Where will all the Garbage Go?

A tale of Spontaneous development work

In the Peace Corps there are some projects you plan out meticulously. You pore over calendars and schedules for months and brainstorm a 5 step plan for development or empowerment or education. Other times, you go to someone’s house to sit down for five minutes to drink terere and the next thing you know you are trying to explain in Guarani why the ozone layer is important to a bunch of sixth and seventh graders. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This post is about waste. Garbage. And how we 'dispose' or, to use a term that almost hides the negative part about garbage, 'manage' it. Some fun facts:

-The mounds of garbage south of Chicago near the Altgeld Gardens housing projects were so steep a few years ago that an avalanche of trash was feared. After considering various solutions, a flock of garbage eating GOATS were brought in to consume some of the garbage and make the structure of the mound more secure and prevent a disaster.

-Anyone who has driven out of St. Louis into Illinois has seen the massive mounds of garbage that are located right next to the poor neighborhood of East St. Louis. It’s no secret that landfills are generally located next to poor areas who lack economic and political power. Just imagine how fast a proposal to build a landfill next to oh, I don’t know, Hinsdale, IL would get shut down. It would be a quick case of Nimby, aka Not in my backyard.

The garbage problem of our throwaway culture is obviously more readily observable to someone who lives next to a landfill. In the suburbs, we have trash pickup, recycle, and the problem is easy to push out of our immediate priorities. Out of sight, out of mind. I remember how in one of my undergrad courses at Knox it was easy for our discussion group to gang up on the ‘evil and misleading corporations’ that profit from waste management in the U.S. How dare they put landfills next to poor people, man! Looking back on that discussion, my 25 year old self wants to go back in time and give my 22 year old self a reality slap in the face: If the waste management companies are so evil, then what is your solution, man?

Honestly, where WILL all our garbage will go? As more areas in the world develop a consumer mentality, the problem only becomes worse. Living in rural Paraguay has shown me what happens when the culture of consumerism outpaces the culture of waste management. San Blas got electricity here in just 1998. Cell phones arrived in the mid 2000’s (we skipped over land lines). The town now watches as much TV as anywhere, and as a result people here are exposed to the same adds for Hellman’s mayonnaise and Coca Cola along with other consumer products. (With genius add campaigns specifically tailored to them). And I can guarantee that people here produce less per-year waste than the average American since so much food is consumed fresh. But a cursory glance or walk down the main road makes it evident that managing waste is not a top priority, as one will find it littered with all sorts of plastic, paper and glass garbage.

One of two things is usually done with an empty plastic yogurt container, plastic wrapper for a sucker or other throwaway item here: it is either a) tossed on the ground or b) burned in a garbage fire. Sometimes garbage is tossed into a garbage bucket, but normally that is just to be burned later anyway. The municipality has listed in its job description that it should provide garbage pickup for all of the companies under its jurisdiction, but so far the infrastructure hasn’t reached San Blas. So what SHOULD BE done with garbage here, especially toxic plastic waste that one shouldn’t be burning? The best solution is to build a garbage pit in your backyard and just burn whatever paper or cardboard waste you have.

I say ‘should be’ because in my experience most people burn all garbage, toxic and non-toxic, in a weekly garbage fire behind their house. I haven’t seen a lot of garbage pits in my town. The other day, I am over at my friends’ house and heading to the latrine after a round of terere when I see one of the daughters of the family sweeping garbage into a big pile.

“Are you going to burn that?” I ask her.
“Yep,” She replies.
I notice that there is a lot of plastic in her pile, so I say “You know it’s toxic to burn plastic?”
“Yea, I know,” she goes.
“Well why don’t you dig a garbage pit?”
“Why don’t you dig a garbage pit?” she said in a sarcastic, joking way.

I’m pretty sure she was just joking, but I decided to call her bluff. I agree that digging a trash pit is a fine idea, so she hands me a shovel and I start digging in her backyard. An hour later we have a pit that is about 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide. We then get her little brothers and sisters to gather the plastic laying around her house and toss it into the pit. Peace Corps grassroots development work for the day: accomplished.

Sometimes, I don’t think the words “Burning plastic is toxic” have much weight to whoever is listening to me. It’s hard to explain that the smoke will travel a short distance, probably settle into the ground and seep into the water supply and result in greater incidences of cancer, deformed offspring and reproductive failure. I get a look sometimes when I say that like I am crazy. Even though, tragically, an extremely healthy 19 year old one 2 miles from my town has just contracted cancer. I mean, its good that burning a plastic bag and inhaling the smoke doesn’t make your face peel off or anything but, at the same time its effects are potentially fatal. Yet my friend knew toxic was plastic on some level, but that wasn't enough motivation for her to dig a pit to dispose properly of toxic plastic instead of burning it.

Creating the right incentives for behavior change is tricky, and more-so in a foreign land and language. Motivation for behavior change depends on the effort needed to make that change, and the immediate benefit or threat of the problem being presented. This is where education comes in. An educated population is more likely to take more preventative measures to problems as opposed to reactive measures. And digging a single garbage pit and explaining to one family why it is toxic to burn garbage could be the start of a green revolution in Paraguay.
At least, this is what we volunteers tell ourselves. But hey, you never know.

A big thank you to everyone who donated to San Blas’ school library. Most Peace Corps Partnership projects that are submitted to the internet take months to get funding, and within less than 3 days we made it to the $360 mark. I guess I should have asked for more money, but live and learn. The students of San Blas will be extremely happy to have some new and very awesome books for next year.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

It’s late in the afternoon and I’m getting ready to make an exquisite dinner of veggie rice stir fry. My across-the-street neighbor, Ovidio, appears outside my front window and give a few claps, as is the custom since doorbells don’t exist here. I step outside to greet him.

“Come, you did a bad thing,” he says. “Your dog. It’s very bad.” Say what? I follow, and my heart starts pounding harder and faster. My dog Yuyo ('Yuyo is a Guarani word that means 'remedy') is at my other neighbors’ house right now, but I’m fearful that he may have been hit by a truck just like my previous one.

We walk across the dirt road and arrive at young Ovidio’s house. We sit down and he begins to talk sullenly yet rapidly to me in Guarani. I understand about 60% of his words, but the gist is very clear. He is angry at my dog Yuyo, who he accuses of killing not one, but two of his ducks. He brings me a dead duck that he just found, throws it on the ground in front of me and explains the evidence.

Three days ago his mother-in-law saw from up the road a dog attack a duck and was certain, from 100 meters away, that it was el perro americano (the American dog) doing the deed. That was the first duck murder. Today, another one of his flock of ducks was found dead. As a result of his alleged guilt in the first attack, Yuyo is the prime suspect in both killings. “So it looks like we are going to be eating some fried duck tonight,” he says sarcastically.

After hearing the accusation, I am in denial. I feel like a parent after a call from school about their teenager who was caught in the act of some serious misbehavior:

My kid? Sarah? No, no, you must be mistaken. Sarah would never plagiarize. She’s a good kid.

I know, Mrs. Johnson, this is probably difficult for you to accept. The thing is, if you google “Birds of south America” in Spanish, the third link from the top is verbatim the report that your daughter turned in. She didn’t even bother to change the font. She will be receiving a zero and will be reported to honor board. I’m sorry.

That’s not possible. Let me talk to Sarah. This is clearly a misunderstanding.

I still felt that the evidence was a bit sketchy and attempted to do a quick cross examination. So you didn’t actually see my dog kill the duck today? Is your mother-in-law sure of what she saw? How good is her vision from 100 meters? I understand you are upset, but are you sure you aren’t jumping to a conclusion here? etc. Unfortunately I don’t think my Guarani came off as articulate as Perry Mason, because Ovidio was still sure that Yuyo was the guilty party, and his grim face was angrily staring through me.

When you are responsible for the death of a chicken, duck, or other farm animal here, it is customary to pay the owner its cash value. Guilty dog or innocent, I was not about to start a feud with my neighbor. I went back to my house and grabbed the 50,000 Guaranies that the ducks were worth. I came back and handed him the cash, saying again how sorry I was. I also brought Yuyo over, let him approach the dead duck as if he could eat it, and then gave him a disciplinary smack and yelled at him. I figured this would satisfy Ovidio and prevent the behavior in the future, if indeed it were true.

Ovidio, though, still looked as angry as he was when he came to my house. So I said, “Well, he won’t be eating any more ducks, that’s for sure. Is there anything else you want me to do?”

Raising his head slowly, speaking deliberately, he looked me in the eyes and said, “If my dog had killed a duck, I am going to kill the dog.” The clear inference was that I should kill Yuyo.

I diverge from the story for a moment to explain a cultural difference about dogs here. Dogs in rural Paraguay are not “man’s best friend” as they are in the U.S. With few exceptions, dogs don’t do tricks, don’t have collars, aren’t on leashes, don’t have food bowls and are not fed dog food. They roam around different houses looking for table scraps, howl all night (especially when there is a female dog ‘in heat’), camp outside and bark at anything and everything that walks by. One thing they don’t do is kill chickens or ducks.

