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!!