Since around June the people in my site have begun working
out in the fields gathering ‘yuyos’.
These are plants that people put in their terere (I think I explained
what this is earlier, but it is like a tea they drink here. Often they put
these plants in the water to give different flavors or for medicinal reasons.). My site has been gathering kapi'i katí. The main site that we have been
gathering is the field of the local estancia. They have been burning their fields (I know, I know as an
agricultural volunteer I should be working against this…) once the field is
burned it is easier for the people to come in with their shovels, hoes, and
machetes to cut up the earth and find this root. I started going out with the women to help out. It is awful work. You can’t really sit down because there
are tons of ants that bite you and it is also really muddy so the women laugh
about how it looks like you pooped your pants. This means that you spend around 4 hours in the morning
squatting over the ground, go in for lunch, and come back out for another 4
hours doing the exact same thing.
Not only is it not the most pleasant work but it also took me around 4 days to really get the hang of what I was looking for. Part of the issue is an 11-year-old girl was training me. She goes to school in the morning (in Paraguay kids go either in the morning or afternoon) and then comes out in the afternoon. She would just laugh at me when I picked out the wrong plant and didn’t explain her system for choosing a spot. I later realized that was because she had no system, she was just wondering around. Towards the end of the day the women (sometimes men) would start burning another section of the field and head home to clean what they had gathered.
Unfortunately I don’t have pictures for the next part, which is odd since I prefer this part and generally try to get invited to the wrapping, not the gathering. This is when the yuyos are prepared to be sold. The women take their clean yuyos and begin wrapping them into bundles about 4 inches long and an inch in diameter. They use a part of a coco tree to wrap them. After they wrap them into smaller bundles they wrap 6 bundles into a bigger bundle, two of these bundles (a dozen smaller bundles) is sold as one unit. The price of these units varies between 1.000gs and 1.500gs. That is somewhere between $0.25 and $0.37. I spent an hour wrapping and kept track of how many I was able to complete- I wrapped 4 units. That would come to about a dollar an hour except for you have to take in consideration the time spent in the fields gathering these plants.
Copper does her best to help out with the digging.
Some of the women gathering yuyos.
This picture isn't that clear but there is a red and white stripped root somewhere in there.
Also should be a 'where's waldo' root in here.
Super guapa.
Burning the field (bad).
Ña Copper gets tired after a long days work. And yes Mom, I know her ears are huge.
Ña Artemia and Dehlia (my teacher)
My pitiful bounty.
Finally calling it a day.
Working with these women has really made me appreciate how
‘guapa’ they are (hard-working).
They all have something that they are saving up for and they all manage
to do this on top of their daily work of raising children, animals, gathering
firewood, and more. My host sister
is saving up for some dental work for herself and her mother. One of my neighbors wants to build a
place for her pig to live.
Whenever I help out in the field I give what I collect to different
women in the community. If I help
them attach them I usually stay for lunch since they refuse to allow me to work
for free. Although collecting
yuyos isn’t something I ever really want to do or will ever do after Paraguay;
it has been a great way for me to further integrate into my community and to
respect how hard they work for what little spending money they have.
