Update

So these last few weeks I've been back with my host family in Pilar. Very little about the city itself has changed. A few more streets have been paved, there's a new dispensa across the street, the "Castiglioni Presidente" signs from 2008 are now pink instead of red, some different stray dogs follow me around, Hamburgueseria Milenio is actually indoors now, but that's about it. Mostly everything is exactly how I remember it, with the added bonus of not having to deal with school this time around.

My first weekend here in Pilar was my cousin Lauri's fifteenth birthday. As in most of Latin America, 15th birthdays are a huge deal in Paraguay, so just after midnight on the day of her birthday, I got to go with a group of her family and friends to her serenata. The two singers who came with guitars did an amazing job, and the celebration went on for a few hours, though I left around 2am.

I've been watching a lot of soccer (Copa Libertadores). Cerro Porteño, a Paraguayan team, beat the Jaguares (from Mexico), but unfortunately lost to the Brazilian team Santos. They still have the regular season though, and this wednesday I'll be at their game in Asunción! I'm super excited since this will be my first real soccer game in Paraguay. After the game in Asunción, I'll be heading to Ciudad del Este to visit a friend, then to Encarnación to see some Jesuit ruins, and then on to Argentina and Uruguay for a week or two.

In the time that hasn't been taken up with wandering aimlessly around the city and hanging out with my host family, I've been working on the project that got me the grant to come here. I'm doing research on bilingualism in schools by talking to teachers and administrators, observing classes, and analyzing print materals. I've visited a few schools and looked at a bunch of books/notes, and so far everything is going well. The teachers here have been amazing about having me drop by with little to no notice and giving me the information that I need. Most of my work so far has been with schools in the city center, but I have one last visit lined up tomorrow at a school on the outskirts of town, where the students are coming from a much more rural environment, so hopefully I'll be able to get some contrasting information there.

For my part in Paraguayan-style bilingualism, I've been studying Guarani as much as possible and I feel like I'm actually making a bit of progress. I'm obviously still far from fluent, but I've been picking up bits and pieces in conversations, and a lot of what I learned last time and forgot has been coming back to me. I hope to be able to actually continue studying once I go back, now that there are so many more materials available online than there were a few years ago. I love the language, and I love those triumphant moments that come when you actually understand something that you hear all the time, or can deconstruct a phrase that you've known for a while and see how it's actually put together. The random Guarani trivia for this entry is that the word for "pray" also means "learn" and that the guarani word for "mass" (as in church) breaks down into "big prayer".

The weather here has been almost identical to how spring was in Beloit, except with the important difference that in Beloit, we were celebrating the warm weather and wearing summer clothes, and here in Paraguay, people are wearing hats and boots. I've mostly been in jeans and short sleeves, but even so, nobody can seem to believe that I'm not freezing. I'm getting slowly accustomed to the climate though, and had to break out sweaters the last few days (though not today). It'll also be colder as I get further south into Argentina and Uruguay, plus I'll have the ocean to contend with.

I've also been enjoying Paraguayan food again. I've been on a veritable empanada tour of not just Pilar, but half the continent thanks to the 2-day trip it took to get here. Paraguay's empanadas are by far my favorites, though the Colombian ones weren't bad either. I was not a fan of the Peruvian mushroom-chicken-pepper concoction that was made into an empanada, but I think they were trying to be fancy, so maybe more normal ones are better. I've already had most of the foods that I missed, including sopa paraguay, mbeju, chipa, mandioca, chipa guasu, bori bori, terere, dulce de leche, guaraná soda, and the Turkish-Paraguayan hybrid of Lomito Árabe/Döner Dürüm. I'm still not quite sure how that managed to retain its popularity as fast food on the voyage with immigrants from Syria and Lebanon to Paraguay, but it did, and no matter what continent it's on (and I can speak for 4 of the 6) it's good.

There are significantly more exchange students in town now than when I was here. There were only two of us for the vast majority of my time in Pilar, but now, I know of at least 5. There are also a few new Peace Corps volunteers around town, including a volunteer who's working in a school, which gives me some hope that I might actually be placed here should I ever make it into the Peace Corps. Paraguay LOVES its PC volunteers. Everyone in town seems to know them, and the national governement dedicated a series of stamps to the 40 year anniversery of PC in Paraguay. I hope that I'll be back in Paraguay as a volunteer in a few more years, but we'll see.

I started trying again, and promptly gave up on making sense out of so much here. There's still the eye doctor in Pilar who advertises for contacts with pictures of blue-eyed lemurs. Bus number 18.2 is still running in Asunción. Furniture and cell phones are naturally sold in the same stores, exclusive of anything else. I saw a guy riding a motorcycle in circles-- on the back of a flatbed truck. I passed a business in Asuncion called "Pizza, pero sólo para llevar" which means (Pizza, but only for takeout). The guy I sat next to in the Asunción bus terminal had "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" as his ringtone, in English and in May. I bought lunch from a place called "Soon" in Asunción. I just don't get it sometimes, but I think that might be part of the reason why I love it here. It doesn't make sense, and nobody seems to think that it should.

