well shoot, i missed cinco de mayo. Now ive missed my one and only reason to drink tecate here in paraguay. Ill survive. Big news here is that it actually rained last night, something that hasnt been happening very much this year. Someone told me today that Paraguay has gotten 80% less rainfall than whats considered normal. So hopefully we keep gettin showers n things so people can dig in the groud to get at their crops. Its honestly pretty rough.

On my end, things have become a bit uncertain with the recent uphevals in the Paraguayan educational system. Seems the government has this decentralization scheme that amongst other things would repalce a portion of teachers salaries with food scrip to be used at super markets. Of course no one wants that, given that the government would probably end up not having money to cover their "oficial" scrip and then people would have all this worthless money.

Starting monday, all teachers are on strike. And this leaves me with a bit of a hole in my schedule..

Im workin on the background info for my design workshop at the end of this month. I think its going ok. Collected responses from the seventh through first year colegio students about their preferences for a part of the property to be developed. Now ive got to synthesize what they wrote into a few design alternatives so as to make a firm decision about the future of the place. And i really need to start drawing, ive seriously been feeling like ive had some kind of block against just sitting down and sketching out some ideas.

I guess ive just been realizing that the things i put together shouldnt just be random, they need to be guided by the people who will eventually be using the space. I can help them to order their ideas and make sense of the space, but I need to know what they want first. I guess this is my block, that im no longer willing to just throw stuff together and sell it, because if i do that no one will listen to me. I havnt been hired, im just an advocate. I have to involve people at every step in the process if i want it to progress, even though itd be way easier to just pump ideas out of my head and have them choose from the results. Merh. We shall see.

this past week has been a bit of an introspective one for me, after I realized that to some extent ive become disalusioned with my work here. Im busy, but havnt really been feeling like ive been accomplishing my goals to the extent to which i thought i would be at this point. Then i kinda realized that id never actually written down what my goals were in the first place, and i was getting upset without actually having a firm reason to be doing so. SO i wrote them down. Its been helpful to actually think hard about these things once in a while instead of just floating along in a semi-dissatisfied state.

I just finised up having students at the church draw pictures of their ideal grounds so the comision can have some idea of what the kids are thinking when we actually sit down and run their design workshop.

I also planned out the schedule and actuvities for my next design workshop for the colegio and hope to have it the last weekend in may. Lets see how that goes.

Ive also decided that I want to write a how to guide for participatory deisgn in Paraguay. Many of the volunteers here are faced with projects that by necesity require some designing (new buildings, fields, churches, tree planting, etc) and the resources people corps has to give to volunteers so they can tackle these projects is limited. So, in order to help form another tool to help Peace Corps´s push to integrate participation into our work, I hope to get a little extension to my service and get this design guide squared away, using my projects as case studies. If nothing else, at least it´ll be a good start to my thesis work.

AND im taking the GRE. Not like im really planning on going to grad school right after leaving here, but its better just to cover my bases all the same.

Thats about it for now, hope everyone out there´s enjoying the sunday!