Sorry its been soo long

Well I´ve not had access to the internet in a bit so I haven´t been able to update this thing. I´m gonna skip the details here and get down to the nitty gritty. I got my site. Im gonna be spending the next two years in the department of Ñeembucu about 2 hours south east of Pilar. All of this is located in the southwest corner of paraguay right across the boarder from Argentina. My intiall host family seems super cool and there are tons of little girls at my house. The littlest one got bit by a fish while I was visting and then dad came out with the machete and choped its head off. They kept telling me we were going to eat it, but never did. My community and many in the area were all given a ton of fancy beekeeping equipment by the NGO who then bounced. SO they have all the equiment they just need a little more technical training. I visited the apiary twice when I was there are some strong hives there. I also when milking everyday and hope to continue this practice when I live there with the goal of becoming half as good as the woman I go with. Also I was promised carpinco (capybara) and jakare (alligator) asados (bbq).

I can´t think of anything else right now.

OH leave comments.. I need them

In like another failed trasiago, out like a (hopefully) succesfull trasiago

Well I´ve had a pretty good week this week. It started out with another trasiago attempt. This hive was located in an old fallen mbocaja tree (coco palm to the unintiated). Super easy. However after busting the sucker open we found a doomed hive... Laying workers. (Laying workers means no queen and that means no new workers only lazy lazy zanganos). Another failure, however this one wasn´t our fault. We loaded up what bees we could scoop up and throw and the box and headed out. Before going to deposit out bees in the apiary we had to go pick up the trasiago the croppies got to do. Those so-and-so´s apprently had a super easy, superstar trasiago. Zero stings and one of them even caught the queen in his hands while she was flying away, and without hurting her. And insult to injury, they sweated up our suits.

The next day we had a feild trip to Asunsion to visit the university´s beekeeping program, a bee equiment store and a local food market. While I´m sure the university visit was informative, I didn´t understand a goddamn word. I did find out that it is illegal to import honey into Paraguay though. We arrived at the bee store on one of the 2 days a year when they make stamped wax, so we got to see that process, which was pretty cool. They had a huge barrel full of water sitting on a big fire and there was a smaller barrel full of melted wax inside (double boiler). Then they would take a pail and scoup up some wax and put it into another barrel. Then they would dip this board into the wax a couple of times then put it in water and the wax would harden and they´d peel it off. The market was a market. I don´t think i´ve been here long enought to appricate its variaty. OH and on the way home I saw alf cell... it was a store that sold cell phones and used alf (from the old tv show) as its mascot. I know where im getting my phone.

And finally, yesterday. Yesterday was our 4th ´dia de practica´. Me and my buddy Caleb have been doing a bee oriented dia de practica thing, which so far had been talking with a copule of folk. However the plan had always been to make a TBH and use it to do a trasiago with Caleb´s grandmothers godson. And yesterday was that day. When we wolk up in the mornging all we had was a dream and a bottom board. We managed to scrounge up some scrap wood from a construction site to bulid the sides with. Then we got some bamboo to use as top bars. Luckly after lunch Alberto came over and helped make the box. After it was done we terered and played cards untill 5 when we planed on doing the trasiago. At five johnathan (out tech trainer) and patricia (one of our language proffesors) rolled up and me, caleb and caleb´s mom hoped in the van, Jaha trasiago hape! (lets go to the trasiago) (oh by the way johnathan and patricia were only there to judge us). We got there, Alberto expertly hacked the tree open, in about 2 or 3 wacks and we began pulling out the comb and ataching it to our bamboo bar (which work awesome for attaching comb). We searched in vain for the queen for awhile (everybody helped with that), but once it started geting dark we decided to go for the crapshoot and just try to smoke ´em all into the box, which actually seemed to work. Me and Caleb are going back over there this evening to make sure they stuck around and also to move them to their new, perminate home. (by the way I also got stung in the nose durring the coarse of the trasiago. For those of you no in the know, a bee´s sting smells like bananas, so all i could smell was bananas for about a minute.)

Oh and one last thing some of the bulls here have these huge fat humps over their sholders and i´ve been dying to grope one. Today I got that chance... It was great also I got to fondle the bull´s droopy neck fat, ESSO!. I have pics of all this and more, which I will upload once I can get virus free internet access.

rolling along

Well I´m back in Ypane for my weekly blog update. Not to much of note happened this week. Things are setting in to a little routine of class, food and sleep, with the occational excersizing happening. But on friday night and saturday we went out for a tech excursion. We went to visit a volunteer who is living a little comunnity outside Altos. This is just an hour or so (rupi) from assunsion (paraguaý). It super pretty out there, in fact there are even paraguayan mountans (we might call them hills). When we got there on friday, we started out with a little terere (which if I haven´t explained yet is cold mate, and the national drink of paraguay). After terereing (and yes it is a verb too) for about an hour or so we went out to the kokue (feild) to harvest avena negra (black oats) and plant some macuna and some other green manure which I can´t remember the name of. After all that hard work, we needed more terere. Two hours later we set out to capture a wild hive. This was another hive that had set its self up in an old termite mound. However as opposed to our other (failed) attempt this one was text book. The termite mound was hollow on the inside and the bees had filled it full of comb. We kept at it well into the night, some of us more into it than others, but eventually around eight andrew (the volunteer we were visitng) foudn the queen a captured her. Hooray. Our first sucessful trasiago!
Upéi (then) we marched home with our spoils and had a victory dinner, chicken and rice, with mandio of corse. After a bit of dancing and a bunch of yelling (its kinda like yee-haw but distinctly paraguayan, i´m still working on mine) we retired for the night. The room I got had no fan and was like 90´s. Also the window had been open all night before I got there so the room was full of beetles which crawled all over me all night. I didn´t get much sleep before waking up at 5 am (truth be told i didn´t acctually get out of bed untill about 6). After some mate and cosido (another type of mate, made with charcoal burned sugar and usually drank mixed with alot of milk) we listen to 2 charlas (which are just little talks). Then we drank some terere had some lunch drank some more terere and then looked at some farmers pond. After all that it was finally time to go. ON the way back to costa alegre we stopped off at some american style dinner and sweet shop. I got a mini peacan pie with soft serve ice cream and a brownie. Heterei (muy rico ( very good)). Im late for lunch so i gotta go.