"When there is no struggle, there is no change." -Frederick Douglass

The common view of the Peace Corps in the U.S. is one that shows volunteers building schools in these poor countries, installing running water, or overall very large-scale projects. However, the reality of life and work of a volunteer is very different from this. Things vary greatly depending on your country, and especially within your country to the site you live in. Each one of my friends experience different types of work because of the different needs in each community, to the money available, to the resources the volunteer may offer or have interest in, to the size of your community. I live in a more urban site so there is more money. However, along with more money, there is great need as the gap between rich and poor within my city is very prevalent.
As the school year began in the end of February, I started attending school to get to know the teachers and have an idea what types of things they are interested in. My main contact is the Coordinator of Projects for the middle school aged kids. She is extremely motivated and has many ideas for big projects, but just does not have the support she needs in terms of expertise of subjects, development of projects, and how to continue the project. This is where I come in. She has wanted to create a project entitled, “Zero Waste Campaign.” However, her hopes for this project are not only for this school of 1,200 students, but she wants this to be institutionalized within every school in my city, and later into all of Paraguay. This makes sense because trash is a big problem and this project includes the maintenance of schools, consciousness of environmental problems so that students learn to value and keep the environment healthy, a school garden to promote nutrition as students are encountering many problems with health here, and environmental leadership though a youth forum in which all schools can attend. Needless to say, this project is large, but since I have experience with large projects, I am excited and motivated. I have already completed with my contact the budget and proposed project, which will soon be presented to local and state governments, but also other organizations in hopes to receive the funding.
As I started with my school, I was introduced to a NGO named PREVER, which focuses on drug addiction, but also other threats to creating and/or maintaining healthy communities. This NGO gets their funding from Spain, but the funding is for their community center and to pay the salaries of the main workers who are a combination of social workers and psychologists. This NGO works in the most marginalized neighborhoods of Encarnacion to promote sustainable development through helping to find health care at reduced costs, classes to promote new jobs like cosmetology, computer science, etc, and many youth leadership groups. The women who work there are amazing and are eager to use my knowledge in the environmental field. With that said, I work mainly with a Social Worker named Francieli who is Brazilian, but grew up in Paraguay. She is about 26, studying to get another undergrad degree in Psychology and wants to study somewhere else in the world for her masters. Anyways, I spend a lot of time with her and we developed a family gardening project. We surveyed about 50 families about if they had gardens, would like one, have health problems due to lack of nutrition, and/or have space for a garden. Essentially we narrowed this group down to 12 families in which we will be providing technical assistance by me on the gardens, and we are still asking for funding so each family can receive tools, seeds, and other resources necessary for the project. This project spans from my class last Thursday until this October. Many of these families once lived in the country and had land, but due to outside pressures and lack of economic resources, were forced to sell this land and move to the city in search of a better life. Needless to say, many of them lost their knowledge about gardens, and many suffer from malnutrition since they can not afford vegetables. In this sense, I am teaching them some biology, ecology, social sciences, and nutrition throughout the course of this project. I am super excited about this project because it is all older women with a couple younger women around my age and although they have spiked their curiosity in me the foreigner, they want to have gardens to empower themselves and their families for a healthier lifestyle. In this venture, I have been inspired to begin my urban gardening as I will begin to garden on the roof of my apartment, probably the first in Paraguay that isn’t just herbs…
Both of these projects have taken a lot of my time to plan, but are finally underway. I am really into both of them and have some other great ideas for projects, which will soon become developed, and I will let you all know. Another thing I am spending a lot of my time on right now is making recycle furniture and crafts for my new apartment…Take a gander of my pic of the trashcan I wove out of newspaper…ballin!