June 20, 2006

San Juan Ara

The official “San Juan Day” is Saturday, June 24, but the first day I remember celebrating it was the 10th or so, and I’ve heard that we get to keep celebrating it well into July. Yippee! San Juan ferias, the little fairs they put on here in town in honor of San Juan, are not exactly fun, but they’re certainly interesting.

The day of the feria, a group of colegio (high school) boys dress up in whatever costumes they can assemble, using old brooms as wigs and potato sacks as dresses and socks as masks, and they run down the street banging things together and yelling and announcing the time of the feria and inviting people to come. The first time I saw the kamba I thought it was an angry mob and actually started heading back to my house til a little kid ran out of his house next door, all excited, and he explained to me that the kamba is a fun thing after all. During the feria they also sometimes dance and act crazy.

Some ferias are just comida tipica, the typical traditional foods of Paraguay, and the local ladies cook up a storm!! My favorite foods, in order, are:

Mbeju: a kind of cornmeal pancake made of crumbly dough that magically forms a flat yummy treat
Chipa guasu: cornbread with egg and maybe cheese
Chipa: what we ate during Easter week, a thick donut made of cheese and eggs and pig fat
Pajaga mascada: fried something, probably meat or mandioca or cornmeal
Torta: simple orange cake, not too sweet
Asadito: little skewers of chunks of tasty grilled meat, unfortunately with alternating chunks of grilled fat

And there are lots of things that I don’t particularly like, such as sopa paraguaya (cornbread, without sugar and with far too many onions) and all the varieties of fried meat you can imagine. The other night, after my host mom had spent the day killing and cooking a pig, the pig’s head was actually sold at the feria too. These Paraguayans love their meat.

The bigger ferias have traditional games too, such as pinball and varieties of roulette/gambling games, and once I got my fortune told (“Two years from now, you will travel far away from here”). They do “draw the tail on the pig” and potato sack races too. There’s sometimes also a yvysu’i, a huge greased pole that you can try to climb to get the prizes hung at the top. And there’s sometimes a toro tata, a bull of fire, which is some contraption that’s supposed to resemble a bull with a big piece of burning charcoal tied to the front and kids run around inside it (think Chinese dragon) chasing people. Hake – look out!! Apparently there’s a pelota tata also, a ball of fire that the kids would play with until a few years ago when a little kid got burnt so they’ve stopped doing that J

And then there’s the Judas, a big scarecrow-ish figure dressed in old clothes and hung up til the end of the night when he’s lit on fire. Sometimes there’s fireworks inside the Judas, and sometimes before they burn him apparently they name him after people, and if you don’t want him to be burned in your name you have to pay to change it.

Every event is put on as a fundraiser for one of the schools or a community group, and it’s amazing the amount of money they can make. Everything’s cheap, only 1.000 guaranies to play a game or eat something, but at the central school’s feria last year apparently they made well over 1.000.000 guaranies, the equivalent of maybe $200 but it goes a loooooong way here. Schools use the money for repairs or supplies, since the Ministry of Education doesn’t provide those kinds of things.

The biggest feria of all is scheduled for Friday, and I’ve been trying to diet appropriately to be prepared for the excessive amounts of delicious food available!!

Work Stuff

I sat down to sort out today where things are work-wise, now that I’ve been here nearly 2 months, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on that, lest you all back in the States think that Peace Corps is all about eating:

-led 2 meetings of the Learning Circle of kindergarten/first grade teachers, need to figure out a way to make these a little more productive without it being a big lecture from me
-plan to practice riding my bike to be able to make it out to visit the nearest asentamiento school, 5k away
-plan also to talk more with the Sister at the church here who works in another asentamiento and may be able to give me a ride there in her truck
-am helping one 2nd grade teacher plan a reading unit, will teach a model lesson on Thursday and then hopefully she’ll take over w/ some new creative ideas
-met once w/ the parents group from the central school
-met once w/ one women’s group, not sure what’s next there
-need to talk with one woman who’s in charge of both another women’s group and another school’s parents association to see when they’re meeting and how I can work w/ them
-have been teaching an intro to computers class at the high school once a week, will talk w/ principal about switching over to train some teachers instead after school vacation in July
-there’s a teacher everyone is complaining about, seems he “doesn’t do anything,” and I want to at least meet w/ him and offer to work w/ him
-visited bunches of times w/ teachers during recess, will continue that and try to talk w/ teachers specifically about what they’re interested in working on
-one teacher is interested in doing some lessons on dental health
-have offered my help to the Cooperative, if another Economic Dev volunteer isn’t assigned in August to replace Ali when he leaves I may end up working w/ them more
-made bunches of books and some other didactic materials
-need to follow up w/ one of the directors of an asentamiento school who lives down the street, her teachers talked @ how they don’t have enough chairs at our mtg last week, and I want to offer my help in mobilizing to meet that need

I feel pretty good about this work, esp. since two months really is a short amount of time. I feel also like I haven’t just jumped right in, that I’ve taken my time and am getting to know the community before imposing myself on them. And I like that I have at least leads into lots of different activities, not just in the schools. I wish people were more interested in nutrition, such as a community garden or cooking with soy, and that there was also an expressed need for information on early childhood development. Without people asking for it, tho, I can’t just go around telling people how I think they should cook their meals and raise their kids, so I’ll have to wait and see if an opportunity comes up for that.

I Have a House!!

I haven’t actually moved into it yet, but should be by the time you read this. After so much frustration a few weeks back, I gave up on waiting for the house I wanted b/c the family seemed like they weren’t going to leave (they still haven’t yet) and was told by everyone that there were no other houses in town, and was losing hope, and then suddenly a house was vacated and poof!!

It’s huge, with four rooms and a big patio, but it’s pretty ugly right now. It’s all made of bricks, pretty crudely in places, with a tin roof, and when I found it it was lacking doors, electricity, locks on the windows, fluorescent lighting outside, cement flooring in places, working shower, and modern (flushing) toilet. But I made an arrangement w/ the owner of the house that I’ll pay to fix it up and won’t pay any rent for the next two years J I’m paying like crazy right now for carpenters and electricians (fortunately I’m in a big enough town that I can hire people to do this all for me), but I think it’ll work out pretty evenly in terms of rent I would have paid anyway.

And once all the work is done, I’ll have a lovely bathroom w/ hot water shower (tho it’ll be outside, about 20 paces away from the house), a kitchen w/ stove, bedroom (bed, wardrobe), office area with all my PC books, and even a gym (what else do you do with a fourth room in Paraguay???). It’ll be fairly empty to start really, but after a few months I’ll have more cash to buy other stuff. And I’ve ignored the yard so far, it’s filled with leftover bricks and random stuff, and there are gaps in the fence so there are occasionally pigs and chickens and things wandering around, and that’ll be the big project once I’m settled in.

There’s a huge tree out front, providing shade over the front porch where I’m sure I’ll spend a lot of my time, and in the back yard I have a tree of sour oranges (you can use them like limes to flavor your food) and a papaya tree, and nearby there are tons of grapefruit and banana trees too!!

I’m soooooooooo excited to live on my own, it’s been far too long!