Settling In

I´m more or less moved into my new house in rural Paraguay and the days are starting to get some sort of rhythm after my first week in my site. In addition to the standard, I don´t know what to do and am supposed to integrate into this community walking around and talking to people, I actually got to do some pretty productive things for my first week. I spent all day Tuesday in San Jose (where I´m currently using the Internet) in the DEAG office (the governmental agricultural extension agency). There are 4 technicians there who could be a great help to me and are already working with an agricultural committee in my community to plant green manures to improve soil health. It was good for me to hear the tecnicians giving advice in Guarani and interesting to see who came to the office (not many people) and why. On Wednesday I dove right in and did some mango grafting with my host dad, Ramon. He had the root stock ready to be grafted and knows how to graft. I was glad that I could at least add something to the process by insisting that we clean every knife and implement and resanitize between plants. He understood why we would want to do that but had never sterilized before when he did grafting. I hope that we have a higher success rate than he usually has to reinforce the lesson. I´ve also gotten to meet some really friendly neighbors and go to a meeting of the agricultural committee where I was actually able to offer resources that they wanted and were excited about (access to green manure seeds in the Peace Corps Office).

So, yeah I´ve been busy but had plenty of time to be ¨tranquilopa¨as well. With Christmas and new year coming up it´s hard to talk too much work with people and I´m excited to see how the holidays go down in rural Paraguay!

It looks like I´ll be able to have pretty regualar access to the internet here and should be able to keep my blog up! However, still waiting on the phone and probably won´t get it until February when I head into Asuncion- more on that when I actually pick it up.

Enjoy the holidays and snow!

To the Trenches and Back

5 days to swear in and counting!

I bet you thought that almost three months when I left the US I was going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, well, that´s not exactly the case. I have spent all of my time in Paraguay up to this point as a Peace Corps Trainee attending classes and being evaluated against prestablished competencies. On Friday, December 14, I have been recommended by the training facility to be sworn in as an actual Peace Corps Volunteer and begin my two years of sevice. After a day in Asuncion to gear up I´ll head to my site and try and stay there for the next couple of months minus runs to the pueblo 4 km away.

Speaking of my site, I spent 5 days visiting to get a feel for what it´s like and be better able to plan for specific projects that I may be doing there. I visited every one of the 51 occupied houses in my site during that time and got to know a couple of girls about my age who aren´t married and don´t have kids!!! Overall the visit went really well and I am really excited to get back there. Some of the projects that people expressed interest in were home made pesticides, home gardens, nitrogen fixing green manures, nutrition information and cooking classes, and planting trees for living fence posts. One man in my site has a bee hive but no smoker so I hope to help him actually manage his hive. The family that I will be living with is great and they have plenty of extra space so I won´t feel like I´m imposing. They even have an electric oven so I will be able to bake!!! I will have to do a lot of explaining what Peace Corps is since I am the first volunteer in my site but I am excited to get to explain that to people.

I´m going to miss my host family here close to Asuncion but they said I can visit them when I go into Asuncion and plan to at some points.

When I actually swear in I will change from a PCT to PCV on my address and will use mailbox number 116 (see address changes on the sidebar). I will also have a phone and people can use Skype to call me for cheap or send me text messages on the internet for free, I´ll include the site when I send out my number via e-mail next week. If I forget to include you and you want my phone number, just e-mail me.

Soooooooo close!