Peace Corps True Life: Teachers don’t wanna do my activities wah wah (with poker analogies)

For anyone who wonders precisely what it is like to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, this post is for you. It doesn’t contain any rah rah adventure stories like the time I got drunk on rum with this farmer and tried to convince him that no, the moon is not a ball of water, and no, Columbus did not discover Paraguay. But it is a damn accurate portrayal of the question PCVs often ask ourselves: What do I do when I walk out my door today? Why should I be doing that and not something else? (Hopefully most of us, not just PCVs, have asked ourselves this question at one point or another.)

One of the scariest things for people considering joining the Peace Corps is the uncertainty of where you will be spending two years of your life. You cannot choose your country, and once you get sent to your country, neither can you choose the town within your country. Of course you have some say when talking to your Sector director throughout training as to whether you would like to be in a small rural town, or a larger or medium sized city. But just because you preference a particular setting, say a large city, does not mean you will necessarily end up there. When I was being interviewed over a year ago about what my strengths are and what kind of site I would prefer, I said: 1) I would like to, and would be good at, teaching at a teacher’s college having just graduated with a bachelor’s degree from a very strong education program, 2) One of my main goals was probably going to be to work on raising the literacy interest level, through children’s literature as much as possible, and 3) I have an extremely patient personality and don’t become flustered easily so I thought I would make a good first time volunteer.

Then came the day we found out about our site and how many of my expectations had been met. Of the copious memories I have from the past year, the day I got my Site Information Packet remains very vivid. I opened up the folder and read the following information about my place of residence for the next 2 years: “Number of houses: 75. Number of inhabitants: 500. Electricity: yes. Running water: yes. Number of kilometers from asphalt road: 16.” Well, I thought, looks like I won’t be teaching at a teacher’s college. Also, there had previously been several volunteers in and around the area, so nor was I a first time volunteer.

The PC Paraguay director, though, tells a really great story to comfort us on at this time. He recalls handing out site info packets to two different women, years ago. One glanced at her packet and proceeded to climb up on a chair and dance around and start embracing random people, obviously ecstatic about her placement. The other read hers and began to weep. To make a long story short, the dancing one ended up hating her site and left Peace Corps early, while the one who cried when she found out her site ended up loving it and maybe even wanting to extend to stay an extra year. The moral? When it comes down to it, often it’s not the site that is important but what volunteers do at their site that matters.

(Warning: poker analogy coming up)

I have been in site for a year now, and although Kilometro 16 wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, I am damn happy with it. I don’t think I would trade it for any other site I know of; although I am still slightly salty that I wasn’t given a Teacher’s College to easily work with (the closest one is 16 km away—a one and a half hour bus ride—and impossible to get to when it rains). But, that is clearly life. You have to play the cards you are dealt. However, the difference between a poker game and a Peace Corps site is that you often don’t even know what cards you are ‘dealt’ for the first six months to a year you are in site. You are unsure of the community needs, what kind of project they would want, who you should align yourself with, etc. Peace Corps is like some really crazy 2 year long game of poker where the cards only reveal themselves to you after a minimum of six months of intense language and culture study via immersion, and probably some dysentery for good measure. Only then can you begin to play your cards. That is a crazy game of poker that would probably make even O.A.R. proud, you are probably saying to yourself.

After a year here, I am having fun playing this crazy poker game. My cards have definitely revealed themselves to me, and they are decent. But I am in no way sitting on a full house, a straight, or even two pair. I would say I have a low pair, or maybe even just ace high. Basically, I am going to have to bluff the shit out of the people who I am playing against. (Of course, maybe I’ll get a awesome river card and end up dominating the hand anyway.) Here’s why:

A major goal of the PC is sustainability. That is, make the work that volunteers are doing in the schools last after we leave. This makes absolute sense: if I teach one class of students how to read, I will have made an impact on just those 15 students. But if I teach 3 teachers who will teach 30 students per year for 5 more years, I will have impacted 450 students. Multiply the number of teachers trained, multiply the effect. Sounds simple, right?

In theory, yes. But I have been working with 11 teachers from the 3 local schools for the past year, and the results have been less than encouraging. Trying to get teachers (many of whom were themselves taught in a dictatorship) to change their methodology is about as easy as getting my Grandpa to read this blog on the computer screen instead of my Grandma print it out for him on paper (to my knowledge he still hasn’t read it on the screen).

