Graceland

I have reason to believe we all will be recieved in Graceland.

It`s autumn here. Today is warm again, but Monday was very cold. For some reason the people of Paraguay have never felt it worth it to put fireplaces in their houses. Whenever I mention my surpise at this people say it is because the firewood here produces too much smoke, unlike the firewood in Brazil. I respond that they could built chimineys too. My host family cooks most of its meals over a brick wood stove, even though they have an electric hotplate and small over inside the house. I love this, it gives my house what seems to me a "camp" atmosphere. Like many of my favorite things, it also reminds me of Pirate Camp.

Fireplaces with chimineys are pretty basic technology. How many hundreds of years have they been in use? And almost all the buildings are made out of bricks, so that can`t be the issue. Really I suppose it has never been an issue of survival, so people have learned to worry about other things. It was very cold here Monday and Tuesday nights, but I doubt it went below 40F (or roughly 5C). This wouldn`t even be worth mentioning in the states, but that is because we expect that all building are heated. It is quite cold otherwise, but with enough blankets (or in my case, a down sleeping bag) it won`t put a stop to much of anything, except perhaps daily showers.

Living in the "Croz Nest", the uninsulated, barely heated loft in the garage of my last house in Portland was a good preparation for Paraguay in several respects.

I have been amazed by the autumn air here; how it feels exactly like early autumn air at home. In my last post I wrote about living in a small town again. The evening air lately has just the same crispness, and the warm traces of the recent summer, as September on Vashon. I could have sworn the cool wind was coming right off the Puget Sound.

I of course neglected to bring much in the way of winter clothes, since I was going to SOUTH AMERICA, but I will need to invest in some here. I bought some sweat pants to sleep in, but I was heartbroken yesterday when I realized I had left my navy blue beanie, which I brought from the states and wore all last winter, on the bench in front of a store, and that it was gone.

I am heartbroken whenever I lose a hat. But this is just part of what I know I`m getting myself into whenever I aquire one. It is only a matter of time.

about town

I`m out at site! This is my second week! Everything new, unknown, different. Some things are mildly to quite inconvienient. I love being able to walk around to everything I need, and to buy a glass bottle coca cola to enjoy on a hot day just about anywhere. I love the library with fast free internet access. I love the mandarins, oranges, and grapefruits crowding trees everywhere just waiting to be picked and eaten.

It is a funny difficult process, as I think might be expected, to move somewhere completely new and foreign, and go about becoming a member of the tight-knit community. But I am glad to be part of a community again. The last 5 years I spent in Portland, and I enjoyed myself very much but did not feel that small town spirit I felt growing up on Vashon. Small towns have thier drawbacks, but to be a functioning member of that society, with relationships to so many people was very rewarding for me. When I visit Vashon now many of those old relationships remain, but they have not grown in 5 years. Every time I visit it is a weary rehersal of the past with everyone a little bit older.

I felt that again at the "clàsico" soccer game between the two local football clubs. There are 8 teams in the surrounding area that compete, but just these two are in-town. Everyone was there. It was a pleasant early fall evening. We were spared the powerful sun, and enjoyed white clouds blushing pink as the game came to its exciting but inconclusive finish (a tie, 1-1).

This all reminded me of the festivity and energy of High School Football games on Vashon. Since we never won it wasn`t worth it much to keep track of the game, which I did not understand anyhow. I was in the Pep band and we just had fun with music. Parents, grandparents, classmates, and younger siblings were all there, making it a kind of mixed-age shared experience that I think has become rare in the States. We at glorious hamburgers slathered with grilled onions.

I can be a part of the growing web of all kinds of relationships called a community again. I will wait on the hamburgers until I return home however. I have very fixed American ideas about how a sandwich should be, and I have yet to find a Latin American sandwich that lives up to them.

In those Vashon days I struggled to first figure out what was "normal" and then to figure out how to be "myself" in realtion to that normal. I unfotunately spent too much time trying to figure out what the normal was, but as I´ve gotten older I`ve become so much more comfortable and capable at figuring out how and when to break from the norm. This has been one of the most important things I`ve learned about living and being an adult.

Here what I have to do is very different. My MO is to find normal and to conform to it to the best of my ability. I am an outsider here. To be as unthreatening as possible I have to do my best to blend in. Figuring out how to do this while at the same time nudge people forward in certain ways (in teaching styles, in acceptance of diversity, in modern health and hygene practices) is one of the several balancing acts of my service here.

