Contact with Home

Congratulations to all the exchange students who've made it through a quarter of the year! If you're in the US, you've already experienced homework, homecoming, and Halloween, and most of you probably cannot wait for Thanksgiving break!

How's it going?

Seriously, how are you doing? Take a minute and think about it.

...

I hope you're having a blast and learning a ton. I hope you're making great friends, getting involved in clubs or sports, and getting along with your host family. A lot of you definitely are! Keep doing what you're doing!

But not all of you are having the times of your lives.

A lot of you in the US are really, really cold right now. Winter came early this year for a lot of the country. You're probably also bored. You're probably not a "new kid" at school anymore, and things might not be so exciting. Maybe you've met everyone in your classes, you're you've already tasted most of the food you're served, or you're sick of your host family yelling sports that you don't care about. Maybe you're already thinking about Christmas, New Years, Hanukkah, and wishing you were going to spend them with your family at home.

This probably isn't what you pictured. Even if you're having a great time, it's probably not exactly what you thought it'd be. Hopefully, you're happy with that! It can be really, really frustrating when you're not happy though. Sometimes there doesn't need to be a big problem to be unhappy- your host family is fine, school is fine, your English is fine, the food is fine, fine, fine, fine. But you're sick of sharing a bathroom with your host brother, eating corn at dinner, stupid questions about your home country, or any other little thing. Or things. And if you don't feel like you can complain to anybody here, you're probably doing it to someone at home, or from your home country.

Sometimes that's fine. It's OK to talk to your family, and other exchange students are awesome because they understand what you're going through. If you're doing this every week, every day, or more than once a day, I want you to stop and think.

If you're sharing something with someone at/from home before someone from the US, why?

How many hours per day are you connected to home? Not just how long do you spend on Skype or whatever app you're using, but how many hours are you able to receive messages from home?

Very few people have tons of super close friends at this point in the year. It's hard to build a lot of trust with someone in just 2 or 3 months. It's normal to not feel so close to your new friends yet, but if you're not careful, you're never going to get there. New friendships take time, but more than that, they take effort. If you're choosing to spend your time talking with people from home instead of people in your host country, you're wasting time building up new friendships.

I'm not naïve enough to think that never ever going on the computer or using your phone makes sense for most people. That's probably how people in your host country communicate too. That just means YOU need to limit YOURSELF though. Turn Facebook chat off. Delete the Messenger app. Disable notifications on your phone for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, whatever it is that you use. Spend some time organizing your Facebook friends, and set your newsfeed to only show posts from people in your host country. Turn off the computer/phone at 10pm. Or 8pm. Or 6pm. If you can't hold yourself to it, ask your host parents to help. Make it harder to interact with people from home.

Talking to people from home is hurting you in the long run, even if it makes you feel better right now. It makes you feel better because it's comfortable. It's easy. It's familiar. Of course that's what you want when nothing else seems comfortable or easy!

But why are you here?

Did you want to make friends? Improve your language skills? Become a family member? The ever-so-vague "experience the culture" that we all wrote about in our applications?

That's not going to happen if you leave one foot in your old life. Of course it can be uncomfortable, difficult, and strange sometimes. You need to confront it though. If you let it keep being a little uncomfortable while relying on home to get through it, you're not going to have time to make great friends, speak fluently, integrate into your family, or truly "experience the culture."

I know it's hard, and I know you might not think it's a problem right now. I did the same thing. In retrospect, I spent WAY too much time online that I should have spent talking, studying, walking around town, watching TV, literally anything would have been better than sitting on Facebook.

