I know it has been awhile since I wrote my last blog and I know this is overdue. I have been surprisingly busy the past few months. First I went on a trip back to the states in the beginning of February to visit my boyfriend in Tennessee. This was my third trip back to the states. If you asked me when I got here if I would fly back to the States three times during my service I wouldn’t have believed it. I had a really wonderful vacation. I flew into Atlanta and Adam and I spent a few days there with his friends. Then we drove to his hometown in Tennessee , we also visited his sister in Nashville and his brother in Asheville. We moved around a lot but I loved meeting all of Adam’s family members and being in the South for the first time. It was really really cold but it was a nice break for me from the stifling heat in Paraguay. Mostly, I was happy to be with Adam again after two months apart. The whole trip was wonderful and it made getting back on the plane to come back to the middle of nowhere without Adam really difficult. Besides an unexpected 12 hour layover in Bolivia everything went smoothly.

Adam left for South Korea a few days later and has been there for over a month now. He has a year contract to teach English at an private English institute on Jeju island. He started with an intense week of training in Seoul and then relocated to Jeju in the south. He loves it so far and I think he feels rich now that he is earning a real salary after two years of making 300 dollars a month. He lives in his own apartment, has made a lot of friends on the island so far, and is working a lot. The institute sounds pretty strict and keeps him on a tight schedule. He is teaching several different classes from elementary to middle school ages. He loves teaching and loves all the kids. He already has a lot of funny stories to tell about cute things the kids say.

The hardest part about Adam and I being apart is not being able to communicate as much as we want. With all the modern technology in the world to connect people it would seem possible but not without its cost. One problem is that there is no cheap way to call between South Korea and Paraguay, from the US to Paraguay or the US to Korea there are a lot of options, but how many people call Paraguay from South Korea? So, we can only afford to talk on the phone a few times a week. Our second big problem is my internet connection. Because Fassardi is a remote little town we have a really slow internet connection and skype does not work here. So, Adam and I have resorted to chatting online at night. So I guess if Fassardi was a little bigger or more centrally located I could have a fast internet connection and all our problems would be solved. So, its all Fassardi’s fault. But Adam and I have realized that we don’t have to communicate every day because we know there is an end in sight to the distance between us and then we wont have to be apart this long again.

I am thinking a lot about the end. My dad says I have short timers disease. And I guess I do because I am constantly counting the months in my head. I mostly want to leave because I am so excited about what is coming next. I get to go live in Korea with Adam and start the next part of our lives together. Also, I am looking forward to leaving Paraguay. I realized this right when I got back from my trip to the states. I am tired of living alone and tired of the Peace Corps lifestyle. I wont miss the long bus rides and the travel. I wont miss the intense heat and the bug bites. I wont miss the other volunteers who party and drink themselves silly when they are out of site. Now that I am here without Adam I have been trying to meet other volunteers and make friends, which has helped me to realize that I was not missing out on anything by spending all my time with Adam.

Of course there are things I am going to miss about my life in Paraguay. I will miss the freedom most of all. I will miss being able to sleep in whenever I want. I will miss the kids that I have formed relationships with. I will miss my dog, Maddie. But really, I am so ready to move on.

I have been busy the past few months because of the library project. Things are really coming together and the library is looking great. Thank you so much to everyone who made a donation. It really means a lot to me. I was amazed at people’s generosity and willingness to help out. There are a few people who went about and beyond. My Uncle Roger donated two laptop computers. One I brought with me back from Tennessee and the other is currently in route to Asuncion, I really hope it makes it here. Also, my dad’s friend Bob Laks made a large and generous donation to my online fund with the condition that we name the library after him. So the library is now the Biblioteca Comunitaria Robert Laks. He picked out a quote for a plaque, which my friend Randi translated for me . Peope are very curious about this Robert Laks so I am going to have a picture of him framed with some facts about him for the library wall. So Bob will always be famous in Fassardi. My contact is convinced he is going to fly here for the inauguration event. Also I want to thank Suzie and her third grade class for their book donations. Suzie had all her students bring in a book in Spanish to donate to my library as a special Valentine’s Day project. What a wonderful way for the kids to get involved! Thank you Suzie.

So my contact and I are well on our way to spending all the cash we had donated. The first thing we did was hire a local man to install bars on the windows and doors to the library building. Theft is a big problem here and computers and other expensive things notoriously get stolen from school buildings in the middle of the night so bars are a necessity. Then we hired a carpenter to build all our furniture. Everything came out beautifully. We have 5 bookshelves, a large table with 11 chairs, a desk and a locking cabinet. We also had curtains made. Next we bought two desktop computers. We have made two large purchases of books from two different companies and are making arrangements to buy more from a third.

So we have spent most of our money and the rest of it will go towards books. We are also considering buying a projector. I have been spending the last few weeks cataloguing all our books into a digital card catalogue and we currently have 730 books, including the text books the high school already owned. This sounds like a lot of books but we are realizing that it is not. Our shelves are still looking embarrassingly bare. Books are surprisingly expensive in Paraguay and the money did not reach as far as I was expecting. I think this is because almost no books are actually published in the country and everything is imported from Argentina or Spain. This is just another reason it is so hard to find books and when you do they are always shockingly expensive. The only place to buy books in Villarrica, my closest city, is from a shelf at the supermarket. I always check the shelf when I am there to see if anything is on sale but most books are 20 dollars or more, which is a whole lot of money for a Paraguayan to spend on a book. No wonder no one reads, even if they have the desire to do so they cant find them or afford them. Just another reason why community libraries are so important. I am still soliciting embassies and other organization in Paraguay for book donations.

I had the best 25 pictures from my kid’s photography class framed and they are currently on display in the library. Also, my mom sent some really great posters to decorate the library. We want to paint before we hang anything so all the posters and photos are sitting propped up against the bookshelves for now. Its not so easy to hang stuff on the cement walls. We have to buy special screws and once something is hung its pretty permanent. I am going to paint a map of Paraguay on the back wall, similar to the world map I painted last year. I want to start teaching free typing lessons with the new computers and maybe host kids reading camps on the weekends.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the new members of the Youth library committee. Some of them were coerced into joining but hopefully once they come they will realize it’s worth while. We are going to spend the day organizing the books, labeling them, writing library cards , setting up a lending policy and general library rules. We are going to make posters to post around town to advertise the library. There is a lot to do to say the least and this is just the beginning.

I think one of the best things about the library is all the wonderful resources we have for teachers. Supplies and text books are so limited for teachers and now we have a plethora of text books and other educational materials at their disposal in a very central location.

The hardest part is convincing people to come to the library and to make use of it, to teach them that reading isn’t just for studying that it can be enjoyable. I cant tell you how many times a Paraguayan has seen me reading on my porch or while waiting for the bus and made a comment about how studious I am or “wow, what a hard worker”. This is because they don’t associate reading with leisure or pleasure. The only place they are likely to encounter a book is at school where reading is an assignment. I want to laugh every time someone makes this kind of comment but it also makes me aware of how little books are incorporated into their daily lives.

I really hope to leave the library in good hands once I leave. I hope I can teach a few people about how to catalog books in to the computer, how to print out new library cards and to be consistent and enforce the lending policy, to name a few things. I have requested a follow up volunteer to come to Fassardi after me who wants to continue my work with the library. This would be the best case scenario because we still don’t have a librarian or an internet connection or thousands of books. These are all things that are long term goals that I don’t have time to complete but a follow up volunteer would be able to jump right in because I have provided the foundation.

That is the news for now!!

Pictures,Pictures, Pictures!

Fassardi kids posing with their cameras during a special Peace Corps kids' photography course I taught

Fassardian taking advantage of the paved road to sell in season watermelons, just one example of tradition and modernity mixing

Myriam, my contact, giving instructions to the 10th grade class at the technical high school

Kids showing off their animal drawings after English class. Can you say bear?

The building where the future library will go at the high school. The room is currently used for computation class. Only one computer works. It will be moved to the new classroom being built this summer to free up space for the library.

The current "library" at the high school in its entirety.

The high school and future library building

At the geography camp in July. Kids so eager to learn!

Smiling faces!

Teaching kids about oceans, continents, and countries!

Donate to the Jose Fassardi Community Library Project at

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2010 is over and it was officially the most challenging and eventful year of my life. Finding my way in a small Paraguayan community was no easy feat. Even after a year and a half, I still learn new things every day and still have days when I yearn for home. (Last week I learned that in Paraguay your cousin’s kids are called your nieces and nephews, no wonder everyone is related!) Although difficult at times, my experiences in Paraguay have also been very rewarding and I wouldn’t want to come home a minute too soon.

Since I moved to Jose Fassardi 16 months ago I immediately became aware of the overall poor quality of education in the elementary schools and high schools. Students have no access to books or educational materials besides the old and basic textbooks in the classroom. Therefore, the four hour Paraguayan school day is mostly spent by students copying notes from the blackboard which the teachers copy from a textbook. Students memorize these notes and then regurgitate it back for exams. The lack of classroom materials has led to the lack in development of critical thinking skills. Further encouraged by the dictatorships’ leftover legacy that discourages individuality and encourages one’s ability to blend in and be one of the crowd, students do not learn nor are they encouraged to think for themselves.

When I have observed classes or given guest lectures my general experiences have been frustrating because classrooms are run so differently than how I am used to. Students are disrespectful to their teachers (especially the boys, it is uncool to learn!) which causes the teachers to yell back insulting remarks back, not a very positive learning environment to say the least. Students from other classes are disruptive too. They come in and out as they please and peer in the windows and shout distracting comments. Students get up and leave whenever they want, hand in their homework or complete an in-class assignment only if they feel like it. The boys choose to sit in a cluster in the back of the class and ignore everyone else and on some occasions the girls will work on the assignment and all copy off one another or clump together and gossip.

Also, when students are asked a question they are generally terrified into silence. Students never want to answer a question or participate in class. They look at each other’s papers to make sure they all did the assignment the same way. This isn’t considered cheating. I have so often received 17 identical papers handed in. But can you really blame them? They were never taught to think for themselves. Creativity and individuality is not valued as it is in our culture.

I am not sure how anything gets accomplished in this kind of environment during a four hour school day, which often ends early or doesn’t happen at all when it rains or even looks like it might rain. Paraguayan children must miss more school than any other kids on the planet due to weather and holidays. Kids who live far from school and must walk several miles to and from school along dirt roads are trapped in their homes when it rains, the dirt roads turn into impassable river. In the winter kids find it too cold to leave the house to attend school and in the summer it is too hot. It’s a crying shame!

But don’t get discouraged yet, a beacon of hope shines in the educational system in Fassardi, her name is Myriam Ramierz. She is my community contact. She is the principal of the technical high school, one of two high schools in the center of town. She runs her small school with a little bit of discipline and lot of encouragement, two unique qualities found in a Paraguayan educator. Her students are proud to be students at her school and come from neighboring towns every day to attend. These students actually care about their education because Myriam gives them a reason to care. Fridays are all day classes. She does not accept tardiness, absences, and misbehavior. She has a strict discipline policy and classes usually run smoothly. My neighbors, both students at the technical high school, often discuss with me topics they have learned in class. They ask me for help on assignments, ask me to look up things on the internet for them when I go to town, buy them books , help with their English homework etc…They could definitely benefit from a community library.

The youth in Fassardi are under stimulated, to say the least, and are forced to look for it elsewhere. They spend their volumes of free time mostly doing nothing, watching TV (soap operas and dubbed Disney Channel shows. Hannah Montana is a huge hit), sitting and people watching, and cruising the new paved road on their motorcycles. Up and down, up and down. There are no organized sports, activities or events for youth, besides the one I organize.

During the winter break in July I hosted a geography camp for kids. It was two days of educational games and fun about the whole wide world! I learned after painting the world map that Paraguayan kids and adults alike are terribly uneducated about the world outside the small town of Fassardi. I decided on a geography camp to make use of the map and offer some knowledge. By the end of the camp, the kids could identify all of the oceans and the continents; they could find Paraguay, the United States and many other FIFA World Cup countries on the world map. Kids were no longer asking me if I took the bus or my bike to get to Paraguay from the United States. They started to appreciate the distance and space of the big, wide world. Kids were no longer asking me what was below Antarctica on the map. However, the second day of camp my boyfriend brought two friends visiting from Australia which ended up terribly confusing the children and to this day, six months later, children still ask me if I am from Australia. But we made some progress…

Can you imagine not growing up with books in your home? As American children we loved books! How different would bed time have been without Good Night Moon, The Hungary Caterpillar, The Giving Tree, or Where The Wild Things Are? Classic books and a classic American childhood. Paraguayans rarely have books in their homes, maybe a rare dictionary or some religious literature. I have heard stories from other volunteers who had to teach kids how to turn pages in a book because they had never held a book before.

Last year I wrote a blog about Fassardi as a town of contradictions, a town stuck between the past and the future. (I believe I wrote this when the main road was paved last December). Fassardi, like many rural Paraguayan towns, is struggling with the classic battle of tradition vs. modernity. With last year’s paved road came easy access for Fassardi citizens to one of Paraguay’s most modern cities, Villarrica, only an hour away. Villarrica is full of internet cafes, public and private universities, electronic stores, and shops galore. The modern world is slowly coming to Fassardi along its paved road and Fassardians are drinking it in. Fassardians are becoming more and more aware of the value of an education. Families, if they have the means, are starting to send their kids to university more often than to find work once they finish high school. Older generations are beginning to see that an education can lead to a prosperous career. This is a VERY new concept to come to rural Paraguay.

So, we have the first most important and most challenging concept covered. Most Fassardians already understand the importance of education, but they lack the resources or the know how to improve it. A community library is the best and most efficient way to easily serve the educational needs of the whole community. It will be a place where students, from kindergarten to high school seniors, students commuting to the universities, and adults can come to research school assignments, use the computers, print out documents, research professional and personal interests, or learn to read for fun. The library will serve as a public meeting place for students to gather, parent meetings etc… It will be a full service multi-media center for the public of Jose Fassardi, something they have never had before!

The library will be located at the technical high school in the center of town. Once up and running the library will have six large book shelves filled with Spanish language books, two computers, two printers, two computer desks, tables and chairs sets for adults and children, office supplies, curtains, and educational materials decorating the walls We are starting small but have high hopes the library will continue to grow for years after my departure. I have requested a follow-up volunteer to take my place in Fassardi in August to continue working with the library and the community.

Some of our future goals include accessing the internet, securing funds from the municipality for a full-time librarian, and continuing to solicit donations from local and international organizations to pay for more books, computers ,and other multi-media technology.

I have been working actively on this project for the past several months with the principal of the technical high school, Myriam, and a youth commission. Myriam and I have formed a very close working relationship and friendship. I spend holidays with her family and teach her two young children English. She is very active in the community and passionate about improving education in Fassardi. She and I have written countless letters to local NGOs soliciting book donations. So far we have received boxes of donations from El Centro Cultural de Espana in Asuncion, ABC Color and Ultima Hora (both newspapers), we are still waiting to hear from the American Embassy. We continute to write more letters. We have also received several donations from a few US based organizations that have shipped books to me in Asuncion.

Myriam and I submitted two grants to help support the library project effort. One is the Peace Corps Partnership grant that I have been advertising on this blog and by email to all my friends and family. This grant is funded completely by online donations. Peace Corps has established the “Partnership” grants in an effort to get Americans involved in Peace Corps projects. It doesn’t just take one volunteer, me, to build a library, it take a whole community and all my friends and family to get involved. This grant totals almost $2,500 and more than half the money will pay for books. This grant will specifically pay for a set of table and chairs designed for children ($76), A librarian’s Desk ($54), Security Bars for 6 windows and 1 door ($260), A variety of office supplies including folders, a door lock, paper for printers, curtains and curtain rods, fabric to protect the computers, ink cartridges, trash can and broom, etc.. ($200).

We also submitted and were approved for a Small Project Assistance grant with Peace Corps for $3,000. We will receive the funds in a few weeks, once the check is signed and sent from Washington. This was very exciting news! This grant will pay for most of the furniture, the two computers and printers, and more books.

Part of the requirement for these grants to be accepted is a contribution from the community. The youth commission has been raising funds for books themselves by organizing activities for children in the community. So far we have had two movie days hosted at the municipality. I borrowed a projector from a doctor in Villarrica and bought a few bootleg DVDs, we bought a lot of snacks and sodas to sell along with the entrance fee and had a very good turnout at the first event. Like I said before, there is nothing for kids to do here, so watching a movie on a big screen in the air conditioned municipality was a treat.

Also, the community is paying for the electricity and water bills, the parents commission is going to spruce up the place this summer by repainting and fixing the cracks in the floors where it always floods during the big storms. The building already has ceiling fans installed (a must!) and light fixtures. The school will also be donating a dry erase board and one book shelf that currently holds the schools entire library.

Luckily, many of the donations I have already received are children’s books. Therefore, while we await our financial donations I plan to host a kids reading camp to promote literature and teach kids that reading can be fun. I know many volunteers have tried this kind of event in the past and they have been very successful. Kids are drawn to books like moths to a flame if you just give them the opportunity.

Once the library is functional I also plan to give lectures at all the schools about the library and its benefits. I will also offer free computer classes for anyone who is interested. Fassardi has a computer center but classes are expensive and therefore only available to the well-off. (Computers are still an inaccessible luxury for most in rural Paraguay). I will also host my English classes in the library and offer after hours tutoring sessions and will encourage other teachers to do so as well.

We are well on our way to getting this library project off the ground. I am super excited and just hope we can raise all the necessary funds. Getting the money raised is just the beginning , the real work will start once we have everything purchased, installed and up and running.

I plan to keep you updated on this blog about the progress of the library, so check for updates!

Here is the link again to donate:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.donatenow&keyword=paraguay

The kids of Fassardi appreciate every dollar you can donate to our library project!

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and my project. It truly means so much to me.

pilgrimage n. A journey to a sacred place or shrine. A long journey or search, especially one of exalted purpose or moral significance.

December is the month of pilgrimages in Paraguay. Second only to Good Friday, December 8th is the holiest day of the year in Paraguay, the Day of the Virgin of Caacupe. Caacupe is a city located about 2 hours by bus from Asuncion and is home to an old and beautiful cathedral that houses that most famous virgin statue in the country. On December 8th, religious devotees come from all over the country to praise her at the morning mass. They come on foot, by bus, by motorcycle, by car, by bicycle etc... But mostly they walk, that is what makes it a true pilgrimage right? The very definition of a pilgrimage is to suffer for a long duration of time for an “exalted purpose or moral significance”. Many people, in fact, begin their journey a week in advance from the north and walk every day to make sure they arrive on time. Some crawl, some carry crosses, I hear...

Caacupe is about a 4 hour bus ride from Fassardi. I have no idea how long it would take to walk there, maybe two days? So to compensate for our distance from the beloved virgin the citizens of Fassardi and the surrounding towns have established a shrine to the virgin which they have deemed the “virgincita” or “little virgin”. So, instead of walking all the way to Caacupe, Fassardenians walk 5km to the virgincita next to the river. A lot less suffering with the same religious benefits!

When anything really important happens in Paraguay, it must happen at the crack of dawn. So of course we had to start our pilgrimage to visit the virgincita at 4 am. I set my alarm clock for 3:40 am and was all set for my very first pilgrimage, expecting to “suffer” the 5km with my all fellow Fassardenians in the dark. I hoped to see someone doing the pilgrimage on their hands and knees and maybe another carrying a cross on their backs like Jesus, just like the stories I have heard volunteers tell about the walk to Caacupe.

I set off at 4:15 with my next door neighbors, the family that has told me all about the pilgrimage to the virgincita. They say they make a promise every year to her to make this sacrifice. We start walking, all alone. Its dark and very quite. Only the few customary fire works are set off in the distance, but still I am surprised to see we are the only ones undertaking the pilgrimage. I was expecting the street to be filled with quite religious walkers. With no cars on the highway we walk right down the middle. My dog, Maddie, trots along side us. Maddie had been walking on three legs the past five days from a cut on her foot, however, this morning she is walking along normally and happily. Liz, the 17 year old, jokes that Maddie is making the pilgrimage to thank the virgincita for curing her foot and to pray for good health next year. Everyone laughs. Its just like this family to joke during a religious pilgrimage.

I am not Catholic, but I always thought a pilgrimage would be a somewhat severe and internally thoughtful experience. I thought people who embark on a religious pilgrimage would be very pensive and stern. Well, that is not how Paraguayans do pilgrimages. In fact, nothing about this walk in the dark down the highway feels very religious to me. Gustavo, the 16 year old, is playing the latest reggetone and top 40 hits on his cell phone. They ask me to translate the songs in English, one of which just repeates the lyrics, “Party all the time”. Its pretty much the music genre selection for any Paraguayan event, whether it be a 7 year old’s birthday party, a new year’s eve party, a Sunday, or a fundraiser for a mayoral candidate, so why not for a pilgrimage?

We make it the all the way to the river without seeing another human being, in the dark, down the middle of the highway. Once at the river we go to the little structure that houses the statue of the virgincita. Her altar has been freshly painted bright blue and decorated. The decorations remind me of a little kid’s birthday party, with brightly colored streamers and balloons.

About 10 people stand in front of the altar and are singing religious hymns in Guarani. We join the group. Every once in a while someone lights a candle and places it in front of the statue or offers flowers.

After about 10 minutes everyone is tired of signing and they sit down on the benches next to the altar and begin to chat. People also complain that my dog smells, which she really does. I don’t know what happened between my house and the virgincita but the pilgrimage made her very stinky.

Elisa, the mom, hands out candy from her purse to everyone on the benches. The teenagers wander off and sit on the bridge over the river. An oxcart shows up and starts setting up a food stand for the events that will take place later in the day. That afternoon will be a big party when everyone will come on their motorcycles, play in the river, drink lots of alcohol and sit around in the shade (Adam and I attended last year).

Elisa and Venancio, my neighbors, decide praying time is over after 15 minutes of visiting the virgencita, they gather their brood of teenagers and we set off again back to Fassardi.

By now it is almost 6 am and the sun is bright in the sky and hot. Now we pass many groups of people walking on their way to the virgincita. I guess they didn’t feel it was necessary to get up so early, only my neighbors. Although I will say now it is getting hot and we are sweating, at least the pilgrimage on the way for us was pleasant and cool.

The second most important pilgrimage in Paraguay takes place on December 18th in Itape, Adam’s site. Adam and I attended last year although we did not partake in the customary walk from Villarrica to Itape, about 20 km. We cheated. We arrived the day before by bus and walked from his house once we knew the festivities had begun. Some people say the pilgrimage in Itape is the rural version of the pilgrimage to Caacupe. Caacupe is a big city located on a main highway and Itape is a very small town only accessible by a dirt road and one really old bus. So if Itape is the scaled down version of Caacupe, I cant imagine what it must be like because Itape on December 18th was a full on circus.

Adam and I started walking with the crowd towards all the noise, we had no idea what to expect from the second most important pilgrimage in the country. If no one told us it was the epicenter of a pilgrimage, we never would have known. It looked more like a county fair on crack. The ‘midway’ was packed with every joe schmoe who came trying to sell you anything he could carry. And just like a county fair everything they were selling was all crap, tons of ceramic Winnie-the-poohs, jesus statues, nike tshirts etc..... The vendors seemed endless. And just like the county fair there were games! There were so many strange games Adam and I had to stop to watch and figure out how they were playing. One very popular game, and almost every other stand, had a cage filled with balloons and fan placed underneath which mixed up the balloons. As the player you simply reached in, grabbed a balloon, popped it, and won whatever prize was written on the paper inside it. Adam won me a tiny plastic crocodile.

Also along the way were a discoteque and a bullfighting ring. I had seen a bullfight before in Spain but Adam had not and wanted to experience one. I asked the man at the gate if they kill the bull and he said yes. So we paid our entrance fee and waited for the show to start. However, what we experienced was not a Spanish bullfight, although it had the same name ‘corrida de torros’. This was a bull fight Paraguayan style, it was more like a rodeo. The matadors came out dressed in the traditional garb but both stayed in the ring and proceeded to jump on the bulls back, run and flip and jump on the bull’s back, do double handstands on the bull’s back, and a plethora of other acrobatic moves all involving the bull. Then they would wrestle it to the ground, stand up, hold out their arms and the crowd would cheer them on as masters of the universe. Considering Adam and I were expecting swords, blood, and 6 dead cows, and instead we got 2 men dressed in pink and sequence doing acrobats we laughed hysterically through the whole show. It was very entertaining.

After the rodeo, the games, the vendors, and the sea of people, we had enough and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning I realized I never saw the virgin of Itape, people praying etc… It was a completely non-religious experience for me and was more people taking advantage of a situation to make a buck. It’s a poor country and when people see an opportunity they will take advantage.

I don’t mean to harp on Paraguay’s pilgrimages as “less religious” than what I expect them to be, or maybe what they were in the past, or make them out to be something silly. That is what I thought at first after experiencing them but after thinking about it I have come to a different conclusion, because I know for many people these pilgrimages are still very religious experiences, like my neighbors. After looking up the definition, nowhere does it say a pilgrimage has to be a painful experience, it is just a means to an end. The end being an “exalted purpose or moral significance”. So maybe all the vendors, performers, loud music etc… are just small distractions/obstacles on the path to the higher exalted purpose. I know it is also the result of a poor country that has slowly opened its borders to the globalized economy over the last two decades and now has cheap plastic goods infiltrating the economy like never before, needing someplace to go. This is the pilgrimage of the 21st century.

this blog originally started as an email to my family but ended up being so long I decided to make it my next blog post, something I havent done in awhile.....

Hey fam,

Dad, Im sorry we got cut off earlier and didnt get to get talk more. Not including today, I have been pretty busy. I have been sleeping a lot better the past few weeks except the last three nights and especially last night I slept terribly. I think its because I was thinking about Jessi. So today I am utterly exhausted after three days of almost no sleep. I have stayed home and rested all day so now I am a little bored but still not feeling great.

The latest animals to invade my house are baby possums. They are the worst yet. Far worse then rats. They come into the kitchen via the roof and the rain gutter every night. Its been going on for a week now. I have tried rat poison, leaving the kitchen lights on, even Hobbes hasnt been successful. He almost had one, and was chasing it around the house for awhile and then it ran under my cabinet where Hobbes couldnt reach it. I stuck the mop handle under there to try and get it out and the possum ended up hiding in a cereal box that had been left under there, so I took the box and threw it out into the yard. Hobbes was left very bewildered and upset to have lost his prey but I was just happy to get it out of my house. But, they still keep coming back .

