Busy, Busy

I am sorry that is has been so long since we last blogged. It has been more difficult to get to the Internet. We have been busy on site. Joe has been working on his census again..after taking a month break. He needs to write a community study in Spanish by Novemeber. He is about half way done with the census. It is difficult because we need a member of the community to come with us and translate many questions into Guarani.
I have been super busy trying to get a support room started. The kindergarten room has just become vacant and I get my own classroom to work with the students that need help with reading. I am also going to go into the classrooms and do model lessons, showing the teachers how they can use reading in their rooms. I am trying to get a balanced schedule, I have 5 students in the morning and 19 in the afternoon. Wow! I have a lot of work ahead of me. I am really excited and can´t wait to start on Monday. I will be helping the students and also improving my Spanish.
The weather here has been off and on. Last week it was hot but this week it was cold. I can´t decide which one is better. It either takes 3 hours or 3 days to dry our clothes on the clothesline.
We have been bad at taking photos and we apologize. We went to the camera store and found that our memory card had a virus so we bought a new one and play to take more pictures....especially of the giant green school garden. We play to have our own garden soon. Laura sent us sweet corn seeds from Iowa and we hope they grow here. We gave a lot of the seeds to the teachers too.
We miss you all very much. Please call if you would like or keep the email updates coming....we really enjoy them. We love you all!

Home Video

We made a video tour of our house and put it on YouTube. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82-F9zQ-JUk

Enjoy!

We miss you all!

Home Sweet Home for 2 years!

Joe and I now have a house in Paraguay. We have been enjoying our freedom and privacy. The house we are living in has 4 rooms and a new bathroom. We are happy with the bathroom; it even has warm water in the shower (though at times it blows the breaker). Our first night here while I was taking a shower I blew the breaker 5 times, we figured out that we have to unplug the fridge and not use the stove while trying to take a warm shower. Since we moved in the days have been cold and rainy which gives us a good reason to stay inside and be lazy. We are very lucky because we got most of the furniture for our house from my community contact; she is letting us borrow it for 2 years. She gave us a bed, 2 tables with chairs, and a fridge (though we paid for a new motor).

It is great cooking for ourselves; Joe has been making most of the food. So far we made pizza, spaghetti, grilled cheese, French fries, potato soup, pancakes, and tacos. A special thanks to my parents for sending us taco seasoning and cooking spices. We have been looking through recipe books for other things to cook, there is a Peace Corps Paraguay cookbook that we use a lot because it has ingredients that we can find here.

School vacation has been extended a week because of the swine flu. It is big news here and the people are really worried about it. So we are going to use the extra week off on visiting people in our community and perfect our cooking skills. School started but then we had to leave to go back to Guarambare for 2 1/2 days of training. Most of the training was in Spanish for me and Guarani for Joe. Guarani is so difficult to pronunciate.

We were sad to miss opening night of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince movie but we caught it in Asuncion at the only mall that had it in English with Spanish subtitles. We really enjoyed it, though the books are never as good as the books.

We can't believe we have been here for 6 months. There are many more months to go but we are ready to get some projects started. The first couple of months was spent getting to know the community and learn more Spanish but now is the time to get started. I am going to start working with reading because there are 5th graders that don't know how to ready. I really enjoy reading and think it is very important for kids to learn so hopefully I can get something started with the teachers and working individually with the students. There are not many books in the library and students don't have any in their homes so just getting books in their hands will be great. Joe is not sure what he will try to focus on, possibly educating parents and community members about health topics.

We would love to get updates on how everyone is doing at home. Please email us.