1 month in site mark

ooooooooooooone month. feels like threeeeee months!

I have been in this house for two weeks now, the house with the internet and a shower I can´t use (i´ve been using the neighbors). unfortunatly, my busy days have slowed down to a whole lotta nothing. The summer camp Kendal (one of my volunteer neighbors) and I helped do at Liz´s site was very tranquilo, only 3 kids showed up, so we just had some arts and crafts time. I did get to spend a few nights in the countryside though, very pretty, very rustic. complete with cows in the yard, hammock on the patio, basin to collect rain water and a latrine. Very diff to my city girl life! (except i´m used to smelly bathrooms since the shower here has poop water in the bottom of it) it was good to hang with some fellow volunteers and do something though. Other than that i´ve been sitting around this house, the house where I share a room with my host bro and mom and can´t get to sleep till 12:30 because that´s when they sleep and wake up at 10 because that´s when they wake up. then my days consist of reading, some studying, talking on the phone and sitting on the computer..i feel like i´m back at home! i need to get out!!!!!!!!! if i were in my soon to be house think of all i could be doing there! fixing it up, getting new sinks put in, getting the fridge fixed, buying new furniture..but here i sit. sigh. ok enough ranting. yesterday it rained so i took advantage of the cooler air and went for a walk to learn what it´s like on the outskirts of the city...

the main square of the city is very pretty with it´s big trees and benches, lots of commerce in this part and the firehouse and church. A couple blocks down by the main ruta is a market where you can get pretty much whatever you need from brooms to terere plants to a bus to the campo. branching out more from the square are houses mostly connected together, a football "stadium" (small and indoors) some schools, branching out more from that the houses are more separate, the road goes from asphalt to cobblestone (well, more just rocks in the road)and it goes on like this for many blocks until the roads turn to dirt and it gets pretty country. all the time in the distance you can see some hills which is nice. all those houses are behind gates with not much of a yard, everyone is very close to one another but it´s ok because everyone likes to hang out together. I went walking up the road from my house and ended up in some woods! I was alone though and figured i should probably be doing this with some company so i quickly turned around.

what do i have to look forward to this month: making brick ovens at kendal´s site (another campo visit!) and another trip to asunción at the end of the month!! huzaah!
oh summer vacation. first couple months are the hardest of service i was told, one down! but don´t worry...i´m still smiling

first 3 weeks in site

guess where i am typing this from? no, not a cyber..and not on my laptop and transfered via pendrive. I´m typing this from my newest PY host fam house, complete with computer and the interwebs! This doesn´t happen alot! and I would know, since it´s my 5th house in 3 weeks! For no fault of my own I keep finding myself having to move! Usually it´s because someone needs the room or whatnot, and I´m usually told that night and pack really fast, shoving everything into bags and moving on. This time I´m at a house with a teacher who lives here with her 11 yr old son. It is not usual to see a woman living sola but props to her. It´s a small house so I have to share a room with them. they have a one month old puppy named sammy who is very cute but taken away from her mom way to early. Now i know why all the dogs here act the way they do, they´re taken away from the mom to young and never get to be taught how to act like a normal dog..then they´re not treated nicely (some, well most) and they grow up and patrol the streets looking to scare and attack me, like last night.

anywho I havn´t been doing to much. first two weeks I read alot and studied every day (so guapa!!) then was christmas and then was new years!! i went into asunción and had a great hotel/on the town party w some of my G (my group, G-31 aka my G) but every since I´ve gotten back from that trip I´ve been to busy to study!! first i had to move my house again to Rebecca´s house (again) then we went one day to Guarambare!! I got to visit the fam and see others as well, Rebecca went to talk about giving a bunny to her old host family. the next day I was in scott´s old house (my soon to be house) repacking all my bags so i didnt´have to bring everythign with me on this next move (so heavy!) then i moved. the next day i went with rebecca to Ndavaru to give a fam we know a bunny. yesterday i studied a little and went to the cyber and met up with brenda for some lomito arabes and today...

