First Few Days

After what seems like a week of traveling, but was only really 2 full days, I have finally made it to where I will be spending the next 10 weeks! So the trip to Paraguay, although long, was relatively uneventful, until we tried to enter Paraguay. Literally each one of us had something wrong with our visa.  Mine took the prize for being the absolute worst.  First, my expiration date had white out on it, which is typically a no-no for government documents. Second, my name was randomly cut off halfway through the o in Rose.  Third, my personal favorite, my gender was listed as “masculino”.  Luckily the Paraguayans were kind enough to look the other way and let us all enter the country (we should be getting new visas this month) but the event has earned me the nickname ‘Marty’ for the time being.  Hopefully this does not stick and I am no longer known as the new guy in the group. 

I am living with a family in Santo Domingo, about 25 minutes away from our training site.  There were 35 of us in total at staging, which basically was so we all understood what we were getting into and to ensure we all made it down.  Half of us are agricultural extensionists and the other half are environmental education volunteers. The Ag group (including myself) is living in Santo Domingo.  The coolest part about this is that 3 other volunteers are staying at my 3 neighbors homes! We are all within walking distance (less than 3km from each other).

So my house is a family of 5, the parents and their two daughters and son.  The girls are 19 and 13 and have been so nice to me! The mom is also very sweet but her Spanish is a little harder to understand.  Luckily over the past few days my Spanish has been coming back to me bit by bit, which is a very good thing.  The house has all of the basics.  I have running water, electricity, and my own room.  Although my showers are all extremely cold, I am thankful that I do not have to bucket bathe (although that may change when I move to my site). 

I have yet to do laundry but I think I will try to tackle that challenge tomorrow.  If it does not go well an arrangement has been made for the families to wash our clothes at the price of 1,000 guarani per item (4,000 guarani is roughly 1 dollar).  That seems very reasonable to me.  The scary thing is you have to iron all of your clothes because they dry on the line and bugs will lay eggs in them.  Also apparently Paraguayans do not wash other people’s underwear so I am supposed to take the underwear with me in the shower and clean it myself.

Everyone in my program is very nice and we all seem to get along.  I recently discovered my kindle has an internet browser that runs off of free 3G so I get a little bit of internet at my house, which is awesome! We haven’t started real training yet but that will happen next week. Tomorrow is my first day off and I have no idea what I am going to do.  Hopefully I will find some adventure to take part in so that I have more exciting things to write about! 

I didn´t end up doing laundry yesterday, but I went to a party instead! Much better use of my time!