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!