I discovered coffee last week.

My room feels like me now. Finally, I can relax and I can imagine living here for longer. I knew I’d get to used to things, but it was more difficult than I anticipated because I had become so accustomed to my life at home whereas before I traveled last time, I was only home for a short while. I was used to being away. Of course nothing can compare to this…but anyway, the night is cool and my fan keeps my room at a pleasant temperature for sleeping. Today we walked so much throughout Villarica that I didn’t want to talk to anyone in that heat. Now I’m home, I have incense burning, my music is playing, and the atmosphere is very tranquillo. I recently rigged the lamp my family gave to me by removing the bulb from its exterior so I can actually use it for a reading lamp rather than an aesthetic glowing Virgin Mary as it was before. I never imagined this room feeling so nice. I didn’t bring incense with me from home because I was afraid they would think I was a witch for burning it because I had no idea of their beliefs. I know that sounds outlandish, but I had no idea and wanted to be careful. Anyway, it turns out that my host mom even had an incense burner for me to borrow. I splurged this weekend and bought lavender body wash and a dream catcher from Villarrica, the town I was visiting this week. The man tried to sell it to me for a gringo price since I’m obviously a foreigner, but too bad for him I pointed out the price tag and I paid him half his asking price. Damn this blonde hair. There’s no escaping it, I’ll always be the obvious extranjera, although everyone thinks I’m German. If your hair is lighter than jet-black, it´s blonde, so obviously I´m a bombshell.

Also, my mind is made up. If at all possible, I am going to have a horse during my term. Yes. I’ll get into that later.

This week was Long Field which is basically like a weeklong practicum. Three other people in my Urban Youth Development sector and I traveled to a city called Villarrica for a week’s worth of work. I stayed with an older woman who always had this look on her face that I first read as disappointment, and then I came to know that it was just her expression and she actually was not disapproving of everything I said. She was shocked at my age because of how young I look and that I did not dye my hair or wear makeup. At first I thought she thought I was awful for not putting forth more of an effort into my appearance, but she kept telling me how “linda” I was, so I don’t think she had bad intentions.


This week I met a boy whose mother lives in Spain with her other family and his father is dead. He stays with his Grandma but his drunk Uncle lives there and he´s abusive, especially when he drinks. When this happens, he runs away and stays with the lady I stayed with. This is how I met Aldo. He’s only ten years old and he seemed so much older. He noticed my plate and and all the food I left behind and said, “I can’t eat well, either.” It’s hard for him to eat much since he’s gone so long only eating very little, or that´s how Augustina, my host, explained it to me. I gave him some candy I had and he asked me if my teeth hurt. I didn’t understand the question at the time, but Augustina later explained that he cries because his teeth hurt so much. It turns out he didn’t even have a toothbrush. I thought about this documentary I had seen with this little boy who had owned nothing before and when he was given a toothbrush, he so proudly guarded it as his only possession. I couldn’t stop thinking of Aldo. I´ve worked with kids that have run the streets before, but I´ve never met one that was currently in the situation, not like this. I bought him a toothbrush the next day and found a package that came with two and he happily gave one to his little brother. I only saw him one other time before I left but he told me how he brushed his teeth and thanked me again. He wants to work with computers and we talked about Skype. I originally thought I would only be effective with working with girls, but after meeting Aldo, I had a strong desire to work with more ¨street kids.¨ (That´s how it´s labeled here). He doesn’t even have affection from anyone. Kids are so resilient and will always amaze me.

It rained so much in Villarica that the towns bordering the city were flooded and the town had no running water for five days. I still don't understand exactly what happened, but the water where I live now used to frequently shut off during the time I wanted to shower. At first I thought that's how it was going to be in Villarica, but it never came back on. Most everyone has wells, but Augustina had buckets of water brought to her from her brother. The first night I bathed with a bucket that was really quite fancy, she somehow had warmed up the water for me. The second night I ¨bucket bathed¨ she seemed so concerned since the water was cold, but I explained I'd rather be clean and what else could I do? She thought that response was hilarious.

It's kind of strange how things feel more comfortable now, because just as soon as I start to find my place here, we're moving on. We find out in a week where we are going to live for the next two years!

We swam in waterfalls. I somehow managed to climb up this tiny cliff that the Paraguayans could practically run up, and we jumped off. It wasn´t nearly as high as the cliff in North Carolina, but it was amazing. It felt so nice to be able to swim again. We tried to go to a different spring with more ¨waterfalls¨ but all the bridges had fallen from the previous rain fall. The signs leading up to the place read ¨Aventuras sin limites¨ but the fallen bridges proved the signs wrong, and our adventures were limited.



I made friends with carpinchos. They were like huge guniea pigs. I fed one a banana from my hand, and it was love.

I wish all mosquitoes and parasites were extinct. I don't know why they exist. It looks like I have chicken pox on my legs and I´m no fan of dengue. Just saying.

