Visiting the artists, a cuban sleezeball, all in a day's work in Paraguay

This is one of the artisan familes working in front of their wood-frame house.


This little treasure was born weighing only 2 lbs and is now 1 year 4months old!! Isn't he precious!!! I loved getting a shot of the little tike holding a cup of terere which instead of drinking he just blew bubbles.

This is the back of the house.













I wanted to take a closer look, and Carol got a snapshot of me tickling little Miguelito so that he would tell me what he had been laughing at. But, as most shy children meeting with a blond foreigner, he never divulged his secrets.

Another fun pic of me with the artists

This is me...sleeping in the back of the pickup truck on a return trip from a birthday party. I

didn't really appreciate them taking pictures of me...but hey sleeping gringa.

This is the group of artists Paraguay Hecho a Mano is working with up in a small community of ceramic artisans. This was the first full meeting of the women working in the program which provides educational resources to all the kids of the wo

men as well as a first aid clinic in the community. Some of the kids have serious health problems and the group is working to get them cheap professional attention in Asuncion for a girl with serious heart problems, a blind girl, and another girl with

nutrition problems. They are a great group. Carol is on the left next to the bearded man Osvaldo--the presidents of Paraguay Hecho a Mano USA and Paraguay respectively.

Welcome to another chapter in the life of a crazy gringa in Latin America. Paraguay continues to become more and more interesting though with the simultaneous rise in heat, my interest in spending time making contacts and going out in the countryside continues to decline. I really physically feel the heat…today

the only official reading I saw was 99 degrees—at 10 in the morning. I’m sure it got over 115 by midday. This weekend it’s supposed to reach 125!!! And, the funny thing is that the natives complain all about the heat too. But, that’s just part of the place I guess.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!! I wasn’t expecting to, but it turned out to be fantastic! I went to Asuncion by invitation from Carol to a full-out banquet of American dishes. I was floored by what she had whipped up—from mashed potatoes and home-made gravy to a REAL turkey, STUFFING, cheese cake, and crescent rolls. I made a pumpkin pie from SCRATCH and everyone was thrilled with it. I had to settle for a different kind of pumpkin that they import from Brazil and is smaller and green, but really sweet, which I boiled and mashed up. I couldn’t find ground cloves, but ground my own with a hammer and a plastic bag, no ground ginger but found ginger root which I shredded with a knife, and no evaporated milk which I substituted whipping cream. Oh, and no baking crusts or round cake pans (I could have bought the pan but decided it was too much money) so I made my own crust from scratch and poured everything into a rectangle brownie-pan. It was GREAT!! I felt like a real American for a night as we dined in the backyard of one of Asuncion’s rich families that own a shoe shop in top-end fashion.

I just got back today from a trip with Carol (the president of Paraguay Hecho a Mano) and her step-daughter out to a small town called Caazapa. About 4 hours down a long two-lane highway, which is thankfully paved with asphalt but has only existed thus for the past 6 years, we arrived at the sleepy town deep in central Paraguay. Carol adopted a Paraguayan boy from that town back in 1989 and that was how she got her connection to Paraguay, later started up a support group type organization for Paraguayan adoptees to come back to Paraguay and learn more about their cultural heritage, and now is running the NGO seeking to work with women artisans and preserve the cultural heritage of the artistry. I am helping her with translation and stuff because she doesn’t speak of lot of Spanish, and it has been great learning more about what her organization seeks to do.

We went to the first Communion of the birth family’s grandson…the family tree is really messed up so try to follow this one. The grandmother is Isadora and had 6 children from 6 different fathers. One of her daughters, Nilda, ended up having a baby when she was 17 which she gave up for adoption (now Carol’s son Ryan). Nilda then had 3 other children with 3 other fathers and is now living in another town in Paraguay with some of her brothers and sisters. One of the other daughters, Cristina, had relations with Isadora’s boyfriend-at-the-time (not Cristina’s father but the father of her younger sibling Joel). The result was a boy named Isaias. Cristina has since abandoned Isaias and moved to Buenos Aires where she supposedly has other children with a new mate. Isadora, then, adopted her grandson/stepson and has raised him as her son. He’s now 12 and received his First Communion in the Charismatic Catholic church we went to. In the house now are only Joel, Isaias and Isadora. Joel works at a local bakery making 50,000 Guaranies (equivalent to just under $10) a week and is the only child working to help support his aging mother. Pretty screwed up… But in poor, rural, Paraguayan society this is basically normal. Single mothers, teenage pregnancy, AIDS, abandoned children, and all the other consequences you could attach to the vicious cycle are everywhere. We talked a lot about the “poverty mentality” and the changes in attitude, opinion, and action that are attached to people that don’t ever see a way out of their economic or educational poverty. They just don’t operate under the same moral pressures that upper society would because the women especially feel pressure to attach themselves to any male breadwinner they can find. It’s sad.

