When it Rains, it POURS!!

Weather here in Paraguay can be a little finicky. Some days it will be beautiful, sunny, warm, summer-ish (even though it is winter), but other days, it is raining, overcast, and super cold. Last Friday it rained. And when I say rained, I mean it POURED, and POURED, and POURED!!!! All day, non-stop rain, more rain, and more rain. I was at the guardería Friday, and because of the rain, we couldn´t go outside, which meant the little kids were a little fidgety after awhile, but that´s okay. Here are some pictures of the flooded playground, and the kids who were stuck inside.







When my parents picked me up, it just happpened to be raining cats and dogs, o estaba lloriendo a cántaros. I literally had to jump puddles and rivers of water as I made a dash for the car. Then while we were driving home for lunch, it was like we were driving through a lake. Clearly the roads have bad drainage, for there was so much water, and it was splashing up to the windows on our truck. I was just waiting for our car to hydroplane, but we didn´t. Here are some pictures of the road and the rain.

Vida y Comida

So, here in Paraguay, things are different, obviously, but in a good way. In the U.S., people have a small (or large) breakfast, medium lunch, and big dinner. Here, Paraguayans have a desayuno pequeño, or small breakfast (yogurt or fruit, maybe a little cereal, or coffee), a very large lunch, almuerzo, (this is the meal of the day and is like the American dinner, normally meat and some form of pasta, potatoes, or mandioca). Then there is merienda, or snack, where one would drink coffee or hot chocolate, eat bread with jam or cheese, or maybe have a piece of fruit. Cena, or dinner, is also small, and very late at night (9 ish). Normally it is a small sandwich, or a few small empanadas, or nothing at all (depending on the day and person). Paraguay is big on meat (always with lunch, mainly with a small dinner, sometimes for breakfast). Basically a vegetarian wouldn´t last here, so for two months, i´m an omnivore again, or more like a carnivore.... But, all the food is super good, and I love all of it.

To mention a few funny things:
1) Milk, or leche, doesn´t come in cartons, it comes in bags that are about a quart. There is a special bucket thing for the milk bag, cause it doen´t have firm sides, just flimsy plastic.
2)Celusal is common here, or salt without fat (i think)
3) eating ensalada is not what most people think. in the U.S., it is shredded lettuce with tomatoes, vegetables, sometimes meat or fish, salad dressing, and croutons. Here, ensalada is eating whole lettuce leaves with a fork, no dressing, and commonly with salt. people eat the lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers separately, again, with salt.
4) Yogurt you drink, no spoon, as it is very liquidy (but good). A common brand is bebible. beber is to drink, so it translates roughly to a "Drink It".

But, aside from these funny observancies, i love paraguayan food. People love to give you more, and share what they have.

Tereré is a tea that is very common. Basically everyone drinks it here. Maté in the morning, tereré in the afternoon when it is hot. Maté is the same herbs, but with hot water, and tereré is with ice water. i love it. it is very refreshing, and cultural. Here, people share drinks, so you share tereré with your friends and family. i have it every day at the guardería, and a lot of days when i come home with my sister. you drink it from a guampa with a bombilla straw, which prevents the herbs from being drunk.



Here is what my average day is like:

5:30 - 5:40 -- wake up
6:00 -- breakfast
6:10 - 6:15 -- leave in the car with my family (we drop off my mom first, then my sister at school, then me. it is absolutely necessary to leave not later than 6:15 as there is a crazy amount of traffic in the mornings)
7-ish -- Arrive at the guardería
7 - 8 ish -- kids play with toys/breakfast
8:30 -- craft
9:00 -- snack for the niños, then they brush their teeth
9:30 - 10:30 -- go outside to el parque
11:00 ish -- lunch with the niños (i eat a little to be polite, but i have lunch when i get home, so i don´t eat too much. normally it is soup with other stuff in it)
11:30 -- Niños take a nap
12:00 - 1:00 -- My parents pick me up, and we go home
1:00 ish -- lunch at la casa
2 - 3:30 -- nap, read
4 - 5:30 -- read some more, hang around the house
5:30 -- merienda
7:00 -- my sister and i sometimes go to the gym
9:00 -- cena/dinner
9:30 - 10 -- bed (i´m super tired by the end of the day!)

