Tekoha Guazu

Tekoha Guazu- Grand Nature. Also the Guaraní name for the San Rafael Reserve.

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Oga Ita, Itapua, Paraguay- World Biodiversity Day

Walking south of Oga Ita, you find yourself in the community of Santa Ana. It’s just as hilly as every other town in the area and just as friendly. It’s simple, like Oga Ita, but it has a larger school and even a small chapel. As you round the corner toward the school, headed uphill again, you see a sign with a large bird on it. It’s the red-throated, blue-eyed, white-crested Jaku (Pava de monte in Spanish, Guan in English). The sign says “Welcome to Santa Ana: Gateway to San Rafael”. If you pass the school and walk up up up the hill beyond, you find yourself overlooking a stunning vista. You can see the two even cerros that separate my community from Chara’s. You can see Santa Ana laid out in a small valley. But the most beautiful part of the vista is the deep green of trees, unbroken and seemingly eternal, that extend north toward Oga Ita and Jovere and further east. You’re looking at one of Paraguay’s largest last standing expanses of untouched Atlantic Forest- La Reserva Para El Parque San Rafael. 

San Rafael is a natural treasure of Paraguay and sometimes I can’t believe I’m fortunate enough to live along its border. The reserve is not a federally managed park, but rather a mixed bag of privately and publicly owned land that many people and organizations work to protect and others would like to see turned into a National Park, hence the official name, “Reserve for San Rafael Park”. San Rafael is special. It’s beautiful. It’s a hotspot for biodiversity and one of Paraguay’s Important Birding Areas due to the high concentration of bird species. It’s a wealth of tree and plant species as well, including an endemic arboreal fern called chachi that reached heights of 15 feet. It’s the home of the Mby’a Indians who still rely on its natural resources to live. And it’s really one of the last places of its kind in Paraguay.

That expanse of green is more than just trees. Go to most other parts of Paraguay and there’s very little forest, if any at all. The green sea extending out from Santa Ana is a symbol of life and wilderness in a country where wilderness stands in the way of producing more soy. The protection of San Rafael is important to the future of Paraguay’s relationship with the environment. It’s important to the chachi and the jaku and the jagua rete’i (ocelot) that live there. It’s important to the Mby’a and their culture. It’s important to me, a volunteer who has seen other parts of Paraguay, treeless, flat, covered in soy and red, bland dirt, where there used to be what I see from the top of that cerro in Santa Ana.

So today, on World Biodiversity Day,  I give thanks that I live next to the Reserve. I get to be a part of the efforts to protect it and all of the beautiful biological diversity that hides inside. I get to teach my students about birds and snakes and I get to show my community members the photos from my trap camera. I get to work with NGOs who care, who want to change the way Paraguayans look at nature. I get to make a difference and have a ton of fun while doing it.

Looking up through the chachi

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Chachi

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Chara and I at the entrance to San Rafael

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The entrance to the biological station in San Rafael, managed by Guyra Paraguay. More on my relationship with Guyra another day!

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A volunteer from Guyra came to teach with me about parrot conservation. Here are my students with their parrot drawings!

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A Teju, or black Iguana, as seen on my trap camera on my family’s property

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A Jagua rete’i, or ocelot, speeding past the trap camera

Planting and Replanting

Your Guaraní lesson for the day:

• (a)ve- I move
• (a)veve- I move repeatedly, I fly
• (a)po- I jump
• (a)popo- I jump repeatedly, I hop
• (a)mbopopo- I make jump repeatedly, I bounce
• (a)pu- I sound, ring
• (a)mbopu- I make sound, I play (an instrument)
• (a)mbopupu- I make sound repeatedly, I boil water

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Óga Ita, Itapúa, Paraguay

Today is Día de San Antonio, who apparently is the patron saint of the few little communities in the area, thus making it a holiday. He is also the patron saint of animals. So we’re killing a pig in his honor. I’ll just assume that pigs were his least favorite of the animals and overlook the irony.