I will give one example of this: Last year in July, I did a reading evaluation to see how many of the 14 or so students could identify words. As it turned out, only ONE of them was able to read me SIX (one syllable) words. (And that kid’s mom was a professor at the high school...so he didn’t even learn those words in school.) A few weeks ago, in April, I evaluated this year’s 1st graders. SEVENTEEN OF EIGHTEEN of the students are reading already. Why the difference from last year? Because I did a word wall with the first grade teacher for two weeks in April. I was so pumped when I shared the results of the reading evaluation with the 1st grade teacher. “They can already read this year! See how well the Word Wall is working?” “Yes they are really learning even Fernando (a kid who seems to rarely be paying attention in class),” was her response.

Seems like things are going well, right? Not totally. Fast forward to two weeks after this conversation. I had been visiting other schools, and in Asuncion, so I had not had time to even stop by the school. I rolled up to the first grade classroom in the afternoon, pumped to see the new progress that my 1st grade teacher had made with the word wall (you add 5 words per week to the wall, so I was expecting to see 10 new words). I say hello, peak my head inside the classroom, and the teacher must have visibly seen my hurt face when I saw that she had not updated the word wall at all, because she instantly said: “Oh I haven’t been able to update the word wall...I couldn’t find any paper.” No paper...what about the paper on my desk... I love my teachers very much, but I almost called bullshit (I mean almost said that out loud, in Guarani) on this excuse this time...ridiculous. My peak into the classroom also had revealed that the students were doing their usual lesson of copying nonsense syllables off of the board for a full hour, which, for most of the kids, is equivalent to copying Chinese characters off of the board because they have know idea what they are copying. And the teacher knows that my methods work...but she won’t change. This one example is typical in my work over the past year.

This has brought me to reflect on my own methodology of teacher training and to question a couple of things: Do the teachers really know that the methods that I am showing them work better than what they are currently using? Maybe I haven’t been 110% clear in conveying this information to them. Getting teachers to change pedagogical practice is by no means easy (not in the U.S., not anywhere). Also, maybe the teachers don’t like the feeling of being “forced” to do some specific activity, much less by a 24 year old hot shot Americano when many of them have been teaching already for 15 years or more. I personally I don’t think it should matter, the teachers get paid to do a job and have a substantially larger income then everyone else in the small town. However, I don’t have the authority to actually ‘force’ them to put into practice what I am showing them. This job is left up to the district supervisor (roughly ‘superintendent’), who is quite frankly useless when it comes to professional development and accountability of teachers.

After the word wall incident where I nearly lost it, I exited the school and took a walk and a step back from all the work I have done this past year and reevaluated where I am and where I want to go. What lasting impressions do I want to leave on Kilometro 16, aside from all of the personal connections and differences I have been making and continue to make? For about a year I have been hacking away at the official Peace Corps Early Elementary Education Goals from grades kindergarten-4th. And yea, undoubtedly I have had some success, as the kids in the school where I am mainly based are reading loads better, and the kids in my host family who I have personally taught to read have obviously benefited from me being around. But for me, that is not enough. The old Thoreau quote struck me as pertinent on my reflective walk: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Improving Primary School is important, to be sure, but what is the root problem that I am trying to strike at? This is what I came up with: Paraguay, especially the rural areas, seems to be stuck in a post-dictatorship intellectual rut (a widely read book published just years ago was called “Let’s shake things up!:Keys for the construction of a new republic). This lack of education and proactive attitude for change affects Paraguay negatively in very real ways. To give one example, very poor Paraguayan sustenance farmers often live right next to Brazilian soy plantations. Brazilian farmers pour pesticides onto their plants and into the ground, potentially contaminating the rivers and water supply and the land for future generations. These Brazilian farms reap huge profits of millions of dollars off of their yields. This money gets brought back to Brazil and in no way helps the Paraguayan economy or public institutions.

(Illegal) deforestation and soil and water contamination in the 3rd world are huge, global issues in this 21st century. All three of these are happening right her in Kilometro 16. So, I thought, is my 1st grade word wall helping to resolve these problems, which seem to be at the root of the Peace Corps purpose in Paraguay? Maybe. More literate kids would ideally be better suited to tackle problems like this, and literacy competency is MOST important in the primary grades. But still, something seemed to be lacking to me in terms of how I am, to go back to the poker analogy, playing the hand I was dealt: small site in a rural area, very few students (and people, for that matter) show signs of intellectual curiosity as I judge it, few people have books at home, access to information is scarce...