World Cup!

Oh, i forgot to mention. Paraguay loves soccer! The played Japón on Tuesday and were tied by the end of the game. but, they needed a winner, so each team had five penalty kicks. Japón y Paraguay each made the first two, and then Japón missed the 3rd, but Paraguay made it. Then, they both made the 4th. So, if Japón made the 5th and Paraguay missed it, they would be tied. BUT.... Paraguay made it, which meant that they won!!!!!!!! everyone was estatic!, and immediately all these fireworks went off around the city. it was pretty cool. plus, there are all these paraguay soccer t-shirts for sale on the streets, and almost every single car has a flag on it. thought i´d just mention that.

but, on the sad side, one of the really good Paraguayan players, who i think made the last goal was shot yesterday. he wasn´t killed, but is in the hospital and will not longer be able to play soccer :( :( :(

Familia, Niños, y Asunción

I love my family! i was picked up by my host parents from the Paraguay orientation on Sunday around 11:30. Everyone here greets each other with a kiss on each cheek. We climbed into their car and drove home. they insisted that i sit in the front because i am so tall. When we got home, my siblings Gabi, Guillermo, y Andrea came out to greet us. Everyone was very excited. Everyone here is pretty short, and i´m pretty tall, so I´m about a head taller than everyone in my family. I share a room with my sister Gabi, who is also 15. We are already really good friends. About 10 minutes after i got home, we all got in the car (again, they insisted that i sit in the front because i´m so tall), and we went to lunch at the Club Internacional de Tenis (CIT), which is a very nice sports club. Everyone eats a really big lunch here and there was a buffet of food that we could choose from. it was all very good. then my siblings and i walked around the club, and came back for dessert.

i love talking with my host siblings. The first it was hard to understand most things, and i ended up nodding my head a lot and saying "si, si." But Monday (day 2), was much easier. Everything wasn´t blended together, and i could pick out more. my sister and i listen to the radio sometimes, and i can understand some of what the radio guy is saying. We watched at paraguayan T.V. show Tuesday and i was surprised that i could understand most of it. I can tell that everyday i pick up more things. responding faster is getting easier, i´m understanding more, and not feeling as lost as the first day. Working with the kids in the guardería is super helpful too because they talk to anyone and don´t care if you don´t understand. i know i´ve picked up a lot of simple words from them.

Asuncion is the capital in Paraguay. i live basically in the city, not a suburb or anything. We leave around 6:15 most mornings when i drive with my parents and Gabi to the school. We drop off my mom at the office (it is some kind of mail/package business), then Gabi at school, and finally me at the guardería around 7. so it takes about 45 min to get there, but that´s because there is a ton of traffic! Oh, and by the way, driving in Paraguay is crazy!! People like to go fast, plus, they don´t like to slow down for a bus or anything, so they just zoom around. people literally have to run across the street because there are so many cars/buses/motorcyles in the mornign that they would never get across otherwise. Lots of students take the city bus to school, and if you look at the buses when driving by, almost all of them are crammed with students (who all have to wear uniforms :D)

i go to the guardería everyday from 7 - 12 (ish, Paraguayan time is never ontime). There i play with the kids, who are all about 2-4, most of them 3. The place i work is called Hogar Infantil Santa Teresita. it also has a school for kids ages 4-6 ish. the school is run by the government for children who have single parents who mainly work street jobs. Some children spend Monday - Friday there. Those who do sleep get baths and new cloths. All the children get breakfast, snack, and lunch. Those who spend the night get dinner. All of this is completely free. I feel like this is such a great program. We don´t really have anything like this in the U.S. (or at least in the Corvallis area). all the children are so cute, and latch onto you the first day you are there. They all call me Tía, or auntie. i work with two other women, and one of the woman´s daughter comes to help after snack. All these kids want to be with you, sit on your lap, have you play with them. they love going down the slide on my lap. i feel so lucky to be able to work with them, and i know that they will always leave an impact on me. Yesterday a little boy came up to me, grabbed my hand, and gave me a dead fly. ¡Que suerte! haha :D I hope that i might be able to work with some of the older kids later on.

overall, i´m having a great time hear!
Chau!

