Site Assignment

The news is in... I got my site assignment: 8000 Bertoni in the Department of San Pedro. This also happens to be the same site that I visited for my volunteer visit in October. I will be a follow up volunteer in the site replacing the other Gregorio that is there now. I plan to go by Cooper in order to eliminate any confusion and so far it seems to be working. The site is very rural and about 15km away from the nearest paved road. In order to leave town one either needs to find one of the few people with a car and ask for a ride or get up at 5am and wait for the one and only bus out of town. If it rains forget about it...no one will get in or out of site. The family I will be living with for the first 3 months are extremely friendly and consists of a mom, dad, and about 8 kids. I will be the oldest ´son´ living in the house since the oldest brother is 22. This family makes their living off of pineapple and banana production. They are actually one of the most well off families in town because they are part of a cooperative that exports the fruit to Argentina and Brazil. The house has a modern bathroom, a computer with less than reliable internet, and its own soccer field. So even though it is a rural site I have cush accomodations. Once I move out from the host families house I will have an apartment attached to the local school that has a living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and a random storage room. The site itself is beautiful with nice rolling hills, lots of streams, patches of forest, and at night the stars are incredible.

This past weekend was my future site visit, so I was able to meet my community contact, meet the family I would be living with and get general ideas for future projects. This biggest goal that whey want me to attain is to get funding for a new building to house the library and hopefully some computers for the school. The Greg before me had already got books for the library and has them in the teachers lounge for the kids to take out. Since the kids have expressed interest in reading and are taking out books to bring home the school has decided that they want an upgrade. In addition to this I was also invited to a dedication of a banana packaging plant that was partially funded by USAID. At this meeting I met some of the people in charge who are Americans and was told about some of the initiatives that they have funding for as well as their contact information that could get me funding for whatever project that I come up with. The idea that they were most interested in is working with a womens group that another volunteer had started up in a neighboring town. Since their is no volunteer there now I could be the contact that could coordinate any improvement to this group of women who were trained to make traditional Paraguayan dress shirts but currently lack resources to get them to market to sell.


Needless to say I have been very busy talking with people in the community and getting to know this new host family. One of the most memorable experiences of the weekend was participating in the slaughter of a pig, I was there to hold it down and cut it up until it was completely gone. Then the next two days I ate just about every part of that pig, for lunch liver and tenderloin, dinner was the feet, the head and the skin (chicharron) , the next lunch (my host moms bday) was bbq ribs and legs....and this meat consumption continued for the next 3 meals. But of course there are rules to eating pork in Paraguay, essentially you cannot drink water, fruit juice, or milk after eating pig products or else you will get chivivi (diarrhea). What you can drink is beer, whiskey, and terere (essentially just tea). Besides eating pig I also played a whole bunch of soccer and since I am so bad at it I was told that I need to practice before playing again and that I need to run to lose some weight (It isnt meant to be offensive, just the general bluntness of Paraguayan culture). Well, this week we have our Thanksgiving feast at the country directoes house and then after then in 2 short weeks we will be sworn in as official volunteers and then I will be back to 8000 Bertoni for the next 2 years.