When I first arrived to here, I didn’t understand why dogs don't hunt chickens all the time. The dogs are starving. You can see the bones of their ribcages. Why don’t they just hunt down one of the 70 defenseless chickens digging for worms in the dirt between the orange trees and satisfy their hunger?

My host-dad Antolin answered my question easily. Laughing, he said, “Oh those dogs don’t kill any chickens. If I find out a dog killed a chicken, we get rid of that dog immediately. It’s done.” Get rid of, of course, means kill. It might sound harsh, but when you are poor and your ducks and chickens are one of your main sources of income, every time one of them dies it is the same as someone taking cash out of your pocket. If a dog develops a taste for live chicken or duck meat, natural selection does not look at him favorably in San Blas.

Back to the action. I am trying to process the fact that my neighbor wants me to kill my dog, who is literally my best friend. Yuyo goes on runs with me, sleeps in my house, and goes swimming in the river with me on hot days. He is the second dog I have raised here after the first one got hit by a truck. I try to explain. “I know this might be difficult for you to understand, but Yuyo is more than just a dog to me, he’s my friend. I’m not going to kill him.” As my lips complete this sentence, I realize how crazy it probably sounds in Spanish to Ovidio that I’m going to let a dog get away with murder.

At that precise moment my grey-haired neighbor Esteban rolls up, unaware of the tense moment Ovidio and I are having. Esteban is clearly in a good mood and enjoying his Sunday afternoon, as the flask in his right hand is almost empty. He asks if we want to join him in his Sunday Funday, then notices the somber, serious mood we are both in. Ovidio quickly fills him in on the situation. Perro americano. Mother-law. Dead ducks.

Esteban processes what Ovidio is saying, then says my favorite Guarani phrase of all time: Ijapueterei.

Literally translated, ijapu means ‘he/she/it is lying.’ The eterei on the end adds emphasis. Instead of a regular lie, it’s a big, fat lie. Add tavy on to that to make ijapuetereitavy if what someone just said was the most outrageous fabrication you’ve ever heard.

“Ijapueterei,” Esteban says emphatically. “That’s a lie. The dog didn’t kill the duck. I saw that duck get run over by a guy on a motorcycle earlier today.”

Esteban picks up the dead duck by its feet to examine it. Sure enough, it has a big, obvious tire tread mark on its back. Ovidio turns to me with an extremely guilty look and gives me back half of the money. I feel like I have just lived through a Perry Mason episode where it seems obvious that the killer is the defendant until the very last surprise witness. Thank god for wandering late Sunday afternoon drunks. I hand Ovidio back some of the money and decide this is a situation for gesture of truce that both of our cultures understand. “I think this calls for a beer.”

Nurturing a Culture of Learning: The Library Experiment

All PC volunteers understand that their service is filled with bipolar mood waves of ups and downs. A low can transform into a high within an hour and then reverse again, or a mood can last weeks at time. Me? I’ve had my share of lows and highs, which are noticeably amplified since there are so few distractions in my town. Yea, I can seek out some outlets—playing pick up soccer with high schoolers maybe. But sometimes I can’t help but miss things from back home: my mom’s chicken and dumplings, Wisconsin cheese, and the innocuous but typical conversation with another Chicagoan about how good the Bears’ second string quarterback is looking this year. But here and then you have those ‘Yes! I actually accomplished something’ moments, which are the highs, that make it all worth it.

Sitting here in my school on a sunny but brisk spring afternoon, I’m thinking about the time almost a year and a half ago when I had some sit down time in the ministry of education of Paraguay. A representative with whom the other volunteers and I were chatting said that the ministry would love to equip schools in more remote areas with books, but that often schools in areas where they have never had many books often either a) put the books into a corner and not let anyone touch them so as not to get them dirty or b) the books are soon lost, destroyed, brought to homes and never seen again. My friend asked the obvious catch 22: “How are communities and schools going to learn how to use books if no one ever gives them any?”
When I arrived to San Blas in May of 2010, I found myself confronted precisely by this chicken-egg dilemma. My school had an extremely limited quantity of kids’ books (about 20) collecting dust in the corner, but they were of poor quality. Without a solid selection of children’s books it was difficult to show even the teachers the benefits of integrating children’s literature into their classroom routines, let alone convince the parents of a poor community to use their limited resources to buy children’s books. The bitter irony is that communities like San Blas needs kids’ books the most.

Fortunately over the last year a few things happened that tipped the scales in our favor. First, I read a lot of books out loud in all of the grades. This became an especially effective activity when students started asking their teachers when is Professor Miguel going to be coming in again to read? Remember how hard it is to say “no” to cute 3rd graders who want to do something educational? At the same time, I received a few decent sized donations of books, one from a friend back in the states, one from an ex-pat, and another from an international book aid organization. These donations allowed the library to grow to its current size of about 140 books, or one shelf’s worth. Perhaps even more importantly, the books that we have now are awesome and pique the students’ interest. When I started reading classics like Where the Wild Things Are and The Hungry Caterpillar, all of the students, from kindergarten to 6th grade, started to ask me for more. I would read a book in 4th grade and 6th grade would hear through the walls and come up to me and ask me to read in their class. Sure, ndaipori problema. A little bit harder was to get the teachers to read the books to the kids in my place, but once I told them that if we weren’t using the books I would have to donate the books to a school that would use them, they went with it.

The culmination of all this was last week, when I had a meeting with the parents to discuss “the TRIAL PERIOD for a system of book loaning.” After taking into consideration the concerns of the teachers at San Blas that a school library loan system would only result in a loss of all the books, we decided to take a hard line: For the next month, we will loan books out to kids only from 3rd grade up. If a book goes missing that student has their book loaning privileges revoked. If enough books go missing, the ‘trial period’ will be over and the books will simply stay at the school. Every student, in order to borrow a book, must pass a small test on how to take care of books, delivered by myself. Students from kindergarten through 2nd grade can only borrow books if a parent or relative physically comes to the school to take out a book.

Yesterday was the big day. In 6th and 3rd grade we had very frank chats about how to take care of books and the consequences for not bringing the books back. After the students passed their test on how to be responsible for books, they were allowed to take home one book for a maximum of 7 days. Even I was somewhat surprised at the amount of enthusiasm that students showed in wanting to bring home the books to read.

A straw pole determined that almost all of the students from San Blas school do not have access to books at home. These are the kids most important to reach with school library programs like this. There are no major social problems in the area, like drugs and gangs which prevent some schools in cities from being effective. There are only the hurdles of bilingualism and the lack of a culture of learning not yet in place. So if it’s not there...put it in place. What else are schools for? The jury is out on the effectiveness and sustainability of the program, but the hope is that it will go a long way towards creating a higher student interest level in all kinds of books, increase reading levels of struggling readers, and generally create a culture of learning.

A big shot out to Prof. Dunn, Ann Marie Schafer, my aunt Marybeth, Darien Book Aid and my mom and sister for book/class supply donations. Know that your gifts are being put to good use!

A Little Triple "E" Swagger

"If you are reading this, your first grade teacher was probably pretty good."
-Socrates

If you haven’t heard the news, the Early Elementary Education Program is gone. At first it merged with the Urban Youth Development program to make the more generalized (or ‘specialized,’ take your pick) program called Education and Youth Development. Then when Congress decided to cut the Peace Corps budget for this year, our newly hybrid-ed program got the ax. Yep, we got the chop. After my group of EEE volunteers leaves next year, Paraguay will have no more volunteers devoted specifically to Early Ed. Adios. Hasta Luego. Hasta la vista, baby. Personally I’m a little bit salty about the whole deal. The move forces us EEE volunteers to consider a rather depressing question: “is our sector so unimpactful and possibly pointless that the office decided to get rid of us before all others?” The answer is a resounding “hell no, we are awesome.” The move, however, has made me consider the lack of respect (or at least priority) that is given to early elementary teachers here and in a lot of places in the world. Reading pedagogy, as we call it in the biz, is taken for granted, big time. My work in Paraguay has shown what happens when early childhood development is done wrong, but also the transformation that can happen when it is done right. Hear me out: I would like to demand a little more respect for our elementary teachers.

If you think I’m being overly defensive about the education profession, think again. Consider which majors ‘talented’ college students are advised to choose. The Sciences, business, law, or going into academia come to mind. Elementary Education majors are mocked as outcasts who failed their first college bio class and as a result are majoring in ‘singing nursery rhymes.’ One of the smartest/most talented people I have met in the Peace Corps was an elementary education major, and when I asked her about it, she admitted that many times in college people had asked her why she didn’t decide to study something more intellectually demanding than Early Ed. Even as an Ed major myself, I still have it ingrained in me that teachers (especially elementary) are given less respect than other similar caliber office jobs.

