Site Presentation and Carnival

So what do these two events have in common?... Not much, besides the fact that both took place in Paraguay and I was present for both of them. However, I thought that some of you out there would like to hear about the random events that filled my last few weeks of summer here in Ayolas, PY.

Site Presentation
The site presentation takes place within the first few months of a volunteer arriving in their community as a manner of presenting the volunteer to the community. The presentations are held within our respective communities and we are encouraged to invite community members that we feel we might potentially work with in the future. Most of the people that attended my presentation were either teachers from the local schools or youth from my environmental group. My boss Eli Cabrera for the Environmental sector and our third year volunteer coordinator Austin came to Ayolas for the evening to give my presentation and check up on how things were going for me in my site. I was very happy with the amount of people who turned out to support me and hear a little bit more about what is Cuerpo de Paz (Peace Corps).











Carnival
Unfortunately this year I was not able to travel to Rio de Janeiro to participate in the huge Carnival celebrations, but I was able to attend Ayolas's version with a few Peace Corps friends. There were 8 of us who spent the hot evening drinking, dancing, and celebrating the night away.

mbo`ehao ha mbo`ehara

(school and teacher)

School has finally started in Paraguay!

Summer vacation finally has come to an end and so have the days of searching for something to do to fill my day. I no longer have to roam the streets looking for people to drink terere with. I now have a place to go. Something to sort of do...

The starting of school has brought about a lot of work opportunities for me. Since I am a second time volunteer in my site, I have found it to be pretty easy to enter the schools and find at least one or two teachers at each school that are interested in working with me. Before the school year began, I headed to all the schools in my area to pass out a short survey to the teachers presenting some possible topics I could work with them to incorporate into their curriculum this year. While I only got a few surveys back, the actual act of handing them out gave me the opportunity to present myself to the schools and meet lots of different teachers. (Now my problem is remembering about 200 different teacher´s names.) As of today, I think that I will have a pretty full schedule of work for the school year. Both of the local primary schools are interested in having a school garden program this year, while the high school teachers are interested in working with me on large community projects within the environmental technical student classes. Even the special education school has plans for incorporating my work into their weekly schedule starting in April (I am most excited to work with them).

While I am excited to work on all the projects/topics that have been presented to me thus far, the challenge is making sure that there is a balance to all my work. While I am here to share my skills and motive teachers and students with my passion for these subjects, I am not here to work alone. This might be one of the hardest things for Paraguayan teachers to understand. When I am in their classroom, it should not be an opportunity for them to leave. I am not their substitute teacher for the hour. The more that I work alongside teachers, the more they will learn and incorporate different strategies into their teaching as well. So my next steps for the following few weeks is to hold some informal meetings with the interested teachers I have met and begin lesson planning together. This is much harder than it sounds due to busy schedules, my still struggling Spanish, holidays, and/or the laziness of the teachers. Vamos a ver entonces. (We will see then)

However, I have found all the students around Ayolas to be very welcoming. The 1st-3rd grades love to stare at me, 4th-6th graders love to ask me random questions about the USA and then run away laughing, 7th-9th graders are a combination of the staring and question asking, while the high school students love asking the personal life questions (how old are you, do you have a boy friend, where do you live, etc.). I have already had the chance to teach in two different high school classrooms about the very important topic of trash decomposition. These two charlas (talks/lessons) gave me a lot more confidence in my language skills and excitement for my work in the schools in the future.

Aaprendese guarni ikatu haguàicha añe`e la gentekuèra ndive.
I want to learn Guaranì to be able to speak with people.


School has not only started for the Paraguayan children, but for me as well. For the past few weeks I have been going to Guaraní school (or my private Guaraní tutoring at a former neighbors house). And I love it! While my Guaraní is still almost none existent, I adore my Guaraní teacher and her family. Profesora Irma is a retired Guaraní teacher that lives two houses down from my third host family´s house (Señor Susana and the granddaughter Camila) here in Ayolas. Her husband is a jokester that enjoys making me say obnoxiously hard words in Guarní and her two kids (Jose 12 and Belen 13) are very mature kids that still love getting into a little bit of mischief.

Irma grew up about 30 minutes north of Ayolas in a small town that has seen about 5 different Peace Corps volunteers in the past 30 years. So she understands a little more about my work here, and about the wacky lifestyles us Americans like to live than the average Paraguayan. I go to their house about three times a week for my tutoring for anywhere from an hour to three (my lesson is usual 45 minutes and the rest of the time I sit around talking with the family). Then after my lesson I usually sit with my old host family and the other neighbors to drink some terere and hear the town gossip. These have been some of my favorite afternoons in Paraguay. And I am looking forward for many more to come.




Those who sow wheat, they prepare for the year;
those who plant trees, they prepare for various years.
Those who teach the youth, they prepare for various future generations.

