Week Seven?

Saturday March 25, 2006

A Looooooooooong Long Field Practice
Carole, Emily, Kyra and I, along with our language teacher Ramona and the Volunteer Coordinator Serena spent the week visiting General Aquino de San Pedro, a city of about 5,000 where Leilani, a 2nd-year volunteer, lives. Leilani set up a packed schedule for the week, giving us opportunities to practice lots of different types of service and see what life as a volunteer is like. Apparently the goal of long field is to push us really hard, which is what happened.

Leilani and her husband Hadee have a great life. They’re in their late twenties and have been married a few years now. Hadee’s a health volunteer, so they get to work together sometimes. They’re both really sweet and fun and welcoming. They have a great house in Geneal Aquino, three huge rooms and a billion fruit trees in the yard. They’re both super hard working and have done a bunch of trainings for our group, and I think we were lucky to be able to soak up their energy for a few days.

One day we went to a school and each gave little charlas (talks) about parasites. We read a story called Luisa Manos Susias, Luisa Dirty Hands, who doesn’t wash her hands before she eats and gets a parasite in her stomach. We talked about how important it is to wear shoes all the time, b/c there’s a kind of parasite that enters thru your barefeet, and we helped the kids make little booklets to take home about how to prevent parasites. The kids were cute, and the 45-minute charlas went well. It was part of a program that Hadee is doing to educate the kids about parasites and provide anti-parasite pills for free to the schools. It felt kind of like teaching little kids back in Honduras: I can do it, I don’t mind it, but I’m not very good at it and I don’t necessarily enjoy it.

The next day we went to the Supervision, which is like a district office for the schools, where Leilani works a lot with the technical trainers. We just talked with them about their work, how they worked w/ Leilani to give workshops to the teachers about bilingual ed or teaching math or whatever. Working with the Supervision seems to be a good way for a volunteer to have a large impact, b/c you’d give workshops to teachers all across the district and help them to improve their teaching practices, and you´re training the technical trainers as well who can continue that work once you´re gone. We also went that day to the teachers college and taught them some educational games like bingo or using Venn diagrams. Again, doing sessions at teachers colleges can have a big impact eventually b/c these are the future teachers, and many of them are really excited to learn new ideas. But it felt kind of like teaching high school again.

I stayed with a family in General Aquino, and it was such a different experience from my family here. Fatima is one of the technical trainers who has worked closely w/ Leilani this year, and she’s very proud of her university degree in bilingual ed. She’s only 31 years old, and has a 3 year old son who is the cutest thing ever! She has a very simple, clean house, and she’s saved money for years to start construction on an addition which will include another guest bedroom and a library! I really enjoyed living with her – it felt like she was a friend, not a mom, and there was no problem when I went to bed early or asked for a cheese sandwich instead of ham and cheese for dinner. The only weird thing about her house was that there was no door on the bathroom, just a curtain. That was hard to get used to.

The thing with long field was that we had prepared some materials last week and had a bit of time each day to prepare, but not really enough. We were supposed to have some language classes with Ramona too, which would have been nice except I was stressing out that we needed to prepare more for the afternoon charlas. It was the day before our dental presentation, and we hadn’t talked at all about what we were doing and I hadn’t reviewed the Spanish vocabulary or anything. It was yet another situation during training where I wasn’t able to do what I wanted when I wanted to do it – the schedule said language class so that’s what I had to do, even tho to me it made much more sense to me to do class after everything else was prepared. I guess the stress and frustration of the past seven weeks finally just backed up on me, and in the middle of language class I started to cry. Me! Cry?? I felt terrible and ridiculous, and after a long walk went back to tell Leilani and Ramona that it had nothing to do with them, it was all my frustration from training coming out all at once. I surprised myself, but I know I’ve been having a hard time with the scheduling from the start. I thought I was used to it, able to be tranquilo and go with the flow, but sometimes I just can’t.

