So many emotions...

so i forgot my camera and or jump drive again today, so i have no new pictures... but we´ve been back in guasu cora for about a week now after visiting our sites. training has really flown by and now i´m feeling the brunt of it. and i´m getting a little stressed. i took on a really big project of making going away presents for all my friends and its definitely taking me a lot longer than i planned on. ohhh well these are the things i like to do! and i´m trying to teach the end of our coreographed dance we´re performing for the talent show in less than a week and i haven´t even taught the end of the last dance yet. but i know it will be awesome, i´m really excited about it! other than that i´m just getting really sad to leave my family here, i feel so comfortable in my community and with my family. i can sit down and have like two hour conversations with my mom about anything, its amazing! and my brother- i just love him more and more every day! he gives me big hugs and cow kisses all the time (just like aiden!) but i told my mom yesterday i´m going to come back for his 1st birthday in a month!

last night we had a cultural exchange with the local kids. it was a lot of fun, however we were a little cramped for space because it started raining and we were forced to sit under this little overhang area. our group did the cha cha slide, my friend steph sang two songs, and my friends: andy, nicole, liza and i did a country line dance that i taught them! we all wore jeans and bandanas... it was pretty fantastic! ha! especially considering we threw it together in a day! i´m pretty good at what i do!

this week should be a lot of fun though... we have a party tomorrow at liza´s house with all our families. we have a party on tuesday afternoon with our language teachers and our families. we have our dance talent show presentation on thursday morning and that night we have another going away party at nicoles house! then we go to asuncion the next day for swearing in and we´re staying for two nights to hang out and celebrate, then we´re all off to our sites!

so all in all, i´m sad to leave but really excited to feel this comfortable in my new site and all the friendships i have to look forward to building over the next two years! ohhh and really excited to get my cell phone, i feel so lost without one! should be fantastic and i will keep you all updated. hopefully i´ll have time to put some pictures up next weekend! love and miss you all!

I Love My Site

So I have some good news and bad news. Good news, I love my future home, bad news I forgot my camera on my trip so I have no new pictures. But its okay cause I’ll have two years to take photos! So I just spent a week in my future home of Tacuaras. I had an absolutely awesome time. My site is amazing! It is about 4.5 hours from Asuncion by bus, but it goes really fast! Then its another 5km from the main paved road on a really sandy road to my town. The town itself is small and everything is really close together, which is awesome, you can walk everywhere really easy! It is really marshy down there in the south and the sand is white not red which is kinda nice my clothes hopefully won’t get as dirty! However since there is lots of water there are also lots, and lots, and lots of mosquitoes!! I know, my favorite blood sucking animal… and unfortunately on my trip I forgot my hydrocortisone cream to stop the itching, so now I have nasty scabs on my feet and legs from the extreme amount of bites I got. I swear if anything kills me here, its going to be the mosquitoes! Oh well so goes life!! But I really enjoy my community. It has an elementary school, high school, the mayor lives right in town, there is a police station, its own post office, a really nice church with priests that came from Italy, a sweet plaza, a soccer field and plenty of volley courts! And it also has its own puesto de salud with a doctor and three plus nurses, there seemed like there was tons of nurses and people always there, but there was a lot of nursing students that have to spend a certain number of hours in the puesto. I didnt do too much this week, except hang out with the family I was staying with, which is my contact, Avelina, shes super awesome and I feel really lucky to have such a great contact, she is one of the nurses at the Puesto de Salud. She has two cute kids Carlito, 3 and Joana, 11. I bonded with both of them and made good friends. Yesterday morning Joana didn’t want me to leave! And last night Carlito and I were snuggling in my bed and playing with my ipod, I was showing him my pictures while we were listening to music! In the house was also Avelinas mom and dad, sister and nephew. The sister Ale was really cool, shes 14, almost 15, she’ll turn 15 two days after I get there! She was my professora this week, she helped me study Guarani and she quizzed me all week! Avelina and I walked around the community and meet people a bunch this week. Everyone seemed sooo nice, I was a little worried at the beginning because one of the other nurses came over to the house the first night I got there (hes Avelinas cousin) and hes like: You need to learn Guarani, everyone speaks it they hate speaking Spanish, and I got a little freaked out. But the more I went and visited people and their families the more I realized that yeah people may not like to speak Spanish but they did to me. So I still will be able to communicate when I first get there, but I really do need to learn Guarani so I can be that much better integrated into the community and I’ll be that much more respected in the community. I hung out in the afternoons in the puesto de salud with the doctor and nurses. That was always a good time, they definitely have a much more laid back style of working… we just sat around all afternoon drinking terere, it was fantastic! I connected a lot with the wife of the doctor who is also a nurse, shes really nice and we hit it off right away! They are one of the people I’m going to live with in my first three months that I have to stay with families! And we’re going to start a diet together when I get back and we’re going to help each other to not be cheaters! And I saw my future house that I’ll be able to live in by myself after three months that I’m obligated by Peace Corps to stay with a family! And it is sooooo cute! I love it! It has two rooms and a kitchen, no bathroom right now; I’m going to have to build one. And I just saw the outside, but its kinda perfect! And I will live next to Avelinas grandma, who is about 90 years old, lives alone and so cute! She said she was really excited to have such a pretty neighbor! Overall I’m so excited to be where I am, I think I’ll be really happy for my two years and have plenty of things to keep me real busy! Plus I have a really really close neighbor, Josh who lives in Guasu Cora with me now. So I’ll be able to work closely with him, do summer camps and such! Plus he has an amazing way of getting sweet hookups! I don’t know how he does it, but he’s definitely a good person to have around! Now I only have two more weeks in Guasu Cora (tear, sad!) then I swear in, spend a weekend in Asuncion and head back to my site on May 4th. And by then I’ll have a phone and life will be easier!! I have been feeling withdrawals from a phone, I know its sad! But I also feel more safe with one- or at least that’s my excuse I’m going to give! So next Wednesday we’re in Asuncion and I don’t know if I’ll have time to get on the internet, but the week after that the 29th were in Guarambare soooo… I guess I don’t know when I’ll update next, you’ll have to bear with me, and once I go to site I wont have a planned schedule of when I’m using the internet, it’ll be whenever I go to the bigger town of Pilar, but as we say here in Paraguay… Tranquillo! Besos a todos!