This is when I had an “aha!” moment: instead of zeroing in on the problem at the elementary level, why not take a more ‘big picture’ approach to the problems of lack of literacy, disinterest in books and the sparseness of creative community problems solving? Sure, teaching reading in the primary grades is part of the problem, but why stop there? As a PCV, I have the freedom to choose which institutions I want to work with and on which projects, a position in which most people will rarely find themselves in their job. Bureaucratic and specific objectives aside, my job at its core is to ‘make kids read good and do other stuff good too,’ and I have a lot of flexibility as to how I want to achieve this end, as long as I can justify the means in my thrice a year report to Washington, D.C.
So this is my holistic plan for the next year to improve literacy and community involvement in Kilometro 16. Instead of just focusing on the elementary education aspect of things, it focuses on several areas.

1) Professional Development of Elementary Teachers. While not my only goal now, without solid elementary school teachers, it would be hard to sustainably see any of the other goals developing. I am not going to continue sailing along just as I have been doing in this area, though.

a) I will be doing once per month workshops, in which school is canceled on a Friday and I have the teachers’ undivided attention and 8 hours to focus in with them. I will especially use this time to convince teachers of the outdatedness of the board-copying method, and to get them to think about what their vision is of all the things that there students will have learned by the end of the year.

b) All of the model lessons that I do will include pre- and post- evaluations, and I will go over these with the teachers, making sure that the teachers can clearly see the usefulness of the technique that I am presenting. I will strongly suggest that they continue doing the activity/method in question. If they don’t want to do said method I will procure to find out why not.

c) I will get my Kindergarten teachers to teach WORDS and ALL OF THE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET to their students, instead of just the five vowels to FIVE and SIX year olds. They literally do not believe me that this can be done. So my job is two-fold: convince them that yes, it can be done, and then show them the methodology they need to use to do it. I am thinking about making a bet with the K teacher at my main school: If you do all of the activities I show you and the kids still don’t learn how to read by the end of the year, I will make you dinner for a week straight. If they do learn how to read, you have to make all the materials that I have shown you for the next year and continue teaching like this when I leave.

2) Using the local High School students as volunteers to promote literacy. What’s the best way to make some one believe in something? Have them promote the benefits of that something to other people. I plan to make the high school students advocates for literacy and volunteerism. Possible activities: Reading Buddies, World Map Project, giving dental health talks to Elementary school, raising awareness about environmental issues, Waste management project. This is possibly the most important part of my plan, and also the most difficult. Getting the youths age 12-18 involved in literacy and community initiatives will mean that (hopefully) a sense of community responsibility and intellectual responsibility will be instilled and them, and ideally carry over to future generations in the town. This will not be easy, though. I have a very charismatic high school principal who I am depending on help me carry out this initiative. This idea is in the developing stages, and I still need to set specific goals and a way of carrying it out. For now, I am brainstorming ways to make volunteerism attractive to local youths and incentivize them to get involved. This may take the form of exclusivity a la national honor society, or something totally different. Suggestions are welcome.

3) Work with Parent’s commissions to get them to take an active role in their kids’ education. Parental investment in quality of education is such a positive correlation that I would be idiotic NOT to do this. K16 has a long way to go in this area.

4) Bring more materials (books) to Kilometro 16. For this I will probably do some kind of financial help from the U.S. project. There are very few books in the school libraries in the high school, middle school, and elementary school in K16. But, Miguel, you are probably saying, no one wants to read in your town yet. You yourself said it. Why would you want books already? So yea, it is sort of a chicken-egg problem: kids can’t get interested in reading without the books, but it will be hard to get the community to invest in books if they are not interested in them. Personally I think the fact that the students aren’t dying to read books is a bullshit reason to not get books. (Although that is what a member of the Ministry of Education once said to us when asked why they didn’t give more books to schools in Paraguay.) So, this will be the material aspect of my plan, to bring more books and get students ages 5-18 interested in reading those books.
Looking at what I just wrote above, I feel like I have set me goals pretty damn high for the next year. Ho-hum, I just want to create a culture of book-reading, problem solving, and intellectual curiosity in Kilometro 16, a place where my teachers won’t even adopt my clearly amazing word wall. A place where the VAST majority of kids who graduate from high school have never read a novel. Hmmm...Looks like it is going to be a fun year of experience in learning how to motivate people to change their behavior at the most basic level.