I am attaching some pictures of the activities of the return drive—we stopped to meet with one of the coordinators the program works with in a small town called Mbocayaty. Really close to where I went to the ao poi festival, this town isn’t the heart of ao poi, but the women in the surrounding area make it as their primary source of income. Carol, through the local connection with Osvaldo Codas, is trying to take the ecology cotton the women make to the States and develop a market for it through contacts she has in Michigan and Wisconsin. Anyway, we went with the lady Aida to some of the houses of local artisans and watched the families do some ao poi on their dirt patio under an eave of their humble wood house. It was really touching to see the group jump up with their hoops in hand whipping the stitches out in rhythm. They spoke very little Spanish and weren’t as amused as I had hoped with the few Guaraní words that I could squeak out. Osvaldo had sent an order to Aida and the family was working on it—Aida charges 7500 Gs (about $1.50) per finished row of pattern which takes about 1 ½ days they say to finish…meaning that the workers themselves get something less… no comment right now on that exploitation.

I finally got to the Cuban doctor who subsequently tried to hit on me when he gave me a diagnosis of a clean bill of health. I went to the office to meet with him and while he wrote out a prescription for an antiparasitic, he started talking about how Paraguayans are really close-minded because they don’t know how to talk about circumcision and none of the boys are circumcised and I was sure to note the difference with my local boyfriends… Kinda random topic of conversation for your patient don’t you think? I came back the next day to get my blood drawn, which ended up getting botched by a nurse that stabbed me 3 times and couldn’t get a vein and ended up asking her colleague to do it—from my hand. I went back in the afternoon to get the results of the blood work and as soon as I went into the doctor’s office, he gave me the customary double-cheek kiss but then left his hand on my shoulder and asked for a “peck.” I said NO and he double-checked… “No pico?” NO!. I shoved him away to have him sit down and realized that I couldn’t storm out until I had him interpret the results from the bloodwork! He told me I didn’t have any infection, there was no alarming levels of anything, and whatever I had was either transitory or microbial and the other prescription he gave me would take of that. I said thanks and started to try and leave and he asked when I was going to visit his house to meet his wife and kids. Sleezeball. With the office door shut, I didn’t want to tell him off and risk making him aggressive, so I faked innocent and said I was really busy, no I didn’t have a cell phone number because it wasn’t working right now, and I would be in touch when I had more time. If my stomach pain isn’t the result of some random food that struck me wrong, it may very well be ulcers as a result of the incompetence and immorality of the men in my surroundings!!!

Otherwise, I am going strong with my ñandutí, ao poi, and Guaraní lessons. I met another woman that has huge 3 meter wooden frames and is one of the principal informants for the only known book ever published on ñandutí (in Spanish of course.) She is a widow and loves to tell me about how her husband had lots of lovers that would come by the house and she would let them in and treat them well because even though her husband had women, he never beat her and always brought home enough money to pay the bills. She likes when I come over because otherwise she is all by herself and gets really lonely and waits until her two kids come home in the evening to keep her company. My ao poi workshop ended this week and will be having a closing expo in the middle of December. The teacher came up from a nearby town Capiata and would bring her newborn 3-month-old boy (that does not and will not have a father). It was always interesting to watch the other women in the classroom take over watching the little one and cooing at him in Guaraní and telling him what a beautiful little boy he was. I asked the teacher if she was married and she said no and when I started to ask about being with someone she cut me off with an adamant no and talked about how men in Paraguay are good for nothing, irresponsible lazy machistas that don’t belong in her life anyway. The story is repeated all around me… I am going to finish my Guaraní lessons soon too and want to transition my project into more interviews, more action, and hopefully some rough drafts for publication within the next couple months. I am realizing that I am not going to be able to learn the Guaraní that I had planned to just because I don’t have the time or the energy to concentrate all my time on the language. I love doing the handicrafts and nobody expects me or really needs me to speak Guaraní here. If I planned to live in Paraguay, I’m sure that would change things, but as it is, having enough to pronounce things well and write them down makes my life easy enough.

