Home?

I know, the title isn't in Spanish. Weird. But it's about time for me to start transitioning back into English, no?

I remember before I came realizing that it was soon when I could look at the 10-day weather forecast and know what the weather was going to be like when I arrived. Now I only need one more day past the 3-day forecast that automatically shows up until the weather here in Paraguay doesn't affect me anymore.

I'm leaving on Monday, so this is probably my last post in-country. The last week has been crazy and busy and wonderful. I have my final presentation in the office tomorrow morning, and then I'm done, and have the weekend to hang out with people and pack up. I'm excited to go home where the plumbing always works and I have my own bedroom and a job that I get paid to do, not to mention my family and friends, but...

I'm happy here. A deep-down, satisfied, comfortable kind of happy. And there's so much work left to be done. That's not to say they can't do it without me, of course they can. And this kind of work will never be done. Maybe I'm just not done. But life calls; school calls.

I will try to write a couple more times with more general reflections on my experience here, once I've had time to readjust to life back in the States and consider it all more completely. Thank you all for following along on this journey.

Sueños

I have heard my supervisors say to committees time and time again "It's not about money, it's about your life and your dreams." Recently, we've been trying to help the women develop specific goals and plans out of their dreams. And then, turn their goals into reality. But first, we had them write down some of their dreams. I thought I would share some.

"Mi sueños es acer un negocio de verdad y de conceguir en ayuda de ustedes y des dios" (For those of you who speak Spanish, forgive the spelling errors, I'm writing them as they did.) My dream is to have a real business and continue moving forward with help from you and from God.

"Mi sueño: dentro de 2 a 3 años sueño con este salon" My dream: within 2 to 3 years I dream of having this salon (There was a drawing of the salon, sorry I missed that.)

"Sueños: dejar a mi familia un futuro mejor: economicamente, moralmente, espiritualmente" Dreams: leave my family a better future: economically, morally, spiritually.














"Que mis hijos se casen y tener nietos" That my children get married and have grandchildren.
"Abrir mi propio joyeria en mi casa" To open my own jewlery store in my house.
"Me Gusta ayudar a todos..." I like to help everyone...
"Me gustaría abrir un peloquería en mi casa" I would like to open a hair salon in my house.

And a final thought:

Me siento linda. Si cambio, ya no voy a ser yo. I feel beautiful. If I change, I won't be me anymore.








What are your dreams?

Una Historia: Susana Zanate

A couple of weeks ago I shared the story of a woman that broke my heart and left me discouraged. Today I will tell you one that I found truly encouraging. They start the same:

A somewhat haphazardly constructed house too small for all it's members...

Incomplete walls in part of the house. (Imagine sleeping there when it rains...)

So, she too is in poverty. But that is where the similarities end. She was confident and easy to talk to. When I explained to her that I needed to take some pictures of her house for the Ikatu project and asked her if that would be okay, she said, "No, you don't need to take pictures. You just want to because you think my house is so beautiful! I'll let you." She was able to laugh at herself and at me. Well, mostly me, but the point remains: she has a sense of humor.

And her house was beautiful. Despite the missing doors and incomplete walls, it was beautiful.

There were details like dried flowers on top of her refrigerator...

Her land was clean and well kept...

She has plans. Her dream is to be able to start making her own compost and using her land for more, and finish her house. I believe her when she says she knows just how to do it. And I believe her when she says she will do it.

Para Manejar un Negocio

It’s hard to run your own business. People pay thousands of dollars to go to school for years to learn how to do it. And here I am, working with an organization who gives women in developing countries money to start their own businesses who are, on average, educated to the 5^th grade. And we expect them to know how to do be successful. Or maybe we just hope. Many of them do in fact succeed, but not all of them. We give them capacitaciones every time they take out a new loan (every 3-4 months) but they can’t learn everything they need to in those 30-45 minutes.

We’ve been giving our first round of workshops of the Ikatu program (setting and reaching goals) this week, and this will continue into next week. In the meantime we’ve started writing our next workshop, which will be on planning and budgeting. It seems like a simple thing to you to know whether you’re earning more money selling something than you’re spending on the raw materials used to make it, but that’s because you were educated past the 5th grade.

I tried to explain to a woman the other day the difference between her sales and her profit—that she wasn’t earning everything she was given from selling her empanadas because she had paid for the ingredients that went into her product. This was a difficult concept to get across, and it had nothing to do with my Spanish.

These women are not stupid. I want to emphasize that. They just haven’t ever been taught. This is where we come in. We have two hours to teach them how to make and keep one budget for their business and one for their family that allows for some savings and provisions for emergencies. And in each comité, there are one or two women who don’t know how to read and write. This is where drawings come in. We’re still working out how to teach this effectively to women who have no previous knowledge of the idea, in a way that will serve its purpose but not be overly complicated.

