Giant Rodents and Hardhats

3-25-09

I am currently in Villarrica sitting outside of my temp host family´s house. I´m waiting for the 22 year old son to get out of the bathroom so I can rinse the smell of river water off. I had an excellent afternoon swimming and hanging out at Salta Pa´i, the river/¨waterfall¨. The waterfall wasn´t impressive but we were in a nice area and packed a solid picnic lunch with our UYD training group. It was so incredibly nice to swim after the past 6 weeks of hot sticky weather.

We´ve been split into two groups and I´m obviously in Villarrica visiting the UYD volunteer here. It has been great. Villarrica is beautiful and has a good tranquilo feel along with the amenities of a city. There are about 8 colleges here. It somehow reminds me of Cuernavaca. They have a huge beautiful park, which is by far the nicest I´ve seen in Paraguay thus far. My favorite part wasn´t the the pond, or the paddleboats, or the fountain that supposedly makes you lucky in love, or the nice covered bridge...it was the rodents. Carpinchos. I fell in love. With a huge guinea pig. There are about 8 at the park and a couple new ones were just born a few weeks ago. They are so tame that you can feed and pet them. I obviously did both. I´ve been excited for these for months--yes, months...since before even arriving in Paraguay. Their fur is coarse and long and they make the same disgusting squeals that guinea pigs do. I started thinking of our guinea pigs from growing up--Molly and Fred, and the fact that Fred died with his head in the food bowl... Regardless, they´re wonderful; I´m going back tomorrow to take more photos and develop a plan to kidnap one to make it my very own so that I can just ride it all over Paraguay, never again having to cram onto a bus or explain the Peace Corps no motorcycle rule.

Yesterday we also went to a sugar cane factory. I was mostly excited for the opportunity to wear a hard hat and actually had our tour guide give one to each of us. To be quite honest, I didn´t follow much of what was being said about the factory. I got the gist...the machines are almost 100 years old, the sugar cane is cracked and squeezed for the sweetness, then the cane itself is burned (like everything else here) . I was distracted. At the factory there were empty booze bottles in some quiet corners. I was wearing a hard hat. I saw someone bump his head accidentally while wearing a hard hat. (Classic comedy.) One girl in my group was convinced the tour guide and I were long lost siblings. (There are a bunch of people of German decent in this area of Paraguay...many of whom still speak German.)

We did more charlas in schools today in partners. Ours was about the environment--specifically trash. We talked about what you can do with trash, then had the kids run around the school yard finding examples of different kinds of trash. If you´re reading this from the US, this may seem strange. Yes, we had kids running around picking up glass bottles (more booze, strangely), candy wrappers, paper, plastic, whatever with their bare hands. Then the kids were to make something creative out of it. The first group was great, the second was insane. I´m starting to get really good at recognizing when things are going well and when to throw up my hands...