Baby possums are way worse than rats, they are better climbers, way sneakier and so disgusting. eww

My neighbors say possums have been a problem always in this house.

The optometrists came back on Monday. Their third time this year! They are a Paraguayan foundation called Fundacion Vision that offers cheap eye care services and surgery to the poor. I had orginially contracted them to come out to Fassardi for the day to do free eye exams back in March and the foundation was so thrilled with the response they keep asking me to come back. They come in a van from their clinic two hours away, with four staff members, one doctor, equipment, glasses and medicine for sale. Its a whole travelling eye clinic.

However, this time we had them operate out of the muni, that was not my choice. The only cost for them to come out to a community and offer their services is their gas and their lunch, which the muni must pays for. The last two times we did it at the health center, an obvious location I think. After two visits, the nurses at the health center know what to do when they come and are well aware to handle the situation so I have less of a role, which is the very idea of a sustainable project in Peace Corps.

So after I had made all my posters and my announcement on the radio to advertise the optometrists arrival, the secretary calls and says they want to have it at the muni because they think one of the nurses controls everything too much and nobody likes her blah blah blah... Its such bullshit. The truth is the mayoral elections are in less than a month and the mayor wants to take credit for bringing this service to the community. Everything is political in Paraguay. Even though he has nothing to do with the Optometrists, if they hold it at the muni, every one will assume the current mayor was responsible. It would have made much more sense to keep the consult at the health center where things were running like well oiled machine by now. But, the mayor is paying for the costs, so I couldnt say anything.

But, all in all the day went well. It was kind of nice, on my part, to have it at the muni because the workers took care of a lot of things I normally would have had to do and the nurses at the health center never had time to help me with. So I didnt do much but sit around and watch all day. My job was to make sure they got reimbursed for their gas money, that someone was going to cook them lunch, and answer any questions. They saw 60 patients and ended at 3 in the afternoon. Besides having to spend the day around the bitchy Brazilian lady that works there, it was all good.

The best news is that because Thursday is World Vision Day, the Foundation said anyone they found during their consultations with a cataracts they would pick up from Fassardi on Wednesday and drive to their clinic in oviedo, two hours away, operate for free, and drive them back home the next day. All for free! Nobody would have to spend a cent. This is an amazing offer to people who live in my town and cant even afford the bus fare to go to the clinic for consults, let alone the surgery. 6 or 7 people from Fassardi were given the offer. And I just got the call from the driver that he picked them all up and they are on the way to the clinic now! Very exciting news!

I have also started some work on the library project. The idea is to turn the office of the highschool, which is hardly used, into the a library which will be accessible to all students in Fassardi. There are two elementary schools and another high school all in walking distance. The library will be a full functioning multi-media center, with computer access, books, and educational materials for students. I hope it could be used a community meeting place and learning center.

I formed a commission at the high school with 5 students (all girls) who were elected by their classmates to participate. I am not sure if any of them really want to be on the committee, or if they just accepted the nominations in lieu of saying no. Anyway, we have meetings on Thursday afternoons before class and have decided to try and have a fundraising event once a month. I am going to apply for a Peace Corps grant for most of the money but the community must contribute 25% either in cash or in-kind/labor donations. We originally planned to do a movie day for kids before I came home but we couldnt find a projector to borrow so it was postponed. However, i eventually found someone who was willing to lend me a projector, the Rotary Club president in Villarrica. Adam has done a lot of work with him the last year for his own library project. Adam introduced me to him last week and he said I could borrow the projector whenever I needed it. So, we are planning now to do the movie day next weekend on Saturday. We are charging 1 mil, about 25 cents, for tickets, and we have donations for a cantina from stores around town. I bought Toy Story and High School Musical to show. We also might extend it into the evening and show films for adults to try and raise more money.

In the mean time we thought we could make jewelry to sell. I bought some materials in Villarrica and Sunday Nati, the president of the commission Raquel (who has actually been really wonderful and helpful), and Adam came over to make bracelets. The girls took them to school on Monday to sell but only sold a few, apparently nobody liked them! Oh well.

My landlords and crew were visiting next door so they were in and out of my house all afternoon, so I served the easter candy mom sent me. One girl described the marshmelllow peeps as "sweet cotton".

Hopefully if the movie day is successful it could be a monthly occurrence. I am also thinking about doing a ' fun with reading' summer camp as a fundraiser in December. The kids loved my last camp so I know they will come to the next one. Also, it will be a good thing to keep me occupied when Adam leaves.

My new English classes are going well. I am teaching on Thursday nights from 5 to 8 at the high school. I now have 11 students in my basic class and 4 in my advanced class. Fassardi's doctor is in my advanced class, he is the only adult but I really enjoy having him. He brings a level of maturity to the class that it was lacking before. He also knows a lot of English and asks intelligent questions which makes teaching English much more enjoyable for me. The teenage girls however are not happy with the class. They think the doctor is a know-it-all and want me to kick him out. But, I know they dont like being in class with thier friend's father and dont feel free to goof around like the last class. I told them I wasnt happy with the last class when we learned nothing and they would leave in the middle of class to hang out with their boyfriends and got so distracted in lessons because of their cell phones. So, I am very happy with how these classes are shaping up.

I am also continuing to teach my contact's kids on Tuesday afternoons. The last few weeks we have had a few other kids join in, which has made the lessons a lot more fun. My lessons are very simple and Im not sure how much English the kids are retaining but I really enjoy being around them and I know they enjoy the experience too, i also know they love drawing with my fancy American markers that I always bring. The last two weeks class has ended in a dance party. Little Jose gets out his dad's cell phone and plays reggaeton music and all the kids bust a move. Its adorable. This week we didnt have the cell phone so all the kids sang the words to Shakira's 'Waka Waka" (The world cup song) while Amanda did the dance.

This weekend Adam and I are going on a little get away. We have been talking about going on a mini-vacation somewhere in Paraguay forever and this weekend we are finally doing it. We are going to this hotel/resort near Caacupe that is offering a special for couples for two nights. It looks like pure luxury to me! They have a pool, a sauna, nice rooms, and hopefully good food. I am very excited! As of Friday I will have been in site for 3 weeks in a row, I only spent 4 hours last Friday out of site in Villarrica, that is a record for me.

The last week of October is Nati's quincinera, which will be a big event I think, held on the lawn between our houses, weather permitting. Then Halloween weekend Adam and I are going to La Colmena where he plans to run in a 10K. We have been there once before in January, it is known for the Japanese colony and the beautiful, hidden waterfall called Salto Cristal.

Adam and I are going to spend the last two weeks of November together, its our time just the two of us before he leaves Paraguay. Then, he is going on a three week motorcycle trip with his friend leaving from Buenos Aires and driving around Argentina. He is going to fly back to states a few days before Christmas.

We think we might go on another mini trip during those last two weeks. As of now, we have no idea where, I guess it all depends on my work schedule.

Plans for Korea are still up in the air. He has interviewed with two different English teaching companies and he is confident he will be hired by at least one of them. He could leave for Korea anytime between mid February to April. We arent happy about doing long distance and we know its going to be hard but we are up for the challenge, and what is 8 short months compared to a lifetime?

So that has been my life the past 3 weeks in Fassardi since I came back from the states. I have been thinking a lot about my family in California and Mexico, especially about my grandpa and my sister. Its hard to be so far away right now.

I love you all.

Pictures!

Optometrists give free eye exams in Fassardi

The kids show off their drawings after English class

Hobbes isnt so worried about the possums right now

Showing off my HIV/AIDS lecture poster

The current high school library

I just got back from a vacation to the states for 2 1/2 weeks and it was an amazing time. It went by at lighting speed and I cant believe I am already back in my house in Fassardi writing another blog. This trip was extremely necessary and worthwhile. I was in desperate in need of time to relax and recuperate and feel a sense of normalcy. I got a fare share of all of these things while I was home.

Before I left on vacation I was having trouble sleeping for months which was affecting my motivation to work and my mood in general, I loathed the bitter winter cold nights, and was in need of a nice long reality check I thought the States could give me.

What I most needed from my trip home was sleep. I was finally able to sleep in a quite house,

in a big comfortable bed and feel totally unscathed. I cashed in on all the sleep I had

been missing out on for months and it was glorious.

Second, I needed food. I stuffed my face at every meal and enjoyed it all immensely. I am back

in Paraguay a few pounds heavier and a little bit healthier. I loved everything I ate, the first

meal I had to eat back in Paraguay was such a let down after 2 1/2 weeks of a feeding frenzy.

Next I indulged in all things I have missed from living in a poor, developing country for the past 14 1/2 months. I took hot, long showers twice a day, I drove with the music blasting, I went to the beach, I drank good beer, used high speed internet, and I watched a lot of TV in English.

I was over enjoyed to indulge myself in all of these things the first week I was back. Everything

was like a sensation overload. I didnt so much feel a sense of culture shock as I did a tremendous

wonder and enjoyment at being back home and feeling pampered for awhile. I loved being in a

clean home, having a pantry stocked full of healthy, good food. I marveled at how easy it was

to do my laundry with the washer and dryer! I loved being able to get in the car when I wanted and get an amazing amount of things done in such a short amount of time.

These were the things I loved. However, by the second week it was all seeming too normal again.

I was getting frustrated sitting in traffic and I was already taking for granted that our maid would wash my clothes for me on Friday. It was amazing how easily I could adapt back and not think twice about it.

But as the second week came to an end and I had visited the few friends I had left in San Diego and done everything I had set out to do on my vacation I realized I was feeling ready to come

back to Paraguay. I thought I wouldnt want to go back at all, that the US luxuries would be too enticing. But I realized that I have a life established for myself back in Paraguay, which is exactly

what I dont have anymore in San Diego. Once upon a time I had a wonderful life in San Diego.

I had a lot friends, a full social calendar, a challenging academic career, an apartment, a

roommate etc... Now most of those things are gone. There isn’t much remnants of my former

life in the States, and my trip reminded me that I am not in such hurry to get back.

My life is in Paraguay now. I have a boyfriend, a job, a house, a pet, and friends that are

all reside somewhere in Paraguay.

I am feeling rejuvenated now. I have a sense again of how I felt when I first got here 15 months

ago. I know I have the rest of my life to live the States and I shouldn’t be in any hurry to get back.

Also, it seemed almost a unanimous consensus from many of my friends and family who are working or struggling to find work in the down spiraling economy that life in the States is not all that awesome right now. Even from those who loved their jobs, they seemed to convey a sense that they all still had to experience that daily grind.

This really put a lot into perspective for me and it was what I got the most out of my trip home. I realized although I tend to complain about the inadequacies of life in Paraguay, that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. The States doesn't seem anymore appealing. When I weigh the pros and cons, I think I am living large in Paraguay. I may only make about 300 dollars a month, but I am rich in my daily life. I can get out of bed when I want, I can travel when I want, work when I want. Life isnt so bad here. The day I left the States marked my one year anniversary in Fassardi, August 18th. Now that I have one year left and I can see the end of this journey I have finally stopped counting the number months I have been in country and started counting the number of months I have left. So now I have realized I better make these last 12 months count.

With this all said, the best part of being home was seeing all the people I have missed so much. Although, the time I got to spend with them was always way too short. I was really busy while I was home and didnt even have the chance to talk on the phone with some friends. But I am so grateful to all the friends and family I did get to see. I feel lucky to still have such good friends in my life. I loved to hear from everyone who are fans of my blog. It is encouraging to know that other people are actually reading besides my parents. So I am going to keep doing my best to update. I especially loved to hear from my friend Margie who validated my point when I told her Paraguay had made me dummer and she said she could tell because my blog had slowly become less verbose and a little less articulate, but that probably meant my Spanish was improving. I took it as a very honest compliment!

As my bus turned off the highway today into Fassardi, the first thought that crossed my mind, was 'Back to Reality'.

Then I thought, how strange that this place is now my reality, how awesome.

Two weeks ago I attended my first funeral and saw a dead body for the first time.

I think I am lucky that at 25 years old I have not had to experience a lot of death in my life. Only since I came to Paraguay have I experienced death more up close. Peace Corps told us in training that two people die everyday in Paraguay from motorcycle accidents. In a country of only 6 million people, this is a lot. Motorcycles are everywhere in Paraguay, in the cities and in the countryside they are the most common mode of transportation. Recently Paraguay has opened five new motorcycle manufacturing plants which has driven the cost of motorcycles way down and made them extremely affordable even to the poor. Plus, companies make their product easy to pay for in a series of small installments. So, now everyone drives a motorcycle from 14 year-old girls to grandmas. They are cheap and useful. But they are extremely dangerous.

Motorcycles and their drivers have an entire image all to themselves in our country. They are badasses. But that whole image is lost in a country when everyone and their mother rides one. Motorcycles are no longer just for the daring and risk-taking, they are for everyone. So, without that image of the risk taker that comes along with the motorcycle culture in our country comes a false sense of normality and security in this country. Some people here understand that motorcycles are dangerous but still a different set of rules are applied than we as Americans would expect. Helmet laws are not enforced and so I rarely see drivers wearing them, except on the highway. I often see a whole family (3,4 or 5 people) piled onto one motorcycle. The respect we give to these death machines is lost on Paraguayans and caution is thrown to the wind. I am sure it is for some of these reasons Peace Corps volunteers are banned from riding motorcycles. The worst part of all is when teenage boys get on a motorcycle.

By far the most common drivers of the motorcycle in Paraguay are the most reckless. I often see young boys in my town speeding down the newly paved road, popping wheelys, swerving carelessly, not watching where they are going to check out a girl on the side of the road, steering with their feet, never wearing helmets, with 3-4 of their friends on the back, standing up while speeding, standing on the seat while speeding, drag racing,drinking alcohol, and the list goes on and on for what stupid things young boys think of to do with their motorcycles.

Since I have been in Paraguay I have heard so many stories about motorcycle wrecks and the resulting deaths of young boys. Although lots of women drive motorcycle I have never personally heard of a woman dying in any of these accidents. I have seen the wounds, scars, burns, and scabs first hand, even on little kids.

Two weeks ago two young boys from Fassardi died in a car accident one morning driving back from a party in a neighboring town. Their were 7 boys in the car. The driver, Elias, 17, dropped his phone and was searching for it when he came to a curve and didnt turn in time, he tried to correct it too late and flipped the car, the car went off the side of the road and flipped over 14 more times. The newspaper article I read said Elias died immediately. The other boy who died, 16, I had seen him two days before and he had participated in my lecture at the school. One boy went to the hospital in critical condition and two others were uninjured. Although the article did not mention it, everyone says the boys were drinking.

I was in Asuncion that morning but I got a cal from my contact to tell me about it. I arrived back to Fassardi that afternoon and the whole town was very somber. I had to cancel my English classes because all my students were at the town cemetery. Later that night my neighbors invited me to go to along with them to what I thought was going to be a prayer memorial for one of the boys in the next barrio. I still do not have a handle on the Catholic mourning process. All I know is many days of praying follows a death so I figured that is what I was in for. But it was the actual funeral, and I was not prepared. I didnt know the boy or his family and I felt like I didnt belong. The body was displayed in an open casket in a small front room with a large crucifix displayed over it. The room was crowded with Elias's loved ones. When I walked in I stood in the corner and didnt move, there was no where to sit and people werent moving around a lot. A lot of people were just standing and staring at the body, so that is what I did. Elias's face was bruised and cut up. He was a very handsome young boy. Two men stood on either side of him and caressed his face, kissed him, and cryed. This was the first time I had ever seen Paraguayan men cry and it struck me as incredibly odd. They are normally so manly and stoic.

Elias's mother was in the next room on the couch surrounded by her family and wailing the most desperately sad cry I have heard in my life. It could only have been the sound of a mother who had lost her only child. I was told she was living in Spain to save money and had to fly back when she heard her only child had died.

A woman came in the room and announced anyone who would like to pray should come in. The patio outside was full of mourners. All people from town, I recognized half the faces. The woman led the group in prayer with a stone cold face and without interruption for 20 minutes. When she was finally done she fell to her knees and screamed.

I finally found an open seat outside on the patio next to a friend of mine. We made some small talk but mostly didnt say anything. One of the boys who was in the accident but was not injured showed us pictures of Elias on his cell phone. A few people came up to me and asked me about the eye glasses I had ordered for them and when they would be arriving. Otherwise I sat in silence and listened to Elias's mother sob inside and yell out his name. Finally it was time to go. I was very happy to leave.

Elias' body was taken to the cemetery the next morning. Then we settled in to watch Paraguay beat Japan in the World Cup. It was a bittersweet day in Fassardi. The mayor called for two days of mourning and all schools and activities were shut down. Fassardi is a small town, a place where everyone is family or friends. When someone dies the whole town mourns and comes together.

It was a tragedy and one I hope I wont have to experience again during my time in Fassardi. But sadly, no one seems to have learned a lesson from the boys who died. The day after Elias funeral I saw people speeding down the main street on their motorcycles with no helmets and without a care. Young boys, no matter what country you are in, have a false sense of invincibility which hurts them in the end and makes their loved ones suffer.

Even though Elias died in a car accident and not a motorcycle accident, I felt it was necessary to talk about motorcycles because they are so omnipresent in Paraguay. My dad put the fear in me about motorcycles since I was a little girl. He has repeated countless awful stories about motorcycle accidents and always warned me about the danger. Despite Peace Corps rule, I personally hate motorcycles and have avoided them my whole life. In this way I am lucky that i dont have to rely on motorcycles as my means of transportation. I come from a country where I have choices. This is just one more example of the unlucky costs on life people have just being born in a poor country.

One year has come and gone in Paraguay and everyone asks me if I feel like it has gone by quickly. The answer is yes and no. It has gone by fast because I now realize a year is a very short time to learn everything there is to know about a culture and to integrate yourself into that culture, in fact its impossible. Even after a year I am still learning new things about all things Paraguay and Paraguayan. Also, I still feel like I am settling in here, in a way. I am still forming relationships and forming ideas for projects. I think people are still getting used to the idea that I am living here.

On the other hand, this year has gone by slowly when I think about my life back home and how far away it feels, it makes me feel I have been living in Paraguay a long time. I feel time has gone by slowly when I realize how accustomed I am to life here; how I am so used to riding the buses, riding my bike into town everyday, Speaking in Spanish all day etc... At the same time, time seems to wear on me when I start to get fed up with certain "inconveniences" like the inadequate showers, inadequate housing, inadequate technology, inadequate transportation, remoteness and inefficiencies.

Reflecting on my life in Paraguay after a year here is a synopsis of where I am currently at:

Projects and Work: I am working in a lot of different areas, although none are directly related to the sector I was trained in, Municipal Services. Actually, my sector no longer exists as a project in Peace Corps Paraguay. The new group that just arrived two weeks ago is being trained under a new project title "Community Economic Development". That is my project's new sector name. The muni project was scrapped in PC Paraguay because it proved too difficult to improve the muni from the top down by infiltrating the muni and working directly with its employees. The system, we figured out after only 15 years, is too corrupt and too nepotistic for Peace Corps volunteers to be successful. Peace Corps finally realized that after so long when most muni volunteers completed their service never actually having worked in their assigned munis.

This is exactly my case. My muni is very closed off and uncommunicative and has proven almost impossible to work with. So I have had to find work in other parts of the community.

Some current projects I am working on:

HIV/AIDS workshop lectures

Barrio Santo Domingo water commission

Optometrists in Fassardi

Girls Group

English Classes

Library project?

Living: I have been renting a house in a barrio 2km from the center of Fassardi for about 8 months. I rent the home from a family who lives in a neighboring town but they visit about once a month to clean up the yard and collect fruit from the many fruit trees which they sell at the super market. I pay about 45 dollars a month, plus water and elecrticity. I think it is a pretty good deal. I have a lot of space in this house for just one person. Most volunteers live in small, one room houses. So I feel lucky to have a nice, big place. I also have a great family living next door that treats me like their daughter. The bus passes right in front of my house so traveling to and from my site is very convenient.

Pets: Hobbs the cat! Hobbs is 4 months old and was the brother of my other kitten Jeeves. Jeeves was obviously the runt of the litter and was very tiny. He got sick one day and very quickly declined, he never recovered and died a few days later. The vet seems to think he had a respiratory disease that cats get from not having vaccines, and she said it is always fatal. Such is the life of animals in a developing country. The day Jeeves died was my worst day in Paraguay. But, now I am happy to have Hobbs who is very active and healthy. He spends lots of time in my neighbor's yard chasing chickens and loves to sleep in your lap! He is my little buddy.

Language: My Spanish is significantly better than when I arrived a year ago. That is one thing I can proudly say I have accomplished this year. However, Spanish is still something I struggle with. I still constantly make mistakes, I still ask people to repeat themselves all the time and I still find I have difficulty expressing certain concepts. So, who knows if I will ever be fluent in this language I have spent more than a decade studying.

As for Guarani? I had a tutor in site my first few months but it just wasnt happening. I never practiced and I never made myself practice or study. I didnt have the heart. Everyone in my town speaks Spanish and knows it is my best language and so that is what they speak to me. It would be nice to speak Guarani, because I do run across people sometimes who I cannot communicate with, but in the end it has not been crucial to my service. I can communicate just fine without it. But after being here a year I can understand a little... so when people think I dont know what they are saying about me, sometimes I do.

Love: By far the best experience I have had this year has been meeting and falling in love with my boyfriend and love of my life, Adam. We met at a volunteer meeting in Villarrica in October and started dating in November. We celebrated our 6 month anniversary just last week. We are lucky that we live close by each other, about 2 hours by bus, and get to see each other almost every week. I met his family on a trip to Buenos Aires in May and he got to meet my dad at the beginning of this month. Adam is my best friend and its because of him that I make it through the really tough days here.

Visitors: My Dad came to Paraguay in the beginning of June for a small tour of Paraguay and my site. We spent a few days in Asuncion, Fassardi, Villarrica and Adam's site.... I'm still hoping for more visitors!

Other activities: I have a lot of down time in the Peace Corps. At first I thought i might become a cook or a gardner (I did garden for a few months) but I think I was just kidding myself, that just isnt me. Simple chores and errands take up a lot more time here than they do back home and I find myself giving up hours to tasks like cleaning and washing all my clothes by hand. Otherwise I spend my free time reading, doing crossword puzzles, watching movies, napping, playing with Hobbs, talking to Adam, listening to podcasts.

So that is my life briefly after 13 months in Paraguay. I have 14 more to go!

I want to apologize for the hiatus from my blog. I blame it on the fact that my laptop mysteriously died in the middle of April and I had to wait until my Dad brought me a new one down on his trip to Paraguay.

This blog is nice and long to make up for the two month lapse, also featuring guest writer Don Houts.

Part I is a compilation of my Dad’s emails home and final thoughts about his trip to Paraguay.

Part II features some of my comments.

Part I

The air travel went on schedule. It felt weird to spend eight hours in San Salvador and to just be stuck in the airport. It was an hour to town with good traffic, and I did not want to risk missing my flight, so rather than hiring a taxi for a tour, I just hung out. It was not so bad flying coach. I slept a little, and since most people were speaking Spanish, I could not carry on any long conversations with random people, a bummer, but oh well. I’ve been talking about this trip so often that I think only half of the western world does not know I am traveling to see my daughter in the Peace Corps in Paraguay. In Asuncion, Jenna met me at the airport at 2:30 a.m. on June 3rd. My luggage was there by the time I got through immigration and they just waved me through customs. Jenna was waiting -- I gave her lots of hugs. It was a short ride to the hotel, the one where she usually stays, which is a converted house, very nice. Jenna’s activities at the high school for the next day were canceled, so we spent an extra day in Asuncion, traveling by foot and bus. We had not formulated any specific plans for the week. Just so wonderful to spend time with her.

The first full day in Jose Fassardi, Jenna’s site, which was a 5-hour bus trip from Asuncion, was a day of meals. We had lunch at one house in town with a woman whose daughter is in Jenna's English class. She served some traditional meat ball soup that was very good, which means not too fatty, not too salty. The woman was very happy to have me over because she loves Jenna so much. The girl, Maria Jose, is also in Jenna's girls' group. By the time we were done, Jenna was exhausted with the translating effort. It's about a 30-minute walk from her house into the center of the city. The weather was warm and beautiful. We got back to the house, and in the course of the walk, heard a pig being slaughtered. That sound really carries. We had a couple hours back at the house before we went next door for a meal. They really love Jenna, and Nati (the 14 yo girl) is a sweetheart. I also met her older sister Liz and the middle kid, Gustavo. They cooked outside and the chicken was good, but the beef was nearly inedible. My teeth were sore for a day after trying to eat that. I had mandioca at two meals in one day, which is enough.

Back at Jenna’s house, I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- fabulous book. Make sure you read the trilogy, and do it in order.

Okay, it is time to wind down for the day. I think we're going to do more of a walking tour of Fassardi tomorrow. On Monday, I'll go with the neighbor, Venancio, whose nickname is Nene, to his fields (sugar cane) and maybe get an ox cart ride, which will be a first. There was a classic scene this morning when I saw an ox cart go by Jenna's house with a man driving the oxen, with his family in the cart, while he sipped on his mate. This afternoon, one of Nene's cows was grazing in Jenna's front yard. I listened to it munching on the grass while I finished a book. I watched some soccer games both in town and then across the street from Jenna's house.

The beautiful weather continued to hold, and the next day was nice and warm today. Jenna said it was the single best weather week she had seen for the entire year that she has been in the country. It got pretty cold last night and it was good to have a decent sleeping bag. In the morning, we took a 3-hour walk through Fassardi, mostly to see places that we had not seen the day before. As we walked by various houses, people would shout out at Jenna or come out to talk with us. She said the young men were giving her much less attention because I was walking with her, and she appreciated not having to deal with the usual adolescent banter. We went by the medical facility, the library where she painted the map (very cool), and to the new computer center. She showed me the only stand in the town where she can by fruit. Although it was not a highlight, I walked by the car wash where the sheriff was having his truck done and a couple boys were washing their motorcycles. I met her Guarani tutor and her husband, and we sat on their porch and talked for a little while. This was one of those times when I wished I could speak Spanish. Meanwhile, Jenna was really trolling for a meal, for lunch or dinner, but we didn’t get any offers, so we bought a frozen chicken and brought it home. It did not thaw out by dinner time, so we had peanut butter on pita bread, which was the extent of Jenna’s supplies. On the walk back, we were joined by a 19 yo guy, one of Jenna's friends, and we talked local politics all the way home. He obviously has a crush on Jenna, something about which she is quite aware.