If you can relate to any of this, please consider the following:

• Put your phone away unless you're using it to talk to people you met in your host country.
• Keep pushing new friendships. You need to keep trying to make plans. 
• Get involved. If you don't know who to make plans with, join a club or team to meet new people. Ask a teacher if you don't know how, and don't be afraid to try something totally new. Dance, stage crew, swimming, volunteering, why not? 
• Stop posting so much in your native language. If over half of your Facebook is in your native language, your new friends can't interact with you! 
• Make contact with home a treat. Set up a weekly or monthly Skype call with your parents or a best friend. Write down things you have to tell them so you don't forget in the mean time. 
• Write a weekly or monthly blog or newsletter to tell people what you're up to. If every seventh grade classmate and second cousin is sending you messages asking how you are and what it's like, you're probably wasting a lot of time repeating yourself! 
• Unless it's a true emergency (your health or safety is threatened) wait a little bit to tell someone. Try to solve/get over it by yourself, and if it's still bugging you in a day or week, *then* tell someone about it. 
• If your host parents have set rules about when/where you can use technology, it's because they see this as a problem now, or it was one in the past. They want to spend time with you, but you're on your phone/computer. Don't ruin your relationship with them over some Facebook messages!
• If it's your family/friends back home who won't leave you alone, you need to talk to them about why they can't contact you so much. If you need to, ask a volunteer in your home country to talk to them as well. 
• Remember that host parents, liaisons, volunteers, etc. are there for you. Most of them would be more than happy to talk with you when you're feeling homesick or unhappy. 
• And for the love of god, GET. OFF. NETFLIX. Unless you're watching it with someone else, you should barely be on it!

Your friends from home with either be your friends when you get back, or they won't. What you do now probably won't change that. You have the rest of your life back home, if that's what you want. This is your only time to be on exchange.You're 1/4 of the way done with your year. Don't wait any longer to start to change something you're unhappy with. 

El Chaco

The Chaco is extreme. It is either unbearably hot, or very cold. People dying of thirst, or drowning in floods. This weekend was chilly and wet. Most of the inhabitants are indigenous people. Some people think there are still uncontacted tribes somewhere in the Chaco. Those that aren't indigenous are Mennonites from Germany, Ukraine, and Canada. The lingua franca is German in the cities, and in the indigenous communites Guaraní and other indigenous languages. Spanish is widely spoken as well, but signs come first in German, then Spanish. The Chaco has no natural resources, save the tannin extracted from some of its trees, and has been called "the green hell" on many occasions. This is where I was last weekend.

Friday I got on a bus at noon with Jana, the other AFSer in my town, and arrived in Asunción at about 7. There, we met up with the exchangers from Ciudad del Este, Encarnación, and Santa Rita and Fernando, the AFS volunteer from Capiatá. From there, we got on another bus (micro) to go to Capiatá. The 10 of us non-asuncioñeros went to his house to wait for the bus that was going to take us to the Chaco to get there, and watched TV for an hour or so, including a subtitled "I Am Legend" and a poorly-dubbed "Fresh Prince", before playing some sort of card game that had instructions in German, Dutch, French, and Italian.
About 15 minutes into our game, we went to the supermercado to get on the biiiig bus to take us to the Chaco. Some people were already on the bus, and some people got there right after. In all, there were 40 of us, from the US, Germany, Belgium, Thailand, Austria, Turkey, and Japan, plus three Paraguayan AFS volunteers. At about midnight, we left with the destination of Loma Plata, Presidente Hayes. Needless to say, nobody got too much sleep. We talked, entertained a gas station attendent with our crazy mix of languages, and watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre while driving through one of the most desolate areas of the world...
Eventually, most of us fell asleep, and woke up in Loma Plata. Loma Plata is home to a grocery store that sells marshmallows, gummi bears, donuts, and a few other really out-of-place foods alongside chipa, mburucujá, and who knows what else. After a grocery store breakfast, we went to tour the Chortitzer Cooperativa, which is run by german-speaking mennonites, and produces dairy. Lots of dairy. And a tinnnnnnnnnyyyyy museum. Next was Neuland, with another museum, featuring poorly-stuffed animals native to the Chaco and Paraguay, including tapirs, anteaters, jaguars, and capyberas.
After that, we boarded a bus to Filadelfia, where our hotel was. We went to a store that sells indigenous handicrafts from the chaco tribes and books. Choice of languages: German, Spanish, English, or Guaraní. A museum filled with poorly stuffed animals and mennonite newspapers later, we went to Fortín Boqueron.
Fortín Boqueron was the site of a large battle during the war with Bolivia over the Chaco in the 30's. There's an indoor museum of photographs and weapons from the war, and an outdoor "museum" of underground bunkers, bottle tree sniper hideouts, cemetaries and monuments. I got to actually sit in one of the bottle trees that was used during the war.
Back to Filadelfia for the evening. Dinner at a pretty nice and verrry expensive (by Paraguayan standards) restaurant, and movie night. AFS USA-ers - NUGGET! jaja
The next morning, we woke up and got on ANOTHER bus to Mariscal Estigarribia. First stop was an indigenous town. Our bus was greeted by about twenty kids, eager for the food the buses of blondes always bring. Most of them didn't speak any Spanish, but I was able to talk to a few of them in Guaraní. The kids loved seeing pictures of themselves, and seemed to have learned the word "foto" in Spanish. A few of the adults spoke Spanish, so I was able to have more substantial conversations with them. One woman, Juliana, came here from Bolivia when she was little. She spoke Spanish, plus three indigenous languages and came to talk to us with her niece, Maria Silvia, who goes to the Mennonite school in town, and is excited to be starting German next year. Unfortunately, they hurried us out of there rather quickly to get on to the next stop, which was the Airport.
At the airport, we saw runways, and listened to a guy talk about how it's one of the best airports in Paraguay that really isn't used for anything. He seemed pretty optimistic about some company coming in to take over and turn it into a busy commercial airport in the middle of one of the most inhospitable regions of the world nowhere near anything else.
After the airport, we went to an army base where Fernando the volunteer's dad was stationed. They cooked us lunch- rice, guaraná soda, and massive helpings of chicken. An hour of ultimate frisbee later, we were back on the bus, headed to Asunción again.
The bus ride back was actually pretty entertaining. Scattergories, Wall-E, fortune chipa gurus, mburucuyá yogurt, Garden State, stories, "Leftist Breakfast", immigration arguments, photography, and a million other things..

