Saturday, November 27, 2010

Thanksgiving in Paraguay

Happy Thanksgiving...a couple of days late. As you may have guessed, Paraguay doesn´t celebrate Thanksgiving. It was business as usual. The nice part is that I work for the U.S. government, which celebrates all U.S. and Paraguayan holidays, so I had a holiday. The director of Peace Corps Paraguay invited all of us trainees over to his house for a Thanksgiving potluck. I decided to bring a sweet potato dish that I ate last year at Thanksgiving and absolutely love. Instead of yams I used Batatas...actual sweet potatoes and instead of brown sugar I used molasses. I had a lot of fun making them and learning how to find food in Paraguay and manage a Paraguayan kitchen. There is a supermarket in the training town where I got sugars and flour. I got butter at a corner supermarket in another town, and the rest of the ingrediens: nuts, sweet potatoes, milk, at the mercado. I bought an egg from my neighbor as well, and then used a little of my host mom´s molasses. A large majority of the lower class Paraguayans have gas ovens and stoves, so I learned how to use a gas oven for the first time. The dish turned out a success and everyone at Thanksgiving loved it and I am passing around the recipe to friends here.

So the director of Peace Corps Paraguay has a really incredible house in the capital of Asuncion. It reminded of some of the houses that I visited in East Memphis. We swam in the pool and lounged in the yard, along with eating an incredible amount of delicious food...including vegetables (vegetables have become a luxury in my Paraguayan diet.) I enjoyed visiting with other trainees that I don´t get to see very often and relax by the pool. The cold water of the pool was refreshing in the Paraguayan heat!

Training is quickly wrapping up. We have two weeks before swear in. Last weekend I visited my future site. It is in a beautiful location only 2.5 hours from Asuncion and 3K from the nearest paved road, which is pretty nice. I have it better than a lot of my friends that have a two hour walk to the bus stop. My bus is only 1K away. Although I think I would have enjoyed a more remote community, I think I am going to like my site! One of my contacts has a kitten that she is going to let me have so I am reading up on how to care for a cat!

Ciao for now friends!
Jajatopata!

Saturday, November 6, 2010

5 weeks down

I have been living in Paraguay exactly 5 weeks. I was thinking earlier this week that this is starting to feel familiar, natural, & almost comfortable. Of course there have been days when I wish I was back home in the states and would rather be drinking a latte at Dunn Brothers than being here in Paraguay, but I wouldn´t trade this for anything, not even a steaming hot shower (although I do have these for now...).
I am still in training. I have 5 weeks to go. I am fairly impressed with the training program that the Peace Corps has. They are very strategic about what they do to help us become integrated into Paraguay culture and life. Their approach is that the individual is responsible for their own learning. Every time I am doing something new I realize that a previous activity is helping me to realize the current activity. So it is very cumulative and experiential. It is also rigorous and I have a hard time keeping up. We normally have language in the morning and technical areas (mostly agricluture related things) in the afternoon.
Sometimes we will go to town and meet with our entire group of 47 for common areas (health, safety, development, policies, working with youth.) The technical areas are pretty interesting. We built a bio-intensive garden and learned how to build a compost pile. We created a demo plot of common cash crops in paraguay and experimented with fertilizers and mulch. We learned about vermiculture, soilds, and green manures. I taught about tree planting, and last week we learned how to do some beekeeping. I only got stung once. We also have talked about methodology in a Paraguayan context. Oh, and we are raising chickens!
Something cool we got to do was go alone into the campo and stay with a volunteer for 4 days. This was helpful to see exactly what being a volunteer is like. This upcoming week we will go in groups of 4 for a week of living and working in a current volunteer´s community.
Something neat that they are working into training is a ¨day of practice¨ where we go and work with a contact in our community and use methods that we are being taught in training. I am working with a very guapa (hard-working...BA) woman that has 70 chickens, 2 pigs, and 5 cows. She also makes her own cheese and sells eggs.
I am enjoying my family stay as well. My family is very sweet. I live with a Mother, a father, their 2 year old daughter and their 5 year old niece. Sometimes the girls get on my nerves, but I lock my door if they do. Sometimes I get antsy to be done with training and be in my site and living alone, but we will find out in less than 2 weeks where our sites will be!!