Random Life Photos

Volunteers hanging out in the Peace Corps office.

Agro-Shopping, an Indoors farmers market that takes place in a mall in Asuncion on Tuesdays.

Enjoying Agro shopping produce.

His head is about 1 inch from this bus's ceiling.

A street in Asuncion.

Typical house in my community.

Recently killed chicken being prepped to cook. His friend on the ground there doesnt notice.

Still possibly the cutest kid I have ever met.

Yup.

My largest room that serves as a workout spot and study spot. The greenish netting in that door is to prevent mosquitoes from passing through.

My kitchen. I cook on two gas burners next to the sink.

My bathroom. The toilet is to the right of the photo.

My front room. the door to the left leads outside. This is my main table. And there is a rice cooker on the ground.

The acting president of my fogon commission eating her lunch.  Mandioca is in her mouth .

Most of my fogon commission was present at this meeting.

More commission.

My bedroom with yellow mosquito net over bed

Jenny again.

She wants to give me the ball.

One of my host dads chopping wood. He is awesome and jolly. 

Host mom making Chipa.

Chipa is yummy.

She is super fuerte.

Prepping the oven for baking the chipa. 

Ahendu Weekend

First pre Ahendu poker night (hopefully the start of a tradition)

Yes he got iced.

Some of my favorite people who sadly finished their service last week.

Ahendu

Yes, they are rapping... Yes they are good at it.

Flash street concert courtesy of Peace Corps outside of Ahendu.

Dinner together at a hostel.

Aobut 50 volunteers from different training groups came together to eat .

It was Korean food. Not bad.

Dudes from my training group.

Yellows and greens, kinda cool huh?

RiSo goes to Ahendu, Mediocrity Ensues

"We are all gunna go hard tomorrow night after Ahendu. Every one is going to Hollywood. It's gunna be crazy." It was the common word being passed around between the 100 or so volunteers that had come in for Ahendu and various other required Peace Corps tasks.

To understand this message you need to know several things:

First, Ahendu means "to listen" in Guarani, the indigenous language that is far more common than Spanish here. It is also a music event organized by Peace Corps to raise funding for various Peace Corps causes. Ahendu is like THE event to go to as a Peace Corps Paraguay volunteer. Produced once every 3 months, the concert is a mish mash of musical performances put on by Peace Corps volunteers, Paraguayans and KOICA volunteers (Korean Peace Corps). Performers sign up and practice their pieces in the months upcoming to the concert. A venue is chosen and Peace Corps volunteers from all around the country come into the capital to do bits of Peace Corps office work, hang out, drink and be merry.

Second, Ahendu night is notorious for being Legendary (There are about 200 volunteers constantly serving in Paraguay. Ahendu often draws about half of them. That means an influx of 100 city deprived, lonely, energetic and mischievous Nortes meeting together in one place at one time. Thus, the best stories come out of Ahendu nights.)

Third, Hollywood. For the past couple Ahendu's Hollywood has been the primary location for the after party/ dance party. Hollywood is a large, well known dance club in Asuncion. It is particularly suited to volunteers because of its: large space (Ware-housish with lights and smoke), music (Plays a mix of house, pop and hip hop which few other clubs do), and because it is primarily gay clientele (female volunteers are harassed far less).

So when Saturday came I was understandably excited.

Ahendu was pretty fun but I was really looking forward to the high energy fun that would follow. Yet for whatever the reason, Hollywood was never reached. Instead, most of the volunteers dispersed, heading to other venues and chiller places. I was disappointed. sigh.

No great stories.

Going Crazy

To be honest, for a week or so I thought I might snap. In late March I was realizing I had been here for a year and accomplished very little. I still didn't know if the funding promised to us by the local government was ever going to come (my main project of 16 fogons), my soap making group had all but ceased to exist, my youth business group kept postponing their supposedly weekly food making and selling, and I still did not know if my chicken raising project would work out.

the above depiction describes my sentiments

 At the same time I was beginning to sorely miss the close connections I had with people back at home. My closest friends and my brothers of course. I have never really been close to my parents but I saw the support parents gave to other volunteers and I just simply did not have that. I wouldn't have that even if I did talk to my parents. Thus was the circumstances in which I began to think that real progress was impossible. Luckily, things have turned around since then. Yesterday the money came from the local government and was exchanged for materials that we brought to the community. We did not receive all of what was asked for but it is a huge step. Furthermore, families have been recuperating the money borrowed for their chicken raising projects in a steady flow and I am planning to organize a second round. My youth group successfully sold double the quantity of food we usually cook and all on their own without my help. We also reconvened the soap making group and successfully made shampoo and softner for washing clothes. I still need to figure out a way to sell the product to recuperate costs but I already have an idea for that. So things are much better and I have gotten a second wind that will hopefully continue.

On to more interesting things.

I got a new camera so I will hopefully be posting more of everyday stuff so you can see what my life is like hurray!