today i went to a waterfall! called santo crystal o algo. It was beautiful. we had a crazy hike down this steep rocky slope in the woods to get there, but when we rounded the corner and saw the falls with the pool underneith to swim in, it was worth it! we hung out there all day and had lunch and jumped off the middle of the falls (not me, big chicken) and on our way back up the steep slope it started to rain. once we got back to our ride (in the back of a pickup) it was pouring and my phone got soaked! it´s drying out now. It was a fun trip and i got to meet volunteers from other G´s that i havn´t met before.

so that´s what i´ve been up too. i think i´ll go eat some sandia now. next weekend I will be helping a fellow volunteer down the road with a summer camp at her site. so.. work! Maybe i´ll even do my own summercamp...es posible!

until next time
chau!

Welcome to Carapegua

So it’s been six days now since I’ve arrived in site, and they go really fast! Without the structure of training and need to be somewhere I now take advantage of the freedom I have to: read, study Spanish, sleep, eat. Repeat. And text and call people on the phone. A lot. Peace Corps gives us phones that we can call other volunteers with for free for the first ten minutes. And the phone just happens to come with a nifty timer that we can set to hang up the call at 9 minutes and 55 seconds. So we’ll be talking having a conversation when one person will say “OH THREE SECONDS” the phone will hang up. The person will call back and continue the convo where we left off. This terrific little cell phone is helping us out through this transition period, having been so used to seeing and talking to each other everyday we can still continue to do so.

The swearing in ceremony was very nice, It was at the American embassy at 10 am. Apparently this embassy is the nicest one in South America with the best grounds, and it was very pretty. Also apparently there is a deer living in the grounds. I saw the crossing sign! While waiting for the ambassador to arrive all sat under this open part of a building (I think the ambassadors house) next to a waterfall that looked like it could be used to take prom pictures next to (which is what we did). Once she came Don, our country director, spoke, followed by the ambassador and then by Charles, one of our very own, who did a terrific 5 min speech! The press was there taking pictures the whole time and apparently the next day we were in the paper, but I didn’t get to see it .
After we had the cake everyone talks about, it was very good, and left the embassy for the PC office. We can come to the embassy anytime to use the pool now that we are volunteers! At the office we waited around to get our cell phones and repack some bags, then headed out to San Bernadino for the goodbye party of G25, the group swearing out. The party was at a really nice hotel with a pool, we were served dinner and then danced the night away. Of course I got sick this weekend with a tiny cold, I’ve only been here for 11 weeks totally fine but when the party weekend comes I get sick. Oy. But it was still fun.
The next day we took the 2 and a half hour bus ride back to Asuncion and to the Chaco hotel where we stayed until Tuesday. On top of the Chaco hotel was a pool and in the distance you could see Argentina, very nice. That weekend was really fun, we needed it as well. A weekend to just hang about, not have to tell any h fams where we were, could come and go as we pleased and had lots of good (expensive) food. Then Tuesday came…a sad day. A few of us had left early that weekend to get to their sites, but most of us waited for the last day. I took the bus to Carapegua at 12 and go there at 2:30 ready to face my moldy bed bug room. Once I got off the bus Rebecca came to help me move my 4 bags (4!) (and yes I still have more at the PC office, I don’t want to talk about it). We brought them to the house I stayed at last time and Rebecca left, I took a shower and quickly went to the internet café (cyber). 2 hours later I got a call from Rebecca saying I couldn’t stay in that house. I was ecstatic! I didn’t want to live there anyway because of the bed bugs and mold, apparently the woman there wasn’t comfortable with a stranger in the house (although she was fine last time I was there) or another story was her son (who lives w his wife and kid down the road) didn’t want anyone using his room. Whatevs. I was happy. 9 pm that night Rebecca and I were throwing my stuff into bags to move out of the house and I went to her house for the night. The next day I moved into a friend of my contacts house, a retired science teacher, with a very nice family. We went to a talk on nutrition (the food here is so much better and nutritious than what I’m used to!!) they took me to their fams house in the country where I got to ride a horse, and they show me around. The husband is older and, while he’s very nice, we have the same convo every day. Yes there’s snow in NJ, did I know there’s a lot of north Americans in the town up the road, all mormons run by Armond Smith, do I know him? It’s actually pretty funny. He loves to talk about NJ and the Christmas lights. He’ll say “en Nueva Jersey (he pronounces it Jersay) there are a lot of Paraguayans. I’m going to go in your suitcase to visit Nueva Jersay” hehe.
Then yesterday she told me that I need to move out…. Her husband is sick and she is overwhelmed. So I will be packing my stuff up and moving once again. We were told to have patience and be flexible, so I take it all with a smile on my face. Of course in my head I’m thinking about when I can move into my own house…and only 3 more days till Christmas eve! Here I’ll be spending it with a fam I just met. How peace corps of me!


