#communityeconomicdevelopment

Poster for my family/personal finance workshop

This post could also be called “Projects”. Most of my projects are courses, workshops, small business consulting, and those don’t lend themselves to interesting pictures—think of a group of people in a classroom or two people talking at a table. All the courses are interactive, mostly sessions where we talk about a technique, practice it, and then the homework is doing it for yourself.

The finance class in the poster at the beginning is an interactive workshop of seven sessions on values, saving, budgeting, managing conflict over money, cooperatives/banks, borrowing money, forming new habits. A neighborhood group and a social services organization asked me to do something on personal finance during my community study. I have been interested in this topic forever and I worked for many years with pension plans and companies offering retirement savings education. Every institution that holds people’s money is continually developing material and tools for budgeting, saving, and investing.

People are terrified about finances. It’s probably second only to public speaking, and an interactive finance class combines both! I did the course for the first time in a night high school, for people who didn’t finish or who work during the day. It has a very diverse set of students: It is very hard (impossible) to come up with a budget example that’s relevant for both a 15-year-old living with his parents and a 56-year-old with six kids and her parents at home! To get people involved and working together, my activities were things like tossing a ball around a circle to complete a sentence. “I’m saving for…” toss, “Young people save for…” toss, “Savings help you…” toss. Or form groups by choosing between savings goals: Emergencies, Personal Use, Future Opportunities. Discuss and make a group presentation on the goal. These kinds of activities make up a large part of my Peace Corps work.

Slide from family finance class

Posters for a community tree planting day, and for the training on planting and care

I’m currently working on a community tree-planting project. Some volunteers in other sectors have goals to establish gardens and tree nurseries. My project is more to help community initiative: getting donated trees, arranging training on planting and care in the first year. This work comes under the “citizen participation” goal of community economic development: leadership, group formation, better group interactions, like setting goals, positive communication, managing conflict. Volunteerism. I worked with a couple of community tree-planting projects in training, so I understood the need for community commitment and involvement: If a tree isn’t protected from cows and watered in its first year, it won’t survive. That requires individual families, community groups, and institutions like schools to participate in the training and commit to the care. Which leads to a big, visible community improvement project. Hopefully as an example for future ones!

Business plan course

My biggest project and the one I started first, more than a year ago, is a youth entrepreneurship program called “Paraguay Emprende”. It’s an annual cycle of teacher training, a business plan course, a national competition and workshop, and consulting and mentoring for new businesses. I am on the national steering committee, responsible for the consulting and mentoring part.

Paraguay Emprende annual cycle

I started planning my class in October 2016 with the person in the City Hall who’s responsible for continuing education classes. (Most of those classes are trades, like baking, cosmetology, soldering.) We began a 15-week course in March 2017, on generating and evaluating business ideas, including a community study; operations, marketing, sales strategy; budgeting, accounting, legal requirements, ethical and socially responsible business practices. Each session analyzes business examples with activities like developing a marketing plan or an operating budget; the homework is to do the activity for your own business idea. At the end, each participating has the components of a business plan in the homeworks. They write it up and make a short PowerPoint presentation in a competition judged by local small business owners. The winners of each class participate in a workshop and a national competition in the capital in August. The national winners, and others who start their businesses, form teams with a Peace Corps volunteer consultant to help with the technical issues the course was about and a Paraguayan business owner mentor who helps them adjust to life as a young entrepreneur and to the business culture. That’s the part I help coordinate.

Common types of businesses are a restaurant, a bakery, copyshop/school supplies/Internet access, landscaping. This year’s winners were a phone app for local businesses, a strawberry farm and distribution business, a vegetarian/vegan restaurant, and a “Farm for the 21st century”, a model rural farm focused on Stevia and milk products.

It’s exciting to see these young people develop an idea, give a passionate presentation of it, and start a new business in their community. The participants in this project consistently impressed and surprised me with their hard work and imagination.

