I just got back from my future site visit. Let's see....what can I say about the town I will be living and working in for the next two years??? It is a town 6 hours north of the capital, in the department of Concepcion. (Departments are like our states in the U.S) It is called Horqueta and is a lovely, charming little town of 10,000 people. There is one paved road that goes through town where you can buy most anything you would need to survive, there is a really pretty plaza (in comparison to other plazas in Paraguay-not pretty plaza like in Spain or anything) a big church, a little pizza place, two high schools, two elementary schools, a girl's group home, a muni, a library and a soccer field. All the other roads are dirt roads, like most in Paraguay and it rained two of the 4 days I visited so I didn't do too much exploring. When it rains, the roads become like rivers and nobody goes anywhere, not even to work or school. Not to mention all the farm animal crap and trash that is in the road floads over your feet and that is just gross! It also leads to parasites getting in your feet so no thank-you, I will do as Paraguayans do and stay indoors!
The days that I did get out and explore, I went to the schools with my contact and he introduced me to some people. Everyone has been very nice and seems willing to work with me. I was trying to use my middle name (Kristine) and go by the name of Kristina in site since people have such a hard time with Jill but the previous volunteer already told some people in the town that my name was Jill so I think it will end up being Jill. RIght now people use both so we'll see what happens...
When I wasn't walking around awkwardly introducing myself to people, I was hanging out with my new host family. There is a single mom and her 5 kids. There is a baby, a 6 year old, 11 year old and 2 teenagers. They are all great kids. The Urban Youth volunteer that I am following up lived with the family the whole 2 years and I am sure I will too. She built her own house on the property of the family and by built I mean paid for the materials and the family paid for labor. The house is really cute, nicer than some studios I have seen in California. It has a bedroom, a bathroom with running water and a flushing toilet, a little kitchen with a sink and stove and a patio. The only problem is the roof is made of metal and it leaks in the rain and is very hot in the summer. As soon as I get a camera I will post pics of all this. My host mom owns a little store and I sat on the corner a lot and watched kids play soccer on the dirt field out front and drank terere with neighbors. Within the course of an hour I saw a kid walking by with a bicycle and a squealing pig strapped to the back of the bike, I saw 3 grown men piled on a motorcycle almost run into a pole, and saw goats, pigs, horses, dogs, and cats roaming around the street. It's funny how familiar these surroundings are becoming but I still laugh a lot at them. In my backyard there are pigs, chickens, dogs and cats. When we eat at the dinner table the little piglet walks under my legs all the time. I have to remind myself one day they will kill this pig and I'll probably have to witness it so I can't get attached!
There is another volunteer in the same town who has been here almost 2 years and works as a municipal services volunteer. He will leave in August and is really cool. He will be a big help in showing me around and for moral support. He did a radio show with the volunteer I am following up and would like to continue it with me. Where in the U.S can you just walk into a radio station and say Hi, I would like to have an hour slot on your program...and have them say yes!? I will give it a go but will be very nervous about it. I did speak a little bit on the radio on Sat with another volunteer in the area who has her own show. Radio shows are very common ways for volunteers to get information out to the community and educate. Also very fun once you get over your fear of speaking in a different language for hundreds if not thousands to hear!
Every volunteer as well as our boss has told us that the first 3 months in site are the most challenging. The make it or break it time. It's hard to get work going right away since you ahve to build trust of the community first before you start projects and building projects is no easy task. Also, saying goodbye to your fellow trainees after 3 months of training and living in the same town is hard. I will have to do that in 2 weeks and get on a bus and go off on my own to practically the other side of the country! Two more people decided Peace Corps wasn't for them and decided to leave before site assignments. One was from my Urban Youth Group. It was really sad because she is the first person I met on the plane from L.A to Miami and was someone I was close to. Now there are 9 Urban Youth volunteers and 6 of them have sites near the capital-Asuncion. I am way up north and my best friend here has been placed way down south! My other good friend is kind of in the middle of the country. The next time we will all see each other will be in August for another training for a week. Then the time after that will be at Thanksgiving.
