Although Paraguay has very little altitude and lies in a subtropical region, it still gets cold here in the winter. There´s no snow or sub-zero temperatures, but there´s also no heat or any way to escape the coldness that dominates July and August. Like I´ve said before, I live in a shack, like everyone else in my community and like many other volunteers here. The shacks generally have cracks in between boards and almost always a space between the top of the walls and the roof, allowing for ample wind to blow right through. The coldest nights we had hovered around 0 Celsius, with the days not getting too much warmer. My sleeping bag was my best protection against the cold. And every layer of clothing I brought with me. It was so cold in my little shack that my bottle of olive oil would solidify overnight and not thaw out for days at a time. Showers were totally out of the question because we only have cold water, so I willingly turned to bucket bathing instead. At least that way I could heat up the water beforehand, but it was still a miserable experience to pour water on myself in my outdoor shower in freezing temperatures. Luckily, it was not just me who was chilled to the bone. I could commiserate with my neighbors and fellow volunteers because we were all feeling it together. Sometimes I would go to my family´s house next door for a couple hours before bed and sit in front of their wood burning stove with them, drinking mate and watching novelas. The schools here take a two week winter break in July but this year they extended it for an extra week because it was too cold for the kids to sit in unheated classrooms at 7 in the morning. I read in the newspaper that during the height of the coldness, somewhere around 8 people died in the country of hypothermia. And this is in a place that will soon be so hot that I won´t be able to think straight! The good news is that most of us made it through and now we get to enjoy the extremely pleasant, albeit brief, spring weather before the heat becomes suffocating.
But don´t get the idea that the winter was all bad. The cold and early darkness allowed for a lot of down time which equals lots of yoga and reading for me. I figured out that doing an hour or so of yoga when it started to get dark kept me warm for a while and kept me fr
om getting into my sleeping bag at 5 pm with a long night ahead of me. I was also able to read quite a bit, disovering two of my new favorite authors: Isabel Allende and Haruki Murakami. (I highly recommend The House of the Spirits and The Wind Up Bird Chronicles, respectively. ) My garden held up like a champ, aside from my tomatoes which have some sort of virus or fungus. I´m harvesting a ton of broccoli and cauliflower right now, the cabbage is just about ready (for those of you out there who know an easy recipe for kimchi and/or sauerkraut, please please please send it my way!), there´s lots of peas waiting to be picked and the spinach is doing great. My favorite part of all of this is getting Paraguayans to eat new vegetables. They get really stuck in their ways (don´t we all?), especially when it comes to food, so they generally only plant carrots, cabbage, lettuce, 
radish, tomatoes and sometimes beets and swiss chard. I didn´t plan well with my broccoli and cauliflower so I had about 4 heads of each all ready at the same time. That meant vegetable giveaway time. I found families who weren´t completely opposed to trying them out and got to spread the joy of vegetables. This happens with my lettuce a lot as well, because there´s no way I can eat all that I planted. A lot of my Paraguayan buddies are really intrigued by the spinach I have growing when the come over to check out the garden, so I´m always handing out spinach leaves for them to try. And they usually like it so much that they want to plant it in their own gardens, so I also have a lot of spinach seeds on hand. My family next door planted a bunch of beets but they don´t really know what to do with them, so I made them a Russian salad (?) recently with a lot of other veggies from the garden and they loved it! So far, the garden is my one of my favorite parts of my job.
But back to the good parts of winter. For me, the most wonderful part of the cold season was the bananas. Apparently, bananas are ready to harvest around here in the winter. And when they´re ready, lots and lots of them are ready. My family has a good little banana orchard to the side of the house so I would help them cut down the banana bunches when it was time. Every few weeks or so we would trek on in there and find the ones that were ready, chop the huge banana bunch off, and then machete that whole part of the tree down. Banana trees are strange, barely trees at all and more like a huge, water filled grass stalk that produces delicious fruit. When one stalk produces a banana bunch, it´s life is over in
terms of fruit production. You machete that stalk down, and another stalk begins to sprout up almost immediately. In these tropical and subtropical areas where bananas grow, decomposition happens rapidly, so the downed banana stalks are just left in place, quickly becoming incorporated into the soil. Needless to say, with small, family banana producers, the banana orchards are very fertile places. With every banana harvest with my family, I was given at least one huge bunch to hang up in my house. We cut them when they were still green, so we would hang them up inside until they were ready to eat. One downside of this is that all the bananas on one bunch ripen within a week or so of each other, and we´re talking about at least 50-80 bananas per bunch. When they start ripening, all I eat are bananas: in my cereal or oatmeal, with peanut butter, banana bread, banana pancakes with banana topping, just bananas. I do everything I can to eat them before they go bad, but it´s almost impossible on my own. Fortunately, chickens and dogs enjoy overripe bananas (as does my compost pile) so they help me
finish them off. If you haven´t noticed from this long paragraph about bananas, I absolutely love them. It makes me extremely happy to eat them when they´re grown 20 m from my house and not shipped half way around the world. It´s going to be a sad summer without them, but I of course have a huge ziplock full of them in my freezer waiting to be made into smoothies when the heat starts to become oppressive.Another great thing about this winter was my recent trip to Buenos Aires. That is one great city. I´m going to save the stories and pictures for my next blog post (I promise it will be soon), but wanted to put the idea out there for all those potential south american visitors. If you don´t want to come to Paraguay, I´ll totally meet you in BA. Think about it....
Ciao, Leah
