So I haven’t loaded pictures on my blog for a long, long time. The reason is because my camera cord to my computer broke in October, and I had to wait to get my spare one when I was back in the United States for Christmas. I have a lot of back-logged pictures, so there will be a few posts coming up showcasing the last couple of months!
But for this post, I’d rather focus on a more recent event this past week: for the first time, I traveled with my cooperative to an extremely rural village two hours outside of our city! I’m going to start working with the production team to teach farmers who take out loans how to invest wisely in their businesses, rather than buying consumer items like TVs or flashier cell phones. This is a great development for me, and so I was really excited to go on my first big trip with them, just to meet some farmers and learn about the process. The particular trip we went on were to meet a couple of farmers that had an organic cotton export business through the cooperative.
It was an amazing experience- trekking through the woods and fields of corn, mandioca (Paraguay’s staple starch food), sesame, and cotton, meeting with two farmers to update their organic certification, and of course a tereré session followed by a lunch of chicken and pineapple juice. Check out some of the photos below! Just another beautiful day in Paraguay.
This is why I love being in the Peace Corps. I get to do really fun construction that helps people, and call it my job.
On Wednesday, another Peace Corps Volunteer Lauren that lives close by invited me to help her construct a special type of Paraguayan oven called a ‘fogon.‘ Made out of bricks and ‘mescla’ (dirt mixed with water), a fogon is a special type of outdoor oven. Many rural Paraguayans cook over open fires in their houses, which can be dangerous and also bad for their health- therefore, as Lauren is a health volunteer, a big part of her Volunteership so far has been building fogons.
It was an incredible day, and I feel that the pictures really say it all. So without further ado:
How to Build a Paraguayan fogon
Peace Corps drills into your head from the first day of your interview to even apply: don’t have any expectations. Be flexible. A Volunteer must be willing to serve under hardship, if necessary.
So to be expecting to live under hardship for the next two years, and then get my site placement for Caazapá, one of the more urban cities in Paraguay, I have to say- I am not living the quintessential ‘in the bush’ Peace Corps experience. Far from it, I walked right into in a super ‘chuchi’ (Paraguayan word for nice/rich) area for Paraguayan standards. As a rule in Peace Corps Paraguay, Volunteers spend the first three months ‘in-site’ living with a homestay family. Welcome to Posh Corps: here’s a tour of where I will be living for the next three months.
What’s a rite of passage without pictures? Check out some pictures from G-36′s swear-in ceremony below.
Today, as my amazing training group of G-36 and I swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers, I wanted to honor this special occasion by posting a video that perfectly captures the last two months of our training. For all of the friends and family of G-36, I hope you enjoy and think of us today as we celebrate!
I love this adventure. I love my life. I love G-36. And I love being a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Much love,
Brittany
Training is literally flying by. It’s hard to share everything about my experience that I want to, since things are happening here at lightning speed.
As a highlight, I’ve been enjoying learning more about what our Peace Corps sector (Community Economic Development) does here as Peace Corps Volunteers. After five weeks of jamming material down our throats, the fog is finally starting to lift and I am getting more of a clear picture of the kind of work we do down here to improve the business sector. The most interesting to me is the possibility of working with a cooperative or financial institution in my community. My previous experience as a Kiva fellow really lends to this kind of job placement, and I’ve been fascinated about the kind of work other CED volunteers have been doing with co-ops. Another stand-out to me has been one of our Peace Corps guidebooks, ‘Construye Tus Sueños’ (Construct Your Dreams), which is a manual on basic family finance. Peace Corps Volunteers teach classes on family finance to interested members of the community to help them improve their businesses. Both prospects seem very exciting to me as a Volunteer.
This week our group is in something called ‘Long Field Practice.’ It is a four-day event where we all travel in small groups of 3 or 4 to current CED volunteer sites, where we are expected to give ‘charlas,’ or presentations, to members of their community. This is done to help us learn more about life as a Peace Corps Volunteer and prepare for the kind of work we will be doing once we swear-in (become fully-fledged Peace Corps Volunteers). I am traveling with my language group to Caaguazu, the third largest city in Paraguay, to work with a current CED Volunteer Casey. We will all be taking over Casey’s classes and giving charlas on family finance and savings, teaching a bit of English, and even teaching a few ‘Ahendu’ classes. Ahendu is a Peace Corps-founded organization that teaches Paraguayans how to become photographers. I am really excited to be teaching one of these classes! I will be giving a charla on emotions that pictures evoke, and why it makes them powerful.
I’ll be back this weekend- in the meantime, here are some pictures of one of our training trips to Nueva Italia, where we visited a municipality and school. Really though, the best part was that our tech trainer Ann also lives in Nueva Italia, and she took us to her backyard afterwards to pick all of the delicious fruit off of her trees! Just another amazing day in Paraguay. Enjoy!
Paraguay, the land of bountiful fruit
If there’s anything I love celebrating while traveling, it’s the U.S. holidays. Whether Halloween or Thanksgiving, Americans always scope each other out in nearly every other country than the U.S. to get down and pride themselves on being Americans. Having witnessed a few American holidays in other countries myself (Halloween in Bangkok, Thanksgiving in Chile, etc.), I was keen to see what all the fuss was about for the ‘Big 4th of July Party’ at the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay. Yes, every year the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay hosts a 4th of July party that is open to any American in the country- and quite frankly, about a third of the people at the party every year are comprised of Peace Corps Volunteers. On Saturday, July 2nd (we celebrated the 4th of July a little bit early here!) my fellow trainees and I hopped on a bus to Asunción to get in on the excitement.
