It has been far too long since my
last update, so this is my chance to catch everyone up with what is going on.
Overall I am doing well. Some things are good others are proving to be enormous
challenges. On the difficult end I just got back from a week of additional
training at what Peace Corps calls reconnect. It was a chance to have more
specific question answered regarding technical aspects of our service,
specifically gardening, tree planting, and agroforestry. It was awesome having the chance to see
everyone from the training group, and I was on cloud 9 upon my return to
O’Leary when my community contact and former host Dad Julio informed me that
the lights were now working at my house. Sure enough they were working like a
charm for the 36 hours since my arrival, but just as I was sitting down to
write this entry they stopped working again. This is despite my investment in a
cable that was supposed to fix the problem was installed this past week. It is
a pretty devastating blow coupled with the fact that Julio also informed me
yesterday that my water still doesn’t work, and that I still owe him some money
for materials that went to building that bathroom. To be honest, I have no idea
what is going to happen with regards to the house. I am sort of stuck between a
rock and a hard place because I invested a far amount of money making the house
livable, which it still is more or less, and am still short a bit on the
payment front. This house has easily been the most difficult aspect of my service
so far. It is very challenging to do projects or activities when you don’t have
a place that has consistent amenities.
Naturally as I was writing the
previous paragraph in a somber state I had a series of good things happen to me
all at once. First, I had a visit from Caludio, an 18-year-old high school
student who has agreed to accompany me to a library workshop this Friday and
Saturday as the representative of the elementary school where I work. I was
initially pretty hesitant to take someone so you to the workshop for the
obvious reason being would if he care or get anything out of it? My
apprehensions were abated when I actually got to spend time with him this
afternoon. He came over to my house and we sat in front drinking terere and
chatting about a wide range of things including the library project. He told me
a lot about why the number of students at the school has declined citing the
leaving of the previous director (principal), an influx of community members
reaching high school age who could take their younger siblings to larger
schools that are elementary-high school that have more resources and students,
and the age average of the community relative to surrounding areas is a bit
older than in Barrio Imaculada with a lot of retired age people. Our
conversation yielded some very insightful information to say the least. While
we were talking Julio cam over, and with the help of one of my neighbors
reconnected the light and helped me reconnect the tubing necessary to fill my
water tank, which by some small miracle worked effectively when filling my
entire tank. So now I have electricity once again, water inside the house, a
motivated person to take to the library workshop, and a whole new outlook on
how my day went. I nerves were quelled about my financial situation when I
talked to Julio who said I could pay him in installments, and mentioned that
everything is tranquillo and I shouldn’t worry so much. I would say that my day
today went along the lines of many days I have had in Paraguay in that if
things are going bad to start something randomly happens that makes things
better.
The same thing happened to me
yesterday when Julio initially told me that I still owed him some money. That
was something that brought me really down, but as I was leaving the señor that
lives next to my old host family, whose name is coincidently is also Julio
flagged me down and asked if I spoke Spanish. I said yes, so he asked me if I
could translate some things out of his Mercedes owner’s manual that was
entirely in English. Now translating the reasons why ones check engine light
would be on and how one sets a few components on the dash board, but I did it
more or less and in the process I met a very nice family who expressed an
interest in starting a worm compost for their garden, teaching their son
English, and gave me a big sack of bananas, palmelos, and Paraguayan cheese.
Something upsetting led to something good all of a sudden, and so life
continues. I’m not saying that those things happen everyday, but more often than
I would expect that is the case.
With that being said I have a few
things going coming down the pipeline. I have my first of 6 VRF’s whose acronym
I cannot for the life of me remember, but I think it is volunteer report form.
Essentially this is a document that keeps track of the projects, activities,
and events that I do in my community. Some of them are continuous projects that
can be elaborated on throughout my service; others are onetime events that
lasted a less than an hour. The point of the VRF is to give some kind of
quantitative measurement of our impact in our communities e.g. how many people
we come in contact with, whether there was a transfer of knowledge, or a
training that would allow a member of the community to do an activity or presentation
after we leave. It is extremely difficult to measure exactly how much something
impacts someone quantitatively, so a lot of what we measure is an educated
guess because there is no real way to express how much a single presentation
had on a person ability to comprehend an at times complicated concept, but that
is the task at hand, so I am just going to do my best and see what happens.
It is also gotten pretty chilly in
Paraguay. Now I am sure a lot of you are thinking how cold could it really be?
The answer is roughly mid 40s at night with the absolute coldest only being a
bit above freezing in the dead of winter, but what separates American winter
and Paraguayan is that in America we have central heat in most homes and
buildings. That doesn’t exists here whatsoever, so when it is 45 degrees it is
45 degrees in my house, outside, and all over. There is no relief from the cold
whatsoever, and it as led to some pretty cold nights of late in my comely, but
very draughty home. I head that it is only going to get worse, so I better
brace myself for the inevitable frigid condition which I am not looking forward
to but all I can do is bundle up and wait for the weather to warm up again.
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