Monday, February 23, 2009

This is not about poop.

2-21-09

I´m going to separate these two blogs only because I don´t know where to go from that poop rampage. But I´m still on the bus. I found out a few things on Thursday. One is that I will find out my site placement on April 1, 2009. Yes, I realize that this is April Fool´s Day. I really hope that they don´t do some sort of April Fool´s joke with site placements. At that point I´ll know where I¨ll be in the country and kind of what I¨ll be doing, although that really changes depending on what I think is needed and what I´m interested in doing.

The OTHER thing I found out is that I´ll definitely going to be able to come back for Mimi and Matthew´s wedding in July . I´m psyched for that and am already compiling a list of things to bring back with me to Paraguay. (Let me know if you somehow know of some super random thing you want me to bring back to the US of A...other than the world´s biggest rodent. I don´t know how well they travel.)

OH! And my compañera and I did our first charla (workshop) yesterday. We did hog call as an icebreaker, where everyone was given a partner, gets separated from said partner, is blindfolded, then everyone needs to find the other by yelling their half of a word or phrase. Because it was a sex-ed charla we started with normal vocab, then went to technical sexual terms along with the slang that means the same. Then we talked about how it felt to yell those words and phrases. And we did a scenario-type discussion where partners got Dear Abby letters and were asked to give advice. I think it went well overall...although the vocab was tough since it was all in Español.

I´m going to go read some more or stare out the window... This still seems very dream-like to me. I just keep reminding myself that I´ll be here for the next 2 years. How strange!

I wrote this on a bus.

2-21-09
So I wrote this a few days ago and am now putting it online. Get used to this trend. Also, my English is detoriorating along with my spelling so anybody who would normally judge me by my grammar, lay off. (That is to my Qdubs roomies.)
I´m sitting on a bus right now on my way from Asuncion (the capital) to Encarnacion where I´m going to visit another PC volunteer to see what a volunteer´s life is actually like. Each trainee is going to a different volunteer from today (Sat) until Tuesday. I feel sort of the way I did when visiting colleges (and boarding schools) when I´d stay with a stranger who is kind of a ¨big kid¨ in the scenario. It is a bizarre feeling. I have my backpack with clothes, a book, and Spanish-English Spanish-Guarani dictionaries. You know, the basics.

I took the bus to Asuncion sola this morning...the ride was pretty unexciting. I was pleased to get a seat immediately and spent the ride starting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I´ve intended to read for years now. The bus I´m on now is much nicer. It is basically a Greyhound but pretty clean, and with AC, thank God. Unlike Greyhound though, people are getting on to sell things at every stoplight we hit. (We´ve just left the station.) So far I´ve seen fruit, socks (why always socks?), DVDs with a really impressive salesman, gum, candy, and porn. Yes, porn. I really don´t understand this phenomenon. At the dispensa attached to my house there is one big poster with the Yeti and two bikini-clad girls all with beer in their hands. That is in my house. That particular poster is everywhere in my town as well. Strange. One of my PC friends says her host dad is quite proud of his English CD collection, with highlights like Billy Joel and Elton John. Both CDs, like all the others, don´t have the cover of images you or I might be used to but pornographic images instead. Odd.

Regardless f the excess of bikini-clad blondes, things are going well for me. On THursday everyone had to travel to Asuncion from Guarambare in pairs. We were given little missions in Spanish. Each pair was to find their way to a specific organization related to their project, then go find lunch at a particularly busy area of a mercado, then be at the PC office by 1230. All of these tasks was fine with me but unfortunately my partner was feeling pretty sick, so we took it easy. We went to a place called Don Bosco Roga, which is an overnight camp looking place where children who are having trouble at home or are homeless can live. SOmeone was supposed to have called ahead to let them know we were coming but that was somehow lost along the way. So we showed up, me and Senor Sick (he later found out he had a fever of 101), claiming we had an appointment with someone. The director, a priest, showed us around, though didn´t seem super excited to have his morning so abruptly interrupted. He showed us around anyway, answering my questions patiently, telling us about the psychiatrists, social workers, nuns on staff and about continuous problems with funding, crack, and people loitering outside to try to sell drugs to the kids. We saw the pool, some gardens, little cabins to sleep in, sports fields, a cafeteria... Some kids stay for a couple of days while others stay for years at a time. It was an interesting place.

We didn´t do much exploring in between there and going to the PC office mostly because of the stories we´ve been hearing from volunteers who have been here for more than a year. These weren´t scary stories about Asuncion or about poisonous food from street vendors or anything like that. These were frightening public pooping stories.

If you have spoken to me in the past ten years you probably know that bathroom humor really isn´t my thing. At all. After that summer of working at club with ten year old boys I hoped not to ever hear another bathroom joke EVER again. However, I´m now in Paraguay...with the PEace Corps. This is, I think, the first time I´ve signed myself up so willingly ot have some sort of gnarly stomach issue. It seems inevitable that at some point I´ll get a parasite or have disgusting diarrhea problems. I thought maybe this wasn´t the case but after hearing stories from curent volunteers, it seems absolutely, undeniably inevitable. One girl pooped in an ally. Another into a jar when locked in her room. Nearly everyone has pooped their pants while here. I´m sorry. I´m sorry to be writing this and that this is on my mind but ew. I can´t handle it. So anyway, my sick partner and I decided it best to stay as close as possible to baños for fear that by day´s end he too may join in the poop story club.

Again, I´m sorry if that made you cringe slightly. I hope never to follow up at any point in my life with my own personal scenario. I also probably would never tell you anyway. And for that, I´m also sorry.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Mi vida.