Adam comes tomorrow, on Monday, and we are tentatively scheduled to leave Fassardi on Tuesday morning, to head for Villarica and meetings with some other Peace Corps Volunteers. The word “tranquilo” keeps coming up when the locals ask me what I think about Fassardi. Fassardi is "tranquilo." Cool, tranquil, yes it is. This has been awesome.

Go Lakers.

Adam got here yesterday, and he really does seem like a good guy, thoughtful, gentle, bright, easy to talk to, asks good questions, and he knows sports. We're going with him today back to Villarica where well spend at least a day. I am hoping to go to his site, which is an hour bus ride from Villarica, and then an hour walk. We might end up at Angelic's site which is in another town, a large one, for a day.

One of the things I've not written about is the sounds. I hear roosters crowing almost all night long. They are apparently time-challenged since the break of dawn has no meaning for them. In the morning, the cows start mooing at each other, one on one side of Jenna's house, another on the opposite side. There is an occasional motorcycle that I hear go by, an occasional bus, and the occasional horse cart or ox cart, so you can hear their hoofs strike the pavement. I sat outside reading yesterday and a bull that was tied up was munching on the grass about 10 feet away. Then, there is the silence, just lots of that.

Just like the walk Jeani and I had with our guide Amy in China around her farm, we got Nene or Venancio to take us to his fields. It was maybe 1/2 mile from the house, and he had a lot of land, maybe 20 acres. He was growing mostly sugar cane and mandioca, but he had lots of other crops including yerba mate and beans that they served us for lunch yesterday. Jenna taught English yesterday from 3 to 6, but the girls were too shy to let Adam and I be in the room, so we sat outside, watched life go by and talked. On the walk back, we had to stop at another neighbor's house for a little evening meal -- it is all so friendly and hospitable. They obviously love our daughter and want me to know they are looking out for her. During dinner, I learned from our host that Christopher Columbus discovered Paraguay, and I learned that Adam and Jenna hear that kind of thing all the time and find no reason to challenge that belief.

Pris was right. This has been one of my greatest trips, ever. Also, hardly the easiest.

On Tuesday, the day ended in Villarica. I took Jenna, Adam, and two other Peace Corps Volunteers out to dinner. The conversation was great as they talked about language, individuals at their sites, other PCVs, the world, etc. Meanwhile, the third Laker game against Boston was on in the background. We got back to our room at a nice and very clean German-owned 3-room inn in time for the second half of the game. That was great. Go Lakers, up 2-1, game 4 tonight.

On Wednesday, after an early walk around town by myself, we traveled to Adam's site which is near Itape, in Potrero. After breakfast, we took the bus from the second bus terminal in Villarica, not the nice one (a relative term). Jenna referred to the second terminal as "the terminal of shame," meaning that the place and the buses that go there are on their last legs. True. It was an hour ride over bumpy dirt roads, and we were a constant source of curiosity for the locals, some of whom Adam knew. Itape is about the size of Fassardi. From there, it was an hour walk to Adam's site. This was remarkable in itself. The path was narrow, often single file, through fields, through fences, by cattle - beautiful, and remote. I thought Adam lived in a lean-to, but it is a house, just one that has no running water, and his electricity usually works. There is a well in his yard, so he does not have to go far. We walked through his orchard and ate mandarins before going into his barrio. About 100 people live there, but the houses are 1/2 mile apart - so lots more walking. It was probably another mile into the center of the barrio, but if he had not told me we had arrived, I would have missed it. At a turn in the road is another house, a church that did not look like a church, and a school. That's the centro. We hung out at the school, met one of the teachers, looked at the kids, and then worked on his world map project. From there, we walked to the opposite end of the barrio to see another neighbor and take a look at a computer that was donated for the site. I thought it was a scene of unique contrast when we arrived at a very basic structure, they brought the computer outdoors, ran an extension cord out of a window, and tried to turn it on. Meanwhile, the dogs, pigs, one sheep, oxen, cows, and chickens all grazed and made noises immediately next to us. Alas, the computer did not work, so we had to bring it back to Villarica for attention. We then walked back to Adam's house, which probably took close to an hour and then waited for a taxi at 5:00 p.m. that collected Jenna and me for the trip back to Villarica, and our German hotel, Zum Stadtmusikant. That was when we said goodbye to Adam since he needed to stay at his site and get some work done. I was very surprised the taxi could get here over a single track road that was filled with deep ruts and water. The ride back in the taxi was a bit less taxing than the bus ride, but not much, and Jenna and the driver chatted like long-lost friends all the way back. BTW, Jenna thought the owner of the hotel was not giving as a Sieg Heil when he said hello, but I thought he was and felt a bit freaked out by that - I mean, this Jew might be a little sensitive.

Jenna and I hung out at the hotel where we had dinner. Today, it's a 4-hour bus ride back to Asuncion, and my plane leaves at 3:30 a.m. tomorrow. I have such mixed feelings about leaving. I miss my wife, but it's hard to leave Jenna. Life here is harder than I imagined, for the locals and the PCVs, as well. I can see how wearing/tiring it is to be here for long. It is an understatement to say that every day takes effort, physically and emotionally. I was stunned to learn that Jenna's neighbors are as young as they are -- they easily look 20-25 years older. At the same time, the Paraguayans are right when they talk about their tranquilo lives. So many contrasts. I could not have gotten a clue about all that if I had not seen it and felt it for at least a little while.

I am impressed with Adam. He's a good man, obviously bright, gentle, a sports fan who is easy to be with. He was very gracious with me. What's not to like?

6/12/2010, back in California

More thoughts about the trip to Paraguay:

The flight home went on schedule. After arriving at LAX and being picked up by Steve Cooper, I stopped for 30 minutes at Coopers for conversation and some of Daniel’s new coffee brew (which I highly recommend). I got juiced enough on caffeine for the 2-hour drive to Palm Desert where I’m now camped out at the Marriott Shadow Ridge. Let’s see, 24 hours from Fassardi, Itape and Villarica to Palm Desert, equals culture shock.

Given that I’m a doctor, Jenna knew this was bound to happen. It may be true that I know more about medicine than anyone else in Fassardi even though it has been 30 years since I did anything other than psychiatry. Jenna’s neighbor, Elissa, 38 yo who looks as old as I do at 60, has a grandmother who is still alive at 85, which is ancient by Paraguayan standards. Grandmom speaks only Guarani, not Spanish. She is having breast pain, but does not want to go to a doctor, so the question was, what could I prescribe for her that would make her feel more comfortable. Jenna knew that I would simply advise them to get her to a doctor for an exam, but that is not a simple process to enact in rural Paraguay. While there is a medical clinic in Fassardi, they don’t have a car. They have to take grandma to the clinic by ox cart. Grandma is very old fashioned and associates hospitals with the unknown and submitting to doctors’ requests, and given their cultural passivity and deference to any form of authority, they often don’t understand such recommendations do not have to be accepted. Jenna translated for me that there is no way to tell whether her grandmother’s complaint is minor or major without doing, at least, some blood tests, and that she needs an exam by someone who has touched a breast with a clinical frame of mind in the last 30 years (leaves me out). We talked about differential diagnosis from cyst, to infection, to cancer, but I don’t think that led to any understanding. They are fearful of the medical system because they think they are giving up any control over their lives just by walking in the door of the clinic. They also know Jenna has been willing to help them out in the past and see me as an opportunity to skip the complicated processes that occur in a top-down health system. We’ll see what happens, but my guess is they won’t be getting her to the local clinic any time soon.

To put that in a little more context, before this trip, Jenna had texted me about the local belief that goiters are caused by cat hair. I texted her back that goiters had nothing to do with cat hair, that it was an iodine deficiency. She communicated that to her neighbors and said it probably had no impact on their thinking. I was sitting with her neighbors, passing the mate (the a is short “a” sound, and the e is a long “a”), when her cat, Hobbs, walked into the middle of the circle and we began playing with him. Venancio, the neighbor and husband of Elisa, commented about cat hair being the cause of goiters, so we should be careful playing with Hobbs. When I said these things were not connected, that goiters were caused by iodine deficiencies, he said his doctor had told him that cat hair was the cause, and then he changed the subject.

I was sitting in this beautiful setting (see Jenna’s Facebook pix), passing a cup of mate, perfect weather, being well-treated by the neighbors who obviously love Jenna and look out for her, who make her life so much more tolerable than it would be than if they were not there, and I was soaking up their genuine hospitality. It was humanity at its finest. At the same time, the impact of their very hard lives, limited education, and limited opportunities is so obvious. Jenna and her fellow Peace Corps Volunteers described the glacial speed of the societal progress they are seeing, and they know this effort is going to take some generations before it really makes a difference to those who live outside the cities (in the campo).

Jenna and Adam refer to their lives, respectively in Fassardi and Potrero Reduccion, as being “Peace Corps Light.” That opinion is based on a comparison of the physical effort it takes them to live compared with some other volunteers in other countries. Jenna has running water, and Adam has a well in his yard, so he does not have to go far for water. They both speak Spanish, which is enough to get by. Jenna really does not have to learn Guarani to communicate with the people in Fassardi, but Adam’s site is remote, where many people only speak Guarani, so he has become conversant in that language. They contrasted those experiences with volunteers in Africa who have to walk long distances for water. Those volunteers might be taught one language during training only to find that it is nothing like the dialect at the site where they are finally assigned, so they have to learn a new language from scratch. It makes sense that those would be significant hardships, but it’s my impression that the hardest part of this process is the emotional aspect, not the physical, and it is much more difficult than I understood before being there. When you are in your house, you’re never completely comfortable because of the weather, the low quality of the housing, the food – so even your retreat to your house is not really a complete escape. When you step foot out of your door, you are constantly working since everything is scrutinized by the locals: how you walk, how you dress, how you speak Spanish, whether you believe in god, what you eat and don’t eat, what you drink – it is endless. It is constant work to communicate, and I can see how all of it is exhausting and so very rewarding at the same time. Adam asked me if I thought I could do what he and Jenna are doing, and I would like to think I could, but that might be presumptuous. My language skills would always be challenged, and there are so many other variables to consider. I am left feeling considerable awe for what my daughter and her friends are doing and the effort that it takes them to deliver to the Paraguayans. Their efforts are the most noble of intercultural exchanges.

Part II

Jenna’s commentary on Dad’s trip to Paraguay…

Reading my Dad’s emails and comments makes me think about a few topics I would like to divulge a little bit further…

Having my Dad in Paraguay and in my site was truly wonderful. I had been talking about my parents’ trip for so long and promising their presence in Fassardi since the day I arrived that I was so pleased to finally deliver. My Dad asked if people were excited to meet him just because he was a white foreigner which made him unique and interesting. I said yes, but I think that is not all. Now that I think more about it , people in site were excited to meet my Dad because they could finally get the opportunity to see firsthand that I come from somewhere. Family is so important to Paraguayans, it is so important that most would never consider moving away from their families. So here I am, this supposedly motherless, fatherless, familyless foreigner living thousands of miles from my home country. I don’t make sense, no matter how much they seem to like me, I still appeared out of nowhere. So meeting my Dad or even getting a glimpse of us walking down the main street through town shows that I do come from somewhere, that I have a family. It puts me on their level and hopefully, in their eyes, will help them to see how we are more alike than how we are different. I think parents in Fassardi could relate to my father coming all this way to visit me. They have children who have moved to Spain or Argentina for work and they miss them desperately. I know if they had the means to visit they would in a heartbeat. So I hope my Dad’s visit let my fellow Fassardians see that I am daughter just like their daughters and my Dad is a father just like Fassardi’s fathers.

My dad made some comments throughout his emails about potential plans we had made and then never mentioned them again. Well, that is just how life goes here. If I have had to learn anything after living a year in Paraguay, it is try to be more flexible. I know we Westerners like to say the only things that are certain in life is death and taxes, well the only things certain in Paraguay is your day will never go as planned and your week will never turned out as you expected. In the states, I could have my whole day planned ahead of time knowing what I would be doing and where I would be at each hour of the day. This is not the case in Paraguay and this is something I can still struggle with sometimes. But most of the time I love it. I love the freedom from the schedule and the grind. Its liberating. But I really had to learn to make changes on a moments notice. So, I didn’t make any big plans for me and my dad for the week, I only had a general outline for our travel plans. Plans changed and then plans changed a few more times, but that is just how things go. Even after a year in Paraguay and my old habits sometimes still come back to haunt me when I find myself getting frustrated that people are not abiding by the set schedule. Just goes to show how hard it is to break some culturally learned habits.

Health legends and beliefs are rampant in Paraguay and I am often told stories like the goiter story by Paraguayans that contradict modern medicine. Paraguayans have lots of beliefs about mixing specific foods, specifically hot and cold foods together will make you sick, or watermelon with tererre will give you a stomach ache etc… But these are beliefs they have strongly held their whole lives and have never questioned. So me telling Paraguayans their beliefs are wrong just because I know they are wrong can seem insulting. It is a balance game for me, I have to pick my battles in these situations and decide if it is appropriate or necessary to challenge the belief or just let it go. I usually choose the latter. I am not convinced of my persuasion skills in Spanish or of my authority as a foreigner or rather lack their of has the power to change anyone’s mind.

I am thankful for my Dad’s visit because I got to spend so much quality time with him. I am thrilled that he was able to meet my boyfriend Adam. I know that I have talked enough about my family that I am glad he is able to know at least one other member of the Houts family now. I am also thankful he was able to see, experience, and articulate what I could never personally express to my family and friends back home, which is exactly what it is like to be here. PCVs always say that they have such a hard time having phone conversations or writing emails with people back home and trying to answer questions about their lives in Paraguay because it just doesnt come across the right way. I agree with them 100%. I can tell my parents all the facts every week on the phone, write them emails and write blogs but it will never be enough, they will never understand unless they see it for themselves. So I am so thankful my Dad was willing to come all the way here, travel for 24 hours (in couch!), and experience my life first hand, otherwise he never would have known. I know my mom wanted to come and see Fassardi for herself more than anything. The people of Fassardi desperately wanted to meet her too. If my Dad was asked any one question the most it was where was his Senora. They all asked him to send their best wishes back home to her as well. Everyone was so concerned about her and asked about her well being. Like I said, families are extremely important to Paraguayans, but they love their mamas most of all…

PS I will be home July 31st to August 18th and I cant wait!

Read an article about me in the Peace Corps on the UCSD Website News Page at:

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/02-09PeaceCorps.asp

I got a kitty! His name is Jeeves. He is a little six-week-old, black and white kitten. I have had him a week and already I feel like I am raising a baby. But I have grown so attached to him. He requires constant attention, cries a lot and drinks lots of milk. He is very active and just wants to play.

Now that the time has changed and it gets dark at 6 o’clock and everyone is indoors at this time, he makes the long nights feel a little less lonely. He is my new little baby!

I have a few projects going on right now but by far my favorite is the world map project. If you want to understand the background of the map project you can read this article…http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.media.medstories.view&news_id=1536

The idea of the map project is to paint a giant world map mural on a wall in a central location in town to teach kids and everyone else about geography and Paraguay’s relations to the world. In general, most Paraguayans know very little about world geography and I have been asked a lot of interesting questions about geography during my service. But, not until I started painting this map did I realize how unaware Paraguayans are of the world surrounding them. It has been an eye opening experience to say the least.

I decided to paint the map on the wall of the library, the municipal library almost no one knows exists. It is a dreary place and has about 100 dusty books that no one ever looks at. The place remains locked up most of the time and is attended by the town “librarian”, a bitter Brazilian woman who comes to work when she feels like it and is only nice to the young, cute boys.

The youth group was fixing up the plaza where the library stands the weeks before school started, which was my perfect opportunity to get kids involved in my map. Kids where hanging out at the plaza all day and every day to fix up the decrepit old plaza around the library, because lets face it there was nothing else to do, and so I was able to spark some interest in the map project.

The process for creating the map is pretty simple. Peace Corps has published a handbook with everything you could ever need to know about making the map. First I petitioned the municipality for supplies and then got to work. Day one we painted the dirty, disgusting and grafitied wall a beautiful blue. We painted two coats, a new concept. The handbook has formulas and graphics that demonstrate how big to make the map and how to center it on the wall and all other logistics. With the formulas we figured our map to be 3 meters by 1 ½ meters. We were going to draw the map using the grid method, meaning, small box by small box we would trace the world onto the eastern wall of the library. But first we had to draw each individual box, over 1500 boxes actually. Each box was to be 5 cm by 5 cm. So with a meter stick I marked out every 5 cms along the left border and bottom border and then very tediously drew lines up and down the wall all day long. The kids took turns helping me. It was very time consuming.

Then we started to draw. I was recruiting kids from the park to help out. A lot of kids would look on in interest but recoil in fear when I would ask them to actually participate claiming they didn’t know how to draw. I tried to explain the brilliance of the grid method was that you didn’t have to know how to draw but some would still refuse. Paraguayans are afraid of new things so I didn’t try to push them to much. But I still had a lot of participants that would practice drawing on the handouts I gave out and then move on to the wall. Some kids were great drawers and saw quickly how easy and fun it was. A lot of people would walk by and assume I had drawn the whole thing myself. Because I am the Americans they assume I know all and can do all, therefore I must be a professional drawer and painter as well. It doesn’t matter how many time I repeat that I don’t draw or paint they don’t really believe me. Actually, I only contributed a small part, the kids have done a lot themselves. I always supervised but they were the bulk of the input.

Now that the kids are in school I am most likely to get participants in the late afternoon, around 5 o’clock. I can always show up to the library and get out my supplies and within thirty second find myself surrounded by a few kids firing away with questions. Usually these kids are too little to actually put paint to the wall but they love to watch and touch all the paint supplies. But I can always tempt some older kids passing through to lend me a hand.

The map project has been a great way for me to get to know a lot of kids in Fassardi. I have spent so many hours at the library/park where these kids hang out and I have been incorporated into their world. Now while working on the map I have lots of little voices calling my name asking me a million questions, asking me to look here, look there, look at this, to borrow my bike, how you say words in English …..

After one long day of painting and lounging in the shade, two little girls that almost never leave my side scraped all the paint off my hands and arms. They were determined to get every last drop of paint.

The most eye opening part of this whole project has been the questions I have tried to answer about geography. I knew Paraguayans knowledge of the world was minimal, but throughout this process I have begun to slowly see how uneducated they really are. A lot of people understand that I am painting a world map but some do not. I have had a few people ask me what the map is of exactly. As Americans, we have grown up with the image of the world map, I am sure you can conjure up a mental image of it right now and possibly draw an outline of the continents yourself but in the last few weeks I encountered Paraguayans who had never seen this image of a world map before! They had no idea what they were looking at.

Also, looking at and reading maps comes very naturally to us, you probably don’t even remember when you were taught how to look at a map, but I promise you it happened sometimes when you were a kid. Most Paraguayans out in the campo never had this privilege. I thought kids could look at the map in the handbook, pick a country to paint, and then go ahead and paint it. I was wrong on this account. Most kids have been unable to do this, they get lost between the small map in their hands and the big map on the wall even though the picture is the same. The idea of looking at and comparing maps is so new and can be so disorienting for them. For example, once two kids were looking in the book at the map of Europe and pointing to a country in Africa assuming they had found the same country in the book, assuming a map is a map and not realizing they looked completely different. Or I will point to a country on the wall and outline the border with my fingers and show them exactly where they are going to paint, they will say ok, go get the paint and paintbrush, come back to the wall and have forgotten which country they are supposed to paint.

The map project is almost completed. Right now we are in the process of erasing the grid lines. The next steps are to repaint the oceans, label the countries, and finally paint a clear protective varnish coat and then we will be done! Creating the map itself has been a unique and rewarding experience, but this is just the beginning. I have big plans for the map once it is completed. I am planning to teach interactive geography lessons using the map with the high school and elementary schools classes. I always loved geography lessons when I was in school so I am excited to create fun and interactive lessons using the map. Think of the potential for what these kids could learn.

I know my blogs over the last few months have become less frequent but as I have begun to slip into my day-to-day life in Paraguay I have found some kind of a routine: an everyday life that is not as interesting and new as I used to find it and therefore I find myself with less than fascinating circumstances to write about. Paraguay and Paraguayans still never cease to amaze me and I still find myself learning a lot but my ability to accept the cultural differences as norm and not dwell on these differences as much as I used to is much greater. In fact, I find myself starting to pick up on a lot of cultural habits, whether I realized I was doing it at first or not. For example, Paraguayans are a bunch of liars. I’m not being offensive, its just their way of trying not to be offensive. Paraguayans are characteristically timid, passive and will go out of their way not to offend, so saying ‘no’ to any kind of request sounds like a great offense. To avoid any confrontation or awkwardness, Paraguayans say ‘yes’ to everything, even when they mean no. I can invite the whole neighborhood to a meeting at my house the next night and get a positive ‘yes, I will be there’ from everybody and have nobody show up. I have found myself becoming quite the liar as well. I tell people, “yes, I will come visit you tomorrow”. Even when I know I have no intention of going over there. I here ‘yes’ so much that it has just started to flow from my own mouth. The Peace Corps has made me a liar.

I also have not been writing as much because life in Paraguay the last month or two has been somewhat of a struggle for me. I am very content with my lifestyle and wouldn’t want to give it up for a second. In fact, the thought of going back to the States and having to LIVE and find a JOB there sounds pretty dreadful to me. And although some of my PC friends refer to their service as ‘two years of summer camp’ (and sometimes I have to agree with them) life in Paraguay and the Peace Corps isn’t always easy. It has its ups and downs, and this past month or two has been a down for me. It could be because of so many factors. It could be because its summer vacation, the kids are not in school and the overall pace of life is small pueblo Paraguay is even slower (if that is at all possible), that also means I have to wait till classes begin again in the end of February till I can start up all the projects I would like to do with the schools…oh so many ideas.

It could be because it is the dead of summer and the heat is relentless and unmotivating. No wonder Paraguayans are stereotyped as lazy, the sun is way too hot to go outside and do anything most days. I have never experienced such continual, intense, humid heat before. I understand the need for a siesta in the middle of the day. The heat takes away all your strength and energy and there is nothing to do but sleep after lunch with this kind of weather. I couldn’t have imagined it until I actually experienced it myself.

It could be because people in Fassardi are still trying to understand what the heck I am doing here. So far I haven’t tried to convert them and I haven’t given them any money like all the other white people that have come through here in the past. All they know is I rented a house, I talk funny, and I haven’t left yet. They are still a little suspicious. In this manner I am having a difficult time finding people to work with me. Paraguayans are extremely friendly and open and they will call to me from the street and invite me into their homes. They will offer me food and what little they have. They will ask me lots of questions and I will talk to them about my ideas for projects and ways to improve their community but I still have yet to find people who are really willing to back me up and support me. Maybe they have heard this kind of talk before and nothing happened. Maybe hope is a dangerous feeling to have lingering.

Maybe it is because it is difficult for people to really understand me. Yes, I speak Spanish and I can speak it well. But I am not fluent. Who knows if I ever will be. I still make mistakes all the times, find myself stumbling over words, and still find myself in situations where I cannot express certain ideas or concepts. This is the most frustrating of all.

Maybe it is because living in a foreign culture is a difficult thing to do, something I have to remind myself, away from all I know that is comfortable and meaningful. Peace Corps is a 24/7 job, I can never escape it, I never get a break from my job. Even when I am alone in my house at night, Fassardi is dark and quite, and I think I can relish for just awhile in some of my American ways I will turn around and there will be Paraguay, still in my house, staring me in the face. A storm passes over the house in the middle of the night and the power goes out, my fan shuts off and I have to pass the night in a sleepless sweat, I want to cook dinner on my gas stove and realize my tank is empty, the water is cut and who knows when it is coming back on, I want to go to bed a little early one night but the Evangelical church down the road has a different idea and the pastor blasts his preaching accompanied by loud reggaton music over the loudspeakers into the night, some creepy dude in town has gotten a hold of my cell phone number passed from this guy to this guy to this guy and sends me anonymous love text messages.

Paraguay never goes away. My boyfriend likes to say we as foreigners are in a constant battle with Paraguay and if I don’t start to fight back Paraguay is going to win. Paraguay wins tiny battles everyday. Especially over my health. I have had countless, unidentified insects bite me that swell up to the size of a baseball. I have also had numerous unidentified ailments that have had me on my back for more than a day or two. Paraguay sure had its way with me on those occasions.

Peace Corps Paraguay PTO Jason Cochran put it best. He says you have to think about your “Little Victories”. He gave me and my fellow training group a pep talk during our three month in-service training and reminded us during all of our bitching that Peace Corps is a hard job, its supposed to be, but it’s the little victories that count and those victories are different for everyone. If you are having trouble just figuring out how to light your damn Paraguayan oven and you finally figure it out, that is quite a little victory. I have really taken his words to heart and although I think his words of wisdom can apply to anybody they really do make sense for our situation in the Peace Corps and I like to think about my little victories everyday. This strategy really helps me get through the day.

I also might just need a vacation. So my boyfriend, Adam, and I are going to northern Argentina for a week. Yeah! I am going to leave Paraguay behind and forget about it for just a second. Take a break. I’ve been working for the past eight months, I think I deserve a vacation!

But if this job was easy I wouldn’t like it, I never would have signed up. Peace Corps says it is the Toughest Job You Will Ever Love, and no slogan could ever be truer.

I have a friend who came to Peace Corps Paraguay and was extremely disappointed when he discovered after his first week that Paraguayan food was nothing like Mexican food. He realized he would not be eating tacos and enchiladas for the next two year, instead he would be eating Paraguayan food, a traditional cuisine all its own….very different Mexico. Paraguay has many of its own traditional foods, unique to this country alone, and Paraguayans love to brag about it. So, I’m going to fill you in on some of the typical foods, eating habits and customs, and my own experiences with food in Paraguay as I have journeyed in Paraguay the last eight months.

