More recent posts about Paraguay
Articles from Paraguay
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World Map Prison
Putting the finishing touches on a three month project to paint a world map on the classroom wall of a prison in Concepcion, Paraguay.
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Condoms on Bananas
A safe sex workshop excercise, practicing putting condoms on bananas in a girl's school in Horquetta, Paraguay.
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Roadside Laugh, Paraguay
Peace Corps Volunteers even demonstrate personal sustainability practices in the ways we get around. We navigate Paraguay's dusty countryside on bicycles, which can be a source of amusement for machismo men on their motorized bikes. Or maybe they were laughing at my huge sack of peanuts? (As vegetarians in a very meat-based culture, people were always giving us delicious treats from their "emergency" storage of plant-derived protein!)
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Bahia Negra Boat
Though the Rio Paraguay is massive and carries a huge amount of freight, it can also be incredibly serene. This is especially true up in the extremely isolated northern town of Bahia Negra, Paraguay, on the southern edge of the amazingly vast and biodiverse Pantanal wetland.
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Boat Day, Bahia Negra
Imagine living in a place so isolated and remote that your only physical connection to the outside world was a boat that came once a week. That's what it's like in the town of Bahia Negra, Paraguay, on the Rio Paraguay. Boat Day in Bahia Negra is a total bonanza of activity. A rush of people and goods pour on and off the boat for a couple hours before it floats back down the river and life in this sleepy town returns to its slow pace once again.
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Neni's Creative Seed Starting
Being a Peace Corps Volunteer is all about helping local people value the resources they have and coming up with creative ways of sustainably exploiting the ever-present "under-utilized resources in the community." Our friend Neni mastered this principle by using the abundant citrus rinds lying around the farm as seed-starting pots (a "maceta casera").
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Sesame Lovers
Amongst the many crops we promoted for crop diversification in Paraguay, sesame was one of our favorite cash crops because: 1. It generally had a high market value, but even if farmers couldn't sell any of it, they could still use it as a valuable protein source for their animals or themselves; and 2. It grows extremely well without need of chemicals or irrigation, even in Paraguay's hot, droughty summers.
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Horses grazing
Horses graze in the countryside surrounding Yataity, Guaira at sunset.
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Lake
The lake in Aregua, Paraguay.
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Countryside School
This was the old school in the area of Independencia. One weekend a few of us helped build a new one.
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Big animal
Up close and personal with the ox that pulled my host dad's cart.
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Meat storage
I opened from fridge one day and gasped when I saw that someone had gone meat shopping.
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Grazing
A horse grazes next to one of many abandoned houses with grass growing inside.
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Butcher Cart
A woman shops for meat on the side of the road where this man often slaughters cows.
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Piggies
Day-old piglets struggle to nurse.
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Making gyros
Coming from a Greek town, I wanted to make my family gyros. This is how we picked up the lamb.
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Carnaval
Somehow I let them convince me to samba down the main avenue in a gold sequined bra top and a skirt.
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Firehole
My friend's dad in front of the tatakua, or fire hole in guarani, used to cook traditional foods.
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Me and mom
Me and my host mom, Conchena, with whom I laughed for two years. One of my favorite people in the world.
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Traditional Dance
Girls dressed in ao po'i dancing the Paraguayan Polka
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Yerba
A long aisle of yerba, the shredded, dried plant needed to make terere or mate.
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Host Grandma
My host grandma is awesome, as you can see here.
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Riding a horse
This is me riding a horse for the first time in Paraguay. I later bought my own.
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My house
My Peace corps house. A little fancier than most, with free garbage disposals.
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Man and horse
My horse Bigote, (mustache) bonding with my host uncle who took care of him.
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T-ray to go
The popular tea, terere, in the ubiquitous leather-covered thermos and taken everywhere in the heat of summer.
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Teeth-Brushing 101
Although I was an Agroforestry volunteer, I helped out my nearest cohort, Erin, with health programs at a community school that was centrally located in the community of Santo Domingo, Guaira, Paraguay. My hometown dentist had sent down a duffel bag full of toothbrushes and toothpaste, so we decided to do a dental health program. Saw lots of bloody mouths and had to keep numerous kids from eating toothpaste like candy, but it was a great day.
