Week Two

Monday February 13

The Weekend
It was a tough weekend actually – I think on Friday and Saturday morning we were all feeling a little overwhelmed with all the language and cultural issues, so on Saturday we took a trip to the nearest city, Villeta. It’s a pretty cool place – paved roads, bus service w/ in the city, internet cafes, pizza and beer. We stayed the afternoon and visited with some of the Urban Youth volunteers who live there, and ended up staying to see part of the Carnivale fiesta that began that night at 10pm. It was quite Brazilian, with nearly-naked women in beautiful elaborate costumes and lots of samba dancing, and while we left after the first few dances b/c we were tired, I’m still glad we went. But I’m also glad we didn’t feel pressured to stay, b/c we have at least two more Carnivales to spend in South America.

I had my first travel-style adventure on Saturday night too. I had been reluctant to stay in Villeta past 10pm b/c that’s when the buses stop running, and even tho people swore up and down that there were taxis, I didn’t believe them, but in the end I gave up and stayed w/ everyone. The five of us who left at 11pm were successful in finding the taxi stand in town, but after asking a bunch of people someone finally admitted that they didn’t know if there was taxi service tonight (Paraguayans try to be helpful and answer EVERY question, even if they don’t have a clue about the answer). We turned around to walk back to the fiesta (and to our Paraguayan friend who we figured would have an idea about how to get back) when a bus came by. It was a bus going the wrong way, ending in Villeta, but we asked if he or another bus was going back to Naranjaisy, just in case. He said no, but then he said something about come on in and he’d drive us there. My Spanish is still nowhere near perfect, but after a quick consultation the five of us (all girls) got on the bus. As he finished the route and dropped the last people off, we were definitely wondering if this was a good idea, but figured we had nothing to lose at this point. He drove us all the way back to Naranjais’y (only 10 minutes away actually) and we left him a HUGE tip so that in the future he’d continue to stop for lost gringas late at night!!

Have I described the “we” yet, my new best friends? We’re a group of nine education trainees (they call us aspirantes here), and we’re pretty close. We are:

Carole, who’s 42 and has been teaching all kinds of ages for years and lives a few doors down from me, so we walk to school together and hang out a lot with her family
Kate, who has taught 1st grade for a few years in downtown LA and is super funny and sarcastic
Bryan, who just graduated from USC and is one of the most positive people I've ever met in my life
Chela, whose real name is Chelsea but we use her Spanish name, and just graduated from college Blair, who can’t decide if her Spanish name should be Dani or not, is 24 and makes me laugh all the time
Sarah, who is in my language class and is really nice and smart and down-to-earth
Emily, who taught elementary school in Chicago for 5 years and is the smily-est person I’ve ever met
Kyra, who is 22 and is the quietest person I’ve ever met!! but she's super sweet

Since we’re all teachers I think we have similar enough personalities and interests, and we don’t have cliques or anyone who’s annoying like the other groups, and I feel really lucky to be sharing this experience with such fantastic people!!

Wednesday February 15, 2006

More Thoughts on Training
Sometimes I think the training workshops are really fantastic. Usually those are the ones run by the central staff on stuff like Development Theory or Health and Sanitation. They are prepared with a sense of humor, a good sense of the amount of information we’re able to digest at a time, active and interactive learning, and are really relevant to what kinds of information we’ll need to be successful as PC Volunteers. But here’s a funny one: next week, we’ll have a session on Relationships in Paraguay, which they set the stage for by acting out a little skit with a PCV woman and Paraguayan man talking in the community, and they held up little posters with what each was thinking (the Paraguayan man was thinking things like, “Oh, she wants to go sit with me in the shade! I guess North American women really ARE easy!”) It’s designed, I guess, to help bring up cultural differences, but it was mentioned during the intro that a large number of PCVs end up marrying Paraguayans (we’re thinking around 20%). All of a sudden I realized what was going on, and asked “Are you going to be training us on how to find a Paraguayan husband? Has my mother put you up to this????” I’ll be sure to post what I learn….

But sometimes the trainings are torture. Sometimes we do things for hours that could take ten minutes, and some of it is stuff that we already know. For example, in the terrible Paraguayan heat a few days ago, a current volunteer came to do a session on playing games with children. He was running close to an hour over schedule, but insisted on our playing a game called “Quien soy?” where everyone gets an item or animal taped to their back and has to walk around asking other people yes/no questions to try to figure out who they are. It’s a cute game, one that I’ve played many times, and that everyone else had played before too, and that even if they hadn’t ever played they could figure out pretty quickly. Instead we stayed outside for 20 minutes playing this stupid game, a complete waste of time. I’m trying to stay tranquilo and not let things like that get to me, but it’s hard. It’s kind of like traveling with a guided tour, where someone else has decided how much time you get to spend at a museum or tourist site, whereas what I really want is to determine for myself when I’m ready to leave the museum and where I want to go next. It’s a hard thing to get used to, but I’m working on it.

