Thursday, April 15, 2010

Welcome to the Campo

It´s been awhile since my last post, sorry about that. Some of it has been due to the lack of internet access, and also to the fact that I´ve been ¨busy¨lately, slash I´ve been sitting around with Paraguayans drinking lots of terere and assimilating into the culture. Anyhow, I did finally find out where I will be for two years! I am in a tiny rural town of about 400 people or so called Sant Blas. It is 16 km from the nearest ¨city¨of ten thousand people, although as I found out yesterday, the 16 km bus ride ends up being about 2 hrs because it is on a bumpy dirt road. And if it rains, forget about it. So as we say in Peace Corps spanglish, my site is super-campo, or super-rural.

My site is awesome, though. For the past five days, all PCVs went out to visit their future sites, and mine did not dissapoint. Honestly, I could not have picked a better living situation if I could have created it like create-a-player on hangtime, for all of you out there that played that marvalous sega game. I will living with a family that runs a farm and owns about 20 hectares of land, with a variety of crops including cotton, soy beans, grapefruit trees, pear trees, orange trees, and several others. In addition, they own about 10 cows, several oxen, 4 horses, 6 pigs, 100 or so chickens (although it was down to 99 after we ate lunch last Saturday), and there are about 6 to 7 dogs who roam about the house at any given moment. Oh and I almost forgot there are 9 kids ranging in age 4 to 19 living in the house, whichy means no I will never be bored. Everyone is hilarious...although it took me a good 4 days to get all the names down. Also this week, since I am super rural I experienced the glory of a cold shower at 6 am, which is a pretty good way to wake yourself up. Also, I don´t have a toilet, more of an oversized keyhole shape in the ground. Yes, pictures will be forthcoming at some point.

Aside from my living situation, I found out a great deal of what I will most likely be doing during my 2 years here. In general, I will be trying to create slash bring in more materials to the schools here, as well as give workshops to all of the teachers here on topics such as how to use didactic materials and involve students more in the learning process. Be it for a lack of materials or a lack of pedagogical knowledge, often times school for kids here consists of the kids just copying stuff off of the board instead of critical thinking, which I am going to try to work on through bringing in better activities for math and reading. I might also be teaching a class in the teacher college in the adjecent larger town, and teaching a little bit of English in the high school or middle school.

So, a couple of funny stories from the week. First, my friend in town slash the principal of one of the local schools took me all around town to visit all the schools in the area. And in one particular school he took me to visit, the professor was not there for the day (for the freshman class). Miguel, do you want to give a talk to the class? he asked me. I said sure, what like 5 or 10 minutes on American culture? And he said well, more like 2 and a half hours, the teacher isnt here today so maybe you could teach the class. So yea, ended up in a class of 24 freshmen teaching them random stuff off the top of my head for 2 and a half hours, including some English and some creative writing. Honestly I could have done whatever I wanted for that time and they would have loved it I feel like.

Second little story. So, I was unpacking my bags yesterday night after the 8 or so hour bus ride home. I take my shoes out of my backpack, which are in a plastic bag, and notice that one shoe seems to weigh slightly more than the other. I look in my left shoe, and low and behold, a huge toad is wedged into the toe area, laying on its back. It had made the 8 hour bus ride with me from my future site to my training site. I yell to my 11 year old host brother and host mom to come and look as I freak out, assuming that the toad is obviously dead from being tossed around on a bus and being enclosed in a plastic bag for 8 hours. Laughing hysterically (because I had of course told them my previous toad story), my host mom and brother stare at it deciding what to do. Abel grabs it, and tosses it on the ground, where it lays on its back for about 15 seconds, starts to wiggle, eventually hops off to start a new lineage far away from its hometown. I don´t know what it is about the left shoe of my TEVAs, but toads just love it.

Needless to say it was a weekend filled with surprises. I realized definitively that I need to learn Guarani this weekend, because too often my family would talk in Guarani and I would hear jibberish jibberish jibberish...MIGUEL! followed by a lot of laughing and pointing at me. I cant let this continue going on for two years. In general though, most people in my town have heard of the peace corps and seem excited to have a volunteer around for the next couple of years, which is good news for me, as long as I can get used to the cold showers...which are going to be pretty rough in the winter, as the temp keeps getting cooler.