Not that this is related…but yesterday I
came home from class to hear my 6-year-old host brother Erwin chattering on
about a kure'i, a chanchito—a little pig. That
can’t be right, I thought to myself—I live with one of the few host families
who doesn’t have any farm animals.
However, I soon discovered that my small brother had in fact received a
baby pig as an early gift for his upcoming birthday! So we now have a surprisingly adorable tiny
pig tied to a tree in our back yard, tentatively named Gordiño (little fatty). Now we
just have to make sure our dog Cookie doesn’t try to play with him…
On an entirely different note, last week we
had our first PCV site visits. Each of
us trainees was sent to visit a different current volunteer at their sites
across the country, for about 3-4 days.
I visited a really great volunteer in a “medio campo” site—i.e., rather
rural, yet about an hour and a half walk from a small-ish city. I know this because I did that trek to and
from the bus stop in town upon arriving at and leaving the site. Wisely, I managed to trudge both ways at about
noon, and it’s general about 85-90F at that time these days. Smart, I know. However, in my opinion, this would be the
perfect sort of site for me—you have the feel of your own small “community” to
work in, but have the option to go into town when necessary to go to a larger
supermarket, meet up with other volunteers in the area, use internet,
etc…ideally traveling on a bike and with no backpacking backpack…
We were sent on these visits to get a
better idea of what service may be like for us. It is continually drilled into
us that “training is nothing like service, training is nothing like service,”
and the trainers and staff want to make sure that we know what we are
committing to and are in it 100%. I
really liked what I saw on my visit. The
volunteer was doing some really great work in the local schools and with some
women’s committees, and she’d done other camps and workshops in the past. She was about a year into her service. This is generally the time when PCVs have
worked really hard at learning the language, integrating into the community,
and doing many small projects, and they are getting ready to really get into a
large-scale project to do during their second year.
It wasn’t (entirely) by luck that I was
sent to a site I liked so much. There is
a pair of program managers who are in charge of finding and placing each
trainee at the best site for them and especially for that community. We have had one interview with our program
managers to get an idea of who we are and where we might fit, and we will have
two more. This will be after our “long
visit” a week from Monday—a week-long visit to another PCV site where we
actually do some work with the volunteer there, instead of just observing. A few weeks after that, we’ll have a visit to
our future site. Eep! But it’s hard to talk to the program managers
about our expectations/“ideal” site while at the same time trying not to have
expectations and to remain uber-flexible to whatever may come. Fortunately, we’re all being supplied with an
incredibly intense amount of work to focus on here in training, so there’s not
much time for extraneous thought! J
Oh hey!
I also turned 23 last Friday! The
other trainees were awesome, and I had a really fun birthday weekend. I got my very own guampa (see previous
post)! I got iced (if you don’t
know...that’s fine)! I got lots of
cookies/cake/ice cream (way too much sugar)! My host family made me pizza (not
quite up to Chicago standards but still good), and a fellow trainee made apple pie
(glorious)! And I got to skype my
parents! Bonus, I had the gift of
reuniting with everyone after our PCV visits (how are we going to handle being
apart for 2 years when 4 days seemed like we hadn’t seen each other in
forever?? Haha).All-in-all, an exciting weekend.
Por fin, our training has also begun to
move away from safety/security/health/etc lectures and on to mostly technical
training. Sadly, this means we see a lot
less of the Agriculture sector trainees, but it also finally feels like we’re
learning Environmental Consevation-related skills…useful, no? We’ve built our own 10m x 10m trainee garden,
with 10 raised beds, mediasombra (partial-shade) roofs, and planted tomatoes,
peppers, lettuce, and one of the herbal remedies used with terere. We’ve also done quite a few workshops on
things like compost, worm compost, didactic materials for classrooms, trash
programs, and more! Next week we’re
going to start learning about agroforestry and such things, and we’re in charge
of taking care of the garden for the rest of training.
Yikes!
It’s almost 12:30am! I’m actually
writing this in my room on Thursday night on my netbook, which is why it’s
obnoxiously long. I finally wised up and
realized that I can bring this post into the computer lab on a thumb drive and
use my cyber-time much more wisely.
However, since I generally go to bed at 10pm these days, I’m gonna be
hurting tomorrow…luckily I’ll have plenty of sugar to keep me going, since
we’re planning on buying candy for our own little Halloween and leaving it with
our host families, then trick-or-treating with our small Paraguayan siblings
before heading to a Halloween party at one trainee’s house. Nobody in Paraguay (except maybe in Asunción)
dresses up or trick-or-treats for Halloween, so it’s going to be entertaining,
to say the least…