pics:
all the stuff i had to pack before swearing in!!
the cake we got to say thanks to our teachers
the saddest moment. tom the hot dog watching us leave him :(
something yummy i ate in asunción
the rooftop pool w view of argentina
horseback riding in the campo
birthday party at my contacts house. that´s her and her fam
one of the kittens that live outside my house now

Capturing the Queen

(a little late this post but better then never!)

Today was awesome. With only 4 days left before we swear in as volunteers the days don’t seem as structured, and today we had the chance to do some ‘independent studying’ i.e. language study, talking to tech trainers, napping or washing underwear. I decided to try my hand at beekeeping. Ever since Nick and I learned about them at the New Jersey State Fair last August I’ve been very interested in bees. They are so amazing once you discover the nuances of hive life, like the fact that all worker bees are females and they can grow males (drones) when they need them to mate with the queen who only mates once in her life (after the drones grow they just hang about eating honey and stumbling around the hive. Men.) Or how they dance to tell the other bees exactly where to go to get the good nectar.
Me and four others not from the beekeeping group stayed late at our training center to help capture a wild hive that had set up residence in an old bee box in the back of the yard. Not exactly the most ‘wild’ of captures since instead of hacking into a tree we were just taking them out of a beebox and into another, but still they were wild none the less! The hive had only been there for about a month and we were not sure what we’d find inside, if they’d be more on the docile side or more upset. The bees here in Paraguay are Africanized bees, meaning they have roots with the African bee aka the killer bee that, in the 90s, made the front page because they were heading into the States to chase you into your house, knock down your door, make fun of your carpet and sting you to death. I remember the hype about them back in elementary school and I remember being terrified! (of them and acid rain). But looking at them today they looked cute with their big black eyes and fuzzy vests. They were brought to Paraguay for beekeeping purposes and, like with all introduced species, escaped, mated with the bees here and made a crossbreed of ornery but hard working lady bees.
The first thing we had to do was get the smoker smoking. The smoker is like a mini fire puffer that people used in the old days to blow oxygen into the fire, with the wood on the outside and the middle that would scrunch and stretch like an accordion. Attached to the mini fire puffer is a tin can that you put hot coals or light paper in to burn, then you add woodchips or dried cow poo. Attached to that is a spout where the smoke will come out once you have your woodchips and poo burnin and close the lid. After a considerable amount of forearm work using the mini fire puffer I finally got my smoker smoking. We needed the smoke to puff on the bees when we opened the box to subdue them, I think it makes them think the hive is on fire which makes them want to stay in and eat a lot of honey. I can lay no judgement for them wanting to stuff their faces in bad times, I understand.
After the smokers were ready we donned our beesuits. A baggy canvasy white shirt (because dark colors make bees angry and want to sting) with a screen on the top where your head is, a whole on the top where we put a straw hat in so bees couldn’t get in and it made the screen stick out away from our faces. Rubber gloves went over our hands and over the sleeves and we tucked the bottom of the shirt into our light colored pants, and the end of our pants into our socks. Beeproofed and invincible! (and we kinda looked like those people at the end of E.T.) Now we’re ready to open the box! Jonathan, the bee group trainer, opened the lid and we quickly puffed smoke into the box. The buzzing sound got really loud and made me think of Amityville Horror when all the flies were in the bathroom. But the bees pretty much stayed in the box with their comb and weren’t very aggressive at all. Then we set to work capturing it.
