First Few Weeks

Hello all! Let me start by saying that I hope there are still people that are actually reading this blog because the internet in my site is so slow that it takes me about 45 minutes of sitting (usually while sweating because of the awesome heat in Paraguay) and reloading to post one of these blogs. Okay so week one in site is officially over! I can say definitively that I have absolutely gotten better at killing evil flies and mosquitoes.  I also have about 25 spider roommates that help me out by killing these guys at night for me.  I am okay with sharing my room as long as they keep doing their part. 

On my first full day in site I decided to wake up early and walk around the community.  I wanted to make a map of all of the houses so that I could put it up in my room and mark down the names and interests of all of the people that I visited.  What I learned that first morning is that my site has about 15 houses.  Originally I had the smallest site in our G with 30 houses and now I have learned that I really have the smallest site.

I have been spending the most time with my contact’s family and a woman named Julia’s family.  Julia will eventually be my landlord when I move into the extra house on her property.  I also went and visited two other families during my first week and went to a lot of resos.  We have spent about an hour everyday talking about family and praying for Christmas.  I generally just sit there confused but I think the community appreciates my presence so I show up. 

I also went to church and then a youth group meeting with some girls about my age last Sunday.  This was interesting because initially I thought I was going to do Christmas activities in Acahay, the main town, with small children.  I learned as I was walking in that I was going into town with some ‘jovenes’ who were around my age.  My mind began racing at the change in plans and I forgot that ‘jovenes’ is not a gender specific word.  This means I thought that I was being set up by a stranger who wanted her sons to take me into town for the day.  After 2 minutes of panicking and several frantic phone calls I eventually learned that I was going into town with girls and calmed down.  We ended up attending the church service and then a 3-hour youth group session.  The session had invited different members of the communities surrounding Acahay that were active leaders in the church.  Somehow I accidentally became the leader of a group that was supposed to discuss how we felt upon receiving the invitation to attend the youth group, whether we felt it was a call from God, and what attributes we possessed to have God call upon us.  Keep in mind this is all happening in Spanish and Guarani.  I once again, freaked out.  I told my group I could not be their leader since I didn’t speak that great of Spanish and I myself had just tagged along to meet them.  They argued with me for a little and then allowed me to sit and just listen.  That Sunday I spent about 5 hours doing religious activity since we spend about an hour every day praying for Christmas in site. 

My meetings with the families generally consist of me going over and drinking terere with them.  They ask if I have a boyfriend and then if my eye color is real.  They then ask about my parents and what color eyes they have.  When they find out I have three sisters they ask if they are all “rubias” and say how lucky my parents are to have so many light eyed children.  They are really big on eye color here.  I have only been able to talk to my family and Julia’s family about anything at all agricultural but we were warned in training that integration would be slow and projects would be hard to come by in the first few weeks so we will see how it goes!

I have started a blog post about Christmas but it isn’t finished so that will probably get posted sometime later this week! I hope everyone had a great Christmas it was nice and awkward here!

First Entry as a Volunteer

Hello everyone! This is my first blog entry as an official Peace Corps Volunteer! My ten weeks of training are finally over and I swore in on Friday (12/9)! The ceremony was sort of anti-climatic. We repeated some things in English, then in Spanish and then it was just over. But one of my fellow G-37 volunteers gave an awesome speech in a mixture of Spanish and Guarani! After the ceremony, which my host sister Isa and my host mom attended, we loaded into a van and headed out to Asuncion.  We had to get to the bank before 1 so that we could get our debit cards and have access to our money. We made it there at about 12:50. Luckily it was the easiest card I have ever opened. I signed my name on a piece of paper, the banker then told me my signature didn’t look enough like my passport signature so she showed me how it should look and I tried again. The second effort seemed to please her so I was handed a debit card with a pin number and told my money would be there by five, very rigid security here in Paraguay. We then went to the Peace Corps office where I attended a seed bank meeting and got a package from my awesome grandma! It just wouldn’t be Christmas without the Christmas tree nougats!  Since I opened the package in front of people I was obligated to share but everyone appreciated them so it was worth it.  After hanging out at the office and meeting some of the other volunteers (there are about 230 in total in Paraguay), a group of us headed to our hotel to check in.  Peace Corps had a concert that night with a mixture of volunteers and local Paraguayans called Ahendu and it was really fun. G-37 made our mark as being the first new G to really dance and get into the music, we were also told we were the most well behaved new G! G-37 is keeping it classy.

