Small Town Gossip

            The past few weeks in site have felt a little bit different to me.  I no longer feel like I am constantly visiting families to get to know them; I already have established relationships with them.  I recently took my contact with me to a one-day conference on Permaculture in Paraguay and it went really well.  I started teaching English classes in the elementary school once a week and in the Church on Saturdays for the older kids.  I have also started work on a series of lectures about green manures in my community.  To top it all off I discovered that there is still one committee that exists in my site.  This is important because in Paraguay a lot of the communities request funds from different organizations and often times you have to be in a committee to request funds and some times the committee has to be in existence for over 2 years before they can request funds.  I was excited because I believed this would create many more opportunities within the community.

            My host family and my contact are not members of the committee.  I have been told that they were at one point but the primary goal of the committee has shifted to obtaining water in the community and both of these families have wells that provide year round water.  I attended my first ‘meeting’ last Sunday.  The first hour was spoken completely in Guarani and I understood barely anything.  I learned that they have already paid to have an artesian well put in next to the school and they want to raise funds to purchase piping, a tank, and a motor to run the water throughout the community.  They also talked about my contact’s family and my host family for a good bit in Guarani.  I am fairly positive nothing good was said, I understood the words liar and untrustworthy.  They then switched to Spanish and began talking to me.  I explained that I would talk to my boss about requesting funds from different organizations but I could make no promises.  If I could not help them directly get funds I told them that I would be more than willing to help with fund raising activities, such as making and selling chipa.  They seemed to understand my point of view and the meeting ended.

            The next evening I went to return a plate to my host mother and was immediately asked a series of questions: Did you say you’d work with them? Are you giving them money? Do you not want to work with us? And so on.  I explained what had happened at the meeting and how I planned on working with everyone in the community but these people had an existing project they wanted help with, and that it would not take up all of my time.  I was then told that a lot of the members of my community were mad at me because this project would not benefit everyone in the community.  Then my host mom told me she was mad at me because I did nothing to help her get money when she was putting a well in her house.  After about an hour of explaining that it would be impossible for me to request funds for a single well, for a single family, I think they finally understood. 

            What I have learned from this is that my community is completely divided and they love to gossip.  My hope is that if I do not participate and continue to do my best to work with everyone that eventually they will understand that it is not necessary to pick sides.  I am going into Asuncion this week to meet with my boss about my plans for the next 4 months and after everything that has happened I now have a lot of questions.  Most importantly I need to take studying Guarani more seriously because apparently I sat and smiled while a room full of people bad mouthed my host family and contact, not my most successful day in Paraguay. Hey, at least my English classes are going well!

Sorry for the lack of pictures, I left my connector cord in the States.  The cord is in a package that hopefully gets here before Spring!