Future site visit overview

I’ve got about ten minutes, but let me give you a quick run down. I just got back from visiting my future site. I’m overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for the people there and I’m overwhelmed with the feeling of inadequacy. Compared to what they expect and hope to receive from me I feel like a little kid. They have organized committees and are hardworking. On my sheet it said there was no running water and I was expecting really campo. It may be far removed from a large city, but compared to my training site it was an upgrade. Most of the wells had electric pumps so this is just like running water. Not only did I have a hot shower and flushing toilet, but the family I stayed with had a washing machine and a wringer to wring out the water. The site it just beautiful situated among rolling hills and 1km from a pretty river. It’s lush and green. It gets hot, but while I was there it raining enough to keep things constantly at a refreshing temperature. A lot of the neighborhood cooks with soy on a regular basis and my family had a machine that pulverized the soy and separated the soy meat from the milk. I drank lots of soy juice and enjoyed plenty of tasty food. I even taught my family how to make peanut butter—it was a hit! This was the best peanut butter you’ve ever tasted. After hand shelling the peanuts, we toasted and ground them up finely. Finally, added some sugar, salt, and oil.
Over the past 5 days I also picked mandarins from the grove of trees, dug up mandi’o, played many a game of volleyball, and taught the kids to lay out for the Frisbee. I listened to a Taylor Swift sing on the radio, played PYan hide and go seek, drank gallons of Terere and stood in from of the church congregation to be introduced to the community. It was a trip of tranquility, but it wasn’t dull. I got a lot of language practice and I’m excited to go back and begin serving them in any way I can. Yes, I’m nervous, but I serve a great God and I’m trusting Him to lead. Please keep me in your prayers. And now I’m going to enjoy some thanksgiving dinner with my fellow PCTs. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers I’m thankful for you!

long field practice

Oh Paraguay. It’s hard to believe I’ve been living here for going on 8 weeks now. It’s been long enough to get used to some aspects, but other things (like the food) I don’t think I’m ever really going to accept. It’s more a matter of waiting until I can do something about it. Sometimes I really like the food. For example this past week I ate vegetable stuffed squash and fish loaded with sautéed veggies. I also had baked (not fried!) empanadas, and chipa guasu (it’s like cornbread). All very delicious, but this isn’t common and there are only so many days you can stand of fried mandi’o, fried tortillas, mystery beef parts full of grilse, steaming hot soup when it’s boiling hot outside, mandi’o, greasy rice. I can’t count the number of times I have had conversations about food. I have always felt that I appreciated food in the States, but I think I’ve reached a new level of appreciation. I do love the chicken here and a good pig is usually pretty tasty (even if others are picking off meat from the head). I learned a very important phrase this weekend—nda’ukauui so’o. This literally translates to “I don’t know how to eat meat.” This is a non rude way of saying you don’t want to eat something. You’d think that they’d try to teach you how to eat something, but no.
I learned a few more words and phrases this weekend too. Ara rembe (are ah rim bay) this means sunrise and literally translates to suns lips and resa y(res-ah oo)means tears and literally translates to eye water. I get asked a lot if I cry or am sad—not that I look it, but whenever they see my pictures and I tell the Paraguayans about my boyfriend they are curious. I just say avy’ai (ah-voo-eye), I am happy. I also learned, or rather wrote down a few tongue twisters, one doesn’t even use your tongue to pronounce the words! I can’t wait to be fluent. It really is a beautiful language even if it sounds goofy sometimes.
This coming Wednesday I will find out my future sit and this Friday I will be visiting my future site for 5 days. I am nervously excited. I’m excited because training is almost over and I finally get to start my service, but I’m nervous because my language skills are not very good and I’m going to be out there without any other Americans.
Let me share a few more pictures with you. (from the top)
David’s little house. The Cropees have all kinds of plans for filming Campo houses. We filmed David’s first—hilarious! We also have plans of making a latrine calendar of all our latrines.
David’s flower garden. I’m going to be needing seeds from the states. This isn’t related to flowers, but I would also like to introduce sweet corn and different types of pumpkins and squash. It would probably be more of a novelty, but at least I could eat it even if it wasn’t popular.
Rooster perched on the board where the Molino is. They love it when seeds are ground up.
They have some beautiful butterflies here.
L to R—David, Jordan, Kevin, and Dan. We visited David for Long Field practice. We spend 5 days in David’s site getting a feel for life as a volunteer. We had a great time. I even learned how to play Escoba de quince. It’s a fun card game. They use the Spanish deck of cards. In this picture we are preparing our ”Mapa del Finca’s”. Last Wednesday, we gave presentations on composting (abonera), shade structures (media sombra), and summer gardening. It was very successful with over 40 women in attendance from the 3 women’s committees that David works with. We suspect they really came for the cake that we raffled off, but they still came. They asked some questions and sadly my Guaraní wasn’t sufficient to comprehend and formulate an answer. They were patient with our Guaraní. The little kids love my “check for learning game”. I drew pictures of things and asked them to categorize what could and couldn’t be composted. We had 3 rotating groups. Dan and I were in a group and we got practice 3 times.
My part of the barrio is getting a new street. By new street I mean stone laid street. It beats walking through the beach every day. The families that live along the street are paying for it and in order to raise money they put on a dance show. My host sister, cousins, and neighbors danced in it. There was plenty of traditional dances and reggaeton.
This is my “Dia de Practica” contact. She is such a sweet lady and this is her family. Two Friday’s ago I did a Soy cooking demonstration with her. I wrote some information, in Guarani, about the benefits of soy. We then made apply soy milk juice and soy empanadas. I used the herbs from my Grandma Graham in the states and they were absolutely delicious! Heterei!
Yep that’s an owl, a real live owl. That was my same reaction.
Enormous toads grace this place. My little host sister wouldn’t dare get any closer as much as I tried.