The main thing in capturing a wild hive is you have to find the queen and put her in your beebox, without the queen, there is no hive. Since this hive decided to reside in an old beebox and use the slides that the beekeepers pull out when they want to get honey, our job was pretty easy. All we had to do was pull out each slide one at a time, cut off any excess comb that was stickin out in a weird direction, and ‘sew’ it onto the slide drawer thing. This is how it works. You take out the slide thing which is a rectangle shaped ‘drawer’ with only the edges, which are wood nailed together. The middle has wire going across so the bees can start a comb on the top wood piece and use the wires to build down on. We pulled each ‘drawer’ out of the old box had a look to see what had been going on with the hive since it moved in. They were pretty hard working! They had some big combs with honey and pupas! We had to cut off any moth larva (pesky moths comin into the hive uninvited) and make sure the comb was centered on the piece of wood. We would take a soft string and tie it to the top wood piece, then wrap it around to the bottom and ‘sew’ the comb in place so the bees would continue building it on that drawer and not mesh it into another one so that there wasn’t room to slide it out of the hive later. We did that with all the drawers in the box, and any excess comb hanging in wrong directions we took off and put it in a pot for later consumption.
Each time we took a drawer out it was cooooovered with bees, and we would have to give it a good shake (after looking for the queen) and dump them into the new box so we could get to work sewing and scraping off moth larva. Soon we got to the last drawer with no sign of the queen. Off on vacation eh!? Actually the queen mates once after she has hatched and spends the rest of her life laying eggs from that one mating with a bunch of worker bees at her side feeding her and cleaning her. If anything happens to the queen the bees have the ability to turn one of the regular pupa into a queen pupa by feeding her royal jelly that they can make with a secret recipe. Finally Jonathan spotted her hiding on the wall of the old bee box. She’s bigger than the rest of the bees and her abdomen is kinda orange. He scooped her into a small hair roller with one side taped and the other side he plugged with wax. Then placed her at the bottom of the new hive where she will sit in her new throne until someone chews her out, and she will reign over her new kingdom of beebox in Guarambare.
Then we just had to scoop up piles of bees that mingled about on the outside of the boxes (a very weird feeling to have a jumble of bees in the palm of your rubber gloved hand) and just like that we have transferred a wild hive in an old beebox to… a new beebox. The only difference for them really is their hive will be better maintained with no moths, oh and we’ll be eating their honey, which we got to do today with the pieces of comb we broke off, bit right into it (watch out there’s no pupas first!) with some peanutbutter and bananas. mmm mmmm. And we didn’t have one sting! Until Dan took off all his beestuff and was standing around watching a toad eat some bees, she got him on the back of the neck. Ah well.
Way cool and super jealous of the work the beekeepers get to do, well we could have bees to in our site if we wanted, except I’m in the city so…. But there is a bee here that is stingless and tiny and they live in a little box so hopefully I will be able to get them for my new house! Me and my stingless little bees hangin out at night singin songs and roasting empanadas over the fire, I can’t wait. But until then I have to pack (stress!) swear in as a volunteer (cool) and figure out my living situation in my new home of Carapegua (ultra stress!). Looking back I should have packed an empty duffle bag or something to put the massive amounts of books and medical stuff that we get during training. Who has extra room for 15 books in their bag! Not me!

