4 Days Until Winter and it`s 80

Hello, World!

Matthew here. I apologize if my last post was a bit of a downer. We have been told that this two-year ride known as Peace Corps would be like a roller coaster: lots of ups and downs, and sometimes one right after the other.

My life here in Misiones started in a strange way, but now I have gotten my feet under me a little and am starting to feel out my role in our community. Every Tuesday and Friday Tegan and I have been visiting the primary school to give health-related talks to the 80 or so kiddos there. It usually takes two hours in the morning (grades 2, 3, and 4) and another two hours in the afternoon (grades K-1, 5, and 6). It's technically only a half day of work, but after so much Spanish, Guarani, laughing, and teaching, we are usually exhausted. We are preparing for a big event where we showcase how to reuse trash. We are planning to make hand-washing stations with every kid in the school, teach how to make jewelry out of recycled materials, and dig a compost pile, as well as make some refreshing orange juice to reinforce free, healthy, natural juice over (the much more popular) dubiously-fabricated soda.

Also, we have a girl's soccer team that practices two afternoons each week. While no formal positions, plays, or drills have been implemented yet, it is easy to see which girls are most interested and what are their natural inclinations on the field. We have at least two other Volunteers in the department who are also looking to start girls' teams in other parts of Misiones and maybe we can set up some formal games in the Spring. (P.S. June 21 is the first day of Winter. Hard to get used to that concept.)

Another development is a language class we have started in the secondary school (grades 7-12). We are hoping to foster an exchange of languages as we desperately want to improve our Guarani to better integrate into the community. Lots of families think that a rudimentary knowledge of English might help their kids in the increasingly-global job market. Our first class had five students, the second, 31. We have since split them up into two groups (middle school and high school). Most of the kids in the middle school group are reluctant to try and speak in English. We are going to spend more time going over the alphabet (only the letter “o” is the same sound in all three languages) and work on phonetics. Their latest homework assignment was to bring to class any English words they come across. We heard things you might expect like “yellow” and “sister” but someone came across the word “howdy”, which made us laugh out loud.

Tegan went to Asuncion for a long weekend with some friends to celebrate her birthday while I stayed in our community. I made drinking glasses out of old wine bottles (you only need wire, sandpaper, and ice for this; awesome!) and spent a lot of time with my host brother. He is all of 5 years old but I am convinced he is a Mensa candidate. He has essentially taught himself Spanish (in contrast, most kids here aren't really comfortable speaking it until age 10, if at all) and is always building stuff out of twigs and trash to keep himself entertained. We played a game where I would hide an old matchbox somewhere where he could not see it (since I've got about 4 feet on him, this is easy) and he would not give up until he had fashioned some way to get it back. If you go to Facebook and see a picture of a kindergartener with a bowl cut, that's him.

We celebrated Paraguay's bicentennial May 14^th (pictures on Matthew's Facebook page) and with July 4^th fast approaching, it seems appropriate to talk of independence. We remain living with our Paraguayan family of three where we are not afraid of the bathroom and our host mother cooks with some different and exciting spices (cumin, garlic, how we missed thee!). We have, however, found a house to rent for the next two years! The catch is that it has no bathroom. We are waiting on a local contractor to return and help us build it. After that and some furniture, we will hopefully be on our own sometime in July.

Tegan's two cents:

Mba'echapa friends and fam! Matthew about summed it up, but here´s a littleof what I´ve been up to. I recently celebrated my first Paraguayan birthday and it was a blast! The weekend before I met up with some other volunteers in Asuncion [sans the hubband, GASP!] for a few days of relaxing and catching up...and maybe a little all night boogying and karaoke! On the big day, here in our little hamlet, we had a lovely lunch with our favorite ol' lady and the teachers. Then for the weekend after we had a triple-header birthday party shared with a 7 year old and a 2 year old. Another PC Volunteer friend of ours came and stayed with us for the triple-header party and taught all our little friends the art of Frisbee. We barbecued an entire pig and sheep... needless to say we are not lacking in protein in Paraguay.

Opá (that´s it) for now! As always, please keep us up to date with all of your adventures in your lives as well!

The Training Wheels Are Off

Tegan here: Hello beloveds! We are nestled at the foot of the mighty white rock for which the village is named. Sadly, or maybe fortunately, we have found our internet modem to be cowed by the remoteness in which we live. So be it. Once a week we shall trek to the nearest town to keep y'all up to date and to hear of the goings ons about Oregon and the world at large. Please accept this as our excuse for such a long silence.