While I won't see other people from my group that often there are other volunteers from other sectors that will be in the Concepion area. This group is called your VAC group, those that live in the same department and once a month we get together for meetings and to have fun. The VAC group up in Concepcion has a reputation for being very hard working and close and a lot of fun. I have met some of them and they are being really supportive of the newbie. I think I will fit in fine with them and the Paraguayans.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Monday, April 9, 2007
My Site
I have the folder in my hands, I just found out my site!! I will be living in The town of Horqueta in the department of Concepcion! Look it up on the map, it is nowhere near the capital of Asuncion. It is very far north, a rural site. It is a 6 hour bus ride to the capital or if i want I can take a boat down the river, a 20 hour ride complete with hammocks on the boat! I will be a follow up volunteer. That means I am the 2nd volunteer in that site. Luckily the previous volunteer was very hard working and left a good reputation. There is another volunteer in my site and two people from my training group will be within a 30 min bus ride!! I am very happy!!
Tomorrow I meet my contact and wednesday morning I go to Horqueta to see my site and find housing. Then I come back for 2 more weeks of training before I am living there for good!
Tomorrow I meet my contact and wednesday morning I go to Horqueta to see my site and find housing. Then I come back for 2 more weeks of training before I am living there for good!
Friday, April 6, 2007
Semana Santa
We only had 3 days of class this week due to Semana Santa (Easter week) Semana Santa here is a bit different than it was in Spain. In Spain there were huge parties and celebrations on the street and parades. Here, people go to church a lot, for hours and hours and they eat a lot of food. The thing they eat the most of this week is chipa. Chipa is a bread like treat that they make from homemade dough and cook in an outdoor brick oven that looks like an igloo. All day Wednesday people just make chipa. Everywhere you go, every family is making chipa. We made it with families in class on Wednesday for 4 hours! My hands were so tired from kneading the dough. Then we ate a ton of it, I actually really like it, other people hate it. When I got home, I was so tired I just wanted to rest but there were about 7 people in my kitchen making chipa with my host mom. So, I sucked it up and put on my "Yay, we´re making more chipa" face and made chipa for another hour or so! I´ve eaten so much chipa, I´ve probably gained 5 lbs this week. Of course my clothes are getting so stretched out from all the hand washings, it doesn´t really matter! In addition to the chipa Paraguayans eat a lot of pork, Thursday felt like the equivalent to our Thanksgiving. The whole family gets together and eats a ton of food. By the time Sunday gets around, it feels like Easter is over. Nobody really does anything on Sunday, they have been celebrating for a week and people need to get ready to go back to work on Monday so they go back to their normal routines. I woke up the other day to the sound of a pig being slaughtered for semana santa. If you´ve never heard a pig being slaughtered I don´t recommend it to anyone. They scream bloody murder because they know what´s coming! They cook the meat in the big outdoor oven igloo thing too.
Aside from eating chipa, I´ve been relaxing this week. Traning is coming to an end and Monday is the day we have all been waiting for-the day we find out our sites! At 3pm Monday I will know where I have been assigned to live for the next 2 years. We did give our input of what we would like in site but ulitmately we don´t have the say, we are put where they think we would be good. To keep our minds sane until 3pm, we are being taken on field trips all morning. I am going to Luque, which is a town famous for silver jewlery and guitars. I am going to buy a cheap guitar so I´ll have a good way to spend my down time once I get out to my site.
On Tuesday we meet our contacts, our contacts our people that live in our sites and will help us get aquainted in town, introduce us to people, give us leads on finding housing, etc. This person could be a principal of a school, etc. We will travel with our contacts to our sites on wednesday and stay for almost a week to see our site and find housing. Then we come back to Guarambaré for 2 more weeks of training and then we have our swearing in ceremony and we´re on our own.
I will let you all know where my site is as soon as I can!
Aside from eating chipa, I´ve been relaxing this week. Traning is coming to an end and Monday is the day we have all been waiting for-the day we find out our sites! At 3pm Monday I will know where I have been assigned to live for the next 2 years. We did give our input of what we would like in site but ulitmately we don´t have the say, we are put where they think we would be good. To keep our minds sane until 3pm, we are being taken on field trips all morning. I am going to Luque, which is a town famous for silver jewlery and guitars. I am going to buy a cheap guitar so I´ll have a good way to spend my down time once I get out to my site.
On Tuesday we meet our contacts, our contacts our people that live in our sites and will help us get aquainted in town, introduce us to people, give us leads on finding housing, etc. This person could be a principal of a school, etc. We will travel with our contacts to our sites on wednesday and stay for almost a week to see our site and find housing. Then we come back to Guarambaré for 2 more weeks of training and then we have our swearing in ceremony and we´re on our own.
I will let you all know where my site is as soon as I can!
Saturday, March 31, 2007
I Was On The Radio!