Next Weekend -- the 18th
We get to leave town!! We each will be spending Saturday-Tuesday with a current volunteer to get a taste of the real PC lifestyle. I’ll be staying with a girl named Mikah in the Southeast of the country somewhere (I have detailed information and directions, just not in front of me right now). I remember that it’s about a 6 hour bus ride from the capital, in what seems to be a pretty large city (it has a bus station). I’m excited to get some different food and meet new people and to feel a little bit more independent. We were supposed to have our big adventure in Asuncion today, but b/c of a bus strike it was cancelled and we were left with language classes instead  So this weekend should fulfill a bit of that wanderlust I’ve been feeling. There’s so much of this country to see!!

A Worm
Tonight there was a worm in my bathroom. It was only about an inch long, and dark purple at the head and lighter colored towards the end, and I watched it wriggle around on the floor for a minute, trying to memorize all its features, before I squashed it with my flipflop. (It didn’t die right away, it kind of paused for a minute and then started convulsing and I had to squish it more). But of course it flipped me out, and I ran immediately to my room to look it up in the PC book Where There is No Doctor, which has all kinds of information about worms and any other health issue you could imagine. Intestinal parasites/worms are a big problem here due to poor sanitation and hygiene habits, so I wanted to see if this worm I saw is one that could have been or could go into someone’s (ie. my) intestines. GROSS! Can you believe I’m thinking about these things?? I got a little freaked out so I told my parents I needed to ask someone a question and took my book and left the house and went down the street to Carole’s and we looked it up together. It turns out most parasites, like hookworm and tapeworm, are too small to be seen w/o a microscope, but it could have been whipworm. Wanna know what the book says about whipworm?? (warning: this is SO not for the faint-hearted)

Whipworm (Trichuris, Trichocephalus) 3 to 5 cm long, color pink or gray
This worm, like the roundworm, is passed from the feces of one person to the mouth of another person. Usually this worm does little harm, but it may cause diarrhea. In children it occasionally causes part of the intestines to come out of the anus.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you believe this is something I’m even considering having seen?? It’s very unlikely that this thing would be just crawling on the floor, and it was probably just a regular garden worm that I saw. But it’s just appalling to me that there are places (like Paraguay) where people drink contaminated water and don’t wash their hands after they poo and they can get whipworm and their children’s intestines can come out. It’s estimated that 90% of Paraguayan children have some form of intestinal parasites, the effects of which can vary from diarrhea and dehydration to inability for cuts to heal themselves, inability to pay attention in school and forms of brain damage. Serious stuff, those worms. (Not mine, tho. Mine was a cute little inoffensive one. No worries. Tranquilo.)

Guarani
We’ve been learning more Guarani, today getting an extra long lesson, so here’s a taste of what I’ve learned so far. It’s a very gutteral language, pronounced from the throat, with nasal vowels that are pronounced like you have a cold. Some words, like the word for yes, he’e, remind me of the strange sounds my family makes when playing cards (“heeeYEEEEE”). It’s hard to say it without laughing, but hopefully I’ll learn to pronounce it properly (and respectfully).

Mba’echapa – hi, how are you?
Mba’echapa derera – what’s your name?
Che cherera – my name is
Mooguapa nde – where are you from?
Avy’a Paraguaype – I like Paraguay
Che vare’a – I’m hungry
Mba’eichapa oje’e …. Guaranime – how do you say … in guarani?

My host family has been helping me practice a little. Today when I came home for lunch I announced that I had learned lots of Guarani and we could practice at lunch. It was fun at first as I practiced these and maybe a dozen other phrases, but then I could tell that they were unimpressed with how little I actually could say. It was fun to try tho!

I am at a weird stage with my Spanish, feeling almost like it’s not getting much better. Bryan, who’s in my language class, said he was feeling the same way. I’m speaking Spanish in class for 4 hours at least every day, and I talk in bits with my family and often play games with the kids in Spanish too, so I’m getting in at least some practice time. One issue is that the people I’m talking with don’t necessarily speak perfect Spanish, and I have trouble understanding many of them which makes it difficult to have a real conversation. Also, I wonder if now I’m suddenly realizing all the mistakes I’m making and have suddenly gotten self-conscious about it. Or, maybe I’ve just plateaued for now and won’t be learning much new as much as just practicing talking more and faster. PC was clear that Paraguay was not the place to be perfecting our Spanish. From now on my language class will start phasing in more and more Guarani, which we’re all supposed to have at least a basic knowledge of by the end of training. Depending on where we live, it’s possible that we’ll speak better Guarani than Spanish after two years!!