I Was Robbed!

Well I did everything The Peace Corps told me to do. I locked my bedroom door every time i left the house. I kept things hidden and never told anyone where they were, not even other volunteers, i did not flash my stuff around. Yet, somehow somebody got in my room and by somebody I mean a family member and stole my camera, along with the camera battery charger and the USB cable. It happened somewhere between last Sunday when i last saw my camera in my suitcase and Friday. Friday afternoon I tore apart my room and had another volunteer help me look. Sure enough it was gone. I know that my host mom has a key to my room, which they are not supposed to have so I am pretty sure my 26 year old host brother got a hold of it and had himself a shopping spree in my room. He has a really bad reputation in town for being a crazy drunk and has come home multiple times with black eyes and swollen cheeks. My host mom always said "he fell down" but I knew someone must have given him what he deserved. When I told my host mom it was missing she acted really strange, normally if i misplace something she helps me look for it or gets really concerned-not this time.

All along I knew something was off with this family. Other people would talk about how their mom´s were so sweet and accomodating. Mine asked me for money and for things to be mailed to them from the states. Other people´s families made them pizza and things they liked every once in awhile. Every once in awhile my family would not even make me dinner, or would give me just rice or just yogurt! Other people had little brothers and sisters they played with, i had a creepy brother older than me that was often very rude and inappropriate. Despite all these things I just kept thinking it was normal, after all i didn´t have anything to compare them to. I´ve never lived with a host family before. My brand new camera was the last straw though. I reported it to my trainer and my Paraguayan house contact person. Within a few hours, they had gone to talk to my mom (i heard she was very upset and defensive) and arranged for me to move out. I went with my Paraguayan language teacher and my American trainer and we packed up my stuff in about 10 min and had it in the Peace Corps SUV and out the door. It´s really kind of liberating to know you can be really pissed off at someone and move out of their house in about 10 min with everything you own and still have the car running outside to drive off in! It sounds dramatic and trust me it was and very uncomfortable!

It was really sad because my 7 year old host nephew had just come to visit for the weekend and he was ready to play with me. He didn´t know what was going on and just watched us pack up from the doorway with really confused eyes. My host mom wouldn´t even look me in the eye when i said goodbye to her, I am sure because she is embarrassed about her son. I never got to say goodbye to my host dad, who actually is a really good guy or the 16 year old brother who is nothing like his older brother. The saddest part was that I spent about half my time at the neighbor´s house, who was my host Aunt. She owned a little dispensa (a tiny store out of her house) so i would go sit with her sometimes and talk, drink tereré or yerba mate with her and listen to her play guitar and sing in Guaraní. She has a beautiful voice and a very warm spirit. When I left she gave me a huge hug and said it affected her too that i was leaving and she hoped I still talked to her!

I spent Friday night at my trainer´s house because they had to find a new family for me. Saturday after class I moved into a new home. They dropped me off and introduced me to my 48 year old host mother and 12 year old host sister. There is no one else in the home but there are Aunts and Uncles and neices next door and accross the street. I went from a mostly male home to a mostly female home. I was tired, still upset about my camera and feeling really disorganized with all my stuff thrown in bags in a pile and was sitting in my new room with about 10 Paraguayans staring at me, ready to make me feel at home. It was a bit overwhelming. The whole street came over to meet the new American girl :)

I left the house and went to another meeting with the grandparent club and I did some fun activities with them and even got to dance with them! I thought we were going to work on getting a garden started but it didn´t happen. They are not sure if they want one now, I heard about the frustration of thinking you are going to get a project going, and then it doesn´t happen the way you would like it to and now i can see what that must be like. The garden was their idea to begin with so I am not that dissapointed, just amused. The singing and dancing cheered me up and then I went home again and unpacked and watched Beethoven dubbed in Spanish with my host mom (how random huh?) and bonded with her and her daughter. My new host mom is awesome. She is very sweet and asks what I like to eat. She calls me corazón and carino, which mean heart and sweetie. I didn´t eat dinner with them because she really didn´t have any food in the house since she wasnt prepared for me to come. My fellow trainees and I went out for hamburgers instead, well i had a burger with fried egg instead of a patty and then we had a few drinks. It was a lot of fun and at one point I was trying to talk about the abuelo club and everyone was involved in their own conversations and I said "i feel like i am in California right now when i always tried to talk about my job with older adults and my friends back home didn´t really care to listen there either!" Funny how in Paraguay I found a way to do it again! They said "okay, Jill go ahead and tell your story.....only because you got robbed"

I lost a camera and a lot of pictures but I am still safe, happy and healthy. It was kind of a blessing because it got me out of the house. I am going to try to live without a camera until August when another volunteer´s parents are coming to visit. They will be able to bring me a new one if i have it mailed to their home in the U.S. or reimburse them. Until then, I will still be able to have pictures taken on other volunteer´s cameras and I still have 2 years here to take pictures.

Tomorrow morning I leave for my long field practice with 2 other trainees. The 3 of us, along with our language teacher are going to Quiindy (pronounced keendoo) and we will each stay with a host family of our own and for a week basically shadow and work with a volunteer who has been here a year. Quiindy is about 2 hours from Guarambaré so I¨ll get to see a little more of the country. I am excited for the trip and the practice. When we get back on Friday, there will only be 4 more weeks of training. It will go by really fast because in those 4 weeks, there will be Semana Santa celebrations (Easter week) we find out our sites and visit our future sites to find housing and have goodbye parties with our host community and we have our swearing in ceremony at the U.S Embassy! Not to mention still cramming in more language classes and other things we will need to know and learn before we head off on our own.

I turn in my paper tomorrow that says what i want in a site and I think i sound so wishy washy they will priobably put me wherever they want! Its hard to know if i want to be a follow-up volunteer or if i want to be the first volunteer in that site, or if I want to be more rural or urban when i really have only seen more urban areas so far, or if i want to work in schools or if i would rather work with non-profit agencies. I keep thinking I don´t know but our trainers know us pretty well and I have heard they always do a good job with matching our skills and personality with a site. We will see! I did express that I would prefer more urban areas and that I would like to have more than one school in my site and the opportunities to continue working with things like older adults as side projects. Maybe I don´t sound as free flowing as I thought. No matter what, it will be up to me to make it what I want and to keep on keepin on!