I learned much more on Practica Larga than I could have ever hoped to have taught.

Somewhere between waking up at midnight puking in a discarded paint bucket in the dirt floor,wooden shed that served as the all purpose room/kitchen/ my bedroom with a sheet door, with stomach acid and mbeju (a kind of PY mix between a pancake and cornbread) coming out my nose or between running to the very Slumdog Millionaire-esque outhouse with my headlamp on, barely making it in time with Chivivi (Guarani for Diarrhea) I decided that until Samantha Brown did a Passport to Paraguay, I no longer valued her opinion on la-de-da travel.

Peace Corps, facilitating people´s ability to talk about mortifying bodily functions (or sometimes the equally discerning lack there of) in public since 1961. (Seriously this is a top ten most touched on topic among volunteers.) Not complaining though. I actually felt triumphant at the end (and took a picture of myself with a thumbs up at 4 am) like I was getting the writ of passage for volunteers over and done with. Puking in foreign countries is a character building experience and quite frankly a reality, no mas.

My trip definitely was a learning experience in "campo" and "campo-campo." They all slept in one bedroom, putting a bed and sheet door in a part of their dirt floor multipurpose area ( I´d say kitchen, except for her wood burning stove was in another building attached by a doorway) both buildings being made out of wood slats, one with corrugated metal roof, the other with thatched palm frans. I got a crash course in bucket bathing (technically halved tired bathing.) Little House on the Prairie ain´t got nothing on me. The latrine really was bad though. We´ve learned the necessary items to make one sanitary and it lacked them all. I tried to hold it and use the neighbors or the one at the volunteer´s house unless it was an emergency, especially after the night my flashlight reflected on a throbbing trail of worm larvae filling by the doorway....

Barnyard animals roamed the yard and house freely: ducklings, piglets, chicks, kittens, you name it. I can´t follow how supposedly female volunteers gain weight because I definitely ate entire meals of crushed peanuts or lima beans.

Despite being sick and the lack of comfort that I´d grown accustomed to in Guasu Cora, I didn´t let it sour my longfield practice. I stayed with an amazing family, a young couple in their mid 30´s with 2 daughters, age 1 and 7, and was quite afected by their laughter, their constant jubilant spirits, and the tenderness between them. I followed Zuni, the mom, around like a lost puppy while she cooked and told me all sorts of stories about being the oldest of 7, moving to Buenos Aires at 16 to send home money, and how she became entertwined in the life of a senora for whom she cared for for 5 years. Watching Eli, the dad, dance and play with his daughters in the kitchen after dinner, making faces and clowing around with Baby Alicia, and how tenderly he wet and combed her baby curls and put them in a little clump on the top of her head. How Zuni woke up when she heard me at 2 am to make me a remedio (medicinal herbs) tea for my stomach, for which she had to start a fire to boil water on the wood burning stove. That despite having next to nothing, they gave me the largest portions, perhaps one of their beds, maybe even first dibs on bathing water (I know mine was clean, I just obviously never figured out if they changed it, though they did have a running water spigot in the yard, but as people reuse cooking and cleaning water from preparing meals more than once sometimes, who knows. Doctor Oz would have a field day in Paraguay, Mom.) How patient they were with my Guarani, eager to teach me more and for me to reciprocate with English (some of the neighbor girls came over and we ate tangerines off the trees and took turns pointing at things and saying them in Guarani, Spanish, and English.) If this is what I´ve learned and it hasn´t even been 2 months, I can´t begin to fathom how different I´ll be today from who I´ll be in April 2012. I will also often wonder how my little family is San Miguel is making it.

We went as a group from Monday to Friday to see PCV Amy, who is a year into her service. With it raining all the first day and me recovering from being sick all night the last day, I didn´t do much that week besides give a charla in the school to 8th-9th graders on gender stereotypes and plant a couple of trees, but that won´t even be the part I remember as fondly as I will the time I spent with the Bridas-Rojas family.

People are slowly wrapping up what they came to do in the internet cafe and with it getting dark, I don´t want to get left behind. Hope everyone is well and I have 2.5 days off the upcoming week for Semana Santa. Hopefully I´ll get another chance like this to come into town without coming for school and really get to write what I want to say in my blog for a change (the driver dropped a few of us off on the way home from the trip.)

Adio America.

-Steph