But it is so hard to change behaviors, to create habits. At the end of these, I often go home wondering, Are they actually going to do what we’ve just taught them?

Iguazú

This weekend, Katherine and I went on an adventure. The plan: Iguazú falls. These are famous waterfalls on the river that creates the border between Brazil and Argentina. The bus that goes there from Asuncion takes you all the way to the Brazil side, but Kat didn't have a visa for Brazil, so we were told we had to get off in Ciudad del Este, the city just on the Paraguay side of the border.

So, we followed the rules and got off of our bus at the bus terminal in Ciudad del Este though I'm pretty sure no one would have cared if we just stayed on...where we proceeded to wait for another bus that would take us to the Argentina side of the falls, where you don't need a visa to get in and we would be able to spend the night. The bus never came. (The lesson: don't get off your bus unless someone makes you.)

So, instead we just found dinner and a hotel in Ciudad del Este, drank some wine...

                           ate some chocolate...

                            played some cards....

and talked about life. Sorry, no pictures of that.

And then I asked Kat to throw cards in the air for me. I know I've found a good friend when I find one who will indulge my photographic whims with a smile...

And then we slept. In beds much more comfortable than the one I've been sleeping in for the past two months. Wonderful. We woke up bright and early Sunday morning, drank some cocido and ate some bread in true Paraguayan fashion, and decided to hop a bus into Brazil, having heard that you don't need a visa to go just for the day.

So we got on the bus and kindly asked the bus driver to drop us off at immigration, which he did. But the border people weren't too keen on letting visa-less Katherine into their country. The lesson: don't get off your bus unless someone makes you. Are you noticing a pattern here? Well, we're either slow learners, or else someone has drilled it into our heads far too many times that rules need to be followed, at least when it comes to immigration.

What do you do when one country won't take you? Go to another, of course. So we walked across no-man's-land and right back into Paraguay...

...where we hopped a bus to Argentina instead. By this time we'd learned our lesson: don't get off your bus unless someone makes you. Well, this time someone made us. But Argentina was happy to let us into their country. Thank you, Argentina.

Unfortunately, the gray and gloomy weather didn't seem to scare off the other hoards of people. As hypocritical as it may be, just because I'm an English-speaking, camera-toting white girl, doesn't mean I want to hang out with other English-speaking, camera-toting (poncho-wearing) white people. Okay, so a good number of them were from Argentina, but the point remains: tourists.

But anyway. Then we saw some waterfalls. And they were beautiful.

And then we got on a bus that drove us through Brazil  to get back to Paraguay, and five-billion more buses (I exaggerate) to get back to Asuncion. But everything worked like clockwork this time. Buses even came when people said they would. Which, quite frankly, is a miracle. It turned out to be a good adventure.

Pensamientos

Just some errant thoughts from a week in the field...

School uniforms. I have heard women say more times than I would like to relate that the reason they don't send their kids to school because they can't afford to buy them new uniforms and shoes every year. How many more kids would be educated through at least secondary school if they were allowed to wear whatever they have? Latin Americans in general seem to think that uniforms will add to the pride the children get out of their education or any other number of things, but I can't help but think that it's quite difficult to have pride in an education you never got just because your shirt was the wrong color.

Sombreros are not a lucrative business. Many of the women make sombreros by hand, which they later sell. But here's the thing: most of them are only breaking even, some of them are even losing money doing this. In most cases, they have been doing this since they were quite young, and their mothers before them... you get the idea. There's a lot of tradition and perhaps a bit of sentimentalism involved. But maybe when you don't have doors or enough clothes, there are things more important than tradition. Or maybe not, it would appear.

Childcare is a wonderful thing. Many women end up leaving businesses they've been developing for quite some time when they have another child because they can't both take care of an infant and work. It seems to me that if someone would start something like a child care center, even out of their own home, they could make some money off of it, and more women would be able to work. Everyone would be better off. I'm not sure why this doesn't happen. And while I'm at it, birth control is a wonderful thing too. I struggle to imagine that anyone actively chooses to have 15 children or 12. I met one woman last week who when asked about her bedroom situation answered thus:
"How many bedrooms do you have?"
"Two."
"And how are they divided?"
"The boys sleep in one room, the girls in the other."
"And where do you and your husband sleep?"
"He sleeps with the boys, I sleep with the girls." She followed this up with, "we can't afford to have any more kids" like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Also, it is cold. That is all.

Finally, I am leaving in just over two weeks now. That is hard to believe. I'm not sure I'll be ready.

¡Corrí!

This really has nothing to do with the work I'm doing here or even the fact that I'm in Paraguay at all, but the fact that it happened while here makes it fair game: for the first time in the three months since I injured my knee, I was able to go for a run the other day! Again in the spirit of honesty, I'm going to qualify that statement: according to my wonderful Physical Therapist, for the first week I'm allowed to run for 8 minutes every other day. Next week I get to run for a whole 12 minutes every other day. And then 15 minutes two days on, one day off the following week. You get the idea. Not much running really, but hey, you have to start somewhere, right? Right. And I'm pretty excited about it.

