There are no germs in Paraguay

Everything in Paraguay is shared.  I mentioned tereré in my last post, and how a single cup/straw is passed around among the entire gathering.  This custom isn’t unique to tereré, however.  It is also true of soda, beer,  the ever-popular mixtures of wine/coke and beer/coke, and nearly every other kind of drink you can think of, alcoholic or not.  One, or sometimes two, cups will be filled with drink and spread around for everyone to sip and pass.  So it would seem that germs don’t exist here! Very fortunate, yes? Haha but no worries, I haven’t been doing much drinking—wouldn’t want to give the impression that we like our alcohol in the US!

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…

If you stuck with me for this entire post, I’m glad you made it, and I hope you found it interesting!  Comment with what you want to hear more of.  My mailing address is written on the second tab of this blog.  If you’re an educator and interested in doing a Correspondence program with me, email me (also on second tab)!! Nos vemos!