Summer

So the weather here the past three months has been unbelievable. While most of you know this from other emails or letters I have sent, I thought that it would be important to state it one last time. (Sorry if you all have had enough of hearing about it, but it is a pretty all consuming matter in my life here.) On average I talk about how hot it is here about 20 to 30 times a day with my host family, friends, or random people I run into on the street or in the supermercado. The main reason why it is so unbearable here is because there really is no escaping the heat. When it gets warm in the states we have our refuges of the movie theater, the mall, our air conditioned homes, swimming pools, and lakes or rivers to pass our day away in. Here that is not so. The best you can do is either sit under a ceiling fan or hang out under the shade of a tree while drinking terere. And most of the time if you are doing either activity you are either thinking or talking about how hot it is. However this summer I have been trying to keep myself busy with random little adventures in both Ayolas and Paraguay.


Sonidos de la Tierra
In the early part of February, over 2,000 youth from throughout Paraguay and Northern Argentina, gathered in Ayolas for "Sonidos de la Tierra" or "Sounds of the Earth". Sondios de la Tierra was founded in 2002 by the musician and composer Luis Szaran. Luis Szaran was lucky enough to study composition in Europe after a prominent Paraguayan musician recognized his talent. As the eighth child of a farming family, he was extremely grateful for the opportunity, and he went on to become an internationally known composer and the conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Asuncion, Paraguay.

Wishing to return the favor, he founded Sonidos de la Tierra to inspire local towns to form musical ensembles for young people. The organization travels throughout Paraguay during the year with their "conservatory on wheels" to lead workshops for Parguayan youth interested in enhancing their musical abilities. Some of the youth in Paraguay have never seen a violin or harp, let alone have the opportunity to the learn the basics of playing such an instrument. Every year, Sonidos hosts a national music camp that is open to young musicians from all over Paraguay. Children from rich and poor families eat, study and perform music together for one week. Ayolas was lucky enough to host this annual event for Paraguay this year.



For one week, the town was full of youth praticing their instruments by day and performing for the community by night. During the day, the youth were scattered around Ayolas, practicing under mango trees in the town plazas or inside emptied schoolrooms alongside new friends from across the country. While at night they preformed pieces ranging from Motzart and Vivaldi to traditional Paraguayan folk songs. Not only was I am greatly impressed by the advanced level performers, but also by the beginner students that took to the stage to play "Twinkle Twinkle" after just three days of playing the violin.


Itaipu
The previous volunteer in my site created a jovens or young adults (15-29) group called EcoAyolas. The group focuses on raising awareness about environmental issues in the community and exploring the natural environment of Paraguay. So during this summer vacation the group decided to travel to the Itaipu dam, located outside of the Ciudad del Este along the border of Paraguay and Brazil. The Itaipu dam is the worlds largest operational hydroelectric power plant in the world. The group petitioned the dam in early December to receive an all expense paid trip to the dam for the day in early February. And we got it!




At 1am in the morning, the bus arrived in Ayolas to drive the six hour trip to Itaipu. All 37 of us loaded the bus and prepared for the sleepless ride. When we arrived the day started with a bus tour of the dam, followed by a trip to the dam´s museum and zoo. We spent the afternoon at the Refugio Biologico Tatí Yupí where we relaxed in the shaded, took a horse buggy ride, rode horses and enjoyed the view of the Itaipu Lake.


Yes he is texting while driving our horse buggy. Got love technology.

After a rest full afternoon we got back in our tour bus and headed an hour outside of the city to Los Saltos de Monday. These beautiful waterfalls were a refreshing site to visit. While not nearly as big as the famous Iguazu Falls that I hope to visit in the near future, I did enjoy the sights and sounds that the waterfall blessed us with that day.



As the day came to an end we headed back to the Itaipu dam for a second time for the evening light show. Since we arrived a little early with a few hours to kill before the show started, we decided to start an impromptu dance party in front of the visitors center. We even got some other visitors to the dam to join in with us. After the lighting of the dam tour ended, we loaded the bus for one last time and traveled the six hours back to Ayolas. It was a day full of adventures and new friends in Paraguay.





SuperBowl
While most Paraguayans do not understand the complicated rules of fútbol norte americano or football to us from the USA, they do understand the importance of a partido or game. So when Super Bowl Sunday approached, us volunteers in site decided to take the opportunity to cook up some tasty traditional Super Bowl Sunday food and watch the game together. Since we are Peace Corps volunteers, none of us had a TV or the cable connection needed to watch the game at one of our houses, so we took the opportunity to share a little bit of our culture with some local Paraguayan firefighters while we watched the game on their TV in front of the firestation in town.

