It has been a while...HELLO!

Hello friends and Family!

Sorry it has been so long since I have written, things have been a little hectic here! I no longer have access to internet all the time. It takes me about an hour bus ride to get to the city to use the internet cafe.

So much has happened since I last wrote! First of all, I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer as of April 15! Our group of 48 volunteers swore in with the ambassador of the U.S. at the U.S. embassy. It was a really great ceremony...well mostly just for the chocolate cake... which was fabulous!

After our ceremony, we all stayed in the capital of Paraguay for 3 days to have a small vacation before leaving eachother for our sites that we will be l living in for two years. We stayed at a nice hotel in the city and all exchanged movies and music before departing to the ends of the earth...well, really just Paraguay.

We all left for our sites on the 19th of April by bus. We brought with us as much stiuff as we could fit on our backs and left the rest in storage until our site presentations with the Director of Rural Health and Sanitation (this is when our boss comes out to our sites to officially present us to our community.) I will be having my site presentation on the 19th of May. I hope it comes sooner than later because I am f-f-f-f-f-f-FREEEZING! yES, i SAID IT. iT IS COLD in SOuth America right now...I could see my breath this morning as I left the house in burmuda shorts. Hahaha I guess when I left for site sweating, I did not plan for cold wheather and left my long pants in storage.

Just got a notification from the PC office about packages... thank you to everyone who sent them!! I dont know who they r from yet, but thanks!!! hahaha

Lets see, right now not too much is going on in the form of what I am doing for work in my community right now. I am not allowed to actually start working for three months. This is so that I can get to know the community first and thorouughly understand the way they do things and what the problems really are. So, right now I have just been talking with people and getting to know my new neighbors. I attended a women´s commission meeting ( this is how people get stuff done here. They are groups of about 20 women who work together in an pofficial group to ask for things from the government to better their lives and they also work together in the farm and their gardens to raise money together for their families.) yesterday and talked to the ladies about furture projects and goals. We discussed the major healñth problems afflicting people here and what causes those problems. We then had a brainstorming sessiion on things we could do together to better the situation. The main problems were things like nutrition, diabetes, high blood pressure, parasitosis, and dental health. When I asked about dental health, everyone started laughing and covering their mouths because it is a HUGE problem here. Most people are missing teeth...a lot of teeth. When someone has a cavity here, they just yank out the whole tooth. AND people have  ALOT of cavities. Nutrition is really ppoor here. People eat a lot of sugar and fat. They also have poor dental hygeine practices. Most people to not brush their teeth.

Over the next two years I will be working with this commission, the school, and the other 4 womens commisions in the village to better health practices. I will be working with kids in the school to talk about hygeine, parasitosis, nutrition, and dental health. Along with the new school commision that we are getting together, we are going to tryu to bring a doctor and a dentist out to the school. We would like to get some antiparasitosis drugs for the village (on average 80 percent of people in the rural parts of paraguay have parasites) To do this, we have to write out documents and go through some beaurucratic nonsense to ask from the government.

As for my day-to-day stuff: right now, I am working on completeing a house for me to live in. The host family I am living with now are lending me a house rent-free! Which is ver nice of them. It was SUPER dirty when I first saw it. I have never seen so many spiders in my life... I am talking a thatch roof FULL of webs and spiders. I took some spider fumagator in there and knocked them out...but not without having a few in my hair and climbing up my arms! My neighbor came over to see what I was doing the other day and we were talking about her kids. I had a broom in my hand and she said in spanish that I had a spider on my arm. I threw the broom and screamed. This was the day that everyone learned of my fear of spiders. haha. Apart from cleaning, we are putting in a bathroom. There is currently a latrine there but my family was pretty insisten that they didnt want me leaving my room in the middle of the night to use the latrines, so we are putting in a bathroom. Most everyone in the village uses latrines. The houses are mostly thatch roof houses. People are poor here. They are all farm families. They leav their houses aearly in the Ox cart to go to the chacra.

Apart from my house stuff, I spend most of my day doing chores..haha. Life takes longer when you don{t have things like microwaves, stoves, vens, dishwashers, washing machines, ect. Haha so I devote half a day to washing clothes and then I usually make atleast one meal for our family everyday. This is for two reasons: one is that I want to teach my host mom how to cook healthier (almost everything here is fried and contains red meat.) The second is that I want to eat well. I enjoy vegetables, and they are few and far between in the food here. So right now I buy groceries for our family and we eat salads...because I make them! haha

Other than that, not a whole lot going on in rural Paraguay. I heard that you all had some pretty crazy tornadoes... I hope everyone made it out okay! I miss you all a lot! I think about how blessed I am to have such wonderful friends and family back home everyday. I am excited to be able to come back for a couple of weeks at the end of August and beg of September for the birth of my new nephew!

If you have the resources to come down to Paraguay, come visit me anytime! My village would love to meet you all!

Jajatopata! (guarani for see you later) -Em