Mbaeichapa, Che Cherera Jill, Che Californiagua. Che aiko Guarambarépe!! That is how I introduced myself on the radio show I was on this week, in Guaraní!!! It was so much fun. I then participated in a 3 minuted skit that demonstrated a couple of examples of what Urban Youth Volunteers do. I played the part of the volunteer and the other 2 UYD trainees played the part of youth. We got our 5 min of fame and then sat back and watched the hour long show that 5 Peace Corps Volunteers put on once a week on the 2nd biggest radion station in Paraguay. I was really impressed with how well they did. Getting on the radion in Paraguay is not hard, sometimes radio stations are just a beat up old computer in someone´s house with a micorphone attached somehow and then a stack of CDs next to it! This one was pretty nice though.
Being on the radio was just one of the things we did during our long field practice. I went to a small, rural town called Quiindy. Quiindy is the equivilant to the smallest urban site a UYD volunteer would be placed in and I loved it. So it made me alter my site selection form to say I could be happy in an urban or rural site, so basically put me anywhere you think i´d be happy and where i am needed. The air is cleaner and there is beautiful scenery the farther you get from Asuncion. One girl actually developed asthma in Asuncion so i don´t think i would mind being more out in the country. I find out in a week where I will spend the next 2 years, eek!!
The week was a wonderful insight and motivation into the work I will be doing. We gave 3 charlas, (speeches) during the week. One was on nutrition and we did it with some rural health and sanitation volunteers out in the country in someone´s front yard. Only 2 Paraguayans showed up but it was still really good and those 2 Paraguayans are more informed about nutrition now!
We did a charla on Values in a class of 30 students, all 17 year olds. We did a fun ice breaker, then we handed out pieces of paper that had different things on them like "marrying someone outside my religion or culture" etc....and each student read the paper and said what their family thinks about it. Then we put up a big piece of paper on the board that had all kinds of value on it like "being a virgin when i get married" "buying a house" "having a good job" "living in accordance with my religion" and each student put them in order of what was most important to them. When they were finished I asked if anyone wanted to share, expecting no one to raise their hand, but someone did right away. After she read, every single person read theirs! Then we did a wrap up about how you may have values different than your friend or family and it is important to learn what your values are and live in accordance with them. They were so into the activity. Everyting we did required participation, creativity, getting up out of the desks, etc. They are not used to that kind of thing. Class time is always spent copying word for word, VERY neatly what the teacher says of writes on the board, for hours.
We did team building games in another class but that class was a little more rowdy and the Principal of the school was blabbing for a half hour, so our 1 hour slot got bumped down to a half hour. It was really frustrating but good to see how some charlas will go great and others won´t.
The volunteer we stayed with was awesome and very motivating. She kept saying "you guys did so great, i am so proud of you!" I heard stories about some of the other trainees having horrible volunteers that were telling them to dress nicer and critizing them on their work.
My host family was great in Quiidy as well. The only bad thing about all of long field practice was that one morning I went to the plaza with the other 2 trainees to run. I put my nalgene bottle and tevas in a very hidden spot under a statue in the middle of the plaza. We were literally running in circles around the tiny plaza but somehow a little girl stole my bottle and tevas. (tevas are expensive sandals just in case) It was dumb of me to leave them there but I just didn´t think that would happen. A woman said she saw the girl and pointed at the house she went into so I went clapping at their front door (people don´t have doorbells so you clap outside their gate) The mom came out and said her daughter went to school and insisted the little sister take me to the school to get them back. I went to the school, which happened to be right in front of my host family`s house. My host mom came out and asked what happened. Once she found out she demanded the girl come out of class. That is why host families are great. They got your back! The teacher came out and I felt horrible because everyone was accusing this girl of stealing my stuff but I still wasn´t positive. She said she touched the stuff , then put it back and her "friend" took it. So then she took me to this imaginary friend`s house at whichpoint i realized I didn´t have time for this wild goose chase and gave up. I am sure she passed it off to her friend in class, although what she wants with size 10 Tevas I don´t know. The amount of stuff I own that I value is getting smaller and smaller so pretty soon, if anything goes missing, i bet i won´t miss it.
Being on the radio was just one of the things we did during our long field practice. I went to a small, rural town called Quiindy. Quiindy is the equivilant to the smallest urban site a UYD volunteer would be placed in and I loved it. So it made me alter my site selection form to say I could be happy in an urban or rural site, so basically put me anywhere you think i´d be happy and where i am needed. The air is cleaner and there is beautiful scenery the farther you get from Asuncion. One girl actually developed asthma in Asuncion so i don´t think i would mind being more out in the country. I find out in a week where I will spend the next 2 years, eek!!