Holidays don’t particularly govern activity in rural Paraguay, mainly just food consumption. Yesterday was a nationwide holiday in honor of the Paz de Chaco (Peace of the Chaco), when Bolivia and Paraguay finally stopped fighting over a desolate landscape and got their act together, from what I understand (and then Paraguay just gave it away for free to the Mennonites). Despite the fact that the wonderful Peace Corps administration staff got to stay home from work, I was woken up by Lalo, clapping at my door at 7, to start work on seed beds for our vivero, or tree nursery. I pretended to have been up for awhile, mumbled some non-committal, incomprehensive Guaraní and stumbled around while making coffee (I had stayed up late reading, falsely believing that I could sleep in due to the federal holiday). Three hours later, we had at least 20,000 Yerba Mate seeds planted in two well-protected seed beds to hopefully grow and share amongst the community or sell to outside interest. This project has sparked a lot of interest in my host brothers and I’m hoping to also plant citrus and native tree seeds as well, to eventually start reforestry efforts in Óga Ita. We’ll see how these seed beds turn out, but it could be a start for a big community-wide project that both myself and the people are excited about.

Families still tend to gather on holidays, no matter how big or small the affair, and my sister Fermina came over from Joveré, Chara’s community, for lunch. After eating, we sat, gossiped about Chara, discussed how long it had been since Chara had visited her, suggested that maybe I mention this to Chara, and decided that Fermina should just take matters into her own hands and go visit Chara herself. Chara is her favorite topic with me, which is fine, because I’m the topic of conversation when she’s with Chara. Then she asked to see my garden. Now, here’s the thing: I have a very lovely garden space. It’s seven large raised beds surrounded by a nice fence I made of branches and partially shaded by a large Guatambu tree, but for some reason, the only thing I can get to grow is beans and two tomato plants that flowered with the promise of ripe, juicy, sweet tomatoes, but then decided that I was undeserving of such fruit. It’s been raining heavily lately and whatever the rain didn’t squash flat and bury, the ants promptly devoured. My garden is slightly embarrassing right now. But there I was, standing with my mom and Fermina, looking over the fence while I said “the carrots used to be there. And the Swiss chard was growing there. And I had cucumbers planted there. And at one point there was a jalepeño there. And I thought the lettuce had come up there. And it had looked like the cabbage might survive…” The suffix –kuri is added to verbs in Guarani to make them past tense and –kue can be added to a noun to mark that it once existed, but no longer does. I was using both a lot. Throughout this whole narrative, Fermina is just staring at the empty beds dubiously and my mother is just nodding her head slowly, as if she knew originally that my garden was headed towards impending doom. She always knows these things. It was embarrassing. And all she said was, “Ohhhh well you have work to do then, so we’ll leave now”. So much for a holiday.

Some may recall my tale of following cows around with a shovel and digging through my mom’s garden trash looking for corn husks and watermelon rinds. Six months later, I have some pretty beautiful compost and it’s the main addition to my garden renovation. Recently, my friend Spencer, who lives in Seattle, sent me a photo of a small container garden that he put together on his patio. I have never been more jealous, just based on the color of the soil in that photo. It was dark and rich and his plants looked happy. I look at mine and it’s marbled red and white with clay and sand and my plants look like they’re surviving, just not thriving.  This new compost is a big deal for my garden and yet it’s taken me six months to get it. In the U.S., we have it easy. Anyone can garden and actually succeed and be good at it! You can go to big home and garden stores and pick up manure, compost, potting soil, peat, mulch, ready-to-plant seedlings, insecticide, herbicide, potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus and take care of any garden issue or project in an hour! If there were a Home Depot in Obligado, it would be my second home. But instead I have to think differently to appease Fermina. I boil water as a soil treatment to kill bad bugs. I collect ash from my mom’s outdoor oven to deter ants. I wait six months for decent compost to form, which really has seemed like six months of a committed relationship. So much heartbreak and joy has never come from cohabitation with a box of cow poop and kitchen scraps. I love you, compost. Rohayhu.

I’ve embarked on take 2 of my garden. Chance’s garden: the remix. I’m hopeful that my beds will have more nutrients now and that the bugs will stay away for enough time that my plants can sprout and I can make an organic pesticide. And maybe Fermina will stop by on her way to help send a little piggy to that big sty in the sky this afternoon and see the work I’ve done. But really, it’s not about Fermina. All this work is for me to enjoy the literal fruits of my labor. I’d love to have something to put on the table this winter for myself and Moritz, other than beans. He’s a picky eater.

Abundio with the finished seed bed. The grass on top is to keep the soil humid and protect from the sun.