P.S tomorrow is a holiday for the day of the Virgin of Caacupe. Thousands of people pilgrimage to Caacupe to pay tribute and listen to mass at the church, a bunch of trainees are going, left earlier today and will walk all night to get there then take a bus back home. I decided a religious pilgrimage, while should be experienced once in everyone’s lifetime, was not in the cards for me this year. Maybe next. But think of all the chaffing! Uh.

last day as a trainee

I had a whole blog written out and forgot to put it on my pendrive!!!

hm..ok well today is my last day and etry being a trainee! Tomorrow we are getting picked up at 7am and heading off to the bank to get some cash money then to the embassy for swearing in!
Today we had our talent show, each sector plus the trainers did some skits or sang some songs. It was pretty hilarious. We sang a thank you song to Riiichard our trainer to the tune of that graduation song by vitamin C.

I´ll miss training! Everything is familiar and comfortable but it´s time to make the next change and move into my site and do volunteer stuff.

well, next time you hear from me I will be a volunteer!

(and will have posted what i meant to post today)

Jajotopata!

Dia de accion de Gracias

was awesome. We went to the country director, Don´s house. really nice. only my group and the beekeepers went. the other groups stayed in Guarambare and had their own, we were gonna but Don offered us his house and a free bus to his house in asunción and food and a pool. We were convinced!
it was really nice with lots of food and good people!

