Rain Check

So my Dia de Salud had to be postponed yesterday due to rain....lame. But, that is just how things go in Paraguay. Im not too bummed about it. We reschuled for the 22nd, lets hope the weather is nice. It has been cold and very, very rainy for the past week or so. Not fun. Things in my house have started to grow mold on them, like my nice suade shows and my bee keeping gear. There isn´t really anything I can do since they are hanging in my house. When it is cold and wet outside, it is cold and wet inside! It reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, when it rains for years and the town gets covered in a green mold - that´s my house right now! Yuck! But, whatever, it is alright. Im not bummed about the weather, it is what it is and that is all it is! Though I must say I am running short on clean clothes! You can´t wash your clothes in this weather because they will never dry. So what do I do? Well, I drink a lot of maté, that is for sure, but I also read and just hangout with my community members and then we drink more maté. I finished Anna Karinina, though I have to admit I wasn´t too blown away by it.
In other news, I have some Americans living in my community! Two highschool volunteers from a program called Amigos de Las Americas are living their for a month. I went and trained the whole group of 60 some odd highschoolers on Guarani, paraguayan culture, gardening and tree planting last week. They will be in different communities doing garden work, tree planting and building of fogóns. A fogón is a brick and earth stove and oven. They are relatively simple to make but the added benefit is that it gets the women in my community from cooking on the floors which is both dangerous for little children who occasionally fall in and also bad for womens health since they are constantly breathing in smoke from their fires. The fogón has a chimney, so the smoke is taken outside. The Amigos volunteers should be making 5 fogóns. I am honestly a bit nervous. They had a little less than a day training on how to make them, and I question the goal of this NGO. To me, and to the other PC volunteers who helped train, the NGO seems more like a summer camp for highschoolers that is more aimed towards making the kids feel good about doing something rather than REALLY doing this for Paraguayans. I only say that because they spent little time on training for fogóns, which is their main goal. They were not emphasized enough to the kids. I dont think they realize how important these are to the Paraguayans that receive them. I mean, these are EXTREMELY important to Paraguayans. I have seen children scarred for life by falling into fires when young, and I hear the respiratory problems of the señoras in my community. And yet these volunteers come in and barely know how to make them. Basically, if they can´t do it I am going to step in and finish these fogóns myself if I have to. I know it might not be the best thing, but I am looking out for my community. These volunteers will leave in a couple weeks and that will be that, I am living with these people and I want them to have these fogóns.