the paraguayan reverie

so as to not leave another month without an update or peep of anything, i thought id give a run down of the things im presently finding myself involved in these days. I take a deep breath now, actually, because thinking about my work has been making me a bit stressed out, but here goes anyway.

Ive been working with a local NGO based in the capital of my department to bring trees and a bit of technical support to my site so as to enable them to plant trees in various public spaces in the surrounding area. The only problem is that right now its not raining when it should have been raining for the last three months, and the groud fairly resembles a solid sheet of rock. SO while we wait, the students slowly forget about watering their trees, interest in the project slides and i feel defeated by factors beyond my control.

Moving right along, ive been helping a comission in charge of the local church make decisions regarding the future expansion of their grounds and building. Weve started at the very very basic, just defining what theyd like to change, why, and the time frame for accomplishing what they like to see happen. This has been interesting in terms of working with people to organize their thoughts and seeing the methods that work to push people towards cohesive goals. Its been frustrating dealing with my language still in this respect tho. In terms of explaining why planing is necessary and fighting to understand the nuances of the conversations that happen between people in the meet its been very challenging.

At the colegio a whole other host of things has been transpiring with the seniors and my quest to get them to actually complete their homework. It seems kinda trivial writing it like this, but when a whole week revolves around depending on a group of people to collect data for a project with deadlines, and they dont do it.. its kinda a bummer. We shall see if they actually complete the work. If they do they they really stand to actually educate the community about itself in addition to completing an interesting piece of work. But like most things i do here, in the end success isnt up to me. Its up to them.