the paraguayan reverie

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.