“So what is the food like in Paraguay?” so many people from home ask me. Paraguayan food is fatty, greasy and usually lacking nutrients. But it is GOOD, which is why Paraguayans are so reluctant to change their diets when they are in poor health. Although, the diet itself is probably responsible for a lot of Paraguayan health problems such as obesity, diabetes and gastritis. No doubt, Paraguayan food makes you fat. I myself put on the pounds my first months living with a Paraguayan family. The heavy, starchy meals twice a day took a toll on me and my clothes, which started to fit much more snuggly after about two months. One night while leaning over the trash can to empty my plate my host mom patted me on the butt and told me it was much larger than when I first came. She said I should be careful because I won’t fit into my jeans anymore. She also said she was going to put me on a diet and stop serving me meat. The next night I got a plate full of fried mandioca instead, which is like having only greasy French fries for dinner.

My motto when over sees is, “Eat what is put in front of me.” I do this simply not offend or inconvenience anyone. Paraguayans love to feed their guests, especially the foreign kind. They want you to know how they make the traditional foods is better than their neighbors and they want you to emphatically agree. I often have plates of food shoved into my hands when I visit Paraguayan homes, if I asked for it or not, and Ill be damned if I don’t eat everything I am given and bless them as the greatest cook in Paraguay (I also appreciate any food given to me, because it means I don’t have to prepare food for myself that day). Sometimes I can’t help but think vegetarians are just being too picky and offensive towards Paraguayans. The fact that someone doesn’t eat meat is a mystery to a people who eat meat everyday of their lives. Choosing to not eat meat is an absurd concept to them. I personally do not like pork, or any other pig meat for that matter, but when served pig in Paraguay I will eat it. I don’t want to be rude…or go hungry.

Paraguayans have a lot of distinct food superstitions. Most of these superstitions revolve around the idea of mixing hot and cold elements. If you drink hot tea and then eat some yogurt, the combination of the hot and cold will infuse in your belly and explode by making you terribly sick. This is a superstition I hear about everyday. It seems Paraguayans everywhere emphatically believe in these food taboos. You would never want to eat an orange and then drink hot mate unless you were planning on staying in bed for the next few days. The other day my boyfriend and I were at a restaurant eating breakfast and we ordered a pitcher of orange juice. After the little old lady brought us our pitcher we ordered two coffees and yoghurt. She didn’t understand. Maybe she thought she didn’t hear us correctly because of our thick north American accents. To her, our order sounded like a death wish, what with all that cold and hot combining in our bellies to form an evil spirit and eat us to death from the inside. I guess that day we got lucky and walked out of the restaurant feeling reasonably content.

My host uncle during training claimed he no longer ate eggs because once he got sick after eating them as a child. He said he has recently drunk milk and then ate the eggs, therefore he no longer has the desire to eat eggs. I told him I didn’t believe him. I was drinking hot cocido, Paraguayan tea, at the moment and he offered to get up from the couch and make me eggs to eat with my tea. I agreed (another night of no cooking!) and set out to prove the superstition wrong. Raul sat and watched me eat the eggs in amazement, waiting for me to throw down my fork and run to the bathroom. When it was all over and nothing entertaining had happened Raul was in awe. What an awesome, powerful stomach we Americans must have!

However, food superstitions do help me out in one way. If I have been drinking terere all day and don’t feel I can squeeze another drop down my throat I can politely decline by telling my friends I recently drank something hot and they will understand with out protest.

Mandioca- Known in English as mandioc root and in other cultures as yucca or cassava (mandi’o in Guarani). Mandioca is the staple food in Paraguay. You will be sure to find a big plate of mandioca with every Paraguayn meal. Think of a potato except with little less taste and less nutrition and you have yourself some mandioca. Considering how popular and important mandioca is to the national diet, I am shocked how much effort goes into preparing a plate of mandicoa for just one meal. They must be peeled and cut up before they can be put on the stove to boil for an hour. This is not like preparing potatoes, mandioca is much sturdier and starchier and I still have yet to master the skill, best to leave it to the woman who have done it everyday. Mandioca doesn’t have much taste but it is yummy. I love it. I could probably eat mandioca everyday for the rest of my life and not get sick of it.

Asado- or a barbeque is the classic Paraguayan meal. An asado consists of meat, meat and more meat. Parguayans love their cows and especially love to eat them. An asado takes place on Sundays and any special holiday, be it Christmas, New Years, or Friendship day, asado is the only meal to make Pargauayan feel like kings. I personally never enjoy the asados. In my opinion, meat in this country in never very good. Just like the rest of the cuisine, the pieces of meat at asados are always fatty and greasy. The meat will be accompanied by a few side dishes, mandioca obviously, maybe a rice salad made with mayonnaise and a few veggies, and some of the cows intestines. I know I said I eat anything put in front of me, but I do have a few exceptions to this rule and cow guts is one of them. I draw the line at meat sausages made from the blood of the animal it came from (morcilla). There might just be a few things in Paraguay I wont learn how to eat.

Sopa Paraguaya- is not Paraguayan soup, which can be very tricky for Spanish novices who have recently learned that sopa is the word for soup in Spanish, not soap. However, Paraguay, that anomalous little country in the heart of South America, had to go and change it up on us again. Sopa is bread. Often Americans describe sopa as cornbread because it looks like cornbread but it tastes very different, and it is addicting. I promise you have never tasted anything like sopa and I could try to describe it to you but you wont understand until you have had it yourself. Sopa is a bread made with cheese, greese and maybe some onions, depending on your preference, but I am guaranteed to eat as much sopa as I can when I come across it because I too am now addicted.

Chicken, beans and spaghetti- Paraguayans always want to know if I have tried that food or this and what is my favorite Paraguayan dish, in case I ever come over for lunch. Paraguayans LOVE to talk about food. I often tell people my favorite Paraguayan food is pollo y poroto (chicken and beans). Even though I eat these things regularly in my own country, many are unaware that the chicken and the bean were not created in Paraguay. I don’t feel the need to explain this fact anymore, I just go with the flow and surprise everyone when they find out I love beans too! They think I must be acclimating to their culture just fine if I love chicken and beans too.

Spaghetti might be another staple of Paraguayan cuisine. I eat a lot of spaghetti with beef or chicken and mandioca when I eat lunch in Paraguayan homes. Its cheap, its easy and its yummy…pretty much the reason people everywhere make pasta.

Tortillas- I know what you are thinking, but forget about fresh, hot fluffy and light corn and flour tortillas that you know and love. Instead imagine a large, patty sized ball of fried batter and you have a Paraguayan tortilla. It doesn’t look, taste, or make you feel the same on the inside as its Mexican namesake. Tortillas can be made with beef, cheese, or vegetables like carrots and Swiss chard. They are fatty and dripping with grease but I love them. They can be served with soup to soak up the broth or on their own.

Mbeju- I don’t know if you will be able to find anything like mbeju anywhere else in the world. Traditionally a food served during the winter San Juan festivals, but made all year round on rainy days or cool nights, mbeju is the closest thing to a Paraguayan pancake, only very salty.

Rivero- fried flour, almost tasteless but surprisingly addicting!

You will notice a total lack of vegetables in most of these foods. Vegetables are used to season and spice up a meal but are never the main attraction. Therefore, Paraguayan adults often don’t like vegetables because they didn’t grow up with them and sure as hell aren’t going to start now. They know what they like and know what they don’t like and are often unwilling to try anything new. But when I tell my Paraguayan friends about the millions of bratty kids in America who are forced to sit and eat their needed servings of vegetables today, Paraguayans will commonly respond, “I don’t know how to eat vegetables”. They don’t know how because they never learned…or had the opportunity.

From a day to day basis Paraguayans eat food that is common to many Latin American cultures and our own. I already “knew how” to eat a lot of Paraguayan dishes even before I came to Paraguay. They make a lot of soups, stews with rice, and pasta dishes always with chicken, beef, or pork. Sometimes they cook vegetables, often they serve bread rolls along with the mandioca. I knew about empanadas and milanesa (a fried meat burger) from my time spent in Argentina. I am often very satisfied after eating in a Paraguayan home. And if you ever really want to know what Paraguayan gastronomy is like you are going to have to come visit me and find out for yourself!

I am on my own! Six months, more or less, of living with families and I have finally moved out on my own. I have my own house in barrio San Antonio located 2 km from the centre of town. I was determined to move out and find a house so I made house hunting a number one priority. I told everyone I ran into that I was looking for a house and talked about it constantly. I could not go about house hunting any “normal” way I knew about. There are no classified ads, bulletin boards, or craigslist with empty houses for rent in Fassardi. Almost every evening for three weeks I walked around town and talked to people about the housing “market” in Fassardi and followed any leads I was given. I would hear about a vacant house over yonder and I would go track it down and then track down the owner only to find the owner lived in Buenos Aires and would come back to stay in the house for Semana Santa, or wanted to sell the house and not rent, or the house was already rented to someone else, or they didn’t want to rent to me, or they used the house for storage, or they just weren’t used to the idea of renting to a foreigner like me, or their sister came and stayed in the house from time to time, or the most common problem was the house had no bathroom. I had come to the conclusion that I was going to have to build a bathroom onto any house I rented. The entire house searching process was getting very frustrating when one afternoon I got a phone call from Toti, a kid in the youth group who lives out in barrio San Antonio. He told me the owners of a vacant house near him were visiting and wanted to rent their house to me. The house is huge, has running water, electricity, and a bathroom. And the owners wanted to rent to me. That was all I needed to know. We set a rent price, 250,000 guaranies a month, about $50 a month, and made a date to sign a contract and move in the next week. After all that hard work I found a house in 15 minutes.

I have lived in this house for awhile now and I love it. I love living on my own, having alone time, having my own schedule, eating when I want and what I want (not my host dad’s salted fried eggs for dinner every night) and being as messy as I want. However, living in and taking care of a Paraguayan-constructed home has its unique quirks. My house is huge and I have a big yard and it’s a lot of work for one person. Luckily, I have a lot of free time to take care of it. My house has two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, bathroom, and a giant dinning room/garage/party area, I still haven’t figured it out yet. Half the house has tiled floors and half cement floors. All the walls are made of wood and some are poorly constructed with lots of large visible holes and cracks, which makes it easy for the wind, leaves, dust, and bugs to enter through. And there are lots of bugs! I am an assassin in my own home. I kill bugs all day all night. When I asked the PC medical officer how to control bug infestations in my house, her medical advice was to not kill the spiders…they will help you kill the bugs. In other words, there is nothing you can do.

Not only do I get lots of unidentifiable bugs, lot of other critters of the animal kingdom invade my home such as fuzzy caterpillars, frogs, toads, butterflies, wasps, and ants. I leave the frogs alone because they also are apart of my anti-bug defense team. Yep, its just me, the frogs, and the spiders together against the rest of the Paraguayan militia of insects.

This house was occupied by a family for many years until the father died of a sudden heart attack (apparently in the bathroom) and the family moved to a neighboring town. It has been abandoned for the last two years and has been sitting and decomposing in the process, although many aspects of the families past life have been left in tact and I feel like I am living in a Paraguayan home with a Paraguayan family. You can take the Paraguayans out of the house but you cant take the Paraguayaness out of the house. The inside of my house is painted bright aqua, the color of every fourth house in the country. Also, the walls are covered with decorations typical of many Paraguayan homes. When Paraguayans get their hands on a picture or a poster of a baby, flowers, a landscape, Jesus etc… it will go up on the wall in any haphazard manner and never come down. If the picture/poster comes covered in plastic it will stay on the cherished treasure to protect it forever. In my house I have several identical plastic covered pictures of elephants, plastic covered landscapes and flowered paintings, lots of Jesus pictures, religious posters and inspirational quotes and the Last Super, three identical pictures of silverware and a plate placed side by side, a plastic Santa draped in fake roses (he is my favorite), a very large picture of a praying baby, and many outdated calendars. I think every Paraguayan home has several outdated calendars hanging around the house. It’s a mystery to me. During training I was in one woman’s kitchen and she had so many calendars on every wall of her kitchen. We asked her why she had so many calendars and she said so wherever you look you will always know the date.

Another fantastic feature of my house is my yard. I have a huge yard and some great fruit trees. I have two peach trees, orange trees, a mandarin tree, guava, and… the king of my front yard who stands the tallest and grandest above all the other fruit trees is the most gorgeous mango tree you have ever laid your eyes on! The mangos are almost ready and should be ripe in just a few days. Behind my house is a whole orchard of mango trees that the patriarch of this house used to sell during mango season. I will never be lacking a mango in Paraguay. I also have red grapes growing in my back yard. There are so many grapes I wont know what to do with them when they are ripe. The grapes shade my entire back patio and it is so pleasant to sit out back on a hot day. The grape arbor is one of the best places in the house. I also have an outside sink under the grapes where I do my laundry. On a hot day, I can do my laundry in the shade, listen to music and scrub my clothes while my neighbors’ chickens run around my yard and their cows stare at me from the pasture just a few feet away. Its can be very relaxing on a hot day and often I look forward to it. It gives me something to do when everyone else is hiding from the heat.

I can’t forget to mention my neighbors. Absolutely the best thing about my new house is my next door neighbors. I share a yard, garden, water, and my new life with my neighbors. They are my new Paraguayan family. Although I have only been here a short while this family has taken me in as one of their own and I already feel closer to them then either of my previous host families. I was just looking for a house to live in and I found the best family in Paraguay as a result. I think they worry a lot about me being a young girl living by myself in this big house and so they are constantly coming over to my house to see what I am up to. But I am equally over at their house sitting on their porch drinking terere and hanging out with them. I eat meals with them, go to family events and parties. I feel very much apart of the family. They have three teenagers, Liz, Gustavo and Nati. Nati is 14 and has quickly become my best friend. I spend the most time with her than anyone else in Fassardi. We garden together, go on walks, cook, and are planning a community project to clean up the barrio’s soccer field. I share my life with this family. They come and go as they please in my house and I walk in and out of their house as freely as I wish. Neighbors in Paraguay are family, and they are more family than my neighbors.

Last night was Nati’s ninth grade graduation ceremony. Graduation invitations are very exclusive because each graduate must rent the exact number of chairs they need for their family at the ceremony. The cost to rent a chair of course is cheap but it is expensive for Paraguayans to ever spend more than is needed. Nati had been talking about the graduation for weeks. She is the best student in her class and was excited about making her speech. She invited me to come to the graduation and sit with her family. Last night was the first time I truly felt apart of a family here in Paraguay. I didn’t feel like I was just the American tagging along. I felt like I was just one of the family. I was even given chores to help prepare like everyone else. Normally I am always treated like the special guest and they want me to sit like a princess, be served, gawked at, and nothing more. It was a great feeling to be included.

So not only did I gain a house and my freedom but a whole new family. This house is my own personal Paraguayan sanctuary. It can be dirty and hot at times and it’s a lot of work too but it can also feel perfect and feel just like home. And the best part is its all mine.

I was inspired to write this blog after reading my friend Lyn’s blog and her perspective on the heat in Paraguay. She is from Texas. Therefore, we have a major difference of opinion on this subject.

The temperature last week made a drastic leap from a comfortable, spring warmth to a tropical, suffocating heat. Last week was the hottest week of my life. A few storms have now come and gone and cooled off this burning country, but I had never experienced such inescapable heat. I know places get much hotter in my own country but most places in the United States with intense weather can escape it with the miracle of heating and air conditioning. How lucky we are with our fancy modern technology we can live comfortably in any climate we want any time of the year! Mostly, we are lucky that we can afford such luxuries. Of course, these technologies have made their way to Paraguay but only for the well-off and the lucky, the majority must live in their environment; they must sweat through the heat in the summer and shiver through the frosts in the winter.

The last few weeks have begun the transition into summer and it is hot and humid, even during the storms. I sweat all day and sometimes all night. Often multiple showers are necessary. On those really hot, chart topping days I fall asleep at night sweating and wake up sweating before I have even opened my eyes. It is a sweaty world and I am living in it. But, everyone else around me is just as sweaty and we bond over our mutual sweatiness. We complain about the heat, drink terere, and complain some more.

Long, crowded bus rides can be very uncomfortable experiences. The bus drivers pack the busses to maximum capacity so people are stacked on top of each other in the aisle and their limbs, butts, baggage etc… take up location on the laps and shoulders of the seated passengers. We are packed in like sardines and the only air conditioning comes from the wind passing through the open windows when the bus is on the move. To say the least, a bus ride to the capital on a hot day might be comparable to riding in a packed elevator full of strangers snuggled up close, but for 5 hours instead of just 30 seconds.

Now, I have not only come to accept my constant dirty, sweaty state of being but fully embraced it. It is impossible to be clean and fresh for too long in Paraguay, no matter what corner of the country you are in or how hard you try. The dirt seems permanently stuck under my nails, my clothes never get completely clean because I have yet to personally master hand washing them in a bucket in the back yard, and sometimes I’m just too tired or lazy to shower after a long day of interpreting Paraguayans. It’s a hot, sweaty, dirty world south of the equator….but…I have the best job in the world, I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer…I can’t complain too much in the end.

5 ½ months living over seas sounds like a long time to me. It sounds like a significant amount of time to learn and appreciate a different culture. 5 ½ months is the longest I have ever been out of the country or away from home so I thought by now I would feel like I really knew Paraguay, but 5 ½ months is really no time at all. I can’t believe I have been here almost half a year, that is unbelievable to me. The time has gone by dramatically fast. I feel like I am only just beginning to understand Paraguay, Paraguayans and how to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. I know my friends and family feel I have been gone along time but in my world I am still a Peace Corps baby learning the ropes.

As the Paraguayan pueblo becomes my every day life I am slowly forgetting what reality was like in my other world. North America seems oh so far away sometimes. I realized that I have found the lifestyle I truly was searching for in joining the Peace Corps. I am free of schedules and time constraints and the daily grind. I am faced with new mental and physical challenges almost daily and learn more about myself through these experiences. I am constantly meeting new, interesting people from all walks of life. I am loving the Paraguayan tranquilo pace of life and currently have no desire to go back to the US. I am surprised at how content I am to be living in Paraguay with not an inkling or yearning for my country. I did experiences some waves of homesickness around the three month mark during my transition into my site, but that has passed. I expected that much because 3 to 4 months was the longest extended period of time I had ever been out of the country. I don’t miss the United States but I do miss my family constantly. I constantly talk about my family to Paraguayans and PC volunteers alike, in Spanish, English and really bad Guarani. I have to admit I miss home excessively when I am sick. Paraguay is a tough place to be sick and I have been sick a lot since I have been here. I just want my mom. The only time I ever think, “what the hell am I doing here?” “why on earth did I come to Paraguay of all places” is when I am sick. But then I get better and thank god I get to live in the country for a little while.

I was invited to a picnic to raise funds for the ninth grade class by my next door neighbor. Nati,14, told me about the event a week and a half in advance and really wanted to make sure I would come to the party. As I got more and more information about the party leading up to the day I was more confused about what kind of event it actually was. Nati referred to it as a picnic and a party but it was going to be held on a Sunday night, starting about 9 o’clock and I didn’t have to bring any food or drinks with me. Then she told me they were going to crown “Miss Spring 2009” and have a little pageant. You just never know what you are going to get with a Paraguayan party.

The night of the party my PC friend was visiting and so he came along as well. The party was outdoors in a dirt patio. The all important stereo blasting with reggatone music had been set up and many many young men stood around the yard drinking and staring at each other. Paraguayan parties always have an improporinate amount of men to women. I found myself at another dull, male intensive Paraguayan party. I get really tired of these events and now just like to make an appearance. The pageant soon started and the crowd was in a tizzy as the girls came out one by one in less and less clothing. The three contestants took turns parading around the dirt yard in different outfits to the hoots and hollers of the male audience. Over the loud speaker the girls were introduced as they paraded around in their little dresses, their age was announced along with their interests. Usually their interests included singing, dancing, and reggatone and romantic music. It would go something like this, “Here comes Carmen in her night time dress, she is 16 and she likes to dance and enjoys reggatone music”. And the crowd of googly eyed boys and old men alike would whistle and hoot until she disappeared back into the house and the next young, supple teenager appeared.

“Ok” I thought, “So, this is what a simple, campo pageant is like out in the middle-of-nowhere Paraguay. It’s a little perverted and backwards but I can accept it for what it is as simple entertainment.” Then the next round started. This was the bathing suit/beach wear round. However, the first contestant was not wearing a bathing suit but very sexy lingerie. The crowd was wild with excitement at seeing this young, beautiful girl prance around in sexy, lacy, barefooted, nothingness right before their eyes. My friend and I couldn’t believe our eyes either. “This is a lie, that is not a bathing suit, that is lingerie and this is supposed to be a conservative country!”

And it still got more interesting. Round three a new contestant decided she was left out and wanted to join the pageant. This being Paraguay and not wanting to offend her, there was no one to tell her no. Also, not having come prepared with any outfits and being belligerently drunk the young contestant decided to take off all her clothes and parade around the yard in front of her equally drunk audience in her thong and bra. She was announced also to be sporting her bathing suit. I could no longer hide the shock on my face. I couldn’t believe this was happening in my sleeping Paraguayan pueblo right before my eyes, even the drunken Sheriff was over in the corner yukking it up with my friend and the rest of his drunken comrades. I was looking around, with my jaw on the floor, trying to see if anyone else was as shocked and horrified as I was but everyone else was either expertly hiding their horror or was enjoying the show immensely. My friend announced that I had brought him to a strip show. He was equally astonished and said he had never seen anything like it in his 1 ½ years in Paraguay.

The moment had come nobody had been waiting for…the end of the pageant and the announcement of the winners. It was the most depressing awards ceremony I had ever witnessed. Either all the men just didn’t care who won or where so depressed they didn’t get to watch half naked adolescent girls prance around anymore but they showed no enthusiasm for the announcements of the winners. As each place was announced and each girl came out to receive her bouquet of flowers, the crowd gave a pathetic attempt at an applause. Considering the racket that just went on when the girls came out before, I felt embarrassed that no one was applauding them now. Obviously this meant something to these girls and it took some guts to get up there in front of those pigs. So I applauded and cheered as loud as I could as each girl came to accept her flowers. I was by far the loudest and longest clapper in the crowd.

Drunken-underwear girl took 1st runner up despite only have one outfit and even came out to accept her flowers in her underwear, the crowd approved of this decision. The winner was sexy, lacy, lingerie girl. She had a crown unceremoniously placed on her head, the men soon lost interest when they realized she was no longer in lingerie and immediately pumped up the reggatone on the stereo and stood around, stared at each other and got more unnecessarily drunk. The pageant had ended. It was a Paraguayan night to remember.

I went into the high school to meet the principal. I thought it would be a good idea to sit and chat with her to kill some time. I had done the same with the principal at the technical high school and she loved having me there for the afternoon, so I figured I would have a similar experience at the other high school. I was wrong. I was hoping my first impressions of this woman would ware off after awhile but every time I am in her office I grow to dislike her more and more. She is rude and condescending towards me. She thinks me lack of language skills in Spanish and Guarani makes me an inadequate human being. This is odd because Paraguayans don’t treat me this way. They understand that I am a foreigner and trying to learn their language, even though they don’t meet many they seem to really understand. They are very accommodating for my lack of of language skills. However, this woman seems to think I am a total idiot because of my funny pronunciation. Her students get it, you think the principal would.

Anyways, the day I met the principal she demanded I give a lecture (charla) for her school in honor of youth month. She said usually throughout the month of September she usually brings in people to give educational lectures to the students and she needed to fill more spots and wanted to know right then and there what I could do. I was a little taken aback, she was very abrupt, but I had an idea in the back of my head that I want to start student governments at the schools eventually so I said I could do a charla about democracy and participation. She said that would be fine and we set the dates for the next week.

I had a few examples of democracy charlas and activities to do with youth in my PC handbooks but I also did some additional research in the Peace Corps office in Asuncion. I spent a lot of time preparing this charla since it was my first one I wanted it to be good. I had done a few charlas during training but always with a partner and with my teachers and other volunteers observing in case I needed help. This would be my first actual lesson as a Peace Volunteer in my village all alone. These experiences combined with my past year teaching and my years speaking in front of crowds settled my nerves somewhat. I definitely felt prepared. But I have never taught large groups of high school kids in a foreign country in a foreign language before. That would all be a new experience.

In true Paraguayan fashion, no one knew I was going to be at the school when I showed up that morning. The principal was out of town and the teachers weren’t prepared. So they decided to group three of their classes all in one large class all to listen to my charla. They all brought their desks outside so we could have enough space. It was my first real charla in Paraguay and I had 50 unruly teenagers to deal with. I just had to go with the flow and do my best.

I have no done this charla now 6 times and this is how it usually went:

I would start by introducing myself, asking if someone could guess where I was from and they anyone knew what Peace Corps was. I would then try to explain Peace Corps, why I am living in Fassardi, the fact that I am going to live here for two years, that I am not a teacher so don’t call me “profe” (I learned to say that only after the first charla), I am here to work and live with them, please feel free to come visit me in my house if you want help with English homework or want to talk about the United States or just want to be my friend. I ask if they have English class. They all say yes. I ask if its hard or easy. They all say its very hard. I respond, “Then you all know how hard it is to try and learn another language so just imagine how hard it is for me to try and give this lesson in another language. I know I speak funny but Im still trying to learn your language and that is why I need to you to help me. When I make a mistake I am not offended if you correct me, I want to improve my Spanish. So Please you have to help me.” They all nod and say yes they will help me. Paraguayans are notorious for their ass-kissing diplomacy. They would rather slit their own wrists then risk offending anyone else and will lie through their teeth to keep you happy. So you never know if you are getting a real yes or a Paraguayan yes. I am still learning the subtlies. So then I usually finish my intro by saying I don’t conduct my charlas like a regular teacher. My charlas are more like a conversation, its not about me talking and them listening because I am here to learn from them too. Therefore, everyone is required to participate.

