A Month of Firsts

August has been a month of new experiences and lots of success. It has been one of those great months that come along once every so often over the course of the Peace Corps service. It has also just flown by! It is hard to believe that this weekend will mark the beginning of September and therefore the last few months of my Peace Corps service. September will be spent mostly out of site as I have a Close of Service Conference and then shortly afterwards I will be travelling to the US for a 10 day vacation. I suppose this is just the craziness of the last few months of Peace Corps service.

This month has been a culinary adventure and I have had more crazy food in the past few weeks than I had in my first 22 months of service. It all started with a conversation about what I had and had not eaten in Paraguay. Of course I have had all the normal things like pork, beef, chicken and spaghetti, sopa paraguaya, pig head, cow head, cow feet, cow intestine, bull testicles, pig intestine, chicken feet and neck, armadillo, blood sausage....the normal stuff. It came out that I had not eaten some of South America's famous wildlife so the Paraguayans decided to change that. I can now say that I have eaten and enjoyed eating Carpincho, Paloma and Yacaré. The Carpincho or Capybara, is the worlds largest rodent and is really just a Giant Swamp Rat. This was prepared very similarly to pulled pork and was slow cooked for half a day with various spices and vegetables that apparently rid it of its normal swampy flavor. The result was delicious and tasted like a drier pulled pork that would have been great on a sandwich only with random rodent bones thrown in. The Paloma or Pigeon, left a little more to be desired. The cook told me at first that it was frog soup and I tended to believe him as the way the bird was cut looked like a squatting toad. This dish was prepared as a soup and the meat tasted like chicken but just with a lot less meat...the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. A fun fact that I learned afterwards is that pigeon is supposedly an aphrodisiac...can't say that I can verify that. The Yacaré or Caiman, was a result of a surprise invitation and included a nighttime walk to someones field where a small group of people were preparing this dish. Caiman is renowned to be a tasty dish and I was really excited to give it a shot. This was also prepared in a slow cooking type of way that resulted in tender meat that was as white and flaky as fish, meatier like pork and flavored like chicken. It was  quite tasty and well worth the adventure. The least adventurous of the different meals was something called lechón which is really just a young pig barbecued in its skin. While this for me was very delicious and produced very tender meat it was also very fatty and made me a bit sick. Also watching Paraguayans attack it like lions eating a zebra but with a knife and fork caused it to lose some appeal for me.

The Asuncion Marathon was also this past weekend. In an effort to get in shape and lose a few pounds I signed up for the half marathon a couple of months ago and have been diligently training for my first race ever. My training consisted of running 4 days a week at various distances in and around my site. All my running was done on dirt and sand which has probably saved my knees and ankles but also made me nervous about a transition to pavement. Turns out I had nothing to worry about and it also turned into my advantage to have a relatively hilly site which gave me a lot of practice running up and down hills which turned out to be the key to my race. Throughout my training I had set a goal for myself of an 1:45 to finish the half marathon which works out to be about 8 minute miles. Some days I felt this was attainable others not so much. So this past Friday I arrived in Asuncion and Saturday I picked up my race kit which included a shirt, hat, washcloth, vitamins, and my number 598. About 20 or so other volunteers also participated in the race with the majority doing the half marathon, some doing the 10km and a few crazies doing the full marathon. Saturday night we went to a pasta dinner held for the runners so we could all  pre-race carbo load. This turned out to be a nice event that gave shout outs to the participating countries and had some traditional music and dance including the bottle dance where the dancer had a total of 20 bottles stacked on her head and she seemed to struggle just keeping them up there much less dancing with them on her head. The marathon had participants from England, Kenya, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Argentina and of course Paraguay among others. Sunday morning came around and it was cold, in the 50's, for me this was the ideal running temperature so by 6:30 we headed to the starting line checked our bags, pinned our numbers on, stretched out and prepared to run with 3,000 other people. At 7:00am the clock had counted down and we were off, well the Kenyans were, we were still way back in the midst of the crowd. Eventually we got going and started to get some space to run when we got to the first of many hills for the day. Then it was on, I killed the hills both up and down and loved the feeling of running past people next thing you know I am 10km into the race and the crowd has significantly thinned and I am feeling great. All I could do was smile as I confronted yet another hill or saw a friend also running, it just felt great and I was making excellent time.I also learned that drinking water while running is extremely challenging and half of my drinking attempts resulted in choking...I will have to work on that. At 18km I knew I only had 3km to go and I had to push it and so I ran faster and the closer I got to the finish line the faster I tried to run and the more people that were there cheering. Finally, the finish line was in site and I passed the old man that had passed me only a few minutes before ad I crossed the line at 1:41.39! I crushed my goal and finished with a more or less 7:45 minute mile. I couldn't have been happier. So maybe a marathon could be in my future....

Last week also included another fantastic event which was the Environmental Expo that was planned by the Volunteers in San Pedro. This event was held in Itacurubi del Rosario where currently 3 volunteers are living as it is a medium sized city. The idea was to have several stations set up with the school children rotating through. In total we had 13 volunteers to help manage the 450 or so kids that we had in the gymnasium. The six stations were climate change, deforestation, tree planting, trash classification, trash management and the snake kit. I was in charge of the snake kit which I would not be wrong in saying was the biggest draw of the six stations. So 450 kids and 8 mini talks later we had gotten through the mobs of kids after a tremendously successful event thanks to the planning of the volunteers in Itacurubi and the participation of the rest of the volunteers in San Pedro. This was just another success in what has been shaping up to be a tremendously successful Peace Corps Service.