I asked him where 2a línea was, but he refused to tell me. He told me that it was far away and ‘why didn’t I just come with him?’ I refused, thanking him for the offer and telling him that I was going to get back to jogging, and sprinted off in the opposite direction. I didn’t stop to breathe until I was several hundred meters away. My heart was racing from running and because something in his demeanor had seemed threatening. Unfortunately (remember that I was lost), I landed up running in a big circle. I hoped he had gone on his way, especially as he was on a moto. He hadn’t. I saw him at the end of the trail and dove into the banana chakra. Unfortunately, he spotted me at the same time as I spotted him. I ran and hid behind a banana tree, making way too much noise stepping on the layer of dry banana leaves covering the ground. He drove his moto up to the point, got down, and started walking towards me. I knew the jig was up. We both exited the chakra and he asked me where I was going. I said, “the río, no más,” trying to play it off like I had found my way. He said, “Come with me to my house” and called me his “muñeca,” his doll. At this point, I was having a heart attack. I thought I was going to be raped. I was trapped and I didn’t know where to go. He grabbed me, hard. I knew his intentions weren’t good, I knew he meant to hurt me. All I could about was what I had learned in my RAD (Rape Aggression Defense) class and how and where I could hit him to stop him from hurting me. Somehow I freed my arms, and ran down the camino to my right, not stopping until I reached a house. He followed me, but turned around when he saw that there was a group of men and boys were sitting around drinking tereré. Deciding that a group was safer than this guy, I asked them for help. I tried to play it cool, telling them that I was lost and asking them how to get back to 2a línea. They could tell I wasn’t okay. They said, “You’re breathing hard and you look really tired. Are you ok?” They sat me down and had me tell them what happened. Luckily for me, the boys knew who I was from the high school and escorted me back home, up to my doorstep.
Why am I telling you all this? This is not a story that’s meant to scare anyone or have you worrying about my safety. Normally, I’m very careful about where I go. I rarely go out after dark, and if I do, I make sure that I’m accompanied. The one day that I accidentally wandered down the wrong road and got lost, this happened, in broad daylight too. The point is that this can happen to ANYONE, anywhere, no matter how careful you are. Thank God, I’m safe, I got out of the situation unharmed, but many of my friends in the U.S. have not been that lucky. LADIES, SIGN UP FOR A RAD CLASS. They’re FREE. TAKE A SELF-DEFENSE CLASS, IMMEDIATELY. I don’t care how safe you think you are; take one now, because you might never know when you’ll need those skills. They can save your life.