Week 2 Adventures

I just wanted to give you all an update about what has been going on the last week or so.  I have now been in Paraguay for over a week and some days it feels like I just got here, while others seem like I have been here for years.  I am so far really enjoying my time here.  I am living with a wonderful host family and my siblings are very nice and fun to be around, but five of us trying to share one small bathroom has become a fun experience.  I also have a new very good friend, Michi, the family cat.  He is my new best friend because he has learned to sit under me during meals because I will feed him the food I don’t want (mostly meat fat).  I would never do this in the states, feed animals under the table but I my host mom feels bad if I don’t eat all the food, so feeding the cat a little on the side I think is okay because he is just given my “extra” food scraps anyway J.  He also slept with me my first couple of nights here, but once I put up my mosquito net he hasn’t quite figured out how to get in which is alright.    I finally decided to not let him in my bed when I saw him carry a chicken head and feet around the house and he was disappointed when he couldn’t put it in my room.  Also it is a lot of work to keep the chickens out of my room while still maintaining air circulation, but I am getting much better!  It’s amazing the variety of new “skills” you can learn in such a short period of time!

                They have been keeping us very busy and will continue to the next 9 weeks or so until December 9^th which is our official day to swear in to be an official PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer).  I am living with one of the small environmental groups in a town about 2 hours outside of Asuncion.  We started out with 12 in our group but sadly have already lost one PCT (Peace Corps Trainee).  We were all very supportive of her decision, even though we were very sad to see her go we all knew it took a lot of inner strength to make that decision and return home, so I wish her the best in her future plans!  They told us that it is quite normal and that they normally expect 5-10% to go home during our training here and out of 46 in our group I guess we will still expect to lose some more.  I have also learned how quickly you can get to know people, even though we have known each other less than two weeks I know many of these people will be lifelong friends and I have a wonderful support network here. 

The majority of our time (about ½) is spent on language training which we are trying to learn both Spanish and Guarani which gets very confusing at times.  I have three people in my language class which is very nice because we have to actively participate and get a lot of one on one attention and feedback which I feel is necessary for language.  Along with language training is cultural training so we learn what the norms are and things that we do in the states here is seen as very bad or rude.  So far we have learned about many different hand gestures, which was a very fun experience. 

We spend about ¼ of our time on technical training which I am having a ton of fun in thus far.  Just about all of our sessions are hands on.  So far we have built a compost pile as well as a small garden that is actually located in my backyard.  I am learning a lot of new information and getting very good using a machete and bamboo to make fences and just about anything else that is needed.  We are also double digging our garden, which is a new concept for me but seems like a wonderful idea.  We have a very small garden with three small raised beds but as a demonstration garden I think that it will be okay.  Our compost pile we built right behind our small school in our community that the Peace Corps rents out for our training.  I have heard of composting and used it a lot in Costa Rica but never had a true compost pile of my own so I am now learning the science behind the compost pile and learning that making a compost pile will be essential for my garden success in the future with the soils here.  I am also learning a lot about sustainable community development and what that looks like.  I have been very interested in this topic and am reading an amazing book titled Two Ears of Corn which discussed agricultural development which can also closely relate to environmental development.  My favorite quote thus far that I am trying to remember is that “our job isn’t to become heroes, but rather to make heroes out of the people with whom we are working”.  We have just begun to talk about this topic so I can’t wait to learn more about it and read more in my book. 

The other small amounts of our time are spent on community development, personal adaptation, personal health, and safety and security.  We have a wonderful team of three doctors who are all Paraguayan (and have their own regular practice), but are very passionate about what they are doing and helping PCV’s.  I am very lucky that I already had many of the shots because they are giving shots about once or twice a week and so far I haven’t had to have any so I am hoping for the best.  J We also have a wonderful Safety/Security guy that is very entertaining but knows how to scare the heck out of us with a scenario but then teach us how it can be avoided.  This seems like a very safe country thus far with the main incidents being pickpocketing mostly on the bus and in the big cities, but so far everyone has been good. 