My brothers, Lalo on the right and Abundio on the left, working on a seed bed

At least I’ve got beans

Timshel

“This too shall pass” – Tanya Gipson-Nahman

Timshel. Thou Mayest. – East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Óga Ita, Alto Verá, Itapúa

In the training center in Guarambaré, there is a piece of paper with a big wavy line on it. It starts out with small, more shallow, up and down waves that get bigger as the line continues. At certain points on the line, at peaks and valleys, there are markings referring to time periods in service and a list of descriptive words. This is the emotional roller coaster of Peace Corps Service. It marks the emotional highs and lows and elaborates on how we can potentially be feeling at certain points in our service. No two volunteers follow the exact same roller coaster of emotions, but it gives a general sense of how we process our service and develop personally.

May was a low. A pretty deep one.

I have no idea how to describe why May was so terrible. It could have been the 100% humidity and low temperatures that left everything with a black/blue fuzz. It could have been that the rain just completely destroyed my garden. It could have been that when I made detergent with my women’s committee, the biggest event I had planned, my host mother referred to it as “un disastre”. It could have been that when I replaced my computer screen, which had broken in April when a hammer fell on it, it broke again one week later, and when I replaced that screen, not four days ago, my computer fell out of its case and the screen broke again. It could have been that when I needed to go to an important training on project development, none of my community contacts could go because there was a soccer game that week. It could have been any of those things that made May so terrible.

However, there is hope for June. Toward the end of training, our Director of Programming and Training, Tanya, an absolutely wonderful woman, told us one simple line to keep in mind: “This too shall pass”. There are highs, but there are lows to follow. And although we may be tumbling down the side of a mountain into a deep valley, there’s always the other side to climb back up. This simple saying has been my mantra throughout every item on my “Why May Was So Terrible” list. It is not only applicable to Peace Corps service, but to life in general. This too shall pass. And the fact that a moldy May can lead into a more productive and positive June gives me a little faith in myself.

The 29th of May happened to be the one-quarter milestone of my service. When reviewing what I’ve done in the last six months, I couldn’t really come up with anything big. Everyone tells me that I’m doing a great job and that they’re so proud of what I’m doing, but I just feel as though I haven’t accomplished anything worthwhile (you can deny my self-deprecation, but it won’t change anything). My lack of accountable activity has basically dropped me down the well that appeared to already be located at the bottom of a very large valley. But to escape this too, I have found my mantra; this time from literature. Hannah has long tried to persuade me that John Steinbeck was one of america’s greatest writers, but my experience with Grapes of Wrath in high school left me with a bitter taste in my mouth and a long-standing hatred for Steinbeck. I actually believe that my existence has been sustained by this deep-rooted dislike for Steinbeck’s literature. Hannah, however, practically forced upon me East of Eden and told me to read it. I finished all 602 pages in a week. I devoured that book. I felt more engaged by East of Eden than I have felt in a long time. My mantra comes from the most powerful phrase in the book and the very heart of its story: Timshel. Thou Mayest.

That word carried a man’s greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it … it set him free, it gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man … that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he still has the great choice. He can choose his course and fight through and win.

Never have I been so affected by one word of literature. In my weakness this month, this word jumped out at me. My lack of accountable activity had me in such a deep low at this point of my service. But with Timshel, with this word, I know that I can choose my own course. I can take control. I have that power. I can do great things. And I will. This is my service and I can choose to be a great volunteer in the eyes of my community. I’m in a slump, but I have the power to get out of it, and that’s why June is going to be so much better than May.

To prove my point, it’s June 8th and this evening I asked my main contact, Lalo, if he’d like to start a tree nursery. Not only did he say yes, but we immediately began planning and even went out to the citrus field to find a specific lime tree, which will provide good root stock for citrus grafting that we can do next year if everything goes according to plan. Tomorrow I’m going to my neighbor’s house to get yerba mate seeds to plant and I’m going to start the paperwork to request native tree seeds from the National Forestry Institute of Paraguay. TIMSHEL. I got this!

So here I am, in June, and already headed up the other side of the valley. It feels good. I am in control and I’ve taken charge. So raise a glass for me, and maybe for my good friend John Steinbeck too, who’s made his mark and empowered me beyond any other author ever could have.