I started with an icebreaker activity I was really excited to see how it would actually work with Paraguayan kids. I selected 20 kids to stand in front of the group in a circle. I had a big ball of yarn and one kid would start with the ball of yarn, say their name and their personal definition of democracy and then hold on to the end of the yarn and throw the ball to another person in the circle. The next person would announce their definition of democracy and hold on to their end of the yarn and then throw the ball to the next person until everyone in the group had a turn. This would be an easy activity for American high school students who are used to being asked to participate in activities and have to think for themselves, but Paraguagan high school students are a different animal. I was asking them to do something completely abnormal. Paraguayan kids are shy and timid for the most part and this activity was completely frightening for them. I totally put them on the spot. After explaining the instructions to the group they would all gasp in horror about what I was asking them to do. I just ignored them and tried to exude confidence hoping it might rub off on some of them. I would pass the ball of yarn to a kid next to me and ask them to begin. I know not to ask for volunteers because no one will ever volunteer themselves, I just have to select. The first person I select visibly wants to wither away and die on the spot. One girl even asked me to pick someone else. But I don’t give in and no matter how long they take I just wait for an answer. I think its good for them. This is something they have never had to do before. They have to think for themselves. A few times the kids were taking so long to come up with an answer so I asked them if they thought Democracy was a good thing or a bad thing. And they said it was good, and that was good enough for me, so I let them pass the yarn. And then the next four responses would be “My name is ____ and I think Democracy is good”. Paraguayans were never taught to think for themselves. Teachers write passages on the board, students copy it down in their notebooks and students regurgitate it back for them on the exams. Its memorization. They never really learn the material and the never really learn how to think because they are always given the answer. This is why when I ask adults questions about Paraguayan history they all say, “Oh, I used to know that, ask a someone in school”. They never retain any material. Its not seen as copying or cheating to give the same answer as the one your classmate just gave. If American students were doing this same activity they would try to come up with the most original answer, while Paraguayans want to give the most common answer. In a class I would get a lot of “Democracy is liberty” or “Democracy is right” or “Democracy is justice”. In one group I even got a few, “Democracy is love”. I don’t know if the kid who started it was just fooling around, was actually being serious or was just very poetic. But I emplore him for his creativy. However, every once in awhile I would get a bright shining star who might say, “Democracy means all people, no matter who you are, have freedom and human rights, and the right to elect who you want to represent you. Democracy is the freedom to participate in a government system.” Bingo!

The end result of the big ball of yarn is a big spider web in the middle of the circle. I read about the activity in my Muni handbook. It is called nanduti, which means spider web in Guarani. The web is meant to symbolize democracy. First, everyone participates because everyone holds apart of the web and had a hand in making the web. Second, the web is transparent. We can see every part of it. I would have liked to make a third point if I had multicolored yarn that not everyone is the same, different religions, colored skin, gender, but they are all united but I could not find multicolored yarn in Fassardi. Next came my favorite part (and which I forgot to do the first time because I was so frazzeled with all the disruptive kids). I had two or three people drop their yarn and would ask the kids if our democracy still worked without two participants. Some would say no some yes. I would tell them it does still work because we can still see all parts of the web. Therefore, we don’t need everybody to participate in the democracy to make it work. Then I have half the group drop their yarn and the web has now almost disappeared. I ask them if our democracy still works. They almost always agree that no it doesn’t. I say this means its because we need the majority of our community to participate for our democracy to work. Therefore, case in point, democracy doesn’t work without participation! It was always a pretty cool activity and went over pretty well, especially when I had smaller groups. Some groups were much more participatory and less timid than others, but that first group with 50 kids was ridiculous because we were outside, no one could what was going on if they were paying attention and the kids talk so softly that I would yell their answers out for everyone to hear.

Next I put up a visual I had drawn of the outline of Paraguay with a definition of Democracy written inside. I would ask a student to read it outloud in a nice big voice and then explain it in their own words. Then I would say this is only one definition of Democracy, after the demonstration, we know democracy means many things to many people, so we need to improve this definition. I had eight cards with different words them. I told them that in pairs or groups depending on the size of the class they would each get a card and have to decide how their word was apart of the definition of democracy. I would give them a few minutes, sometimes I would walk around and help them, then we would talk about it with the whole class. Usually they would be able to get the right answers. After we discussed the word I would have them go up to the board and tape their card to the map. I asked every class if they knew when their constitution was written. No one knew. It was written in 1992. This was shocking to me considering the year our constitution was written is branded in the brains of all American children.

Then I would ask the class now that they understand democracy, what is their responsibility in democracy. I was looking for them to say participation. Some got it, some didn’t. I then but up another visual that talked about the definition of participation and how democracy is founded on participation. I then asked how they could participate in democracy, right here in Fassardi. With this question everyone was stumped. No one ever came up with an answer of their own during this section, that was frustrating. I told them they could better inform themselves about current events in their country to be more knowledgable by reading newspapers and watching the news (even though you cant buy newspapers in Fassardi), I said you can form youth groups, help the environment, start a student government, petition the mayor, have a fundraiser. Some kids got excited about these ideas but lots gave me blank stares and looked bored.

We are always supposed to finish our charlas with a “check for learning” so I ended with another little activity. This always seemed to be everyone’s favorite part and ended up having a bit of a competitive edge to it that I didn’t anticipate. I indicated one side of the class room represented “democracy” and the other side represented “not a democracy”. I had written on a bunch of slips of paper characteristics that were present in democracies, dictatorships, autocracies, etc… Anything that was represented in “not a democracy” I tried to pick elements from Stroessner’s dictatorship. ‘Only one political party’ and ‘Can’t form groups’ and ‘no transparency’. For democracy I had things like, ‘open debate’ and ‘multiple political parties’ and ‘balance of power’. So I would hand out the strips of paper and the kids would have to move to the side of the room they thought was appropriate. Then the kids would read their papers out loud to see if they were correct. If someone was wrong their was always a lot of shouting and laughing as the kid had to do the ‘walk of shame’ to the other side of the class room, it was pretty hilarious. I thought of this activity all on my own so I am pretty proud that everyone liked it. I think it was a good activity because everyone had to participate but didn’t put anyone in the spotlight too much (except for the few unfortunate souls who got the wrong answers, although they were all very good sports and laughed at themselves too), everyone had to think for themselves but it wasn’t too challenging, it was educational, it was competitive, and it only took a few minutes. (Although, the pressure to decide what side of the classroom was obviously too much for one kid and during the shuffle he came up to me and asked to go to the bathroom. I said yes, but in 5 minutes, he put his slip of paper on the table and ran out of the room. Poor kid.)

Often my charlas would end and I would be bombarded by teenage girls. They would surround me and attack me with questions. What is my moms name, my dads name, what is their name in English, do I have a boyfriend, what is my last name, what is my favorite color, do I speak Guarani, can I teach them English. The questions never stop and sometimes the questions are really funny and sometimes they just cant imagine that we don’t have mandioca in the United States or only use our fathers’ last names. The fact that my name is only Jenna Houts never ceases to amaze them. There just has to more to it.

Overall, I think my charlas went very well. Although I don’t think my one hour lecture is going to change anyone’s life I think I made an important step into becoming apart of the community. Now I have interacted with half the teenagers in Fassardi (a good chunk of the population in the center) which means they have all gone home and told their families about me. Now I am not just the foreign girl walking around town to them. They know my name and know why I am here. I can tell after a few weeks they feel like the know me now, they aren’t so scared of me anymore. They wave at me like they have made a personal connection with me, sometimes they even call out my name. One kid came to my house one night for help with his English homework. I was so thrilled someone actually took me up on my offer! He also borrowed my extra dictionary…he has yet to return it.

So that is the news for now!!

Fassardi is a 4 ½ hour bus ride from the capital of Asuncion. Asuncion is a big, semi-cosmopolitan city with classy shopping malls and a wealthy, elite population. I was given a statistic during training that the HDI (Human Development Indez) of Asuncion is equal to Israel while the HDI of the rest of Paraguay is equal to Kenya. Asuncion doesn’t feel like the Paraguay I lived in my first months in country. In Asuncion I can find all the comforts of home…movie theaters, supermarkets, taxi cabs, outlet stores, you name it. But Asuncion is a world within itself, the country surrounding it doesn’t seem to fit. So boarding the bus at the Asuncion terminal and riding the 4 ½ hours to my site is like slowly floating into a different universe.

I love the bus rides. Its a time when I can truly relax and be just with me. No one tries to talk to me, no one bothers me. On the bus everyone seems to want to be left alone, to get the ride over with. Its fine with me. I spend everyday talking to strangers, trying to understand their language, sometimes painstakingly, and the bus ride is a welcome break. I love sitting and staring out the window watching the Paraguayan countryside go by and listening to my ipod. Its like I have a front row seat to Paraguay with my own soundtrack. Often I’m sad when the ride is over. I know I have to get off the bus and put my neck out their again. I know my “break” is over. Even though I just sat on a crowded bus for 4 ½ hours, I was entertained the whole time. The bus drives on a two lane highway carved through green forests, small towns and large crop fields and I have a magnificent view the whole trip. The bus drives through 4 different states to get to Fassardi. Women in short skirts board the bus to sell “chipa”, a traditional Paraguayan bread for $25 a piece. The bus makes two stops along the way in the two large cities. At the bus terminals I can buy chipa, sandwiches, ice cream, candy, bananas etc.. simply by opening my window and I will have a pod of vendors quickly gather below me. I claim what I want and the selected vendor will step forward and hand me my snack. I hand them their money, close my window, and go back to my daydreaming. I see the real Paraguay on this bus trip. I see how Paraguayans live.

The Paraguayan countryside is subtly beautiful. It doesn’t have the striking volcanoes of Ecuador that take your breath away or the bold blue and white beaches of Brazil (so I wait to find out). But the Paraguayan landscape stretches to infinity in subtle beauty. Paraguay is blue, green and red. Blue for the deep blue sky. Green for the dense, endless, forest. And red for the red dirt that covers the Paraguayan landscape, that stains your shoes, finds itself in your clothes, your fingernails, your ears, your hair, toes, and every other crevice of your body.

I know I have arrived home when the bus turns off the asphalted highway and onto the cobblestoned streets of Fassardi. (All the main roads in the center of Fassardi were just recently cobblestoned. Before, they were all dirt roads and now the buses are willing to pass through the town. It is extremely expensive to asphalt a road in Paraguay, therefore, many municipalities choose the highly inferior cobblestone which is much cheaper but protects the road when it rains.) The bus drives down the long bumpy road for 2 kilometers to the center of town.

How do I describe how it feels to be in Fassardi? Does it feel like a poor town? That is really hard for me to say. I’m really not sure. Maybe it would feel poor to someone coming here straight from a rich country. Maybe it would feel poor to someone who hasn’t experienced other parts of Paraguay. Fassardi does not feel poor to me. But that isn’t to say someone else wouldn’t think it is. For the most part, the people who live in the center of Fassardi live well and comfortably. They eat well and they enjoy small luxuries. Everyone has a cell phone, many have motorcycles, few have cars, very few have computers. Obviously, some families are better off than others. Fassardi does well because they have the wood factory, which means they have an additional source of income and they don’t only depend on their fields. Although the majority of Fassardians do depend on their sugar cane fields for income but sugar cane is a highly productive cash crop throughout my state, Guaira.

Most homes in Fassardi are modest, typical Paraguayan homes made from wood. Some are very shabby and appear to almost be in disrepair or abandoned but then people still appear to be living in them. A lot of homes do not have modern bathrooms, they have latrines. The elementary school just had a brand new bathroom built and it took four years of the principal’s blood, sweat, tears, and begging the state to get it built. Her efforts were well worth it because the latrines the children had to use were incredibly unsanitary. The bathroom cost $10,000. I took photos of the new and old bathrooms to make a before and after display for the school’s office…the difference is appalling. The high schools and the elementary schools in the rural areas still have latrines.

I spent one Saturday with the nurses from the health center driving/off-roading around the almost impassable dirt “roads” in the rural zones of Fassardi giving vaccinations. These areas are very poor and extremely far from the urban center. We were lucky we could get in and out in a day because we borrowed the mayor’s powerful 4 wheel drive vehicle, otherwise people’s modes of transportation are oxcart, walking, or motorcycle..

Fassardi is a town conflicted with the old and the new. Cowboys on horseback herd their cattle through the streets to the slaughterhouse and huge 18 wheeler semis loaded with the freshest sugar cane harvest share the same roads on their way to the factory. The semis are owned by the lucky, successful farmers. More common than the semis are the ox drawn carts loaded with sugar cane and the clippity-clop of the oxen hoofs on the cobblestone. Modernity is slowly reaching Fassardi and Fassardians are drinking it in. People are trading in their horses for motorcycles, the neighborly house call for cell phones., the speedy water heater for tea kettles. I see easy technology seeping into all parts of life in Paragauay, maybe some is for the better and maybe not. But Fassardi perpetually lives in a state of limbo between tradition and modernity and in the mean time the cobblestoned streets will be shared by hoof and wheel alike.

Two stories that mix a little bit of the old and the new:

Although the technology makes my life easier I especially love the tradition, I love walking by cowboys on horseback, oxcarts and horsecarts and women on their horses coming into town from the campo for supplies. The day before my birthday I was passing the time drinking terere with my friend Stefi when there was some commotion down the street. Her street is the thoroughfare to the slaughterhouse and all the cowboys walk their cattle right past her house on their way. Down the road two cowboys were having a hell of a time getting their cow to cooperate, she sat down right in the middle of the road and refused to get up. A crowd gathered to watch them struggle. Its like she knew she was being sent to her death. The cowboys were whipping her, trying everything they could, but she refused. They caused quite a scene and blocked the road. Cars had to squeeze around them to get by.

A week later, Mirian, my coworker at the muni, was flipping through pictures on my camera and came across the pictures of the stubborn cow in the road. She said that was the cow we ate for my birthday barbeque. I didn’t know what to say. But she sure was yummy.

Yesterday I went to the Fassardi Sport Club away game in Itape, about 1 ½ hours away. I drove with the mayor and a bunch of his cronies in what I like to call the mayor pimp mobile. It’s a shiny, purplish, super-slicked up pick-up truck and by far the fanciest car in town. If anyone is lucky enough to even own a car it is most likely a piece of crap from the 80s. Eduardi, the 27-year-old mayor, picked me up along with 7 of his friends and his 7-year-old son, that I never knew existed. We crammed into the pimp mobile and we zoomed off to Itape. First we stopped in Villarrica, the capital of Guaira. We all got out, sat on the curb and drank terere while the mayor drove off and left us there for 30 minutes. Super sketchy? He eventually came back, we crammed back into the truck and went to the game. The game was uneventful. We lost 2-0. Our team sucked. But on the way back as the sun was falling and Eduardi was dodging cows, dogs, and other animals in the road, one dog darted out in front of us. He put his foot on the break for a brief second and then realized he was either going to hit the dog or have to swerve. So, he pushed the accelerator to the floor and ran right over the dog. It felt like we only went over a speed bump in that monster vehicle. Eduardi laughed and said, “All I’m missing now is a cow!” Then everyone in the car had to recount their own proud stories of how many animals they have personally killed with a vehicle. Chiki, my contact, killed three cats in one night. To be honest, after living in Paraguay for 4 months I felt no emotion toward that dead dog in the road. There are too many damn dogs in Paraguay and they are pests, I think. They bark for all hours of the night, breed like rabbits, aren’t trained, shit everywhere, and have rabies. No one is going to miss one less dog in Paraguay, especially me. Also, I was especially proud of my mayor for his snap judgment skills. I think many Americans would have swerved that car and gone off the road to save the dog. However, with seven people in the car, two riding in the bed of the truck, and only one wearing a seatbelt (ehhhm, me), my mayor’s instinct to run over the dog and keep all the people in his car safe was by far the best decision. So, I felt I was riding with a driver with good instincts and I suddenly felt safer, and maybe (or oddly) had a little more confidence in him as mayor (Ill take confidence in politicians wherever I can find it!).

I have officially been in my site for one month, a milestone marker I think. So what is my next step? I still have no clue what kind of project I want to start. I really feel like I am still getting my feet wet. I still have a lot to learn, a lot to figure out. Sometimes I feel completely in over my head, like I am taking on way too much responsibility and I have no idea what I am supposed to do or how I am supposed to help these people. A month feels like no time at all. It feels more like a week has passed than a month. I really understand why Peace Corps needs us to be here for two years. Things take a really long time to happen. The days just pass me by. At times I feel this new, “tranquilo” lifestyle is addicting. I feel I can fit in by being lazy just like my neighbor Paraguayan and spend the day not doing any work too and feel like I am doing my job because I am “adapting” to the culture. But, I was pretty good at being lazy at home in the US too.

Its really nice to be my own boss. I really can do whatever the heck I want to with my days. I’m not going to lie, its really nice. The hard part is fitting in other ways. People are often interested in meeting me and I can communicate with people easily at first. But, connecting with people beyond that first encounter and making friendships, in another language, is proving a lot harder than I thought. I am supposed to establish a whole life for myself in this town and that means making meaningful friendships, but two languages and a cultural barrier stand in the way.

I am one month in my site but four months total in Paraguay which equals four months living with a Paraguayan family. Living with a family has been a great experience, mostly, but this past week I have really started to grow tired of it. For four months I have lived in someone else’s house, ate someone else’s food, lived by someone else’s schedule and used someone else’s stuff. And I have been completely content with this arrangement until just recently. I even thought when I first moved in with my family in Fassardi that my set up was so great that I might never want to leave but I have started to itch to live on my own again. Now that I am out of training, living in my own site and dictating what I do everyday I am itching to live on my own again. I would like not to have to eat lunch at noon on the dot everyday and not eat mandioca twice a day everyday. I have started to look for my house to rent and to fix up so it will be ready when I can move out. My mission the next few weeks will be to start making these arrangements. I think I will feel a lot more settled and at home once I have my own house.

Some Paraguayan Ridiculousness:

Spy Me

Today my host sister and I were on a walk when all of a sudden she changed to a very serious tone and said she was about to tell me something but “I didn’t here it from her”. She said people are very suspicious of me and there is a rumor going around that I am a spy. I have heard about this happening before and I can see maybe why people would be suspicious since I have come to live in their village all by myself and haven’t done anything yet that I claim I am here to do. So far I just go to the muni and sit around. But, come on, why on earth would the US government care what people in this silly little town are doing? NOTHING happens here. Its so ridiculous. But, I guess it goes to show no matter where you live or who you are you think what you do matters. My friend told me the next time someone tries to tell me I am a spy I should tell them I’m way too pretty to be a spy or pretend to take notes on what everyone is eating for lunch. Maybe I could even step it up a notch and walk around like Ace Ventura, sneak up on people from behind bushes, and pretend to tape record conversations with my cell phone.

Water Thief

I often get asked if water is expensive in the United States. At first I was really confused why Paraguayans always wondered about the cost of water. I tell them “no water is really cheap” and ask if water is expensive in Paraguay. They say “no water is very cheap here”. It turns out I am asked this question so often because Paraguayans are convinced Americans come to their country to steal their water. Paraguay has the largest aquifer in the world, one of their only declarable resources and something they are very proud of, so why wouldn’t Americans be here conspiring to steal their valuable water? It makes sense. We invade other countries to steal other valuable and expensive resources, like oil, so obviously water must be expensive in our country too. Logical right? But I live alone in this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, so how am I going to steal the water? Am I going to steal away with it in my backpack? I don’t really get that part.

Here Kitty Kitty

All the cats in Paraguay have the same name. Michi. All dogs are given names but cats are all called “Michi”. At first I thought it was derived from the Guarani word for little ‘Michimi’ but everyone says it has nothing to do with this word, even though it sounds exactly the same. But everyone I ask still can’t explain what Michi means and why dogs have names and cats don’t. I have decided ‘Michi’ would be like calling every cat ‘Kitty’. Obviously Paraguayan culture values dogs more and that’s why they give them names. Cats serve a purpose; cats kill pests that invade the house they are not for companionship. They kick them when they meow, throw them scraps from the table, and mostly ignore them. Some Paraguayans still claim they are cat people over dog people but I never seem them pick them up, hug them, pet them etc… I believe Paraguayans would be appalled if they ever saw how my family and I treat my cat in the United States: we buy him special food, open doors for him when he demands it, let him sleep in our beds, clean his toilet for him, carry him from room to room because we want to be with him, pay for multiple surgeries when he gets in fights with neighborhood cats, ask about his whereabouts several times a day, the list could go on and on. My cat has a better life than many Paraguayans themselves. Its pretty pathetic.

My cat has a clown Halloween costume my mom’s friend bought for him a long time ago. Last year I fished it out of the junk drawer and dressed him up. I have a picture of my clown cat in the photo album I brought to Paraguay. When I showed my first host family this photo album and my host grandpa came across this picture he asked me if it was a photo of my stuffed animal. He couldn’t fathom anyone would dress up their cat as a clown or that a clown costume would ever exist for a cat. He had never looked through an American’s photo album before, maybe all Americans carried pictures with them of their favorite stuffed animals? Maybe all American girls have stuffed cat clowns….why not? It would be just as freaking insane as dressing up Michi as a clown.

My host family in Fassardi has a cat. They treat their cat like all Paraguayans treat cats and of course call it Michi. Being a cat lover, I cannot stand that they don’t even name him. So, I decided to name him myself and will call him by this name even if no one else will. My USA’s family tradition for cat naming requires all cats be named after someone famous. The reigning feline is Benjamin Franklin. So, I wanted to continue the tradition and give this cat a name just as profound. He is black and white. Or, half black. So I christened him Obama. Everyone knows about Obama and it is pronounced just like the Guarani word ‘Opama’. So maybe it will start to catch on soon.

Pictures

Sugar Cane Field in Fassardi

Two friends in Fassardi at the local soccer game

The Post Office

Out in the campo visiting another volunteer, sitting on the porch, watching the sunrise, drinking mate

Parading around the soccer field after Fassardi Sport Club won the Championship...They were excited!

The Paraguayan Countryside

Fassardi main street and view of the hills

I call this...Paraguayan Cowboy at Sunrise

Here are some topics that consume my day to day life in Paraguay that are starting to seem so normal to me I am starting to forget what my blog-reading American audience will find interesting and starting to run out of blog ideas (I am afraid Dale is going to find this blog somewhat or terribly boring)….maybe that’s what happens when you really LIVE in a country for awhile. If anyone is ever interested in a certain topic about Paraguay or Peace Corps from my perspective feel free to suggest a topic for my next blog!

Thinking about Language Learning

I have never considered myself a language person, I never just “picked up” the language with ease and I was never a top performer in my Spanish classes, I was always somewhere comfortably in the middle. I really enjoyed my Spanish classes mostly because I was fortunate enough to have really fabulous Spanish teachers in high school (which I really did not come to realize until the last year or two) and I worked hard in those classes because I was a good student. Also, I firmly believe that an excellent teacher can make any student enjoy any subject material, no matter what it is. For example, I even enjoyed physics class in high school because I had the most charismatic, out-of-this-world teacher. So, I don’t think I was predisposed to become a Spanish speaker (I wanted to take American Sign Language and my dad forbid it and forced me to take Spanish, he said I would thank him later…so Thank You Dad, I think you changed my life!). So I think my ability now to speak Spanish was created from a combination of my great teachers, my endless brown-nosing desire to please them, and a general growing enthusiasm for the language after I realized I had a minor aptitude for it…nowhere compared to my terrible math skills. Part nature part nurture. I know not all my classmates from San Dieguito felt the same way about our Spanish classes and maybe some just hate language or just don’t have the capacity to learn another language. But I know I was extremely lucky to have Spanish class at that institution. Who knows, I may not be in Paraguay today if it weren’t for them (So thank you Mrs. McClusky and Co!) I always said language class was the most beneficial thing anyone could ever get out of high school…look where it took me.

I have been thinking a lot lately about my Spanish education career as I try to undertake the daunting task of cramming another language into my brain. I have realized learning a language is all about learning style. I have always known I am not a “language person”, I could never listen to people speaking a foreign language and eventually learn to speak it myself. I know these people exist, they are some of my fellow trainees and Peace Corps Volunteers, some who came to Paraguay without a lick of Spanish or Guarani and now speak both without a hitch. Although I did not really learn to speak Spanish in my ten years of sitting in a classroom, those countless hours of drills, repetition activities, videos, homework, and textbook reading were the way I learned the foundation of the language I needed to be able to speak it. Of course, there is no other way to become fluent in a language than being completely immersed in it, this is obvious, but those ten years of classroom lessons are also invaluable to my understanding of the Spanish language. Now, I am trying to learn a new language in a totally different style. I had three months of formal language class but three months worth of lessons covers a pathetic amount of material when it comes to an entire language. So, I am almost starting from scratch and sitting and listening to foreign conversations everyday and wondering how people just “pick up” a language this way. I am a formal language learner, there is no other way around it. I need the classes everyday: the drills, the homework, the worksheets, the stupid dramas, and textbook passages. I never thought I would have a craving for a fill-in-the-blank worksheet in my life, but now I certainly do. Or maybe I am just a big nerd. These things do not exist outside of PC training. There are no textbooks or classes for Jopara, the mix of Spanish and Guarani Paraguayans speak. Paraguayan children learn pure Guarani in schools and so many of these textbooks exist. But considering a very small portion of the population actually speaks pure Guarani, these texts are really useless to me. I have also have never been very good at self induced study. So making myself study this language all on my own is not so appetizing when I don’t have to turn in an assignment for a grade or show a teacher what a shining student I am. I would rather take a nap.

People are constantly trying to teach me words in Guarani, but Guarani is different from Spanish in that the words don’t stick with me. Spanish is similar enough in its sound structure and lexicon to English that I can hear a word, ask its meaning, and easily hold on to it and use it in conversation the next day. This is not the case for Guarani. Guarani’s sound structure is so completely different than English and Spanish that words just sound like mumbo jumbo and they go in one ear and out the other. Sometimes I want to reply, “How can that possibly be a word? You are just spitting out a bunch of vowels and grunting like a caveman, that can’t possibly be a word!” Sometimes I think Guarani words are beautiful and sometimes they are nothing but maddening. I usually try to repeat the word out loud several times to try and hang on to it, but alas, I will have forgotten 5 minutes later. I have to hear and possibly see, and be retold the meaning of a Guarani word 10-15 times before I am really going to get it.