Sorry so random, but I’m in a rush and will be teaching another workshop tomorrow strictly for students applying for the Perpetual Education Fund. So, I better get back to getting that together. Enjoy the pics, talk soon!!

the days go by

Hello one and all, I send greetings from the land of the Guaraní. I am learning more and more that I really hate the climate here. I had plenty of warnings about the heat (which were all correct) but I never heard anything about the capricious cold that comes with the nasty rains. When it rains, it REALLY rains. I had gotten used to the daily rains in Guatemala, but when the rain rolled out you weren’t thrown back into dizzying heat. It’s crazy how fast the weather can change around here and I had never really expected to be COLD… This last week I was bundled up in the only sweater that I packed while visiting friends that had their homes inundated by the crazy rains. In the States we would probably call it a flash flood but here it’s just rain… I went to a friend’s house for dinner and she constantly apologized for the make-shift dinner of empanadas and fried tortillas because the food she had made was in the fridge that all went sour with the electricity shortage and the almost 3-feet water level in her house. I didn’t believe what I saw but there was a line across the house where the water had come in and it had only rained for one night! I also learned that an underground river passes right underneath my building (incredibly comforting let me tell you) and the sewer opening on the side of the street was flooding over into the dirt road. The center aisles of the building were all flooded but luckily nothing happened in my apartment and I’m on a middle floor so I don’t have any leaking roofs or flooding…but not everyone is as fortunate.

I bought a bike this week. And, as you might appreciate, it is purple. I love it. I went shopping and found a bunch of different models but the purple one was cheaper, sturdier, and well purple. So, I tested her out on the back roads of Paraguay and learned just how bumpy life can get racing down a rock-paved road. Roads start out just compact dirt—the deep red of rusted metal dirt that colors the entire countryside—and easily turn to mud. So, the next level is a layer of flattened black rocks that they dig into the dirt. The highest level is asphalt pavement but there are very few roads with asphalt. Even in Asuncion, most of the main residential areas still have rock-paved roads. At first it seemed like a lack of development or money, but the asphalt roads have a lot of problems. With the heat, they actually start to melt. With the rain, they crack and break apart and then the heat makes them melt away again…The rock roads are bumpy, but it allows the water to pass through without turning the road into a swamp, doesn’t heat up, and doesn’t require nearly as much maintenance. It’s amazing how such a simple thing could characterize a place so much. Anthropology really teaches you to appreciate that people know their surroundings and “modernization” and “development” aren’t always what they are cracked up to be. Having said that, it still sucks for bicyclists… There are some roads that have a cement shoulder and that makes it easier. All in all, though, a good investment so far.

I am still living things up in Itaugua…I don’t think I really explained where I am living so now would be a good time. The capital of Paraguay is Asuncion, right on a curve in the river on the far west side of this small country. 30 kilometers down a main route towards the south-east is a small urban center called Itaugua. Population about 60,000 spreading out from the 6 kilometer stretch of the route growing out into the open plains. My apartment building is located right on the main thoroughfare—a four lane highway ruta 2. For about 5 blocks on either side of the main thoroughfare you find commercial centers with everything from carpenters to shoe repair to medical clinics to the growing abundance of pawn shops and credit unions. Past that area it turns into small town Paraguay with residential neighborhoods and their occasional tienda, schools, and churches. Most roads close to the ruta are rock-paved and there are about 3 blocks with asphalt surrounding the municipality and old colonial town center. The central catholic church is a beautiful semi-gothic cathedral in the center of walking gardens and the “pasillo de los enamorados” or “lover’s lane”. Surrounding the church are a few blocks of old colonial architecture or archways and columns restored for houses, commercial stores, and even a private high school. Colonial architecture connects all the buildings at the façade so the houses share their interior walls and there are no spaces in-between the buildings. They are usually narrow and long lots stretching back into lots of interior space and patios. It’s a fun little place. People are definitely more “latin” in terms of polychronic thinking (most people would think of it as not being punctual because it means not showing up for things for at least an hour after it’s supposed to start) and the rhythm of life is a lot slower. Things take forever to get finished and I find myself falling into the same attitude of letting things sit with the perpetual…”tomorrow, tomorrow.” Everything happens “tomorrow” which ends up meaning any given day in the future when they actually find time to do things.

