Flip This HOGA!

Hoga means House in Guarani. Here´s mine, start to recent finish! Go to the bottom of the post to see the progress as it happened.

Some interesting points:

Flip flops are work shoes for everything.
I designed, bought for, and ran my own running water for 1 spigot and 1 shower.
My neighbors gave me their 'old' puppy. His new name is Rufio! (like from Hook)
My house is a part-time kids club, check out the card game.
I am very happy to finally be living on my own.
Thank you all for the goodies you sent to stock my kitchen!!

Thursday - Seed Plantin', Tennis Shoe Washin'

Thursday

After a good but long day yesterday, today I sleep in until 7:30am. I get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and then start on my main task for the day – washing my clothes. Again. When you regularly sweat through one shirt and pair of pants a day, you go through clothes very quickly. Also, I was out of clean sports bras already, and wearing regular bras in this heat just doesn’t do it for me. Ugh, uncomfortable. So yeah, I washed ALL my dirty clothes this time, as opposed to leaving some for later. I also washed my towel (a pain) and went REALLY Paraguayan…I washed my running shoes. This is the second time I’ve done it here, and I only do it really after some repeated subtle hinting from host family members. It’s really not too bad, and they do look/feel a ton cleaner after you’re finished. I’m sure my shoe/boot expert sister could tell me, but why again DON’T we wash our shoes?? It was such a foreign concept to me a few months again, but now I can’t remember why exactly.

So washing my clothes takes me through lunch, with a rest/music break midmorning and some térere as well. The weird thing about the day after a super busy day is that sometimes I feel worse because I think of all the things I could or should be doing that I’m not. Plus late mornings can be a tough time anyway. They seem to drag on. But I got a text from a neighbor PCV, and ended up talking to him for a few minutes about life in general, and about him coming out to my site to help with bees, and me going over to his site to do some garden work with his ladies over there (it’s much less awkward for them if I come to help, me being a woman myself and all). So that unexpected possibility gave me something to look forward to in the near future and picked up my spirits to get on with the rest of the day.

The host family was having organ meat for lunch (which I “do not know how to eat” [directly translated from Guarani]) so I got to make myself a lovely bean/rice/green onion/pumpkin/cheese/cilantro soup. And NO oil…amazing. After lunch, I layed down for an hour and then got up to plant some of my new seeds! I had been saving my yoghurt and pop containers from when I drank those in town, so I had 7 spaces to work with. I ended up planting 2 tomatoes, 2 green peppers, 1 marigold, 2 honeydew, and then transplanted my 2 rosella tree plantlings into their own separate boxed wine containers. I’m so proud – they’re each about 8 inches tall and getting bigger every day! My tech trainer gave us the seeds as a gift. Apparently the fruit is high in Vitamin C, makes a great jam, and the leaves taste like cranberries. We’ll see if they get to that point while I’m still living here! When I move into my house and make my garden, hopefully I will have small plants all ready to transplant. 

After that, I biked over to my community contact’s house to check in with her and make good on the térere invitation that I turned down the evening before. Everything was pretty chill over there. Her grandkids demonstrated some of their new bike riding techniques for me, and her 17 year old son serenaded us on guitar with “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” and “Time of Your Life” that the American girls that stayed here for 2 months last winter had taught him. I sang along.

Back at the host family’s house, I caught up with my fellow Croppie Mike on the phone for a while, with a short interruption by some neighborhood girls who came over to try and sell tiny pink “SEXY” underwear and invite me over to their house. I told them the underwear looked too small for me, but accepted the invite and told them I’d be over tomorrow or Friday. We ate manduvi kui for dinner, which is ground up roasted peanuts and sugar that you can either eat plain (it kinds of turns into peanut butter in your mouth) or with milk, like a type of cereal. It’s one of my favorite dinners. Now it’s 10pm, and I better get to bed so I can get up early tomorrow for my mate date with Na Tomasa! Buenas noches.

Wednesday - Fire House Meetin'

Wednesday

On Wednesday, I headed to Carapegua, a town that’s an hour away from Ybycui (my pueblo) by bus. I left the house around ten to 7am, and due to the lovely road conditions for once, I made it in in record time and caught the 7:30 bus, though I didn’t have time to stash my bike somewhere, so I brought it along. In Carapegua, I met up with 5 other PCVs from the area to talk about a new project regarding forest fire prevention in the national park called Salto Cristal that’s near Ybycui. We met in the Fire House of the Volunteer Firefighters of Carapegua, so it was a nice journey down memory lane for me to my days at West Barnstable Fire Department last year. I felt right at home. Also I stopped in an agro store on the way there and bought some seeds for my garden! Cherry tomatoes, sweet corn, carrots, green pepper, and onion. Very exciting. After the meeting, I headed to a local restaurant patio to hang out with the PCVs from the meeting and eat an empanada for an early lunch.

The travel home was way more frustrating because two buses headed for Ybycui, the "Salto Cristal" line (see picture) passed me saying they didn’t have room for my bike in the storage area. Mbore! So I waited at the road crossing for 2 hours in the middle of the day before finally a bus came that had room. I was stressing out as well because I had a commitment to give another charla about beekeeping at 4:30pm. But, I got to Ybycui just fine after all, stopped at another agro shop and bought some lettuce, swiss chard, and zucchini seeds, and then biked back out to my community. 45 minutes in the hot sun, but at least there was a good breeze. Nevertheless, that was the second shirt that I sweated out for the day. And I mean completely – belly sweat, back sweat, and chin sweat. My personal favorite.

So I got to my host family’s house with enough time to sit for a bit, eat leftovers from lunch, shower, and hop back on my bike to head 1k down the road to the church for the meeting. Less people came this week, but still a good turnout – 10, mostly men. So I left out my goofy icebreaker due to the more somber group dynamic, but the rest of the charla went very well. We covered when to go the apiary, what is important to bring with you, what kind of equipment you need to work bees, and finally the appropriate etiquette for working around Africanized “killer” bees so that they get the least angry as possible. Activities included drawing on my stick figure Don Juan what he needs to go to the apiary and a check for learning game called Matched Up! in English or Upeichaite! in Guarani. This was a favorite of the Croppies in Training. It’s fun. After my charla, the meeting continued as I passed out plans on how to make your own hive, bee veil, and smoker. We will see at next week’s meeting where the group decides they want to go from here.

After the charla, I head to Na Tomasa’s house to watch some volleyball and térere with her. I find out that the tree that will be cut down to make my doors, windows, and bathroom structure with be taken out by a chainsaw on Friday, “if God wants it”. I bike home as the sun is setting over the horizon, and am quickly put to work filling dough with a soy meat/veggie concoction for the soy empanadas for dinner. My host sister Vero (age 16) makes the dough, I fill and close up, and host sister Isi (age 13) deep fries them over the fire in the kitchen. Delicious! Shortly after, I head to my room where I stay up much too late writing part of this blog entry.