Since it is now April I guess it is that time of year where we all admit that our New Year’s Resolutions were a big flop; I am no exception.  However; if I have been a less than stellar blogger this year, I do feel like I have been a better Peace Corps Volunteer.

Year one in the Peace Corps is a weird thing.  You are thrown into a community with 10 weeks of training and you hope for the best.  Looking back I am often surprised at how hard it actually was for me.  Year two is great! You know the people and already have relationships with them. They know why you are there and you only get asked if you’re German every other week! 

Since my last blog my women’s group had a male join; however, our name did not change.  We are still ‘kuna kyre’y’, which means hard-working women in Guarani. We are going ahead with a chicken coop project.  Most Paraguayan families have chickens just running around and sleeping in trees (I had no idea chickens enjoyed sleeping in trees before this).  The problem with the Paraguayan method of raising chickens is that they don’t properly feed them so the egg production suffers and the chickens are skinny.  As a part of the chicken coop project each family will (hopefully) receive 20 chickens and materials for their coops; they will also be responsible for planting and harvesting beans and corn in order to make their own home-made chicken feed. The past week I gave a lecture on different varieties of home-made chicken recipes they can use.  Next week (when Sarah is here!!!!!) we will begin fund raising by making and selling bread within the community. 

I also began working with my contact and her family and their bee boxes!  They had very old Langstroth hives which were falling apart.  Paraguayans prefer these boxes because they are pretty but there is an easier to make and cheaper option called a top bar hive.  These are African style hives and I convinced my contact to switch to them! We built the first one together with her son and then Elijah and I built the second two.  Unfortunately we were unable to do a wild hive capture, because ants had eaten our wild hive, but we moved the other two hives into their new boxes!  My contact was kind enough to let me have one of these boxes and late one night Elijah and I snuck out and moved the bees next to my house.  Now it really is all women over here with my 4 chickens, dog, cat, and thousands of bees! 

This is the old box that is a disaster!

Bees at night! Not the night we moved the box.

In honor of Sarah coming next week I also got the ball rolling on my World Map project.  World Maps are a pretty common Peace Corps project because they are easy to do and it is a physical tangible success.  After getting told that the US is smaller than Paraguay and asked if the US is next to Spain enough times you begin to see the importance of geography.  The majority of the paint is donated so what the volunteer really needs is time and hopefully some friendly PCVs to come help out! I still have to actually draw the map but I have the wall cleaned and painted! 

The wall of the school where the map is going!

I cannot wait for Sarah to get here and I am hoping I can con her into writing a guest blog! It’s pretty serious journalism so I understand if she isn’t up for the task.  Hopefully I get better at blogging but I’m not making any promises… Until next time!