While I Was Away in Paraguay: Mba´échepa

After being in Paraguay just over a week I am getting this blog going. I never thought that I would be a ¨blogger¨ but here goes. Enjoy!

Mba´échepa means ¨how are you¨ in Guarani.

Before we left for Paraguay, we all met up in Miami for staging. The group consists of 54 people in two sectors, Environmental Conservation and Agriculture. We spent one night in Miami and then boarded the plain to Paraguay. We flew from Miami to Buenos Aires, and then then to Asuncion, Paraguay. I am living with a host family, but we didn´t meet them right away. We spent the first night in Paraguay in a Catholic event center. It was pretty relaxed the first night and now I understand why because everyday here has been packed full with classes and a lot of information, but I will get into that later. When we got off the plane I was expecting to walk into a wall humidity, but it was actually very nice, I think I even kept my sweat shirt on. It was cool for the first couple of days, but now it is pretty hot, but they keep telling us we haven´t experienced hot yet.

My House

I live in the small community of Tacaruty. There are 5 people in my host family. My host dad´s name is Mariano and he is a driver for a company that sells chicken. My host mom´s name is Carolina. The oldest girl is 17 and her name is Melissa, then there is Fabio and he is 16. The youngest is Luján and she just turned 7 two days before I got here. We live more or less in the country. We have lots of animals. Roaming around the yard there are 8 cows, 3 dogs (I think, they sort of come and go) tons of pigs, chickens, and guinea fowl. Two of the cows are milk cows. I don´t think I had been with my host family more than a couple of hours and it was time to milk the cows. I thought ¨what a good opportunity, I have never milked a cow before.¨ They all laughed at me because I could hardily get any milk, but I have gotten a lot better. Just tonight they told me that it is almost time for me to do it by myself. I also plucked my first chicken the fallowing day. I will be living with this host family until I swear into the Peace Corps the first week of December. At this time I will move to the site where I will be working for 2 years. I still don´t know where that will be. The house only has one bedroom and I have it. In the living room there is a bunk bed and a double bed. There is another bed out where I think the table should be so the table is out on the patio. Usually it is nicer outside now anyway, but I don´t know what is going to happen when it starts raining.

My daily schedule goes something like this: I wake up around 6 and have breakfast which usually consists of warm milk with sugar and a little roll. The first couple of days the Peace Corps office sent a van to pick us up, but now I take the bus. I usually catch it around 7:15. The bus ride to Guarambare, the town where the Peace Corps training center is, is about a 20 minute ride. We have classes from 8:00-5:00 6 days a week with one hour for lunch, except from Saturdays they will only be half days. The classes are everything from language, Guarani, to safety and health, culture, and more technical classes that pertain to the work we will be doing later. One of the directors gave us a great metaphor to describe training. It is like trying to take a drink from a fire hose and it is very true. Every day I get home completely exhausted from trying to absorb so much information. We also had classes about the money and how to wash clothes by hand. The money here is called Guarani. The conversion rate is about 4,500 to a dollar. The bus to the training center costs 2,300 one way. There are bills on 100,000 50,000 20,000 10,000 5,000 and 2,000. There are coins of 1,000 500 and 100.