It has been a busy first week in site. Here are a few pictures to show you what I´ve been up to. The first is me with a bunch of mitaí kuña, or little girls. There are a ton of them living around me, mostly from the ages of 5-10. They are great most of the time, but five kids hanging on you constanly can get old pretty quickly. I never knew I was so interesting. They´ll even stand right over my shoulder and watch me read. SERIOUSLY. And I guess I´ll never get to be old news, is what I´ve heard.
The next few photos are from a cooking day that the women´s comite had on Thursday. We made Pan de Navidad, a.k.a. Christmas bread, a.k.a. Pannetone. !!! It was delicious! We set the dough to rise in the paper molds you see lined up on the chairs, and then baked them in the tatakua, the dome shaped clay oven that you see in the last picture, which translates literally to 'fire hole'. My community also grows a lot of corn, and it is harvest time. That means that we also made chipa guasu, which you can see in the pans with the large leaves underneath. Chipa guasu is a kind of corn bread made with onions, cheese, butter, and of course, corn. I like it, personally, but it can also get to be a little much. I have had it every day I´ve been here, and every time that I go and visit another family, they are also dekerneling corn, getting ready to make chipa guasu. Tis the season I guess! (One day I had it for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner. No joke.)
So other than shucking corn and eating a lot, I have also been a guest on some neighboring PCVs radio show, explored my town or pueblo, looked at a few housing options (ranging from VERY nice to fixer-upper to impossible), gone jogging almost every day, done a lot of laundry by hand, and improved my bucket bathing technique. I like to call it the toss and flip. I also told my host family I didn´t know how to eat chicken organs (the polite way of saying I don´t want to) and have walked the 10k, or 6 miles, to town a few times now. Che guapa. (I´m hardworking).
For Christmas slash my birthday (because they celebrate mostly on the 24th here), I´m looking forward to awkward moments with lots of new host family members visiting for the holidays, trying to speak more Guarani with them and sharing a room with who knows how many people, drinking clerico (Paraguayan sangria), chicken for lunch, making more Christmas bread, and of course, hopefully getting to talk to my family back in the States.
Merry Christmas! All my love!