This past week has been frustrating because I got sick. I have been completely drained of energy and sick to my stomach with anything I ate but I didn’t feel too bad to get out of bed and didn’t have any nasty diarrhea so I figured it would get better with lots of fluids and some aspirin but no…then I finally got in with a doctor yesterday and he charged me $20 to tell me that it was all just stress and irritable bowel syndrome. If I wasn’t stressed before, having him tell me that after paying a ridiculous amount of money for a consultation definitely made me frustrated. I hear there is a Cuban doctor here in Itaugua so I’m going to check that out and see if I can get somebody competent to talk to me about something more substantial than stress.

I finally got my fridge in working order…I’m learning that while the informal network of working through a friend of a friend of a brother of a friend system definitely has its perks and its drawbacks. I got a good fridge but old fridge used so that I could save money but ended up having to pay an extra 20 bucks to get the right rubber seal and the guy to come fix it and after three weeks of opening and closing my fridge with a plastic cord, I can finally put stuff inside and not find it covered in melting freezer water and junk. Another step closer to no stress right?

I’ve also had the chance to go to a few ferias artesanales in the area where local artisans come out and sell their wares. Paraguay is incredibly creative and self-productive and each town has its own focus and own specialty. In Luque they specialize in silver filigree and I found the artists there are making silver earrings, necklaces, and rings with a design inspired to imitate ñanduti. It got me really excited to see the crossover among all the native handicrafts. I also went to an ao po’i festival up in the central part of Paraguay. Ao po’i is like Norwegian weaving where they take a damask cloth just like counted cross-stitch cloth and embroider over the top of it, but also take away threads in the middle so you have openings in the designs. This last week I found a local school that is teaching ao po’i and there are plenty of women around that do it to so I started learning to do ao po’i in addition to my ñandutí. It’s a LOT easier than ñandutí because I’ve done counted cross-stitch for so long. The ñandutí has so many other techniques due to the fact that you don’t actually work with the fabric it’s on top of. You sew the edge of the design to the fabric but then everything in the middle is built into those threads that you sewed onto, not onto the fabric itself. Ñandutí means spider web in Guaraní and since they make it self-contained like that, they take away the fabric in the end and you are left with your own free-standing spider-web circles. The ao po’i is a lot less symbolic and more geometric. So, much easier, but a lot less anthropological.

I also got up to a small community called Tobati. Their specialty is making ceramic…everything. They have never had pottery wheels but create perfectly round “kambuchi” or ceramic pots that traditionally were used to carry water or food. They also specialize in brick-making. It was awesome to see how they churn the clay with a big post in the ground with an arm extending out to a rope tied to a horse. The horse walks around with a hoe digging into the dirt behind him while a tube pumps water into the mud and he makes high-quality clay for the artist to play around with. There were huge factories of rows and rows of bright red bricks baking in the afternoon sun which are then refired in huge brick ovens that remind a lot of the adobe tujs of Guatemala but gigantic. I bought some black-clay bowls with frogs lining the rim as if they wanted to jump in and eat whatever is in the bowl. While not the traditional big pots, they are wider serving-type bowls and I really wish I could send some back to the States for everyone. I met with one of the most recognized pottery artists that has some of her creations in the national museum in Asuncion. Buying a set of 3 black-clay bowls cost me 20,000 Gs or $4. While seeing all the work and talent of all these artisans, it’s no wonder that they have trouble keeping their traditions alive in a capitalist economy that values quantity and price over quality.

