im back! Were getting ready to leave tomorrow for a meeting with our site contacts from our future place of residence. Its going to be pretty interesting trying to communicate with this person (who ever they are) about the community and such things. Since Im a follow up volunteer, Ill also be going around with the current PCV and get the lay of the land, get my living arangements squared away for the first three months and asses some of the things the community might be interested in making happen. Everything seems pretty up in the air but Im sure it´ll turn out alright. The day after tomorrow we travel to the sites, so we´re on overdrive right now trying to get everything squared away before we go nilly willy into the campo.

Its kind of funny thinking about living in another new place after were all just now getting comfortable in neweva esperanza. I personally welcome the change, as I prefer my new place much more than my current living situation. But still, Im hoping that this new place will finnaly be somewhere that I can feel like Im at home. I dislike feeling like an extended stay guest a great deal. Im actually really looking forward to cooking and taking care of my own place 4 months from now when peace corps lets us move into our own places.

The other day we gave these presentations about the culture of paraguay in guarani. Mine was on jokes, and I preped for about one hour before so it was for sure my most rushed presentation so far. People seemed to find the jokes funny though, which was nice. My paraguayan host mom is still talking about how funny my jokes were after 3 days. On a less humorous note, while we were playing an ice breaker game before these little presentation one of the trainees in the crop extension unit got crushed under a few people, hyperextended her knee and thought she heard something pop. Im crossing my fingers shes alright (crosses fingers),as we´ve all come so far and it would be incredibly shitty to have something like that throw a wrench in the mix. She´s also really a good person and has a lot to offer, which would make it all the worse if she had to leave to get fixed up (crosses fingers again).

Lets see, I havn´t seen a wink of any packages but everything takes about a month to get here so things should show up by the end of my training im thinking. I look forward to the mushroom book its a good one. Also, on the topic of christmas i dunno about presents yet, Ill think about it this week. But hold off on the books for now as Im not yet sure if theres going to be some topic that would be really useful that ill discover on my site visit.

However one thing that Im going to have to learn a good bit more about is cattle and dairy work, as many of the families in the area are running cattle and clearing forest to do so. They certainly are funny looking, all white with big droopy ears. More to come about this later. Well, for now thats all ive got. Ill try to maybe do an update sometime durring my site visit if I get a chance, but most likely itll happen next week. Jajotopata!

che apunose ndepe. Anitepa? Anite.

alright. So its been a busy past week with field trips, language/tech training, site placement, multiple visits to the cantena for libations and of course a very american thanksgiving paraguayan style. Here´s the rundown:

We´d been getting ready for thanksgiving for about the last 2 weeks or so, collecting money and researching the turkey procurement problem that is oh-so-pervasive in paraguay. We decided to go with spinny-chickens (the kind that you buy on the street that are spinning in metal cases) and about 7 kilos of potatoes. In total we got 12 full chickens. The full spread included:

chicken (of course)
standard mashed potatoes with chives, margerine, and milk from a tetra pack.
sweet-potato mashed potatoes (my favorite)
mac and cheese
stuffed peppers
SOFT whole wheat bread, not cocito "dog biscuit" ring style
deviled eggs
obscene amounts of salad and veggies
HOT salsa and crackers (there are NO tortilla chips here)
tons of fresh fruit salad
apple pie and apple crisp
rice and bean salad
bannana and peanutbutter empanadas (my favorite desert)

Im sure there was more too, but this is the stuf that sticks out. I got there at about 7:30 to start working on the mashed potatoes and experimented with different mashing methods including a blender, spatula, cheese grater, soup ladel and standard fork. It was a good time hangin out with my fellow aspirantes (trainees) and not have the spector of impending homework doom hanging over us.

After getting sufficiently fat, we went and played a game of american football on the local kancha for about 2 hours, and ended with a few beers at the cantena. All in all a really good day.

OH! So site placement - yeah i got mine (drumroll). Im going to be the follow up volunteer for the Enviro Ed. volunteer we visited in ensenada! See last post for the description. Im REALLY excited, this town is a-mazing and pretty progressive in terms of working to improve and conserve environmental resources. And they´re all liberales which is a nice bonus. FYI, there are two major parties in Paraguay, the colorados and the liberales. Strossner´s (paraguay´s dictatory for 30ish years) old party was the colorados so i´m feelin pretty good to be living around people not down with the same old game. I´ll try to post some pictures of everything soon, the internet is so frikin slow here its really impossible to get anything large up on flickr.

Mom - I have been receiving all your letters and packages, do not fret. I got the new yorker arts issue (people were jealous) about 3 days ago, but havn´t seen anything else since then. Yay mail!

Margot - Hey! Yes, my address will change but i´ll update my infomation on this page when it does. The confiscation thing is due to import restriction placed on certain items coming into the country. Dunno why exactly, but i can certainly can see someone out there in this corrupt litle country squirling away a huge pile of plastic toys, sock and bateries (to name a few). Letters are just fine but take about a month to get here, so id say have the kids hold off for a bit till I know my new address.

Dad - how goes the new job? The name of the professor in charge of my project at Cal Poly is Bill MacElroy in the landscape architecture department, and he does have hard and digital copies of all my work. However, because the state of the project was in pieces rather than a coherent whole at the time that I finished, Im not so sure that its going to be very easy to fit it into whatever format the planning awards require. Tell me more about the competition and I´ll let you know what I think about the potential of my stuff to fit the criterea.

