Kicking it in Cuarta Linea, rubia style.

I know what you’re thinking and you’re right, I’m long overdue for an update. I’ve been living on my own, or che año, as they say in Guarani, for a little over two months now, since about the end of July. For the most part it’s been a really good change for me to have my own space to work, cook, and just overall express myself. Nothing against the families I stayed with, just that a girl’s got to be able to sing in the shower once in a while. After six months of taharine, a pasta dish with gristly meat, and what we volunteers have come to refer to as “grease broth,” it’s been really nice to be able to prepare some of my favorite and much missed dishes from home: pizza, curry, soy sloppy joe, pancakes, and my favorite snack, cinnamon applesauce. With some of my move in allowance I bought a small electric oven with a single burner on top, and all my dishes get washed outside by hand at my spigot, as I have no sink or indoor access to water.

My house is simple: All in one room I have my kitchen, bedroom and work space. My walls are all wood planks of varying colors, (I started to paint the inside portion all yellow, with inspirational quotes,) and my roof is corrugated metal. The other night I learned just how not waterproof my house is. I had buckets, pots, and tin cans all over the floor where the roof leaked and at one point water was running down my wall closest to my bed, and bubbling up and through the gaps where the mortar had crumbled away where the boards and bricks meet toward the floor. Luckily my floor is basic concrete, and I stowed all my electronics in my wardrobe, so nothing was harmed. There is also a gap between the roof and walls, so I recently hung my mosquito net over my bed in anticipation of summer around the corner. I have one window, over which I installed bars, so I can safely sleep with it open during the summer, as well as two doors, a front and side door. The side door leads through the other building, an abandoned general store, through which I pass to go to my bathroom, which has a toilet, sink, and shower. This other building is technically mine as well, but is in such shambles, that I don’t keep anything inside of it, though I would like to utilize the space in the future as my own personal classroom, if I can find some extra chairs and a table. With the house I was left a bed frame and two tables, and from the other volunteer, I inherited yet another table and chair, wardrobe, fridge, and fan. Even still just from buying my oven, mattress, kitchen wares, and other basic odds and ends for setting up the house, I had to take out some of my US money to have food through the end of that first month. In this regard, I am very fortunate to have been a follow up volunteer and can say that I honestly don’t understand how first time volunteers are expected to get by on the same move in allowance.

