Search Results for: "peace corps diaries"

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author is finishing up a two year hitch in the Peace Corps doing health counseling in rural Paraguay. He sends Phawker intermittent dispatches of his adventures whenever he gets close enough to civilization for Internet access. BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH SOUTH AMERICAN CORRESPONDENT Paraguay’s Chaco is a forbidding plain of mesquite, baking heat, and swirling dust. The last time I visited, I promised myself I would never return. But last month, after I heard about the Arete Guazu – a type of indigenous carnaval – I once again found myself spending eight cramped hours on a bus […]

BY SAINT JOHN BARNED-SMITH I’m not quite sure when Christian, 27, first invited me to go on a pilgrimage. But, in the spirit of “Why not,” – in which I’ve also learned how to help cows give birth, eat raccoon, and kill pigs – I agreed. I assumed we would go to the shrine of the Virgin of Caacupe, the main site of pilgrimages in Paraguay. But the shrine of Itape, located about 40km east of Potrero Pucu, is closer, and (more importantly) walkable. The night we left, I packed a couple of soggy empanadas my host mom had cooked […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author  just started a two year hitch in rural Paraguay.   BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH  Tesho* and I were sharing maté**, passing the guampa** back and forth in the shadows of the kitchen, an attached hut with a smoke-blackened thatch ceiling, an open fireplace and its ash-encrusted pots, and a wooden table that held a motley array of bowls, pans and enamel cups. “Santo***, you should make some mandio chiryry****,” he said. “Ok,” I said. “Are you going to eat it if I make it?” “Yea, I’m hungry,” he said. Mildly perplexed, I skipped out of the kitchen […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author [pictured above right] is in the midst of  a two year hitch in the Peace Corps doing health counseling in rural Paraguay.  BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH The thing that surprised me most was how long it took for it to die. The squealing had already started when I got there. Teofilo had collared his 4-month-old-pig with an old piece of cord, and was in the process of pinioning it to the ground with Ramon, my floppy-haired, 19-year-old neighbor. He probably would have kept if for longer, but it has started eating his chickens’ broods, and really, […]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH One of the cool things about living in Paraguay is that there aren’t any neat packages of chicken thighs in aisle six. There is just clucking, feathered creatures running around, and if you want to eat one, you have to catch, kill, pluck, clean and him first. In my community, people mostly eat beef. However, about once a week, families here will slaughter one of their chickens and prepare a dish called tallarin (noodles) or mbori mbori (balls of corn meal) in broth, or some other kind of soup. And in Potrero Pucu, we use the […]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED SMITH The question I get asked the most by people back in the States is “So what do you do all day??” Just like everything else in Peace Corps, “it depends.” Since I finally arrived in site, I have been shuttling between families, living with each for a week or two, and then moving on. The idea is that I’ll integrate much faster into the community and meet a lot more people this way. Right now, I’m staying with the family of a man named Teofilo, who owns some cows and makes his living growing cash […]

BY SAINT JOHN BARNED-SMITH So this ends my time as a Peace Corps Trainee. I’m officially a Volunteer, and we are now at T-2 years and counting. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve learned through this process, how I might have changed, how I might change in the future. First, I’m learning how to handle awkward and uncomfortable better. This is a skill I think I’d already started to develop as a reporter – it’s not particularly fun or easy to ask a man how his mother was shot to death by her cracked out boyfriend for a […]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH The tarantulas here are generally pretty hard to find – I haven’t seen a single one since I’ve been here, but in the last week, they’ve been emerging from their burrows because of the torrential rainstorms we’ve been having. It’s amazing how hairy these critters are. But spiders aren’t the only thing keeping me on my toes. Paraguay is a fairly peaceful country – in fact, super tranquilo – but has been having some problems lately with a group called the EPP, the Ejercito Pueblo de Paraguay, or the People´s Army of Paraguay. It´s a group […]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH I received my site last wednesday. It’s a semi-arid town in the department of Paraguari, and its got 75 houses in it. The land has that flat, sun-seared look to it that you see driving down the interstates at the end of summer, when all the grass has turned tan-copper but the trees still are green. It’s basically one long road, very Spaghetti-Western-looking. The people there were incredibly nice and gung-ho when I met them. I was there for five days, and visited probably a third of the houses in the area. The main issues that […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author [pictured above with the jawbone of a cow] just started a two year hitch in the Peace Corps doing health counseling in rural Paraguay.  BY SAINT JOHN BARNED-SMITH I was walking back from a pickup soccer game yesterday. One of my fellow [Peace Corps] trainees called me over to where he was standing with three other people. They had clustered around a black cow tied to a tall pole, which it was circling slowly. “Hurry up, we’re helping a cow give birth,” he said. That’s when I noticed two miniscule hooves poking out underneath the cow’s […]

BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH  In Paraguay, there are 230 Peace Corps volunteers, ma o meno. That group is expected to rise to 300 or so in the coming year as Pres. Obama is pumping a lot more money into the agency as a whole. Peace Corps in Paraguay is also one of the biggest programs in the country – only Ukraine has more volunteers. Within the 230, 49 are in my “G” or training group. We will be working in three different sectors – Health and Sanitation (mine), Early Education, and Urban Youth. The Health and Sanitation group has about […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker South American Bureau chief St. John Barned-Smith just started a two year hitch in the Peace Corps teaching English in rural Paraguay.   BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH Paraguay’s hot. Not deal-breaking hot, but definitely toasty. It’s frequently around 35-38C, which means its frequently in the mid 80s-90s. So how to deal with the heat and humidity? Some genius long ago came up with Terere.  Terere is the iced version of Mate. Whenever Paraguayans gather, they end up forming a circle, and passing around the stuff. Here’s how it works: you take a guampa, which holds the yerba. Guampa’s […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Phawker South American Bureau chief St. John Barned-Smith just started a two year hitch in the Peace Corps teaching English in rural Paraguay. BY ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH Hello everybody. I hope you are all well. This will be my first blog entry since I landed on the ground in Paraguay about three weeks ago. There’s been a lot that happened since then. Lets start at the beginning. I landed in Asuncion with 48 other freaked out and excited American men and women – all young, below the age of 30. There are 24 in my group (including me) […]