Let’s use salary as a gauge of respect. Go look at teachers salaries in the Chicago suburbs on Champion.org right now. A Physical Education teacher of 20 years with a masters who coaches sports commonly might make six figures or close. How much does the all-star 1st grade teacher with 30 students and similar experience make? Maybe half. You see, while the work of the elementary teacher is much less glorious than the work of the high school teacher, a plethora of research shows that formative years in pre-school, kindergarten, first grade, second grade could be much more impactful in terms of intellectual and linguistic development than high school. Not only have studies shown this, but it is just plain common sense: who is more in danger of dropping out, a first grader who can’t read or a seventh grader who can’t? Trust me, school is way more boring (and embarrassing) for the illiterate seventh grader. But that is beside the point. How did a student make it all the way to sixth grade without learning how to read? The sad fact is that it was (outstanding cases aside) probably a lack of elementary teaching that reaches everyone.

It’s about damn time that we give our elementary teachers some mad props when they do a good job, and make elementary teaching more of a priority. It’s just that early childhood development is easy to brush off as insignificant. The difference between a bad teacher and a good teacher in the early grades is extremely subtle. It is the difference between taking 10 minutes instead of 3 minutes for the daily calendar activity. It is the difference between giving students 5-10 seconds to think of the answer instead of just saying it out loud for them. It is using word cards and gestures while singing a song instead of just singing. It is singing the ABC song everyday. Still seem trivial? THINK AGAIN. Let’s take a look at some evaluation results.

Last year the reading evaluation I administered in Kilometer 16 school showed that ONE of THIRTEEN kids could recognize a single word. In case you did not comprehend that last sentence because you were in disbelief: 12 of 13 students could not identify ONE word on a list of ONE SYLLABLE words.

This year? 14 of 18 COULD IDENTIFY words. Yea, in case you were wondering, that is a pretty big jump. Pretty, pretty, pretty big.

This was due largely to the ‘subtle’ changes we made in terms of teaching techniques in Kindergarten and first grade: singing the abc song every day, exposing the students to words via word cards, doing a word wall, playing bingo with letters and words. The changes are sometimes so subtle; it’s hard convincing the teachers that they need to consistently do them when I’m not around. I feel like I am the nagging Paraguayan version of the boss from Office Space. Instead of Did you put the cover sheet on those TPS reports? We’re gonna need you to go ahead and DO that. MMMkay?, it’s Did you sing the ABC song yet in kindergarten? Area you doing it every day and saying the sound of the letter along with the word? I’m gonna need you to go ahead and do that. Do mind if I watch your calendar activity and micromanage the way you do it? Are you still having the kids spell out the day and not just asking them for one second and then spelling it for them? While these differences might seem insignificant, they are the difference between learning for all and learning for the top third (who know how to read already anyway).

It’s easy to be bitter and angry at the evil but faceless ‘school system’ when a 9th grader still can’t read. It’s not easy to get Scrooge McDuck style furious at elementary teachers when they skip out on the daily game of vowel BINGO that you suggested. It’s even harder to get angry at the ‘system’ for the fact that elementary teachers don’t get respect. It’s a lot easier to whine about the lack of success students have later on in their school career.

The Naperville School District gets it: they are trying to equalize high school and elementary school teacher salaries. Guess who is going to get the most talented elementary teachers in the years to come?

Reading pedagogy is not rocket science. It is not sexy...well maybe if Jordan Lanfair was your teacher. But it’s also really easy to overlook and screw up. It's the offensive line of education (see: the history of the Bears' awful running backs). When it's good, you barely even notice it. When it's not good, you can still just blame the running back (aka blame the high school teachers), or the coach, or the quarterback, whatever.

If this post seemed like a repetitive diatribe defending early elementary education and those who teach it, it was. So much money and resources (not to mention spineless rhetoric) is wasted these days on changes that have zero effect or are the equivalent of putting a band aid on a gushing wound (see: remedial programs in high school). Why not focus on what we know works? We so take for granted our elementary teachers, the ones who taught us how to read, write in the lines, and add. Next time you think that an elementary education major is learning how to major in ‘singing nursery rhymes,’ just consider again that one year of implementing basic participatory teaching reading techniques increased mid year word decodification ability from 7.6 % of the class to 77.7 %. So next time you are having a good time, maybe in a restaurant reading a menu or something taking your literacy for granted, make a toast to your 1st grade teacher, or maybe even pour one out. This one’s for you, Ms. Marciniak.

How Soccer Explains Paraguay's Underdog Status

“Ves, Erik? Estamos subiendo, Paraguay.”

“See, Erik? We are climbing up, Paraguay.”

-Celebrating gentleman to my friend Erik after Paraguay’s shootout victory over Brazil

Dead silence alternates with wild screams of joy and hugs in the well populated mall as the soccer teams of Paraguay and Venezuela take turns shooting penalty kicks. Our group had come to an exposition to learn about reforestation, but there was no way we were leaving early when the Paraguay National team was playing a game in the semifinals. At least one hundred of us stand around watching the game on a big screen. With every Paraguay goal come screams. Venezuela’s made goals produce a reaction from the crowd not totally unlike a human imitating a cat’s hissing. Paraguay’s goalkeeper, Justo Villar, AKA The Human Wall has already shutout one of the most powerful soccer squads in the world in Brazil days before. But with penalty kicks you never know what is going to happen. Everyone is waiting for the same thing: The Human Wall has to make a save on a kick, no easy feat. If he does, Paraguay will win and cement an advance to the championship of the Latin American Cup.

I diverge for an important and revealing subplot. There is effectively one sport in Paraguay: soccer. Soccer is the sport that is played, watched, and obsessed about by everyone in Paraguay, from little munchkins learning to walk and kick a ball to elderly folks talking about their glory days, and 40 year old dudes who still got game. To help you envision how crazy Paraguay gets over soccer, imagine this: Instead of having 4 very popular sports, each of which has a large fan base, the U.S. has chosen just one sport. One sport and everyone is a part of it: there are no baseball, basketball, football, or hockey fans: only soccer fans; one outlet to channel our evolutionary longings to belong to a tribe by to investing in a sports team. This is a fact: there are no other even mildly widespread spectator sports in Paraguay: only soccer. Picture Chicago cerca 2003 when the Cubs ALMOST made it to the World Series, and you are starting to get an accurate picture of the madness that occurs when the Paraguayan national team plays. I wouldn’t doubt that if there were a Steve Bartman who interfered with Paraguay’s team he would have to get plastic surgery and move far far far away. Paraguay has made to the finals this year in the Latin American Cup, and I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone and their mother is going to be watching the final game today and living and dying with every twist or turn the game takes.

So why does Paraguay put so much stock in their soccer team’s success? To understand Paraguay’s underdog nature we have to look at its history. Paraguay used to be the most developed country in Latin America. In the 1800s it had the first train and opera house on the continent, symbols of wealth and status at that time. It seemed to be on the fast track to becoming one of the most powerful nations in South America. Unfortunately, Paraguay’s dictator in the 1860s got greedy and decided to wage war on its neighbors Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay seeking territorial expansion. The war devastated Paraguay: its population was reduced to 100,000 women and 20,000 men, almost all of them under 12 or over 50. You heard right. That’s a FIVE to ONE ratio of men (and boys) to women. Some suspect that Paraguayan machismo is still recovering from this historical imbalance, which resulted in not a few polyamorous relationships, as one might suspect.

After the Triple Alliance war, as it is called, Paraguay developed an inferiority complex as a country. With its families and infrastructure in shambles,it fought an an uphill battle to catch up to the development and industry levels of its Latin American neighbors. Brazil has 200 million people and loads of industry, on its way to becoming a world superpower. Many Paraguayans go to Argentina in search of work, where they are sometimes looked down upon as ‘indigenous’ or ‘less civilized’ just because they are from Paraguay and may speak Guarani. Somehow Paraguay is always getting the shaft. One of the wonders of the world, the waterfall Iguasu, lies on the border between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Which side has zero tourism revenue? Yep, the ‘guay. Look in any South America tourism book. I guarantee you that Paraguay has the least pages of any country. Most of the tourists that I have encountered in Paraguay are the type that love going to places where no one goes. Leading Paraguayan intellectual and journalist Benjamin Fernandez Bogado’s most recent book is titled ‘The Urgent country,” where he basically lists all the things that need to change in the country for it to catch up with other developed countries. And yea,speaking of comparing yourself to other countries around you, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina have three of the most talented, well respected soccer teams in the world.

Paraguay’s freaking amazing soccer team provides it with an outlet to gloat over these other countries. In some ways it is the same kind of gloating that I did towards my friends who are Chicago Cubs fans after the White Sox won the World Series in ’05. That is, I know the fact that the team I support has won it all doesn’t make me a superior person, and most of our jesting is in good fun. But the Paraguay vs. Argentina or Brazil or Uruguay or Venezuela or Chile games have more of a feel of the Olympic hockey games between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war. (An interesting side note: none of these countries have Peace Corps volunteers anymore.) In other words, soccer is more than ‘just a game’ here. Much more. It is a status symbol, and Erik’s friend’s quote is a perfect example of this mentality: “See, we’re climbing up, Erik.” Their soccer team’s scrappy style of play aligns really well with their country’s personality: seemingly against all odds their underdog team manages to pull off victory after victory against teams much more talented and flashy. It is Paraguay’s way to gain respect in the international scene.