Meeting with the local artisans has been really interesting. People that don’t live here keep telling me that the artists guard their secret designs and the techniques so that they are the only ones producing the stuff. But, talking to the older women they constantly tell me that nobody wants to learn anymore and they are so grateful that I have taken an interest in an art that is part of their community identity. Many say that they tried to pass it onto their daughters the way it was passed on to them, but that the kids these days don’t have any interest because they won’t make much money doing ñandutí. It makes me think a lot about how I want to work with and for the artisans. I think that a lot of Western NGOs would like to preserve the art “exactly as it is” and work to keep it going as a profession. But, the ñandutí never was a profession until very recently. It was more of a past time than a job. Unlike other textiles that were made for clothing and everyday use like the weavings in Guatemala, ñandutí was never a necessity. It was used to decorate tablecloths, napkins, bedspreads etc and then they started having the beauty queen contests and started using ñandutí for skirts and shirt sleeves and then expanded into all the applications that they have now. So, why try to “preserve” something that was never that way in the first place. I think that promoting it as a profession maintains a concentration on the commercial value rather than the artistic value—a concentration that caused the art to start dying in the first place. If people think of it as an artform, they are more likely to maintain more designs than the quick ones that you can whip out in a couple days, not to mention more likely to learn enough to do it well and do it in their free time rather than a full-time profession. So, I am thinking that I would like to get involved in promoting more of these weekly workshops where people work in their free time to learn how to do it and therefore continue to pass the art form down but the participants aren’t pressured to make things to sell.

Finally, a very Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! Since nobody knows about Thanksgiving, they all think I’m a little strange scrounging for ingredients to make a pumpkin pie. I finally found ground cloves and ginger root (that I have to grind myself) and a green variety of pumpkin that will hopefully substitute to the luxury of a can of Libby’s, but am at a loss to find evaporated milk. I’m going to do a test run tonight and see how it turns out and I’ll let you know!

Hope everyone is doing well, enjoy the snow and Black Friday without me! Lots of love,

Kristine

More adventures in the land of the everlasting heat

My first Career Workshop in Asuncion...I'm not going to be teaching a lot because it takes too much time away from my research, but it was fun to teach all by myself and get back into the workshop again!









This is Catalina, my adopted mom....look at how much she loves me!



















































This is a poster hanging in the municipality building...a Wanted poster for the Dengue mosquito...to be honest, I don't WANT to see a single one, but I had to take the picture...




I about died seeing my flag in ñandutí!!! Alongside the Paraguayan flag it makes a great display don't you think?










































































This is the famous vaka akângue or cow's head in all its glory...























The girls had to make a scene with the huge jawbone...not the most appetizing part of seeing a cooked head on the table...






Me with the birthday twins Iris and David



























































Hey all, this has been an interesting week full of fun activities that have helped me adapt to my new environment. For anyone that might be wondering, yes, culture shock is real and is doesn't matter how many places you have been to or lived in over the course of your life, anyone with a heart and a sense of sociability is bound to experience it in a new place. I am learning that Paraguay is extremely unique and I have a lot to learn about how people relate to each other and carry out their lives in this land-locked tropical desert.



This week I taught a Career Workshop in the office in Asuncion and it was an interesting experience teaching again. I had a difficult group but they turned out to really like the workshop in the end. One of the participants was an Argentine missionary finishing up his time and heading back to his homeland...but came to the office accompanied by his 3-week newby Utahn companion. Luckily, he stayed quiet most of the time but he didn't speak enough Spanish to participate and wanted me to translate every 5 minutes and I refused...I would translate every once in a while when they were doing activities and working alone but I refused to waste everyone's time translating all the dialogue when he wasn't the one that was actually taking the workshop...frustrating. I also had a surprise visit from the son of my Guarani professor who just got back from his mission in Missouri, USA. He's a pretty nerdy, presumptious type that drives me nuts but seems to be oblivious to my sarcasm and thinks that he has a shot at courting me...we had a pretty brutal discussion with me telling him that I thought he was presumido and arrogant and that I didn't want anything to do with him...and he still continued to text message me and act like we were best friends because he was so marvelously understanding of my honesty. grrr. In the middle of the workshop, though, Sinthia came in and saved me by having him go interview for a position that a farmacy wanted to fill right then and he got a job before we even finished the workshop! So I didn't have to deal with him the last day of class.



