This year's Thanksgiving had much different feel from the very extravagant feast at the US Embassy last year. My friend Cara decided to host and be in charge of finding the turkey. Thursday morning I, along with three other volunteers headed over to Cara's friend's house to kill, pluck and gut the turkey. Turkey feathers are much harder to get out than chicken feather, but finally we got it clean enough to eat, with a lot of help form the women who sold it to us. There was a lot of discussion about how to cook the bird. If people have ovens at all they are usually little electric ones. Or they have a traditional brick oven, tatakua, which you build a fire inside and when it burns down to coals you either sweep them out of just push them to the side. The problem with this method was that we didn't think we could keep it hot enough long enough to cook the, what we guessed to be, 10-12 pound bird. In the end we followed the advice of a few Paraguayans and boiled the bird until it was cooked, took it out, stuffed it and put it in the tatakua to crisp and brown it. None of us really had high expectations for how the turkey would turn out, but to our surprise and delight it was delicious. I was in charge of making rolls because there was a consensus they are an important part of the Thanksgiving meal. Another volunteer, who inherited pumpkin pie spices from another volunteer, made a pumpkin pie. We even managed to make a cranberry sauce from craisens and "dulce de guaiava" which is guavas boiled for a long time with sugar until it becomes a jam like substance. We made mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, potato and beat salad and brownies as well.
Turkey preparation
Food preparation
The feast
At some point on Friday, while we were all chewing the last bits of meat off turkey bones, the idea came up to climb the tallest mountain in Paraguay. I said any one who wanted to climb it was welcome to come to my house. Two volunteers, Corey and Porter, ended up coming. The weather was was iffy and I don't know how many times we went back and forth on the decision to go, but in the end we made it up the mountain. We were just sitting down to our little picnic lunch when black clouds started to move in. We decided we should get down off the mountain before it started raining because the path is very steep and you can see the water runs right down the trail. We made it to the base of the mountain before the rain hit and as we were walking out on the road it started to rain. Fortunately a truck passed and they gave us a ride to the town where we had a ride waiting to take us back to my house.
Now that school has ended I was wondering what I was going to do to fill my days, but fortunately I was able to meet with Teko Porã. Teko Porã is a governments program that gives money to women who don't have any other income. In order to receive the money the women are supposed to have gardens and other things that help them become more self sufficient. Also as part of the program they offer classes and talks. The women who workes with the women in my area contacted me months ago to ask if I could teach some classes. I was very excited about it because it was the first time someone had come to me for help, rather than me trying to initiate a project. Unfortunately nothing more came of it and I never taught any classes. When Brook left, she gave me a bunch of trees seeds that she never used. I decided to go to one of the Teko Porã meetings and ask the women if they would be interested in planting trees. They all seemed fairly interested so we set a date to make starter "pots" from old news paper. I wasn't sure how many, if any, women would show up, but in about an hour we made 50 or 60 pots between seven of us. The following week the same women came over and we filled about 30 of them with dirt and manure and planted three different kinds of native trees. We ran out of manure so we made plans to fill the rest the fallowing week so we'll see if the weather holds out. I'm hoping this project will lead to other projects with this group of women.
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