I finally washed my own clothes and cleaned my room. My host mom always insisted on washing my clothes and would clean my room, but I decided I needed to take control. It sounds like a small victory, but at first everything was so overwhelming and I felt uncertain with how to approach certain things, such as explaining the desire to do my own clothes, and finally, I feel more with it. I have graduated from middle school. It's the little things, you know.

Cold showers are actually refreshing in this heat. My language teacher said it's good for your circulation, I´m convinced she´s right. There are actually electric hot showers, but I only have the desire to use that on occasion. And mine is broken right now.

Stephen and I talked on the radio today! We had a sort of script written out and we were going to discuss some myths about Americans, but when it came time to talk, the DJ just asked us questions about Peace Corps and how we liked Paraguay. I was somehow able to keep up with him and understand most of what he said in his impossibly fast spanish. I felt like it was the micro machine guy or as if I were placing a bid at an auction. I had to do most of the talking because Stephen couldn´t understand him well and they let me introduce a song by my choice artist, Julieta Venegas. Very exciting, ha. I told them that I wasn´t used to speaking spanish because I usually speak Guarani at the house. That was pretty hilarious to everyone. Right after we were done at the station, I saw my host brother who had listened to us and he said I did well! You have to understand, compliments like that are not to be polite. Paraguayans are brutally honest so I was ready to laugh off any hate he had for me, but it was good. This is a culture where you can constantly make fun of your sister for being fat, and nobody corrects you. Or that´s what I´ve witnessed thus far, I should say. I should also mention that my host brother is twenty-six and has a one year old little boy, and that my sister is only ten.

We only have five weeks left and my host mom is trying to cease the moment since time has passed so quickly. For example, we ate fish on Sunday and I expressed the desire to go fishing. A few hours later, all of us, along with the long bamboo reed fishing poles that my host dad and little sister had to carry with their arms outside the windows because of their great length, were headed to the river. We found a cool place under a bridge and it was so incredibly peaceful. I felt sad to see trash polluting the river, but it was still beautiful inspite of this.

Yesterday we had a fancy party at my house. My host mom has been talking about making waffles for the other trainees for awhile, and yesterday morning she told me I had to invite everyone over that evening. Every single person came, along with one of our teachers, and my mom had it set up like we were in England. She put out her fancy dishes with coffee and tea, it was out of control chuchi. Chuchi=posh. There´s a teenager from Argentina that works in her store named Jose and he plays the accordian in a band with his family. I half jokingly asked if he had his accordian with him because I wanted to hear him play, and unbeknownst to me, he called his mom and had her bring it to him so he could play for me as a surprise. My entire training group was pretty shocked at the fanciness.


I had the brilliant idea for my mom to take a Spanish class and for her and my step dad to come visit me next year. That´s next on the list.

I hope everyone is well. I started writing this last week, I will update you next week when I found out my destiny! Mucho amor!!

I´m telling my Paraguayan mom that the doctor said no more meat for me!

I just wanted to write something really fast because I didn´t realize it had been so long since I´d written. I never feel like I have time for anything, but that will change after training. My best friend here got sick and had to go to the hospital and I stayed two nights in Asuncion with her. I am so happy that Peace Corps allowed me to do that because I know I would have been scared to go to a hospital in a foreign country alone, and I did a lot of translating for her. She´s doing much better now and was released today. Anyway, that was an experience in itself, but we did get a chance to watch American television and got a break from the bug bites. It was also humorous when she cursed at the nurses in English when they put in her IV because nobody understood a thing. It´s funny now, I promise. It was actually funny then.

Next week I´ll be traveling with three other volunteers to another site to do some work with kids, but I´m not sure what exactly we are doing yet since I´ve been out of the loop, but we´ll be there all week. Field work.

Last weekend we visited another volunteer and my group played games and did crafts with the kids in an after school program that´s funded by the Canadian government. It was really exciting to have a chance to work with kids again and it reminded me of why I´m here. I felt excited all over again.

Tomorrow are our last placement interviews which are a big deal. This is the interview that will determine your placement for the next two years. I´m not entirely certain of anything I want to say, but we find out our placements on April 8th. I´m thinking I might want to mention an orphanage and how I work better with some sort of structure, but also a lot of freedom. That probably sounds like a really hippie thing to say. I really can´t focus and feel like I´m losing my English.

And it´s true, I was thinking entirely in Spanish this morning, but I didn´t feel like I had reached a great level with the language, but that my thoughts had just become more simplified, rather. The spanglish mixed with Guarani in my brain is out of control.

The other day a few of us were on a bus headed to our weekend destination (work) trip and the ride seemed to drag on. I was so hot that I tried to sleep because I felt like I couldn´t breathe and thought a siesta was the best way to cope. I sat by the window and the wind blew so unpleasantly hard that my straw hat got all torn up. I realized then that I could close the window a bit to save me from that problem...I wasn´t thinking right. Anyway, we were going up a sort of incline and going really slow. None of us knew what was going on. My friend turned to me and said, ¨I think this must be a reeeeally steep hill and that´s why we are going so slow.¨ ¨No. I think we need to stop by a gas machine.¨ (That´s that English I´ve lost). We continued to very slowly move along as cars passed us and a lady very incessantly kept ringing the bell to be let off the bus. We finally came to a halt in a pile of sand on the side of the road. Apparently our bus´s brakes had quit working! So we all survived our run away bus, and we had no idea that it was running away. But I think it sounds pretty impressive. Very Paraguayan of us.

