February is Avocado Month

Every February I harken back to the year we lived in Paraguay and to our ex-pat friend John Wiley’s avocados. John had a couple of avocado trees in his yard and had little use for the fruit (actually a large berry).  John would bring over a grocery store bag full of huge avocados.  As near as I could tell, like John, few Paraguayans ate avocados.  I guess that they had too many other fruit trees to bother with these big things. We had many dinners of what passed for guacamole. It was tough finding hot sauce.  The photo is thanks to Romy Goldberg of Discovery Paraguay.  She notes that this is a medium large avocado.  There really are larger ones.  I don’t remember the stone being that large but different trees produce different fruit.

Environmentalist wins Award for Work in Paraguay

Karina Atkinson started Para La Tierra as an environmental organization in Paraguay.  Now she has won the 2012 Young Laureates of the Rolex Award for Enterprise.  Para La Tierra would be an awesome place for a Kansan to engage in a service learning study abroad volunteer assignment and apply for the Kansas Paraguay Study Abroad Scholarship.  Here is the link to the organizations website.

http://www.paralatierra.org