It got really cold really fast here. My normal attire went from t shirt and shorts (often minus the t shirt) to 2 sweatshirts, jeans and long johns underneath (yes they look silly and sound funny but so glad I brought those).

With the clod weather, social activities change too. Before it was volleyball late into the night with spirited drinking or terrere drinking and loud music booming into the night. Now the volleyball had begun to subside in favor of soccer but short sessions until it gets to chilly and people retreat to their homes to sit by fogon fires with ten layers of clothing on and drink mate. The change is sudden and drastic.

Meeting Christina... How I Met Your Mother Style

Kids, there is an old cliché saying that you cant go looking for love, it finds you. And although it wasn't love at that point, by the March of 2012 I was counting the days till my vacation back home so I could finally be with Christina, a girl who, by all measurable means, seemed to match me perfectly. But first lets back up a few months.

You see in the Spring of 2012 I was in the midst of the well known 1 yr lull in Peace Corps. The time you realize your attempt at saving the world has culminated in a trash pit at some random house and an overgrown, dilapidated school garden. When you realize you left all the comforts of home for a noble cause and achieved.. pretty much nothing. To top that all off, I was also realizing the discomforting and depressing fact that girls I had been with seemed to be in picturesque relationships with the guys they dated right after me. Jennifer, Rebecca, Grace and Tian. I was like some unfortunate love curse, tolerate me and the next guy will  be your soul mate. Plus it had been hard to hear that my last ex, my most serious and promising relationship, was very happy with her new boyfriend. Then when it seemed like the universe was giving me the giant celestial finger, I got a message from an acquaintance of mine, Christina Pham.

Now to be clear I had never dated Christina. She actually hadn't even been a close friend of mine. I knew her from some of the community work I was doing pre Peace Corps and that was it. Well, except  for that one time at Dave and Busters, but that's another story. Anyway we were  both dating other people at the time so nothing happened. She was just that sorta cute girl, who I kinda knew from those couple of times over those couple of weeks. By the time I got her message it had been over a year since I had seen Christina and all she was doing was commenting on the blog I kept during my Peace Corps experience. But after that we started talking...


...and that turned into more talking and a three hour video chat session that used up a months worth of my internet credit. By April 1st we had been talking for at least 3hrs a day everyday and it felt strange to not hear from her. We had gone from acquaintances to virtual boyfriend and girlfriend using babe and hon and sending good morning and sweet dream messages every day. It was disgustingly corny, romantic and storybookish. Yet even with all that aside, the truth was, she was everything I knew I wanted in a girl and I seemed to be everything she wanted in a guy.

So was it love? Did love find me? I don't know and cliches are stupid. But I do remember when I thought losing Tian was the biggest mistake of my life. So maybe there is something to be said about some doors closing to let others open and just in case, I am seeing Christina first thing when I get back because cliches exist for a reason and as far as we can tell, us together will be awesome.

Pants Jacked

So when you move into your house in Paraguay you are always told not to leave things outside of your house. This primarily refers to gardening tools such as shovels and hoses but also chairs. Yes people might jack your chairs at night if you leave them outside. Literally pick them up in their hands and take off running.

Here is a list of things that volunteers left outside and got jacked:

Shoes

plates

cups

chairs

shovels

hoses

hammocks

and... pants

2 days ago someone stole my pants. Right off my drying line. Given, I had left them there for about 3 days but jacked none the less. 1/6^th of my pants were stolen, yes that's 1 pair of the 6 I have in total.

Sigh

Power Outages in Paraguay

So I have talked about this before already but today's Hurricane Pwnage storm reminded me again. So today the rain gods unleashed a wall of water that lasted from about 11 am to 7 pm. It is particularly discouraging as I had just finished digging and seeding my home garden... sigh...., Well have to do that all over. But the focus of this post is to talk about power outages. So with the impending storm I went to unplug all of my electronics just in case there was some sort of surge (common practice here), move my things to avoid getting soaked (water gets in at the windows and certain holes in the roofing and prepare my kerosine lantern for later in the night. It was in this process that I realized how normal it was for me. The storm had not even started, yet I knew for sure the power would go out and probably would not return until late at night or the next day. Each family has its routine for storms and moving belongings or covering them and strategically placing candles are common place.

Thinking about all this I couldn't help but compare power outages here to those in the US. A power outage in the US practically paralysis a US home. We think that we cant do anything. but here where electronics are not common and food is cooked on a wood burning stove a power outage is just a minor inconvenience. Here, when the power goes out people grumble complain and sit around indoors in a circle but that is pretty much what they would be doing with power anyway. For me a power outage is annoying because I cant listen to music on my computer and its hard to see around my house. On the other hand its a good excuse to use my kerosine lantern which is awesome, fun to use and really useful when there is no power. I prepped my dinner by its light tonight.  

Its funny to think in a lot of ways, Paraguayans are far more prepared for true survival than we are.