But people do learn this language. I have heard many of my fellow countrymen speak it with ease and I am nothing but green with envy when they do. Of course, I don’t have to learn Guarani. My brother Reuben, the secretary of the city council, says I speak better Spanish than some of the city council members (I like him!). I could get by just fine and live a content life here in Paraguay without speaking Guarani, and a lot of volunteers do just that. But, Guarani is the language of the people, it’s the language in their hearts and sometimes I think it pains them to have to only speak Spanish to me. Guarani is a very malleable language, its traditionally a spoken language and therefore doesn’t have a lot of structure or rules and Paraguayans twist and turn it to fit their moods. It’s the language they joke in, the language they cry in, the language they celebrate in. Guarani is their language of expression. Spanish is their language of textbooks, official documents, and politicians. Guarani is the people, Guarani is the culture. So if I really want to start to understand Paraguay and Paraguayans….its Guarani or go home

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Terere: “It’s like Crack to These People”

-Fellow PCV

How have I written 10 blogs and not written about terere? If a Paraguayan ever read this they might think it was a crime. If you have ever traveled to the Southern Cone than no doubt you are familiar with the infamous yerba mate South Americans are additcted to. It is ubiquitous in Paraguay, Argentina, Urugauay and apparently some parts of Brazil. But just like they speak their Spanish, every country drinks their yerba mate just a little differently. And just like their Spanish, it is an intimately important part of the culture, and you never leave home without it.

I am sure you can google terere or mate and get a perfectly good definition on wikipedia, which you should do if my explanation doesn’t satisfy you. I have tried to explain it to my dad over the phone several times and I still think he doesn’t get it. I don’t know if its because he is getting old or because my descriptive skills fail me but each time the conversation ends with, “you’ll just see when you get here.”

Yerba mate is a plant similar to plants grown for tea. In fact, I think of terere as a very different spin on tea. You can buy yerba mate tea from organic supermarkets in the states and drink it how we Americans/Europeans like to drink tea, with a tea bag immersed in a cup of hot water. Paraguayans do it differently. First, there are no cups and there are no tea bags. Terere is drunk from a gourd. The gourd can be made of wood or metal and they come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes the gourd looks like half a ram’s horn. You fill the gourd almost to the top with the leafy yerba mate plant. Then you pour water into the yerba until it reaches the top and drink the water through a filtered straw. This is your basic mate all around the Southern Cone, but of course every country has its own spin. Mate means you pour steamy hot water into your gourd and Terere means you pour ice cold water into your gourd. That is the only difference. Argentineans only drink mate and Paraguayans drink both because of the drastic climate change. Since I arrived in the winter I didn’t understand what all this terere talk was about, I fully enjoyed the hot mate everyone was drinking. But now that the temperature has taken a sudden swing into the scalding summer with no warning all I want is that ice cold terere.

Paraguayans drink their terere and mate all day everyday everywhere they go. Ask anyone who has been to Paraguay, I am not exaggerating in the least. A girl from my training group said, “Its like crack to these people”. I think she summed up their addiction perfectly. Instead of purses, women walk around with their thermoses and guampas (gourd). They have specially designed purses, fashionable ones at that, to fit their thermos, guampa and cell phone. Thermoses and guampas come in all kinds of feminine colors and sizes and can be bought absolutely anywhere in Paraguay. Thermoses are a more common sale item at any bus stop/newsstand/roadside fruit stand etc… than the actual item being sold. Thermoses are ubiquitous throughout Paraguay. I strongly believe that if the thermos was never invented Paraguay probably would not be a country, just an empty wasteland. Men are equally addicted to their terere/mate and walk around with their specialized thermoses and guampas with their favorite soccer team logo blazed into the side of the macho leather carrying case. Sometimes I think Paraguayans are willing to spend more money on their thermoses then their houses or children’s education. Even city bus drivers have a secure location for their thermoses, with an easy press spout, so they can drink their terere and constantly refill with one hand on the wheel and one hand on their guampa….and one hand to open the door and one hand to collect the bus fare and count change???

Drinking terere is the national pastime of Paraguay. If nothing is going on you can always go over to your neighbor’s house and bet the family will want to drink terere with you morning, noon or night. My friend will say, “Come over tomorrow and we will drink terere” like there was an option to do anything else. But you don’t have to ever be invited to drink terere. You can just sit down with a group of Paraguayans and you can guarantee a gourd will eventually end up in your hands. Terere is a social experience and there are several unwritten rules, norms and taboos if you will, every visitor to Paraguay must know about terere drinking. In a group of terere drinkers, there is one gourd, one thermos and one server. The server will fill the guampa and hand it to the person next to them. When they have sucked all the water out of it they will hand it back to the server who refills it and hands it to the next person, and around and around it goes, for hours upon hours it can last. After an hour of drinking terere I get very full and feel I have had enough. I can take a brake and then start up again with another group later, who will be sure to offer it to me, but Paraguayans never seem to need a break. If you want to stop drinking just tell your server, “Gracias” and they know you are done and will skip you the next time the gourd comes your way. The fact that “Gracias” in Paraguay actually means “No Gracias” is a Paraguayan cultural quirk that we Americans have a hard time grappling with because there is no other clear way to say thank you, because Paraguayans don’t expressly say thank you for everything how we do. I have now become overly aware of how often in one day I feel the need to say thank you, I never realized this was a cultural attribute, I just thought I was being polite. I now have to stop myself from saying thank you all the time, it makes me look weird and makes them feel awkward because they don’t really have a way to say your welcome…..but that was a tanget….back to terere.

So everyone in the group shares the same gourd and the same straw. No care in the world for germs, it’s a germ free for all! Yeah, pretty much. And if the idea of sucking on a straw with a group of strangers freaks you out then you don’t have to drink the terere. Paraguayans have come up with a bunch of fabulous passive phrases to get out of terere drinking in order not to offend anyone such as, “I just drank some milk” or “I just had a mandarin” because combining any of these items in your stomach would certainly lead to death. But I have never considered myself a germ-aphobe and I thoroughly enjoy the terere/mate and the whole terere drinking cultural/social experience and so I think it is a risk worth taking. Some volunteers totally opt out of drinking terere the whole time they are here because of the germ sharing phobia but I would equate this on the same level as not trying to learn Guarani. Just a bunch of leaves in a gourd may not seem like a lot but Paraguay is a poor country and they don’t have a lot to offer, but they can offer you their terere and they are sure damn proud of it. Guarani and Terere ARE Paraguay. So….what is today’s lesson? Drink your terere and speak your Guarani (as pitiful as it may be) and love your fellow Paraguayan.

My House on the right and family store on the left

My site has all the small town charm a Paraguayan village should have and I have experienced a heaping handful of this charm in my short time here. Peace Corps training the last three months prepared me to deal with the “Paraguayness” of a small town and I have heard dozens upon dozens of stories from other volunteers who live in small towns like mine, if not smaller, and small town life is rather charming, but some of it is going to get some getting used to.

I have found a wonderful new host family to live with. I set myself up with the most perfect living situation I think I could find. I have two rooms in the front of the house to myself with a door to the outside patio so I can come and go as I please. I have a lot of space and plenty of privacy. My family is made up of my host dad Don Silvio, my host mom Na Kale (Short for Doña) and my host sister Clara. Don Silvio is in his early 60s although looks much older and has the sweetest old man demeanor about him. He doesn’t talk a lot, probably because he can’t get a word in with Clara and Na Kale around, but he sure is sweet. My first night here Na Kale and Clara were not here so just me and Don Silvio sat around together. He was really shy at first, he seemed embarrassed when I would talk to him directly, but now he is coming around. Although, that first night he really got the idea that I was there to be apart of their family and already was calling me “mi hija”. That made me feel very welcomed.

Na Kale has only been here for a day. She was visiting two of her daughters in Ciudad del Este on the Brazilian border. They have 7 kids in total, 4 live in Fassardi. This is a very normal family size, it seems everyone around here has 7 or 8 kids. So Na Kale is also a very sweet woman. She loves to crochet. She will sit in font of the TV and watch novella after novella and crochet all night. I think that sounds kind of like me. And, sadly I am starting to like the telenovelas, which is basically all there is to watch on the two stations we get in Fassardi. She is going to teach me to crochet. I am excited about that.

Clara is really cool. She is 28 and has two jobs as an obstetrician. She is very independent for a young Paraguayan woman from a small town. She sacrificed a lot to become an obstetrician because school is very expensive and finding a job is very hard. Now she works most of the week a few towns away where she has another apartment and the rest of the week at the health center here in Fassardi where she lives with her parents. Clara is old to still be single. I am sure people talk about her and wonder why she isn’t married. Although she has a boyfriend so that probably puts their minds at rest a little. Paraguayans are made very uncomfortable by single woman, they always want to marry them off or set them up. I would make a good case example.

My house is very quite and calm with only 4 people living here, a very nice change from the chaos I lived in the past 3 months. And although there are only 4 of us in this house, I am now related to half of Fassardi. Unknowingly I had already met my brother and sister during my future site visit. My sister, Nancy, is the principal of the elementary school and I was at my brother’s, Oscar, house for the friendship day barbeque. Also turns out my other brother is the secretary of the city council, the junta. Nancy and her husband run the little store next to my house and their little daughter is over here all the time. She loooves me and yells “Hola Jenna” “Chao Jenna” whenever she seems. That is a nice change from my other little host sister who was scared to death of me.

If Fassardi had a local newspaper my arrival would have made front page news. However, a town newspaper would be totally useless because the gossip circles cycle through town faster than a printing press ever could. If we ever hear a little bit of gossip and ask how that individual came about that specific piece of information we might be told, “A little birdy told me.” Well if Paraguayans do anything great its gossip, and their gossip is much too heavy for just a little birdy. Paraguayan gossip travels through the radio so’o – which means “the meat radio” in Guarani, or “cow radio”. And La Radio So’o is a town institution in Fassardi. Half the people I meet already know who I am, most know where and who I live with and they know I am a Peace Corps volunteer. Its amazing that this town hasn’t had a PCV for 15 years and they still remember Peace Corps. I am the new gossip in town. I was told I would get a lot of unwanted attention, unwanted text messages and phone calls, cat calls…this is all apart of being a female volunteer. And it is all true. I received an anonymous text message my second day here from someone saying he wanted to meet me because I must be beautiful because all Americans are beautiful. So ridiculous. “The brazilian” Deleusa, my second contact, then texted me that she had given him my number. I told her they were wrong, there are lots of ugly Americans.

Everyone wants to know if its ok for me to have a boyfriend, if I can marry a Paraguayan, and they “joke” that I should find myself a good Fassardeno. This is usually one of the first things people will mention to me when I meet them. It really makes them uncomfortable that I came to Paraguay all alone, it would make them feel better if I was attached to someone. For this reason I tell everyone that I have boyfriend. I think this lie soothes their souls and meanwhile helps detract some unwanted attention for me. It somewhat prevents people from constantly trying to fix me up with their sons, brothers, uncles, etc… Sometimes I tell them I have lots of boyfriends and they are all waiting for me in the United States, the women think that is hilarious. However, this lie doesn’t always help and I am still going to get harassed on a daily basis. Its just apart of Paraguayan culture I have come to expect.

Nothing says small town Paraguay like the Fassardi Post Office. I don’t know why I was expecting to walk in their and find an entire mail room, I guess that has always been my image of a Post Office, but that was very naïve. The Post Office is one, small, dark room with a table and a dirt floor. It is pretty depressing. Two women run the Post Office, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Turns out the woman in the morning is my contact’s mom. When I was asking about the Post Office the day before my contact, Chiqui, failed to mention this small detail and even told me it was closed that day. His mom told me it was open every day. I get contrasting information like this all the time. I came to the Post Office to find out the address so I could receive mail. Not so simple. There isn’t really an actual address like you and I would think because addresses in small Paraguayan towns don’t really exist. I had a hard time explaining this to my dad on the phone the other day. He wanted my new address so he could look me up on google earth. Not so simple. Often streets don’t have names and if they do nobody knows what they are. Houses do not have numbers. Addresses are based on landmarks. My address in Fassardi is the house across from the soccer field next to the store. This works if you didn’t know Fassardi but everybody in Fassardi knows each other or is related to each other therefore everyone knows where I live when I say I live with Don Silvio. When I asked the Post Office lady what should be written on the envelope she said I could put a variety of things, it didn’t really matter because she knows me and knows where I live and would come deliver the letter to me at my house or at the muni. She showed me a few examples of some letters she had in a drawer. Most letter where folded and stapled pieces of paper. One address looked like this:

Name

The house next to the school on the corner

Jose Fassardi

Department of Guaira, Paraguay

So, considering I am famous in Fassardi and you wanted to send me a letter you could send it to:

Jenna Houts “La Americana”

Barrio San Cayetano, Casa de Don Silvio

Jose Fassardi

Departamento de Guaira, Paraguay

Or simply

Jenna la Americana

Jose Fassardi

Paraguay

And it would get into my hands eventually. The volunteer coordinator told me this actually works and volunteers do actually get their mail.

I feel incredibly welcomed into this new community. If I can make any kind of general statement about Paraguayans its that they are very open and friendly. I can say I already have one real friend here. Here name is Stefi, she is 18 and invites me over to her house every afternoon to drink mate. Her mother doesn’t like her to leave the house, she thinks she is going to get pregnant. A very common story here in Paraguay. So she is stuck inside all day everyday helping out with the store. So, I think our new friendship is exciting for her. She calls and texts me and invites me over. She is really spunky. It might seem weird that my closest friend here is 18 but age here is all relative. People here don’t necessarily associate with their peers, they associate with their family members and their “in” group, the people they know and trust. Its totally normal to befriend someone 10 years older or younger than yourself. Plus, I think she is very mature for her age and I think I can be a very good influence on her and her mom. Maybe I will have the chance to show them how an independent woman can live safely and happily without getting pregnant. I also think her mom is okay with our friendship, it seems everyone is okay with me. She lets Stefi leave the house with me. Yesterday we went “shopping” together. Fassardi has a few stores where you can get all the basics and a few non basics. I was in one store talking with the clerk and before she knew my name she invited me over to her house on Sunday. Can you see yourself doing that with a foreigner you just met?

You might be asking yourself what about my job? Well, this is all apart of my job. It sounds kind of funny but I just went through three intense months of training, learning everything there ever was to know about municipal services, Paraguayan culture and being a Peace Corps volunteer while following a rigorous “very American” schedule only to come to my site and start living the Paraguayan schedule. The pace of life here is very slow, or tranquilo, to use a favorite Paraguayan word. So now I gotta be tranquilo too. I have been specifically told by Peace Corps not to work my first few months in site, or work how we think of work. My work the first few months is to get to know the town, try to introduce myself to as many people as possible, visit all the institutions, hang out at the muni, really learn about the town and what the problems are, what the people want and possibly what the people are willing to do. I couldn’t come into this town not knowing a soul and expect to get a successful project off the ground. Peace Corps projects are about getting the community involved and sustainability. Sure I could work on a project by myself everyday and when I finish I could say, “Look Fassardi, look what a guapa Americana I am. Look what I have done for you!” Sure they will appreciate it but no one will have helped me and no one will have learned how to help themselves once I am gone. That is not the principal behind Peace Corps, that is not why we come and live in a village for two years, why we learn the language, earn the same amount of money, eat the same food, wash our clothes the same way etc… Community participation is especially important for my job as a muni volunteer but Paraguayans have a history of a dictatorship working against them in this regard. This means the community has to get to know me and learn to trust me if they are ever going to allow me to work with them or expect them to participate in any kind of community activity. Therefore, I might not actually be producing anything tangible but this is all part of my work. It might sound nice and relaxing but it isn’t easy. I really have to put my neck out there and for a shy person that isn’t easy. Fassardi is small but I have a lot to learn and it feels overwhelming at the beginning. It is exhausting to speak in Spanish all day, exhausting not to understand the Guarani, exhausting to be experiencing everything new all day, exhausting to constantly be cold, exhausting to constantly explain why I live here, exhausting to feel lonely at times, frustrating, extremely exciting too…this week has been so many things. Maybe this can all makes sense in one experience I had last night.

I went to my first Fassardi city council meeting last night. I showed up at 5 o’clock and met all the consejales hanging out outside the muni waiting for everyone to show. We sat in the junta room in a circle, with the president and the secretary (my brother Reuben) at the head table. This meeting was different from the junta meeting I went to in JA Saldivar, it was a discussion about their town amongst friends, it did not feel political, formal or cold, and the junta meeting in JA Saldivar was all those things. They offered me a chair in the circle like I was one of them, a local Fassardena. I liked this set up already, it was very cozy and friendly. I thought this is how the junta of a small town should be. I told them I had come just to observe the meeting but that is not what they had in mind, they were extremely curious about me, the new comer, and asked me to present myself. So I told them about me and Peace Corps and why I was living in Fassardi. They asked me a lot of questions about my purpose here and what was my specific obligation. It turned into an intense interviewing session with lots of rapid-fire questions. It started to feel very very warm in that room all of a sudden. Their questions were nothing I had not experienced before, luckily Peace Corps training had put me in some similar situations and I felt I handled the situation great. They even praised my Spanish. However, all of their questions were very friendly and supportive. In the end they came to the consensus that I was an excellent addition to the community and they were very excited to work with me and to see what I could do. I felt really fabulous about the whole situation and then they switched over to regular business and I was lost in a sea of Guarani and something about the mayor and a lawyer….I really have no idea what happened the rest of the meeting. I sat their feeling extremely frustrated that I didn’t understand the Guarani and saw my future in front of me, an uphill struggle to still learn this language. I felt frustrated because I knew understanding these meetings is really important to my work, to understanding the town and its problems. This is the place where the town’s leaders gather to discuss its important issues, it doesn’t happen anywhere else. So in one hour I went from an extreme high to an extreme low. And that is exemplary of a typical day for me. It’s a rollercoaster ride.

I never expected this to be easy. I expect it to be hard everyday. I don’t think I would like it if it were easy. Even in the “low” times I know I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything else. I have no desire to be back in the United States. I can tell Fassardi is a really special place and now it is my special place. And to anyone that ever wants to come visit me in Fassardi I extend an open invitation to you. If you are ever lucky enough to step foot on Fassardi soil I guarantee you will make front page news too!

Note to Dale: I’m sorry my blog is “as long as the fucking bible” but you are just going to have to deal with it.

I now officially know where I will live for the next two years of my life. My town is called Jose Fassardi in the department of Guaira. The day of our site assignments my training group sat with our chairs facing the giant map of Paraguay that hangs on the wall in the training center in Guarambare. Our coordinator and assistant director, who have been preparing our sites for the last few months, stood in front of us with a stack of folders with our towns and names on them. They called out our names and placed a piece of tape next to our towns on the big map one by one. It was kind of a nerve racking moment to say the least, we were about to find out where we were going to live for the next two years of our lives. After the chaos of folders exchanging hands, I had time to go through my own folder and read about my town.

From my folder I know Fassardi is 4 hours by bus from Asuncion. It is a smaaaaaal town. 1500 people live in the center and 5500 live in the outside rural areas. I know it has electricity and running water. I know it hasn’t had a Peace Corps volunteer for 15 years. I know its economy is almost entirely agricultural and most people have sugar cane farms. I know the municipality, where I will be working, has only 5 workers including the mayor. I know I will have two counterparts, one is a man and one is a woman. And I know my friend Carrie will be in a town about 30 minutes away, which makes me happy. My friend Lyn is much further which is a big bummer. The folder also tells me more about the potential projects I could be involved in and what problems the mayor thinks the town has. That is pretty much all I know. As far as I can tell my APCD and coordinator really listened to everything I had to say about the kind of site I wanted and I had no reason not to be pleased.

The next day all of our contacts showed up in Saldivar. This was the day we had to meet the person we were supposed to work with for the next two years. Can you say awkward? They all walked through the door and had name tags on with our pictures on it, that is how they knew who belonged with who. That was fun. I will admit my first impression of my contact was not good. He is a tiny guy, very young, with a bad beard and a rat tale. He was screaming “which way to the disco?.” I couldn’t believe this guy was the general secretary of my muni, let alone my contact. I was less than impressed. His name is Luis, although everyone in Fassardi calls him Chici because he is so little. He is 25. We had activities planned for the whole day for the trainees and the contacts to get to know each other and learn about Peace Corps and how to help volunteers adapt to living in their towns etc… It was all still very awkward. Also, Chici spent the night at my house because Peace Corps budget is so low right now they can no longer afford to put up the contacts for the night. I wished they had sent my female contact instead. But he fit right in with all the young guys in my family. He went and hung out most of the night with the guys in the back in the “guy room” and I was left with my mom and little sister as always. So it was ok after all.

The next day we went to the training center in the morning for more Peace Corps training yatta yatta and then we were off to our sites. Carrie and I were planning to travel together since our sites were so close but we were having some issues considering both our contacts considered themselves young Paraguayan “studs” and were planning to take us back in their friends’ cars. Knowing how Paraguayans tend to drive, how young guys tend to drive, and how extremely sketchy it is to get into a car alone with two Paraguayan guys you don’t know…..we had some problems with this to say the least. But we were able to arrange to take the bus together from Asuncion using Peace Corps “rules” as an excuse as always. Those rules can always come in handy.

I stayed for 5 nights in Fassardi. I stayed with the mayor…..and his parents. Yes, the mayor still lives with his parents. He is 27….and girl crazy, therefore he was almost never home. So, I spent a lot of time with his parents, his dad is the ex mayor, and they are very sweet, but old and make a lot of unpleasant noises. It is not normal for the mayor in Paraguay to be so young. I have met a lot of mayors so far in Paraguay, and this is weird. He is a young guy that is always going out and doing god knows what. He comes home late and sleeps till 11 or later. Sounds normal for us but Paraguayans do not sleep late, they get up at the crack of dawn and milk the cow, take the bus two hours to their job, work on the farm, or at least drink mate with the family. On Monday morning when I left he was outside fiddling with his car when he definitely should have been at the muni taking care of business. I only saw him go to the muni once and I never saw him go in his office. Chici is his best friend from childhood and obviously got this job because Paraguay is still so nepotistic. Chici and Eduardi (the mayor) are quite a pair palling around Fassardi looking for chicks, I still can’t believe these guys are running the town, unbelievable.

Eduardi always greets me with a fist bump and asks me questions about the US and how to say things in English. He is smart and curious, two things I have a hard time saying about a lot of Paraguayans. He got out an Encycolpedia (He had one in his house!!!!) to have me point out where on the map of the US I lived. Thursday was Friendship Day in Paraguay. Kind of like Valentines Day but just for friends. To celebrate, Chici and Eduardi took me to their friendship barbeque that night. While we stood around and watched all the meat cook on the ground over the coals for several hours, Eduardi asked me how to say many many things in English. He asked me how to say ‘carne’. Which translates as ‘meat’ but here they refer to carne as just cow meat. So I told him we would call this kind of meat “red meat”. He practiced saying “red meat” a few times to himself. A few hours before the whole crowd sat down to a dinner of meat, mandioca and salty lettuce, Eduardi made a little speech, as all good politicians do, in honor of Friendship day. He said he felt blessed to be in the presence of such good friends on Friendship Day etc… Then he gave a special welcome to me and said he was very happy to have me here and welcomed me to Fassardi, he said it with such grace and it brought tears to my eyes. It was such a wonderful thing for him to do. Then we all sat down to eat. As he began to eat he looked at me and said very slowly and in English, “I likey red meat”. I try not to laugh when people try to speak in English but this was just too funny and I laughed my head off. I knew no one else knew why it was funny and I just wished another English speaker was there at that moment.

When we first got to the party we were sitting around the coal fire, inside, to warm ourselves while listening to the radio and chatting. I wasn’t saying much because they were speaking mostly in Jopara (a mix between Spanish and Guarani). Then I heard my name on the radio. Fassardi has a local radio station that the whole town listens to religiously that one guy runs out of his house, anyone can stop by and say a few words. So Hector, a secretary at the muni, was telling the whole town that Jenna, the new Internataional in town with the Peace Corps, is over at Rita and Oscar’s house for a Friendship Day barbeque. Then he listed off everyone else who was at the house. It took forever because Hector had to make a joke or comment about each of his friends. Then he came back to me and said a few more welcomes to Jenna the International. Only in a small town….

My first day in Fassardi Chici my contact took my around town to all the institutions to introduce me to the people. Fassardi has a muni, a church, a wood factory, an elementary school, two high schools, a health center, a police station, a social pharmacy, a library, a few stores selling the basics, two soccer fields, and that is about it in the centro. It also has 19 rural districts, called companias, each with its own elementary school. The muni is a very interesting place because it seems almost nothing happens there, and this is where I am supposed to work for the next two years. I have visited a handful of munis in Paraguay so far, most of them small, but none of them are like this. It seems its just a bunch of kids playing government. There is only one worker over the age of 30, but she acts like a kid just like the rest of them. The munis in Paraguay are only open in the mornings. They all close at the siesta and are closed until the next day. So if people aren’t doing much in the morning you can’t rationalize that they will get something done later. No, they go home and take a nap later. The first morning we went to the muni and nobody was working, just sitting around and drinking terere. Chici showed me pictures of his friends on his computer. Then the treasurer came in, she is 21, and it looked like she was actually doing some work. Eduardi showed up some time later, gave me a fist bump and then left again. I have no idea what he goes all day. Doesn’t seem very mayorly to me. He doesn’t even wear a suit.

The next day Chici and I showed up at the Muni around lunch time. Everyone was sitting out back drinking terere and cooking a chicken. We sat out behind the muni for 3 hours waiting for the damn chicken to finish cooking over the coal fire and then we ate lunch in the room where the city council members have their meetings. What a muni.

The health center is also a very interesting institution in town. It would be a scary place to go if you ever needed some real health care. The nurses were thrilled to meet me and excited that I might be able to work with them. One nurse, Chici’s aunt (everyone in this town in related, half are related to Chici) showed me around and I was shocked. The urgent care room had two plastic chairs and almost nothing else in it. The vaccine room seemed to be the most important room and the most valuable service they offer. Preventive health care is almost not thought of but so important and the nurses recognize that. The delivery room was very sad, cold and plain. It had one metal table in the middle of the room. All the paint is chipping, the walls are corroding, and the services are basic. On the plus side all services are free and they did have a room for family planning and all contraceptives are free, that is very cool, but not enough people take advantage of it. There are 6 nurses and 2 doctors. But the nurses do all the work, the doctors are only there for consultations and send patients to the district hospital in the capital.