I stayed in Asuncion until Tuesday morning and I spent my time swimming at the embassy, eating Mexican food and pizza, and savoring my last few days with the members of G-37 that have quickly become my family in Paraguay. Our hotel had hot showers, awesome towels, and air conditioner that sort of worked so I lived the chu-chi life for a few days. Chu-chi is what Paraguayans use to describe fancy, frivolous things. It is very possible that I am spelling it wrong but it is one of my new favorite phrases I say.  I also love ‘Ikatu’ which means ‘it is possible’.  I was warned that I would leave the States speaking one language perfectly and return sort of speaking three and I absolutely believe it. I have been here less than 3 months and most of my sentences have 3 different languages in them.

On Tuesday morning Mario, Elijah and I checked out of our hotel (my roommate for the weekend, Lauralee stayed until later to enjoy the comforts of the hotel) and headed to the bus terminal.  We all had massive hiking backpacks with the stuff we will need for the next 6 weeks.  Seriously, this bag easily weighed 35kg.  So after saying goodbye I caught the Salto Crystal bus to my site.  I left the terminal at 7:45 or so and miscalculated the trip so I ended up arriving to site at 10:45.  Why is this important you ask?  Well here in Paraguay it is coming into summer and the heat here is no joke.  The guy who potentially could have picked me up in his car ignored my 3 phone calls so I called my contact and told her I could just walk the 5km distance to the site. Stupid, stupid Maggie.  When I put the day pack onto my hiking bag the combined weight was enough to continuously keep me off balance and I literally had to sit on the ground to get the backpack on. This was not about to deter me.  I put on some Adele and soulfully made my way up and down the hills that lead to my site.  Around the 2km mark a crisis occurred.  My left shoelace came untied.  Not wanting to take off the huge hiking backpack I decided to try to balance and bend over at the waist to retie my shoe.  I get about half way and I am super proud of how well I am doing when all of the sudden I just sort of fall over.  I rolled around like a turtle for a minute before decided I was not being efficient.  I took off the backpack and stood up and assessed the situation.  At this point I was covered in red dirt and sweat.  I then remembered one terribly awful Crossfit class that I took with my mother this summer.  We had to put a sandbag on our shoulders and stand up with it.  During this exercise I also had trouble standing and remembered the instructor, Mario, taking pictures and laughing at me.  I did my best to channel the same feeling of shame in being defeated by a sandbag (and having it documented) to lie on the backpack and roll over on my side gradually lifting up the bag.  Luckily shame is a fantastic motivator for me and I managed to stand up and continue on my journey.  The rest of the trip was sweaty but uneventful.  When I reached the road my contact lives off of I was greeted by an unpleasant surprise.  My contact and 6 other women from the community were waiting to great me.  Keep in mind that my face gets extremely red when I exercise and I am going to consider the 5km walk with the 35kilo bag exercise.  I also am covered with an odd red mud type substance as a result of the red dirt of Paraguay mixing with my sweat.  Basically I looked fantastic.  They all freaked out.  They kept saying poor baby and got mad at my contact for making me walk and kept asking if I fell or what happened.  Naturally I lied and said I got the dirt on me when I put down the bag to readjust it.  Eventually after talking for around 2 hours I was finally able to take a nice cold bucket bath.  Welcome to site Maggie!

I have spent the past two days in site walking around and integrating.  So far I think it is going well but I know it will be extremely slow.  Everyone I have met has been very nice and happy to have me here.  I have been spending the most time with my contact so tomorrow I am going to start making house visits and drinking terere with others.  Hopefully everything goes well but considering how my entrance into my site went I am bound to have some ridiculous stories for you all. I also got a cell phone so if you want to call me from skype just email me or facebook me and ask for my number, it is free for me to answer calls from the US so it would just be the random skype cost.  Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while but Internet is getting a little harder to come by.  I miss you all and happy holidays! Jajotopata! 

Also if you missed the facebook post, I now have an official volunteer mailbox! This means my new mailing address is:

Maggie Flinn PCV Mailbox 258

Cuerpo de Paz

162 Chaco Boreal c/ Mcal Lopez

Asuncion 1580, Paraguay

South America

The chicken that would not die.