The game started around 7pm here in Paraguay, so Mandi, David and I, took the afternoon to cook up some chips and salsa, hot pork sausage dogs, an apple salad, and for dessert Mandi prepared buckeyes in saludos to her home state of Ohio. Unfortunately, that Sunday ended up being one of the hottest days in Paraguay, making the food preparation almost unbearable in the 105 degree heat. But the sweating was well worth it in the end. For at the nights end our stomachs were full and we all cheered on the New Orleans Saints to their win.


Olympics
It was only last year I was living a little more than an hour drive away from Vancouver, Canada, the host city for the winter Olympics of 2010. Now I am living over 5,000 miles away...

While I was a little sad during those two weeks of ceremonies and competition seeing all the snow and beauty of the Pacific Northwest, I had a great time watching the games with my host family and neighbors down here in South America. Paraguay did not have any competitors in the games, but Paraguayans still took some interest and luckily I was able to watch a lot of different events. During those two weeks I became the town`s walking Winter Olympics encyclopedia. I was asked to explain many of the rules for the events, where certain countries are located in the world, what language they speak in those countries, and what the hell is curling to at least five different people. I can hardly explain that in English!

My favorite memory I will take from watching these Olympic games will be sitting with my Guaranì teacher for three hours on two different days watching the ladies figure skating. During both of those days I was supposed to be learning more Guaranì, but instead we had a great time watching each routine, commenting on their outfits, country they were from, the choreography of the routine, etc. The best part of all was that it was a Brazilian channel that showed the skating, so everything was in Portuguese!

Next
So with autumn just around the corner, I am going to say that I had a great first summer in Paraguay. While there were definitely challenges in the first few weeks with language, holidays, and new host families, I learned a lot about my community and about myself. While it wasn`t easy and I wouldn`t want to do it again, I did learn more from things being challenging.

Almost all Peace Corps volunteers say that the first three months of service in site are the most uneventful, lonely, and awkward months of service you will ever have during your two years. After three months my calendar is starting to fill up with activities at the schools, I have a handful of close friends and families I can rely on, and as for the awkwardness....that will never change.

Sharing Paraguay

This past week I had the most amazing opportunity to have one of my best friends Sprout-Kate, from Western and Lutherwood, visit me here in Paraguay for the week. Sprout is currently voluntering for the year in Montevideo, Uruguay, through the Young Adults in Global Missions program of the Lutheran church. She arrived in Uruguay at the beginning of September, and this was the first opportunity either of us has had to see anyone from home. So on Saturday I made the 6 hour bus ride into Asuncion to pick her up from the airport that evening. I left almost 3 hours early from the hotel to pick her up from the Asuncion International airport, I heard the bus was infrequent so I wanted to give myself some extra. The bus is very infrequent because Parguayans do not usually have the money to travel by airplane, and if they do, they also have the money for a car to drive themselves there. I waited for almost an hour and a half before the bus finally did come to pick me up. Sitting in the international capital airport of Paraguay that is roughly the size of a Macy´s department store brought to my attention that Paraguay definitely is still developing in lots of ways. I sometimes get asked the quesiton from Paraguayans of why don´t more people visit Paraguay for tourism. I think that the main reason is that it is so expensive to fly in. There are no direct flights to the USA and thus no one wants to pay over a thousand dollars to visit Paraguay when Argentina and Brazil are so much cheaper and have a developed tourist centers. I am not saying this to detour anyone from visiting me, just reminding myself and you all that visiting Paraguay is not like taking a cruise.

So after 5 months apart, at roughly 9:36pm (Paraguayan time), we were finally reunited! Everyone in the terminal stared at us as we hugged (Paraguayans kiss cheeks) and began to cry. Luckily before Sprout arrived, I met a nice gentlemen at the airport who had just returned to Paraguay after spending over 10 years in the USA. We talked in English about his time in the USA and my time here in Paraguay, and since the flight he was waiting for didn´t get in for another two hours, he was nice enough to drive us to our hotel for the night. Saving us the hassle of trying to catch a bus at that hour or an expensive taxi ride. Sprout was a little freaked out, but driving in a Mercedes is much nicer than any bus ride in all of Paraguay. We spent our first night in an air conditioned hotel room snacking on peanut butter m&m sent to Sprout by her mom and chatting all about our past five months apart. We did not sleep that much the first night.



On Sunday we traveled to my see my host family and neighbors in Guarambare. Brenda, my training neighbor and best friend in Paraguay, also joined us for our trip to Guarambare. It was great walking down the familiar streets and stopping to say hello to some of the families we met during our three months of training. However, the best part was being in the company of my host family and Brenda´s. Both families were excited to see us and comment on how fat both Brenda and I have gotten since December. We just laughed and blamed them for always feeding us white bread and sugar. It was great to feel as if we had never left. Sprout got to drink her first "ha" or turn of terere and I got to see my little Paraguayan boyfriend Derlis. The most exciting part of being back in Guarambare was seeing my PUPPY!