Now back to the story. I’m standing surrounded by one hundred or so people, no one’s eyes moving from the big screen. The Human Wall made a save against a Venezuela goal, so Paraguay’s penalty kick specialist just has to drill this goal and it’s lights out for Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. He approaches the ball, kicks left, keeper goes right...

“Goooooooooooooooool!” Pandimonium hits the crowd like we just averted a nuclear attack. A guy and gal next to me make out like it’s New Years, and total strangers are hugging each other and jumping up and down. Chants of “Par-a-guay WoooOOooo” and “He who doesn’t jump is Argentine/Uruguayan etc.” (sounds way better in Spanish, trust me) rip through the crowd.

On the five hour bus ride home, I couldn’t distinguish the college students from the volunteer network I was with from the 50 year old Agroforestry Engineers who were traveling with us. Everyone was so rowdy—they were partying as if... well, as if Paraguay had just made it to the finals of the Latin American Cup. For at least two straight hours on the bus home celebratory beers flowed and the PAR-A-GUAY chants were kept up with impressive volume; at one point people were so gleeful that they insisted I sing them English songs so they could chant along. (After hearing me, and trying once to imitate me, they reverted back to PAR-A-GUAY!). I chanted along, but I could not seem to match the intensity of these guys who poured their heart and soul into every syllable of the chants. Yea, the behavior might normally have been considered a little debaucherous or excessive by some, but who is going to be a party pooper and tell everyone to Please Keep the Volume Down when your upstart country has just made it to the finals of the most prestigious soccer tournament in Latin America?

We’ll see what happens in about an hour when Paraguay faces off against Uruguay in the battle of the ‘guays. It would be Paraguay’s first Cup win since the 1970s (while countries like Brazil have won like they are the Yankees in the World Series.) I love rooting for the underdog.

It's All About the People

Conveying the real Peace Corps experience to people outside of it can be difficult. The day to day work is explainable: go to the school, make materials, promote new teaching techniques, etc. Day to day explanations, however, miss what really defines the PC for most volunteers: the relationships built with people. Crossing cultural and language barriers can sometimes make forming meaningful friendships difficult. Nonetheless I have fallen into some wonderful people here. Sometimes when I think about how the people in my life right now often seem like they could be the makings of some kind of zany small town novel, the plot of which would be not unlike the Little House on the Prairie novels, but with motorcycles and electricity and in Guarani. A few of my following posts will attempt to explain a few of the wonderful people I have fallen into, starting today with my host dad, Antolin.

Antolin

Most PCVS have that one person in their community who is their go-to guy to talk to or hang out with. If things aren’t going so well, or you are getting weird vibes from someone in the community, you have that one person from the community who you'll be able to ask questions about other people in confidence. For me since I have arrived here it has been Antolin, my community contact and host dad. Picture a decently well built 50 or so year old who has had his skin an body shaped by a lifetime of working in the fields (without a tractor). His left eye is made of glass, but remarkably looks quite similar to his right. Only a few stray gray hairs infiltrate his still full head of black hair.

When I first got to San Blas I lived in his house for almost 6 months and used to drink mate with Antolin and his wife every single morning. Like a true farmer, he enjoys his mate very strong and bitter. He is the president of the neighborhood commission and also president of the citrus cooperative. He donated part of his private land for the community’s water tank. Antolin attends church more than just about any other guy I know. I have heard a lot of gossip about a lot of people since living in Paraguay, and never, not once have I heard a bad word spoken about Antolin. “That Antolin knows too much how to work,” people say (love how that Guarani translates). Whenever I am over at his house he is working; watching TV and cracking nuts to sell at the farmer’s market, separating cotton from the cotton plant, shearing corn. Almost too rarely does he take a break from working. Antolin doesn’t drink, although I have seen him take a sip or two of wine when he is playing cards. I can tell it is just a tiny taste just for courtesy, though. He speaks Guarani almost all of the time with his family, but luckily for me he also speaks good Spanish after having worked for a while in a larger city of Paraguay in his 20s.

Born and raised in the rural community of San Carlos, which is 3 miles from where he now lives, Antolin has been a farmer his whole life. I can’t imagine the amount of awesome stories he must have, but unfortunately it is hard to prompt him into story-telling mood. I am never sure exactly what to say to elicit these stories from him, and usually our conversations just focus on the present. One night though, he told me how he got his glass eye:

Antolin “I don’t know if you can tell, Miguel, but my right eye, it’s made of glass.”

Miguel “It does seem a bit different. How did you lose it?”
He proceeds to tell me this story using the same tone I would use for say, summarizing what I bought at the grocery store. I don’t mean to infer that he is a boring story teller by any means but that to him, this story wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Antolin: “Well I was in the fields one day harvesting soy. We were in the middle of working when a bug flew in my eye. He got in there pretty good and didn’t want to leave. Well, I finished up the soy harvest that day and by that time my eye was hurting pretty bad.”

Miguel: “Wow did it hurt a lot when it first got in there? Wait did you just say you finished the harvest first???”

Antolin: “Yea, it’s got to get done. By the time I got back to my house it was hurting really bad, so I went to the hospital in San Juan. I kept getting worse, and next thing I knew I was in a hospital in Buenos Aires, and they were taking my eye out. Luckily they had this color.” (points to eye.) “just about the same color as my left eye!” (Taps eye with index finger.)

Miguel: “What kind of bug did you say this was?”

Antolin: “just a little bug. Not sure what kind.”

When Antolin was a kid his dad got bit by a snake while working in the fields. The snake was venomous and, given the fact that there were no hospitals in the area 40 years ago, he died that same day.

The guy has a perpetual smile wrinkled into his face from being in such a jovial mood all the time. If I ever get in a weird mood here I always know that I can head over to his house, drink some terere with him and his family and in a short minute I’ll forget whatever was troubling me.

On numerous occasions, Antolin has said some of the deepest, most profound things to me that I have heard in Paraguay, although unfortunately I can’t remember all of his quotes.

One example of this is when after spending a morning chopping down a vast amount of weeds with machetes in the back of Antolin’s property, we paused to suck the nectar from some oranges. Within 20 feet of us stood the remains of a raggedy old shack. Spitting out an orange seed, Antolin tells me how when he first married his wife Erma over 20 years ago, they used to live in that shack for a couple of years before moving into their current house. “We used to sleep their, tranquil, with no fear of being robbed or anything. If anyone stole a cow, you would report them and they would go straight to jail. So no one stole cows. Of course that was during the epoch of Stroessner (Paraguay’s dictator until 1989). Now we’ve got democracy and you have to watch out for yourself...” Right here Antolin pauses, kind of looks in the distance but the way his eyes were defocusing I thought I saw him looking back in the past. Then he delivered one a quote I will always remember on democracy post-dictatorship: “Democracy is nice, but you’ve got to use it right” (“Democracia es linda, pero hay que usarlo bien”) A lot of people actually looking longingly back on the period of the dictatorship as a time of more stability.

Antolin does not conform to the machismo stereotypes that latino men are sometimes guilty of. At a meeting about reading in the home I was administering at the school the other day for parents of Kindergarteners and first graders, he showed up in his favorite orange colored button down. The only male in a crowd of about 20 female moms, he had my back as he made comments to everyone about how important he thought the work I was doing. The guy’s an all-star.

Still, he’ll throw in comment that catches me off guard every once in a while, like when he commented on the volunteer before me’s boyfriend: “She wanted to bring him back to the U.S. but he didn’t want to go. But Luis sure enjoyed that while he was here.”

If San Blas has a local Renaissance man competition, I have little doubt Antolin will come out on top. Did I mention he’s got nine (well-behaved) kids?

Deforestation at the local level

I vividly remember the shocked look on my face (or at least making that look) in 5th grade when my science teacher Ms. Hewitt informed our class that 36 millions acres of natural forest are lost each year. I was so confused; where were these all these trees being cut down? It certainly wasn’t my hometown of Brookfield, where the only tree I had ever seen logged was my neighbor’s when it began to interfere with the power lines. I just simply couldn’t picture how a quantity of trees this large could disappear. Wouldn’t the world have run out of trees already? Where were these places in that let you cut down a tree without a permit as is required in the suburbs? I pictured an evil greedy old man with a team of bulldozers laughing like Jafar from Aladdin as he devastated huge rainforests for profit. After living in Paraguay for over a year though, it becomes obvious that deforestation is much more complex than I first thought. Although my personal experience obviously does not apply to all situations in the developing world, I feel like it is a good place to start for anyone who might be wondering how such a vast amount of trees continue to be lost each year.

