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!!