Oñondive

“In our togetherness, castles are built” -Irish Proverb

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Óga Ita, Itapúa, Paraguay

I’m finding that the longer I’ve been in Óga Ita (almost six months!) and the more that I engage with my community, the more comfortable I feel and the more I love the people here. I’m beginning to feel more at home, however short my time here may be, and I’m starting to realize how welcoming my community members are. I am still, and will always be, the freak entertainer who typically puts on a good show, but now I know that instead of them laughing out of malice, they’re laughing because sometimes, I truly do sound/look/act stupid. And that’s something we can really all laugh at together- oñondive. 

Yesterday, I did my first big group project with my women’s committee. At their request, I searched for and found the ingredients for homemade detergent. They were all instructed to bring a plastic bottle to take some home in and we would make the detergent, I’d explain to them the ingredients, tell them where to buy them in Encarnación, and then we’d all be on our merry way to cleaner dishes. Things don’t work out the way we want them too. First, we showed up and the President was no where to be found. Everyone is just kind of sitting around on her front lawn until I see her stepping out of their outdoor shower, toweling her hair, and completely 100% unprepared for this meeting. But that’s okay because us Peace Corps volunteers are adaptive by nature so I just launch into my spiel about caustic soda and magnesium sulfate and other things that I had trouble pronouncing in Spanish and explaining in Guaraní. My host mother later referred to this whole meeting as “un disastre” because no one listened, the committee President was slow getting there, I basically made the detergent by myself, they argued for an hour about how to pay me for the supplies, I misunderstood A LOT of mumbled Guaraní, got made fun of because nantendei -I don’t understand- and then they argued more about who will do the request from the municipality for chicks while the committee President’s husband tried to ‘sell’ one of his daughters to my mom for my single host brother and community contact, Lalo. He needs a woman. I just stood there and took money. Overall, I’d say it wasn’t too much of a disastre. They liked the detergent, said that it was, and this is a direct translation, very creamy, and I made money that I forgot they owed me. We all won, maybe even Lalo. Particularly, this experience showed me which women I’ve come to know and grown closest with. The women that are in my family, who I spend the most time with, and the ones I visit most often, defended my Guaraní, thanked me for doing this, and were patient and caring and funny throughout the whole process. In this job as volunteer, it pays well to integrate well.

After the detergent meeting, I walked home with my mom and Marlene, my sister-in-law and we stopped at the despensa, which is a small store in someone’s home where they sell dry goods and hygiene products and sometimes, if you’re lucky, vegetables, clothing, or even hardware. My mother promptly tried to sell Stella, the owner, the liter of detergent that she had just paid me 3000 Guaranies for, for 5000. She would have gotten away with it if I hadn’t started laughing halfway through the sale. On the way home, I was informed that tomorrow (which is today as I’m writing this) is the anniversary of my mother’s mother’s death, which calls for a rezo. Typically, a rezo is just a remembrance of someone who passed and it involves the whole family and lots of prayer and even more food. On an anniversary rezo like today, it’s very relaxed and the family just comes together to enjoy each other’s company. Rezos also occur as a kind of wake following an immediate death. There’s typically a lot of wailing for a lot of consecutive days at those. And for some reason, the food isn’t as good. For today, my mom told me, we would make sopa paraguaya, the standard Paraguayan cornbread, and could I please be of assistance and help them grind corn tonight? Now, I haven’t really hung around my host family’s house since I started cooking for myself, but last night, grinding corn in the dark with my mom and Marlene and joking around about the detergent meeting and my great grinding skills has to be one of my favorite moments here in site. There’s something so amazing about having a family here, people who help me find projects and feed me and care about my well-being and make me feel at home. My mom asked why I never came over to drink terere anymore. Was I mad? “No, I’m just enjoying my independence” isn’t a great answer, so I replied, “No! It’s just…. Uh… Cold.” She laughed and said, “well come mate”. So I’ve resolved to come mate more often and hang with my family.

For lunch, we ate a corn and guinea foul stew and sopa, in which the corn was grinded perfectly thank you, and after a prayer for my dear departed grandmother, we stepped outside to digest and chat. I was kind of looking for an excuse to leave, as everyone was speaking rapid fire Guaraní and smoking, but I felt awkward and looked longingly over at my little house off to the side of our grazing pasture. That’s when I noticed Chile, one of our dogs, dart out of my open door with my bag of cat food hanging from his mouth and head into the woods. I’ve never moved so fast. I probably looked a fool sprinting in my Birkenstocks and oversize wool sweater, bounding over three fences, wood and electrified and barbed wire alike (no injuries Gracias a Dios) to get to this dog and get back my cat food. He saw me coming and tried to move a bit faster, got cornered into a thicket of vines and then just gave up the bag. As I headed back to my house with my prize, I saw everyone staring, jaws slack at my antics. Thank you, thank you very much, I’ll be here all year for your entertainment purposes. This was one of those moments I was talking about where we all laugh at my stupidity.

