Rainy Days and Medical Advice

5-7-09

I´m quite happy right now. It is pouring rain--which Paraguay has desperately been needing--and I´m full of yummy quasi-Mexican food. I say quasi-Mexican because it was really more like Tex Mex meets the Paraguayan kitchen. It was also the first time, strangely, that I have ever cooked meat by myself. I´m pleased with the outcome. My host brother and I joked that we were both very impressed with my cooking skills as long as we´re not all running to the bathroom in an hour vomitando. (I love cognates.)

This week has been interesting and has certainly picked up. I´ve been observing at schools, had a few meetings with school principals, met with the head of the community center about our goals and interests, and started working at the community kitchen. My schedule is still very open but I´ve been filling at least some of my time. There is a seventh grade teacher who has an incredibly rowdy bunch of kids to whom he teaches History/Geography, Ethics (I initially thought etica meant etiquette but was sadly mistaken), and community development. I´m definitely planning on working more with him and his class again. There was a near fight until he stepped in. I´m also really enjoying the community kitchen which provides breakfast and lunch to kids in the community who can´t afford it. They have enough money to provide daily breakfast and lunch to 50 kids but 75 have been showing up, so they´ve been figuring out ways to have it stretch. They do all this with the equivalent of $20 US dollars a day. I went to a meeting with the women´s group who run the comedor and community parents yesterday. For whatever reason the woman introducing me said that I was an educational psychiatrist. I clarified that I did graduate from college, studied religion and philosophy, then did some social work and counseling afterwards. The meeting ended. A middle aged woman and her mother approached me afterwards, asking for some advice about the middle aged woman´s daughter. Apparently she is 13, got her period for the first time then hasn´t had it again and two months have passed. There was a great deal of motioning and repeating in order to get this idea across to me. I´ve been asked some strange questions after saying I graduated from college as a religion major (i.e.: What religion is best?), but have never before been asked a medical question. Who knew studying religion made me qualified to answer medical questions??