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Moreno (cat) and I were trying to warm up near the brazier on a winter day

I love hot weather. Once I would have said I love the summer, but that was before I lived 25 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. So you must love Paraguay, people say. I do. But, no one told me about the winter. People lied. “There really is no winter in Paraguay.” “It only lasts a couple of months and even then, it will be a little cold for a day and then warm back up.” The reality of the winter of 2016 was two-week periods with lows in the 30s and 40s every day and the highs barely into the 50s. Frost in the morning. Some people will laugh at the idea that this is cold, just as some people laughed that day in 2014 when Bay Area schools were closed because it rained. Just as in Berkeley, where there are practically no storm sewers and they’re clogged anyway and no power because trees fall down in the rain, so here, we have no heat, no insulation, no hot water, only wooden blinds to close the holes in the walls, and nowhere inside to be except in bed. In the morning, you put your feet on the 30° floor to walk to splash 33° water on your face before you sit outside in a polar wind near a coal brazier, one side of you in the wind, the other too close to the 400° coals. You’re wearing two pairs of socks, long underwear, jeans, three layers of shirts and a jacket, but you will never get the cold out of your bones until you go to bed at night in your drafty room and wait sleeplessly, because it’s too cold to sleep, for the day to repeat. For two weeks. Then it does warm up for a few days. Before it’s cold again. The first cold day was April 26. That was the day I traveled back from my site visit. It was also raining. I found a picture of people in coats one night in October. That’s more than a couple of months.

Watching a soccer game on TV in June. We eat, watch TV, hang around outside in all seasons.

The view from my frequent winter position, one side 30°, the other side on fire, turning from time to time, like a rotisserie chicken.

Music on a night in October (and TV soccer). People are still wearing coats.

Why the lies?? To be fair, everyone in Paraguay said it was the first real winter in five years. The active volunteer memory is about two years. And it was an unusually harsh winter, the worst in more than ten. I had seen, on a what-to-pack list on a blog, “Sleeping bag. Don’t bring a 40° one; it’s not enough.” Mine is 20° and it was my most prized possession all winter.

For those who laughed, it’s also true it’s hard to be prepared. You’re always coldest in places where the cold can’t kill you. I’ve never been cold in the winter indoors in Boston or Toronto. But I lived 11 years in a Berkeley house with no insulation, windows that didn’t fully close, and no heat in most of the house. We’d cluster around a floor heater in the hall to the bedrooms and when anyone needed to go to the kitchen, they’d say “I’m heading out there if anyone needs anything.” It’s just that I had thought that nightmare was behind me.

I couldn’t write about it then; it was too close. But this winter hasn’t been bad. There was frost a couple of times, but it really was just a day here and there and most weeks the lows were in the 60s. It’s September now and we just had a little bit of cold at the beginning of the week. Every time now, we all say, I hope that was the last. I hope. Today the high was a beautiful 92. I can’t wait for December and 105 (“feels like” 115, aka heaven). I do love Paraguay.

Animals in the chacra, a small family farm

The squawking and crowing is constant, day and night. I don’t even hear it any more—yesterday someone said “I always know John joined the conference call when I hear the roosters.” So I guess they’re not constant everywhere. I don’t know who invented the myth that roosters crow at dawn. They do only because they crow each hour and minute of the day.

But chickens are the animals I have the most different view of. They seem very smart and social. I love watching the mothers train their chicks to scratch and how they lead them around the yards for the first weeks.

Mom and her chicks on my compost pile

They seem to eat everything except citrus fruit.  I just throw all food scraps in the yard for them. They especially love banana peels. I’ve never seen an animal run faster than a chicken across the yard, tripping over itself, when I throw out a banana peel.

This guy wanders all over the house like he’s the boss

Chickens at a kid’s birthday party and insouciantly wandering past the grill

Every few days a couple of roosters pair off in my backyard. They spend most of their time staring at each other and then suddenly one attacks.

All the birds climb into trees at night

Cows are the next most ubiquitous, 24 hour munchers of grass, trees, bushes. I’m sometimes startled leaving my house to find a couple eating my bushes. They also like hanging out on the roads, which provokes a lot of complaints about accidents. We’re not allowed to drive cars and our lack of skill in dodging a cow when you come around a curve fast on the highway is one reason. (One that didn’t get dodged by a truck made for the stinkiest day in my first month.)