But the thing is, I really don’t care if things don’t work out exactly the way I want them to. And they probably won’t. The important thing is that I do everything in my own control to work toward influencing and impacting the people of Kilometro 16 in the most positive way possible. It might be improbable, but it’s not impossible. As long as I am drawing analogies today, the achievement of my goals here might be like improbability drive in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “There was nothing [improbability drive] couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would even happen.” Or to go back to the poker analogy, sometimes the Dude wins a millions dollar pot and it turns out he was sitting on deuce seven that whole time. The point is, in this game I am going all in.

At the very least, if I attempt to do all of this and I fail, K16 will be in the same situation as before, probably better off, as I will undoubtedly achieve at least some of the goals I have put forth. It is kind of the same idea as for teaching words to kindergarteners: if we teach letters and words and the kids don’t learn them, what has been lost? Nothing. And it will certainly be easier for them to learn their words and letters when they arrive to 1st grade if they already have some experience with them. Similarly it will be easier for K16 to arrive at a culture of volunteerism and literacy if they already have books and have listened to crazy Profesor Miguel trying to get them involved for a year.

To put forth a quote from the great one, Michael Jordan: “I have failed time and time again, and this is why I succeed.”

So in sum, I think that somewhere along all the time I was spending in elementary classrooms throughout the past year I lost sight of the big picture, which is to create a culture of literacy and intellectual curiosity in the town, and well, change the world.

Wow, I just reread this post, and it is riddled with Peace Corps idealisticness. Oh well, if we don’t have ideals, how will we make progress? Plus, I am in the Peace Corps. I am allowed a license to be overly idealistic. The toughest job you’ll ever love, baby.

If you read this whole post, I give you props. Honestly, this was as much written for any of my friends, relatives and colleagues who are curious about what I am doing as it was a way for me to articulate my goals for the next year in a way that makes sense.

Go Bulls.

Cute Puppies

I have a new puppy. After Lukie was hit by a car, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to handle getting attached to another pup and then possibly losing him, but then fate intervened Freud style.

One night about 2 weeks ago, I vividly dreamt that I was back at home in Brookfield and was mysteriously drawn to my backyard where my boyhood sandbox used to be. Approaching the area, I found that a dog had just given birth to 4 black puppies. This dream was so vivid that when I woke up the next day I recounted it to my neighbors over our morning mate.

That same day I headed over to one of my favorite kilometro 16 families to drink some terere. Before we had even started to pass the guampa, one of the daughters in the family asks me: “Miguel, you wouldn’t happen to be interested in a new puppy, would you? Four black puppies were born in our kitchen last night. Holy crap I thought, my dreams have never told the future before. I headed back to their kitchen to take a look, and low and behold they were, four black puppies. This is when I realized that I clearly needed to heed this omen and adopt one a new pup. Six months from now I will probably be on one of those Animal Planet ‘my dog saved my life’ shows.

Clearly the puppy in the picture is not black (mine is the yellow one with white paws and tip of his tail). That is because I chose instead to adopt Lukie’s recently born half-brother (same mother, different father probably, it’s hard to tell around here who the daddy is). I am having some debate right now as to what to name the puppy. Suggestions are welcome. The front-running name right now is Petey. I hope that’s alright with you, Stoj.

Miguel pulls a Charles Comiskey

“There is nothing more difficult...than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”
-Machiavelli

Machiavelli was right. New ideas are not very readily accepted to those unfamiliar with them. And not only are people who try to introduce a new order of things given a hard time and ignored, but they are shunned; many people of their time consider them to be crazy. It is often not until many years later that they are finally given their due respect. Galileo Galilei, for instance, an Italian physicist who publicly supported the heliocentric view of the earth, was denounced by philosophers and clerics of his day, and put on house arrest. Martin Luther was excommunicated by the catholic church for saying that people should be able to read the bible themselves. One-hundred years ago, the most advanced method of training to run a marathon was to walk long distances. What did people think of the first guy they saw running? Hell, in the 1950s, EVERYONE shot free throws GRANNY style. I think we can safely conclude that people get a little anxious, and are indeed skeptical, when it comes to the implementation of new ideas.