I’ve also been trying my hand at gardening a bit. With the help of my neighbor, Kyle, who is in the agriculture sector, we planted a few rows in the shared plot next to my house (an older couple from the religious community have a few carrots, green onion and tomatoes in there,) of lettuce, spinach, peas, cucumbers, beets and eggplants. I also planted a few tomatoes and peppers to transplant, though the majority of them died in last month’s drought. One thing I really like about my house is my patio. To the right side I have a flower bed, where I transplanted some “yuyos,” or different herbs to mix in my terere. Under the covered area, I have my Gator’s checkered orange and blue hammock, with a grapefruit tree overhead, and my clothes line running diagonally from end to end.
In preparing to live on my own, one thing I had to complete was digging a trash pit, as obviously we have no WMS in the campo. The majority of people in my community burn their trash, and I can only tell you how many times I have been woken up to the smell of burning plastic wafting through my house. Trash management and recycling is one area in which we as RHS volunteers as supposed to focus and to set a good example we are asked to dig our own mini landfills, instead of perpetuating the cycle of respiratory infections from breathing in these toxic fumes. In about my second week of living here, I dug a hole up to about my waist to put my trash in (as I told a friend yesterday, you know you’re in PC when you save and classify your garbage based on its usefulness. I have a “possible arts and crafts/working in the schools,” section “possible gardening,” section, “possible Tupperware/dishes/kitchen use” section, not to mention I put all my organic materials in my compost pile for my garden. I’ve gone so far now as to choose some products based on its packaging when I’m in the grocery store.) About half way through digging, these two women came up to the other side of the fence and proceeded to watch me and giggle a lit bit. I greeted them and they asked what I was doing. Finally, the older one said “Why don’t you just pay a man to do this?” to which I replied that it was important to me to show that I was capable of doing this kind of work also, even if it took me longer (not to mention that I don’t have the money, haha.) Though, I have to admit I might have dug that hole for nothing, as I got to thinking that while I would only be living here for two years, my impact on the land would well last 50-75+ years down in that hole, so now I’m considering toting my trash into my pueblo to be disposed of, though I’m not sure if their method of disposal is more environmentally sound or not. If anything it would prevent my neighbors from rooting through my trash, as one fellow volunteer told me her neighbors had done out of curiosity to see what an American bought and if she’d thrown away anything useful.
About a month ago I started working in the school closest to me. I visit twice weekly and give presentations to students K-9. With K-3, I started with parasites, and with 4-9 with nutrition. At first I was nervous, almost phobic, of going and trying to teach in another language. The first week, I wrote out a script, as I was worried about thinking on my feet in Spanish, but now it’s been coming to me much easier. I’ve been about 4 or 5 times and I love it. I’ve fallen into a groove and am now able to just write out an outline and adapt it as needed with the kids. I’ve recognized how very important it is to stimulate these kids to think creatively, as for every subject, in every grade, they just copy paragraphs off the blackboard. I can see how my activities sometimes throw them for a loop and take them out of their comfort zone, which is exactly what they need. My friend Nicole and I are constantly discussing plans for a youth group over the summer with activities to really show these kids how to problem solve, plan for the future, leadership activities, etc, to introduce these kids to different ways of thinking than just rote memorization. Anyways, I recently finished with the first two topics and yesterday, moved on to dental hygiene. My big goal for today is to model a 3D mouth out of card board and Styrofoam to use next week in my brushing demonstrations with the younger children. These kinds of visual aids and fun activities are really exciting to them (with parasites, I made to scale models of how big the females can get in one’s body out of homemade play dough, and a kool-aide visual for how much blood 500 can deplete from one’s body every day and they thought it was wild. Moreover, being a third time volunteer, they already know a lot of the tricks I get to sent to site with, so it encourages me to look for new ways to convey the information.)
Another huge project that took off last week was the formation of my modern bathroom project. After church (I listened to an entire sermon in Guarani) close to 50 people stayed and listened to the meeting. It was nerve wracking. It felt like my Peace Corps moment of reckoning or something. I had prepared this speech and it was pretty much lost on them as it was in Spanish, which afterward my contact jumped in and took over. I realized that I’d kind of underestimated her dedication to helping me. Anyways, we decided the different roles of the commission, the name, and how often to meet. Later today I’m going to my contact’s to prepare different documents that we need to turn into the local government to be officially recognized. The amount of money we need to raise is daunting, and the process will most likely take my entire two years. The way I see it is, if we already have running water in the community, I would be cheating them if I didn’t at least try to get them the most I could and what would last the longest, as if we went to the trouble of starting a latrine project, this would only last another 15 years before they would need to start the process all over again. I’m only just beginning to understand the poverty of my assigned community, as the community I lived in with the families and the other one in which I live in now are a bit more well off. Most of the latrines in the other communities are just planks of wood leaned together with a ragged sheet for a door. They lack every aspect that would qualify them to be sanitary and with 90% of Paraguayan campo children suffering from parasites, I really want to do everything that I can to see this project through. If anyone is interested in donating to this project, please feel free to email me at gatorsns@gmail.com and I can give you more details. I hope to have a link up a bit before Christmas through the Peace Corps Partners by which people can donate and am brainstorming a benefit I could do back home, an exhibition of sorts, with photos, possibly a video and a question and answer section about my community, work and Paraguay in general that I could tie back into fundraising for this commission, as well as do some awesome work on the third goal, teaching Americans about our host countries. As I studied journalism at UF, this idea is one of my ideas I’ve become really excited about when I envision the possibilities, but I don’t want to rush into anything. I want to do it thoroughly and like my community deserves.
Hurray! The electricity just came back on after two days. In the past two weeks of rainy weather, I’ve come to learn, at least on this side of town as I never experienced power outages with the host families, that sometimes after serious rain storms the power and water can go out, usually for no more than the day. Other times we have this weird phenomenon of “medium power,” where I can run some appliances, but our lights can’t get enough power to operate. Last night we were in the dark. Still no water, but hopefully that will return by the end of the day, as it’d be really nice to flush my toilet…. I learned after the last rain storm to run outside and put out a basin to collect rain water to at least have enough water to wash my dishes the following day, and I always have a few reserve bottles in my fridge. My fridge was what really worried me, as with medium power, I heard it continually clicking on and off and my neighbor told me it was better to unplug it all together so I didn’t chance burning out the motor. Of course it defrosted all over my floor, and I’ve been worrying about whether I would lose my food/postponed a shopping trip today as I had no cold fridge to bring my food home to.

Well I suppose that about wraps it up for now. Right now it’s time to go fix some grub, work on some teaching materials, write up some documents for the commission, and drink some terere in my hammock. As always, feel free to drop me a line or give me a call via Skype. I always enjoy hearing from people, though I must admit sometimes I enjoy being disconnected in my tranquilo life. Now that my house is falling into place and I’m developing a bit of a routine, I’ll do better at keeping in touch, les prometo.

Adio.