The decision has been made...

It was super nice to have a long weekend free of any schedule. However we had company the entire weekend, which wasn’t bad it just messed with my sweet routine with my family. They were a great family though and after the long weekend I really got to know them better. They have two boys: 9 and 7 then a 3 week old baby girl. The baby cried a lot and it made me appreciate my brother who is so fantastic and hardly ever cries! But the young boys were fun to talk and play with. On Thursday morning I made chipa with my mom, that was super fun, I got my hand dirty and got to do some cooking! Later that day I hung out with Eliza then we went to the soccer field to hang out, our normal routine. That night we hung out with some of my closer peeps. We’ve started this backrub party routine, we get together, play cards, hang out… and take turns giving each other back rubs! Its silly but we all love it! Friday morning I slept in hung out with my family, then even more people came over to the house, at one point I think there were 25 people at my house. I didn’t really know what to do, so I kinda escaped to my room to work on a project! But I always had my door open so I chatted with the passerbyers! Later that evening it was just my fam and I was playing with the kids, chatting and having a great time just chillin! After dinner at Jacobs house we were just hangin out and some of our friends came over to invite us to play kings… since that’s my game I decided to go. We had a blast, good times just being silly, and I learned some new kings rules- which was super interesting! Saturday morning Stephanie and I went around the neighborhood inviting ladies to come to our charla on Tuesday about the importance of vegetables. Then we all got together and practiced our dance, which is coming along just awesomely!! However, we split up today boys and girls to practice our individual dances and I was teaching the boys their song, and they didn’t like any of my moves, so amazingly enough they all came up with their own moves, which were way funnier than mine! I was dying laughing at the moves they came up with, most, if not all of them involved hip thrusting! So good! I went home for lunch and hung out with my mom, took a sweet nap then watched my baby bro for a couple of hours while mom did some things around the house, it was fun just playing with my bro! That afternoon we went to the soccer field and I played with the little kids again, there was no way of getting around it, as soon as I showed up they were like, Sarah, put your shoes on and get out here! So I played for a while, good day! Once I got back home I just kinda hung out, worked on my super awesome project I’m doing for my friends when we leave Guasu Cora and Jacob came over just to chill for a bit. Sunday is our day at the big cancha. It was both our local teams that we’re playing each other, so it was a big game and tons of people from the community went. It was cold though, our first real cold day… I wore my north face and I was kinda cold at points. The weather is changing, its been cold all week. But it’s a nice change! Monday I had class again and I learned so much Guarani that day, we don’t have many classes left so my teacher was just shoving info down my throat, it was slightly hard and frustrating, but she said we just need to know the rules and then later we can actually learn them! Which is true, I need to know the tenses and the construction of the sentences and later I can memorize them to actually form sentences! Monday night my friend Stephanie and I made chocolate cucumber cake for our presentation on Tuesday morning. We talked about the importance of vegetables and what they contain and how they affect the body. We invited a lot more people than actually came but it went really really well and all the ladies really enjoyed it and wanted more info and a copy of what we presented and our recipe for the cake, it was a big hit! So it felt real cool that everyone enjoyed it and it was a success! The weather on Tuesday was absolutely gorgeous, slightly cold but the sun was out and it was perfect! I just hung out with my friend Liza all day in the sun chatting, reading some books, mostly talking about our sites that we would find out tomorrow… we were both freaking out a little bit, but mostly hoping that we would be semi-close to each other so we could visit each other!!

And here is the verdict, after an excruciating day of anticipation I am going to a town called Tacuaras in the department of Neembucú, its very close to a bigger town of Pilar. Its in the far south and east corner of Paraguay on the border of Argentina! I am soooo excited about it, its going to be a perfect site for me, I get to work in a health post with a doctor (which is extremely rare for a rural community, normally there is just a nurse if that) and 3 nurses!!!! They said to get ready to be a part of their team! I couldn’t be happier! Then I get to work in the elementary school doing charlas on parasites and dental health and the high school on drug and alcohol abuse, reproductive health and HIV and AIDS! And my last main project is working with womens groups! It’s a smaller town but very concentrated right on a main road, which is awesome I wont have to walk far! There is 126 houses and its suppose to be really beautiful. Tomorrow i´m going to meet my contact person from the community and then Friday i´ll go to my site for a couple of days to meet it!!!!! So I wont be on till next tursday to tell you how my site is! Love you all!