In other news, Winter has finally arrived here in Paraguay. It is cold. It was 37 degrees when I woke up this morning, and here's the fun part: neither the office nor our house are heated. Both have air conditioning, which I'm sure is actually more important considering how hot it gets here in summer, but heat feels pretty important too right about now. The solution? Lots of clothes and lots of tea. Mostly lots of tea. Paraguayans like tea almost as much as I do. Almost.

Blanco y Negro

Libros

Well, I've been working close to 50 hours each week, though some weeks more and others less. As it turns out though, when you don't have any homework or any other obligations upon leaving work other than sitting on the porch with your co-workers (which I do a fair amount of too--my life is hard, huh?), there's still a surprising amount of time left. And, if you know me at all, you can probably guess what a crippled me who still can't run or anything might do with all this free time when it's dark out (which it always is after work--due to this Southern-Hemisphere-Winter thing). Yep. I read. But this is somewhat problematic, since I'm hardly more than halfway through my trip and I've already finished all the books I brought with me, as well as several books other people brought with them. Oops. Miscalculated on that one.

So, I wandered into a bookstore the other day that I had seen while walking to a café to try to find a new book that I could read in Spanish. Well, nearly all of them were either translated Tom Clancy novels or the like, or....ready? In English. Which is not what I was looking for. Also, it was a used book store in which the books cost, on average, about $10. There's a used bookstore close to my home in Boulder in which I could have gotten similar books for $2. This is the one thing I've encountered thus far that actually costs more than it would in the States. When I asked around about this, everyone gave me the same reason: People just don't read around here, so in order to make any money at all, book stores need to charge high prices for the books they do sell. It's pretty basic economics, I guess, but I wonder if people would read more if the books were more affordable? Either way, it's a pretty unfortunate phenomenon.

Puesto de Salud

Last time I went out to do surveys with team Ikatu, Tim and I only had one to conduct, while a couple of others had two or three. So, when we were done with our one, we wandered around the town to see what we could learn. During our wanderings, we happened upon the health center, and decided to stop and ask some questions. It was a very informative experience.

The health center. (And Tim)

Some fun facts for you:
As you can see from the sign, the health care center is open 24 hours a day.
All services are free. But... (there are always "but"'s in the developing world)

There is never a doctor on hand. There are only nurses, and one medical student.
They never have enough medications for the month. For example, while they offer free vaccinations, they are currently out of Hepatitis.
They also offer free family planning, including birth control pills and condoms. Apparently they don't run out of these, like all other medicines. But that's only because no one takes them.
There are no emergency services. For those, you need to go to Asuncion. They have an ambulance that can take you there, but to use it, you have to pay for the gas in advance. If you can't, they won't take you.

Despite these downfalls, it seemed pretty clean and organized. It's a start.

Escuela Agrícola

Tuesday and Wednesday two other interns and I worked two consecutive 16 hour days to prepare for a meeting on Thursday with the Director that would decide the fate of Ikatu (it survived!). So, we were given Thursday and part of Friday off.  We decided to leave our computers and phones behind so we couldn't be reached and go out to the Escuela Agrícola (Agricultural School) which is run by the Fundacion, to see what that was all about.

It was great. There are 150 15-18 year old students who live there and take classes and work the farm. They rotate so they're in class one week and working on the farm the next. They learn about farming, obviously, but also about things such as hotel management (there is a hotel on the grounds), as well as the business side of running a farm. Many of their families own a good deal of land, the majority of which is not being put to use, so many of the kids hope to be able to begin using those as farms when they are finished with school.

Many students go on to University when they're done there, and the others apparently have no trouble at all finding jobs upon graduation, as they have such high levels of vocational training. It was amazing to see the way they used all natural pesticides and fertilizers, solar energy, and the like. The school is completely sustainable and self-sufficient.

We were just visiting, so we got to enjoy the experience without being interns, for a change. Here is some of what we saw:

Pig's noses. We saw pigs too, but they're not nearly as cute as their noses.

Coffee. They don't harvest it at the school, there was just a plant hanging out. Oh, South America.

Baby goats. Katherine wanted to take this one home.

And then I milked a cow. I know, you can't tell it's me, but it is!

Kiddos weeding. Fun, fun!

Stars. Lots of them. Scorpio is high in the sky in the Southern Hemisphere. Ah, to be away from the city!

Went for a little bike ride. Life is complete, now...

But in all seriousness, I may have found my calling in life. I could be happy as a farmer. Between a farm and stars and a bike ride all in one day...I dare you to try to wipe the smile off my face. It's all about the little things.