Although typing a post while im here in the US seems a little contrary to the content of this blog up till now, I feel like i should put down for posterity how strange it is being back here.

Week1: I was trying really hard to not speak spanish to people but it didnt always work. Random words like "verdad" or "y" kept popping out of my mouth. Everything seemed strange: the size of cars, the voices on TV, parking lots, snack foods, the way people talked about things that they felt mattered in the context of their lives. Even the decor of restaurants or a chair i might have been sitting in made me feel like id been dropped into some kind of weird dream land. People complained about little things, threw away perfectly good food, sat in front of the football game. Constantly on display for groups of moderately curious people and relatives who asked things like "so how's Paraguay? Is it nice there?" I was freaking out.

Week2: Things seemed more normal, but driving in a car everywhere was getting progressively stranger. Seems like the only people walking the street were the homeless guys lining up in front of the church across the street for food at dinnertime. Parking lots still seemed horribly strange, huge wastelands of asphalt with stunted trees. I wont lie, i like being able to stand in front of a heater for long periods of time and to have everything at the push of a button. But everything seemed to not shine so much, to be a little less real, more effort than substance. Again, I am at a loss to explain what this really means.

Week3: More normal feeling these days, driving in a car feels normal again. Visited the desert which screwed with my head a bit, in that people will voluntarily go out of their way to visit a place where no one naturally would ever find themselves. I bought food in a supermarket for the first time, and was scared by the vegetable washer/sprayers above the produce. All the apples were very shiny, the bananas looked like plastic. I just touched things, not really knowing what to choose. I bought a key chain compass that i thought was very overpriced at 6 dollars, seeing that i could buy a really good meal at a restaurant in PY for that much. I find myself comparing everything in my head, not wanting to spend anything if i can help it. I wonder if this tendency will go away, or if its a good thing that i think twice before buying a candy bar?

more to come..

Back again, its quite hot and muggy here. The kind of heat you cant escape from even with a fan - the humidity kills. Anywho, i finnaly ran the fourth and last design workshop for the highschool project here. We had about 35 people which was a huge turnout, much more than i was expecting to have to deal with.

I had the parents and students form groups and go over the second design proposal package and answer yes or no questions as to whether they liked certain aspects of each design. In contrast to the last time where making comments was optional, people had to be direct with what they wanted in order to give me a clear direction for the design to come. It really came down to ordering the drawings correctly and getting them to respond to specific, written prompts connected to the drawings. Telling people that they have the option to express their opinions doesnt work here, it has to almost be made obligatory, otherwise no one says anything, or they just copy everyone elses ideas. Thus, the yes or no questions such as "do you like the idea of having benches here?" and so forth.

Were hoping to package this thing up and use it as a tool to keep people in the ministry of education up to date on whats going on. At this point tho, it seems that their assistance isnt going to be super necessary next year at least considering that we heard today that a local NGO is going to build another classroom in the coming year. Yay!

Preliminary work continues on the planning for the design of the Instituto Libre; I
really need to square away the objectives of the owner before starting to fire off stuff he isnt into. I believe i heard him talking about gardens and how landscapes have to potential to help people culture themselves..

Im hoping to come back to CalPoly during my january home leave and maybe do a presentation or two in the landscape arch department. Not sure how that might fit in with what theyve got goin on over there these days, but theres no harm in asking.

Uff, this heat really is draining. The rest´ll have to wait till later.

Welllll, here I am in Caacupe again killing time until a bus can take me back home. So whats the news..

Ive been cleared by Peace Corps Washington for a third year of service, and will start to cycle that up in a very short while. Im still trying to define exactly what im going to be accomplishing, as making headway within the gobernacions office of environment has been a challenge. The secretary of environment in this department doesnt seem to bee super interested in helping me realize something that i can hold in my hand, but is perfectly content chatting me up about various enviro topics. This is nice, but ive had two years of circular conversations now (to generalize) and im interested in things more or less moving in some kinda of direction. Teaching people about how to use and value their natural resources has to happen better here, and it can. Its just going to be a question of finding the right people to work through. I also met the director of SEAM (secretaria del medio ambiente) at the country level, and he talked so fast in so may directions that before I could get something out to add to the discussion hed jumped to another topic. Least i got his card.

Working with some of the students at the Universidad Nacional should start to be fruitful relativly soon as im begining to help a group of them with some design work. Ive got nothing to loose really, in fact i have a whole lot more to gain by making good connections with these people. I met the uncle of one of the students yesterday while we were at his house talking about a redesign of the grounds and he offered me a free house to stay in for my next year in Caacupe if i wanted it. Just like that, perfect.

Design work on the colegio is goin kinda slow, or actually its presently not going. Mostly for lack of time on my part, and the lack of desire to push my days into the evening with material preparation on top of what ive already got floating around on my desk.

Socially things are going really well, as ive been having a great time seeing one of the teachers outside of school for lunches and trips and such. Shes great - its made things seem even brighter than they already do.

As i type this i cant help but feel physically really really tired. Two days of waking up at 430 to ride in a bus for two hours on a cobblestone road has been draining, and im gonna be doing it again tomorrow and the next day too. I almost just want to move to caacupe already and start to develop my work here. I love the campo dont get me wrong, but its just time for a change. Im sick of being so isolated, sick of the students and teachers sticking themselves in my buisness, and pretty much over getting shorted by profesionals because as of yet my spanish isnt perfect. Of course once i move i dont expect it to be perfect, but the context will be completly different the poeple different and hopefully more rich. After all, i can still visit the campo for fiestas, i just wont have to deal with the daily anoyances of living within that world.

I dont want to make this a bitch fest, because i feel happier now that I have for my whole time here. I just need a nap. now off to that busssss

here in asuncion gettin ready to go to my close of service conference, which means two days in a super nice hotel with free food and a break from teachin. Sounds good to me!

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!