Wednesday
On Wednesday, I headed to Carapegua, a town that’s an hour away from Ybycui (my pueblo) by bus. I left the house around ten to 7am, and due to the lovely road conditions for once, I made it in in record time and caught the 7:30 bus, though I didn’t have time to stash my bike somewhere, so I brought it along. In Carapegua, I met up with 5 other PCVs from the area to talk about a new project regarding forest fire prevention in the national park called Salto Cristal that’s near Ybycui. We met in the Fire House of the Volunteer Firefighters of Carapegua, so it was a nice journey down memory lane for me to my days at West Barnstable Fire Department last year. I felt right at home. Also I stopped in an agro store on the way there and bought some seeds for my garden! Cherry tomatoes, sweet corn, carrots, green pepper, and onion. Very exciting. After the meeting, I headed to a local restaurant patio to hang out with the PCVs from the meeting and eat an empanada for an early lunch.
The travel home was way more frustrating because two buses headed for Ybycui, the "Salto Cristal" line (see picture) passed me saying they didn’t have room for my bike in the storage area. Mbore! So I waited at the road crossing for 2 hours in the middle of the day before finally a bus came that had room. I was stressing out as well because I had a commitment to give another charla about beekeeping at 4:30pm. But, I got to Ybycui just fine after all, stopped at another agro shop and bought some lettuce, swiss chard, and zucchini seeds, and then biked back out to my community. 45 minutes in the hot sun, but at least there was a good breeze. Nevertheless, that was the second shirt that I sweated out for the day. And I mean completely – belly sweat, back sweat, and chin sweat. My personal favorite.
So I got to my host family’s house with enough time to sit for a bit, eat leftovers from lunch, shower, and hop back on my bike to head 1k down the road to the church for the meeting. Less people came this week, but still a good turnout – 10, mostly men. So I left out my goofy icebreaker due to the more somber group dynamic, but the rest of the charla went very well. We covered when to go the apiary, what is important to bring with you, what kind of equipment you need to work bees, and finally the appropriate etiquette for working around Africanized “killer” bees so that they get the least angry as possible. Activities included drawing on my stick figure Don Juan what he needs to go to the apiary and a check for learning game called Matched Up! in English or Upeichaite! in Guarani. This was a favorite of the Croppies in Training. It’s fun. After my charla, the meeting continued as I passed out plans on how to make your own hive, bee veil, and smoker. We will see at next week’s meeting where the group decides they want to go from here.
After the charla, I head to Na Tomasa’s house to watch some volleyball and térere with her. I find out that the tree that will be cut down to make my doors, windows, and bathroom structure with be taken out by a chainsaw on Friday, “if God wants it”. I bike home as the sun is setting over the horizon, and am quickly put to work filling dough with a soy meat/veggie concoction for the soy empanadas for dinner. My host sister Vero (age 16) makes the dough, I fill and close up, and host sister Isi (age 13) deep fries them over the fire in the kitchen. Delicious! Shortly after, I head to my room where I stay up much too late writing part of this blog entry.
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