Living in Villa Ygatimi

So I spent 10 days living out in the campo and now I am going to be living there part of the time in Ygatimi and part of the time here in Asuncion. It was amazing to get out of the city world for a while but I found that the campo life is just a little too tranquilo for me. They do nothing out there and we are talking nothing. When it is really hot outside they dont work because it is too hot and when it is raining they dont work because it is raining and all the streets are destroyed. So while I was out there I did a lot reading and nothing in general. One day I was sitting around the office reading my book and Patricio (he is the groundskeepers and was like my father) came inside so I asked him if there was anything I could do to help out. He said very excitedly, yes Ven Ali Ven so I followed him outside where we decided to sit on the porch and drink terrere for the rest of the morning, a pretty nice life but in general a little too mellow for me.

I have taught a couple of my classes which is nice but hard. It is hard because I don't speak Guarani, which means that I am trying to teach these campesinos about business in their second language which they don't really understand. I would give my class and try to ask for participation and they would stare at me with a blank gaze. I realized how hard teaching in general is and on top of that trying to teach a very unfamiliar topic in a second language.

In the end I decided that I was not going to be able to and did not want to live in Ygatimi for my whole time here. It was a great opportunity to see what real Paraguay is all about but as all of you know I am very social person who feeds off the energy of the people around her and that was not happening. When groups of people would get together they would speak to each other in Guarani even if everyone knew Spanish, a little frustrating and limited the types of relationships that I could develop with people. So I decided I would go back and forth a couple of times but that my main base is in Asunción. But if anyone ever gets the chance to live in the rural part of any country I highly recommend it, it is something that cannot be described with words...

My Weekend with the Cruz Roja Paraguaya (Red Cross Paraguay)

My weekend with the Cruz Roja Parguay (The Red Cross Paraguay).

My first weekend in Villa was way more action packed than I ever could have imagined it and it also opened my eyes to a lot of things and allowed me to experience things I could never have imagined. The region of Paraguay that I am living in has been stricked by a six month long drought and recently horrible wild fires that destroyed forests, the crops and homes of many people who were already fighting to get by. Therefore the Red Cross Paraguaya working with the European Comission and the Spanish Red Cross established a program to distribute food, medical supplies and conduct trainings on firts aid and fire prevention. I came right in the middle of the first food distribution in the region which was awesome. I spent two full days riding around either smashed into the front of a truck with at least two other people, in the back of Land Rover Ambulance or in some other truck driving around awful dirt roads in 100 plus degree heat giving out food to campesino and indigenous families around Villa. It was a great way to be able to see different areas around the region and do my little part to help people, I also got a really cool t-shirt and hat (talk about unique souveniers). We gave out over 50 kilos of food (I have no idea how many pounds that is but I know that it is a lot because I had to carry the bags around). These bags had the essentials of pasta, rice, beans, flour, sugar, salt and a Paraguayan necessity Yerba for Terrere. Yeah that is right they gave people over 2 kilos of Yerba to make sure that all Paraguayans can keep up their crazy habit of dirinking Terrere (cold Mate) all day long. We also gave them kits with different hygenic products such as soap, detergent, tooth paste and toothbrushes which I think is really cool. Through this experience I also got to learn a little bit more about Paraguayans and meet some cool people. Overall the communities we went to were very accepting and gracious they would always offer a chair some terrere and a smile to crazy sweaty white girl. There were also children everywhere, this country really needs to do something about birth control. I met one woman who had 16 children under the age of 17!!!!! This is something that I will never be able to understand. I have trouble imagining having one child let alone 16. I was talking with another volunteer about how they have a full soccer team, with subs, a medic and some fans. Another interesting element was how the people signed for their food. The Red Cross being a large organization there was obviously a lot of paper work that went along with simply helping people. A lot of people in the campo are illiterate and therefore do not sign for things but use their finger print. They have it on their national ID card and everything. Not knowing how to sign your own name is something totally outside my realm of thinking, it have been doing in my notebooks and credit card slips since I can remember. So yeah it was interesting to meet the people in the communities we visited but also amazing to work with the other volunteer who were all Paraguayans.

Throughout my time in Paraguay I have not had the best luck finding cool Paraguayans who I can actually relate to and simply shoot the shit with and I finally found it in this group of volunteers. We would work hard all day and then at night just sit around and chat about things, drink beers have Asasdos (in my first week here I ate a sheep, pig and cow that were killed that day but I haven´t yet seen an animal killed but it will come soon I am sure). Within hours we were joking around like old friends and they really loved the American girl with a funny accent (but anyone who has ever heard a Paraguayan accent knows that they have no ground to stand on). Saturday night we even decided to go dancing. Yeah that is right there is a ¨dance club¨ here in Villa. It was an outdoor lot that was much too big for the amount of people that were there but it was a very interesting cultural experience. We walked in and there was a line of couples dancing in a very 1950s kind of way and then along the sides there were a bunch of men just watching. I came in with my crazy new friends and we had a blast dacing like fools. We were no questions asked the entertainment of the night but it was probably the most fun I have ever had a dance club. Throughout the night I saw what seemed to be a five year old child drinking beer next to a seventy-five year old, it was a cultural experience to say the least. It was great to have people to enjoy this amazing place with. Their project is going to bring them back here almost every weekend which will be nice and hopefully lead to more adventures.

My work with the Red Cross got me thinking about Humanitarian Aid especially in comparsion to the work that I am doing with Economic Development and micro-loans. The first day it was really hard for me to accept the idea that we were just going to give these people a bunch of food because I knew that when the food ran out they would be in the same place that they were. But my biggest problem is that I am not sure what can be done. The micro-loans that the Fundación Paraguaya gives out requires a base of capital (not much but something) and a lot of these people do not have that base. We need to try and find a way to help people get from receiving food from the Red Cross to a place where they can start to work with loans and create a way to make a living. Anyone have any ideas because as of now I´ve got nothing. I also had a really great conversation with one of the employees of the Red Cross about what other work they are doing to help with actual development and they are doing some cool things. They have different projects throughout the country making factories to allow rural farmers to process their goods and sell a finished product rather than raw materials and also all the food in the kits that we gave out came from within the region in order to support local farmers. Overall I support the work that they are doing but I would rather work in the economic development realm than humanitarian aid because I think that it allows people to help themselves rather than fall into a dependence on aid from outside.