So a while back I wrote about how the agriculture trainees got 20 chicks that we were going to raise and eventually slaughter.  Well this week we were informed that the chickens were big enough and we could take them home to our families or do whatever we wanted with them.  I decided that I wanted to kill my chicken.  I think that since I eat meat I should at least be able to kill a chicken.  

So this morning I went on a walk to go pick up my chicken from the nearby school.  I got into the pen and searched for the fattest chicken that I could find.  I managed to grab it and pull it out of the pen and then I realized it didn’t exactly want to go with me and I got scared of it.  So naturally I grabbed an empty feedbag and shoved the chicken inside of it.  I then began my mile walk home with my panicking chicken flapping around.  I ran into a few Paraguayans on the way that were curious as to why I had a chicken in a bag and I told them I was scared I would lose it; they thought I was absolutely crazy.   I get home and go to my friend Mario’s house because I want him to document my first chicken kill.  We head back to my house and my mom tells me we are going to wait until later to kill it.  I had psyched up for nothing.

Then around 4 pm there is a knock on my door and my mom tells me it is time.  I told her Mario wanted to be there so I go to his house to get him.  Mario has already killed his chicken so he offered me some advice. However, Mario’s advice and my mom’s advice were different.  Mario said I should turn the neck of the chicken before pulling down (which made sense) but my mom said I just needed to pull down.  I then got worried because my sisters and a bunch of local children were all watching and I was told not to pull too hard because I could accidentally pull the head off (gross).  So I go up to the hanging chicken, grab the little head and pull down hard.  I did it wrong.  The chicken is still alive.  So everyone laughs at me and tells me to do it again.  So I go back up to the chicken and the same thing happens.  I am basically stretching out this chicken’s neck like a chiropractor.  I start to get really frazzled and embarrassed and everyone starts laughing at me. I try a third time, still no success.  My mom is looking embarrassed now too, so she suggests Mario do it.  I said she should just do it since I was obviously a chicken failure.  Somehow it ended up that Mario had to kill my chicken.  This was incredibly nice of Mario since he was a little upset after killing his own chicken.  So I now owe Mario a beer or two to make up for doubling the number of animals he has killed in his life.  His little cousin also came up to me laughing and saying, “Mario kills chickens better than you!”.  So I am a chicken killing failure.  Oddly, I am okay with that.  I think that sometime in my next two years in Paraguay I will try again, and the next time I will make sure that I succeed. 

So here are some pictures of my first and failed attempt at chicken killing (my Grandma will be so ashamed!)

Fail. Fail. Fail.

Thanksgiving

This past Thursday was Thanksgiving!  All of the trainees went to the U.S. Ambassador’s house in Asuncion for lunch.  We all had to make food to bring with us.  I made my grandma’s deviled eggs.  The issue with this was that we made the food Wednesday and then had to travel on buses and walk down dirt road with the food in makeshift Tupperware.  By the time my food got to the fridge it had seen better days.  Pretty much every egg had fallen over and spilled out into the container.  On Thursday while we were waiting to enter the embassy a few friends and myself broke into the deviled eggs before we went in.  This ended up being a good idea since my deviled eggs mysteriously never made it to the table.  This is understandable since the lunch that the embassy staff had made was gorgeous.  There were 4 huge turkeys and everything was on silver trays.  This looked rather amusing when you saw the random fruit salads and popcorn that the trainees had made as their contribution to the meal. 

It was one of the most fun days that I have had in Paraguay.  I was able to use the phone for free and call the states, which was amazing.  I also got to go swimming and play sharks and minnows, always a good time!  It was just an awesome chance for all of the trainees to relax and hang out.  The ambassador was extremely hospitable and made all of us feel welcome in his home.  Holidays outside of the U.S. and away from family can be pretty hard so the fact that we were all able to get together, eat pecan pie, and pretend that the day held any importance in Paraguay meant a lot to me. 

Unfortunately the day after Thanksgiving another trainee decided to go home.  She was in the other training group, Environmental Education and Conservation.  Her reasons for going home were obviously well thought out and she knew what decision she was making.  Still, it is always sad to have someone in our group go home.  Hopefully the rest of us can see this through until the end but I guess we will see how it all goes! 

