Big Fish

05-24-2010

Well, it’s raining. Again. And it’s driving me insane. When it rains here, as I’ve written before, things stop. School is cancelled, meetings out the window. Last winter there was a drought so although the weather was cold, the days were pleasant out in the sun. The past week has been wet and dreary. Ugh.

Though the talk here in Paraguay very frequently revolves around the weather, I’m not sure I want my blog to follow suit, so we’ll move on. The past week has been a bit quiet thanks to the rain, but I’ve had two surprising conversations with Paraguayans. Well, OK, I lied. The first was actually with a drunken Argentinean who asked if I was thirty-six! Thirty-effing-six!! I’m twenty-five, jerk. The kicker? He claimed to be thirty when was definitely at least forty. Jerk.

The other surprising interaction happened this past week in my neighborhood. Tomorrow an organization called Fundación Visión is coming. They came last month as well to do cheap/free eye exams and sell cheap eye glasses. Both times I’ve been responsible for putting up fliers to let people know about the visit. So I was putting up propaganda (the word for advertisements in Spanish) in front of local stores. I went into a used clothing store I’d never been in before and asked to put up a flier, explaining who I am and the project. The woman asked me about English classes for her teenage kids and I explained that I do have an English class but it is now too late for new students so I’ll let her know when I start another. She was absolutely thrilled by this and the idea of any and all of the projects I’m doing. We said goodbye and I walked outside to tape a flier outside her store. She followed and stopped me just as I was about to leave, saying I should come over for lunch one day and then spend a whole day together. And then a huge smile spread across her face. You know, she said, last night I had a dream that I was a fisherman…and I caught a huge fish…and I think the dream I had was actually about meeting you—YOU were the big FISH!! I really didn’t know how to respond to that. So I laughed and smiled and promised to come back for lunch some time—what else could I do?

So aside from being asked if I was 36 and being told I appeared in a stranger’s dream as a fish, what’s new in my life? Well, as I mentioned, the eye doctors are coming back again this week and to two other parts of my neighborhood next month. We did the second day of the community census this past Saturday and now have a bit more than 150 of 600 done. The project is going painfully slowly, to be honest, and the teens who were originally enthusiastic about the project have become much less so. Only five of them showed up to help this Saturday and two of those five are actually part of my other youth group and just came to be nice. Three PCVs came to help as well, which was really sweet of them. With the younger youth group we have continued doing activities on Saturday mornings with the kids from the free meal program. This past week I checked out a Mobile Library from the PC library which consists of a bag of 15 kids’ books that I’ll have for the next month. I read aloud to the kids in small groups Saturday and plan on bringing the bag of books around at various times so they can read to themselves or with me. It is absolutely amazing how attentive even the most hyperactive children are when a book comes out. There are almost never opportunities for them to read books at their leisure—the books they see are always textbooks. English class is going well but nothing really new to report there. The sex ed/HIV/AIDS/relationships class is also going well, though it got cancelled a few weeks in a row thanks to soccer tournaments. This past week at the end of class I had the students write down things that they want to talk about/learn about. A few kids wrote that they want to talk about pornography…I don’t really know what that class could possibly look like to be honest. Weird. This week the topic is decision making and we’re doing an activity in which they talk about reasons to have sex now and reasons to wait to have sex. It usually makes for an interesting discussion. I’d better run but will try to get better about blogging. Chaucito.