GROW BIOINTENSIVE

life is a classroom.

so this month i have been swept up (mostly by accident and pure dumb luck) into a three week course on the GROW BIOINTENSIVE Method - a method of sustainable farming/growing designed by Ecology Action (check out the link, it's really amazing).

a Californian, Jennifer, is teaching us: a select few students from each year at my school, a few outsiders from other organizations/people interested in sustainable farming, and me. Jennifer has been really helpful/generous in sharing information with me about sustainable gardening; she gave me a awesome book called How To Grow More Vegetables and today she gave me another booklet called The Sustainable Vegetable Garden, (which is a guide to starting your first veggie plot) after she found out i am interested in trying to start feeding myself by garden in college! i am also enjoying the fact that we only speak in Spanish, which is great.

the big book How To Grow... is fascinating and full of knowledge:

"...Gandhi observed that '...to forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.' ...Voltaire ... 'The whole world is a garden and what a wonderful place this would be, if only each of us took care of our part of the Garden!' Each of us is needed. Building a truly sustainable agriculture is an essential part of building sustainable communities. As we build soils, we also build a culture made up of healthy living and effective farming, as well as enduring communities."

that's, in a nutshell, Ecology Action's basic mission - to have everyone working sustainably... and they have a lot of information on how to do it! anyone can really. =] they have a ton of literature so all their current knowledge is at your fingertips.

i'm so thrilled to have all this to learn, and i look forward to becoming more involved with the organization when i get back to the states.

for now i'm just gobbling up all i can, listening and watching and doing and smiling and trying to share it with everyone i know!

i think anyone who's interested in growing their own food should check the book out - it's got super-detailed how-tos and everything.. it's fabulous. the best part is they are very efficiency conscious in time/money/land + water use/everything!

so that's my infomercial for today.

i'll post more pictures this weekend! =]

a perfect moment:

sitting in the seedling house made of shade fabric
circled up each with papaya in hand
scraping away the spotted green/yellow skin with my tiny penknives
breaking open the sunrise surface and digging into the seed-filled fruit
slurping and eating and enjoying.


[i was finally able to download some pictures - check out the links. more will be posted soon]

Asuncion

so i've been spending some of my weekends exploring Asuncion
taking the bounding buses back and forth over El Rio Paraguay.
the AFSers in the city and i run around like sweaty white blobs,
getting lost and loving it.
last weekend we rambled all over the city looking at this and smelling that.
after a morning of investigation we made it to Lido Bar. i'd read about it in a book by a Brit who'd done some travelling in this country known as the Heart of South America.
Lido fulfilled all of my expectations: fantastic empanadas, positively stuffed and enormous; scarlet ceiling fans; waitresses' sturdy bodies are slid into orange creamsicle 50's diner-meets-willy-wonka uniforms (complete with striped fez) like lovely lady sausages; diners are packed elbow-to-elbow along the lone, long, winding orange bar that slithers its way through the entire length of the restaurant.
fabulous. i loved every minute.

the four of us gringos bus hopped, toting our tereré (iced mate that Paraguayos thrive on) thermoses, guampa, looking rather local, or so we thought, until a street musician sang to us - delightfully off-key and loudly: "Los americanos tomando tereré..."
i guess we stick out a bit.

as we wound our way through skillful entertainers and mercantes we became increasingly sunburned and sweaty.
though that's the funny thing about the Paraguayan sun: it doesn't burn me. i'm used to becoming as red as tomatoes, singed and whimpering...but not here. though they claim it's stronger, my skin is either becoming more resistant or i'm becoming more Paraguayan, because i am just burning browner and browner. my hair, too, is darker, which seems a little counter- intuitive.
but then again, this is Paraguay, and here things just don't make sense.