In reality, the reason is that it is quite difficult to adjust to all of the changes with which moving here has presented us. Communication: wrestling with two new languages only to be told laughingly that we won't learn anything. Food: eating meat we saw hanging raw in the open for days and three meals a day of the same stale bread product, revamped by soaking in some pig lard. Also, our first morning in site, we were served pig head. For breakfast. Dwelling: a wooden shack with an unlatchable door which is regularly disturbed by the passing dog, chicken, pig, and town drunk. Hygiene: none. Well, some, but washing ones' hands in a bucket of opaque water inspires little confidence. Bathing: a nearby stream and some spousal bidet-action is involved. Laundering: similar to bathing, minus the bidet. Toilet: oh, the toilet. I will spare you all the details, but let's just say only liquids go down...ever. Labor: chopping, hacking, and dragging branches for cooking fuel, shucking corn, um, having all our meals prepared for us... which brings us to Dependence: this is perhaps the hardest, as it is not possible to shift to interdependence just yet, and we are relying heavily on the kindness of strangers for even our most basic of needs. For people who love hosting others and cooking, baking, and creating for them, it is strange to perpetually be on the receiving end.

Virtually everything here requires adjusting, shifting of perspective, and letting go of expectations and my sense of “normal,” as well as my sense of self. Imagine each of us as an intricate watercolor painstakingly painted over years and years. An experience like this is a splash of cold water that bleeds the colors and blurs the details. I am now squinting at the result, looking for what remains of the old and finding unexpected beauty in the the new.

Understand that none of this is to be read as complaining. This is precisely what we signed up for: the discomfort and challenge of down-shifting to a more simple, sustainable, communal, natural, and peaceful way of living. We have a vision of where we are going in this adventure, as well as our senses of humor and love of each other and life to carry us through the most difficult stretches. Quite the contrary to complaining, I hope to truthfully inform and elucidate you all of our life here. I do not want to simply gloss over the difficult stretches in our dispatches to you, our friends and family in the developed world. As much as I am in this to learn all I can from it, the educator in me demands that I share it so others can learn from it as well. I take this jumble of experiences like a handful of glitter and toss it in the air, leaving the wind to its task of blowing them to someone who will see their own reflection in each little mirror.

So, to tell you a little of the unexpected beauty I am finding here, please look upon our pictures and know that I am happy. Uncomfortable, stretching, blurring, changing, and happy.

Matt's turn: I have run the full gamut of emotions over the past two weeks. Sometimes within the course of a few hours. It has taken its toll on my body in the form of sinus headaches, pink eye, nagging cough, and lethargy. But things are looking up. Most of our difficulties were resolved by moving to a new location.

We started our journey in a house of seven (we were family members eight and nine) where there were lots of small children, farm animals, and unhealthy interpersonal (and interspecies) communication. We have since taken up lodging in a much larger, cleaner, and quieter space. We live with a single mom and her two kids, a 14-year old girl and 5 year old boy. They are certainly not rich, but they seem very happy. Although there is no running water, they go to great lengths to provide us with clean water with which to bathe, insist on doing our laundry, and keep the house meticulously clean. Also, the toilet is in much better shape and I no longer feel sick. The only downside is they are about half a mile from the nearest neighbor. While our time here is peaceful, we are certainly not as easily able to integrate into our community.

It is a constant struggle to balance my desire for independence and the unbelievable generosity of our community. How long do I try to convince our host mother that I can wash my own clothes before I give in and let her do them? When we visit the neighbor and she sets out a three-course lunch after we just finished a three-course lunch an hour ago, how much do we eat? How late do we stay up watching terrible Brazilian soap operas with the family?

We are searching for a home of our own for the next two years of our life and it has not been easy. Vacant homes in a community this small are few and far between. There is a big vacant home available, but it has been used as a cattle stall for the last few years and needs so much work it might be cheaper and easier to build a home from scratch. But where to put it? We know we want neighbors, but we don't want to live in someone's backyard (another option available to us).

A friend of mine compared the confinement of Peace Corps Training to being stuffed into a cannon; you will live here, eat this, sleep here, be at this place at this time and for this long, etc. After swearing in, the cannon has been fired and we are flying through the air, completely unrestricted, but looking for a safe place to land.

P.S. For the record; we have only been told once that we won't learn anything. And we didn't believe it for a second.

Retro Post

Tragety strikes today, as the Health volunteers of G-35 were struck down by food poisoning at the very restaurant we reserved for our celebration dinner last night. Damn you, Bolsi Bar! Matthew is under voluntary house arrest at the hotel while Tegan explores the capital city of Asuncion.