I showed up at the health center again early on Sunday morning because the nurses had invited me to go around town and give vaccines to the people who still were missing their shots but they had canceled it because it had rained the night before. Everything here gets canceled because of bad weather because the dirt roads get washed out. I was really bummed about it but I sat and chatted with two of the nurses and after five minutes they had asked me if I would help them whenever there was a birth. They said usually only one nurse would handle an entire labor and delivery if it was at night (only one nurse on duty at night) or during the day if there were other patients and if they could call me to help they would be really grateful. I said why not. They asked me if I had seen a birth before. I said only a cow birth.

My main mission for this short visit to Fassardi was to find a family to live with when I returned. As of Sunday I still had not found a family. I was explaining this to Clara, one young nurse, and she invited me to live with her. She said she lived with her parents and had a spare room for me. Later that day I stopped by her house and met her mom, an extremely sweet woman who is very excited to have me. I have to say I am going to have a very sweet deal at this house, its definitely a step up from where I am now and quite a bit bigger, which isn’t very hard to do. I am renting two rooms in the front of the house. The two rooms are connected and the front room is sort of an office area. Its not really necessary but the two doors that lead to the outside and the rest of the house are in this room and allow me my privacy. So, I am going to have a lot of space which will be a nice change from what I have now. I haven’t met my new host dad yet. My host mom is going to cook for me too. When I left she said she is very excited to have a new daughter. So I have a new family waiting for me in Fassardi in two weeks.

My week in Fassardi was interesting, entertaining, unbelievable, and somewhat boring. There was a lot of down time and a lot of sitting around time. Paraguayans are masters of sitting and chatting or sitting and not chatting. And in a small town they are kings of the sitting and the chatting and the terere drinking. But, being in a small town means I am going to get to know everyone and they surely will all know how I am. I am the norte, the white girl, the blonde girl, I am one of a kind in this town. They all want to know me and ask me millions upon millions of questions. They want to invite me into their homes and give me terere or cocido (Paraguayan tea) and talk about food. They love to talk about Paraguayan food. I have had the same conversation about food over and over again in many different houses the last two and a half months. I am sure if you came to Fassardi and hopped off the bus in the middle of town and asked the first person, “where is the white girl?” you could find me within 10 minutes. Yep, I think I’m going to like it here.

Last Tuesday night I was in the kitchen helping my host mom, Delia, prepare dinner when our milk cow, tied up right outside the kitchen, was making an awful lot of noise. Delia said the cow was ready to have her baby that night and I should go have a look. I flicked the switch and peaked my head out the kitchen door and around the corner and I saw one big illuminated cow butt 5 feet from my face with two small hoofs just peeking out from under its tale. Holy shit, I was not expecting to see that at all.

We turned the light off and my dad came out with a flashlight to watch the birth. My parents didn’t want to turn the light on because they didn’t want my little sister, sitting inside watching TV, to be aware of the birth and come running out to watch. Delia thought Diahana was too young to watch and would ask too many questions, which she didn’t want to answer. I didn’t necessarily agree with this. She is 10 years old. I think that she is old enough to know about the birds and the bees. At least cows’ birds and bees. Delia herself didn’t even watch, she thought it was gross, even though she has had two children.

The little hoofs popped in and out of sight for awhile and then the mama cow laid down and we knew it was time for business. I stood outside the kitchen with my dad and my uncles in the dark, in the cold, and the silence with only the beam of the flashlight and we watched the new baby cow slowly come into the world. After the hoofs came the tip of the nose and the tongue. Next the whole head appeared. It was all very silent, mama nor baby nor observers made a sound. When the rest of the calf’s body started to appear the mama cow stood up. There she was with half a slimy cow hanging out of her ass. At this point my host dad beckoned for Delia to come take a look. Her eyes almost popped out of her head and she screeched, “Dios Mio.” I can only imagine what a sight it was if you hadn’t watched the whole process. She immediately went back inside.

Then my dad and uncle, Raul, decided it was time to help and they approached the 1 ½ animals and both grabbed either side of the calf and pulled him out of his mom. Then they dropped him and he flopped on to the ground. And so a cow was born! It all happened surprisingly fast. Immediately the mama cow turned around and started licking the baby and didn’t stop licking him for about three hours. The baby was disgusting, not only because he was covered in birthing fluids but because he was born in the mud. The endless licking seemed pretty hopeless to me. The baby was flailing around in the mud, trying to stand up after about 10 minutes of life, and getting itself even muddier.

After the baby was born we called Diahana and let her come out and see the new cow. She was in love with that baby cow at first sight. Although she couldn’t stop staring at the mom’s ass with the umbilical cord hanging out and she kept saying, “how ugly is that cow’s ass”. So maybe she was too young to watch after all. I tried my best to explain what it was but my Spanish was failing me and I’m not sure she got it.

We stood out in the cold for awhile longer and watched the mama and her baby. Most of us went in side to eat dinner when Diahana came running in screaming that something big and round and disgusting had just come out of the cow’s ass. Delia just ignored her. That is a common Paraguayan technique, when you don’t want to answer a question just don’t saw anything at all.

The baby stood up after about an hour and then wandered around the yard like a drunken sailor. It was very cute and very funny. We were all very entertained. T

So, its not every night you get to see a new life enter the world.

Its cold here

I have lived in Paraguay for two months and by far the most interesting part, for better or for worse, has been living with a Paraguayan family. I have learned a lot from them and I hope they have learned a lot from me. I feel very lucky to have lived in their house and been part of their family for a short while. I am sad that I have to leave in one month and start all over again with another family.

My host mom, Delia, is my Paraguayan hero. She works so hard, she has never had a day of vacation in her life, she knows her life is hard and she almost always has a smile on her face. She is the nucleus of the family and everyone depends on her. This family would fall apart without her. Not only is she the patrona of the store in the front of our house, but she does almost all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, takes care of the cows etc… She runs the household. She is the woman in charge. She takes care of everyone who lives in this tiny house, including me. She is just amazing. That is the only way to describe her.

Delia is my best friend in this house and when I am home I try to spend as much time as I can with her. I also find her very entertaining. One night, I was outside emptying my plate onto the ground for the dog to eat and Delia was watching me curiously. When I walked back into the house she patted me on the butt and told me “this is much fatter than when you first got here”. Now, fat comments are very common conversation topics in Paraguay and aren’t considered rude but after two months living here its still surprising to me. I still can’t believe my mom told me I had a fat ass. It is true I have gained a few pounds since I have been here, but what do you expect when you have to eat mandioca (like a potato) twice a day for two months? After that night Delia has continued with these comments and just straight out calls me fat, especially around meal times. One day at lunch she said she wasn’t going to serve me meat because I was getting too fat. Instead she gave me chessy soup and a big plate of fried mandioca, which is just like French fries, an excellent diet for loosing weight apparently because only meat makes you fat? I still haven’t figured out that logic.

My friend Lyn and I have brought Snickerdoodles to Paraguay. Surprisingly, the Paraguayans seem to love them. This is surprising because the Paraguayans, for the most part, are extremely picky about their food and if its something unfamiliar they what nothing to do with it. (One night my friends and I made Mexican food and one Paraguayan woman proclaimed, “look at all this strange food” and “I don’t know how to eat vegetables” and only ate the empanadas she brought). They like things extremely salty and extremely sugary. Watching a Paraguayan put sugar in their tea will give you a heart attack, its heaping spoon of sugar after heaping spoon of sugar and just when you think they are done they add one more spoonful. So maybe this is why they like Snickerdoodles: because they have the excessive Paraguayan portions of sugar and butter. Lyn and I made Snickerdoodles one afternoon and I brought some home for my family. They had been bugging me to cook for them and I told them they really didn’t want me to, all I can make is toast and eggs and they don’t have a toaster so it would be a really disappointing meal. Anyways, I brought the cookies home and offered them to everyone and got the customary/polite/passive Paraguayan response of “mas tarde” meaning “a little later” which actually translates “when hell freezes over will I eat that pig shit”. So, I was thinking this is the thanks I get for making you people cookies? I will never cook for you people again!?

I had to leave the next day for a 5 day trip to visit another volunteer and when I came back my mom said that my little sister, Dihana, ate all the cookies and she LOVED them and I had to get the recipe from Lyn. A few nights later Delia, Dihana, and I cooked Snickerdoodles together in our hallway/kitchen. Delia soon got bored of just making cookies so we made a Snickerdoodle cake and other interesting Snickerdoodle creations a la Paraguay. Since then, Delia has been making Snickerdoodles on her own almost every other day and they show up on the lunch and dinner table just as often. The family is officially obsessed with this new exotic food, I even get them for breakfast. No wonder I fat ass, its all her fault. Oh, I love Delia.

I also started to appreciate Delia so much more when I got back from the trip after I had to stay with a crazy lady for 5 days. Her name is Mami and was a lonely widow and therefore thrilled to have me as her guest for 5 days. However, I was happy to be away from training for 5 days and have a little bit of freedom. Our ideas about how we were going to spend our time were quite different. She thought I had come to be her best friend and I wanted to just spend time with my fellow trainees for once. She was crazy clingy! She was calling the volunteer we were visiting when I didn’t come home, asking where I was. The kicker was on the last night when we were cooking and spending time at his house she just came over and joined the group. When we were talking about our activities for the next day she got really mad and advocated we cancel our class and spend time with our host families instead because “we should spend quality time with the host families”. My Guarani teacher found her hilarious. I was scared. Although she did have her quirks. She had a big plastic bag of crocodile meat delivered via motorcycle one day and fried it up the next day. I tired a little, tastes like chicken. (I also ate capibara on that trip without knowing it. I was told I was eating wild boar. I only found out a few days later that capibara is the world’s largest rodent!)

Lyn, Me, and Carrie in Villa Florida

Capibara

Dihana, my little sister has definitely warmed up to me. She talks to me now, which is a huge improvement from the first month I lived her when she was so afraid of me, the big white monster that moved in to her room, she pretended I didn’t exist. Now, she plays games with me, she lets me help her with her homework, talks to me about her favorite things, loves to let me borrow her school supplies, and help me with my Guarani.

We play tic-tac-toe, hang-man, and mash with chalk on the living room door, we play uno and other Paraguayan card games. She is quite spoiled because she is pretty much an only child because her brother is so much older than she is therefore she is babied and feels entitled and her parents have no parenting/disciplinary skills at all. She can be such a brat. She talks back to her dad and never listens to him when he tries to scold her. He even will get out his belt and threaten to hit her with it but she will grab it away from him! He holds no weight with her. Its pathetic. She is the little princess of the household. Dad and Dihana screaming matches are a common occurrence. I don’t even flinch at them because they are so meaningless, I just sit and watch in amusement. Its like a circus. He tries to get her to stop doing something, she tells him no, and back and forth and back and forth, and he always gives up and she always wins. What a wimp.

My brother, Jorge, is as still obnoxious and full of testosterone as the day I met him. My first impression of him has not changed. He often bugs the crap out of me. He is an immature, insufferable teenager and he just can’t help himself so I guess I can’t blame him for being the way he is. But maybe I should start to consider an alliance with him considering we are now the two fattys of the family. Jorge endures the most attacks of fat comments from his family members. It really doesn’t seem to bother him. He knows he’s fat, he embraces it. He likes to flex his bicep for me and asks me to feel it and proclaims “muscle!” It is so obnoxious I just proclaim back, “fat”. Totally acceptable comment.

My two uncles live with Jorge in the room the back yard. Oscar is 19 and Raul is 20. There are a lot of men in this family. Oscar broke his cheek and jaw bone in a bad motorcycle accident and had to wait almost 2 months for his surgery and finally he had his surgery two weeks ago. He seems to be recovering well but still can’t eat solid food. Poor guy. The health system here is just so horrible and to watch this guy suffer the entire time I have been living here has really opened my eyes to how inadequate, to say the least, the national health system is. But that is a topic for another blog.

Raul was extremely shy when I first met him and wouldn’t even look at me let alone speak to me. But now he has started to relax and will talk to me some. He is still pretty shy but I think he is actually a great kid. He is extremely hard working and has a very good heart. He doesn’t go out and party with Jorge and stays in with the family. One day I watched him washing Oscar’s hair in the backyard with so much patience and care to make sure he didn’t hurt him, it was such a tender gesture of brotherly love it made me want to cry. When I came home from the 5 day volunteer visit the first person I saw at home was Raul, and he was wearing my necklace. It was a gold chain my American mom gave me that said Luck, a necklace I really really loved. I pointed to it, “where did you get that, that’s my necklace!” He said he found it on the ground and has been wearing it for two weeks. He let me take it off of him immediately. He said he thought he was so lucky for finding a gold necklace on the ground. He looked ridiculous with it on because it was way too small and was practically choking him and it is very feminine. But the whole family thought the encounter was quite hilarious and it was gossip for the rest of the day. Apparently Jorge had been trying to buy it from him for 3 mil, which is less than a dollar. This was just too funny for them to handle. Whatever. At least they were entertained and I got my necklace back.

I don’t have much to report about Antonio, my dad. Although, I really love that his nickname is Toto. Toto is a pretty big wimp and giggles at me a lot but he and I don’t have much interaction except when I have Guarani homework. He LOVES my Guarani homework. Although I fail to actually learn anything from him because he speaks so damn fast I never know what is going on. Dihana reminds that he has to slow down when he talk to me, which is very sweet of her, but that just result in another screaming match between the two of them and my homework is forgotten.

All of this said my family is quirky but I love them and I am surely going to miss them, especially Delia. She is so damn cool. Also, living in this house I feel a little spoiled because I know I have a lot that many people in this country do not. I know Peace Corps placed me with this family to mimic what my living conditions will probably be like once I get to my site, meaning I will have some luxuries other volunteers will not. Being a muni volunteer I will most likely be in an urban area meaning I will have more access to amenities. Therefore, I feel a little spoiled. I have my own room, a big bed, I have doors, a window with glass pains, I have running water most of the time, electricity most of the time, a hot shower most of the time, hot meals twice a day, access to the highway, access to internet etc…

Although I am a “spoiled” volunteer this is definitely a new, interesting way of life. Sometimes I come home and we don’t have water to cook with. Every time there is a storm the electricity goes out. The other night during a big storm when the power went out I was preparing my presentation for the next day so I had to make all my materials by headlamp. Although the temperature only gets down to freezing once or twice a year my house, along with the rest of Paraguay, doesn’t have the infrastructure to escape it. We live in our environment. We live with the cold. And when it gets really hot we will live with the heat. There are no furnaces, there are no fireplaces, there is no insulation. The buildings are made of brick and cement so often it is colder inside than outside. There is no escaping “the frio” as we call it. We just have to live with it. We have a really crappy space heater that Delia will plug in on especially cold nights. It will make one part of your body very hot if you sit right next to it while the rest of your body still freezes. Still, better than nothing sometimes. Therefore, I love my sleeping bag, it is so warm and cozy, sometimes I think its my best friend, sometimes its my boyfriend. It’s the best thing I brought to Paraguay.

The power in any given Paraguayan house, including my own, is pretty limited meaning the system can’t support too many electrical appliances, or any one power appliance at one time. Whenever Delia uses the electric mixer (quite a luxurious item to have!) the TV goes snowy, whenever anyone irons at Lyn’s house the shower goes cold. My blow dryer does not work here, even with the converter, and it wont work anywhere in Paraguay.

But none of this feels like a sacrifice or an adjustment. Its just how it goes, its how a lot of people live. But a lot of people don’t live this way. Its much worse. People live in uncompleted houses with no windows, no doors, no roofs, no water, no electricity. So I am extremely lucky to be where I am. I know to some people my situation may not sound like what their vision of the Peace Corps should be. But the Peace Corps has grown and manifested into a different entity than when it was first created. This isn’t your mother’s Peace Corps anymore. Its not just about living in a mud hut and building wells. I mean, it is for some sectors and in some countries. But that is just one part of the Peace Corps. Development can happen in many places and in many ways. Municipal Services is a fairly new program in the history of Peace Corps and not omnipresent in other PC countries but the more I learn about my future work the more I realize how important it is and the more excited I am to start. I find out my future site on Monday and will spend the next week visiting my site. Then I have just two more weeks of training and my official swearing in ceremony as a volunteer at the US Embassy in Asuncion (there are rumors that President Lugo could come). After a weekend of freedom, finally, in the capital I will be off to my site for two year. The beginning is almost here.

Wednesday night my host mom asked me if I wanted to go to San Lorenzo for an errand quickly. San Lorenzo is a 30 minute bus ride away and so I figured we could be there and back in an hour since we were taking the car. I also figured we were going to the supermarket, one of the main attractions in San Lorenzo. I was wrong on both accounts.

The family car is tiny and has broken down twice since I have been living here. Cars in Paraguay are generally a luxury for anyone to own and generally shitty. New cars are a fantasy, they are only for the super wealthy, and used cars date back to the dictatorship. Delia, my host mom, doesn’t know how to drive and is surprised that I learned how to drive at 16. She is terrified of driving and never wants to learn. The driving age here is 18, although hardly anyone obeys this law and most people, young or old, drive without a license. I have yet to ask my host dad if he has a license.

So me, Antonio, Delia, Diahana and some other new family friend I had never met before all piled into the car and drove off down the highway to San Lorenzo. I sat in the middle seat in back, the seat of honor, between my little sister and Mr. X. My host family doesn’t introduce me to people for the most part, it is culturally way too forward for Paraguayans to do so, so it is up to me to introduce myself but the last time I introduced myself to a male family friend it backfired and he wouldn’t leave me alone so I have stopped doing so. Therefore, I sat next to this unidentified man who spoke mostly Guarani without knowing why on earth he was accompanying us on our family errand.

We pulled into some kind of car mechanic shop. It was raining and wet outside so we ran for cover. Some men came out and inspected the car under the hood. I figured we were here to get the car fixed since it had broken down over the weekend. However, Delia was dodging my questions and wouldn’t tell me what was exactly going on. It was odd because usually she fills me in on the details. Then a bunch of men, including Mr. X and my host dad all were standing and staring at a truck and talking about it. It seemed like my dad was now interested in buying the car but Delia was still dodging my questions. Then one guy got behind the wheel of the truck and the family all got in, apparently for a test drive. So we were car shopping, apparently. Car shopping in the rain, at night.

The car sales man drove us around the crazy, congested streets of San Lorenzo in the dark and in the rain. He spoke mostly Guarani until he noticed me in the “seat of honor” between my sister and Delia in the back and asked how on earth I could be Delia’s daughter. All of a sudden selling this car to this family no longer became his concern, it was now me. He was asking question after question and Delia and I took turns fielding them. This is pretty common because as a foreigner with white skin and “blonde” hair I stick out and people are fascinated. These conversations seem to be filled with answering questions filled with many stereotypes about Americans. Especially when it is a man they like to make jokes that we should get married and move back to the states because since I am American I am obviously rich. They think they are so hilarious. Like I haven’t heard that one before.

At first I really didn’t like all this attention from Paraguayan men, because once they have started these conversations with me they never end, but I have started to learn how to bend them in my favor. After 10 minutes of the test drive, the car salesman invited me to an asado, a Paraguayan bbq, a very typical invitation from a man to a woman. Being direct and flat out saying “no, I think you are a total asshole” was my first reaction but is not an acceptable answer. Paraguayans avoid confrontation and rudeness at ALL COSTS. Instead they practice the art of the verbal dance which I am just starting to learn and appreciate. Therefore, I told this creep that I would only accept his invitation to the asado if I could bring my whole family. Delia thought this was just hilarious. The salesman said they could come only if they didn’t eat too much. I said “well, my family can eat a lot and they looooove asado, especially my brother, he can eat a whooooole lot.” At this, Delia lost it. Her son Jorge is a giant, disgusting garbage disposable of a teenager and can pack away the mandioca like no other. And, since discussing people’s girth is so normal, she thought my “fat jokes” about her son were fantastic.

Anyway, this conversation carried on for much longer. He asked about my personal finances, am I sure I am not a missionary, what are my mom and dads names, could he marry me and move back to the states with me, why wasn’t I already married, did I know the US has some poor people too (he mentioned this only after he told me I had to be rich because I was American) blah blah blah. Pretty typical. If he had been a kid the conversation might have included what is my favorite color, my favorite animal, my birthday, my favorite food, does the US have mandioca? Etc. etc. etc… the questions never end. The typical questions I field regularly. Sometimes it can be pretty hilarious. But this guy was ridiculous, however, my family found it hysterical and especially found my deflections to his come-ons entertaining. I was glad I could entertain them.

We drove up to the salesman’s other lot of cars where we had to get out in the rain and climb over the fence to open it. We drove in, dashed out of the car to an overhang with chairs and a table and sat there forever and started at the car. I didn’t know if we were going to look at another car because almost right away Delia told me that car was way too expensive and they wouldn’t buy it. It was very nice, I have to say and would have been a HUGE improvement over their current car. I couldn’t imagine how on earth they could afford it, I really don’t know why we ever got in the car to begin with. But we just sat their even longer while the creepy car salesman asked me more ridiculous questions. Then we got back in the truck and drove back to the original lot. The whole way back the windshield was so fogged up the salesman could not see out the front. He had the windshield wipers going, the windows open and was wiping the inside with his sleeve, but it was still fogged over the whole way back. But it still didn’t seem to bother him or warrant pulling over until the windshield cleared up, no one would ever think to do something like that. I thought this wasn’t making a very good sales pitch to my family. But it didn’t matter, they weren’t going to buy it from the second they saw it anyway. They just went through that whole scenario to be polite and not offend the used car salesman by telling him they weren’t interested in that particular car.

So, we got back to the lot, got back in our little car with Mr. X and drove back home.

“Man” I thought, “buying a car in this passive culture is going to be an arduous process”. But Delia was pretty thrilled with the whole experience and was recounting my hilarious comments to the salesman the whole way home.

However, last night when I came home Delia and Antonio were sitting in the car port and looking for a car the most American way I know of, circling adds in the classifieds! I think looking for cars this way might serve them much better, and take a lot less time.

After five weeks in Paraguay and one quick lesson this morning on the history of Paraguay, I am going to try and summarize Paraguayan culture from my perspective, experiences and education in this blog. I believe many of the Paraugayan people’s customs, attitudes and beliefs today are a direct reflection of their past and the decision’s their leaders have made over the last several centuries.

Since independence the country has been run by a succession of dictators. The major players include Dr. Francia, Lopez, Solano Lopez and the infamous Stroessner. Dr. Francia began a pattern perpetuated by the rest of the dictators in which he simultaneously supported the poor to remain popular and repressed the elite and middle class. He fed and clothed the poor and provided them with all their basic physical needs. The poor were satisfied with their leader. Yet, he neglected to provide them anything beyond basic needs. Leader after leader saw it necessary to continually repress a middle class and education to remain in power. However, a lack of a middle class and an educated populace in this country for centuries repressed development of any sophisticated culture in Paraguay. The middle class in most cultures are responsible for culture creation and Paraguay lacked this key component during its crucial development as an independent nation. Dr. Francia stunted the progressive potential of the country to keep himself in power and many of the leaders after him followed his example.

Furthermore, Paraguay has experienced two tragic wars in its recent history that has greatly affected the current atmosphere of today’s culture. Solano Lopez led his country into a war that almost erased Paraguay off the map. In the mid 19th century, Solano Lopez foolishly started the War of the Triple Alliance and put Paraguay into a five year siege against the aligned militaries of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. Paraguay lost a lot of land, hundreds of thousands of men died, and Paraguay was occupied by the Brazilian and Argentinean governments after the war. After the war, the country was left with less than 30,000 men and 110,000 women. This left a large space for immigrants to begin to populate the countryside, which the government began selling off in large parcels to foreigners as a way to begin generating income again. Paraguay’s economy was stunted during the war but had no hopes of starting after the war because its entire labor supply, young men, was killed off. Paraguay would have to wait another generation to repopulate its labor source once again and regenerate a suffering economy. Therefore, at this time immigrants were seen as very valuable because they were the only ones producing an economy, they were brining their wealth from the outside. This belief is still held today and foreigners are thought to be wealthy and in general Paraguayans are fascinated by them.

I mentioned the Chaco War in a previous blog so I won’t go into too much detail. But, it is often written up in the history books as a draw between Paraguay and Bolivia, a military victory for Paraguay but a political loss. Paraguay once again lost a significant proportion of their men in this war- 41,000- and lost confidence in the ruling Liberal party which set in motion the long reign of the Colorado Party which only ended last year when Lugo historically became the first Liberal in almost 80 years to become president.

Although Paraguay lost these two wars, they are generally extremely patriotic about them and emphatic about their war heroes. Maybe this sentimentality is necessary to keep the country united in the face of such tragedy and shame of loss or maybe it is due to the Paraguayan’s miserable education system and the fact that most Paraguayans do not really know their history. Paraguayan kids only go to school four hours a day and the system is mostly a wrote-memorization style where teachers write something on the board and students copy it down in their notebooks, memorize it and write it back for exams.

When I asked my family about the wars for my homework assignment they all said they used to know details about the war in school but couldn’t remember anymore. Everyone was taught the information at one time but the system doesn’t really allow students to ingest the material. My host brother and uncles all offered their own tidbits about the Triple Alliance War. Raul said Brazil won the war, half true. I was pretty proud of him since it’s a common myth that Paraguay won the war. And then I felt bad for poor, shy Raul when the rest of the family started to tease and taunt him for saying Brazil won the war when obviously Paraguay won. “Oh Raul is such an idiot.” Poor Raul. Its also a common myth that Solano Lopez and his wife collected gold pesos from the populace to support the war but as they retreated from the allied forces they began to bury the gold in the ground and gold is still buried throughout Paraguay. My host mom mentioned this myth as fact once again. Apparently, if you see a tree on fire and a dog with no head at night that means gold is buried below that spot. So everyone grab your shovels!

This brings me to the Stronatto- the reign of Paraguay’s modern dictator Stroessner- the second longest dictatorship in the world and the longest dictatorship in the Western hemisphere. Stoessner’s legacy sounds somewhat similar to other dictators of the 20th century. He had a secret police of spies, party membership controlled all state jobs, propaganda was rampant, people were disappeared at random if they spoke against the government or stood out in any way, he tortured, he supported a constant state of emergency, people were afraid to be out after dark, he created favors, favoritism, paternalism, underdevelopment, fear, patron-client relations, vertical loyalties instead of citizenship. There was a myth that all resources were a gift from the beneficent father figure Stroessner such as schools, roads, hospitals, electricity etc… Every new school/hospital had to be inaugurated by Stroessner before it could be used to perpetuate this myth. In fact, one language teacher at my school tells a story about standing in the rain at her new school as a young child waiting for Stroessner to come inaugurate her school. He was very late and instead of coming in and performing the whole ceremony he just drove by the school in his fancy car and that was his “gift”.