Future site visit

I better get this started before I get to far behind!
Last week we got our site, which means we now know why we are here. As well as where we’re going to be living, what we’re going to be doing and who is going to be around us. For weeks on end we had been speculating where we would be and what kind of site we would get. Many a language class was used to talk about where we would be, mostly in English. Finally the day dramatically arrived, we all were in Guarambare but wouldn’t find out where we would live until 3:45 pm. Torture! I think we had a language class in the morning and that afternoon we did some Paraguayan polka and listened to some Paraguayan harp and guitar playin. Finally at 3:45 we broke into our respective groups, the environmental sector and the crop sector, meaning environmental ed and agroforestry and beekeeping and agrocultura. We all sat in a circle and Holly our person in charge of finding our sites came in with a bunch of folders in her hand. Without further ado she just jumped right into it, very anticlimactic like after weeks of talking and thinking about it. She picked up a folder and handed it to the person, on the folder it said where your site was, and then Robin, her sidekick, put up a sticky note on a big map of Paraguay that was in the room. My name was called, I was handed a folder, a post it note was stuck on a map, and the next name was called. That was it. I looked down at my folder and…. Carapegua. All right! No clue where that is or anything about it. I soon learned it was the hammock capitol of Paraguay and there are a lot of artisens there. It’s a city with about 15,000 people and actually kinda close to La Colmena, where I went for my volunteer visit (with the Japanese food!). I will be living in the center and will be mainly working in the schools. I will also be directly following up 2 EE volunteers, preeessure! The last volunteer who just left, Scott, was very guapo (hard working) and did lotsa projects, so I have a lot to follow up on! I’m down with that. So the next day we were to meet our contacts who would take us to our new site and present us to the community. They would arrive in our towns and would eat and sleep in our houses. How…awkward. But, as we all know, it’s not PC Paraguay if it’s not awkward.
The next day we were ready to meet our contacts. We were sitting in our CHP and a van pulled up full of Paraguayans, they were probably as nervous as we were. They got out of the van and some of them were taking pictures of everything. They filed in and we formally met our contacts. My contacts name is Paula and she was very…very.. .happy to meet me. She was hugging me and everything, taking pictures, talking, talking…more talking. She’s a talker! She’s also from Argentina but moved here when she was 21, she’s 34 now and is married to a Paraguayan and has 3 kids and teaches at a school in Carapegua. She was very excited to be part of this and was into all the activities we had to do. That night she slept in the other room in my bed and talked to my h mom, and the next morning we left for Carapegua. Oh, and I changed my name to Lola, so as not to be confused with a parrot anymore since lora in Spanish means female parrot.
Carapegua: the main plaza is very pretty. It has a bunch of old trees and a statue in the middle. There are some vines and mosses hanging from the trees that gives it that old time feel. On one side of the plaza is a big church, and close by is the fire house with 2 fire trucks (not the big red ones we’re used too). Branching out from the plaza are streets set up in a typical city block fashion. Looking out into the distance you can see hills and at night a beautiful sunset. Getting further out of the city center the land becomes campo very fast. There are more fields and the houses are spaced further apart so it’s very easy to ride a bike to the outskirts and see some nice views. Very beautiful sunsets too.
Everyone and their mom drives a motorcycle here…and I mean that. No one really has cars unless you’re rich. Motos (as they’re called) are much cheaper and easy to get. I’m not even sure what kind of license you need, I’ve definitely seen a 12 year old riding one. They actually really annoying though, very loud and I’m always getting out of the way for them. Not to mention that we are not allowed to get on one unless we want a quick one way ticket back to the US, it’s a little disheartening walking down the road in 100 degree weather as people zoom by on motos. But not to worry, I’ll have my bike soon (bici).
My week: ok. The first night I spent at Paula’s mom’s house. Very nice woman, yummy food, chuchi bathroom…. and a bedroom that makes me cry thinking I have to go back to it!!! It smells of mold and the floor is cement, the bed and dresser take up most of one part of the room. The mattress was probably 30 years old and an inch thick in the middle. The pillows smelled pretty funky. But this is the Peace Corps right? So I happily took it. The next day I met up with Rebecca, another volunteer who lives in the city with me (it’s not that common to have 2 in one place). She showed me Scott’s house where I will be living in the future and met 2 other guys who were in town at the house (it’s kinda used as a hotel at the moment for volunteers passing by). These guys kinda close, which means they are in my VAT group. The VAT group is all the volunteers close by you, we meet every other month to talk about stuff then one person goes to Asuncion and tells Peace Corps how things are going.
The next day I went to a town near by with those people plus some others. I have 2 people from my group (a beekeeper and an agroforester) in my VAT group, we went to the town where the agroforester is now going to be for a goodbye party for the volunteer who is leaving that town (she’s gonna be taking over his spot). He had been raising a pig for this occasion and the day before he had killed it and today was the eating of it, thank god he killed it yesterday. Not something I want to see. But it was fun and good to meet other volunteers and watch them have a jam session with guitars and a banjo. While at the site I started to get itchy on my stomach, I looked to see where the mosquito bite was and saw two, then three, then four, they were all over my stomach and I realized they weren’t mosquito bites. They were bedbug bites! That damn 30 year old mattress was infested with bedbugs! I guess I didn’t sleep tight since I was bitten everywhere! So uncomfortable (though not as bad as poison ivy).
I didn’t want to go back to that bed the next night so I slept in Scott’s old house (my future house) but knew I had to go back at some point. When I did I told Paula and her mom that I think we should put the mattress in the sun to kill the bugs, they said I was allergic to the dust in the mattress and just put a blanket over the mattress then the sheets. No no no. that’s not gonna keep them away! But I don’t want to be disrespectful! Ugh. So I had to sleep three more nights in the cave room with the bugs. I don’t know what I’ll do when I go back in 2 weeks because I don’t want to disrespect Paula and her mom by moving out of the house but…let’s be honest it’s gotta happen! Very nice people though.
Anyway Paula and Rabecca took me around and I got to meet my other contacts and teachers in other schools I will be working in. But I was really happy to be going home to my nice room that is only plagued by giant spiders and the cat. On a fluffier note Rebecca has a rabbit who just had bunnies and she’s gonna make her have more and I’m gonna get one. Pet bunny for my house. Do you think I can have a kitten and bunny and have them get along? Perhaps we’ll find out.


P.S. Advice for anyone who wants to join the Peace Corps, we’re card playin people so brush up on you’re card games, especially yuker and hearts. And rummy. My VAT group says I better learn how to play hearts in the next two weeks because that’s all they do at meetings. Good thing it’s on my computer!