The Post Office

Our postal lady forgot to come to our school this week so I decided to track down the post office in Guarambaré to mail my letters myself. I followed the directions i was given and found the post office, which in reality is the postal lady´s house. Her house IS the post office. Sure enough, there was a little flag and a symbol on her front porch that said "correos" which means mail. She saw us walk up to the gate and said very enthusiastically "come on in girls, i am just working on mailing the letters from your group!" We went into her front room, aka the post office and she told us about how she has been running the post office for 27 years, all on her own. Before her i don´t think there was a post office. Paraguayans just don´t really use mail like we do. If you addressed a letter to a person in this town, you would literally have to write the name of the biggest street closest to the house, then like "5 trails past the main road, 4th house on the left" and that is how the letter might get there. she brought out two big photo albums and showed us pictures of all the traditional dances shé has been involved in over the years, pics of her family and even pictures of the 7 Peace Corps volunteers she has hosted in the past. They were volunteers from the 70s and 80s!! It was so trippy to see those pics and wonder what their experience must have been like 20 years ago!

After a long time of chatting and hearing stories, she eventually sat down and weighed our letters, taped down our envelopes, put stamps on them and changed our money. This whole process took about 40 min. when i left i just thought "if people back home knew this is how their letters and postcards got to them, they would laugh hysterically" So...now you know.