Limpio Mokoi

Hello again! Sooo I’m back. I’ve spent the past week in Limpio and can now say that 1) I am OFFICIALLY mentally checked out of all things training and 2) It is going to be an intense two years.

Friday we went to this retreat center and met our community contacts in this weird kind of blind date format in which all the volunteers were in a room and all the contacts came in at the same time with nametags on with their name but our pictures and we had to awkwardly approach and greet each other and then have breakfast for an uncomfortably long period of time. Luckily for me my contact was a wonderful guy named Victor who is about 21 years old and about 75 pounds heavy but every single speck of him is sweet and wonderful. Victor and I spent the morning getting to know each other and then got on a bus back to Villa Madrid (the name of the barrio I’m specifically assigned to in Limpio). We made our way down Ruta 3 and he showed me all the notable landmarks and we made small talk and such until we finally arrived at the entrance to Villa Madrid. Villa Madrid has about 2,500 people living in it so as barrios go it’s fairly large, but the city of Limpio has 80,000 people living in it so it’s a pretty small part of the city as a whole, and is basically the northern most point of both Limpio and Departamento Central.

Our first stop was supposed to be to the current volunteer, Nancy’s, house but we had arrived early so Nancy wasn’t home yet so we stopped over at the neighbor’s house, a woman named Naoli (or something like that) an instantly likeable and friendly woman who asked me all kind of questions and drank terere with me and told me all about the new library and what not and then came with me to my new host family’s house around the corner as well. We walked up to the house where there were a bunch of women and children drinking t-ray and I sat down and introduced myself and chatted some more until Nancy came and fetched me and we went back to her house so she could start filling me in on the ins and outs of the community. Limpio is three long and skinny roads that run from Ruta 3 about 2 Km (I’m totally guessing but it was about a 25 min walk) to the edge of the barrio which turns quickly into the country/the asentamientos. It has a disconnected kind of campo feel in some ways but also a very urban feel in that buses pass on the regular, the center of Limpio is about 10 minutes away, and the center of Asuncion is less than an hour away. It is a great balance in a lot of ways and I think it will do well to serve my restless moods/need to be busy.

Villa Madrid is filled with a lot of youth and children, a lot of soccer fields, and a lot of motos and dogs like most places in Paraguay. While I was there, Nancy was doing a Peace Corps wide project called Ahecha (which means “I see” in Guarani). The project consists of giving five digital cameras to five children/youth in the community and having them capture their homes through their eyes as well as developing their artistic interests and abilities. At the end of two months, the volunteer prints out the five best photos from each kid and exhibits them somewhere in the community. In Villa Madrid’s case they are going to go in the new community library. We took the kids on a walk to the outskirts of town where Villa Madrid becomes campo. It was right around sunset and it served as a really amazing intro to the community and the landscape. The pictures the kids took came out really great and it was interesting to compare what they chose as the focal points of their communities in comparison with what I would’ve have picked.

Turns out, almost all of the women and children who were on the porch when I walked up were actually people living in that house-I will be the ninth member of the Flietas family in Villa Madrid, a family consisting of my host mom Elvira, my host brother Aldo, my four sisters whose names I mix up/forget so I’ll clarify next time, one of my host mom’s cousins, and her two year old daughter Johanna who is positively precious. In short, I’m living in some sort of Paraguayan sorority house that somehow this poor twenty one year old boy has ended up stuck in, for the time being at least. There are three bedrooms in the house, one of which they have given to me and only me; however, they don’t seem to think that fitting four people to a bedroom is the least bit of inconvenience so I guess I’ll just go with it for now. They are an extremely close family and as of late have gotten even closer because of their father’s sudden exit about two months ago. Despite the cramped-ness, I think I am going to enjoy my time with the Flietas clan.

Nancy and I spent the week visiting various places-the church, the elementary and high schools, the newly inaugurated library, the community center, the new non-profit day care, the soup kitchen that feeds 70 kids lunch and breakfast Monday through Friday (a source of considerable drama in the community despite its super lindo objective) the mayor’s office and city hall, the radio station, and even the river! (not quite the mighty Hudson but hey, what can you do) which was beautiful and tranquil and probably in biking distance from my site which is sweet. Most interestingly, we visited the newly re-opened jail in Emboscada, the next town north of me. We got a tour of the bread factory and new library by the Director, a super knowledgeable and on the ball man who welcomed us and our questions. We also got a personal tour of the visiting area and living area by one of the guards and we had the opportunity to talk to several of the prisoners for a while. There are a little over 100 prisoners there right now, and they are all required to work and go to school while inside. We met a man who made handmade terere thermos’s and other types of artisan crafts which were really beautiful and well done. He had a lot of interesting things to say about his jailtime and what it did for him as a person and it made me think about the other room for personal development work there could possibly be in this place. Hopefully I will get the chance to get back there again soon.

In addition to all the infrastructure, Nancy introduced me to a bunch of very warm and friendly family’s and individuals in the community that I’m for sure looking forward to getting to know a bit better in the coming months. I also got to talk to Nancy’s landlord who said I could most likely move into Nancy’s house after my time with a host family which is sweet and I am already looking forward to doing some painting and decorating. Oh yea, and I’m TOTALLY getting a puppy.

The trip back to Guarambare was uneventful and I ended up sleeping most of the afternoon until Charly and Ellie came to wake me up. Friday at the big centro was unusually fun and interesting; maybe because it had been a while since we’d seen everyone and also really hadn’t been asked to sit still in quite some time either. We got a lot of details about swear-in weekend (ah!!) and how to go about getting a bike and signed an oath which said something about defending America from all enemies foreign and domestic which I found a little weird considering basically everything else we’ve learned about Peace Corps mission but whatever. In the afternoon we had a little craft/art/generally useful Paraguayan information fair that included a Paraguayan “cribs” station, a laundry-by-hand station, a guitar station, and even a station where we learned how to make wine bottles into drinking glasses-which I obviously attended. I am going to be a recycling extraordinaire by the end of my service, it’s just inevitable.


Missing you all, como siempre