high time for an update id say. After more than two months of finagling and tweaking my way through projects and into some interesting work, id say im quite content with the way just about everything is progressing. Well, that is to say everything that Im really invested in. As a recap:

I ran my third design workshop using the site planning work and survey information collected in the first and second round. Activities included linkage diagrams for major site elements (soccer pitch, entrance, classrooms, etc) and their supporting elements. People ended up agreeing on a pallate of things that needed to be included for each major elements (for example: shade, water access, seating, etc for soccer area) and diagramed it out. Then using a packet of proposals i drew out for each of the areas, the groups came to concensus on their favorite drawing and modified it to fit their interests. We then voted collectivly as a whole workshop for which proposals to go ahead with. This has left me with a pretty clear direction for my final proposal drawings which i hope to have completed by december. My work contacts are already getting some milage out of the drawings, having shown them to people at the ministry of education to get funding. Seems to have worked. Guess those five years at Poly did teach me something? haha.

The school now has electricity hooked up, all the desks and furniture, and a promise from a local NGO to build the next classroom in the following year. I hope they follow our proposal! Regardless, being where i am now its a load off my mind, thats for sure.

On a lighter note, im still beating my head against the apathy of certain teachers at the highschool, and have honestly given up on changing their points of view. Im just focusing on what i can do with the students at this point. The seniors will be presenting their investigations on natural resource use and conservation this Wendsday to prep us for community projects to finish out the year.

The school tree nursery now has about 400 seedlings in bags growing and ready to be transplanted at the end of the year. At least helping them run the project and providing the tech knowlege has produced some tangible results. And the frost didnt kill the trees, which is always nice.

Leadership traning and workshops at the other highschool are going well, with the students set to interview the community at large this week with a form we created at the last teacher meeting. I bet about half of them do it, haha, we shall see.

Biggest news for me by far is that ive made a formal work proposal to an NGO that runs reforestation projects here in Paraguay for the comming year. All signs look good from Peace Corps and the NGO that ill get the go ahead, so Im super stoked. Itd mean another full year working on developing their environmental educaiton program, working with highschools across the southern half of the country to implement arborization projects and the like. And i get to live in a town. And have running water every day, and buses that run without fail at all times of the day. Id like that. As part of the program ill get to come home for a month on quasi-paid leave and then return for my year of service. Thanks taxpayers.

With the end of my second year fast approaching, i find myself sitting sometimes and considering where Ive come to after all this time spent fumbling along. I wish somethings had been different, but on the whole ive accoplished most of what id originally set out to do. I think. I certainly dont care so much anymore about whether what ive done and am doing would be considered succesful by other people, just so long as I feel satisfied with the effort i put into it.

Take last week for example. There was an impromptu teacher assembly and the director asked me to run something with the students for about an hour and a half. Luckily id done some leadership stuff and and an activity with the other colegio in the morning so I repeaterd it, the major difference being the 45 or so 15 to 19 year olds with no teacher supervision (except me) as opposed to the 25 in the morning with two teachers assisting. So i ran my stuff, and the activity bombed. Everyone gave up and just stoped doing what they were supposed to be doing and started yelling at each other. The topic was about conflict resolution and compromise, but none of that actually happened, so instead of talking about how well the activity went we just talked about why it failed and what was missing. So still a success, kinda, even though it really didnt work out like it was supposed to.

And so its getting dark and ive got a half hour bike ride back home so Id better get on with it. Till next time!

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!

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.

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!