First, people naturally remove the trees to make way for houses, communities, and agriculture. I live in a town called San Blas, where almost everyone is a small sustenance farmer. San Blas was founded in the year 1970, and by talking to the old timers who live here, I have been able to reconstruct pretty accurately the beginnings of San Blas. (Sidenote: those are always amazingly interesting and entertaining conversations. Picture yourself trying to talk to an Irish farmer from the boondocks who speaks English with a heavy accent, then imagine that he doesn’t even speak English but a weird sounding indigenous language. Throw in some whiskey and they start talking even faster, making it REALLY interesting. Yea, let’s just say it’s a good time.)

Picture this in your mind’s eye: 40 years ago, from my town to the nearest large pueblo, San Juan, there was no road, no fields being cultivated, not much of anything really. IT WAS ALL SUBTROPICAL FOREST. There were only FIVE houses in the 12 or so mile horse ride from San Blas to San Juan. The director of my school has told me about how, for him to get from San Juan to his house, he would walk for 4 hours to go there during the week, then four hours back for the weekend, carrying a rifle just in case he encountered any funny business on the walk. From 1970 on, outsiders would move here who didn’t have land and wanted to make a living by farming. Often they would burn the forest to get the land ready for cultivation. The fresh land had never been farmed, so it was easy to sow the fields, with Paraguay’s year round growing season you were ready to produce. Just keep get those big trees out of the way and you are good to go.

Currently there exist patches of trees here and there but are vastly less. We haven’t lost an area of square feet of trees the size of Portugal in just this area, but you can see how this process repeated on a large scale could have an extreme effect on the number of trees in the world, making those seemingly crazy statistics plausible.

The second thing I have learned first hand about deforestation in the developing world is that when there is a lack of ‘honest’ or ‘legal’ jobs, and what’s is more those jobs don’t pay very well, people tend to look for other ways to make money such as illegal logging. Even if there are ‘honest’ jobs that pay decently (i.e. farming) but people see the opportunity to make more money doing something else, they will take that opportunity unless they have a strong incentive not to (such as a long jail sentence that will actually be enforced).

San Blas is a prime example of the above. Not far from my house is a National Park, filled with old growth trees. Except not anymore, because they’ve all cut down and sold for profit. Some people from my town work full time harvesting the trees and selling them to buyers in San Juan. Of course they know it’s illegal, but that is beside the point. They also know that if the representatives come to enforce the law and get them in trouble for logging, they can just pay off the law reps. The park rangers have a certain price, and then the departmental public prosecutor representatives have another (much higher) price. Even if every once in a while they get caught, economically they are always going to come out way ahead. After being here for a year and learning about the price of old forest wood and the price of cotton, and the work-money made ratio by doing each of those two jobs, I will just say you can make a hell of a lot more money by just cutting down trees. And in a lot less time. To give you an idea, I can live decently here on my PC stipend, and those guys make at least 4x more than me per month.

This system is ridiculously unsustainable and unfair, of course. How would you feel if you made an honest but modest living by the sweat of your brow, and then continuously saw your neighbor making renovations to his house with the money he was money through illegal industry? My guess is pretty pissed off, at least I would be. Then there is the fact that the trees are going to run out sometime soon. THEN what do you do? Go find more trees in another area?

But here is just how institutionalized the corruption is: last Friday, several people from my area were arrested when the public prosecutor came to the park and found them, chainsaw in hand. I am talking about prominent community members, guys who I like to hang out with. How did they get out of jail? A payment of approximately $600 per head to the public prosecutor and they were free to go. Kind of makes me thing of what Chicago must have been like during prohibition. As the old adage goes, crime exists to the extent that the law lets it. Unfortunately this mindset of corruption is very ingrained in the mentality of people in power.

I empathize to a degree with the people who live here in the boondocks and have taken up logging; the reality is that there is a real lack of opportunity for upward mobility for those who continue to live in the rural areas as opposed to the cities. It makes perfect economic sense that they turn to illegal logging to make a living on a lot of levels. However, this is something that clearly needs to NOT happen. A sustainable solution to the problem does not lie in just enforcing the law, but also in changing the attitude of the community toward natural resources via an educational campaign or something like that, and also in enhancing the quality of the local schools so that the students/future workers that live here have the ability to become qualified for a variety of jobs.

One of the biggest disadvantages of illegal logging is that the revenue is not taxable. My opinion is that the powers that be need to make up their mind: either ban logging and enforce the law, or legalize it and tax it and put the money into the quality of the schools. This is a tragedy and huge irony of the 3rd world: in spite of all the primary resources that are taken from San Blas, the schools scarcely have any books or even paper.
So there it is, a little example of how deforesting work on the micro scale. After being here for a year it has become all too normal for me to see trucks going by with ridiculous amounts of wood, or at least hear them at night as they sneak by.

On another, perhaps oppositely related note, it is world environment day, and the theme this year is Forests: At our service. Happy World Environment Day everybody! Hope this post helps you appreciate trees!

Swinging for the Fences

Sometimes, in life, you just have to swing for the fences. How else does Barry Bonds hit home runs? (I mean before steroids.) At some point in our lives, we all move to L.A. try to become an actor, apply for a job you probably won’t get, ask the super pretty girl out. Or something of that nature. Finally, of course, we might present a series of professional development workshops to your superintendent for possible use in the whole district that would have high impact in the local school district. Any guesses on which one I attempted today?

Yep, since LA is just a little bit out of my current budget, I had a meeting with the superintendent of my district today. I presented him and his technical team an idea for professional development of elementary teachers grades 1-6. In this presentation, I showed him the results of my reading evaluation from the previous year: 31% of kids in first grade couldn’t read, 25% in second grade. Then, I showed him the positive results from this years work in the school where I am mostly based: all first graders can read. IN APRIL already. From my perspective the correlation with new teaching reading methodologies and was crystal clear. I felt that the positive results that I have had thus far in my school were significant enough to warrant this presentation. Basically my idea was to give monthly workshops based in different teaching reading topics, something that Education volunteers very commonly do. Well, unfortunately my results were evidently not clear enough, or something did not go precisely right in that presentation, because the super did not like my work.

I have been lucky enough not to have many overtly negative experiences in Paraguay, but this was definitely one of them. After my hour plus presentation, I asked the Superintendent and his panel what they thought of the results, the professional development ideas, and what kind of support they would be willing to give me. At this point, the supervisor turns to address his panel and proceeds to say more or less the following: “The Americans from the Peace Corps always come here and do the same thing. They have their four years of special academic preparation, and they think they know everything. Honestly, this idea would not work. This guy will not be able to run workshops. Personally, I think I’ve understood about 80% of this presentation...”

Anyone who knows me knows I am one of the most hard-to-piss-off people around. One of my best friends Elwood will tell you that the only time I have ever been pissed was when he stole my TI-89 calculator and refused to give it back. Well; my fuse was done here. Cultural barriers and Paraguayan indirectness be damned, I could not take this man passive-aggressively and openly ripping on me, while seated right next to me, less then two feet away from me. So I go, as he is speaking: “If you have some to say to me or about me, I much prefer that you say it to my face. I am right here.” At this, he starts to go OFF on me. I say one more thing right as he starts to speak (forget what it was, but it was not anything of note), and get the reply, “See, the problem with you, Miguel, is that you have no respect.”

And I’m spent. I spent the next 10 minutes smiling and nodding as the Superintendent criticized me, my methods, Peace Corps, etc. I wish I could remember the dialogue but I was busy spacing out thinking about other things...
Unfortunately, I think this gentleman had a bad experience with a PCV in the past who tried to work with him (wasn’t an education volunteer). I have heard bad things about this volunteer, even from PC, so yea what he’s saying is probably true, that volunteer didn’t do her job well and it has seemingly soured him on working with us. I understand that these things happen; sometimes PCVs do not uphold the standard of professionalism that is expected of them. He brings this previous volunteer just about every single time I try to work with him. It is unfortunate though, whatever the reason, that this gentleman in question seems almost combative against me, as if I am an enemy of his. As I explained to him privately after the meeting, I think and hope we both have the same goal: all kids read.

So I designed a series of workshops based on the best teaching reading techniques in existence, using my year of experience in the schools here to tailor the program specifically for the teachers here. I hoped that I might be able to reach out to a larger quantity of teachers and have a more rippling impact. And I got a resounding no, we don’t want them. Swing for the fences...aaaaand it’s a big swing and a miss. I’m alright with that, though. At least I got my hack in.
It’s just a little sad to me because, from my point of view, I have the knowledge, knowhow, reading techniques, whatever you want to call it, to create a vastly different educational opportunity and environment for students here. Still trying to figure out why, but the powers that be in the area don’t seem very open to new ideas and don’t even want me attempting to present those ideas.

This little story is a pretty good example of the countercurrent volunteers and other development workers encounter in their work. One of the hardest things to deal with in the developing world is seeing a problem, and, from your perspective, being 100% sure of the solution, but being utterly powerless to change it. Tends to happen alot with health problems, environmental stuff, and of course education. Yay for learning about the difficulties of grassroots change the hard way.