After this week we are not really going to be at the training center too much more as a big group together but rather in our small satellite communities meeting.  This week we have an exercise where we are given a task to do in Asuncion and we are paired up with someone and we have to make our way into Asuncion and complete our tasks.  When we are finished with them (or at 1:30) we have to make our way to the Peace Corps office in Asuncion.  I am very nervous about this since we will be taking many different busses to get there but it will also be fun to explore and to stock up on things that we can’t buy in our small community.  My task is to go to the natural history museum which looks like a lot of fun because I just have to find the museum, tree nursery, and the taxidermy museum.  It seems like my group got the best places to visit because they are evidently doing some outstanding research on tree grafting and creating blight resistant citrus trees, which seems very interesting.  They also evidently have many extinct animal specimens so they should be fun to learn about.   Will try and report back on how this trip into town is.  From the pictures I have seen Asuncion is a VERY large city with skyscrapers and an enormous amount of people so I guess we will see how it goes, I usually don’t like cities (regardless of where they are), but I am hoping for the best!

Also over the next few weeks we will begin visiting other volunteers in their communities so we can see what they are doing over the course of a few days.  This country seems very beautiful and I can’t wait to explore it.  So far my favorites have been the cute baby goats that live right across from me because I can see them from my window and can always make me laugh even when I’m not having the best day.  Also the kids here are so nice and just so interested in everything about us, I don’t have any small children in my home since they are 19 and 29 but there are still plenty of visitors.  The life here seems to move at a very slow pace with a lot of people just visiting each other in the afternoons and they said as it begins to get hot the kids will be out of school for the summer and life really slows down because it’s too hot to do anything else.  We have also just gone through the time change, springing forward, so we are now two hours ahead of Missouri time instead of just one.  I have also learned to not become too attached to really any animal because they all serve a specific purpose, but I do have a new friend who is a rhea which is sort of like an ostrich.  He walks beside me each morning on his side of the fence on my way to school!   

This morning (Sunday) I was able to help my mom wash all the clothes from the family this week.  It is amazing how many clothes there are from the family.  I am trying to wear things at least twice unless they are really dirty to help cut down on laundry, and have become very good at washing my undergarments in the shower each day.  She has a small washing machine that makes our lives a lot easier because it does the main wash but doesn’t drain like in the US so then we have to take the clothes out, rinse them a couple of times in buckets, last time with fabric softener, and then hang them up to dry.  At first I didn’t like the fact that our clothes line was barbed wire but now it makes since because we don’t have very many clothes pins so the barbed wire holds the clothes on the line and if you are paying attention and are careful it will not rip the clothes J.

My host mother here has a beautiful garden all around the house; I have to keep remembering that it is spring here which explains why there are so many beautiful flowers all around.  Many flowers that we grow in the US are present here and many are even on a much larger scale, for example everyone here as a poinsettia tree instead of the small plants we have for Christmas.  Also I have learned that sweeping the dirt to make it nice and smooth is very important and my mom “cleans” the yard every day and gets rid of every broken branch or even just dead leaves that fall of the tree.  I do love our yard though with the huge fruit trees (which we should be harvesting soon) including bananas, many citrus trees, and many others that I don’t even recognize or know the English name for.  We do spend a lot of time on our patio which is beautiful shaded and surrounded with wonderful flowers, I have taken some pictures so will try and post at some point. 

I have also learned that community get-togethers or family festivals are very common here.  Many of them revolve around religious holidays (which there has already been 2-3 since I have been here) mostly for different saints.  These festivities usually consist of a lot of wonderful food and grilling of meat is very popular here.  Also loud music is pretty much normal at all times of the day and night for people even if they are just at their house.  Also people having big speakers in the back of their vehicles that drive all around the community is very popular!  I am very glad that I brought ear plugs! American music especially rap/ hip hop is very popular here and they don’t believe me that I don’t listen to that music back in the states.  I think if they realized what they were singing they might not like it as much as they think they do, but oh well it is very entertaining.  My dad really likes to sing girls just want to have fun, I think he just likes the beat of the song but would be totally humiliated if he knew what he was saying, so I will not burst his bubble.  Also at gatherings the men and women/ boys and girls do not really interact very much but rather sit on different sides of the yards and drink among themselves (usually with one glass) and if a girl would drink (usually alcohol) with a boy it would be seen as a very bad thing, so many of these social customs we are slowly learning about in our cultural/language class.

