Good afternoon from the heart of South America – Villarrica, Guairá State, Paraguay!

I’m almost finished with property tax the database I’ve been working on. Two months of work, a careful combing of cabinets for useful documents – another two weeks and it will be done. We will then have a complete, computerized record of all tax payments for Paso Yobai over the last five year. We also sent a formal request to the National Catastro Service for all the information they have on property registered in the district. I will pick that information up in Asunción at the end of the month.

I’m continuing to hoe in the mandioca fields. A couple days ago I was out there hoeing alongside Luis Britez, the fasted man in Paraguay. He has a big 15k race coming up in Ciudad del Este in two months, but in between training sessions he has been coming back to Paso Yobai to help his family and work in the fields. Along with him and I were five other people, ranging in age from five to fifty.

That hoeing session was more difficult than the previous ones I have participated in, because the mandioca plants have grown upward. Now we must be careful not to cut down the stalks. The six of us who were teenagers and adults each had hoes and we worked our way up and down the rolling hills together. We made rapid progress. Meanwhile Kevin was using a machete to cut what we couldn’t get with our hoes – real big plants and plants surrounding stumps. Kevin is the five year old son of Paso Yobai’s treasurer Wildo Escobar. I hope one day to achieve Kevin’s ability to distinguish a weed from a good plant, and his cutting accuracy and speed. Every afternoon his father either takes him to the fields or takes him to play soccer with the big kids. Thus his farming and soccer abilities are surprisingly advanced for someone so small – and he is small, even for a five year old.

Luis has memorized all the lyrics of Ricardo Arjona’s song “Taxista”. Arjona’s a popular musician from Guatemala. He is so popular that on the radio and coming from people’s mouths in Paso Yobai you can still hear his songs from about ten years ago. I like the music. To me it was a beautiful thing for us all to be working as Luis sung the song over and over again while Kevin hacked away at the weeds that came up to his head and tried to sing along. He could only remember one line, so as he swung his machete around as he yelled, “Yo soy taxista!” (I am a taxi driver) over and over again.

Last Wednesday I had scheduled my first Civic Education talk, at the Arroyo Moroti High School at nine am. I scheduled it through a teacher at the high school who I helped with a grant proposal for a forestation project (a really well thought out project, in my opinion). The previous Sunday I spent six hours preparing the talk, based on a guide I had from a previous Peace Corps volunteer and the public school curriculum. I was planning on bicycling an hour to get there, but I could not bicycle and make it on time. This is because the previous day I learned that the lady from GTZ (the German Development Agency) was coming to the Municipality at 8 am for an hour long meeting, and I needed to attend that meeting.

Don Tata ended up driving me to Arroyo Moroti. I was a half an hour late. It didn’t matter. There were no students in the school. Nobody came because earlier in the morning there were maybe ten drops of water that fell from the sky. I talked to the secretary who lives near the school, and she explained that people come from far away on motorcycles and bicycles and the road is made of dirt. Thus if it is raining, nobody comes to school. This is all true, but in this case the road situation was actually improved by the slight amount of water that came down and made everything a little less dusty.
Still, it was a beautiful, cool, cloudy day, so I enjoyed a long walk back to Paso Yobai. When I actually do conduct a Civic Education session, I will be ready.

One day last week three men from the Paraguayan army came in and I ended up talking to them. There is a base about 10 kilometers away, in 12 de Diciembre, which has five soldiers. They came a few years ago because of a land dispute. According to the one of the men, the army will enter an area to resolve disputes if the local police cannot handle the problem. It is the executive branch of the central government that is supposed to make the determination of whether or not the army enters a situation. This same man, the leader of the base, said that people trust the army much more than the police because the army is more disciplined and less corrupt. I saw him later in the week and he complained to me about human rights workers from Asuncion who came and heard complaints about the military. He told me that the people who were interviewed were subversives, land thieves and bums, and the good, hardworking, honest people of the district respect the military´s mission.

This man and another of the three men have been trained in the United States in military tactics, propaganda and psychological warfare. They were trained in Lackland, TX and at the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Columbus, GA. Neither of the two men trained in the U.S. spoke English, but a third soldier, younger than the others, spoke some English and wanted to speak English with me. He wants me to find him an English version of the Bible, which shouldn’t be hard to do. All three are quite friendly. I enjoy talking to them, but I declined their offer to dine with them and sleep at the base. It is probably best for me not to be seen as being too close to the army, because opinion about the army here is mixed.