Future Site Visit

So last Friday I went with the other 35 volunteers to meet our contacts at a conference center in Asuncion.  The plan was to meet our contacts, spend the morning with them, then travel with them to our site.  My contact’s name is Eugenia.  She is 60 years old and the mother of 11.  Eugenia is also the president of the Women’s Agricultural Committee.  Our morning was awkward and informative.  We then set out together and went to our site!  The trip to our site was about a 2-hour bus ride and then it is a 5km walk in.  Eugenia arranged for a car to pick us up from the main route and then we walked down a path to her house.  Her house is very nice; nicer than my current homestay house is.  I have my own room and although only the mother and father currently live there the kids are coming into town and visiting.  I met four of my new siblings;Magda, Georgina (who has a 2 year old son, Fabre), Manuel, and Mierta.  The three girls were all in their late twenties and it was awesome having them around.  The brother, Manuel, just turned 19 and is in the Paraguayan Army.   I could have done without him.  The reason is that he is absolutely ridiculous.  He spent the entire two days he spent at home doing pushups and pull-ups in front of me.  Literally, he got on the ground and started counting pushups and then asked if I heard that he did 34.  He also told me his muscles were sore and hinted that he wanted a massage.  When this happened I looked directly at him and said “no”.  He was a little caught off guard by my directness (Paraguayans are very indirect) and he laughed a little and asked his sister for a massage.  Since my site doesn’t have running water we also have to bucket bathe; Manuel curled the bucket full of water while he talked to me.  This kid has no shame.  Luckily he doesn’t live at home so I will only have to deal with him when he visits (hopefully not too often). 

The site itself is very small.  I was told it had 30 families and around 150 people but I think that was an exaggeration after visiting.  I met about 12 women and I think I met a person in every family in the community.  I think that having a small site could be awesome! I will have the time to get to know everyone in town on a more personal level.  This also means that I will most likely be the main topic of gossip but I didn’t have any plans to do anything crazy while in site; hopefully they just talk about how guapa I am (once again guapa in Paraguay means hardworking, not good-looking).  

The community is very excited about working in gardens and improving the library at the school.  I was not able to visit the school during my visit because it rained (seriously Paraguay does not function when it rains).  The kids are also done for the summer so I will have to wait until February until I can get started in the school.  My homestay/contact also has 2 beehives that she wants to work with and another family in town has hives so I will be able to do some work with bees which is exciting!

I spent most of the 5 days in my future site following around Eugenia.  I decided before I met my contact that I would do my best to integrate and that I would force myself to deal with awkward situations and suffer through it.  This is exactly what I did.  I sat in the outdoor kitchen from 7am until 11am drinking mate and eating breakfast.  After we ate lunch I took a siesta some days and then went right back to following Eugenia around.  When we weren’t talking I was watching the chickens and trying not to stare at my watch.  At times it was a little bit painful but I felt like it was important to let Eugenia know that I wanted to know how she spent her day and that I did not want to be treated like a guest but like a community member.  By the second day I had her allowing me to help cook! I started off with little tasks, like peeling mandioca, and by the end of the week I had upgraded to making milenesa and cutting up potatoes!

Eugenia wants me to live with her for the whole two years that I am in site.  I would much rather live on my own since I don’t think I can handle eating so much fried food (she went through a bottle of oil in the 6 days I was there).  I also would like to be in charge of my own coffee and breakfast.  This is how she made my coffee: 2 small spoonfuls of instant coffee, 5 HUGE spoonfuls of sugar, splash of boiling water, and heated up milk.  It was basically warm sugar milk.  The bad thing was it was actually delicious but after drinking it I felt horrible and immediately had an intense sugar crash.  I think I need to get the coffee without the sugar like my current homestay mom makes it.  There was a volunteer in my site about 5 years ago named Tara.  She was a health volunteer and lived with Eugenia for the full 2 years.  This is making it hard for me to explain why I want to live in the little house by myself.  The house that I can rent is perfect (from the outside, I haven’t been inside yet).  It has solid walls and a ceramic roof! Most places are wood walls with holes in between and thatch roofs, so this is really nice!  I am planning on living with Eugenia for the first month or so, possibly the first three months when I have to live with a family and then moving out on my own.  Hopefully by then she will understand my need for independence.

All in all I think my future site visit went really well. I am extremely excited about spending two years there! Sure there are things that will obviously be challenging, for example they want me to get them running water which is not something agricultural extensionists are qualified to do.  I am also sure that the fact that my town is tiny will drive me crazy every now and then.  I just am glad that the town is excited to have me there and they want to work with me! 

My new sobrino Fabre!

Map of Paraguay showing where we are all heading!

They thought my name was Elisabeth and not Margaret, but nice gesture!