Third World Problems

These are just for joke sake but most are based on truth. Here we go! Ill try to post a new one each week.

Ask for directions to the closest hair cut place, walk aimlessly for 2 hours because everyone you ask waves their hand and says, just a little bit that way.

Catch a ride from a stranger driving towards your village who drops you off and says its only a little bit down the street, walk down the same dirt road for an hour passing no houses as darkness engulfs you, start to cry.

Wake up to catch the only bus out of your village that leaves at 7:00 AM. Wait at bus stop till 7:40 until someone tells you the bus came early at 6:30 that day... for no reason.

Its raining, power goes out, its windy power goes out, someone pushed on a power pole, power goes out.

(see neighboring carrying a cut down tree the next day to fix it)

Its raining, nobody does anything

Its any time between 10 AM and 5 PM in the summer, nobody does anything.

First World: Thunderstorm made your house shake: Wow im glad im inside!
Third World: Thunderstorm made your house shake: I better go outside in case my house falls down....

Discover burrowed sand flea in toe, leave it for tomorrow.

Can fit all your belongings in one suitcase and a backpack, get told you own a lot of stuff.

Cooked a combination of rice, beans and noodles with some special korean sauce, think you made a gourmet meal.

Ran out of meat, go to the cow killing house on Saturday morning and patiently wait in line for your turn to buy miscellaneous cow part. Pump fist when they dont run out.

My Projects and other Updates

House:

I have some pictures of my house when I first moved in but I have not had the chance to take better pictures since I got settled in. I will try to take some with my computer camera but I do not have a digital camera anymore. I live in what is considered a pretty nice house in my community minus the ant problem. I live in a 4 room home. The house is made of bricks and a mortar made of cement, sand and dirt. The rooms in blue have a floor of the same mix of cement sand and dirt. The ovals are tables. The small rectangles are doors and the hollow rectangles are windows. The middle, blue, top room is my bedroom with a bed and dresser. The left bottom room is my kitchen with a fridge, two portable gas burners and a sink below the burners. The bottom middle room is my all purpose room with a table as well in the corner. The small room to the right is my bathroom with a flushing toilet(small oval), a shower (diamond), a mirror and sink (circle touching rectangle). The non blue room is a large back room that was once a kitchen. It has the remains of an old brick stove in the bottom corner. And the ground is dirt. The arrow points to the front of my house that faces the street but I have a yard in front as well as a patio that provides shade in the front of my house (lines).

I do not have air conditioning of course or even a fan which I should buy bec it is sooooo hot. All furniture is made of wood at local carpenter's house. I have one electrical outlit in each room and one long florescent light bulb in each room. My bad has a mosquito net over it too.

My garden was officially pwned by the Paraguayan heat. Its scorched, barren mounds the only evidence of its former potential. I will retry in the next month following a rainy day.House details

Projects:

I am doing a whole bunch of things with varying degrees of success:

English teaching

Hip Hop teaching

Chicken coop project

Fogon project

Youth Business group project

Soap and detergent group project

English:

I originally offered to teach English every day of the week except Saturday and Sunday at about 7 pm.

I started with about 5 students. Within two weeks it was 2 students, then 1 and now none. My one student who was coming consistanly was awesome and we were making good progress. He was speaking to me in basic English, could tell me about his day and write basic sentences. Most of all he was motivated and responsible. Unfortunately he is starting college in the nearby town and only comes back for the weekends. Thus for now English class is a bust.

Hip Hop/Break Dance:

I started this group kinda on the fly when a couple kids asked me to teach them a bit of break dance. I sometimes do the little that I know at Paraguayan fiestas and the Paraguayans love it. The group grew to about 8 and I was teaching it a couple days a week in my house, using my big room as a dance studio. It was fun to teach although difficult. It took a lot of time for the kids to learn even the most basic steps but we were definitely making progress. The other big problem is that all the kids except my best student were always embarrassed to practice the moves even if it was only in front of the other kids in the class. The classes stayed consistant for about 2 weeks as well and then dropped to 1 kid. Hes okay now and knows the steps but they look awkward when he does them and these days nobody comes. I want to restart the class and I think that is possible.

Chicken Coop:

I wanted to do a secondary project that would increase disposable income in my community. I choose to do a chicken coop project. I chose 7 families I trusted most in the community and each family received 163 Mil, the equal of about 40 bucks but its is a large amount here. The money was used to buy10 chicks (which cost about 80 cents each) and the food to raise the chicks up for 45 days, the period to get to sale age. Last week the food and chicks were delivered to the community and the community has 4 months to return the money at no interest.

Fogons:

This is my primary project. A fogon is a brick and mortar brick stove and oven. There are 15 families in my commission and we are currently waiting for money from the local government to be issued to use to buy materials. We will combine that money with money we have been raising through raffles and community events to fund the construction of the fogons.

Youth Business Group:

There is not that much to do in rural Paraguay except work in the home or fields, play soccer or volleyball and hang around. Thinking about this and the idleness of many youth, I decided to teach business principles and find a way for Paraguayan youth to make a little money for themselves. After a couple meetings, I have formed a group of 3 youths who come together once a week to cook and them sell a small batch of food house to house. There are no restaurants or places to buy premade food so there is a lot of opportunity. Its slow going and nobody has a lot of money to buy a lot of food or more expensive products but it is working.