On another note, my host mom and sister INSISTED on randomly coming over today to clean my entire house. My sink, stove, and fridge are now spotless. Not to reinforce gender stereotypes, but they did a hell a better job than I ever could have done. They still couldn’t get the family of 3 mice out of my stove though.

My walk home today

“Raise your hand if you have ever pushed your bike home.
Through 6 km of caked red mud.
In the dark.
While carrying three bags of groceries.
With handle bars that don’t point forward.

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.”

I just had a flashforward to me saying the above to a whiny high school class when I am teaching Spanish back in the states. It would be followed by me mumbling something about ‘suburban cream cheese’ (in reference to the students, not an actual cheese reference) and how ‘you kids just don’t know how good you have it. I know you all have really difficult lives, but how about concentrating on this matching worksheet for 5 minutes.’ Hopefully some of my old RBHS students read this.

Peace Corps True Life: Teachers don’t wanna do my activities wah wah (with poker analogies)

For anyone who wonders precisely what it is like to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, this post is for you. It doesn’t contain any rah rah adventure stories like the time I got drunk on rum with this farmer and tried to convince him that no, the moon is not a ball of water, and no, Columbus did not discover Paraguay. But it is a damn accurate portrayal of the question PCVs often ask ourselves: What do I do when I walk out my door today? Why should I be doing that and not something else? (Hopefully most of us, not just PCVs, have asked ourselves this question at one point or another.)

One of the scariest things for people considering joining the Peace Corps is the uncertainty of where you will be spending two years of your life. You cannot choose your country, and once you get sent to your country, neither can you choose the town within your country. Of course you have some say when talking to your Sector director throughout training as to whether you would like to be in a small rural town, or a larger or medium sized city. But just because you preference a particular setting, say a large city, does not mean you will necessarily end up there. When I was being interviewed over a year ago about what my strengths are and what kind of site I would prefer, I said: 1) I would like to, and would be good at, teaching at a teacher’s college having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree from a very strong education program, 2) One of my main goals was probably going to be to work on raising the literacy interest level, through children’s literature as much as possible, and 3) I have an extremely patient personality and don’t become flustered easily so I thought I would make a good first time volunteer.

Then came the day we found out about our site and how many of my expectations had been met. Of the copious memories I have from the past year, the day I got my Site Information Packet remains very vivid. I opened up the folder and read the following information about my place of residence for the next 2 years: “Number of houses: 75. Number of inhabitants: 500. Electricity: yes. Running water: yes. Number of kilometers from asphalt road: 16.” Well, I thought, looks like I won’t be teaching at a teacher’s college. Also, there had previously been several volunteers in and around the area, so nor was I a first time volunteer.

The PC Paraguay director, though, tells a really great story to comfort us on at this time. He recalls handing out site info packets to two different women, years ago. One glanced at her packet and proceeded to climb up on a chair and dance around and start embracing random people, obviously ecstatic about her placement. The other read hers and began to weep. To make a long story short, the dancing one ended up hating her site and left Peace Corps early, while the one who cried when she found out her site ended up loving it and maybe even wanting to extend to stay an extra year. The moral? When it comes down to it, often it’s not the site that is important but what volunteers do at their site that matters.

(Warning: poker analogy coming up)

I have been in site for a year now, and although Kilometro 16 wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I am damn happy with it. I don’t think I would trade it for any other site I know of; although I am still slightly salty that I wasn’t given a Teacher’s College to easily work with (the closest one is 16 km away—a one and a half hour bus ride—and impossible to get to when it rains). But, that is clearly life. You have to play the cards you are dealt. However, the difference between a poker game and a Peace Corps site is that you often don’t even know what cards you are ‘dealt’ for the first six months to a year you are in site. You are unsure of the community needs, what kind of project they would want, who you should align yourself with, etc. Peace Corps is like some really crazy 2 year long game of poker where the cards only reveal themselves to you after a minimum of six months of intense language and culture study via immersion, and probably some dysentery for good measure. Only then can you begin to play your cards. That is a crazy game of poker that would probably make even O.A.R. proud, you are probably saying to yourself.

After a year here, I am having fun playing this crazy poker game. My cards have definitely revealed themselves to me, and they are decent. But I am in no way sitting on a full house, a straight, or even two pair. I would say I have a low pair, or maybe even just ace high. Basically, I am going to have to bluff the shit out of the people who I am playing against. (Of course, maybe I’ll get a awesome river card and end up dominating the hand anyway.) Here’s why:

A major goal of the PC is sustainability. That is, make the work that volunteers are doing in the schools last after we leave. This makes absolute sense: if I teach one class of students how to read, I will have made an impact on just those 15 students. But if I teach 3 teachers who will teach 30 students per year for 5 more years, I will have impacted 450 students. Multiply the number of teachers trained, multiply the effect. Sounds simple, right?

In theory, yes. But I have been working with 11 teachers from the 3 local schools for the past year, and the results have been less than encouraging. Trying to get teachers (many of whom were themselves taught in a dictatorship) to change their methodology is about as easy as getting my Grandpa to read this blog on the computer screen instead of my Grandma print it out for him on paper (to my knowledge he still hasn’t read it on the screen).

I will give one example of this: Last year in July, I did a reading evaluation to see how many of the 14 or so students could identify words. As it turned out, only ONE of them was able to read me SIX (one syllable) words. (And that kid’s mom was a professor at the high school...so he didn’t even learn those words in school.) A few weeks ago, in April, I evaluated this year’s 1st graders. SEVENTEEN OF EIGHTEEN of the students are reading already. Why the difference from last year? Because I did a word wall with the first grade teacher for two weeks in April. I was so pumped when I shared the results of the reading evaluation with the 1st grade teacher. “They can already read this year! See how well the Word Wall is working?” “Yes they are really learning even Fernando (a kid who seems to rarely be paying attention in class),” was her response.

Seems like things are going well, right? Not totally. Fast forward to two weeks after this conversation. I had been visiting other schools, and in Asuncion, so I had not had time to even stop by the school. I rolled up to the first grade classroom in the afternoon, pumped to see the new progress that my 1st grade teacher had made with the word wall (you add 5 words per week to the wall, so I was expecting to see 10 new words). I say hello, peak my head inside the classroom, and the teacher must have visibly seen my hurt face when I saw that she had not updated the word wall at all, because she instantly said: “Oh I haven’t been able to update the word wall...I couldn’t find any paper.” No paper...what about the paper on my desk... I love my teachers very much, but I almost called bullshit (I mean almost said that out loud, in Guarani) on this excuse this time...ridiculous. My peak into the classroom also had revealed that the students were doing their usual lesson of copying nonsense syllables off of the board for a full hour, which, for most of the kids, is equivalent to copying Chinese characters off of the board because they have know idea what they are copying. And the teacher knows that my methods work...but she won’t change. This one example is typical in my work over the past year.

This has brought me to reflect on my own methodology of teacher training and to question a couple of things: Do the teachers really know that the methods that I am showing them work better than what they are currently using? Maybe I haven’t been 110% clear in conveying this information to them. Getting teachers to change pedagogical practice is by no means easy (not in the U.S., not anywhere). Also, maybe the teachers don’t like the feeling of being “forced” to do some specific activity, much less by a 24 year old hot shot Americano when many of them have been teaching already for 15 years or more. I personally I don’t think it should matter, the teachers get paid to do a job and have a substantially larger income then everyone else in the small town. However, I don’t have the authority to actually ‘force’ them to put into practice what I am showing them. This job is left up to the district supervisor (roughly ‘superintendent’), who is quite frankly useless when it comes to professional development and accountability of teachers.

After the word wall incident where I nearly lost it, I exited the school and took a walk and a step back from all the work I have done this past year and reevaluated where I am and where I want to go. What lasting impressions do I want to leave on Kilometro 16, aside from all of the personal connections and differences I have been making and continue to make? For about a year I have been hacking away at the official Peace Corps Early Elementary Education Goals from grades kindergarten-4th. And yea, undoubtedly I have had some success, as the kids in the school where I am mainly based are reading loads better, and the kids in my host family who I have personally taught to read have obviously benefited from me being around. But for me, that is not enough. The old Thoreau quote struck me as pertinent on my reflective walk: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Improving Primary School is important, to be sure, but what is the root problem that I am trying to strike at? This is what I came up with: Paraguay, especially the rural areas, seems to be stuck in a post-dictatorship intellectual rut (a widely read book published just years ago was called “Let’s shake things up!:Keys for the construction of a new republic). This lack of education and proactive attitude for change affects Paraguay negatively in very real ways. To give one example, very poor Paraguayan sustenance farmers often live right next to Brazilian soy plantations. Brazilian farmers pour pesticides onto their plants and into the ground, potentially contaminating the rivers and water supply and the land for future generations. These Brazilian farms reap huge profits of millions of dollars off of their yields. This money gets brought back to Brazil and in no way helps the Paraguayan economy or public institutions.

