Extremely Overcast

Fall has come finally to Paraguay. Or has it? On Tuesday, I was sweating through shirts in 95 degree heat, and today, Saturday, I am wearing a sweatshirt, hiking boots, and a scarf thinking that truck ride home is going to be pretty chilly.

I am happy for the fall weather, yet it makes me quite homesick. I miss all yáll, A LOT.

Yesterday was a dark cloudy day, and upon rising late out of bed at 7am, I resolved to give myself a day to be a bum around my house. And it was a great day. I made chili and hot chocolate. I took a nap. I did some reading. But upon reflection you may see that to be happy here in Paraguay, I generally need to be working on something. For yesterday I also made myself a front gate out of bamboo, wire, and rope, sewed 2 curtains for my shower and baño (no more street shows for me! J/K), and went to a birthday party for my little friend Jorgito.

Ok, so the birthday party wasn´t actually work, but on the way there talking with my neighbor, I managed to make plans to go make sopa on Monday, go to a memorial service across the road on Tuesday, and work for her garden on Thursday. This is in addition to my next school visit on Monday, my VAC group (all the PCVs who live close to my same town) coming out to hang on Tuesday, comite meeting on Tuesday, and leaving for a meeting with my Peace Corps boss on Friday. Whew! I am exhausted just thinking about it.

You all know me. I just function better when I´m busy. And clearly, that has not changed. I love how here I can walk out of my door with absolutely no idea of what lies ahead of me for the day, but knowing that I will probably be amazed that evening, with all that has happened within just one day. Such is life.

All my love.

6 months in Paraguay

I have now been living in Paraguay for six full months. In some ways, September seems so long ago, especially in terms of missing friends and family back home and making new relationships with Paraguayans and other Peace Corps Volunteers here. In other ways it seems like not long at all since I received that phone call from the Peace Corps in D.C. (while road tripping in South Dakota with Maria and Davis) offering me a chance to serve in South America starting in 5 weeks. Ahh!!

In honor of this mark, I would like to review how my life has or has not changed through a reflection of my “life skills” at this point.

New Skills:
-peeling mandioca
-baking homemade bread
-making yoghurt (favorite flavor – banana)
-hoeing a line of crops
-washing clothes by hand
-drinking scalding hot mate through a metal straw

Improved Skills
-flossing regularly
-writing letters
-spitting without getting drool all over myself
-snot rocketing without getting snot all over myself
-squatting to pee without getting pee all over myself.. getting the theme here?
-walking long distances in flip flops without getting blisters

Skills that Still Need Work
-using a machete (to cut my grass, cut bamboo, etc.)
-climbing through barbed wire fences in a skirt, or without puncturing my shirts
-cleaning pig skin with boiling water and a spoon
-text messaging in Guarani
-avoiding parasites and uncomfortable medical situations (if you really want to know…I’ll tell you.)

Overall, it really has been an incredible six months. I feel remarkably blessed.
Happy Easter, Semana Santa, and Passover from me to you. Enjoy the time with people you enjoy. Much love.

Happy Belated Birthday Uncle Chuck!

Also, my saludos to Mrs. Curran´s 8th grade class! Thanks for reading along.

The Pictures

Quinciñera Hape for RominaCooking with Soy during TrainingMe and some of my Girls in SiteCroppies (Op!) relaxing at Papu´s during Training

Me and the Family, on the day I left for the Peace Corps
My neighbor, Ña Rubia, and her pig during Semana Santa
My friend Carmen putting the finishing touches on my shower
Isa, Ña Rubia´s granddaughter, exploring the road in front of my house after a big rain
My patio with the homemade flower vases we made and the flowers the neighbors girls brought
My neighbor Blasito teaching me how to make ´rora´, which is delicious and very difficult to pronounce, and he doesn´t let me live it down...hahaha

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.

Tuesday - Charla Makin'

Tuesday

I wake up this morning with absolutely no commitments, which is very nice. I water my seedlings, study some Guarani, brainstorm possible slogans for the fire prevention project meeting I’m going to tomorrow, have cocido and croquitos for breakfast, and then finish the rest of The God of Small Things. Wow. That is one amazing book. After that, I need some time just to let my mind wander, so I join my host father in shucking some peanuts for an hour. Then I plan out my 2nd beekeeping charla (informal teaching session) for Wednesday, first in English for myself, complete with icebreaker and a game for check for learning. Then I translate it into Spanish and make up the charla paper that has the most important points and pictures written on it to guide the session. Lindo (pretty) is key for charla paper in terms of impressing Paraguayans. So I make sure my lines are straight, my handwriting is neat, and my pictures are as decipherable and colorful as possible. I write the charla paper in Spanish, but at the meeting I will translate most of it into Guarani as I am speaking. This is for a few reasons. First of all, there are some adults who are illiterate or semi-illiterate, and these people only speak/understand Guarani. Secondly, even of those who can read, most of them can only read in Spanish (even though they mostly speak Guarani). This is because Guarani was forbidden to be taught in schools for many years under the dictatorship of Straussner, who ruled Paraguay from the 1940s until the late 1980s. Teenagers nowadays can generally read both Spanish and Guarani, but they would not be attending the meeting to translate for their parents. So yeah….language is a complicated thing.

