Many Pictures

Me with the 1st grade class and teacher.

Behind us around the chalkboard is the abcs we made.

Joe helping plow the school garden


After first day of building the bathroom

The outside just about finished

Our Future Home in July!

Carpinchos at the park in Villarrica

Joe's favorite animal....carpinchos (giant rodents)

Joe and his carpinchos

Feeding Time

Joe and I are in the Asuncion right now to go to meetings at the Peace Corps office. We have been in our site for one month now and have already began some work. I have made some abc cards for 1st and 2nd grade and also clocks in 3rd grade. We reused cardboard boxes for all of the materials. I think I will become pretty good at reusing items and might take that back to me the United States. Joe has also started some work...he has worked hard on our new bathroom and also getting the school garden ready. Our school is really excited to have a school garden and made it huge so we will have a lot of work to do. Along with the garden Joe and I will be giving nutrition talks in the classrooms.

We have actually had some colder weather. It has been rainy and chilly but people have promised us it still gets colder. It wouldn't be so cold if you could get warm inside your house but it is the same inside as outside. People in our community ask us why we are cold because it gets much colder where we are from, but we also have heaters inside our houses. June and July are the cold months here, I don't think we will be washing many of our clothes because we have to do it by hand, outside, with cold water. We can't believe it is summer vacation at home when we are cold here. Congratulations Toni on graduating from high school. I am very sad that we could not be there. I also was sad to miss Lane's baptism but I really loved the pictures.

Steve and Laura we got our package! Thank you so much! We are so excited to watch High School Musical 3 for the next 2 years!

We miss you all very much.

Just a Quick Note

Joe and I are in town to look for stuff to construct our new bathroom. Yesterday we worked on the yard and cleaning the inside of our future home. Joe was excited to use his machete to trim the trees. There is still more work to do but it was awesome to get started. My contact´s husband and Joe are going to be building the bathroom....lets hope they know what they are doing. We can´t get too excited about moving in the house because we have to live with host families until July. This week the teachers are on strike so there is not much for me to do. I am not sure the reason they are on strike, either they didn´t get their money or they want more. I have been studying my spanish and trying to get ideas of how to start at the school. Joe has also been trying to decide how to start, at least the bathroom will give him something to do. We do not have much other news. I just thought I would quick put something up since we had some time. We had a great time this weekend talking to family, it is always great to talk in English.

We miss you all very much!

First Week in Site!

Hello everyone! We are now official in our site and working as volunteers. We did enjoy staying in a hotel and having our independence. Right now we are living with a host family: a teacher, a librarian, a 13 year old boy, and a 9 year old boy. The 9 year old reminds us a lot of Thomas so it is fun to play with him. We enjoy living with them....we have our own room above the house with a bathroom. Houses here usually do not have 2 stories. We sit out on the balcony and looking at the stars while playing games on our new cell phones. We made our family pizza one night but they make it different here, you cook all the ingredients first and then put it in the oven for 2 minutes. The dough is already made.
The second day we were here we went to the school and they had a fiesta because the next day was Teacher´s Day. They should have that at home! :) The next two days the kids didn´t have school so we learned how to wash our laundry by hand and went to Villarrica. It takes about an hour by bus to get to Villarrica, which is where we are right now. We met up with other volunteers and explored the city. The rest of this week I plan to go to the school and Joe is going to visit the health post and find some work to do. I visited the school yesterday and observed 3rd and 5th grade. They teach a lot differently here, most of the time kids are copying off the board into their notebooks because they don´t have textbooks. But sometimes the teachers just sit there and make them copy without teaching them anything. It is going to difficult to try to get them to use a different method of teaching.
We have decided on living in the house that we need to build a bathroom. We saw some other houses but this one was the best. We will need to take some pictures of the bathroom in process.
I am not sure how often we will get to the internet but I will try to post as much as we can. We are looking into internet but we would have to put up an antenna and we don´t want the whole community to know we have a computer or internet.
I am excited to see pictures of Toni at prom so Mom and Dad send some soon!
Happy Mother´s Day on Sunday.....moms you can call us on Sunday if you want....that is reverse but if you use an international calling card it should work well.
We miss you all!