Highway out of my town to the east

On a walk at the end of the day

Less happy cows at the dump, where I went to take pictures of the trash fires

Pigs on the loose are less common. Just as I was surprised by the intelligence of chickens, I find pigs unexpectedly stupid seeming. The little ones are more curious.

Dogs are everywhere. Apoplectic barkers in fenced yards with “Ferocious Dog” signs on the gates, cowering strays in the streets, the occasional small pet of an upper-middle class family.

I’m also fascinated by how they all live together. Cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, Guinea fowl, turkeys, geese, cows, horses, pigs, goats all roam around and together with little conflict. I can’t believe the cats don’t eat the chicks and the dogs don’t eat the cats. Another animal myth of inter-species hostility. Almost all the fighting is within species, chickens pecking each other once they are independent of their mothers, dogs fighting, cows pushing each other back and forth with their heads, cat fights at night.

Animals wandering around the kitchen

Huge hideous toads only come out at night or when it rains a lot

Other animals prefer the night too. Once I got up in the night to go to the bathroom, which is outside the house. On my way back in, I noticed a huge tarantula on the back door that I had missed on my way out. I didn’t have the presence of mind to get the camera before I shooed it away, because I was trying to make sure it ran out into the yard and not into the house.

It was Fabri’s seventh birthday the weekend I stayed in his house for my site visit, so I wasn’t the only guest: he has about 40 uncles and aunts (both of his parents have 10 siblings and their families joked they could each put together a soccer team). How many cousins? Laughs and “we lost count a long time ago.” 11 of us slept in the three-room house Saturday night with many others at grandparents and some of the uncles and aunts.

I’ll be living the next two years in Mbocayaty (bo-ka-ja-TUH, where the UH is pronounced like the vowel in “should”). It’s in the department of Guairá in the center of the eastern part of Paraguay. It’s a small town with about 4000 people and another 1600 in close rural areas. That’s not a small site, but I feel like it’s small enough to meet everyone and work with the whole community. It’s also close to Villarrica, an important city, so a supermarket, bank, and stores are less than an hour away. Villarrica is not a large city, like Asunción, Ciudad del Este, or Encarnación, but it is a favorite of many and a cultural center.

I’m very happy about the assignment. We had three interviews with our sector directors over the previous three months, beginning in week 1, although I didn’t know about “site selection” when they started. After the mentor visit and field practice and meeting many current volunteers, I had a lot better idea of sites, including the dimensions of rural (“campo”)/developed, Asunción and Central/”interior”, new/follow-up volunteer, school/other institution. (Another is youth focus, but everyone in Paraguay works with a lot of youth, given the demographics and need: 50% of the population is under 25 and there’s a widespread sense of an opportunity to change the country by supporting this generation that can be taken in the next 10 or so years or lost forever (!). Example: Fabri is an only child; most of those 40 uncles and aunts have 0-3 children, not 11 like their parents.) But despite what I learned, I didn’t have a preference and I only knew a few of us who did. I threw myself on the mercy of the program director (in a long-winded way—I got around to saying that in my last interview after explaining how great it was to have learned so much, but I thought they still had the best sense of where I could contribute).

Mbocayaty is on a major highway and there’s a cute developed center for two blocks off that and then it’s unpaved roads and countryside. It’s beautiful. There’s a range of hills to the south that you can see from everywhere in town and that include the highest point in Paraguay (2762 feet—Paraguay is pretty flat).

The house I stayed in is on the edge of town and this is what you see out the front door.

Monday I walked around and took a couple of pictures. (I didn’t take many during my stay—I didn’t feel like it was a great way to introduce myself.)

I got back to all the chickens standing still in front of the house, something semi-surreal that I’ve never seen again—normally chickens forage widely and are constantly running around.

I also visited grandad’s chacra (like a small farm) a few times to get food for the barbecue and birthday party on Sunday: bake chipa and sopa (another delicious Paraguayan cornbread, despite its name) in the wood-fired oven, crush sugar cane for its juice.