Oswaldo Contreras, Guadalajara Course Manager, Recently visited a Pride Campaign in San Rafael National Park, Paraguay

My first visit to Paraguay will be unforgettable. Last month, I went on a monitoring trip to San Rafael National Park in southern Paraguay.  My goal was to support Elizabeth Cabrera, campaign manager from Guyra Paraguay, lead agency at Asuncion, Paraguay.  Eli is an experienced young environmental educator, mother, wife and a great enthusiastic professional. I went to the site to help her through her planning process phase and apply almost 400 surveys at Caronay municipality (surveys are an important campaign monitoring tool).

 
Pride Campaign manager, Elizabeth Cabrera.

After a six-hour trip from Asuncion to Caronay, we arrived late in the night.  What I found was outstanding.  A local support committee was waiting for us at the local small city hall, and local stakeholders had been waiting for us for about two hours. It was amazing how they were ready and had organized all the logistics for the survey application. We held a two-hour meeting at city hall. The mayor, counselors, teachers, members of two local environmental NGOs, state officers, policemen, Peace Corps members and volunteers were all together planning the next day’s tasks. It was very exciting to have all those local members involved in Guyra´s Pride Campaign. Once we were done with the planning, we set the time to get together next day and apply the surveys.

The next morning we found more than 50 volunteers ready to go, most of them from the last grades of the local high school. I saw how local leaders were guiding the process with the young fellows. A small breakfast was served followed by a small training review (although they were already trained by Eli and local stakeholders), and everybody took off to apply the surveys. A lot of these kids rode off on their own motorcycles, proud to do conservation work.   They wore a brave look, just like the Hell Angels ready to have some action.

 
Local high school students prepare to survey community members.

Eli went to another big town (Perlita) where another 50 volunteers (and more motorcycles) were awaiting instructions. I joined a small party in a community called San Roque. I supported the kids but did not implement the survey. In about two and a half hours we were done.  It was good to drink Terere, local Yerba Mate cold drink, in all the farms we visited– the people there are such great hosts. Meanwhile, Eli and the other group were doing the same at Perlita.

At the end it was really amazing to see more than 100 volunteers so well organized by local leaders. In about 4 hours they applied 390 surveys (1/4 of the all the surveys to be applied) in 10 communities with more than 7 different organizations working together. The logistic were great, but even better was the commitment of all those volunteers. I really want to know if this is some kind of record for Pride. Eli was very proud and excited of this achievement, and tears rolled from her eyes as she thanked everybody.

A couple of weeks later, when I was doing another monitoring visit in Honduras, Eli wrote me and told me about how she secured the same level of local participation to apply another almost 600 surveys that needed to be done during this step in the project planning phase. She sounds very happy.

I found this trip to be unforgettable not only because of the beautiful people and landscapes from Paraguay, but because I saw a very enthusiastic and smart campaign manager who was able to make people happily involved in her Pride campaign. Even though applying surveys is not necessarily an exciting task in the Pride process, Eli found a way not just to make people participate, but to make the San Rafael National Park neighbors have fun and feel proud of being a part of this conservation campaign. Cheers Eli!