Total Bus Time:
Pilar-Asunción: 7 hours
Asunción-Capiatá: .5 hour
Capiatá-Loma Plata: 7 hours
Loma Plata-Neuland: 1 hour
Neuland-Filadelfia: 1 hour
Filadelfia-Fortín Boqueron: 1 hour
Fortín Boqueron-Filadelfia: 1 hour
Filadelfia-Mariscal Estigarribia: 1 hour
Around Mcal. Estigarribia: 1 hour
Mariscal Estigarribia-Asunción: 8 hours
Asunción-Pilar: 7 hours
But worth it.

About Paraguay and AFS

Paraguay is a landlocked country in South America, between Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. It's about the size of California. Spanish and Guarani (indigenous) are the major official languages. Both Spanish and Guarani are used frequently, with Spanish prevailing in cities and Guarani in rural areas and isolated cities. The east is humid and rainy, the west is dry and arid. It's in the southern hemisphere, so our winter is their summer. (I will arrive in February- the middle of their summer, just before school begins.)
Just under 7 million people live in Paraguay. The capital and largest city is Asuncion. Other larger cities are Ciudad del Este, Encarnacion, Concepcion, Luque, Villa Hayes, Caacupe, Villarica, Pilar, and San Juan Cabalero. Hydroelectricity, generated from several major dams, supply most of the country's power. Soybeans are the most important crop.
Many people are poor, but many of the families able to host exchange students are middle-upper class. School runs on a half-day schedule, with classes being either in the morning, afternoon, or occasionally evening. Usually kids are put into a "track" in high school, such as business, sciences, or arts.

AFS was started in WWI by ambulance drivers from the US as the American Field Service. The group was reformed during WWII, and started exchanges after the war. At first, exchanges were just between the USA and several western European countries, but today high school students from over 50 countries are involved. AFS maintains an international umbrella organization, but is really made up of national organizations in each country. AFS-Paraguay was started in 1962, and hosted US students in 1966 for the first time. Today, AFS-Paraguay hosts about 200 foreign students a year from all over the world, and sends out approximately 150 Paraguayan students.