3 day, 3 week

Hello once again from Paraguay. I am pretty excited because in three days I am going to find out where I will spend (hopefully) the next two years...site placement!! For the past sixish weeks I have been living in a training community, slowly learning about Paraguayan culture and learning guarani at rapid-fire pace. However, in 3 weeks I will be moving out to the new community where I will slowly begin my volunteer work. Yaaay.

These past few weeks I have gotten a couple of different tastes of volunteer life. I spent the past week with three other trainees (aspirantes in spanish) and our language teacher out at a volunteer site. We got to teach two classes and I also gave the instructions for an icebreaker for an HIV/AIDS/safe sex presentation. The ice-breaker was called "Pass the Yucca" and involved a race to pass a yucca root around a circle without using hands (aka held between the knees and passed to the knees of the next person).

Another taste of volunteer life came about through a training homework assignment called "aspirantes en accion." The idea is to do a mini-development project with a neighbor in your training community. I had to interview four different community members in guarani about their household, land, crops etc and then ask them what they wanted to improve on their land and in their community. Then I ask them how I can work with them to do any of those things. Next step, choosing one person, meeting with them a bunch to talk out ideas, and then finally doing a mini-project related to agriculture/family economy/food security. I ended up working with my host-uncle Diosnel and we built a sun shade for the garden. In Paraguay, many people have "victory gardens" which supply their family's vegetables and herbs for all meals. Gardens are traditionally a winter/fall/spring project, because it is so hot and sunny in the summer that the plants cannot grow in the intense heat. However, by building a sun shade, a family can continue growing vegetables in the summer (which allows them to keep the money they would otherwise spend on buying vegetables/ encourages them to eat vegetables in the summer).

I gained two main insights from this mini-project:

1. How much the volunteer is a cheer-leader. The process of interviewing people got the ball-rolling--however the idea of the sunshade came directly from diosnel's family (when I asked what they wanted to improve about their land), and though my presence at times may have been a motivator, Diosnel worked on some aspects of the construction (in preparation) while I was on volunteer visit, and he told me about how he wanted to maintain the sunshade once I had moved to my new site (sustainability of the project). He also had much more of the technical skills needed to put the thing together.

2. Rain can throw a wrench in everything. From my (Bostonian) perspective, stores, public transportation, people's plans only stop and shutdown because of weather in the case of extreme snow (more than 1 foot), or major flooding. In the Paraguayan countryside, if its raining, that is it. The roads become rushing rivers, schools close down, and everyone shuts their windows and goes back to sleep. All plans are subject to be canceled in the case of rain. Learning how to weather the disappointment is important, since it does rain about once a week!

Paraguayan Moment(itos)
*Sitting with my host family in the house drinking cold tea (terrere-more on this later), when all of a sudden I hear a loud commotion and see what looks like a gigantic black dog running towards me. As the commotion passes (and everyone lifts up their legs), I realize it is actually a gigantic, muddy, squealing pig being chased through the house by a lap dog.
*My host mother is afraid toads. I come home to her trying to sweep a toad the size of my face out of the house with a broom. The toad was alive and wide-eyed as it rolled side over side out of the house.
*Watched a grandmother wash her toddler grandson in a large bucket filled with bubbly water. He was so pleased to be in this bucket and was totally peeing in it. The bucket came up to his shoulders and was the perfect size for him.