Fast forward to 2011 in rural Paraguay. Profesor Miguel is trying to take the lead in introducing a new order of things in the local schools. Specifically, I attempting to have the kindergarten teachers in the area teach words and all of the letters of the alphabet to their students. Currently, the teachers teach the kids only the vowels a, e, i, o, and u. The whole year. Of. Kindergarten. This boggles my mind. When I was a teacher’s aid Galesburg, I saw even the most troubled kids end the year reading at least 20 words, while the brightest kids could read short books. 5 and 6 year olds minds are simply ripe for the word learnin’! And this lack of teaching words in kindergarten has a reverse snowball effect. The kids start off handicapped already, so it is no surprise that their are a lot of drop outs and unsuccessful students.

Luckily I am developing some pretty good persuasion AKA psychological manipulation skills in the Peace Corps in order to deal with situations like this. Here is the conversation I had with my kindergarten teacher today:

Profesora G “Miguel, what are you planning on doing in my kindergarten class this year?”

Miguel “Actually, I was just about to talk to you about that. I would like to talk about some objectives for the end of the year.” (Pause, allow this to sink in.) “This is an intelligent group of kids we have this year. I think we can put some high expectations on them.”

Profesora G “Si, son inteligentes. So what is it that you had in mind?”

Miguel “Gladys, I know this is something that you have never done, but I would like to try to teach them to read words by the end of the year. And all of the letters, not just the vowels.”

Profesora G “But the system has always been, we teach them just the vowels in kindergarten. We don’t start teaching the vowels until July.”

Miguel “Yes, but this is a really smart group. I think we should try to teach them a lot more this year. Why not?”

Profesora G “But they don’t teach words in Farinakue and Kilometro 14 [two nearby schools]. The system is to teach just the vowels in kindergarten.”

Miguel “Gladys, I’m going to be honest. I have seen classes, in Paraguay, where kids leave kindergarten able to read short books. I think we can just try this year, experiment a bit, to see how much we can teach them. I want this kindergarten class to be an example for all of the schools in the area. Why not try at least?”

Profesora G “We shall see what we can do.”

What was funny to me was that how she kept repeating ‘But we always do it this way. That is our system.’ Well, I am a messenger to tell her that a new system is needed, one that maximizes kid and human potential. To stay patient, I often place myself in her shoes, and think about the fact that she probably views me and my ideas as quite ‘out there,’ probably much like the first person who said the world was round was viewed by his peers.

In the early 1900s in baseball, the 1st baseman stood on first base, the 2nd baseman on second, and the 3rd baseman on third base. People thought Charles Comiskey was crazy when he had his players stand off of the the bases to cover more ground. Oh he was crazy. Crazy like a fox...

Galelio, Martin Luther, Profesor Miguel.

I can now say my name is published in a sentence with historical legends. Gotta love the internet.



Citrus fruits and avocados, baby.

Tales from the Vault: Peace Corps Legends

Peace Corps Paraguay has had many legendary tales unfold in the 40 years it has been in Paraguay; and as volunteers we hear many of these stories. Some seem so crazy that it’s hard to believe they are real: tales of Paraguayan-American love and heartbreak, some pretty shocking violence, and others about PCVs who lost their marbles at some point during their service and went a bit crazy. One of my favorite pieces of folklore about PCVs gone loco is as follows. Though you may not believe it, Tale From the Vault #1 has been corroborated to me by several very separate sources:



Tale #1: Girl attempts to murder cow after cow eats her last pair of underwear

Laura was a volunteer in a rural site in the late 90s. As per norm in Paraguay, she would hang up her clothes on the barbed wire outside her house after washing them herself. This system worked great for drying most of her clothes with one tragic exception. Her neighbor’s cow, who grazed around her yard, had a remarkable proclivity for eating her underwear. The cow would eat no other clothes; he preferred only her undergarments.

Laura attempted to remedy the situation. She made a clothesline and strung it between two trees, but the only sunny spot around her house was the barbed wire. And this was her house, dammit. Laura was living here for two years and had the right to put her clothes out to dry where she pleased, she thought. The cow wouldn’t continue eating her underwear; it was probably just a phase. She talked to her neighbor and told him to please tie up the cow on days when she was drying her clothes. She returned to put her clothes on the barbed wire to dry. With a few isolated exceptions, this system worked fine for about another month. That is, worked fine until one fateful day.

