Hello From Paraguay!

Peichano (so!) I have been in Paraguay for about a week and a half--just beginning my 10 week training session in Guarambare, a small city/town about an hour away from the capitol. I am living with a great host family, a short bus ride from the training site and am learning so much from them about Paraguayan food, traditions, farming, etc. Also they are helping me with both Spanish and Guarani, the language that I will be learning for the next weeks. Guarani is crazy (awesome). Half of the letters in the alphabet are pronounced nasally, and the y, which is also the word for water, is almost pronounced like a gulp of water. During my free time the first few days, I just visited different families and asked them how to say ¨water¨ in Guarani in an attempt to get the sound down.

About my host family (sorry if this post is not as pretty as the last, as I am writing it in an internet cafe): my host mother, Mariana, is a house-wife and my host father, Abrahan, is a farmer. Their daughter Marta, who is 24, works in the office at a factory near my training site, and their younger son, Diego, is in school. They have a field for growing the (present at every meal) yucca, corn, peas, and sugar cane, beautiful gardens, two cows, two oxen and an ox cart, multiple chickens and roosters, two dogs (one who´s name is ¨dog¨), and one cat. They live very nearby to Mariana´s two sisters and brother-in-law, and everyone is always visiting back and forth or just calling across the front lawn to talk to each other.

This past weekend I met one of Marta´s cousins, and did a poem exchange, so I am going to include the first verse here, just so you can get an idea of the language that I have been learning for two weeks:

Nde pora

nde pora repukavo
mombyrymi
ipora nde mborayhu
emañaro yvotyre

(which if i remember correctly, means "you are beautiful, you are beautiful from afar, you are beautiful when you are looking at a flower").

Training is very intense--in a good way. In the space of ten weeks, we are learning two languages (spanish, though more focused on guarani), farm tech-- (how and what to plant in paraguay), animal husbandry (aka raising 20 extremely fuzzy future meat-chickens which we will get to slaughter at the end and share with our host families),  and vegetable gardening--paraguayan culture lessons, learning how to get from one place to another, and finally recieving about 1 shot per week. Next week typhoid! The other volunteers aregreat people and a very supportive community--as we are all trying to navigate our way into the paraguayan culture.

One of my favorite things so far about living in Paraguay is the greater connection to nature. Every family in my town has some amount of  agricultural production (vegetable gardens, yucca fields) for personal use. Most houses don't have screens in the windows and therefore nature is often inside the house as much as it is outside. I have become atuned to exactly when the bugs come out--the exact moment of sunset to shut the blinds, the type of insects (and the bevy of frogs that show up for some dinner) which signify that it will rain in the middle of the night. One of our coordinators described Paraguay as a sort of garden of eden, because seeds really take to the soil here and it is quite possible to pull off a branch/twig from many trees and simply stick the branch in the ground. A couple weeks later, you will have a new rose bush or sweet potato plant.

Unfotunately, I will not have very reliable internet sources for the next three months (!!) but hopefully after that I will be able to post a little more regularly and hopefully will be able to get up some of my photos (which are mostly of cows and chickens, but interspersed with some of the people in my neighborhood).

Chag sameach!
--Emily