The week was a wonderful insight and motivation into the work I will be doing. We gave 3 charlas, (speeches) during the week. One was on nutrition and we did it with some rural health and sanitation volunteers out in the country in someone´s front yard. Only 2 Paraguayans showed up but it was still really good and those 2 Paraguayans are more informed about nutrition now!
We did a charla on Values in a class of 30 students, all 17 year olds. We did a fun ice breaker, then we handed out pieces of paper that had different things on them like "marrying someone outside my religion or culture" etc....and each student read the paper and said what their family thinks about it. Then we put up a big piece of paper on the board that had all kinds of value on it like "being a virgin when i get married" "buying a house" "having a good job" "living in accordance with my religion" and each student put them in order of what was most important to them. When they were finished I asked if anyone wanted to share, expecting no one to raise their hand, but someone did right away. After she read, every single person read theirs! Then we did a wrap up about how you may have values different than your friend or family and it is important to learn what your values are and live in accordance with them. They were so into the activity. Everyting we did required participation, creativity, getting up out of the desks, etc. They are not used to that kind of thing. Class time is always spent copying word for word, VERY neatly what the teacher says of writes on the board, for hours.
We did team building games in another class but that class was a little more rowdy and the Principal of the school was blabbing for a half hour, so our 1 hour slot got bumped down to a half hour. It was really frustrating but good to see how some charlas will go great and others won´t.
The volunteer we stayed with was awesome and very motivating. She kept saying "you guys did so great, i am so proud of you!" I heard stories about some of the other trainees having horrible volunteers that were telling them to dress nicer and critizing them on their work.
My host family was great in Quiidy as well. The only bad thing about all of long field practice was that one morning I went to the plaza with the other 2 trainees to run. I put my nalgene bottle and tevas in a very hidden spot under a statue in the middle of the plaza. We were literally running in circles around the tiny plaza but somehow a little girl stole my bottle and tevas. (tevas are expensive sandals just in case) It was dumb of me to leave them there but I just didn´t think that would happen. A woman said she saw the girl and pointed at the house she went into so I went clapping at their front door (people don´t have doorbells so you clap outside their gate) The mom came out and said her daughter went to school and insisted the little sister take me to the school to get them back. I went to the school, which happened to be right in front of my host family`s house. My host mom came out and asked what happened. Once she found out she demanded the girl come out of class. That is why host families are great. They got your back! The teacher came out and I felt horrible because everyone was accusing this girl of stealing my stuff but I still wasn´t positive. She said she touched the stuff , then put it back and her "friend" took it. So then she took me to this imaginary friend`s house at whichpoint i realized I didn´t have time for this wild goose chase and gave up. I am sure she passed it off to her friend in class, although what she wants with size 10 Tevas I don´t know. The amount of stuff I own that I value is getting smaller and smaller so pretty soon, if anything goes missing, i bet i won´t miss it.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
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!
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!
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Excursion
On Friday afternoon, each group went on an excursion to get out of town and have a break from host family and training life. The Urban Youth Development group i think had the best excursion by far. We went to a camp that was founded by an Amercian named Jack Norment years ago and stayed the night. It was just like an american camp back home with cabins and bunk beds and everything.
We found a frozen yogurt place on the way and made our driver pull over and let us get our fix of American sweets. When we arrived at camp, we were led through a series of "challenges" by two Paraguayan camp leaders. We had to use teamwork to do things like cross over a "swamp" using only two pieces of wood, stand on a blance beam and figure out a way to organize ourselves according to birth date and not step off the beam, etc. It was a lot of fun, especially since i never really went away to camp when i was litte. After the activities we went swimming in the only swimming pool we have seen in Paraguay. All of us said we would never go swimming in a pool that dirty back home but we were so happy to get cooled off that we all jumped in at the same time.
We had pizza for dinner and were feeling on top of the world. After dinner we had a bonfire and I busted out my firedancing for everyone with my homemade equipment. Finally my group was able to see what my hidden talent was all about and they cheered me on as i danced around and twirled my fire poi. I was able to find some kerosene and was glad it worked just as well as lamp oil that i used back home. We had our Ipods out and we had a great time.