Alright, so I also realized that I couldn´t answer any questions anyone was asking me about PC before I left the US so I´m going to try to partially explain what I´m doing here. Unfortunately, I don´t think I´ll be able to become the queen of this country, and I still don´t know where I´ll be living, or what my project will be. Thus far, my days are taken up by language class that starts at 745. I´m in the Spanish class right now, but we´ll be transitioning to Guaraní in the next couple of weeks. We have Spanish all morning...the class is pretty great. There are 5 of us (which is bigger than they intended I think) and as long as are speaking in Spanish, the teacher lets us go with it. The other day we went from the word for sneezing (estornudar) to a discussion about nude beaches (playa nudista)... We go home for lunch, which is by far the biggest meal of the day. Last week I had country fried steak two days in a row. I had to ask to receive salad with limon instead of mayonaisse (yes, JUST mayo).

After lunch, when everyone else gets a siesta, we then have either technical training, with just the seven in my UYD group or with the bigger group. This can include meeting with Medical Mary and Dr. Luis (who was allegedly Mr. Paraguay at some point...), maybe receiving a few shots from them, doing some sort of team building activity or whatever.

And so goes training... We do this for 11 weeks, with a handful of visits to possible future sites. Our swearing in is April 24th (Fred Franke´s b-day). After training, I have no idea where I´m heading but will know around week 9. We met some volunteers who are leaving when we swear in. Everyone is doing interesting projects, and doing multiple projects at their sites. They had a three day camp last week that we got attend. It was very much a normal overnight camp, but probably because it was started by ppl from the USofA. Anyway, I have my first project this week with another volunteer where we have to do a charla (like a presentation) about sex ed and healthy relationships in Spanish in front of our group and a bunch of kids from the community. Things are good. I´ve gotta run but hope life is grand in the US. I have absolutely NO idea what is happening in the world and am really missing the Sunday NYT....(oh, and all of you.)

Donde estan mis pantalones?

2.11.09
(I´ll be prewriting a bunch of these to save time and moneyyyy.)
So I realized that there are a bunch of random things that I should explain about my current lifestyle. I´m currently sitting at our kitchen table fo my house after my 2nd shower of the day (I don´t actually understand the Farenheit to Celcius conversion rates somehow but I´d guess its in the upper 90s here). Showering two or three times a day isn´t that bizarre here since Paraguayans are really into cleanliness. I become especially aware of and excited about this fact whenever I´m stuck on a hot bus where everyone is pressed super close together. Often times Paraguayan laborers will take clothes with them to work, shower there afterwards, then change back into traveling clothes to go home. (They are also not shy to tell you if they think it is high time for you to shower....)
I don´t know where to begin with my current life...Let´s start with bathrooms, shall we? My first day at my family´s house I didn´t see a flusher. I proceded to pour a small bucket f water into the toilet to flush. The next morning, when I wasn´t totally exhausted, I looked up and saw it. Imagine a basement. My bathroom doesn´t look like that. But the flusher is a cord near the ceiling that you pull to flush...similar to the string I would imagine pulling to turn on a single light bulb. That being said, I do sometimes need to use the bucket to flush when we´re having a drought.
On days when I need the bucket to flush, I also need that same bucket to bathe. And, I´m thrilled (yes, thrilled) to report that I`m actually mastering this skill. I even opted to bucket bathe instead of shower the other day. It was hot, and the shower is either frigid or hot. When I can use the showerhead, I can hit a switch that somehow (who the hell knows how?) heats the water through a system of seemingly dangerous wires that go into the showerhead. It looks pretty intense....and apparently the occasonal unexpecting PCV gets shocked.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

START.

Well, this is the beginning. Today marks my third dia in Paraguay. In many ways, it seems like I´ve been here forever, but then I realize that I saw Jac, Trina, Em and the fam just last weekend! How crazy! Here is what I´ve got so far:
There are 31 new PC volunteers who are also starting in Paraguay at the same time. Some are from the Early Elementary Education group, most are for the Rural Development group, and 7 are in my group (Urban Youth Development). We all arrived in Miami on Tuesday, with many awkward silences, had some PC background course on Wednesday, then boarded a plane to Sao Paolo. I, of course, was the only one in the group to sit next to someone NOT in the group. So I had a nice convo about South America, travel, the lack of leg room in ALL flights, blah blah blah.
After a short lay-over, we arrived in Paraguay on Thursday around 10am. (Keep in mind that I'm actually two hours ahead of the east coast...this was extremely difficult for me to grasp for whatever reason.) We had lots of orientation here while everyone felt zombie-like and super stinky from the flghts, then met up with families in the evening.
My family is great! To get into the house, you have to go through a tienda (store) that they own where they sell pan (bread) (which includes little things that taste like stale mini bagels), fruit (apples, oranges, pineapple, etc), shoes, tea stuff, everything. My mother is 52, father 53, brother 24, his wife 19, and their baby 4 months old. The four month old threw up on me last night. I don´t know why this sort of stuff happens to me constantly. Everyone is great, and the father attempts to teach me Guarani constantly (the language that 70% of people here speak). Last night the mother showed me sooooooo many embarassing photos of her daughter (who lives across the street) in various dance costumes from Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Arabic countries...I dont know. I was embarassed for her a bit (b/c really, who likes to have their mother whip out old photos?) but generally amused.
We had a language issue the other day when they asked my religion, I said my parents are Episcopalian and they said they´d drop me off at church tomorrow. (They´re Catholic, but apparently aren´t big church goers...)
Anyway, I´ll try to get good about blogging but am unsure of how much free time I´ll have. Hope things are great for everyone! As a super big plus, it is extremelyyyyy hot here but I´m the only one in my group with AC. HA! Que suerte!!