In other news related to cat food, I found out that my cat Stella, is actually a ‘Stello’ so to speak. Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl cat with that kind of….. umm… arousal…. before. So now I have Moritz, which is apparently the sixth most popular cat name in Germany and it made me laugh. So now I have Moritz and a decreased fear of kittens anytime soon. I like it just the two of us.

All of this hit me as I had just gotten back from Chara’s and my biweekly grocery excursion. Because of our terrible bus schedule, we spent a day and a night at Hannah’s site, Ita Verá, which is close to Trinidad. Chara, Hannah, and myself were good friends during training, placed together in Itapúa, and have been dubbed El Trio Tramposo or The Trampy Trio by our language professor when the three of us started beating him at cards. We always have a raucously good time when we get together, no matter where. Hannah’s host family has met us once before, when we went to the watermelon festival, and are fun hosts for a good Trio Tramposo reunion. We cooked Mexican food for those who were brave enough to try it, played pictionary with the youngest girls, laughed and drank bad boxed wine while squished into Hannah’s tiny house, and explored the rolling hills of Ita Verá the next day. We climbed a tall hill that had three big boulders perched on top and sat together, the trio, talking about life and service and food and travel and the U.S. and Paraguay and dinosaurs and poetry and the past and the future. It’s my favorite moment of the three of us so far, sitting on a rock on a hill in Paraguay, together.

This is my life. It throws a curveball every chance it gets, but I think it keeps my on my toes so that I don’t get lazy. At least I don’t go it alone. I have support in so many forms- family, host family, a dysfunctional women’s committee, Moritz, my friends and fellow volunteers- and I every day I’m grateful for them. Oñondive means ‘together’ in Guaraní and at this moment in time, it describes my service as is.

Ña Aida makes detergent while Ña Rocio makes fun of her

 

MORITZ

Hannah’s little house that she built herself!

Hannah and I and Itapúa

The Trio, Maria, Tutu and the Mexican food

Health! Wealth! And Fattyness!

“The Devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat” -Albert Einstein

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Óga Ita, Itapúa, Paraguay

I… Am fat. At least that’s what everyone tells me. Iky’raite Chance is my brother Abundio’s favorite saying when I’m around. He says it when I’m at his house, he says it when he’s over at our house, it was even his opening line for my site presentation in front of my bosses in January. Chance is really fat. Chara’s sister Sani said it while I was putting my backpack on last week.  My community contact says it to my brother like I’m not even there. My host family in Guarambare said it with surprise like I’d gained a hundred pounds when I came back for reconnect training. What can I say? I’m a fatty.

The thing is, yes, I have a little extra insulation, but here in Paraguay, being told that you’re fat isn’t entirely a bad thing. In the campo, where there’s not a lot of work beyond trying to feed your family and grow a little extra to sell on the side, being fat is a sign that you’re happy, you have food, you have a life where you can eat more. However, my American brain still has a negative stigma attached to the word, and when my brother-in-law, Mario, who is either the happiest of all or pregnant with triplets, tells me I’m fat, I grin and bear it. Some of the other volunteers, who are much more fit than I am, have even been called fat a few times. Fat = Healthy. Skinny = Sickly. My host mom actually thought I was sick when I lost a little weight from my regular jogs through the campo and promptly tried shoving chipa down my throat to get me back to my original fatty self.

At first, I took it as offense. In America, you do not greet someone by commenting on their body or appearance, but here, it’s standard. Not only have I been told I’m fat, but also that I’m blonde (not really), how nice my white skin is (thanks, I polish it daily), how tall I am (most Paraguayans just can’t make it past 5’6″), and how big my feet are (I can’t find my size here in Paraguay, yet I’m only a standard 11 in the U.S.). I’M A FREAK. A FATTY FREAK. And I’m informed of it daily. But now I know that no one actually means it as an offense. It is a way of telling me that I look happy. That I must love Paraguayan cooking. So I tell them I do (bold faced lies), and that my mom has the best cooking in Paraguay (the lie of the century) and they love it. They understand. Heterei la tembi’u paraguaio. 