Arrival and Orientations

So. I left Corvallis Wednesday around 2:30. We got to the airport, checked my bag, and headed towards the plane. My dad had a business meeting in San Francisco, so he flew with me. We met Granny Jeanie at the airport and had dinner at this nice little Italian restaurant, Buno Gusto (or something like that). Then i got back on a plane and flew to Miami, which is where the orientation was. It was a five hour flight and i got about 2 hours of sleep, so i was exausted when i got there at 8 in the morning. I had to go get my luggage and then catch a small hotel bus to the Embassy Suites in Miami. the bus comes every 20 minutes or so, but i was lucky and only had to wait about 5 minutes, though most of that time was spent figuring out where to stand, etc. Confusing.

I got to the hotel, and they had an AFS table set up, so it was easy to know where to go. They didn´t have rooms for us yet cause Argentina and Chile hadn´t left yet, so i got to sleep on the couch in the lobby. Yay! plus, i was the first AFS-er going to Paraguay or Costa Rica. But when i woke up, there were a whole bunch of people there.

The orientation stuff was super boring. And basically was what we went over at the PDO. But, we did watch a movie in Spanish. i think it was argentinian, but it was super confusing, even with subtitles, and everyone was lost. costa rica had to get up at 5:30 to go to the airport, so we had to cram all the important stuff into 7 hours (4 - 11). But, in the morning we got to sleep in, and didn´t start until 11. and all that we did was some surveys and watch the movie. We left at 4:30 for the airport. We had an AFS person take all 19 of us to the airport and help us check our bags. Then she gave us our passports, sent us through security, and we were alone. Everything went well, and we had lots of extra time getting to the plane (about 2 hours, but international flights board an hour before departure instead of 30 minutes).

It was a 8 hour flight to Sao Paulo, but we had a really nice plane. We flew Tam, which is a really big Brazilian airline, kinda like Lufthansia, if you fly to Europe. There were 3 rows (2,4,2), and i sat on the aisle, which was nice cause there wasn´t much space and my legs are long. The man sitting next to me was Brazilian, but lived in the U.S. He was very nice, and we talked about AFS for awhile. Across the ailse from me was a woman who went on an exchange to Spokane,WA for a year when she was in high school. i don´t think she went with AFS, but some Brazilian program. She lives in Florida now, but was going back to visit.

Airplane food is pretty weird. The dinner was good (i had pasta and salad), but the breakfast had the strangest eggs i´ve ever had. i have no way to describe them, except for that they were super weird. someone said that they add cream cheese to them. We got into Sao Paulo at 5 in the morning, which is 4 in the morning in Miami. We were all super tired, but luckily we didn´t have to go through customs. We had about 2 1/2 hours to kill, and i just sat around the whole time. but we did meet this man who is from Paraguay and went to the UK for a year with AFS. He talked to us for awhile and all his info was super helpful. He said that he now goes to Georgia Tech, i think. Then we also met a woman who went to Paraguay for an exchange two years ago. She is from the U.S., and did community service for a year. i think she said that she worked in a school. but, she was coming back to visit.

we got to Asunción at 10 in the morning, went through customs, and met an AFS woman who had gotten most of our bags for us already (they all had yellow AFS luggage tags). The whole time that we were flying from Miami to Asuncion we got these funny looks cause there were 19 of us all wearing bright yellow AFS t-shirts (but it got people to ask what we were doing, which spreads the word about AFS). Anyways, the Asuncion airport is tiny. it seemed smaller than the Eugene airport, but i don´t really know. We all climbed on a bus and were taken to the retreat-ish place in Asuncion for ANOTHER orientation. But this one was actually useful and was all about Paraguay. we were there for a night and then our host families picked us up.