During training, Brenda´s dog Blanqui got pregnant. Both of us were pretty shocked by the experience of a dog going through heat. Neither of us had ever had a dog before, so whenever we were sitting around at her house we would try our best to protect Blanqui from the 5 or 6 male dogs that would lurk around the edge of the yard. So when she got pregant, both Brenda and I decided that we were going to take the plunge and ask to have one of her puppies each. On Christmas day we found out that 6 puppies were born. So on our travel back to Guarambare for the day we had the big moment of selecting our puppies. Brenda knew that she wanted a male dog, and I knew that I wanted a female. They were all sleeping under the outdoor sink when we arrived. But slowly throughout the afternoon, they came out into the shade of the trees where we were sitting insearch of food and water. While we were there we found out that my host family´s black lab was the father and I knew instantly which one of the puppies I wanted to call my own. The black female puppy with two white spots on her chest. Before I knew what she would look like, I decided to name her Che Rubia Porâ or My Pretty Blonde Girl in a mix of Spanish and Guarani. The best part is that she is all black! So far the Paraguayans are getting a kick out of her name. Right now she is one month old and still needs to stay with the mom, but hopefully when I get my own house at the beginning of March I will be able to bring her home. (However, I am not very excited for the 6 hour bus ride with a dog sitting on my lap in a box. I heard you can give them a little Benadryl they will sleep the whole time. Hope it is true!Trust me I will write a future blog about this adventure to come!)


After staying the night on Sunday In Guarambare, Sprout and I traveled back to Ayolas for the next few days. The 6 hour bus ride in midday heat, may not have been the best idea, but we got here safe and sound. The next adventure was moving houses. Since I said that I was only needing to live with Señora Susana for one week, I had to move on to my fourth family here in Ayolas. My new and current family is the Directora (or Principal as we say in the states) of the main school I will be working with. She was gracious enough to open her house to me for the next few weeks before I move on to my fifth and possibly final family. Directora Cresencia lives with her husband, 16 year old daughter, the husband´s father, and 19 year old cousin. She is one of 18 kids and her husband is one of 9! So there has been lots of family members in and out of the house. Sprout and I had a great time during our three days here, sitting around chatting with them, eating lunch, and playing some no rules Paraguayan style volleyball. At some points I thought that my new host family liked her more than me because they would always comment on her "perfecto" Spanish, but in the end they would always say that since I know some Guarani I am their favorite.



Also while we were in Ayolas we took some time to eat some ice cream, go for walks, bake some banana bread for Cresencia´s family, ride around town in the back of the firefighters truck, and eat tacos for dinner with the other Peace Corps volunteers in Ayolas. Our big adventure in Ayolas was to the Yacereta dam. I had been wanting to visit, but I thought that it would be more fun to take the tour with a friend. And that definitely was the best decision, since it was an extremely surface level information tour. I know that no one wants to hear about all the fish that actually have been killed by the building of the dam, or all the residences that have been flooded both up and down river from the dam because of its construction, but the hardest part was not having good enough language skills to ask the real questions. I know that this won´t be my last tour of the dam during my two years, so hopefully in the future I can get some more information out of the tour guides. I was able to take some pretty good pictures there anyways.






After three days in Ayolas we headed on back up to Asuncion for our final two days together. Luckily all the volunteers were called into the office that week to receive our H1N1 shots, so we were able to meet up with lots of my friends and celebrate Jessica W.´s belated birthday. We went out for some great Mexican food, saw New Moon in English, drank fresh brewed coffee, explored some outdoor markets and slept in a miraciously freezing cold air conditioned hotel room.


Early Saturday morning we loaded into a taxi and took off for the airport.After a little bit of a stressful check in process, Sprout quickly made it through customs and she was off. This was a really great opportunity to experience what it will be like when the rest of you all visit me during the next two years! (wink, wink) And it was nice to share some of my frustrations and concerns with someone who is experiencing a very similar program and lifestyle in South America.

Overall, it was one of my best weeks I have had in Paraguay. Sharing the culture, language, and my Paraguayan families with someone I love. One of the main reasons why I joined and continue to enjoy serving as a Peace Corps volunteer is because two out of the three main goals of Peace Corps is about sharing and experiencing culture. Not only learning about Paraguayans, but also providing them the opportunity to learn about some of our personal culture and experiences from the USA. Paraguayans remember Peace Corps volunteers. I have heard stories dating back 20 to 30 years about Peace Corps volunteers who ate peanut butter and jelly sandwhichs, who drank coca cola with breakfast, who married this Paraguayan or that Paraguayan, or who just visited their family once to drink terere when they were 5 or 6 years old and now they have 5 and 6 year old children of their own. It is important to be yourself as a volunteer, and become a part of the stories that Paraguayans will tell for years to come and for us as volunteers to create our own stories with Paraguayans that we will tell to friends and family for years to come as well. Sharing.