Big News and Meat Radio

Yesterday was full of news! I went to finally have the mayor of Limpio sign the document that will cede the room in the municipal-run community center to the library committee. This means that he or future mayors will not be able to take any books, materials, or furniture from our library. It means that the library will continue to be communal—just for my neighborhood of Villa Madrid. I also got a phone call from the Peace Corps Office, saying that my SPA Grant of $3,000 has arrived for us to buy books and furniture for the new library. If this seems pretty late in the game, considering I have only 2 months left, it’s because it is. My library committee and I have about 4 weeks to spend all the money, so that’ll be a big push and will definitely keep me very busy. I’ll leave a lot of the organization piece to the library commission and my follow-up volunteer (who will be here for 2 years and arrive in my site a few days before I leave).

I was also at the municipality yesterday morning to finalize a truck to go to the water treatment plant in Limpio for 100 trees for a neighbor PCV to take to her town (about 20 minutes away by bus). Though she (the PCV) doesn’t live in Limpio, the mayor agreed to donate the trees since I’m going to be helping her plant them in her environmental camp that is running through Saturday in her neighborhood. Though they didn’t have any municipal trucks available, they sent the mayor’s private chauffer with the mayor’s truck. Yes, I have this kind of pull with the mayor, apparently.

Unfortunately, I also heard some bad news yesterday. As I believe I’ve mentioned, Paraguayans are notorious for their wandering eyes (and I’m not talking about the kind that can be simply solved with an eye patch at a young age, though that is also a problem for some). It is pretty common for couples to cheat on each other, particularly the men. This may come from Paraguay’s history—particularly the War of the Triple Alliance in which Paraguay lost nearly 90% of its male population. Whatever the reason, cheating is a reality in Paraguayan culture. So, supposedly one of the main male contacts with whom I work on the library committee cheated on his wife (another very active member in the library committee) while she was away working in Argentina for the past 2 months to make money. Again, I’m not sure what happened, but they’re talking about separating. They have 5 kids, ages 5 to 20. It is just really sad, and really unfortunate for the kids, obviously. But, on a more selfish note, it puts a big kink in the library process. I’m hoping, for everyone’s sake, that they end things amicably. Both of them are from northern Paraguay, so it would be a huge strain on the kids for one to move back north. We shall see. I think I’m going to talk to the wife today after she talks to a lawyer.

Let's move on from "radio so'o" (which means gossip but is literally translated as "meat radio") to the actual radio... I do the radio show each week with two other PCVs and we talk about various topics. Last week was environmental issues, particularly against littering and how to recycle. Today we talked about healthy relationships, the decision of when to have sex, and the lack of the sex talk between parents and their kids. I’ll spend the afternoon today making banana bread and then going to a youth assembly to hopefully expand the youth group I’ve been working with for the past year and a half. I’m not sure how I got roped into baking for a bunch of teenagers, but I wish I was more surprised to be doing so. Better go bake!