In happier news, here is a post we wrote before we swore in, but were unable to publish due to hundreds of simultaneous activities:

Greetings, everyone, and we hope you enjoy our last post as trainees! That's right, this Friday we swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers. It is an exciting time, filled with lots of activities and emotions.

The first bit of news is that we have officially become members of our Paraguayan host family! The night before we left to visit the site of our new home for the next two years (pictures on Matthew's Facebook page), our host brother asked us to be his godparents! In Paraguay, it is tradition that the parents pick the child's godparents at birth, but the child gets to choose a second set for their confirmation in the Catholic church around their 16^th birthday. So it appears we will be returning to Guarambare in November for a big celebration. Our family has hosted a number of volunteers over the years and with the language barrier and cultural differences it was sometimes difficult to tell if they viewed us simply as friendly foreigners passing through their lives or something more. So it goes without saying that we were unbelievably flattered to be honored in this way. Matthew will start working on his Marlon Brando accent posthaste.

Another exciting milestone happened when we spent five days and nights in our new home in the Santa Rosa district of the Misiones department. Each of us has a contact within our community that we will be working closely with over the next two years. Matthew's contact is a strong and strong-willed woman of 63 who works the fields, rides horses, plays soccer, and lives on her own (all of these things are rare for a Paraguayan woman of any age). She also runs the village's “social pharmacy” which means she provides the citizens with a mix of natural and “modern” medicines. She is the de facto medical expert in the community as the official government health post is only open two hours a week. Between wanting to build fogones, latrines, learn about parasites, HIV/AIDS/STIs, and improve the hours of the health post, Matthew will be kept very busy by the new community.

By contrast, Tegan's community contact is a soft-spoken 29 year old mother of three. We stayed with her during our visit and she was our main guide tot he community. We assumed she would be one of the few Spanish speakers in the community, but a vast majority of the community members between the ages of 10 to 50 can speak it fluently. She teaches second grade (half-time) at the community's school and on that salary she keeps her household of eight (her, her three kids, her two sisters, and her parents) running. Somehow, she has been able to save and borrow enough to start construction on a new home that she wants to rent to us. The new house is technically on her family's property and in between their house and the house of Matthew's contact. We hope everything works out and we are able to rent this house and support a single mom trying to improve life for herself and her family.

During our stay we met a few other families and walked over a good portion of our village. The 450 inhabitants that were estimated on our initial information form seems like a bit of an overestimation. The main industry seems to be raising cattle and therefore the houses are dispersed quite a distance apart. For amenities, there is a store an elderly woman runs out of her house and, during our visit, had noodles, onions, margarine, and alcohol in stock. There is meat on Wednesdays we are told. It looks like we will be doing a majority of our shopping in Santa Rosa, which is an hour bus ride away.

Our best friend in our site so far is a 7 year old girl who speaks little-to-no Spanish. The first day we were in site, she was entertaining herself by jumping around and rolling in the dirt. We gave her the nickname Kururu (“toad” in Guarani), which she seemed to love, shouting it over and over. We climbed trees, danced, and otherwise entertained each other during our visit.

As with any community, not all is paradise. No one washes their hands after using the bathroom, nor do they wear shoes (with so much livestock around, this is a great way to get worms burrowing into your feet and making their way into your bloodstream). There are a number of alcoholics in the area, one of whom lives nearby. Matthew's contact was under the impression that he would be more of a medical expert than a health educator, so some assumptions need to be adjusted. The teachers at the local high school don't live in the community, only visit one or two days a week, and have a very low opinion of the students (many Paraguayans become teachers not because of an innate desire to teach, but because it is one of the few jobs with regular pay in the nation). Learning more Guarani will be essential as no one ever speaks Spanish unless they are speaking to us. Also, there are innumerable number of invisible social and cultural norms that will be (and may already have) bumped into, and occasionally, broken.

For example, one afternoon during our stay, we were fed tripe. Yes, the intestines of the family's own cow is considered a treat here in Paraguay. If you've never had tripe straight up boiled, sans spices, we'll just say it tastes a lot like cows smell. We were having visible trouble with the dish and the mother and chef of the house felt so bad she invited us back the next day for lunch, where she prepared enough milanesa (essentially chicken-fried steak) for us each to eat three or four full steaks to make up for the previous day's shame.

