A real live PC volunteer

I just stepped off of the bus from a 4 day long trek into uber ¨campo¨ Paraguay. ¨Campo¨ is how they describe backwoods, rural living here in PY, and I didn´t have a clue what it really meant until this most recent trip. If you all thought my current living situation with no running water, a wood fire for cooking and an hour walk into ¨town¨ was campo, you thought wrong. I visited a volunteer named Doug who is first time volunteer, meaning he is the first volunteer to ever live in his site. It´s in a beautiful part of the country, with rolling hills, some volcanic features, wetlands and lots of trees (at least where they haven´t been cut down yet). It´s near the town of Ybucuí, for those of you wanting to see it on a map. Doug met me in Ybucuí and then we rode the bus for another two hours, mostly on very red dirt roads. Where the bus dropped us off, we had another 2 hour walk before we finally made it to his site (and this is what he does every time he wants to leave). His community is set in the bottom of a narrow valley, with steep walls on either side. There are about 25 houses, total, and all are made of wood planks and most have grass roofs. There´s electricity that runs up the valley, but most families cannot affort it. Everyone speaks Guarani and hardly anyone speaks Spanish, so I communicated very little with them, except through Doug. He also lives in a thatched roof, one-room wooden structure that he had to have built after living there with families for awhile. It was super comfy inside (he let me sleep at his place while he slept at his neighbor´s) but also kind of like camping for two years. The latrine is just a hole in the ground out back behind his house, with no walls around it and he told me I could dump some water on myself back in the trees to shower, but I just decided not to bathe for a few days instead. Like I said, just like camping.

All the families we visited were very friendly, of course, and very welcoming. We made bread one day in a fogón (an efficient wood-burning stove/oven that a lot of NGO´s push out here) while the rain poured down all around us. We visited a few of the farmers he has been working with and I was amazed with what they´re able to accomplish with many of their fields on the steep hillsides. We also just drank tereré and chatted (well, he chatted) with a handful of families because that´s one of his main jobs as a first time volunteer. They only way they´ll ever listen to anything he has to say about agroforestry is if they trust him, and that only develops if there is lots of communication and obvious effort on his part to get to know them. Doug also has an awesome vegetable garden that we raided daily so I was finally able to eat something other than starch and meat. Yay!!! He also has a french press and coffee from the states, so my mornings were a dream.

All in all, it was a great time. Being a peace corps volunteer is not an easy job, that´s for sure, but I´m pretty sure I´m up for the challenge. These next 6 months are going to be super busy and full of ups and downs, but I think I can make it past that to the point where I make Paraguayan friends, have a real community, get to cook for myself and get to sit in a hammock and read for hours every now and then. Until then, however, it´s all business. And right now, that´s what I´m getting back to. Ciao.