alrighty, back for another update after a slight period of inactivity on the web, and a rather confusing stint of action on this side of the globe. My mentioning of teachers not really wanting to get back into gear this year seems to have certainly come full circle to bite me a bit, as now i feel pulled in way more directions (both in site and out) than i previously considered possible. This is a bit vague, let me try to explain a bit.

Ive begun to work primarily at the colegio with the teachers, who coincidentally want to start actually planning something to implement at the school. Im not used to this. Im used to people just wanting to talk a bit, and then gradually drop off leaving one maybe two interested people who will actually want to do work with me. This year its started out with maybe one or two interested for real, and then about half of the rest of them jumping on board, expecting me to integrate their classes and material into the general projects for the colegio. phew. So whats making my head feel a little bit like its going to explode is trying to figure out how to integrate seventh through ninth graders as well as seniors into an institutional project focused around nutrition and gardens, with the end goal of implementing it in the houses of the community. Im being looked to as somewhat of a leader in this, which is fine, but i feel a little like im being a bit thrown out to see how far ill go with the work before i cant string myself out anymore.

Second project involves the all the highschool classes, and must integrate every subject into the completion of one project, in this case being a school vivero (tree nursery) with the end goal of selling the trees and thus making the project able to continue into the next year without outside funding. This is the one thats making my head spin a bit, as ive been trying to conceptualize how to make a tree nursery fit in with a completly unrelated topic, like spanish composition. I mean, sure, i can make the kids write an essay about the utility of trees or something, yeah. But i have a sneaking suspicion that the teachers are going to treat me how they normal do and expect me to take over and instruct their classes while they go outside and talk on their cell phones. This i cant do in this case, and am mentally preparing myself to explain to them (when this happenes) that i cant help them unless they help me.

Third project revolves around the seniors and preparing them for their adult futures which are rapidly aproaching. This work mostly revolves around goal and objective setting, in addition to exploration of their communities to really understand where they are coming from before they decide what kind of changes they have to make for the final two month senior project, WHICH is also brand new and ive recenly realized that i may end up planning with the teachers. Id kinda like this, actually. Senior projects are fun times for ding what you really want to do, which is the whole point of the method of teaching ive been trying to employ with the seniors.

Fourth project revolves around helping the teachers to actually acheive what they write down in their project plans, making and keeping to calenders and schedules in addition to holding their students acountable. Very american, but they are very profesional people and are interested enough to actually listen to me as a group, which at least says that i have their attention to a certain extent.

Fifth project is the colegio design.. im sitting on four very competent preliminary site programs created in the workshop waiting for the opertune moment for my brain to swing into action. Its coming.

Sith, the oratorio design taller which is tomorrow. Im nearly ready with my ideas for the material, but i may be facing another all nighter to swing it through. Nothing like putting it all on myself at the last minute to get it done...

Seventh, the library pedido and planning, which is now done after five hours of work with my buddy hugo.

There are other things too, like students challenging me in class or profesores telling me that i lie about where im going to be, that make things hard right now. But as i typically tell myself, this isnt any different from the pressure i might be feeling were i back in the states. Its just that here, no one is telling us really that we are doing good work, and when we talk about project with other volunteers it typically, with the exception of good friends, turns into a spitting contest. So i guess that leaves me here, on the blog.

I dont mean to sound overly worked up, things are great in other areas of my life, actually, and im feelin really happy. You know, smiling and such. So yep, its still hard like usual, but nothing that i cant handle when the doses are small and the breakdown is clear. Now.. time for taxes.

Well its that time of year again and school is starting up, and that means: lots of little kids who dont really want to learn particularly, but come to school an hour early to have something to do, and teachers who have to be at school but dont want to jump start themselves for at least another week, preferably not until after easter. Time will tell what people actually want to do any whether the kids will have any desire to jump on the learning waggon.

