Monthly Archives: July 2012

I’m sick with a cold, or the flu.  All of my host brothers have been sick with the same illness the past week or so, but somehow my host mom is convinced that I got sick because I take showers in the morning!  We even watched a news story on tv about how many people have the flu in Paraguay right now, but that’s not how I got it! 

On a lighter note, I saw the craziest thing I’ve seen so far in Paraguay.  Most of the kids on my street have pink eye right now, and for some reason they’ve all been coming over to my house to get treated.  I never thought much of it when my host mom would put a spoonful of something into the kid’s eye.  Well today, when I was home for lunch, it was discovered that my 4 year old host brother caught pink eye.  So as we are sitting outside on the patio, my host mom grabs the 4 year old, lays him on her lap, and proceeded to squirt her breast milk into his eye!!!  Wow!!!  She said they only use natural remedies in Paraguay, and that’s the cure for pink eye.

My biggest concern right now is that I’m going to catch pink eye.  I think I may have nightmares about my host mom chasing me down to squirt breast milk in my eye! 

That’s all for now!

Yours Truly, Julie G

I´m officially halfway done with training now!  Only 5 weeks left to go!

Last week I went to visit Iturbe with my guarani language class.  Iturbe is a very clean small city with about 10,000 people.  The sugar business is the main industry, much of which is exported to Florida.  We had a nice tour of the sugar factory to see how everything works, and drank some sugar cane water at the end.  

My favorite part of our trip was working with a women´s group that is about to open a bakery.  There were about 10 women who have already purchased the land and constructed the building for the bakery.  Our group of North Americans came to teach them how to make banana bread and carrot cake.  While those were baking in the oven, we made a list of all of the ingredients for each recipe on giant white paper to hang on the wall.  Together with the women, we listed out the prices for each ingredient, and determined the total cost of each recipe.  Then, we helped them figure out how much they needed to sell the bread for to make a profit.  I know it sounds pretty simple, but it was so much fun!  The women had never thought about making bread with fruits and vegetables before, but they really enjoyed it as much as we did!

Also in Iturbe, I did my first presentation all in Spanish to a group of high schoolers.  One other person from my language class and I organized games and activities to teach them about the importance of communiation.  We taught 3 groups, and the presentations were about 30 minutes each.

Next Friday, Peace Corps asked if I could give a presentation to my group on how to start a small business, and how to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.  I´m really excited that they asked me to do that, and am going to work on my presentation later today.  I find out on July 25th where I will be living for the next 2 years, and am feeling pretty anxios about that right now. 

Hope all is well in the USA!

Yours Truly, Julie G