All the hurdles we have before us we are hopeful and optimistic that we can clear. We are in love with the generosity and friendliness we were met with and are looking forward to working with such efficient and resourceful people. We have already seen people using empty plastic or metal containers as planters, which reminds us of the reclaimed-materials movement we thought we were leaving behind in Portland. Also, our second day in site, we built a wand-washing station (take an empty two-liter bottle with cap on, cut off the bottom, fill with water, turn bottom upside down and put it back in the larger opening and place soap inside, cut two slits near the top, thread wire or string through the slits; open the cap slightly to get water out and you can wash your hands wherever you like!) outside of the family's latrine. So taken with our creation, our 7 year old friend built one of her own before the day was through! Now we just need to get her to use it...

This Friday we swear in with our friends in Asunción Traditionally, everyone sticks around for the weekend and spends a little more time together before we all scatter in the wind. It will be lots of fun, but also bittersweet, as a lot of these friends have been neighbors over the past 10 weeks, but now will be a 6, 8, or 10 hour bus ride away from us in their sites. We look forward to staying in touch with them through the cell phones we are soon to receive. Also, lots of volunteers get together around the 4^th of July, Thanksgiving, and additional trainings and in-services throughout our service. We are excited to and share our experiences with them and learn from the experiences they have had.

The next post will be our first as volunteers, and hopefully posted from our little casita in the campo! Until then, please keep in mind we can start receiving visitors July 15^th (mid-winter here)!

Thinking of you all,

The Godparents

Fotos!

Hey everyone!

We just returned from visiting our future home in Misiones! Check out Matt's Facebook for photos. We will write about our experiences soon (I hope). We become official volunteers April 15th with a big fiesta and swearing-in ceremony Asuncion. Our lives are a whirlwind of activity until then.

Thinking of you all,
Those People You Know Who Live In Paraguay

Home, Sweet Home

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are proud to announce our new home for the next two years: Santa Rosa, Misiones!

Located in the south of Paraguay, along the Argentine border, Misiones is famous for cows and catholic settlement ruins. Oh, and sheep. Our particular site has a population around 450 (452 now, as a friend of ours puts it). Also, we will be speaking primarily Guaraní, so get used to some more stories regarding the strange and inappropriate uses of the language in future posts. It is rumored that we will have both running water and electricity. We have a friend from training who will live about 10km away (6ish miles) and will be our brain-break when we need an English escape... if we even remember English by the end of this!

After being presented a folder of info about our site, we were approached by several directors and tech. trainers to be regaled with stories of how lovely our site is both, in ambiance and community. We have only seen a few photos and both passed through this department (state) for our Long-Field Practice, but already have a sense of lush, verdant rolling hills with a smattering of trees and rocky baby mountains jutting up. For the Oregonians out there, picture the northern approach to Eugene south of Salem.

To share a little of the antsy-butterflies (or burbujas, as Paraguayans call it bubbles in your stomach) we are currently feeling, the next Carter Lange post will be to tell you all about our week-long visit to our future community!!!!! Friday morning we will each meet our community contacts and all ride the bus back to our little town to spend a week meeting the family we will live with for a month or two, drinking a few gallons of tereré (cold maté & medicinal herbs) with each of the 100 families, see the house they´re building for us, visit the town school, and who knows what else.

Keep us in your thoughts! You are all in ours!
Much love,
the Carter Langes

Keeping In Touch

M'bae la porte!

Hey folks, just a quick note that if you have Skype, you may occasionally find us online at the following username:

tegan.c.l.

(please note there are not one, or two, but three periods in the name)

This and our email addresses (matthewdlange@gmail.com and teganamber@gmail.com) are great ways to contact us. In this space, we blather on and on about what we are doing, but please keep us posted on what you are up to as well.

Jajotopata!

Healthy Living

Just uploading some photos today depicting our life in Paraguay. We recently returned from Long Field Practice, a four day trip to another volunteer´s site in which Matthew went to the nearby campo, built another fogón (brick & mud oven), gave a talk to adults regarding nutrition, and a talk to kids regarding dental health. Tegan went to Encarnacion (a big city) and taught a lot of classes on a lot of different topics, including democracy, literacy, values, which she will go into more detail in another post. For now, enjoy the photos of Matthew´s trip! (and, as always, start at the bottom if you want it to make sense)

If Peace Corps doesn´t work out, there´s always Wrangler.

We also spoke about dental health at a nearby school.

The spider was found under my shoe one morning. The coin next to it is a little bigger than a quarter.

We gave a talk on nutrition at the local church.

My host sister, Gavi, followed me like a shadow.

This is what your kitchen looks like when you cook over an open flame for decades. Part of the reason you build a fogón is to keep people´s lungs from looking like this.

Views of and from the house.

View from my window at my temporary host family´s house. Piglets!