Volunteer Visit

Last week I went to visit a volunteer in her site to get more experience and to see what being a volunteer is really like.

I went to a town near Caazapa about a 4-5 hour bus(es) ride from my house in Nueva Esperanza. It was also good experience for us traveling around on our own on the buses here. I traveled with Emily and Liz because all of the volunteers we were going to visit lived super close to each other.

I had a great time. It was nice to see what life in the campo is like. The town I went to visit had about 80ish houses that were spread out over the countryside. There were some incredible views, the campo really is gorgeous. I took a walk with my volunteer and some of the views were so amazing pictures do not do them justice.

While I was there I also go to see some of the projects she works on. I built a fogon (a brick built wood burning stove that is better for respiratory health than for example cooking over an open flame on the ground). It was super hard work, I was pretty sore after and I got super sweaty and super dirty. But, it was neat to see the finished product.

I also went with her to visit her health post that she works with and met and ate lunch with all the people that work there. I also drank tereré (something I will attempt to explain in another blog post, but feel free to look it up in the mean time because it is definitely a part of my daily life here in Paraguay) with the director of the school. I couldn’t really sit in on any classes because even though school started about 2 weeks ago there really aren’t that many students going right now. My volunteer said that more will start coming after Semana Santa (Holy Week). School attendance is a big issue  here.

I also am FAMOUS! I was on Paraguay television. My volunteer does a TV show with 4 other volunteers in her VAC (don’t know exact meaning, but it basically means her “group” of volunteers that are close to her). Two of them are Rural Health volunteers as well; one was an Agriculture volunteer and the other a Community & Economic Development volunteer. That specific episode they just were talking about what is Peace Corps, what they are doing here in Paraguay and specifically what the Health, Ag, and CED sectors are doing. At one point they introduced Liz, Emily and I and there really was no room for us to sit or stand so for the rest of the program we were sitting on the floor. You could kind of see Emily’s head and you could see the back of Liz’s head, but, of course my face was perfectly visible in the bottom right corner of the TV. Towards the end of the program the interviewer was asking questions that people were texting him on his phone and one was something like “What is the name of the girl sitting under the table?” Aka me. So then the camera zooms in on me for what felt like 10 minutes and all I said was My name is Kelley and Hola. But, then when the camera went over to Liz she was so nervous to be on TV she crawled under a table to get away from the TV. It overall was a great and hilarious experience and now Liz, Emily and I can say we’ve been on TV.

Overall I had a great visit. I think it is awesome that Peace Corps does trips like these because it gets us trainees out of the classroom and gives us first-hand experience of being a volunteer in site.