A Typical Day

Tuesday May 23, 2006

I don’t know if I’ve been able to give a clear picture of what life is like right now here in Tacuati, so I’ll describe for a bit my day yesterday, which was a great day and hopefully typical of my experience here.

7am – wake up, see that it’s exactly 60 degrees but feels like 40; go on a little bike ride for practice (20 minutes), feel proud that I didn’t fall; do some squats, situps etc in my room to the Tacuati Playlist I’ve made on my iTunes

8am – eat breakfast, yogurt w/ oatmeal and banana, café con leche;try to chat w/ Ramona, Elisa’s maid, but it’s hard b/c she speaks mostly Guarani

830am – shower, w/ mostly hot water from the electroduche; dress in several layers to stay warm

9am – do laundry in the kitchen sink next to Ramona; again we talk a little, we laugh and call each other “guapa,” hardworking; I scrub furiously to get dirt stains out of the cuffs of my jeans; am unsuccessful at removing soap from my clothes, but I’m tired so I kind of give up; hang it all up to dry, hoping the sun’ll be strong enough to dry by the afternoon (it wasn’t)

930am – start walking to the Supervision office to meet w/ Noemi; takes me a while b/c I’m holding my new cell phone, looking for service; I don’t find any outside, but once I’m in the office I can leave my phone on a ledge and can get two bars, enough to send/receive messages!!

10am-- Talk w/ Noemi and Betty for a while, plan to have our first Circulo de Aprendizaje w/ the Preschool teachers on Thursday; on Friday my boss Josefina comes for my site presentation, we need to be ready for that too (and we need to confirm w/ her that we’re really on for Friday)

11am – walk home w/ Betty, sit and have terere w/ her and her sisters and their kids; have an indulgent snack of tortillas, which are little fried eggs

1130am – walk to the little store down the street to pick up more yogurt and milk; think @ how I saw I was almost out of milk so then thought I should buy some for tomorrow so I don’t run out – a very NorthAmerican thought, not at all how a Paraguayan would do things.

12pm – wait patiently for lunch, tho I’m quite hungry, by sitting in the sun on the patio

1230pm – eat w/ Elisa, her son Erico and Ramona; lunch is noodles w/ cheesey sauce, eggs and a cabbage salad (not the best day). I squeeze myself a glass of grapefruit juice for dessert

2pm – meet Betty outside her house and we walk to the Head School; observe in a 2^nd grade classroom, teacher obviously puts on a show for me but does a good job getting all students to participate by writing on the blackboard and soliciting their examples of nouns

3pm – buy a little torte cake from the snack bar at school, the healthiest option they have; drink terere w/ some teachers during recess, they impress me w/ their knowledge of American History thru movies such as Last of the Mohicans and Dances w/ Wolves and JFK

330pm – walk home, passing by the house of a woman who wants to get a group of women together to make detergent (so much cheaper to make than to buy!). She asks me if I’ll buy the stuff we need to do that next time I’m in the city.; Walk past the hardware store owner who introduces me to his daughter, who has just moved back to town w/ her kids apparently and is about my age – a potential new friend!

4pm – home alone! Every afternoon at this time Elisa and Ericko are both at school and I love having the house to myself!!;I cut my hair in the tiny mirror in the hallway. It’s once again too short but it’s better than paying the 40mil it would have cost me to get it cut in Asuncion; make some notes about work done today, plans for tomorrow

5pm – start cooking myself dinner: a carrot, green pepper, onion and tomato stir-fried up w/a bit of garlic and some lime juice and a roll of white bread. Yum! I eat on my own in the kitchen, it’s pretty tranquilo; After dinner, cross the street to where there’s cell service but see that I have no messages :(

6pm – Since it’s winter here, it’s already dark and much colder.settle in for the night in my room w/ 2 great books, one about eight programs for women’s economic development all around the world, and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, just for fun. Change into my long underwear and wool socks and bury myself in my sleeping bag w/ wool blanket. Fall asleep listening to Chris Isaak on my iPod, maybe around 9pm. Make a dash out to the bathroom in my long underwear, hoping not to run into anybody on the way!

3am – woken up by Don Felix, Elisa’s brother who lives next door and keeps crazy hours, but I pull out the iPod again and fall back asleep in no time