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).

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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.

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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!

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Recently, I went on a monitoring visit to a Pride campaign in El Tokio in northern Mexico. It’s one of our TNC partnership campaigns, and Pronatura Noreste is the local lead agency. El Tokio is in the Chihuahuan desert and has the biggest prairie dog colony in the world. The change in land use from grasslands to agriculture and the excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are some of the environmental threats this Pride campaign is working on.

The campaign manager there is Adorit Lopéz-Ventura, and she recently had a child. Kaled is her three-month-old baby, and now it is quite a challenge for Adorit to finish her Pride campaign with only three months to go in its last phase. Definitively, course managers like me must be ready for everything. During the whole monitoring week we were babysitting Kaled and completing tasks on her Pride campaign (she could not find a babysitter on time).

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Adorit Lopéz-Ventura films her husband in a prairie dog costume. 

Fortunately, I love kids, and it does not matter to me making him sleep while Adorit was dealing with printers and designers. Kaled is a good child. Like a clock, he let us know when he had to sleep, eat or just be a good pal joining us on our daily tasks. Quite a challenge for Adorit, but she is doing her best.

On this visit, she showed me some nice pictures of when she was pregnant and doing school visits in several villages on the desert prairie. Her husband also works for Pronatura Noreste. He helped Adorit on these outreach visits, getting inside of the prairie dog costume of the campaign’s mascot. It was just great to see the couple working together on their Pride campaign—both very happy to be expecting soon her first child.

Personally, I think this experience shows us how important is the commitment of our campaign managers, and how they can enjoy their Pride experiences with their family. I saw that Adorit’s newborn child is not an obstacle for her job, but a motivation for her to do her best to make a better world for Kaled.

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I did my very first field visit for Rare with Albino Herrera in the state of Chihuahua northern Mexico. The beautiful Chihuahuan desert landscape in the Janos Valley was an inspiration for both of us.

[photopress:Albino_1.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Albino is running a Pride campaign, in a partnership between Rare and TNC’s local partner, Pronatura Noreste. He is a local community member of Janos and a great cowboy, with a farm, cows, and some land where his family harvests corn and grass.

He is doing an outstanding job with his Pride campaign, which deals with conserving the most valuable resource in the region: water. Preserving the local grasslands also plays an important role in this campaign, and his mascot, the prairie dog, will be the best conservation messenger. (Janos Valley has the biggest black-tailed prairie dog colony in the whole world.)

[photopress:prairiedog.jpg,thumb,alignright]With his 49 years, this cowboy faced one of his greatest challenges in his Pride campaign. This was to dominate a computer. Our goal in my first visit was to finish his Pride Campaign Project Plan. This document is the bible for his campaign, his map to all the roads he must undertake in the upcoming 12 months.

So, we met and got started. After 5 nonstop days of working 10-12 hours every day, we finished one Friday night. He never before had done a 100-page document in his life, and he was much excited about it.

We were exhausted, and he was ready to write his acknowledgments. I decided to type while he dictated to me. So, he first thanked God for the opportunity he met in this project. Then he thanked his wife (who passed away some years ago), who he said helped him from heaven. When he said these beautiful words, his voice broke and a small tear fell down the cowboy’s face. Then I realized that a tear rolled down out of my eye too.

We stayed up till late in the night, sharing a beer and talking about stuff, as old friends—tired but happy and proud of working with the heart in the last week. I realized that I couldn’t have a better first field visit at Rare.

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