(Illegal) deforestation and soil and water contamination in the 3rd world are huge, global issues in this 21st century. All three of these are happening right her in Kilometro 16. So, I thought, is my 1st grade word wall helping to resolve these problems, which seem to be at the root of the Peace Corps purpose in Paraguay? Maybe. More literate kids would ideally be better suited to tackle problems like this, and literacy competency is MOST important in the primary grades. But still, something seemed to be lacking to me in terms of how I am, to go back to the poker analogy, playing the hand I was dealt: small site in a rural area, very few students (and people, for that matter) show signs of intellectual curiosity as I judge it, few people have books at home, access to information is scarce...

This is when I had an “aha!” moment: instead of zeroing in on the problem at the elementary level, why not take a more ‘big picture’ approach to the problems of lack of literacy, disinterest in books and the sparseness of creative community problems solving? Sure, teaching reading in the primary grades is part of the problem, but why stop there? As a PCV, I have the freedom to choose which institutions I want to work with and on which projects, a position in which most people will rarely find themselves in their job. Bureaucratic and specific objectives aside, my job at its core is to ‘make kids read good and do other stuff good too,’ and I have a lot of flexibility as to how I want to achieve this end, as long as I can justify the means in my thrice a year report to Washington, D.C.
So this is my holistic plan for the next year to improve literacy and community involvement in Kilometro 16. Instead of just focusing on the elementary education aspect of things, it focuses on several areas.

1) Professional Development of Elementary Teachers. While not my only goal now, without solid elementary school teachers, it would be hard to sustainably see any of the other goals developing. I am not going to continue sailing along just as I have been doing in this area, though.

a) I will be doing once per month workshops, in which school is canceled on a Friday and I have the teachers’ undivided attention and 8 hours to focus in with them. I will especially use this time to convince teachers of the outdatedness of the board-copying method, and to get them to think about what their vision is of all the things that there students will have learned by the end of the year.

b) All of the model lessons that I do will include pre- and post- evaluations, and I will go over these with the teachers, making sure that the teachers can clearly see the usefulness of the technique that I am presenting. I will strongly suggest that they continue doing the activity/method in question. If they don’t want to do said method I will procure to find out why not.

c) I will get my Kindergarten teachers to teach WORDS and ALL OF THE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET to their students, instead of just the five vowels to FIVE and SIX year olds. They literally do not believe me that this can be done. So my job is two-fold: convince them that yes, it can be done, and then show them the methodology they need to use to do it. I am thinking about making a bet with the K teacher at my main school: If you do all of the activities I show you and the kids still don’t learn how to read by the end of the year, I will make you dinner for a week straight. If they do learn how to read, you have to make all the materials that I have shown you for the next year and continue teaching like this when I leave.

2) Using the local High School students as volunteers to promote literacy. What’s the best way to make some one believe in something? Have them promote the benefits of that something to other people. I plan to make the high school students advocates for literacy and volunteerism. Possible activities: Reading Buddies, World Map Project, giving dental health talks to Elementary school, raising awareness about environmental issues, Waste management project. This is possibly the most important part of my plan, and also the most difficult. Getting the youths age 12-18 involved in literacy and community initiatives will mean that (hopefully) a sense of community responsibility and intellectual responsibility will be instilled and them, and ideally carry over to future generations in the town. This will not be easy, though. I have a very charismatic high school principal who I am depending on help me carry out this initiative. This idea is in the developing stages, and I still need to set specific goals and a way of carrying it out. For now, I am brainstorming ways to make volunteerism attractive to local youths and incentivize them to get involved. This may take the form of exclusivity a la national honor society, or something totally different. Suggestions are welcome.

3) Work with Parent’s commissions to get them to take an active role in their kids’ education. Parental investment in quality of education is such a positive correlation that I would be idiotic NOT to do this. K16 has a long way to go in this area.

4) Bring more materials (books) to Kilometro 16. For this I will probably do some kind of financial help from the U.S. project. There are very few books in the school libraries in the high school, middle school, and elementary school in K16. But, Miguel, you are probably saying, no one wants to read in your town yet. You yourself said it. Why would you want books already? So yea, it is sort of a chicken-egg problem: kids can’t get interested in reading without the books, but it will be hard to get the community to invest in books if they are not interested in them. Personally I think the fact that the students aren’t dying to read books is a bullshit reason to not get books. (Although that is what a member of the Ministry of Education once said to us when asked why they didn’t give more books to schools in Paraguay.) So, this will be the material aspect of my plan, to bring more books and get students ages 5-18 interested in reading those books.
Looking at what I just wrote above, I feel like I have set me goals pretty damn high for the next year. Ho-hum, I just want to create a culture of book-reading, problem solving, and intellectual curiosity in Kilometro 16, a place where my teachers won’t even adopt my clearly amazing word wall. A place where the VAST majority of kids who graduate from high school have never read a novel. Hmmm...Looks like it is going to be a fun year of experience in learning how to motivate people to change their behavior at the most basic level.

But the thing is, I really don’t care if things don’t work out exactly the way I want them to. And they probably won’t. The important thing is that I do everything in my own control to work toward influencing and impacting the people of Kilometro 16 in the most positive way possible. It might be improbable, but it’s not impossible. As long as I am drawing analogies today, the achievement of my goals here might be like improbability drive in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “There was nothing [improbability drive] couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would even happen.” Or to go back to the poker analogy, sometimes the Dude wins a millions dollar pot and it turns out he was sitting on deuce seven that whole time. The point is, in this game I am going all in.

At the very least, if I attempt to do all of this and I fail, K16 will be in the same situation as before, probably better off, as I will undoubtedly achieve at least some of the goals I have put forth. It is kind of the same idea as for teaching words to kindergarteners: if we teach letters and words and the kids don’t learn them, what has been lost? Nothing. And it will certainly be easier for them to learn their words and letters when they arrive to 1st grade if they already have some experience with them. Similarly it will be easier for K16 to arrive at a culture of volunteerism and literacy if they already have books and have listened to crazy Profesor Miguel trying to get them involved for a year.

To put forth a quote from the great one, Michael Jordan: “I have failed time and time again, and this is why I succeed.”

So in sum, I think that somewhere along all the time I was spending in elementary classrooms throughout the past year I lost sight of the big picture, which is to create a culture of literacy and intellectual curiosity in the town, and well, change the world.

Wow, I just reread this post, and it is riddled with Peace Corps idealisticness. Oh well, if we don’t have ideals, how will we make progress? Plus, I am in the Peace Corps. I am allowed a license to be overly idealistic. The toughest job you’ll ever love, baby.

If you read this whole post, I give you props. Honestly, this was as much written for any of my friends, relatives and colleagues who are curious about what I am doing as it was a way for me to articulate my goals for the next year in a way that makes sense.

Go Bulls.

Cute Puppies

I have a new puppy. After Lukie was hit by a car, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to handle getting attached to another pup and then possibly losing him, but then fate intervened Freud style.

One night about 2 weeks ago, I vividly dreamt that I was back at home in Brookfield and was mysteriously drawn to my backyard where my boyhood sandbox used to be. Approaching the area, I found that a dog had just given birth to 4 black puppies. This dream was so vivid that when I woke up the next day I recounted it to my neighbors over our morning mate.

That same day I headed over to one of my favorite kilometro 16 families to drink some terere. Before we had even started to pass the guampa, one of the daughters in the family asks me: “Miguel, you wouldn’t happen to be interested in a new puppy, would you? Four black puppies were born in our kitchen last night. Holy crap I thought, my dreams have never told the future before. I headed back to their kitchen to take a look, and low and behold they were, four black puppies. This is when I realized that I clearly needed to heed this omen and adopt one a new pup. Six months from now I will probably be on one of those Animal Planet ‘my dog saved my life’ shows.

Clearly the puppy in the picture is not black (mine is the yellow one with white paws and tip of his tail). That is because I chose instead to adopt Lukie’s recently born half-brother (same mother, different father probably, it’s hard to tell around here who the daddy is). I am having some debate right now as to what to name the puppy. Suggestions are welcome. The front-running name right now is Petey. I hope that’s alright with you, Stoj.

Miguel pulls a Charles Comiskey

“There is nothing more difficult...than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”
-Machiavelli

Machiavelli was right. New ideas are not very readily accepted to those unfamiliar with them. And not only are people who try to introduce a new order of things given a hard time and ignored, but they are shunned; many people of their time consider them to be crazy. It is often not until many years later that they are finally given their due respect. Galileo Galilei, for instance, an Italian physicist who publicly supported the heliocentric view of the earth, was denounced by philosophers and clerics of his day, and put on house arrest. Martin Luther was excommunicated by the catholic church for saying that people should be able to read the bible themselves. One-hundred years ago, the most advanced method of training to run a marathon was to walk long distances. What did people think of the first guy they saw running? Hell, in the 1950s, EVERYONE shot free throws GRANNY style. I think we can safely conclude that people get a little anxious, and are indeed skeptical, when it comes to the implementation of new ideas.