After lunch, I take a short rest break in my room, just laying down and listening to some music. I’m feeling kind of down, but then all of a sudden the sun breaks through my window and I realize I really want to go for a bike ride. And it’s finally cool enough out so I can actually do that, even though it only 2pm. So I do. I take my bike out for a good stroll, probably about 5k, out to a neighboring community and back, where I haven’t been in a while. When I get back, I’m sweaty but really craving some térere. So I serve some térere to the adult circle (host father, mother, and visiting host aunt), who are pulling peanuts off the dried plants. Then I’m off again for a short run, because I’m already gross and plus the weather is just too wonderful to pass up. After I get back, I shower, finish my last charla paper for the Matched Up! (“Upeichaite!”) check-for-learning game I’m going to do (got some guapa points for that from the whole family), and then go to bed.

p.s. the picture above is from a charla during training, but you get the idea. Pretty fancy, no?

Monday - Green Truck Ridin', Croquito Luggin'

Monday

I set my alarm early, for 6am so that I would have enough time to maté a little with the host parents, get myself ready, and eat breakfast before catching the Green Truck into the pueblo at a little after 7am. The Green Truck is a beat-up old pickup whose owner operates it like a bus for the people in the communities out my direction (except he’s more reliable and has better hours than the Actual Bus). I ride in the bed of the truck with anywhere from 4-8 other people ranging from babies to grandpas and pay 5,000 Guarani for the honor. It takes us about ½ hour to get to town. I have a lot of things to do in town, and am pretty guapa at getting them done in good time. I go to the bank to withdraw money from my Peace Corps account (no ATM) and mail some letters at the post office, each of which costs 9,000 Guarani to send, or about $2 USD.

After that I go to a local corner store that has a copy machine and the lady there makes me copies of do-it-yourself equipment plans for my beekeeping charla on Wednesday. When I ask if she sells paper clips so that I can make up packets for each person, she instead insists that staples will work better, so I make up the packets in her shop and she staples them for me. So nice.  Then I go to the produce place and buy some green peppers and apples for the host family. After that, it’s off to the panaderia (bakery) where I buy 5 kilos of croquitos (small, hard, round-like cracker-bread) which is roughly the size of a very full garbage bag. I lug these down the street to the supermercado, where I buy 2 kilos of sugars, 2 kilos of rice, 500g of soy coffee, and 500g of dry soy meat. The supermercado owner is nice enough to let me leave all of my groceries there to pick up later because they are heavy.

Next, it’s to the cyber café (but not a café at all) to check my email and try to Skype Marissa. Try is the correct word because I had Skype all downloaded when the power went out for the whole pueblo. So I went outside to wait on the avenue, and it came back on in about ½ an hour. But then my next computer wouldn’t work with the microphone aspect, and by the time I finally got on a serviceable computer, she had to get ready for class. Dang!! But at least we got to talk some on G-chat. After that failure, it was over a few blocks to the ferretería (hardware supply store) to buy 275 bricks, a bag of cement, 9m of black 6-inch wide piping, and some wire screen – all for my new latrine. I ask if I can get a ride back to my community with the truck that will deliver my building materials and the answer is yes. So I wait 2 hours for the family of the hardware store to eat lunch and then get my stuff loaded. Meanwhile, I have gone to bring over my supermercado purchases, and on my way found a Thermo I liked (essential for térere on-the-go). While I was waiting for the ride, I lunched on an apple, Tangerine Fanta, some chipa my host mom gave me for breakfast, and some croquitos from the garbage bag. Also called a PCV friend and talked to her for a bit, and read the newspaper I had bought when the power went out.

Along with my bricks and croquitos, I am delivered just fine to my community. I sit and térere for a while with the family (Na Tomasa) who owns my future house to discuss what work is up for this week, and then upon their suggestion I also head over to my community contact’s house for a visit. My contact and I smalltalk, I ask about the possible meeting for Tuesday which she tells me will not be happening after all because the local Ag Extension agent from town can’t come, and then she gives me a big guilt trip about visiting Na Tomasa lately and not her. When she jokes that she’s not sure about visiting me in my new house in the future, I tell her-laughingly- that she “will have to get used to it.” That may have been a little harsh. But I don’t take those guilt trips from nobody no more. Or at least not to their faces. I let the guilt eat away at me slowly, later on, in the privacy of my mosquito net when I can’t sleep. But working on that! (The not feeling guilty part.)

That evening, I wash a bunch of clothes, by hand of course, just in time for some glorious rain. Well glorious for everything but trying to dry my clothes. So they get hung up all around my room, with my other things placed strategically around so as not to get dripped on. The satisfaction of some clean clothes and the rain finally coming does wonders for my mood, and I go to bed (before 8pm!) feeling guapa and refreshed by the cooler weather.