One Month, Yikes!

Hey all! I just realized how crazy it is that time has flown this fast! It's almost been a month since my last blog post! And to be sure, a TON has happened!

First and foremost, the World Cup atmosphere is over and done with. That crazy hype when we first got to the country was a great way to get involved with the National Pride when Paraguay qualified for the first time in history when they defeated Japan! That week was nuts, flags and impromptu parades of moto's, everyone was excited! Needless to say Paraguay ended up losing to Spain. However the locals were not as upset as we thought they might be. Most people were just excited that Paraguay had mad it that far. In fact, it was almost reassuring to the Paraguayans that the team that had narrowly deafeated them was in fact the best in the world. I'm fairly certain that most people here believe that Paraguay is the second best team in the world. Which, perhaps they are. It's always difficult to tell in tournaments such as the world cup. But anyways, now we are back to regular local team games (Olympia, Cerro, and Guaranís) and political rallies almost every week (more on this later).

Besides the local activites, training has definitely progressed more and more. We had our second language proficiency exam a few weeks ago, and I learned that I have "sufficient Spanish to serve as a volunteer in Paraguay." Initially I was excited, however this quickly faded as I discovered that the only signifigance of this evaluation was that I would no longer be receiving language training in Spanish. For the past two weeks, I have solely been studying Guaraní. This might sound exciting, but I feel almost as if I just arrived in the country all over again. I have virtually no idea what people are saying to me in Guaraní, and Spanish almost feels like a nice break. On that note, I now feel fairly comfortable having a conversation in Spanish. Ocassionally I throw in a few Guaraní words or phrases just for good measure (the locals LOVE this!).

The other training is all but over in a formal sense, an dnow we have focused on more community based learning activities. We completed our "Día de Practica" where I helped to give a chat on business accounting to a few interested families and small businesses in our communities. Little else has made me feel as accomplished as helping Paraguayans to learn better business practices and how to immediately impliment them in their daily lives. Now all we are working on is some follow up activities to help some interested businesses create accounting books for records, something that is surprisingly not present in most small businesses here.

While training has been frustrating at times, and many of us wish we could just focus on the language aspect, I feel confident that the training we have received will help us to pass on this information to Paraguayans once we are in site.

This past week we got another opportunity to visit and work with a volunteer, this time for five days! Me and four other volunteers "treked" the whole 45 minutes to Altos, which is up on a high hill more or less overlooking a lake where rich Paraguayans like to spend their summers. Altos was founded by German immigrants, and that mentality resonates throughout the community to this day. Our volunteer Julie was working with a library comission to organize and open Altos's first library. We worked all week teaching a basic library information class, english classes, photography classes, and even participated in a small civic education camp for a day. Even though it wasn't directly working with small business, I still had a blast. Teaching classes such as english and civic education with youth is an early small success that can make you feel more accomplished in the first few months, as well as aid you in integrating with a community and meeting people who you can work with on business projects. I'm really excited to work on these activities in my first few months in site.

Only 5 days remain until we find out the location of our future site. As you can imagine, tensions are high. We are all counting down the minutes until we finally get to know where we will be living and working here in Paraguay for the next two years. Fingers crossed, and I promis another post sooner than this one!