Hands down, this has been the best event I’ve ever been to! Less than 5 dollars got me unlimited American food (hot dogs, veggie burgers, chips, cheese ravioli, pasta salad, chicken curry- and let’s not even talk about the unlimited DESSERTS- caramel apples, cupcakes, brownies, sugary creamy dulce de leche cake), which I sorely needed after the cheese/bread festival I’ve been having down in J.A. Salvidar every day. There were three-legged races, piñatas, tug-of-war, peel and stick tattoos, an egg tossing contest, a huge blow-up slide, volleyball and soccer tournaments, American music, and unlimited drink specials and two dollar shots. Never mind that it is Winter here- minus the fireworks, it was the best 4th of July EVER!
Words don’t do justice on how much fun this event was, so I’ll leave you with pictures instead.
Celebrate your next 4th of July in Paraguay!
Peace Corps Training is so fast-paced. It is SO hard to believe that we are entering Week FIVE of training- We’re halfway through! So much has happened in the past two weeks that it is hard to keep up with it all.
For the few things that have stood out to me: first, I switched homestay families and I am now living with a new one. I don’t feel the need to get into the reasons why I switched to a new homestay family, but what I can say is that the Peace Corps staff and trainees have been really supportive in this process, which has made the transition very easy for me. I am now living on the other side of town, right on the ‘Ruta Uno,’ which is the big (and only) paved road that passes through J.A. Salvidar. As an upside, I am now living close to the Supermarket and tons of other shops in the ‘commercial’ district of our town. I now live in a ‘Parillo,’ which is essentially a restaurant/bar that serves all kinds of meat. My new homestay family and home is wonderful, I’ll save them for a later post. The only downside is that I am now farther away from my fellow Peace Corps Trainees in J.A., but the extra walking definitely can’t hurt, especially since I have been fed nothing but variations of cheese and bread for the past two days.
Then, immediately after moving to my new homestay, I was hit with a double whopper: Giardia strikes again! I had it for about a week but I had previously chalked it up to stress. When I woke up with my stomach killing me and then the realization that I lost almost 10 pounds in the past two weeks, I realized that this may be a little bit more serious than some good old-fashioned diarrhea (sorry for the graphicness. This is the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer!) The Giardia forced me to miss a day of training this week, which OF COURSE was the BEST day of training we supposedly had yet so far (in the afternoon they had a huge party).
But I can’t complain. I am really enjoying my life right now as a Peace Corps Trainee. I figure if I can handle two mini-emotional roller coasters in the course of a week and still be thrilled about training, then damn I must be IN LOVE with Paraguay! And I am. And the reason for that is because of all my fabulous J.A. Salvidar Peace Corps Trainees, who I love with relish. Here are some pictures of the things we’ve done together in our little community over the past few weeks.
Paraguayans LOVE their bread and cheese. It is practically in every dish they have, whether Chipa (a bagel type of bread stuffed with- you guessed it- cheese), Sopa Paraguaya (A corn-bread type dish chock full of cheese), or pretty much any other kind of delicacy in Paraguay, save the carne asado, which is just mounds of grilled meat. As a Peace Corps trainee living with a homestay family, I find it impossible to not be served bread and cheese in some capacity during every meal. Want some soup? Oh guess what, there’s cheese and bread in it! Want some salad? Well, you can just go right ahead and eat the huge loaves of bread in the center of the table as a side- Duh, Brittany!
But I have a guilty pleasure. There is a special Paraguayan delicacy that I have come to love more than anything- Chipaguazu. I first had ChipaGuazu when Vicky, another Peace Corps trainee, brought me some as a present from her homestay family (my Mom and hers live two minutes from each other and are constantly battling over who can fatten up the other volunteer more. Vicky has had my Mom’s fried eggplant and cake and I’ve had her Mom’s ChipaGuazu and Sopa Paraguaya). From the first bite I was immediately hooked- forget the high calories, forget that I’m inhaling nothing but corn, eggs, milk, and cheese- ChipaGuazu is the most BOMB-DIGGETY thing EVER!
If I had to try my best to compare ChipaGuazu to an American dish, I would have to say cornbread- but this puts cornbread to shame. Chewy and slightly burnt on the outside, creamy and gooey on the insides, ChipaGuazu feels like heaven in my mouth- whether straight out of the oven or served cold for breakfast the next day. I could eat it forever- and I bet you could too.
So with this in mind, Vicky invited me to her house to learn how to make ChipaGuazu with her homestay family, and I decided to post a recipe of it (AND pictures, AND a video!) on here. ChipaGuazu would be perfect as a side dish for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Family Reunions, you name it. Make this for your next party and it’s sure to be a hit!
So without further ado… ChipaGuazu!
ChipaGuazu Recipe from Paraguay
As I mentioned before, Paraguay Peace Corps split up our large training group of 23 into two smaller groups that live in separate towns. The town that 12 out of 23 of us are living in is called ‘J.A. Salvidar,’ and it is home to many a sandy road and one large paved road called ‘Ruta Uno’ (which houses our prides and joys: a gas station, internet cafe, and supermarket). I decided to provide some pictures of our little slice of paradise, which you can check out below.