Mba´e

Things I Wish I had brought:
CDs: especially classical music. (I´m glad I brought some heavy reading because I really have the time am patience to do it. The same would have applied with heavy-listening)

Winter Clothes: (it doesn´t get too cold here, in absolute terms, but there is no heating and no insulation. One is lucky if the windows shut all the way.)
My brown wool embroidered jacket
My fleece sweat pants/any pajamas
A rainjacket

also
Markers
Bike Tools
Short Socks
Better Shoes
A Tie
A History of God by Karen Armstrong
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Northwest Trees by Stephen Arno
More handkerchiefs
My nice blue shirt

More boxers

My CDs

I´m thinking of going into San Lorenzo this afternoon to buy
Leather Sandals
A professional looking shoulder bag
A frying pan for my host mother
A leather belt for Johanna

Sitation!

I´ve been assigned a site! Nueva Germania in San Pedro in the north of the country! I´m the furthest north volunteer in the Eastern half (non chaco) of the country.
Google maps

Summer

The calm pace of life, my lack of independence, the simplicity of my possesions, and of course the warm sunny weather here lately remind me of summers on Vashon. Autumn is approaching, and the weather has cooled from its sweltering peak last month. This week we´ve had something like low 80´s with a pleasant breeze. I was actually cold in my bed last night. This wind especially brings the fresh air of the puget sound to mind.
I wore my old red Vashon Maury Maritime Heritage shirt with a compass on the sleeve and the Wind and the Willows quote yesterday and I had to explain to a few people what kind of a strange ¨CREW¨ I was on. I´ve been thinking about the sound in the summer, especially as seen from the water. The floating green seaweed, the trees bursting with foliage, friendly houses with picnic tables in the lawn. Boats Boats.
Not many boats around here. And the golden watery summer on the sound I´m dreaming of won´t even exist for another 5 months. I´m enjoying the summer here a great deal of course. I´ve got a hammock now, and a bag of exceptionally cheap cigars. I´m going to go out to Cumbarity, to visit a trainee friend of mine out there this afternoon, which should be very pleasant. That town is smaller and further from the highway than Guarambare. We´ll play guitar and sit and smoke.

`Do you know, I`ve never been in a boat before in all my life.'

`What?' cried the Rat, open-mouthed: `Never been in a--you never--well I--what have you been doing, then?'

`Is it so nice as all that?' asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

`Nice? It's the ONLY thing,' said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. `Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: `messing--about--in--boats; messing----'

Lightness

I said to Andrew, or wrote perhaps, how much I loved travelling, because you leave everything that isn´t you behind. The expectations, the relationships, the failures and successes, all the things, and it´s just you and your pack.
I have been enjoying this lightness very much being here. I am probably the only one without a computer in my ¨G¨, which means the 48 of us trainees that arrived in Guarambare (hence the G) at the same time. I also didn´t bring any music, which I regret, but at the same time I am thankful for. I can listen to music with the same virgin enthusiasm I had when I was 14. (Also, they call black cds ¨discos virgenes¨, which I find ammusing).

It is a thrill to be able to redefine ones´self. To find out which parts of what you´ve been carrying are still relevant and important, and which have become vestigial and can be shed as dead weight.

And to be reminded that how much you like what is left!

March Fourth

It is sunny and hot once again here in Guarambare. It rained most of last week which pushed back the start of school from the Wednesday before last to Monday. I observed the 2nd grade class that day at a very small, 4 room shool a little north of town. My teacher seemed competent and engaged, the class was small and they were well behaved, which was quite different from the experiences reported by most of the other trainees who observed a class.

We´re learning about classroom manegment skills here, which is something that is totally neglected in teacher training. As we learn new skills there is always the balance of figuring out what it is that we are more knowledgable about, what it is that is lost in translation, and what it is that we really know little about and must learn from the community. Clearly, with a college education, and my Peace Corps training I am privledged to have been exposed to many ideas and methods that my Paraguayan partners have not. At the same time it is obviously futile for me, young and inexperienced as a teacher, to come into a community or school and tell them what to do, both because I lack thier trust and respect and because I don´t know what the needs and strengths of the school or community. Meanwhile, I have to figure out what knowledge is genuinely new and what is already known by a diferent name (many things which seem like common sense and that Americans wouldn´t think twice about are unheard of here. For instance a popular and very helpful training activity with teachers is to teach them the sounds of individual letters, which they do not know because they learned all thier phonetics in chunks: mi, ma, me, mo, mu (mí mamá me amo mucho)).

Still have not tried Avacado with sugar. Mango and guayaba season is just about over, but orange season is about to begin!