Recent activities

Halloween
All that Paraguayans understand about Halloween is that women usually dress up as witches and kids get candy. So for my first Halloween here I went with two other trainees and a couple of their Paraguayan host family members to a local fiesta. The outdoor fiesta was held at a local soccer field that had a stage and a cement area to dance. The fiesta technically started at 8pm, but Paraguayans don´t acutally start arriving until atleast 11pm or midnight. We left for the fiesta at 11:30pm and by this time only a handfull of people were dancing. But after an hour more and more Paraguayans wanting to dance started arriving and we started our dance session for the night.

This is Brenda´s host brother Julio and wife Carmen who escorted us to the fiesta. They are amazing!

The music was a mix of traditional polka style music and reggaeton. There was a boy band that played at around 1am in the morning and it was really hard to take them very seriously has performers. At this point most of us Americans went and had a seat until they were done. Paraguayan dancing is a little different than in the US for teenagers and early 20s. Dancing is done in lines and the most touching that happens between the men and women are holding hands to spin your partner. They all have pretty good dancing skills since dance is taught throughout their educational system and it is hard to find a Paraguayan that doesn´t like to dance.

During the evening there was a contest to name the next queen of the soccer club supporting the fiesta. It was like a mini beauty pagaent throughout the night. Really fun to watch and choose our favorites to win. We left about 2:30am in the morning which is really early for Paraguayans. It is normal to stay out until 6am or 7am in the morning at a fiesta, but most of us Americans were tired from a week of training. However, Brenda´s host family had a really great time with us and thought we all were really good dancers.

Mario

So I never thought that I would achieve such admiration in my life as I have over the past week from playing Super Mario with my host brother and neighbor boys. My host brother has an old playstation and he got a game that has all the old Mario Brothers games on them. They asked me if I knew how to play, since they were struggling the beat just the first level. Once I grabbed the controlled and started running and jumping through the level, they were hooked. Over the past few days I have taught them how to run fast and jump at the same time, how to fly if you have a feather on Super Mario Brothers and the importance to collecting coins to get more lives. I have never felt more like a rock star in my life. So thanks mom for allowing me to play lots of nintendo when I was a kid, it seems that it is actually helping me to assimilate into my community. Who would have thought?

Future sites
Also this week we had our last interviews with the Peace Corps staff about our future site locations. We shared information about what we would like our site to look like and some of the activities we think we would want to do over the next two years. I am interested in living in a small pueblo or city that has an interest in large community environmental education activities and the development of youth groups. We find out our sites in exactly a week and a half, and we all are really nervous and excited at the same time. Once we find out our site the next day a community contact will be traveling into Guarambare to meet us for a day and then we will travel out with them for 5 days to get to know our site and setup housing for atleast the first month. Soon I´ll know where I will be living and where you all can visit me for two years! I´m so nervous!

Upcoming
Finally I wanted to share a few of my upcoming activities. This next week I will be outside of Guarambare for the whole week with four other volunteers visiting a current volunteer for what is called Practica Larga or Long Field Practice. This is a 5 day experience to observe and participate is some activities that we could hold at our sites in the future. I will be traveling to Ndavaru about 2 hours outside of Guarambare to work at a two day bird festival, create home made laundry detergent and work in a school garden. I am excited to meet another host family for the week and get to practice my spanish even more. I hope to share lots of pictures in my next blog.

Hope you all are well and making plans to visit. Training is complete in less than 5 weeks and I am excited to see where my life will lead me next here in Paraguay.