Too perfect

Lady Gaga co-hosting The View?
Mom-TiVO this for me!

Growing pains

Hanging out with 16 and 17-year old kids is very interesting. (I'm in charge of 6 of them and I visit them once a week.) When I was at my first prom, they were 10 years old. Some of them have no memory of 9/11 and most of them don't understand any of my cultural references. Despite the generation gap they've been very pleasant to visit and supervise and often have me laughing to the point of tears.

Now that we've been here for awhile the growing pains are over. Everyone is feeling comfortable with their host-families and I've seen them hold some successful educational activities and build brick stoves in several houses. AMIGOS has treated me well this summer and I'm already thinking of spending next year in Nicaragua.

On a side note, I read THE ROAD this week. That book is so scary--I had to sleep with the light on in one of my communities. Cormac McCarthy is nuts and my imagination way too easily influenced. It doesn't help that a large portion of my day is spent walking on desolate roads in the middle of nowhere alone--I check every horse-drawn carriage that passes me for cannibal people trying to survive the apocalypse.

This weekend it's raining and the only items on my agenda are to watch Anthony Bourdain on youtube and finish some paperwork. Today is DIA DE AMISTAD, or the "day of friendship". It's a bigger deal than you'd think. Happy friendship day from a bunch of people wearing polos that say "FRIENDS". Cheers

Passatempo

I start most of my mornings to the sound of a few hundred farm animals around 5-6am. Depending on whose house I'm staying at, there's usually Guaraní being shouted as host-family members get up and begin their chores. I manage to force myself up by 6:30 and a cloud of feathers coming from a hole in my sleeping bag follow me to the kitchen. Someone hands me a very stale piece of bread (called "palito" or little sticks) and a cup of warm milk or coffee and I sip while sitting on a wooden chair around a fire. My favorite time of day is the morning; most of my volunteers wake up a little after me and I take advantage of my alone time with the families. Despite initial frustration, I'm able to understand the context of most conversations in the morning that are spoken in Guaraní with some random Spanish added to the mix. I enjoy putting in the effort to understand and respond in Guaraní and can see that my families are pleased with what I've learned so far.

However, this morning I woke up in Staff House in Santaní, as I do every Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I usually don't sleep past 7:30 since I'm on Paraguay campo time, so I try to sneak to the kitchen without waking my three roommates. We recently got wifi in the house, so I start my days with a cup of instant coffee and a bowl of yogurt covered cereal and my twitter newsfeed. My housemates and fellow staff members join me at the table and together we start battling the boredom. Santaní is a pretty dead city, but we've gotten really good at making the most of it by making the best meals with our limited ingredients and watching all of the Bourne Identity trilogy. We all get along and it's so pleasant to come home to our random family, but I find myself wanting to go on route come Monday. I love my volunteers, host-families and communities. Who knew Paraguay would ever win me over.

Sigue Paraguay

The days are flying by here in San Estanislao, Paraguay. The weather has warmed up quite a bit which has put me in higher spirits. Last week I got to swim in a river with some of my volunteers, see another eat an armadillo and walk about 30 km in total. Yesterday it started to rain which has washed away the faint smell of burning trash in Santani.

In my AMIGOS life, things are going swimmingly. I applied for a grant to do a large park project in one of my towns and I got it! All my volunteers will start building stoves for 7 families each in their towns this week as well.

By far the most exciting thing that´s been going on is the Copa America..kind of life a world cup just for Latin America. Last night we all went to an ice cream shop to watch the game the Paraguay Brazil game and Paraguay won!! I was probably the only sad person (for Brazil, that is) but then we left the store and the whole town was crackin. People were driving in their cars in a parade around town--while drinking of course--and playing the Paraguay national anthem, waving flags and cheering. I even saw someone firing up a grill and barbequeing some meat in the back of their truck.

WRITE ME

Amigos de las Américas
c/o Madeleine Moore
Correo – San Estanislao
C.P. 8210
PARAGUAY
South America

La plata

Paraguay manages to keep me very entertained. The way people speak Spanish or "castellano" as they call it rather than "español", is very choppy and incorrect. This makes me not feel so bad about making mistakes since it's all people's second language here as well. The one downside is that I am adapting my Spanish to fit in which sounds very terrible now; but the upside is that I'm learning a lot of Guaraní! My nerdy linguistic mind goes crazy when people understand me when I speak in Guaraní. I've been able to retain a lot of knowledge as well, which both excites me and fills me with want to learn a new language (Chinese, Hebrew, ???).

Money here is slightly overwhelming because of how many zeros everything has. Below is 2000 Guarani, about US$0.50.

PYG$100,000! or US$25.00!

And finally PYG$20,000. It even says it in Guaraní at the bottom of the bill. "Mokoi" means 2, "pa" means 10 and "su" means 1000.

First week of route

The past week or so have been very eventful. One of my last nights in community before the volunteers arrived I spent at a party for the Festival of San Juan, one of Paraguay's most cherished saints. I asked who he was and what he did and got no good answer, however. At the party I got to witness about 20 people lighting palm fronds on fire and using them as sparklers as they ran around shaking burning sticks at each other yelling, "VIVA SAN JUAN". Here are some pictures from my communities.

So, food. Here it comes fried with a side of yuca, or mandioca. My favorite snack is called "tortilla" (not what we can tortillas) and is a fried dough made of eggs, flour, and lettuce.


"Bocadito" means little snack. I ate like a thousand of these chocolates.

Here's some kids lugging my gear around. This community had so few Spanish speakers we actually decided to not send volunteers there. They're pretty precious though.
Typical looking Paraguayan house.

After the volunteers arrived in Asunción we took them to Santaní where we put them into partnerships and taught them how to build stoves which will be their main project while they're here. Here's Noah, another supervisor and me riding in the back of a truck of bricks.



Some lovely volunteers making stoves



Adam, another supervisor and me making a scary face


My volunteers! Julia, Laura, Maya, Daniela, Zane and Marco: my soldiers who have already been making me proud this summer.

Daniela and Maya heading off to their community.


We had a day after volunteer briefing to relax which happened to be FOURTH OF JULY. Some other staff and I went to eat hamburgers to celebrate our homeland which were served to us in individual plastic bags and were disgusting :(


I share a room in my staff house with three other girls during the weekend and during the week we're out visiting our volunteers. Here's my stuff on the floor...we sleep on cots and in the most warm sleeping bags ever! It's around 40 ish in the mornings and at night.