More to come later

NEW PHOTOS ADDED! I completed my first design workshop!! Visit my flickr account by clicking on the link to the right. It took alot of planning, and the help of my good buddy hugo (the to-be-director of the high school) to pull it off, but I now have a clear direction to take with the design thanks to the hard work of the teachers and students who participated. It basically took a week of:

- writing formal invitations
- hand delivering the invitations
- inviting the students house by house (aprox. 1 mile radius, on bike in mud/rain)
- designing the activities
- writing out instructions for the activities
- buying supplies
- preping the materials
- correcting the intended message - goal/objs of workshop
- setting the adgenda/timetable
- organizing use of workshop space
- buying food and cooking
- drinking wine from a box

All this, in addition to guiding people through a process they'd never experienced before to arrive at a product that at the outset they didnt understand. Activities that occured on feb.8th:

- presentation of reasons for holding the workshop
- drawing of ideal colegio and presentations
- explanation of a spatial diagram, by way of the local brick factories
- spatial diagraming of the school environment and presentations
- site walk/exploration
- solar aspect/orientation map
- spatial maping example of brick factory
- create scaled plans of school and presentations
- choosing actual location for first classroom to be built within the month

SO anyway, i kinda ran myself down to the point of sickness and had to stay in bed for a day after the workshop ended. I guess not really sleeping well for 3 days and then pulling a quasi-all nighter at the end basically has the same effect that it would back in the states.

School starts back up here in about 2 weeks, and im presently trying to figure out how to get the teachers be motivated accomplish something with me before the year actually starts. Two things that I know ill be doing for sure is organizing the students-teaching-students program again through the society-environment class, and also running a workshop on proper project management for some of the teachers at the high school. Kinda alot, but itll be all i have for the first month or so and im not too worried about getting most of it done.

Other than that its really hot. Hot. And i have running water twice a week for a few hours a day, said hours typically happening when I happen to not be at home to fill up every bottle and bucket I have. This sucks a bit, and makes nearly every aspect of my life inconvenient, and slightly more dirty than I would like.
It could be worse and I could not have electricity.. life without a fan would be horrid and even more sweaty/dirty. Ha!

Valentines day is tomorrow.. have to make a valentine! he! Chau!

Time away from paraguay has been a very interesting experience for me. And not just because of the places ive gotten a chance to see, but also because of the perspective ive been able to experience as not only a foreigner on vacation in another country, but as a foreigner from two different countries with a mix of two sets of cultural norms applying them to yet a third place.

Geographically, northern argentina is not that far from paraguay. If one were to fly from asuncion to salta it would only take a few hours. But the culture is so much more influenced by the incan empire that spread down along the andes that it really felt like a completly different country, no only in comparison to the paraguayn country lifestyle, but also to buenos aires in the south which was very european. The scenery was high-desert like, with scrub and large cactus on the hills and some larger vegetation down in the low lands. Packs of donkeys, little mud brick houses in backwater towns, packs of children staring at the buses as they pass by their front porches. All of this is much like paraguay (minus the donkeys), but it was kinda strange to hear people speaking heavily accented spanish instead of guarani in the smaller communities.

I actually was kinda taken aback at the conditions in some of the towns that we passed on the way to our destination place a few hours south of salta in cafayate (pronounced cafaCHAte). I know that argentina is pretty well developed in many parts, so i never expected to see people living in simple mud brick houses with no windows or doors like the ones ive encountered while exploring ruins in death valley. Ive seen plenty of tin and plastic sheet shack houses (even in my paraguayan community) but just being in the desert again and seeing the way some families lives out there, with just a little heard of goats and disintegrating mud house kinda threw me a bit.

For most of my vacation id been traveling with a pretty large group of 9 to 11 people, so being able to go into the last week of my vacation and travel with only one other person was super refreshing. It was get really trying when people are pulling a group in all different directions, and no one can make up their minds. One just ends up sitting around feeling irritated. This is in contrast to my last week, where if we wanted to go somewhere it was relativly simple to make the decision. However, this is not to say that traveling with just one other person does not have its difficulties. There were certainly times toward the end of the trip where we had spent so much time together, talking about anything and everything, that there was really nothing left but to just sit there and enjoy the scenery passing. Too, one cant as easily have alone time when traveling as a duo, since the other person would naturally have other people to hang out with in a larger group setting. Also, it kinda goes without saying that whether you enjoy the company of your travel companion can make or break the trip; theres nothing worse than feeling trapped in an difficult situation where one would of course want to instead be having a plesant, vacation-esque time. Luckily for me, although id known gina for only a short while before then trip, we got along well enough to have things go smoothly for the majority of the time.

The highlights of the final part of my nearly month long vacation were a hiking trek we took for a day around the valley to see some of the landscape that bore a striking resemblance to many parts of death valley - the jutting rock formations, box canyons and yellow blooming desert scrub was very nostalgic. At the end of the treck we hiked into the back of a canyon where a man was waiting to give a flute and drum performance in this natural rock theatre. It completly unexpected, and exactly what i would have done had i been there by myself. Thus, to sit and have this wonderful music washing over us and around the canyon while the wind rushed up and out into the sunset spotted valley was better than anything I could have asked for as a terminus to my trip.