Fast forward to 2011 in rural Paraguay. Profesor Miguel is trying to take the lead in introducing a new order of things in the local schools. Specifically, I attempting to have the kindergarten teachers in the area teach words and all of the letters of the alphabet to their students. Currently, the teachers teach the kids only the vowels a, e, i, o, and u. The whole year. Of. Kindergarten. This boggles my mind. When I was a teacher’s aid Galesburg, I saw even the most troubled kids end the year reading at least 20 words, while the brightest kids could read short books. 5 and 6 year olds minds are simply ripe for the word learnin’! And this lack of teaching words in kindergarten has a reverse snowball effect. The kids start off handicapped already, so it is no surprise that their are a lot of drop outs and unsuccessful students.

Luckily I am developing some pretty good persuasion AKA psychological manipulation skills in the Peace Corps in order to deal with situations like this. Here is the conversation I had with my kindergarten teacher today:

Profesora G “Miguel, what are you planning on doing in my kindergarten class this year?”

Miguel “Actually, I was just about to talk to you about that. I would like to talk about some objectives for the end of the year.” (Pause, allow this to sink in.) “This is an intelligent group of kids we have this year. I think we can put some high expectations on them.”

Profesora G “Si, son inteligentes. So what is it that you had in mind?”

Miguel “Gladys, I know this is something that you have never done, but I would like to try to teach them to read words by the end of the year. And all of the letters, not just the vowels.”

Profesora G “But the system has always been, we teach them just the vowels in kindergarten. We don’t start teaching the vowels until July.”

Miguel “Yes, but this is a really smart group. I think we should try to teach them a lot more this year. Why not?”

Profesora G “But they don’t teach words in Farinakue and Kilometro 14 [two nearby schools]. The system is to teach just the vowels in kindergarten.”

Miguel “Gladys, I’m going to be honest. I have seen classes, in Paraguay, where kids leave kindergarten able to read short books. I think we can just try this year, experiment a bit, to see how much we can teach them. I want this kindergarten class to be an example for all of the schools in the area. Why not try at least?”

Profesora G “We shall see what we can do.”

What was funny to me was that how she kept repeating ‘But we always do it this way. That is our system.’ Well, I am a messenger to tell her that a new system is needed, one that maximizes kid and human potential. To stay patient, I often place myself in her shoes, and think about the fact that she probably views me and my ideas as quite ‘out there,’ probably much like the first person who said the world was round was viewed by his peers.

In the early 1900s in baseball, the 1st baseman stood on first base, the 2nd baseman on second, and the 3rd baseman on third base. People thought Charles Comiskey was crazy when he had his players stand off of the the bases to cover more ground. Oh he was crazy. Crazy like a fox...

Galelio, Martin Luther, Profesor Miguel.

I can now say my name is published in a sentence with historical legends. Gotta love the internet.



Citrus fruits and avocados, baby.

Tales from the Vault: Peace Corps Legends

Peace Corps Paraguay has had many legendary tales unfold in the 40 years it has been in Paraguay; and as volunteers we hear many of these stories. Some seem so crazy that it’s hard to believe they are real: tales of Paraguayan-American love and heartbreak, some pretty shocking violence, and others about PCVs who lost their marbles at some point during their service and went a bit crazy. One of my favorite pieces of folklore about PCVs gone loco is as follows. Though you may not believe it, Tale From the Vault #1 has been corroborated to me by several very separate sources:



Tale #1: Girl attempts to murder cow after cow eats her last pair of underwear

Laura was a volunteer in a rural site in the late 90s. As per norm in Paraguay, she would hang up her clothes on the barbed wire outside her house after washing them herself. This system worked great for drying most of her clothes with one tragic exception. Her neighbor’s cow, who grazed around her yard, had a remarkable proclivity for eating her underwear. The cow would eat no other clothes; he preferred only her undergarments.

Laura attempted to remedy the situation. She made a clothesline and strung it between two trees, but the only sunny spot around her house was the barbed wire. And this was her house, dammit. Laura was living here for two years and had the right to put her clothes out to dry where she pleased, she thought. The cow wouldn’t continue eating her underwear; it was probably just a phase. She talked to her neighbor and told him to please tie up the cow on days when she was drying her clothes. She returned to put her clothes on the barbed wire to dry. With a few isolated exceptions, this system worked fine for about another month. That is, worked fine until one fateful day.

Laura had her just washed all of her clothes and hung them up to dry. Her neighbor had tied up his cow, but Laura was vigilantly watching her clothes as they slowly dried on the barbed wire, just in case. Right before lunch, one of her friends walked by:

Friend “Hola Laura, we go to my house for lunch. Ja’úta la ryguasy fidéore. We will eat chicken with pasta.” Laura’s mouth started to water at the possibility of eating chicken...she had been eating only rice for the few days.

Laura “No puedo. Amaña che aohina. I can’t, I watch my clothes dry.”

Friend “ Estas loca, mujer? Are you crazy, woman? Jaha cherogape. We go to my house.”

Laura “Pues...jaha sapyaite. We go for a little while.” Invitations to eat chicken were few and far between. Plus, passing up the invite could even be offensive. But the sun was out right now...she would leave her clothes out. She wouldn’t be gone long. Besides, the cow was tied up at the moment.

Laura arrived back at her house with a belly full of rico pasta and homegrown chicken. What she saw, was the end of a massacre, the cow the assassin and her underwear the victim. The cow, in his mouth, had just taken the very last pair of her underwear into his mouth and was now slowly chewing them just as it would chew grass. As she stared down into the mouth of the cow chowing down, her eyes caught flashes of the hot pink fabric, and sometimes the white lining. Those were my favorite pair. With the calm of Michael Jordan lifting off for a jump shot after juking Bryan Russell in the finals (no sir that was not a pushoff, you know what I’m talking about), she walked into her house to grab her weapon. Laura knew what needed to be done.

* * *
John, the American expat who lived in the nearby town of San Juan, heard his phone ring and picked it up. He did not recognize the voice on the other end.

Voice “Senor Juan, come quick! Your compadre, the americana Laura, está loca! Quiere matar mi vaca! She wants to kill my cow! I can’t hold her back!”

John “Laura, the volunteer towards Pindo’yu? Dios mio. I’ll be there shortly.”

John knew where all of the volunteers in the area lived and within about ten minutes he was able to make out to Laura’s site. The scene to which he arrived was, well, quite the scene. The first thing he noticed was a white and black cow that seemed to have streaks of red blood streaming down its back. 20 feet, away, scissors held high above her head, Laura was literally being physically held back from attacking the cow by her neighbors as she screamed in alternate English, Spanish, and Guarani:

Laura “YOU STUPID COW, I WILL KILL YOU. THIS IS THE LAST STRAW. YOU WILL NOT EAT ANY MORE OF MY UNDERWEAR. TE VOY A MATAR. JA’UTA ASADO ESTA NOCHE. WE ARE HAVING A BARBACUE TONIGHT, PEOPLE.”

But like the Chicago Bears’ offensive line, her neighbors couldn’t hold her forever. As John got out of his jeep, Laura broke free from the grip of her holders, and made a run for the cow again, sticking the scissors in the cow’s back again The wound was not even close to fatal for the cow, and the Paraguayan crowd that had formed around her was clearly more in shock from watching this gringo’s breakdown then from the damage being done to the animal. Laura stood next to the cow, uttering incoherent babblings at a very loud volume. John approached her.

John “Hey Laura, it’s me, John. You O.K.?”

Laura “Do I look freaking okay? This cow just ate my LAST pair of underwear. I HAVE HAD IT!” She broke down and started to cry. “I just, this has been a rough week for me...can you go pick up my boyfriend Nick and bring him here?”

John brought Nick, and luckily he was able to calm her down somewhat. Though I’m sure the Paraguayans in her site had a hard time looking at her after that without picturing a scissors in her hands. Everyone has their breaking point, and I totally can see where this girl was coming from, especially as a volunteer in the 90s. Nowadays, we volunteers all have cell phones, electricity, most have laptops. The experience of the Peace Corps Volunteer has drastically changed. If I am having a bad day because a cow has eaten my underwear, I can easily call one of my friends and complain about my shitty day, no problem. We laugh about it, it’s off my chest, problem solved...in most cases. I can blog about it. Hell, I can even text my mom back in the U.S. And I am one of the more isolated volunteers. Back then though, if a volunteer was having a bad day, or bad week, we sometimes turned to less constructive ways of dealing with our stress, evidently.

And yes, Laura made it through her two years without leaving early.

Keeping with the theme of PVCs battling with animals, my next post, unless I get lazy, will be:

The Epic Battle Begins: Miguel vs. the Pigs (and no I don’t mean cops)

THE DRAMA IS HEATING UP IN KILOMETRO 16!!!