I, Kendra Heitritter solemly swear........

Asuncion sunset---view from the rooftop pool

view from the rooftop pool where we laid in the sun

Joe in his element doing karoke

At the US Embassy at the black and white party

The Rural Health Group

The best cake ever!

Some great friends!

We can really clean up.

Pretty waterfall.

We are now official volunteers. Friday in the morning we went to the US Embassy....the second largest US Embassy, it is beautiful. The US Ambassador gave a speech and we took the Peace Corps oath (which is the same at the US vice president). After the ceremony we ate some snacks and got the most delicious cake I have ever had. We took many pictures and then left for the Peace Corps office. We signed a lot of papers, recieved a bank card, and cell phones. We got some very nice cell phones, nicer than the one I had at home. We relaxed that day and at night we went a pub and then to a black and white party at the US embassy with the Marines. After we went to karoke, which is one of Joe's favorite things. We were very tired at the end of the night. Today, Saturday we had some yummy breakfast of super fruit and we sat/swam at the rooftop pool. I am pretty burnt right now. Tonight we are planning on going out for Mexician food. The rest of the weekend we are not sure what we are doing. Relaxing. It is great to be in air conditioning with internet and tv. After living with a family it is great to be on our own. Tuesday we are going out to our site sometime in the afternoon. We will try to keep you posted while we are at our site but it might be more difficult unless we get internet at our house.

Emma Heitritter you looked so beautiful at prom, we hope you had fun.

We miss you all!

mailing address

I changed our mailing address on here. It is the same just without the CHP part because we will no longer be there. We are welcome to packages. We might look into getting a mailing address at the big city about an hour away from us but we will see.
Grandma we got your package! THANK YOU!

One Week Left!

We are coming to a turning point in our Peace Corps experience! We will get to become volunteers, we are very excited and cannot wait for our two years of service to begin. This past week I finished up my time at the school we were working with, it was interesting to see a Paraguayan classroom. We also went to the Peace Corps office and got more information about becoming volunteers. Also this week we got to participate in a couple of ultimate frisbee games. Joe and I had a great play and everyone was calling it ¨the husband-wife connection¨. But today we are very sore and tired. We are sad to leave our host family and not be around other volunteers in our group.
This coming week we will be wrapping up training. On Friday we have the official swear in ceremony at the US Embassy. It will be a great time to celebrate and dress up fancy. After swearing in we are going to spend a couple of days in Asuncion at a hotel with a swimming pool and air conditioning! We are also hoping for a fluffy bed. We will also recieve cell phones and are excited to be able to talk with family on phones instead of the internet. On Tuesday the 28th we will leave for our site and be there for the next 2 years.
Training was a great learning experience but there were also a lot of frustrations. Though we have definately progressed in our Spanish and are starting to learn some Guarani. We are ready to get out and work with the Paraguayan people.
We have recieved two packages this week on Monday. One from Aunt Dode and one from my awesome mother-in-law, which was full of some great games. I also got a letter saying that we recieved a package so hopefully we will get it tomorrow...Monday.
Uncle Doug I sent your Parguayan coins to you last Monday so hopefully you will receive them in a couple of weeks with the money still inside.
We miss you all very much! Thank you for all of your prayers, we appreciate them and couldn´t do this without the support of God, our family, and our friends!

This week is Semana Santa, Easter week. In Paraguay it is a big deal, the kids had school on Saturday so that they don´t have it tomorrow, Wednesday. They also have a tradition that on Friday you cannot eat meat only chipa...which is a dry bread, people here love it but for Joe and I that we can eat some fruit instead. During Semana Santa people said they don´t do much but get together with family and rest. We don´t think we will mind resting.



After my last post Joe reminded me that I needed to post a funny conversation that happened last week. I was walking with my community contact the first day we met them and we were going to get some juice. We were talking about how thrist we were and I said ¨Tengo sed. Aloha hugo.¨ Which means I am thristy, I hope there is juice. But Aloha was not the right word, I wanted to say Ojala (oh-ha-la) which means I hope so. But I said the Hawiian greeting instead. Ironically Aloha in Guaranì means juice. So really I didn´t sound stupid, lucky for me.

OUR SITE!

Joe being lazy during an afternoon napa beautiful view from one of the schools

our main school

our hopefully future home

We have just returned from visiting our future site and we are very excited. It is a small town in the district of Guairá. There are about 4,000 people...two schools, a health post, and little stores people have in their homes where you can buy food and other miscellaneous items. We found out our site on Wednesday and we both had a contact from the community come on Thursday. My contact was the librarian of the major school and Joe´s was a nurse at the health post. We enjoyed getting to know them for a couple of days and left with them on Friday morning. We had to travel for 4 hours and take 3 buses. To get to our site and in our site there is a cobbled road, which is good news for us....less dirty and if it rains we can still get to town. We stayed with my contact in a very nice house. We got to learn Spanish and Guaraní from them and we taught them English.
While on our visit we walked around the community which is very spread out and it was hot. We definately got our exercise and are looking forward to recieving bikes from the Peace Corps. We visited both schools....one school has preschool-high school and the other school has preschool-6th grade. We went to the health post and visited the nurses, where we had to explain to them that Joe was not a doctor but a volunteer to help the community better their personal health. The schools are very excited to have us and the students and teachers were very welcoming. We ate a lot of typical Paraguayan food and drank lots of terere. While in site we looked at houses we could live in on our own. For the first 3 months we live with host families on our site, we are going to try and move around to get to know our community well. We found a house we loved with 4 rooms!!!! but it does not have a bathroom. We talked to other people and decided it would be worth building a bathroom and then we don´t have to pay rent for two years. What a good deal.
When it was time for us to leave we were sad to go and couldn´t wait to go back. We are so excited to start our work in Paraguay and hope to have lots of visitors from the US at our own house!