On Thursday we got to go to the campo, the countryside, what I had been waiting for all week. (I had really wanted to go to a campo site for the week, but we picked which of the 3 sites we´d visit by a very democratic lottery system, and I democratically lost, so to the city I went). Leilani lived out in the campo for a year, then moved to the city to work more with the Supervision. We went to a school to do a dental charla, where we saw a really impressive enthusiastic 3rd grade teacher, and then we ate lunch with a Paraguayan family, friends of Leilani and Hadee. Life in the campo is different, definitely. Latrines, cooking over an open flame, dirt floors, planks of wood as walls, one faucet with running water, using a big bucket full of pig fat in the food. It felt a lot like that Mayan family I stayed with back in Guatemala - poverty is similar everywhere perhaps. The lunch was traditional – a huge plate of pasta with tomato sauce and chunks of beef, sopa paraguaya (a type of cornbread without the good flavor and with bits of onion), mandioca of course, and juice that may have been Tang. The family didn’t have much, but what they had they really wanted to share with us. I confirmed my feeling that I want to live in the campo, I want the challenge of daily living in a completely different environment. Hadee told me about some of the work they’d done in that community, such as women’s groups, making detergent, a women’s health campaign, and building fogons, which are stoves that have a chimney to let out the smoke (respiratory disease is the #2 killer of Paraguayan women b/c of the smoke from open flames). Leilani had done some work with the elementary school there, but they weren’t very receptive, which is why she started working more with the supervision and college. But overall it sounded pretty cool, and I think the campo will provide tons of opportunities to do secondary (non-education) projects and explore a little bit more different experiences.

But here’s the big story of our week: On the second day Carole started itching. She had big red bites all over body, esp. her stomach, and we thought it could be bed bugs if she sleeps on her stomach. Carole said her mom had said that the room where she was staying was where the dogs slept usually! Leilani helped her figure out how to talk to her host mom about it, b/c how do you tell someone they have a dirty house?! The mom said it must be mosquito bites and suggested Carole go to the hospital, at which point we were kind of stuck so Carole went to the doctor, hoping he’d diagnose bed bugs so her mom’d believe us. But, the doctor (who was a little weird apparently) diagnosed scabies. Scabies are tiny parasites that burrow under your skin and lay eggs there. It’s gross, but totally treatable with a special soap and cream. So Carole had scabies, so we thought. The next morning, Kyra and Emily showed up with lots of similar bites on their arms and legs too, so we went out and bought them soap and cream too. By the end of the day, I had a few little red bites on one arm, but not nearly as much as the other girls. I used the soap and cream just in case, and we all washed our clothes and sheets in boiling water as the doctor recommended. It didn’t make sense, tho, for all of us to have scabies, since it’s passed by skin to skin contact. So on the way home on Friday we stopped in Asuncion to go to the Peace Corps doctor. All four of us tramped into the office there, running into volunteers we knew who asked how long field went, and we got to crack jokes such as, “Aside from the scabies, it was fine.” Anyway, the nurse who was there (the doctors were out) wasn’t convinced what we had was scabies, so she called the dermatologist who agreed to see us later that afternoon. After looking closely at Carole’s skin, he said that the bites were PULGAS, or fleas. A bit of a letdown after thinking we had all gotten our very first Paraguayan parasites, but that’s ok. He prescribed a pill, cream, and lotion for the other three (I got a cream if I wanted, but since my couple of bites weren’t even itchy I haven’t used it), and we finally got home at 8pm last night and had to explain to our families that we might have fleas!! Today I’ll wash all my clothes and hang ‘em in the sun to kill any leftover bugs just in case. Fleas, who´d have thought?!

So long field ended up feeling a bit loooooooooooong. We got practice in schools, supervision offices, and teaching colleges, and we got to copy a lot of the material that Leilani and Hadee have, which was helpful. It rained every day this week (apparently we have the La Nina phenomenon, the opposite of El Nino), which meant it wasn’t hot but that it was super super muddy. And in the end, I’m just really ready to start already! On Monday I turn in my Site Preference Questionnaire, my last chance to tell my program manager the kind of things I want from my site, and on Friday I’ll find out where I’ll go. Then it goes pretty quickly – we spend about a week gathering information about our site, then go to visit for a week, come back, have nearly a week break for Semana Santa (easter) and get ready to swear in as volunteers, and on April 23 we move to our new homes! We live with a family for two months, but we can find our own housing and start working on painting it or growing a garden or whatever. And the expectations for the next three months are only to integrate in the community – to observe schools, have meetings with people, drink lots of terere and talk with neighbors, maybe read some of the thousands of books we’ve been given during training, and figure our where our niche is in the community. It’ll be the complete polar opposite of the busy, over-scheduled training, and I can’t wait!!