On Tuesday, I went to a birthday party for David and Iris, the twins of the Rodriguez family that has officially become my second family here in Paraguay. The oldest sister Sinthia repeatedly tells me that she wants me to be her sister-in-law but unfortunately there is only one brother who previously mentioned doesn't exactly have his act together just yet... So I'm an adopted sister. At the birthday party, they had their entire extended family plus Iris's "friend" that isn't quite more than a friend, Nancy (the youngest sister) brought her fiance, and then me...otherwise nobody that wasn't family was invited to eat at the table. There were some childhood friends that ate at on the patio apart from everyone else, but I felt conspicuously non-family at the table with everyone. It was great though because one of the in-laws is Uruguayan and served his mission here in Paraguay and then moved here with his parents and really identified with me saying that my accent reminded him of Uruguay and we started talking about the unique things of Paraguay and how he has been able to adapt...and he's LATIN!! lol...

The main dish was...Cow HEAD!! I mean an entire cow head....nothing left out and nothing left over. They had cooked the thing in a big pit in the backyard for more than 8 hours and then brought it entire to the table and untied the bag as the family dashed in with fork and knife in hand...no waiting for the ceremonial first cut or servings to be passed around. You fight or you don't eat! They made sure to pass me a bite of everything so that I could try it out and to be fair I had to try it before rejecting it. In all honesty, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had envisioned. I had brains, tongue, cheek, and jaw meat and I actually liked the brains the best. I thought tongue was really rubbery and the cheek meat had a lot of fat, but I swallowed it all down like a good girl and didn't throw any back up :) It was a great replacement for my normal Halloween treats! Enjoy the photos!



In other news, I'm going forward with learning ñandutí and going forward with my guaraní as well. I've finished my first rounds of ñandutí with a design called mbokaja poty which means coconut flower. I have to put the mandioca starch on it so that it goes stiff and then I'll have my very own creation! I feel really accomplished to be honest. I met with the local municipal director of culture and she had a book in Spanish that is literally what I had in mind to do...so hopefully I can add to what they already have published or possibly combine efforts to translate what she has and publish in English. I want to put together a log of the different designs and their names and meanings in Guaraní and the book had about 80 but there are an estimated 300 traditional designs. I am glad to have her work in hand though and hopefully can use some of the same contacts she lists to get things going.






Otherwise I have been trying to get my apartment put together too...I had to wait 5 days to get a refridgerator from a friend and now am waiting for the guy to fix the rubber seal so that it will work...people tell me that the professional service people in the country are the worst when it comes to following through with their promises. Everyone works at a different pace outside of Asuncion...things are just more laid back, less on time and in general less productive. The one exception has been church meetings which start promptly at 8:30 so that we can get home before the height of the afternoon heat. Stores open early and close early for the afternoon siesta, then reopen in the late afternoon for 2 or 3 hours and close at sundown. You would think that would mean that everything is silent at night...but you would be wrong. Weekends are insane with the entire town coming alive at 10:30 and the discotecas open at 12 or 1 and close at 6 the following morning. I'm blessed to be a block away from the largest club in town where they have weekly parties Saturday nights. While I would love the music in any decent hour of the day, somehow it loses its appeal at 3 in the morning.



I went to a youth dance after singing the night away at a karaoke bar in Asuncion and the next morning got a cultural tour of Asuncion including the famous Panteon de los heroes where they have past presidents and dictators entombed in medalled glory, draped in the Paraguayan flag and other statues of other dictators didn't make the cut for the central display. Unfortunately, the builders weren't far-sighted enough to make enough space for ALL the dictators so they'll probably have to do something about that in the future. I then went to the Museo de barro which has a lot of the "anthropological" displays of the country displaying the "wild tribes" of the Chaco and old textile displays. Despite being within the shadow of the pride of Paraguayan history, 3 blocks down the embankment I looked out over a widesprawling slum...the infamous Chacarita reserved for the poorest of Asuncion's poor.





Well, I have to get going but I hope you all had a fabulous Halloween and are having fun getting ready for Thanksgiving!