Volunteer Site Visit

Tuesday, February 21 noon I¨m on my way back to Naranjais´y now after spending a great weekend with Mikal, a current Education volunteer in San Juan Nepomuceno, a rather large city about four hours from Asuncion. It was interesting for many reasons - she lives alone, and it was nice to see how independent my life can be once I´m done with the host family phase (three months after I go to my site), we drank lots of terere and took siestas in true Paraguayan style, she taught me how to cook cool things like carrot cake, tortillas, pad thai (ok, we used a mix she had brought from the States for that), pizzas, and jaguarpo, which is the Guarani term for a black dog and is the drink of choice for Paraguayan women apparently - red wine mixed with Coke. Yum! She showed me some of the schools where she is hoping to work this year (the Paraguayan school year starts today, so right now she´s in the planning stages of everything). There´s one primary school she likes working with, so she´ll continue with that, and she´s also trying to help out as kind of a guest lecturer at the teachers college, and she´s also meeting with the people at the supervisora, which is like the district, level to work with their trainers to see if she can train the trainers there so they are capacitated to work more with the local teachers. Capacitation is used as a verb here, it works better in Spanish, but it´s the whole train the trainers mentality, helping someone gain the capacity to do something for themselves. The most exciting part of the visit was yesterday when Mikal took out her Leatherman tool to cut a wire and ended up slicing her finger open! So I got to see the PC Medical Emergency Plan in action, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. After we wrapped a towel around her finger, we called Dr. Avila, the PC doctor, on his cell phone, and he said to call the local emergency contact. (For people w- cell service at their site, which is pretty much everyone now, PC orchestrates a free cell phone and cheap plan). In each site, apparently, PC has a contract with someone locally who has a car that in case of a medical emergency that person is obligated to bring us to the hospital. So we called Don Padrillo and he came in his car and drove us to VillaRica, less than an hour away. Dr. Avila had instructed us to ask for a particular doctor who was a student of his, and Don Padrillo helped with some of the translation, but within an hour Mikal had stitches and we were on our way. We had to pay out of pocket (Don Padrillo came prepared with cash in case we couldn´t cover it) but PC will reimburse for everything, including the gas and mileage to get there. Dr. Avila called every 20 minutes or so to be sure we were alright and is meeting with Mikal on Thursday to check on the wound. While it was a little scary, mostly I was really impressed that we had a medical kit to adminster our own first aid at home, then had a man ready to take us to the hospital (the best one in town, nicer than many in the States), and a PC doctor who was so attentive and helpful. In training they told us that PC volunteers are the best protected people medically in the world, and I believe it. So it´s a little sad to be heading back to training again, to be eating fried food and spending all day in classes. But also this was a great way to remind us what all the training is for, and I can´t wait to hear stories about what other trainees did and learned this weekend.