Paraguayans here jump on and off the buses like experts, too. I decided to give it a go one day. I was coming home from a very long bus ride and didn´t want to trouble the bus driver with coming to a complete stop, nobody else seemed to need it. So as we were almost stopped, I jumped off the bus, and of course, I fell. I jumped right up to assure everyone that I was fine and saw that a neighbor had witnessed my grace and I yelled, ¨Estoy bien!¨ I´m still determined to get that one down, but it seems that I have a reputation for being clumsy around here already. ha. I call it wreckless. Sounds better to me.

My friend Stephen and I plan on have a health charla (sort of like a chat) with kids and talking about that stuff on the radio, too. After our charla, we plan to teach them some North American dances since it so well coincides with health. Yes, the electric slide is obviously included.

Training is still stressful and I still feel awful at the Guarani language, but things are good here. I miss everyone like crazy, but I put credit on my skype and have been able to talk to a few people from home which helps me out so much. It´s hard to think of missing my nephew grow up, though, that´s definitely been the most difficult and saddest part for me.

I will try to write more very soon and I think of all you like crazy. I really do.

It´s avacado season

I didn´t know I was going to use the Intenet today so I have nothing written to post. It´s easier for me to write in my room as opposed to a hot cyber cafe where I always feel slightly rushed. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Villeta, the town I´m staying in, so tonight there is a grand festival. I´m not sure what that entails, but I know that there will be lots of dancing and art and the whole town is going to be there to celebrate. It´s also a holiday in Villeta tomorrow, so nobody has school so they can party as freely as they´d like tonight. Unfortunately, for the Americans, that isn´t the case. We have school at 7:45 and will either miss out on the celebrations, or be very out of it during language class. Oh, language class. Still not my favorite topic and I´m still bitter about it since I really would like to master spanish before confusing myself more, but it´ll be okay. I think as time goes on, I´ll pick up both languages a lot easier than now. And if I study more, perhaps?

This past weekend I traveled to another city to stay with a volunteer. It was a very interesting experience, and I was very happy to be home on Tuesday after riding on three different hot buses for a total of five hours. I miss train travel. ha.

Anyway, whenever I explained to the ¨chaueffer¨ where I needed to be dropped off in the new city, he dropped me off at an intersection (not like one in the US, but it was technically an intersection) and off the bus drove. A few girls stared at me from in front of the dispensa(store) while sipping their soda. ¨Is the police station this way?¨ I yelled to them. One of the girls pointed out the right direction and I walked away in what looked like the middle of nowhere as it started to rain. At that moment, three large pigs crossed the street in front of me and I could hear music in the distance. A band that sounded like a Paraguayan version of mariachi was practicing, blaring their horns outside. It was so beautiful. It was then that I thought, ¨Wow. I´m in South America.¨ Even though I was a little uncertain if I was going the right direction and I had no phone, I felt pretty calm. I stopped by another store and asked every other person on the way to ensure that I was headed the right way. At last, after turning down another road and heading up a hill, I found the other volunteer. Apparently she meant to tell me to get off at the bus terminal, but I was happy that I was able to take that walk and have the strange realization that I was in Paraguay. It was really beautiful.

Today was fairly easy, my friend Stephen and I went to the radio station in town and did a sort of interview, and we plan on visiting them next week with a script to do a radio show with our host siblings. We aren´t sure what topics we want to talk about, but we are super excited. I would really love to have a radio show when I get to my site. A lot of volunteers have a program because it´s such a useful resource here. The director told us that 70% of the town listens at a certain hour and it´s a great way to rech everyone. Naturally, we want to have fun with it and plan on getting creative.

Afterwards, we visted the fire station and talked to the ¨bomberos¨ there. They went to great lengths to show us everything. They do everything from deliver babies to rescue animals. Their firetrucks are really old, one even looked antique, and their uniforms and gear are always passed on from other countries because they have such limited funding. They do a lot of first aid (if you can call it that, it´s a lot more intense than first aid) and deal with a lot of moto accidents here. The driving here is pretty scary, to say the least.

We had a longer break this afternoon and when I woke up from my siesta, my host mom stopped me and a lady started measuring me for a dress. I was a little confused. I showed her what material I liked best and...I think I´m going to have a dress now. I had mentioned once that I wanted something like my little host sister had, and that´s all it took. I told her I love avacado, and now what is on my plate every moring and afternoon? Avacado. A ton of it. Which I do love, but for breakfast...I´ll take what I can get, really.

I still have no sort of routine here but I plan on working on that. It´s pretty difficult during training, but once things calm down and I´m on my site, I´ll have time for a lot more things. I don´t want to get too far ahead of myself, I really love the people in my group and it´ll be a lot more difficult without their support and breaks to talk English.

I love all of you and will write again soon!