We stayed up late talking like we were having a slumber party and the next moring woke up early for a morning hike. We hiked two and half hours through a really poor, poor village, then up a mountain that gave us a view of the town below - Caacupé. The biggest church in all of Paraguay is in Caacupé and we could see it from the top of the mountain. A few people got attacked by these strange wasp-like insects that were obviously protecting their home or something. I was so glad i didn´t get stung. The surroundings were so incredibly beautiful on the hike, it felt like i was just back in California doing what I would normally do on a saturday in Chico. I had to remind myself that I was in Paraguay, hiking with people i didn´t even know a month ago and I thought "how cool is this?!"
We returned home that afternoon and I immediately changed my clothes and went a meeting with the abuelo club (grandparent club) I have been talking with the woman who runs it and I am going to be working with them for my project in training. We were given the mission-goal of finding someone in the community to network with and then develop some sort of work related activity to utilize what we have been learning in classes. I am supposed to be working with youth but i was so excited to find the older adult club that i went with that. I am going to help them get the ground ready for a garden next saturday and I am going to lead some sort of activity with them as well. They are so lively and fun so it will be easy. Yesterday they sang songs and did excercised and read poems by mother theresa!
I also observed a class last week and will be working with the director of the school to organize a volleyball game during recess on Friday.
It feels good to be getting involved in the community and feeling integrated. This week we will be in Guarambaré all week for a regual week of training and next Sunday we have our Practica larga. We will go spend a week with a volunteer in their site and work with them to get an even better feel for what we will be doing in the future.
This week we have an interview with our director to express to them what we want in a site, i-e small town, big town, another volunteer in site, more rural, more city, etc. In the end, we dont get to choose but we get to express our desires anyways. Keep your fingers crossed that i get what i want! I find out April 9th!
We found a frozen yogurt place on the way and made our driver pull over and let us get our fix of American sweets. When we arrived at camp, we were led through a series of "challenges" by two Paraguayan camp leaders. We had to use teamwork to do things like cross over a "swamp" using only two pieces of wood, stand on a blance beam and figure out a way to organize ourselves according to birth date and not step off the beam, etc. It was a lot of fun, especially since i never really went away to camp when i was litte. After the activities we went swimming in the only swimming pool we have seen in Paraguay. All of us said we would never go swimming in a pool that dirty back home but we were so happy to get cooled off that we all jumped in at the same time.
We had pizza for dinner and were feeling on top of the world. After dinner we had a bonfire and I busted out my firedancing for everyone with my homemade equipment. Finally my group was able to see what my hidden talent was all about and they cheered me on as i danced around and twirled my fire poi. I was able to find some kerosene and was glad it worked just as well as lamp oil that i used back home. We had our Ipods out and we had a great time.
We stayed up late talking like we were having a slumber party and the next moring woke up early for a morning hike. We hiked two and half hours through a really poor, poor village, then up a mountain that gave us a view of the town below - Caacupé. The biggest church in all of Paraguay is in Caacupé and we could see it from the top of the mountain. A few people got attacked by these strange wasp-like insects that were obviously protecting their home or something. I was so glad i didn´t get stung. The surroundings were so incredibly beautiful on the hike, it felt like i was just back in California doing what I would normally do on a saturday in Chico. I had to remind myself that I was in Paraguay, hiking with people i didn´t even know a month ago and I thought "how cool is this?!"
We returned home that afternoon and I immediately changed my clothes and went a meeting with the abuelo club (grandparent club) I have been talking with the woman who runs it and I am going to be working with them for my project in training. We were given the mission-goal of finding someone in the community to network with and then develop some sort of work related activity to utilize what we have been learning in classes. I am supposed to be working with youth but i was so excited to find the older adult club that i went with that. I am going to help them get the ground ready for a garden next saturday and I am going to lead some sort of activity with them as well. They are so lively and fun so it will be easy. Yesterday they sang songs and did excercised and read poems by mother theresa!
I also observed a class last week and will be working with the director of the school to organize a volleyball game during recess on Friday.
It feels good to be getting involved in the community and feeling integrated. This week we will be in Guarambaré all week for a regual week of training and next Sunday we have our Practica larga. We will go spend a week with a volunteer in their site and work with them to get an even better feel for what we will be doing in the future.
This week we have an interview with our director to express to them what we want in a site, i-e small town, big town, another volunteer in site, more rural, more city, etc. In the end, we dont get to choose but we get to express our desires anyways. Keep your fingers crossed that i get what i want! I find out April 9th!
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.
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.
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