Everything

Clearly I'm not going to be a very good blogger, as it has been over a month. Oh well. Quite a bit has happened in the past month. 1st, I GOT MY HOST FAMILY!!!! I'm so glad,and they seem like the perfect fit. I have two sisters, Gabi and Andrea. Gabi is my age, which is awesome. I've talked to both on Facebook, and they are super nice. Plus, i could understand what they were saying (which is good - haha). Then, i have two brothers, Guillermo and Miguel. They are both older than me, along with Andrea, and I haven't talked to either, but i can't wait to meet them. I'm going to be living in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. I've heard that it isn't as traditional as the rest of Paraguay, and more westernized, but that's ok. i'm happy with whatever, as long as a get to go and have a great time. Actually, i think it will be pretty cool to live in the city, as i don't get much "big city life" here in Corvallis. I'm hoping to find a music rental store and rent a cello for two months. I heard once that they were arranging somewhere involving children to volunteer at, but i haven't actually gotten a notification of where and what. Time's kinda running out, so i'll probably just find out when i get there.

Also, i mentioned earlier the country specific conference call. So, that was June 6 (i think). It was really helpful. There were 5 or so of us on the call, along with a returnee who did the soccer program. We got to answer questions, and stuff like that, which was really helpful. there were some others on the call who will be living in Asunción, and some that are doing the community service one, so hopefully we'll all become great friends.

I've started packing. I heard from a 2009 returnee that it was super cold when she went (in the 30's), but i checked for this year, and currently they are having weather in the 70's. My dad looked at the average temperatures, and apparently last summer was on average about 20 degrees cooler than the accumulative average of a few years. Guess i lucked out. haha. I was definitely preparing myself for some VERY cold weather, but hopefully it will be a bit warmer. Yay, cause it means i won't have to pack all of my warmest (ski-ish) cloths like long underwear and hats and gloves that i was thinking of bringing. It seems it will be quite pleasant :)

So, just a few things going through my mind. I have to say i'm poco nervioso, but i know i'll be fine. I just hope that i don't forget all the Spanish that i've learned. My goal is to come back fluent-ish. This may seem like a large goal to accomplish in 8 weeks, but i WILL DO IT!!! :D

Well, i've got about 48 hours left here in small Corvallis. Then off to Miami for the Gateway Orientation, and then we hop on a flight to Asunción. How exciting!!! This is something i've been waiting to do for so long, and i can't believe that i'm actually doing it now. I know that when i get back i will be a changed person (in a good way), who can hopefully speak/understand almost anything in Spanish. I'm going to miss everyone.

PDO, etc

I went to the Pre-Departure Orientation two weeks ago. It might not have been the most intriguing day of my life, but it certainly got me exciting for the exchange. I also got my travel itinerary, so i know when i leave and when i'll be back. I'm only gone for about 8 weeks, and in Paraguay for about 45 days. It seems so short already, but I'm definitely going to make the best of my time there. I'm also in the process of applying for my visa, so everything is starting to wind down when i leave (i still have a month).

I think i may be becoming a little obsessive about checking for new info. I check the AFS website, Portal, and my email almost every day. I've found the Forum, which has been quite helpful. And, i finally found time to do that Culture Trek thing.

I am so excited about going. I know that this is truly going to be one of the best adventures of my life time. My friend went to Thailand last year, and I've been listening to her stories. Not only does it make me jealous that I'm not going for longer, but all the stories have made me realize how life-changing/eye-opening these 8 weeks may turn out to be.

I'm still waiting to hear about my host family. It is killing me, not knowing, but i'm trying to be patient. I'm sure I'll hear soon, but I so desperately want to know now. haha. Oh, i also have the country conference call coming up, which hopefully will let me "meet" other AFS-ers going to Paraguay this summer, and hopefully doing the community service program.

So. now i diligently wait for more news, and for the day when i'll step onto the airplane headed to Asuncion! :)

Adios