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Painting the the church
To celebrate San Juan the community painted the church a bright yellow. This picture was taken at a morning terere break.
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Dinner
Sra Teodosia had a contagious laugh that could be heard a distance away. I snapped this picture before cow's head went into the cauldron.
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Road Trip Altitude Hell
Driving from sea level to 15,000 feet in an afternoon to camp out at Parque Nacional Lauca (in Chile on travel leave) was a bad idea. After suffering a night of miserable altitude headaches and freezing Atacama Desert air, Greg Mason and I got a Park Guard to snap this photo before heading back 'down the mountain.'
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Flags
At the "inauguration" party for my newly constructed house, my counterpart and his family flew our flags.
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Family Portrait
This picture of Rogelio Martinez and his wonderful family was taken during a family outing to a nearby river running through some of the last remaining forests in my site.
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Rooftop
Sitting on top of the newly erected frame for my house. Wood, nails, wire, some string, rope, a hammer, crosscut saw, sweat, bamboo, and straw were the only ingredients. Six of the neighbors had the one-room mansion up in 2 days!
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Reunion
It was incredibly rewarding to have the opportunity to return to Paraguay 7 years after COS'ing...to see how kids had grown and to see projects still in the ground and to reunite with old friends. Mario Espinola and his family were the best neighbors anyone could have.
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Bee-Kini
At the end of training, the beekeepers were doing bee-beards and invited all interested parties to participate. The fun part was getting them off!
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How I Learned Guarani
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How I Learned Guarani
The Peace Corps is not a travel agency. I sat nervously in the recruiter’s office, exhausted from the two-hour interview, when I was asked the golden question. “What part of the world would you like to serve? Remember, we assign volunteers where their skills are most needed, not because they want to be tourists.” I desperately wanted to live in Central America. The climate! The food! The beach! But I was better prepared than that. “I would like to serve in Central America s...
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Weed Lady's Tereré
Just thinking about the sound of the pounding mortar and pestle at the corner “weed ladys” stand makes me thirsty. My wife and I served in the Peace Corps for three years in the hot South American country of Paraguay and we both came back hooked on the undisputed national beverage, tereré, a bitter green iced tea made from the native yerba maté shrub. Aside from the social nature of the beverage, which is always drunk from a common cup and metal straw that’s passed back and forth around chat ...
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Paraguayan Power
Even most rural Paraguayans now have power lines connecting their homes to the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam built in the early 1970s across the Paraná River between Brazil and Paraguay. At Itaipu, which means "the sound of a stone" in the native Guarani language spoken throughout Paraguay, massive volumes of water pound through immense turbines on the way down toward the sea. Itaipu’s spinning turbines produce over 90 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. That’s more than any ...
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La Mandarina
My site is perched on a hill next to the last bit of Paraguay’s Upper Parana jungle. Twenty-five years ago, it consisted of little more than a handful of indigenous families surrounded by barely-accessible roads and intimidating rainforest, thick as a howler monkey’s beard. From the air, the forest would have resembled distant ruffled moss, polka-dotted pink and yellow by blooming Tajy trees. Today, the land is mostly red dirt. Bald. Deforested. Over the decades, my site transformed in...
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What Have I Gotten Myself Into
It was the end of our 2nd month in training, and time to go out to our current site to meet our counterparts, find a place to live, check the place out. We got off the bus in our little town, looked around, and saw a small sign on the little tienda: Se alquila cuartos (We rent rooms.) So, we checked inside and the owner was more than happy to kick her numerous children out of the one bedroom, with a large double bed and a bare light bulb, to give it to us. I noted that there was no mosqu...
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Kiko & Roberto Learning English
As Peace Corps Volunteers, we took advantage of every opportunity to teach Paraguayans something. During a dull moment in the truck on the way to an agriculture training in a rural community, Kiko asked us to teach him how to say "I want to wish you a merry Christmas"...and then we made Roberto try it, too. The language you hear them speaking is the native Guarani which we did most of our work in. 12-9-08
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Chicken Killer
Ever since we'd arrived in Paraguay, Enrique had been dying to kill a chicken. He finally gets his chance. (Included in the bottom of a blog entry here: http://peacecorpsparaguay.blogspot.com/2008/07/milk-and-cheese-and-bananas-and.html)