Az - I hope you are very very well! Im miss you lots and am very glad your house didn´t get torched. It was hard to get information here, and I was quite worried for a few days. How goes the job? I can´t complain over here ;)

Here are a few more books that im adding to my list, but havn´t really had time to research yet:

Seed to Seed - by Suzanne Ashworth and Kent Whealy
Breed your own Vegetable Varieties - by Carol Deppe
Smallholders, Householders: farm families and the ecology of intensive sustainable agriculture - by Rober Netting

To everyone else, amazing family and friends, I miss you all very much! I´m going to be setting up skype here (an online internet phone service) so I should be able to give everyone a call sometime soon! Yay!

I visit ensenada again next week for more meet/greet and t-ray (yerba). Ill do my darndest to get some pics up! Till then, Ciao!

okaaay. hey! Im back from long field practice, the time that certainly lived up to its name. It was a long week, in that i felt like Id been in this little rural pueblo forever by the time we were getting ready to leave. But at the same time, the days pased really quickly - it was a strange dynamic. We visited a little town called ensenada (no, not mexico) about 4 hours away from nueva esperanza. To find it on the paraguay map, go about a quarter of the country east from asuncion and you´ll find ensenada. We were on dirt roads for about 2 hours to get to the place so it was kinda far out there. I kid you not, when we got there I swore I was back in california. The landscape there was really nostalgic with its rolling hills and sporadic groves of trees and grazing cows.

We got in just fine the first day and got set up with our families. I lived in a house with the librarian at the collegio (highschool) and her extended family. We had flush toilets and running water (cold) with all dirt floors and animals (chickens/ducks) in the house. But of course they had a DVD player and cell phones. Paraguay is a strange place.

We got rained in the second day and I discovered that when a roof leaks onto a dirt floor you get mud! Imagine that! I decided to go take a walk to another guy´s house and walked for about an hour through a little forest that was surrounded by cane and mandi´o field. It was so nice with lots of birds flying around and the rain making everything nice and cool. Of course I got soaked in the end (my raingear wetout and started to condense on the inside) and had to walk back the way I came becaue I got lost, hah.

The next day we visited the collegio and shadowed a professor there for about 3 hours and did our best to talk to them about their teaching methods and the paraguayan educational system. It was a really strange experiece being in a class with the pofessor essentially talking at you for the whole time and ignoring the rest of the class. The schools here a kinda sad - kids only got for a half day and they have an hour recess. Teachers randomly leave the classrooms to go chit chat and there really isn´t any focused learning going on at all. Most of the time is spent copying down text from the books, memorizing it, and being tested on your ability to memorize. No one asks any questions, nor is there any discussion on the topics being covered. It´s strange.

Toward the end of the week we each led a small workshop about a preprepared topic relating the the environment. I talked about nutrition with vegetables and the connection between vitamins and minerals and our health. I had the students read about a problem someone was having with their health, and have the students connect a vitamin deficiency to the health problem and suggest solutions via diet change. I think it went well.

I find out where Im going to be staying for the next two years on wendsday, so Im a little nervous. We turned in our site preference sheets on saturday, so I hope I get something close to what I said I wanted. Will update more about this when I find out the low down. Time for class! Ciao!

well well im back again for another post. At least this time the internet is up and running at full speed so I can actually access all the web pages I want. We´re still doing a lot of busy work in tech training. It´s useful stuff and all but I can´t help but feel a little borred when we could be learning actual practical skills like transplanting trees or soil fertility management for crop production, for example. I mean, classroom dynamics are important too but I can only take so much on one topic.

We´re going on long-field practice next week which means that Ill be leaving for another site with a few other trainees and staying with families while we attempt to work a little bit one on one with teachers in a high school on environmental issues. Im going to be covering health and nutrition, so Ive been doing a fair amount of work thinking up activities for people to work on in the classes that are creative and stimulate their desire to learn. After long field we have a little less than a week untill we find out where we´re going to be placed for the next two years, so people´s stress levels are running a little high right now. Everyone wants to get into a good site, but no one is sure if the opaque entity that is peace corps is going to pull through and actually give us some of the site amenities that we´d like. We do get to fill out a questionaire about our future site and have been interviewed by the higher-ups on our site preference, but no one is really sure whats going to happen untill november 21st.

Tonight im going to a music festival that is going to show case the best paraguayan national music tallent. Im pretty excited, considering that the festival is just 15 minutes away from my house. It costs 10mil to get in, which roughly comes out to about 2 US dollars. Speaking of dollars, it sure has been losing value lately...

I put my mosquito net up for the first time the other day because I was tired of getting eaten by said insects during the night. It has not, however, kept the bed bugs from making a meal of me. yay. Oh, and I also finnaly got a fan in my room so now im no longer sweating bullets at night. I enjoy sleep without waking up drenched at 3 in the morning thank you very much.

Not a whole lot else to report, except that the frisbee that Im "hoping" to receive is indeed one for throwing and catching =]. As you suspected dad, any sporting goods store should have some kind of frisbee that can be used for ultimate frisbee, just be sure to ask the clerk for the right one. Well, time to go to the show. Will return later.