the paraguayan reverie

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!