….(Thursday morning)

I just wanted to give you another update about this week, this blog post just keeps getting longer and longer because I haven’t had the opportunity to update/ connect to the internet.  On Tuesday we all received the first round of our rabies vaccination which wasn’t very exciting and they tell us we still have at least one more rabies shot to go, plus all of our other ones.  It seems like we have a couple shots a week now for awhile L

Yesterday we had our adventure into Asuncion and I had a wonderful time.  We were luckily able to just catch the bus right in front of my house and took it all the way through to San Lorenzo which is a suburb of Asuncion.  We got off there at the university and started out by going to INFONA which is sort of like their forestry service/research sector run by the government.  The museum is called the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural del Paraguay.  We went to the natural history museum there which was simply amazing.  The museum isn’t like one you would find in the US that is like a self-guided, everything laid out and displayed to see.  Rather we showed up at this museum that looked a small house and was greeted by one of the workers.  He then proceeded to show us the museum which was just a series of small rooms with each room being for something different.  The first room he took us to was the entomology lab where there were hundreds of small clear containers filled with tarantulas and other HUGE spiders.  Since this was a museum I assumed they were all dead samples so I proceeded to pick one of them up and just about died when the spider started moving and proceeded to quick drop the container and then I really freaked out when all of the containers started to move with the spiders inside.  The two other guys in my group and the tour guide thought that it was so funny, but I just didn’t especially after he was telling us how poisonous some of them were.  Luckily I was able to quickly move through the lab and into the next room.

The next few rooms were huge rooms with hundreds of tall wooden storage closets and just plain shelves that contained over 300,000 specimens of invertebrates (30,000 species), 31,000 specimens of fish (including 231 species), and thousands of birds, mammals, reptiles, and other insects.  Many items were stuffed as well as many sitting in alcohol, or just pinned and dried.  My favorite part was the extensive plant collection with over 30,000 specimens of plant species that were found in Paraguay over a 30 year time period.  Everything was very well organized and they just had so much to look at, there is no way it could probably be done even within a few months, they just had so much stuff.  The tour guide was so passionate about the museum and all that it had but even though it is a free museum there are not many people that come to visit unless they are a student that has to come for research purposes.  The sad thing was that pretty much anything he touched/ tried to show us kept falling apart but he just kept on moving through.  They also do not get a lot of funding and the money they do get goes towards more research/collection.  Sadly many of the plant and animal specimens we found are no longer found in Paraguay or even anywhere else in the world and he said the major reason was from deforestation.  The craziest thing we saw (which was luckily dead) was a snake that took up an entire 55 gallon drum; I just don’t even want to think about coming across that thing in the woods.  There were so many beautiful butterfly and insect samples I wish we could have stayed longer and I know many of my professors and friends could spend years in there just looking at everything. 

Once we were done looking at everything there we went next door to the house where they invite student groups to come in that has everything geared towards environmental education for students.  They had many stuffed animals, plants, trees, and a lot of recycled art.  The lady we met there is so passionate about her job and loves to teach kids about conservation and the animals that sadly have gone extinct as well as those that still call Paraguay home.  One of the aspects that I really loved was all of the recycled artwork that she helps the kids make when they visit, I was able to get many of new ideas that I can’t wait to try in my community.  It was amazing that through our short visit we could just see how excited they were to see us visiting and how they were able to make the place run with such a small budget and facilities that were falling apart around them.  They have so many valuable specimens that truly need to be preserved because many are the last of the kind. 