Laura had her just washed all of her clothes and hung them up to dry. Her neighbor had tied up his cow, but Laura was vigilantly watching her clothes as they slowly dried on the barbed wire, just in case. Right before lunch, one of her friends walked by:

Friend “Hola Laura, we go to my house for lunch. Ja’úta la ryguasy fidéore. We will eat chicken with pasta.” Laura’s mouth started to water at the possibility of eating chicken...she had been eating only rice for the few days.

Laura “No puedo. Amaña che aohina. I can’t, I watch my clothes dry.”

Friend “ Estas loca, mujer? Are you crazy, woman? Jaha cherogape. We go to my house.”

Laura “Pues...jaha sapyaite. We go for a little while.” Invitations to eat chicken were few and far between. Plus, passing up the invite could even be offensive. But the sun was out right now...she would leave her clothes out. She wouldn’t be gone long. Besides, the cow was tied up at the moment.

Laura arrived back at her house with a belly full of rico pasta and homegrown chicken. What she saw, was the end of a massacre, the cow the assassin and her underwear the victim. The cow, in his mouth, had just taken the very last pair of her underwear into his mouth and was now slowly chewing them just as it would chew grass. As she stared down into the mouth of the cow chowing down, her eyes caught flashes of the hot pink fabric, and sometimes the white lining. Those were my favorite pair. With the calm of Michael Jordan lifting off for a jump shot after juking Bryan Russell in the finals (no sir that was not a pushoff, you know what I’m talking about), she walked into her house to grab her weapon. Laura knew what needed to be done.

* * *
John, the American expat who lived in the nearby town of San Juan, heard his phone ring and picked it up. He did not recognize the voice on the other end.

Voice “Senor Juan, come quick! Your compadre, the americana Laura, está loca! Quiere matar mi vaca! She wants to kill my cow! I can’t hold her back!”

John “Laura, the volunteer towards Pindo’yu? Dios mio. I’ll be there shortly.”

John knew where all of the volunteers in the area lived and within about ten minutes he was able to make out to Laura’s site. The scene to which he arrived was, well, quite the scene. The first thing he noticed was a white and black cow that seemed to have streaks of red blood streaming down its back. 20 feet, away, scissors held high above her head, Laura was literally being physically held back from attacking the cow by her neighbors as she screamed in alternate English, Spanish, and Guarani:

Laura “YOU STUPID COW, I WILL KILL YOU. THIS IS THE LAST STRAW. YOU WILL NOT EAT ANY MORE OF MY UNDERWEAR. TE VOY A MATAR. JA’UTA ASADO ESTA NOCHE. WE ARE HAVING A BARBACUE TONIGHT, PEOPLE.”

But like the Chicago Bears’ offensive line, her neighbors couldn’t hold her forever. As John got out of his jeep, Laura broke free from the grip of her holders, and made a run for the cow again, sticking the scissors in the cow’s back again The wound was not even close to fatal for the cow, and the Paraguayan crowd that had formed around her was clearly more in shock from watching this gringo’s breakdown then from the damage being done to the animal. Laura stood next to the cow, uttering incoherent babblings at a very loud volume. John approached her.

John “Hey Laura, it’s me, John. You O.K.?”

Laura “Do I look freaking okay? This cow just ate my LAST pair of underwear. I HAVE HAD IT!” She broke down and started to cry. “I just, this has been a rough week for me...can you go pick up my boyfriend Nick and bring him here?”

John brought Nick, and luckily he was able to calm her down somewhat. Though I’m sure the Paraguayans in her site had a hard time looking at her after that without picturing a scissors in her hands. Everyone has their breaking point, and I totally can see where this girl was coming from, especially as a volunteer in the 90s. Nowadays, we volunteers all have cell phones, electricity, most have laptops. The experience of the Peace Corps Volunteer has drastically changed. If I am having a bad day because a cow has eaten my underwear, I can easily call one of my friends and complain about my shitty day, no problem. We laugh about it, it’s off my chest, problem solved...in most cases. I can blog about it. Hell, I can even text my mom back in the U.S. And I am one of the more isolated volunteers. Back then though, if a volunteer was having a bad day, or bad week, we sometimes turned to less constructive ways of dealing with our stress, evidently.