So I am happy to be back in Paraguay, ready to see things in a new light, with a slightly new perspective. As gina and I kept realizing throughout the week, everything thing you do is built on the foundation of your past experiences, your memories and all the things you value enough to remember. I am happy to have had the opportunity to build on who I am while I was away, to have had conversations about things that really matter, to have been able to listen and share, to feel like i do not just let time pass, but am an active participant in shaping what comes to be. And as I told a good friend of mine, "Heres to the little moments - the times that connect moments to moments, between the bright flashes of experience. They define us, but we wont remember them with any clarity as time selectivly shreds the fabric of our memory. So heres to who we are in this moment - heres to now."

its been a great two weeks in uruguay and argentina, times filled with great beaches, dinner parties, lots of wine and more than a few really great times. Actually, this vacation thus far has far exceded my expectations, being that Ive consistently felt like ive been having a worthwhile time, even if i was just taking a nap on the front porch of our beach house, or sitting in a park watching the trees and clouds slowly move with the wind.

And tomorrow(!) i start hopefully the best part of my trip where i go up to beautiful tucumán and cafayate with gina to (of course!) have wonderful time for the new years. Im still not totally sure what were going to be up to when we´re cruzing around, but im pretty sure we´ll at least be going for swims in waterfalls, seeing some sweet desert rock formations and maybe even ride some horses. Oh yeah, i rode horses for the first time in Uruguay. On the beach. I was galloping up and over sand dunes with a pack of 6 other people; it was amazing.

Other highlights include the break-dance show i saw last night with my peace corps buddies and a few new friends from the hostel. It was a really cool time, despite the fact that the club was like an oven and i was basically soaked by the end of the night. As a side note, there are a ton of people from the bay area in BA, an almost funny ammount actually. I think out of a group of l0 that were with us last night, there were 5 people from CA, four of them from the greater san francisco area. Strange.

Another highlight was for sure the tango/dinner show which highlighted two dancers, and a couple singers. They were seriously talented, the man especially. I was totally blown away by the footwork, twirling and spinning, diping and kicking. Also, on the random note there was a family sitting at the table over that was from monterey, CA. I didnt know any of them, but still it was kinda odd. Also, as a slightly funny side note, my buddy dave and i decided to eat left over food after the show that people had left on their tables. Basically it was a cheese and meat plate and were were shoveling the cheese wedges into our mouthes while looking out for the waiters. This was a really nice place too, with people in suits and things, meanwhile me and dave are chowing down on people´s leavings. Classic.

More to come later.

presently typing away from the second floor of a hostel in the palermo neighborhood of buenos aires (BA) that has great stained glass windows and nice, "real" matresses, not a little foam pad that you have to suppliment by spreading magazines out underneath for a little extra cushioning. This is my first of 5 days in BA and ive got a pretty big schedule to get on, including the recoleta cemetary and adjoining artesinal fair today, a slew of museums and tango show tomorrow, and then maybe ill rent a bike and hit up most of the major parks to take some of the photos i keep saying that Ill take and then never do.

Im pretty excited about the cemetary today, to be quite honest. I found a map to all the graves in one of the side rooms in the hostel and the place is huge! Ive always been kinda curious about what would drive people to built a huge monument to store the body of a deceased family member. Must there at least be a little motivation on the part of the living to show off to the curious people, like myself who pass through, that their family was powerful, or that their family had money, or their family was well respected. Granted, it is also a tribute to the deceased, which has its place. But when that tribute (to use some examples ive seen in Paraguay) is a little house literaly covered in smooth shiny tile while the family has a dirt floor and crumbling walls, i have to question the rationality of it all. Well, regardless of the rationality of the place, im off to see it right now!

Ill add more later! Chau till then!

ok. ok. Things are moving along over here in Paraguay, and I dont mean the cows that have worn a trail in front of my house trying to eat my plants through the fence. What I mean is that Im going on vacation! Essentially leaving paraguay untill the begining of january for a much needed mental break from the rigors of bike riding and hydration rituals. Ill be going to uruguay and staying in a little beach town (the ocean!!) for a week, then to Buenos Aires for another week through christmas, and then off to the next exciting segment of my trip in northern argentina. As i pass the days flying kites and eating cheap, delicious food, the moment may arrive when I find myself sitting at an internet café. At that point, i will update this page so as to not forget later what had been going on around me. Till then! Chau!