Last week a spider made me buy a new sponge. When I got home from English class, there was a spider on my wall. Usually a spider is not something I fear, but this spider was huge, maybe ¾ the size of my open hand (which, as we all know, is huge). I contemplated letting it stay on the wall, but then I contemplated the thing crawling on my face in the middle of the night. So I took off my right shoe and smacked it hard. Its remains merged with the large dirty footprint that the shoe left on the wall. Being the conscientious, cleanliness minded tenant that I am, I decided to clean the spider and the footprint off the wall. I misplaced my cleaning rag last week. So I used the sponge that I had been using to clean my dishes. Then I realized that it would probably be a good idea not to clean my dishes with the dirty spider sponge, and dedicate this sponge to non-dish cleaning use. Still, I needed a sponge to clean. So a spider made me buy a new sponge.

I had forgotten that I had done this, so when Arsenio came up to me on day as I was walking to the Municipality and asked me in Spanish, “Why do they like to work?” I thought it was strange. It wasn’t until hours later that I remembered that that was the question I had given him in class. We discussed why different people work, people’s relationship with their work. I had no idea this would happen, but that random question really inspired him to do some research and become the Studs Terkel of Paso Yobai. He went around the town asking people if they liked to work. Some of them liked to work, some of them did not like to work, some didn’t really know. He ended up using the dictionary I lent him and writing the excellent answer ‘They like to work because they need a little money to survive.’

Last Saturday I went out to take a bicycle ride. I was going to be gone for a couple hours in order to explore the companies 12 de Noviembre and San Francisco. I ended up running into Mercedes Peirrera, one of my students. She works with Don Aldo during the week, taking care of his children and store, and goes home for the weekend. We went to her house and I met all of her family members and talked for a while. Her father wanted to show me his fields. So they put me on their horse while they walked around and showed me the crops. They grow cotton, corn, yerba mate, pineapple, oranges, tangerines, beans, mandioca, peaches, and all sorts of other things.

Mercedes told me that they give names to dogs and cows but not cats and horses. In the U.S. we usually name the cats, dogs and horses, and the cows often go unnamed. I understand not naming cats, which can be pretty aloof, but if you’ve got a horse, and you use that horse, you’re likely to develop some sort of relationship with the horse. The horse I rode was pretty tame, so I called it Don Manso. The family then started referring to the horse as Don Manso.

I stayed there for a while chatting, then it started getting dark. The moon was very bright, it would have been a beautiful night to ride home, which I was planning on doing. But they invited me to stay for dinner and sleep there. It would have been pretty insulting for me to leave at that point, so I took up the offer.

The next day was Sunday. I got home around noon and I needed to cook lunch. All of the shops were closed and I had no vegetables. I looked at what I had. I had a jar of peanut butter that I hadn’t been eating. I remembered how when I was in Quiindy Stewart cooked an amazingly delicious Thai peanut butter sauce that we ate with spaghetti. So I figured I’d try that.

I put a bunch of peanut butter in my frying pan and added some black pepper, hot sauce, and curry powder. Then I remembered how good chocolate is with peanut butter. So I added a good bit of chocolate and some sugar. It was too thick, so I put some soy sauce in the mix. Then I chopped up and added my last tooth of garlic, and cooked it all together.

This might surprise you, but it wasn’t that bad at first. Unfortunately, by the time I was halfway finished I started feeling sick. I think I’ll remember to stick to what I know – soups and vegetable based spaghettis. I wasn’t hungry again until dinner, when I ate some bananas and peaches that the Perriera family gave me.

Luis Britez, the runner and hoer, also works at the Municipality tending to the trees in front. I found it a little bit surprising when he came to the Municipality yesterday, with a different hat and a shirt that said ‘Municipal Police.´ Now he is temporary Muncipal Police. He is spending the next months (before the big race in Ciudad del Este) going around to all the shops is the district to see if they use honest weights to weigh their fruits, vegetables and meats. I’m going to try to get out with him one day as part of the inspections.

If you are interested, you can read my review of Tomb of the Inflatable Pig at http://www.carolinapeace.org/index.php/pt/3/a/713 .

I did not like, at all, The Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. If you want to know why, well, read my review. I did, however,  just read a very good book. Although it’s written about the Paraguay of almost 100 years ago and not modern Paraguay,  if you want to read an excellent novel about Paraguay, read Son of Man by Agustin Roa Bastos. If someone knows I good book in English written about modern Paraguay, please let me know.