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.