34
My family is incredible, I love them so much already and I feel like I
have known them for a greater portion of my life, when really it has only been
a month in a half. I live with my Mama, Catalina, who has six children (ages 25-32) and
five grandchildren (ages 3-14). I live with my Mom, my sister Belen (29) and her son Fernandito (3), my
other sister Rosa (31) and her daughter Ota (7), and my brother, Rafael
(31). In the house behind ours are my sister Maria (27), her husband Hugo and
her daughter Vito (9). Behind Maria’s house is my brother Leaders (25) house, he lives with his
girlfriend Karina (22), I don’t see them much as they are very busy with school
and work. A five-minute walk down the roadis my other
sister’s house Sole who lives with her husband and her two sons Isaias (14) and
Fernando (8). Isaias has become one my closest Paraguayan friends here, he has
helped me so much with the language and is always open to playing futbol,
exploring the community and explaining things for an endless amount of times
without getting frustrated. I feel so
incredibly lucky to have an amazing supportive family here. There is always
someone around who can hangout and drink terere. With a family of 12 people
there’s never a dull moment. Living with such a large family has been a great experience,
one that is much different than what I am accustomed to in the states. Growing
up as an only child, my time spent with a large group of family happened only
at major holidays. So other than that my time was spent with my parents or my
close friends who have become family. These past experiences makes it sometimes
overwhelming when I have multiple people trying to talk to me at once, but I’ve
learned that in these moments taking a deep breath and talking to one person at
a time makes me feel less overwhelmed. As a young
girl, I spent many years telling my Mom how I want to live on a farm with many
animals; she did the best to accommodate to that dream with Chickens, Dogs,
Cats, and Guinea Pigs for a decent portion of my childhood. That dream has
stuck with me throughout the years and now I finally have something similar to
that. At our house we have mas o menos 30 chickens that run around the yard and
at times in the kitchen, we have two cows, one in which I have learned to milk,
we have a Goat and her baby, which I try to force into cuddling as much as
possible, we have three ducks and 20 eggs waiting to be hatched,three dogs, one
cat and four adult pigs (the 5thone I watched
get killed for my sisters work party) and five piglets. So as you may
imagine I am quite happy in this house full of animals and I am always going
out to the back with my sobrinos to check out and share my love for animals. Moving on to
language, I am astonished at how much I have learned in the past six weeks, I
came in barely knowing anything in Castellano and now I am holding
conversations for a long period of time that don’t just consist of me being
hungry, tired or needing to shower. I owe a lot of
this development to my family who has helped me significantly, especially
Isaias and Rafael they have been lifesavers. Next I would have to thank the
challenging, exhausting but very successful language program the Peace Corps
has set up for us. I tested into the lowest language level (I’d like to think I
knew more when I first got here but let’s be honest—I knew barely anything), so
I spent the first two weeks learning Spanish with three other people in my
community. These three people have become family to me and for this reason,
along with many others, I am so proud to see how far the four of us have come
in our languages both with Castellano and our newest language Guarani. “What is
Guarani?” you may ask. Well to some of you who asked this question before I
left I said “ It’s a variation of Spanish, so it should come easy”. I’d like to
think someone in the universe was rolling on the floor laughing when I said
that because let me tell you, Guarani is no where near similar to
Castellano. Yes sometimes we use similar verbs as Spanish, yes most times we
use jopora which is a mixture of the two languages, but most importantly, yes
all the times I am learning my third language in my second language—this has to
be one of the hardest things yet.
Guarani
is filled with nasal words, has several new letters in the alphabet (ex. Mb),
and is rarely spoken as pure Guarani, as most people speak in a jopora where
Spanish words are incorporated in to sentences. Although I don’t know my future
site yet I predict that learning Guarani as much as I can now is essential to
my service because I asked to be in a more campo site. With a campo site, comes
a rural community that is more isolated from the cities, people who spend most
of their time working at home or in a field can generally have more access to
nature areas and farm animals, and almost 90% of the time, the people speak
only Guarani. So with this
knowledge, I am working on integrating Guarani. But with the difficulty that
comes with this language, the interesting thing that I wasn’t prepared for is
that often the change in the gut noise in your throat, forgetting a letter or
nasal sound can change a word from food to penis, it’s hot to I’m sexually
excited, and do you want to eat or drink to lets have sex—so as you could
imagine I’m trying my best to watch what I say.
Internet is not as available as I would have hoped to keep this more active, so
this is my late or early apology to those who haven’t heard from me as much as
I would have liked. On September 20, I find out my future site, which is where
I will be living for the next two years. On Monday December 9 I leave for my
future site, my access to Internet may change for the better or worse, so let
us hope for the best. Until next
time, suerte!
35
36
37
38