So here I am. The fatty of Óga Ita and proud of it. All I can do is keep going running and hope that my mom doesn’t think I’m dying, or else I’ll get a big mouthful of chipa guazu and a strange herbal concoction brought to my door.

Still skinnier than Mario

Murder for Sustenance: A PCV’s Guide to Death and Nutrition

In season: oranges, grapefruit, mandarins, clementines, stomach aches (amongst other issues) from too much citrus

Barrio San Miguel, Yguazu, Alto Paraná

Today I’m sitting on Ruby’s patio. I’m watching traffic on the Ruta head toward Ciudad del Este, listening to the roar of motos speeding through her neighborhood on their way back from work. Ruby lives in a barrio of Yguazu, a large town in Alto Paraná originally settled by Japanese immigrants. It’s such an amazingly diverse site: she can buy imported Japanese products from her cooperative grocery store, she drinks Brazilian style mate with Brazilian señoras, and even has a cheese factory run by a Swiss man who makes the best Gruyere that may or may not be coming home with me. It amazes me how different our sites are, how much more access she has to things, the different projects she does in site, compared to my campo lifestyle and projects, even though we’re both Environmental Conservation volunteers who came in at the same time. Ruby does mainly school work, teaching English, creating and maintaining a school garden, and teaching about the importance of waste management and recycling. I do agricultural focused projects: soil conservation, organic gardening, and reforestation efforts by means of agroforestry. Same G, same sector, same country, same training, only 100 miles apart, entirely different services. Pretty crazy.
Last weekend, Chara and I had a few of our friends come down to see our crazy campo lifestyle. Hannah, Ruby, Alyssa, Donovan, and Mya came down (accompanied by Luna, Mya’s spoiled weiner dog), took the three hour bumpy bus ride from Encarnación, and we all piled into my tiny one room shack. Due to my lack of access to food products, or really anything, we had the bright idea to ask my family for a chicken to kill to make tacos (I prebought everything else). Easy. Here’s a chicken. You all know how to kill it right? Yeah sure we do, you just snap the neck. Alyssa tried first. Chicken played dead, let its neck go limp and then flipped out and rose from the dead when she let go. Chara next. Nothing. Live chicken. Alyssa again. Still alive, more irritated. Chara again. Now we just had an aggravated hen who’s puny coop-dominated life was flashing before its eyes. So the last ditch effort was to put its head under a broom on the ground and yank. Hey it worked! Now we had a dead, delicious, spicy taco chicken, who’s foot is still hanging from my patio roof as a testament to the fact that Peace Corps volunteers love murder for sustenance. Night 2: Chara’s house. Hey let’s kill a duck tonight! Easy. Here’s a duck. You know how to kill it right? Sure it’s just like a chicken! Donovan first. Something ripped. Still not dead. Try again. Definitely a sound. Still not dead, more aggravated than the chicken ever was. Try again. More ripping sounds. Not dead. Chara’s turn. Let’s just kill it like the chicken. Get out the broom! Try again. RIIIIP. Blood. Head in one hand. Body in the other. Chara freaking out. Hannah and I somehow end up five steps backward. Donovan calming down Chara. Duck flapping its wings and convulsing as its stubby neck wiggles around. Ruby and Mya yelling because we’re yelling and everything sinks into chaos. Mmmm roast duck. The duck foot still hangs from Chara’s patio roof as a testament that sometimes things go wrong. And bloody.

Beyond having visitors, I’ve devoted myself to finishing my garden. The fence is up, made from intertwined branches, the grass is hoed away, the beds are double dug to give the roots more room to grow and the seeds are sown. Now all that’s left is watering and weeding and praying that my green thumb doesn’t get ripped off and the plants actually pop up. This is my model garden to show my señoras and I’d really appreciate it if I actually looked credible. And had access to vegetables.

But today I’m sitting on Ruby’s patio. We had a birthday party for Donovan in his site in Caaguazu (we refrained from ripping the head off of anything for this one) and I’m headed back towards site. May looks good on the horizon, but you never know. Things sometimes go pretty wrong.

Dead chicken selfie

Donovan gives Ruby a helping hand

Ruby and Alyssa getting toasty in the kitchen

Chara and the Duck before Chara “butchered” their relationship. Poor Ducky.

Hannah, Donovan, Chara, Duck, and the Duck’s Head pose post-neck ripping