After we left the natural history museum we walked across the national university campus and quickly looked at their huge garden where they grow many of their own vegetables, toured the tree nursery where the public can come and buy both plants and seeds, and toured their own smaller version of a natural history museum.  One thing that I learned so far is that everyone here is so nice even though our communication is limited I was still able to learn so much and have a lot of valuable resources that I can use though my service here.  When we were leaving the campus there were a group of Gideons handing out bibles that we were trying to ask directions to and they pointed us in the right direction and while we were walking away the older guys all started laughing because they said, “you know it would have been a lot easier to talk in English for all of us” because as I found out they had moved here from the states, but we still got our free new testament, psalms and proverbs in Spanish. 

We took the bus closer into downtown Asuncion where we got off close to the PC office.  It took us a little while to find the office because everything has tall brick walls and guards and the sign that said PC was about 2 inches by 6 inches wide on a plaque so we went and grabbed lunch before we reported back to the office.  We had to go through intense security screening to get into the “compound” which is huge with many buildings and beautiful gardens.  We had a follow up security talk about our experiences in Asuncion and the bus system and then had to learn all about government computers/ internet and all of the rules/regulations and then had to sign our life away so we would in the future use them.  After all of the policies we had a quick mentor mix where we were able to meet our mentors who are current volunteers and talk to them and was able to ask a lot of question and hear many different stories.  It is always great to just get a bunch of different perspectives of everything.  Sadly we only had about an hour with them and then had to go back through security and get our id’s back so we could leave and luckily they put us on the PC bus so we were delivered right back to our communities and didn’t have to worry about public transit.  Overall it was a wonderful day and I now know how to get around a small part of Asuncion. 

This morning our class is starting late (9:30) so I am able to take a little bit of time to write.  This was the first day that I woke up to a storm and sadly the thunder stopped but so far it has been raining for a few hours very hard and water is beginning to stand everywhere so I can’t wait to try and go out in the red clay, now mud, but I know we need the rain.  I have also learned that our chickens don’t have a chicken coop but rather just a tree they go in at night and when it rains they are trying to come in the house because they evidently don’t like to be wet.

Well after a full day of classes I have learned a few new things about Paraguay.  Today with the rain I found that everything pretty much shuts down in the rain.  We were supposed to go and observe in the schools this afternoon to see how children are taught here so we could begin to get an idea of what we can do in the schools.  Since it rained this morning evidently there isn’t any school for (as I found out) a variety of reasons including: the kids would get sick in the rain, would stain their only good clothes with the red clay, hard to get around in the wet mud, a good day to relax, and the list goes on and on.  So instead of being able to observe the classes we were able to talk to a couple of the teachers as well as look at the beautiful school garden that was built by a current PCV.  There seems to be a few problems with the education system here because there is constantly strikes occurring by the teachers due to a lack of pay as well as shuts down for pretty much anything (if it’s too hot, cold, rain, etc.).  Overall though I really enjoyed the day of rain even though the red clay is super slick and I just about hit the ground but luckily was able to catch myself in time and luckily brought an umbrella and rain coat!  The rain also really helped to cool things down so it should be good sleeping weather tonight.

I also just wanted to let everyone know that I am going to not be able to post anymore for a little while.  If you need to get ahold of me for some reason you can talk to my parents or Thad as they have my phone number and I do love to hear from people at home!  Also I planned on sending many letters from here until I found out that it cost about $4 US and considering that currently I am only making about $4.30/ day I need to save that money for other things right now, you all are worth it but we will just have to wait awhile because they said we need to save our money for settling into our new community.  I have learned that there a few people that do go back and forth to the states for visiting or PCV going home so I am trying to send a few letters with them when I find them so I can just drop them in the mail, so please just be patient.  Also I am not able to check my email very much but I do love to hear from home, so although I might not be able to respond to everyone it means so much that some of you are taking time out of your busy lives to send me a quick email!

Well so sorry for the long post but I’m just trying to keep everyone updated and have limited access to internet.  I hope you all are doing well at home and many hugs and warm thoughts and prayers are coming your way from Paraguay.

P.S. We (all PCV and PCT’s) were invited to the US Ambassadors’ house for Thanksgiving so that should be a fun experience!