the paraguayan reverie

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!