Asunción

I just got back from the long weekend in Asunción. I didn't have class on Wednesday for a teacher's meeting, Thursday was some sort of Teacher's holiday, and Friday was "Día de los Obreros," which translates into "Day of the Workers" and is basically like Labor Day in the US. I took the Wednesday morning bus from Pilar to Asunción with my 10-year-old brother, Anibal. In Asunción, we went to my host aunt and uncle's house for a while, and afterwords he stayed with them and I went to visit my friend, Abbey, from AFS who lives in Asunción.
She finally got her new host family, and they are a much better fit. There are three teenage sisters and a little brother, plus my friend and her parents, and of course, Blackie, the hyperactive but adorable toy poodle. They live about 10 minutes from downtown Asunción, so we went to see "La Casa de Independencia" where the overthrow of the Spanish colonial government was planned, "La Casa Rosada" which is BEAUTIFUL at night, and a few other monuments and buildings downtown on Thursday afternoon. Thursday night I went to a "quince" for one of Abbey's friends, which is something like a big US "Sweet Sixteen" except it's for the fifteenth birthday instead of the sixteenth, and nearly everybody has a pretty big party, rather than the relatively few in the US. Friday we met up with some other AFSers in the area at Shopping Del Sol, paid about four dollars for some pretty awful waffles, and went to see XMen as a fundraiser for Abbey's school.
Saturday we went to a cousin's wedding in Areguá, which is absolutely beautiful. It's right on a fairly large (compared to other lakes in Paraguay, it's got nothing on Michigan) lake, and is FILLED with art, from painting, to indigenous weaving, to flourescent lawn art. The wedding ceremony is basically the same in here as in the USA. The reception was at a club in San Bernadino. SanBer is AMAZING. The town is cute, and the lake is beautiful. I can't believe AFS didn't take us anywhere other than the bakery, or at least let us explore a little when we were in SanBer for the Adaptation Orientation. The reception itself was nice, and we were lucky with the weather that we could be outside as well.
Today, I basically got up and went back to Pilar. It's a good thing the bus wasn't too crowded, because my Olimpista brother decided to take home a 2-foot-tall ceramic dog-shaped bank painted in Club Olimpia's colors. I'm sure my other Cerrista brother he shares a room with is absolutely thrilled with the new decorations...
Club Olimpia and Cerro Porteño are the two biggest, rival football/soccer teams in Paraguay. It's like a Packer/Bear or a Horlick/Park rivalry. At least a third of the graffitti in Asunción has to be devoted to either supporting one of the clubs, or vandalising graffitti that supported the other club. Olimpia is black and white, Cerro is red and blue. Other than Cerro Porteño and Olimpia, other popular clubs are Rubio Ñu, Guaraní, Libertad, Nacional, Sol de America, and Tacuary.

Asunción is about the size of Milwaukee, but after almost three months in Pilar, it feels big. Pilar has no supermercados, shoppings, or movie theaters, which Asunción is filled with. Other than the crazy traffic (there are how-to manuals about how to use stoplights every few blocks), the thing I notice most about Asunción is the poverty. Some of the parks in the center of the city have become tent cities because there is nowhere else for the people to go. Kids in the street try to wash windshields for the equivalent of 10 cents (500 Gs) and people try to sell fresh fruit and knockoff sunglasses car-to-car. Entire families stand on street corners in their flourescent orange vests selling lottery tickets. The steps of government buildings, churches, and storefronts are covered in cardboard and plastic bags because they're somebody's home. I don't even know if the kids in the street have families or go to school. Some of them can't be older than 6 or 7, and I've seen older kids carrying infants around while they work. Sure, some of them are probably a scam. In general, it very obviously isn't. With this many people with this little, it's no wonder the crime rates are so high in some areas. The parks look like Hoovervilles, and most people seem to have become oblivious to the fact that they are in the middle of such absolute poverty. I don't even know where to begin, but if you know of any organizations that help with this kind of thing, help them out. A little bit goes a long way. A dollar here can buy a meal, five can feed someone for a whole day, and free them up from windshield washing so they can hunt for a piece of metal to make a roof for their cardboard house. This isn't a problem just in Paraguay either, this is all over the world. It might not be as extreme or as obvious, but it's there, and a tiny bit of effort or a tiny bit of money can really help someone out. They'll get more out of it than you'll feel like you're giving. Please, even if the economy isn't doing so great, figure out a way to help someone who has so much less than you can even imagine.
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/sponsor-a-child/americas-child-sponsorship/paraguay.htm
http://www.worldvision.org/home.nsf/pages/home.htm
http://www.compassion.com/default.htm
http://www.unicef.org/
http://www.streetkids.org/index.htm
http://www.peacecorps.gov/