Soap and Detergent Women's Group:

This is a women's group I formed to make home made bar soap ad other hygenic products. Many of the more complex products I buy in chemical kit form at a special shop in the capital. You combine the chemicals in a certain way and add water to make the final product whether it is dish washing soap, softner, liquid hand soap, or shampoo. We sold the finished product to recuperate the cost of the kits. Recently we have a surplus of softener and detergent so we have not made any new product.   

Pictures of the Beginning

Most of both the education and health group at the local hang out place near our training center.

Zach and I wore almost the exact same thing without any communication before hand. 

My health group in our waiting for a bus to the training center town. (Health was split into 2 groups)

Some of us waiting for a bus back to our training families.

My super awesome training host family.

Whats that host dad? Is that a pig head?

Why yes it is Peace Corps son! We are gonna eat it!

My good friend Eric and I during training.

My friends Carly and Zoe.

A bunch of the girls at Diana's birthday party in a fancy hotel in the middle of no where close to my site.

Look its spiffy looking education volunteers.

So professional!

That is pique, a sand flea that burrows into your foot and lays eggs. It hurts and i knifed it out of my toe. I've had 3 so far, 1 I took out 2 days ago.

Completed world map Yay!

Children and teacher working on the school garden Yay!

My friend Melissa sporting my hat. She be ballin!

Did Andy convince me to sell homemade empanadas in the middle of a plaza like crazy foreigners?

Yes.

Hanging with 2 Koica volunteers (Korean PC)

Andrea's house .. and a fire... and a dog.

Our small health group again.

3 of the Asian American volunteers.

More Pictures Yay!

Home made bar soap using soda caustica (not sure what that is in English), fat, plants, a little bit of laundry soap and shampoo and water

the pink container was the mold and if u mix it right there shouldnt be so many chunks of plants, that was a mess up ....

A flyer I put up for my Fogon group.

This was an epic picture of super diversity. Starting from left: An old Japanese volunteer revisiting with her sister, botton left. She knew Japanese and Spanish with her sister only knowing Japanese. Then there is Andy, my neighboring volunteer, the white kid in the center, he knows English, Spanish, Russian and bits of a bunch of European languages. 3rd from left, top row is a Paraguayan English teacher who knows Spanish, English and Guarani. Top right is a Korean volunteer who knows, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and English. Bottoom right is Brad, another PC volunteer who knows Spanish, English and some Guarani.

Andrea, a close volunteer with her dog and hammock.

A bunch of volunteers and friends in a restaurant in town.

Lunch while painting a world map.

Andy and I painting the world map.

More Painting.

She looks unpleased. 

Done!.

Pirate Andy.

Elementary school on Mother's Day I think?

Paint.

Composting... means gather and throw outside your back door.

Cooking at Andy's house.

Dusk.

Kids at school.

Part of the Mother's day thing.

FOGONS

This is what a fogon looks like during the building process. It is what I will be raising money for, 15 of these. I dont have a picture of the completed fogon but you can see the oven in the 2nd picture and the oven mostly bricked up in the first picture. The final part you dont see is the chimney that goes behind the oven

Paraguayan Night

The soft red dirt muffled our foot steps as we meandered down the path. It was quiet, the hum of the night insects encouraged us to sleep but the sound of a lone moto betrayed the natural silence its low buzz fading into the distance. It was dark, about midnight but the moon lit up the sky like a distant stage light above our heads. There was a slight breeze and I felt a rare shiver as the wind blew through my t shirt and rustled in the sugar fields around us and hit trees beyond. I was jokingly pestering Eric about the cute girl at the fiesta. He played along and responded with harsh threats. After all, she was the daughter of his commission president. We both laughed. As we inched closer to Eric's house I couldnt help but stop and ponder where we were and what we were doing. It was a Saturday night and we had returned from one of Eric's commission events, a dance that they charged a entrada and sold food and drink at. Despite fears that no one would show up, the event was successful even with only 40 people instead of the expected 80. Eric's Paraguayan youth were fun, good spirited and frankly, the girls were pretty cute. Now the party had ended and we were half way through our 30 minute walk back from the party location. For us it was just another night in Paraguay, with the added fortune of a fiesta and the company of another volunteer. We both had had a couple of beers and we're exhausted. As we let our minds wander and our feet drag across the dirt, it hit me that we were in rural Paraguay, walking on an unlit street miles from the nearest concrete road, We wernt in a city cruising home from a bar or a club, we wernt playing Xbox or watching Fast Five on a plasma screen stretched out on overstuffed couches, we were surrounded by sugar cane and cotton, no bar, no club, no cars, no city lights, no nothing. We were walking back to a house built by hand with wood from the neighboring forest, no insulation, DSL, cable TV, or aircon. But none of this phased us, infact it was normal. We both stopped and looked up into the sky. The night is dark enough here to actually see the milyness of the milky way. The beauty of the sky and the accompanying tranquility was breathtaking and our chatter dwindled into silent awe. “so when do I get to see that cute girl again?” I asked, breaking the trance. “You're horrible Riso.” Eric smiled as he slid his keys into the door and we stumbled inside.  

My house and more