And yes, Laura made it through her two years without leaving early.

Keeping with the theme of PVCs battling with animals, my next post, unless I get lazy, will be:

The Epic Battle Begins: Miguel vs. the Pigs (and no I don’t mean cops)

THE DRAMA IS HEATING UP IN KILOMETRO 16!!!

Lukie and some lighter things

About a week ago, my dog, Lukie, got hit by a car and died. I’m not a fan of emo blog posts, so I’ll just say I was a little broken up about it. When he was born and I adopted him last July, I promised myself I wouldn’t get attached since I knew the logistics of bringing a dog home after Peace Corps are a little complicated/still not sure where I’ll be living after PC etc. But this summer the little guy and I bonded, and just recently I made the decision in my mind that he would have to come home with me. People around town were absolutely flabbergasted by all the tricks he could do: Eguapy (sit), Mba’e la porte (shake, but much more colloquial Guarani sounding), Speak, Lie down (those I taught in english), Eka’u (roll over, but Eka’u literally means ‘get drunk.’) Many people had never seen a dog do tricks, and they always put forth the typical amazed reaction, with a widening of the eyes and saying: “Miguel, demasiado letrado nde jagua”, which translates funnily as “Miguel your dog is much too scholarly.” Damn right. Also funny to me was that Lukie would never do tricks for anyone else; only me. I think it had something to do with my unique accent when I said the commands (in Guarani and English as well). Many a time, after hearing Lukie ‘speak’ when I told him to, my neighbors would launch into hilariously fruitless attempts to get him to speak again themselves: “Lukie, eespick. Eespii Lukie.” Lukie would respond by lying down and licking himself.

Lukie was even allowed to come into classes where I was teaching and everyone thought it was completely normal. Also, they aren’t too nice to the dogs here (I have never seen a trained dog, and they often hit the dogs if they are misbehaving/begging for food), but Lukie could do whatever/go wherever he wanted. Once one of my friends saw Lukie begging and slapped him. So I go, “Miguela, Que haces a mi perrito?” (what are you doing to my dog?). And she goes “oohhh No sabia que era tu perro. Lo siento, aca lo voy a dar algo de carne” (OMG I’m so sorry Miguel. I didn’t know that was your dog. Here, let me give him a little something to eat.) And with that she gave him a HUGE piece of meat (very generous, meat is expensive).

So it’s somewhat sad/weird not to have the little guy around anymore. My host family is already asking me if I want another puppy. Right now I’m not sure if I can handle the responsibility of raising another pup in general, let alone the fact that I will be continuously be comparing him to how awesome Lukie was.

On a lighter note, many things are awesome about Paraguay right now:

-Oranges and avocados are in season. I live in an orange grove. Two of my friends have giant avocado trees. Let the fruit fiesta begin.

- My current girlfriend, Shakira, (at least that’s what I tell everyone in my site, believe me when I say it never gets old) performed a concert in Asuncion last Tuesday, her first concert ever in Paraguay. In case there was any doubt, the woman knows how to sing/dance/perform. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the backstage access I thought Peace Corps Volunteers would be entitled to.

-After getting my account filled with over a milllon Guaranies (the local currency) at the beginning of the month, I promptly blew it all on some shopping therapy in the local supermarket (Shotout to Megan and Nika for their middle school project). I bought a ton of veggies and fruit, a cutting board, peanut butter, sunscreen, really strong Brazilian instant coffee, and goodies for the St. Paddy’s Day celebration this week, you know the necessities. I now have fridge full of food that will last me about 2 weeks, and less than $10 for the rest of the month. There are 3 weeks before the next payday. Hopefully I get lots of dinner invitations in March.

-I went for my first hour plus run since I’ve been in Paraguay this morning. Asuncion marathon in August? Maybe just the half.

-I had this weird line of discoloration on my stomach, so I went to the doctor and got it checked out. I was worried it could be a rash, maybe dengue; something that could kill me, or worse. The doctor tells me it's a LEMON JUICE stain. I mean I knew girls sometimes used that stuff to bleach their hair, but I had not idea it could have the same effect on skin. Needless to say from this point forward I will exercise caution when eating lemons (and limes, just in case) shirtless. No more suns out guns out during lunch at my host family's.