So what does this all mean for Paraguayans now? It means that history separates people, people don’t trust each other and are afraid of each other; they only trust their families. People do not work together, people do not know how to work together and have never thought to work together to solve a problem. There is no merit system. People always got somewhere based on who you knew, who you are, or your political party. How hard you work is not a virtue and is not always valued. People don’t expect their government to work for them. The government always covered their very basic needs, usually, and they don’t expect more when they should. People don’t feel they deserve better. They have a very fatalistic attitude. They have a lack of inclination to challenge information and to question. People look outside for solutions and not in themselves. They don’t think, “how can I fix this?” Individuality, creativity and ability are stifled. The education system definitely perpetuates this last point.

Individuality is not valued. If anyone looks at all different it will be pointed out and in a country where everyone has similar hair, eye and skin color a slight difference will be recognized and somewhat negatively. In Paraguay I am a blonde. This was quite a shock to me. I have brown hair, it says so on my driver’s license. Well, my lighter shade of brown hair and the lack of true blondes in this country has labeled me as a “rubia” in Paraguay. But this new label doesn’t feel endearing. It sets me apart in country where blending in is valued and standing out is uncomfortable.

Furthermore, individuality in personal character is not explicitly valued. Because critical thinking is not present in this culture, this means self exploration is also absent. For example, a volunteer came to one of our training sessions and had simulated an activity she conducted in her high school and elementary level classes in her site. It was called “My Personal Flag”. The idea was to draw a flag with symbols that represented you as an individual. The volunteer drew her flag as an example for the students. She explicitly told them it was an example and not to copy. Her flag had green stripes because she loved the environment, a globe because she loved to travel, a heart, and two flags because she had duel citizenship. And sure enough when I looked through the stack of the kids’ personal flags most of them had stripes, a heart, a globe because they love to travel (even though most of them have never even been outside their own towns) and a Paraguayan flag, they almost all looked the same. Kids just don’t know how to be creative even when they are told to, they were never taught how. They were taught to copy what their teacher did and give it back to them, that is all they know. Although I saw a few flags that were very unique and very creative. So, that is where a volunteer can draw inspiration. Progress!

What about popular culture? TV, music, dance, art are all very simple. Paraguayans have not yet had enough time without the umbrella of dictatorship to begin to explore the possibilities of a more sophisticated culture as a middle class begins to take shape. At night I sit around the sit with my family and watch many dubbed Disney channel shows and man, woman and child all laugh their asses off at the benign humor. My conclusion from this “phenomenon” is that this culture has not had time to develop a sophisticated sense of humor. My friend Lyn and I were guessing that to have a heightened sense of humor you must be educated and without it adults will find the same things humorous that children do. The constant commenting on who is fat and who is not and how you get fat, who is getting fat, who got skinny is another facet of a simple side of culture. This is what they will continue to find entertaining.

So what does this mean for me as a Peace Corps volunteer? It means I must show how democracy is a beneficial system and how the average citizen can use it to their advantage. Right now a common thought is that democracy is messy and nothing gets done, for example no roads have been built since Stroessner, and Stressner provided a lot more to the people. The fact is people do not know how to run a meeting or work in groups. People do not know they can go to their local municipality and talk to the local mayor or authorities and request funds for a project or ask for help. They do not understand that the government is supposed to work for them. They can form local commissions and petition their local government but often these commissions fall apart because they don’t know the rules or don’t know how to work as a united group. Also, it is my job to teach Paraguayans to challenge the status quo, to not take things for granted, to question. This might seem like such a common concept to us but it has been ingrained in us since we were children. This is a democratic and American quality. It must be taught, it is not inherent. Paraguay is a forgotten corner of the world but in the last two decades has been making great strides to become more exposed. It was easy for the rest of the world to forget about Paraguay: it didn’t have a coastline, its dictators closed it off to the world and was mostly self sustaining, and it didn’t offer any valuable resources to the rest of the world. But as Paraguay has more opportunity to be exposed to the modern global culture and is importing more common global products it is changing and expecting more. So in a country where I am a blonde and a headless dog means buried treasure I guess anything is possible.

As I am settling into my new life as a Peace Corps trainee and realizing how the next two years might look like, I am content and enthusiastic about my new country and occupation. Everything is still very new and exciting. Everyday I learn new fabulous idiosyncrasies about Paraguayan culture that are baffling and thrilling at the same time. Everyday I get a glimpse into my future career as a Peace Corps volunteer by meeting current volunteers, from hearing about volunteer experiences, from tech classes and learning about projects I might implement at my future site. Everyday is new and different and that is exactly what I came to Paraguay looking for. I am finding it pretty easy to get out of bed every morning at 6:30 am (well, to be honest the really cold mornings are painful to crawl out of my sleeping bag) to make it to training class at 7:45 because even when I think I know what the day will bring I will be surprised. For example, this afternoon’s technical session appeared as if it would be a simple lesson on how to teach environmental education. Besides a somewhat run-of-the-mil power point presentation the lesson turned into a session on how to make recycled paper from old paper and drinking glasses from old wine bottles. Therefore, we spent the rest of the afternoon “mastering” these crafts in the hopes of teaching them to Paraguayan inquiring minds.

Although training sessions can be interesting and hopefully useful for my future two year service, the training lifestyle is somewhat frustrating. I was well prepared by Peace Corps literature before coming to Paraguay that I might feel this way about training. The reason: Here I am an adult who has been living as an independent woman for the last 6 years and in the spirit of my independence I sold everything I owned, joined the Peace Corps and moved to another hemisphere not knowing a soul. I feel very confident to take care of myself. However, Peace Corps training mother gooses us to the point where I feel I am back in high school and simultaneously under the watchful eyes of Big Brother. The mother goose/Big Brother character is a combination of my host mother, Peace Corps training team, Peace Corps guidelines, and the small town of JA Saldivar. As a PCT (Peace Corps Trainee) I am required to let someone know where I am at all times. The idea is if there is some kind of emergency or Peace Corps needs to contact me for some reason and they cannot get a hold of me then the world would end. Also, it seems all our host mothers are programmed to Jewish mother mode and are constantly worried about their new and vulnerable goslings in this big scary country. So, if we don’t come home on time we are programmed to feel guilty by making our mothers worry. Oh the shame. (Luckily, my host mom is a little better then the rest it seems. I think she is too busy with her store to worry too much about what time I get home). So, either we must always tell our mothers the truth of our whereabouts (if we ever have free time and if there is actually somewhere worthwhile to go) or stay in. Class lets out at 5 pm everyday and the suns starts to go down soon after. It is dangerous to walk around by yourself at night so anytime to do anything after class is extremely limited. There is pretty much only enough daylight to walk home. You can see why I feel trapped sometimes. But sometimes I am so exhausted from an extremely full day of activity I am glad to head straight home, finish up my little homework assignment and head for bed early. Who ever thought I would willingly go to bed at 9 pm?

Last night I was hanging out with my family in the living room watching some really great television, as always. Usually Hannah Montana or some other dubbed Disney Channel show is the family’s program of choice. I was looking over my notes for my Guarani oral exam the next day. My family is always very interested in my homework and asks me every night what I have and if they can help. So, last night they were asking me questions in Guarani and I was answering them back. Although, it wasn’t exactly that simple. My host dad, Antonio, loves to help with my Guarani but he speaks so fast that I never understand him and our “lessons” are pretty useless. Even my little host sister, Diahana, was telling him he can’t talk so fast because I am a beginner. It was actually very cute and very sweet of her. But somehow my family Guarani review session abruptly turned into a discussion about my yoga ball. I brought a bright, neon blue yoga ball which I have determined is a necessity for me in Paraguay. I had shown my host mom, my best friend and confidant in this house, the yoga ball and even showed her how to use it and she was very impressed. But once the discussion started about the yoga ball I realized I mistakenly never showed the rest of the family and that they would probably have no idea what is was. Antonio first asked me if I knew how to play volleyball. Volleyball is very popular in Paraguay and courts are almost as omnipresent in neighborhoods as soccer fields. I responded “no” knowing that Paraguayans play volleyball differently than my American version. Then he asked, “Well isn’t that big blue ball in your room for volleyball?” I laughed for several minutes and so did everyone else.

But Antonio was still determined to find out the purpose of my monstrous unidentified ball. His next guess was a piñata. This had me laughing hysterically for a few more minutes. The whole family was laughing along with me. But, I have to give him credit that my yoga ball does look exactly like a Paraguayan piñata. Luckily, I had gone to my first Paraguayan birthday party the night before and got to see a piñata otherwise I probably just would have thought Antonio was just a little crazy. Paraguayan piñatas are oversized, perfectly round and colorful balloons filled with confetti and prizes, and it does strikingly look exactly like a big yoga ball. The kids sit under the balloon and an adult pops it with a knife and the kids get littered with confetti and candy. The whole piñata process is over in 30 seconds. I think it’s a much more efficient and safer way of getting candy to the kids than our Mexican-give-the-kid-a-blindfold-and-baseball bat-and-see-what-happens method.

Finally, I decided I had to bring out my ball and show it off for the family. I set it in the middle of the living room and we all sat around it and stared at it like a new puppy. Everyone was in awe. Everyone asked me questions about this new object that had entered their lives. They wanted to know how it worked and how many guaranis it cost. First, I tried to get Dehlia, my host mom, to show the family what I taught her but coming from this traditionally timid culture she refused. So in my pjs I showed the fam a few classic stretches, nothing fancy. I did a back bend and some crunches. They were either fascinated or were thinking why is there a crazy norteamericana rolling around on a big blue ball in the middle of my living room. Afterwards I tried to get the rest of the family to take a turn but nobody would try. They all wanted to touch it but wouldn’t even sit on it. Its like they wouldn’t believe it actually worked. Raul, my host uncle (although he is 4 years younger than me) was really testing its strength with his elbows and his knees like he was testing out a new mattress. But he wouldn’t sit on it. The whole scene was pretty hilarious. I told Dehlia she could use it whenever she wanted and I think she is interested. If she likes it maybe I will have my parents send her one all the way from norteamerica!

Over the weekend my muni training group drove about 1 ½ hours to visit another Peace Corps volunteer’s site for a night. She lives in the center of town but works a few times a month in a school out in the countryside, called a compania. She walks 1 ½ hours to get to the school on the dirt road. The dirt is too soft to ride her bike and PC volunteers are forbidden from riding motorcycles and no bus goes out that way so she must walk, that is how much she loves this school. In total the school has about 40 kids. And about half go in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. We got out there by mid afternoon with the PC volunteer and another environmental education volunteer. They had prepared a tree planting lesson for the kids and we were going to watch and possibly participate. I had heard about this environmental ed. volunteer before because he speaks excellent Guarani but his reputation did not prepare me for what I saw. I was blown away. He came to Paraguay not speaking Spanish or Guarani and started Guarani lessons rights away. He only had three months of official Guarani lessons so he picked up both languages on his own and now speaks both fluently after 2 years. To actually see another volunteer speak this native language comfortably in front of a group of native speaking kids was thrilling and inspiring. To hear these crazy sounds flow so comfortably from his mouth with such speed, I was in shock. I had no idea. It really gave me hope that I could really speak this language someday. I would love if I could stand in front of a group of Guarani speakers and impress them with my Guarani. Because every time he spoke Guarani to Paraguayans they would be so damn impressed that this white guy spoke their secret language.

Furthermore, this volunteer knew his stuff. He talked about planting trees and protecting the environment with a passion in his voice. Even if I didn’t always understand it, I could tell that teaching kids about the environment was really what he loved to do. He was fluid, in his language and in his actions. The kids were drawn and intrigued with the new information he provided them. He taught them how to make seed boxes, what kinds on seeds you can plant, how to prepare the seeds and how to plant them. He helped each kid plant their seeds in their own personal boxes. He talked about why it was important to plant trees and asked them interactive questions. He had them with every word. Best of all is he made it fun. Throughout the lesson he sang songs. He started the lesson with a Guarani version of “Going on A Bear Hunt” that we trainees had learned in a tech session so we could sing and dance along, somewhat. Its called “Jaha Jaguata” which means “lets go walking”. At the end he reviewed the material the kids had learned and made them all raise their hands and repeat a pledge to take care of their trees. The whole lesson was very impressive and inspiring. It makes me proud to be apart of an organization that produced a volunteer like him. It makes me excited for my future in this organization. It only reinforces the fact that I am in the right place at the right time. This is where I am supposed to be.

I tried to have these pictures dispursed throughout my blog with subtitles but I am technologically incapable. Therefore, the first picture is a page of my Guarani homework and the second two are of me and my host mom in the store in my house.

Having a store in my house has been a very interesting introduction to the idiosyncrasies of Paraguayan culture. Dehlia has run the store for six years and knows her business backwards and forwards. Nothing has a price tag because she knows how much everything costs by heart. She greets every customer by first name and knows all their life stories. She loves to talk and caries on conversations with all her customers when they enter the store. It’s not just a business, it’s a social experience. Her office supplies include a scale which she uses to measure amounts of corn, bread, cuts of meat etc, a small record book where she records credit, and a calculator.

Little kids often come into the store by themselves sent by their parents on an errand. One little boy came in the other night, he must have been about 5, and gave Dehlia a list of things he was supposed to buy for his parents. The list included milk, diapers, bread, and cigarettes. Dehlia put it all in a bag for him and then he waddled out the door. The bag was bigger than he was. An 11-year-old boy came in and bought one big bottle of beer. Another little boy bought 2 cigarettes. I told Dehila that in my country you have to be 21 to buy alcohol and 18 to buy cigarettes and watching her sell big bottles of beer to little boys was pretty shocking to me. She said they were just buying it for their parents and didn’t see the harm in it. No big deal.

Also, Dehlia keeps several big bags of opened diapers behind the counter which she sells individually. People come in and buy 1, 2 or 3 diapers at a time. At first I was really confused by this. I mean who only needs 2 diapers? But I thought about it some more and I figure that many families probably do not have the money to buy diapers in bulk. Actually, many families in this neighborhood don’t have money to buy anything in great quantity. Dehlia sells tons of bags of charcoal which she explains wont save anyone money over cooking from a stove but most people don’t have the money to fill up a whole tank of gas for their stove at 70,000 guaranis which is about 14 dollars.

My family owns three cows. I had no idea we owned cows until one day I walked out into the backyard and there they were. During the day they graze on the volleyball court and eat the grass in front of the house. At night and in the morning they stay in the backyard to be milked. Dehlia sells the fresh cow milk in her store and customers bring in empty liter soda bottles to serve as milk containers. Im just glad we own cows instead of roosters.

Dehlia’s little record book is a credit book. The book has a bunch of little colored tabs with first names written on them and each section represents an individual client’s credit. Clients that have credit with Dehlia each have a little piece of cardboard to also keep track of their credit. Every time a customer buys something on credit Dehlia writes the amount under their tab in the book and on the piece of cardboard. Some clients will pay off their accounts once a week, once a month and some have to be harassed to pay. Sometimes Dehlia has to go to a neighbor’s house and ask them to pay up.

Having a store in my house has its advantages. Last Friday was a national holiday to celebrate the signing of the treaty that ended the Chaco war between Paraguay and Bolivia in 1935. For my homework assignment over the weekend I am supposed to find a history teacher, an ex-combatant or a descendant of a veteran of the war and ask them questions about the war’s history. This is a pretty impossible assignment since 1/3 of the population died in the war and any veterans still alive are in their late 80’s. Dehila told me I should just look it up in a book, “my teacher will never know”, which is exactly what I am not supposed to do. I am supposed to mingle with the people and practice my Spanish. So this morning Dehlia decided to ask every customer who she thought was smart what they knew about the Chaco war. I then started asking my own questions and everyone seemed to have their own versions of what happened during the war. It turned into quite a discussion as new customers came into the store and added their two cents to the story. I already know a few things about the war from books I read on Paraguay before I came and I have a general idea of Paraguayan history. I also know that it is very Paraguayan for Paraguayans to all have their own versions of history. However, everyone seemed to agree that Paraguay was a much wealthier country before the Chaco war and now they are very poor as a result. However, they all agree that Paraguay won the war. I do know that Paraguay and Bolivia went to war over the region of the country called the Chaco, a barren and inhospitable wasteland where only 3% of the population lives, although it does have some valuable oilfields. Bolivia claimed the region with the oilfields and Paraguay got the rest. But according to most Paraguayans, Paraguay still won the war. According to Dehlia, before the Chaco war the country’s currency was all gold coins, therefore Paraguay was very wealthy, and during the war everyone was so concerned they would be robbed that they buried their money in the ground. When the war was over they were never able to find where they buried their gold, hence the government had to start minting a currency and the country is now. One customer chimed in and confirmed that before the Chaco war Paraguay was one the wealthiest countries in the world. If it weren’t for that damned Chaco war they would still be on top. Maybe this explains why gold is considered so valuable here. You cannot wear a gold necklace in a public place without it most likely getting ripped off your neck. Silver necklaces will be left alone. So, Dehlia’s customers had a lot to say about the war but some things they couldn’t answer at all. When I asked what they thought were the lasting affects of the war they couldn’t answer. I also asked what the agreements of the treaty were and how they came to sign the treaty and I only got blank stares in return. So, the mystery of the Chaco war continues. Luckily, I still have a few more days to complete my assignment.

The traditional dating culture in Paraguay is kind of unique and if you weren’t directly informed about it you may never pick up on it. Peace Corps decided it was necessary to spend an hour of training on the subject. First off it is acceptable in this culture for men to date several women at a time. Therefore, the seven day week in Paraguay is divided up into dating days and mistress days. Dating days are Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Mistress days are Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If a man wants to officially court a woman he will visit her at her house on the official dating days. It would be an insult/send the wrong message to visit her on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday. Apparently, foreigners accidentally and unknowingly get caught up in this cultural eccentricity that everyone knows about but doesn’t necessarily talk about. Volunteers in the past have made some really big faux-paus and have risked their reputations in their communities which has inhibited their professional relationships as well. After this lesson my fellow trainee realized he had stopped by my house the other morning to see if I was home yet from our 4 day long volunteer visits around Paraguay. It was a Tuesday. Hopefully my host mom doesn’t think I’m his mistress. Oops. Oh well, we had a good laugh.

Guarani is a crazy language. The pronunciation is just insane. My vocal chords are required to make sounds I have never made before. Often my Guarani teacher assigns homework assignments where I am required to interview a family member or neighbor in Guarani. However, when I try to speak to people in Guarani they cannot understand me because my pronunciation is so awful so I am forced to translate for myself into Spanish. Then, my pupil will respond to the question in Guarani and I will have no idea what they said and they will be forced to translate their answer back into Spanish. Its an arduous process to say the least. One reason the pronunciation is so hard is because of the “y” sound. The “y” sound requires the speaker to make a guttural, manly grunt in the back of the throat. Now throw in a few ys and vs with some nasaly vowels in the same word and you have a typical Guarani word. My fellow trainees and I have been making a lot of analogies to what this language sounds like, all of which are not politically correct and totally insulting, so I won’t mention it. But hands down the best Guarani word I have learned to date is ‘Opáma’. It means “it’s over”. As in, this blog = opáma.

I am writing this first blog sitting in my room in the home of my Paraguayan host family, the Salinas Ibanez family. They live in JA Saldivar, a town about an hour outside of the capital of Asuncion. However, no one seems to know who Senor Saldivar was or why the town was named after him. Dehlia, my host mom, is so sweet and genuinely happy to have me in her home. She has converted the front room of her house into a little convenient store and spends everyday from 6:30 am to 9 pm at night attending to her steady run of customers. Antonio, my host dad, works at a lumber yard and doesn’t have much to say to me (or anyone else for the matter) but finds my unique norteamericana habits amusing. Dahiana, my 9-year-old host sister, is extremely shy and almost never talks to me, as well. She watches a lot of tv. Jorge, my 18-year-old host brother is pretty excited to have me around and introduces me to everyone who comes over. He is quite the jokester but also extremely immature and totally obnoxious. He likes to make gay jokes, especially towards his uncle Raul, the quietest human being alive, because he cooks. Sometimes I like him because he makes the effort to talk to me and asks funny questions but sometimes he is just an immature teenage jerk who can’t handle having an American woman in his house. And then there is the endless stream of other family members that come in and out of the house, all guys, and most of whom I am confused how they are related to one another. So, my family is my family. Sometimes I really like them and sometimes I don’t, but who doesn’t feel that way about their families ever?

My house is tiny. The store is the biggest room in the house. There is a living room with a couch, two chairs, a tv, a dinning room table pushed up against the wall (if we all want to sit around it we have to pull it out into the middle of the room), and Diahana’s bed. Diahana had to give up her bedroom for me. It is a requirement by Peace Corps that host families provide volunteers with their own rooms and so for me to live here the little girl has to sleep in the living room. Therefore, her toys and stuffed animals are strategically placed all around the living room… a diorama of barbies under the tv and stuffed animals lining the couch. My host mom and dad have a bedroom but with no door, just a curtain on a string where the door should be. Diahana somewhat shares this room with them. The kitchen is crammed into the back hallway, an interesting set up. And then there is the bathroom. A modern bathroom, with a sink, toilet and electric shower. If I can turn the knob just right I can actually have a hot shower but the absence of a shower curtain means the water goes everywhere, apparently this is just how bathrooms are here. After showering I squeegee the bathroom. Jorge has a room separate from the house in the backyard. And apparently they are building a separate house in the backyard to rent out, which I only found out about today. A man was in the back hammering endlessly and making a huge amount of noise at a brick wall and he told me it was going to be a bathroom, that is how I found out about the new house.

The house is located on a dirt road, connected by a network of more dirt and cobblestone roads that lead to the city center, about a 15 minute walk. When it rains these dirt roads turn into streams and rivers and traversing them on the way to and from school everyday is an adventure, to say the least. My little neighborhood has several volleyball courts and soccer fields and everyone knows each other. Dehlia greets every customer by first name, and the customers never stop coming. Its amazing how small this neighborhood feels but how much business Dehlia has.

One family member I really like is Dehila’s step dad, the grandpa. He has lived in the country his whole life and it shows. He has been staying with us, along with his two sons, Raul and Oscar, for the past few weeks because Oscar was in a bad motorcycle accident and broke his right jaw and cheek bones and is waiting for his surgery. They have been waiting to see if the government will help them pay for the expensive surgery, a total of about $800, and it seems they keep getting the run around. Meanwhile, Oscar just hangs around all day not talking and not eating solid foods, poor guy. The upside, the grandpa is awesome. He has PC volunteers in his village and so he knows what we are all about. He lovesssss to talk and is full of fun facts and stories. He lived in Argentina for awhile when he was 13 when Peron was in power and he had never seen people eat with silverware before, the first time he tried to use them he kept slipping and cutting the table with his knife. He has never heard of Barak Obama, the United States’ first black president. He had me in stitches when I showed him my photo album and he couldn’t recognize me in family pictures from a few years ago because I weighed about 10 pounds heavier. He would point to me and say, “who is that?” and he couldn’t believe it was me. “My god, you used to be so much fatter!” he said. It was so honest and so hilarious, I couldn’t stop laughing. I mean, I don’t think I was so fat that I was unrecognizable but it is true that I did weigh a few more pounds. Paraguayans say it like it is. If you are skinny they will tell you and if you are fat they will tell you the same. For example, Jorge, my host brother, is fat and living in this country he will never forget it because everyone and everybody is always saying, “Hey, look at Jorge, what a fatty.” At lunch if I eat a lot its not uncommon for Dehlia to tell me off-handedly that I shouldn’t eat so much because I will get fat. That’s just how it goes.

I have to say that I have had a lot of moments in only this past week and a half as a Peace Corps trainee when I have thought being in the Peace Corps is fucking awesome. (And I don’t use that word a lot). Although the trainee schedule is rigorous and I have hardly had a second to sit and think, I have had several moments where I have thought, this is so fucking cool! The second I stepped off the plane in Asuncion I was greeted by several Peace Corps authorities in swine flu “preventative” masks, and they immediately swept us past immigration and customs and out into our new lives as PC trainees. I have never arrived in a foreign country quite like that! Our basic trainee schedule is composed of language training in the morning and technical training in the afternoon with some variety thrown in. My language training is in Gauarani, the ubiquitous indigenous language of Paraguay. Although it has somewhat adapted to some Spanish words, like graciamante and hasta luegomante, it is pretty different and unlike any romance language you and I know. The grammar is very simple but the pronunciation is killer. The language is filled with glottal stops, accents, and nasal vowels and consonants, like you always have a cold when you speak Guarani. Needless to say, it is hard to wrap your tongue around. But it is pretty cool to get 4 hours a day to do nothing but learn this ancient language, where else and when else in the world would I get to do that? That is pretty damn awesome.

On Friday we had an entire afternoon of gardening lessons. We learned how to build and plant gardens, how to compost, how to build a fence out of bamboo, and how to use a machete. We actually had an orientation on using and sharpening a machete. That was awesome! I couldn’t stop giggling and thinking, this is my job? In three months am I really going to go out and cut down bamboo with a machete to make a fence for my garden and then am I going to plant that garden and then is that garden going to actually grow? I don’t really picture myself doing those things but I sure hope it happens.

My walk to and from school everyday is also really awesome. I walk with another PC trainee who lives a few houses down and we walk along the dirt roads, cross a soccer field, then through a neighbors yard with lots of dogs and chickens, through a field, duck under a barbed-wire fence, turn right at the lemon tree, turn left at the little store, walk through another woman’s yard with pigs, cows, chickens, dogs, cats and god knows what else. She has a glass eye and always greets us with a “buen dia”. Then we cross a playground and walk up the street to our school. It takes about 10-15 minutes and it totally feels how the Peace Corps in Paraguay should feel.

So, to sum up my first blog, Paraguay and the Peace Corps after a week and a half are going great. There is so much more to tell but it is such a whirlwind. There will be more to come later. Just know that I am safe and sound and happy in my new country!