sleepy villa hayes...or so i thought!

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hello all,

thought it was time for another little update as i´ve been here for other a month now! time has gone ridiculously quickly but i have to say i´m glad it isn´t dragging, i think four months in paraguay is a good length of time...it can get a bit intense living with a "familia loca" (crazy family).
teaching is still v.enjoyable, i think just about all of our 200ish students have mastered the alphabet, numbers up to at least 20, days of the week, how to tell the time and my name is etc etc. most of them are really enthusiastic and friendly (one class is bringing me paraguayan lunch on friday)...another class sings the beatles and pink floyd to me and always seem to want to conjugate naughty words...but it´s good practice so we just get on with it, just so long as no-one sees their notes it´s fine! im teaching english in the cultural centre (i think they´re putting photos of our classes up on the net soon so i´ll post the link and you can see me with my whiteboard and markers in action!), every day im there with classes pretty much from 8.30 til 6 or 7 with a break in the middle. i also teach at a preschool with 2,3,4,5 yr old which is IMPOSSIBLE and is getting worse...might pack that one in after easter. they´re such brats as well, paraguayan kids get away with murder, they draw on walls and chuck food around and no-one really cares! but all in all the teaching´s fantastic, more and more students for individual classes so not a lot of free time left but it doesn´t really bother me too much. i alos have an art class on sat mornings with about fifty kids so we have to do it outside and its equally a bit of a nightmare, luckily they arent v.rowdy but they´re all different ages - ie some can cut up paper and some can´t!! and i don´t have any resources or a budget yet so it´s paper and pencils, nothing else!!

i was just going to right a bit about the town where i am because it´s weird...really weird

well, its called villa hayes, it´s about an hour´s bus ride to asuncion (the capital) on a good day. we had thought before we arrived that it was tiny, sleepy and rural but it´s not really like that. it´s rural in a way as you have to cross the rio paraguay over the bridge to get there from asuncion which means it´s in the chaco which is a kind of bleak wilderness that covers most of paraguay and stretches up to bolivia, i think i´ll take the bus ride through the chaco to get to bolivia when i´ve finsihed my placement, it takes 30 hrs normally, but if you get stuck in a ditch you just have to wait for the next tractor passing to pull you out so it can take up to a week! villa hayes has about 1,200 ppl living here (so i´m told) all the houses are in blocks and not many people actually know the name of the street they live in, they jsut describe it in terms of other places (wouldn´t call the landmarks though). there´s lots of ice cream parlours and random shops that specialise in either cooking oil and cowboys boots (yep at the same time) or fruit and second hand phones. it´s all a bit mish mash but generally speaking you can get everything you need (except you dont need much, life is v.simple here)...there´´s no atm though so that´s a little trip on the bus when you need cash. but you dont need much of that either, a bunch of bananas (gooooood bananas) is 10p, 2 scoops of ice cream is 10p as well and apart from that you don´t need much. apart from when i get hungry becuase my family runs out of food that isnt rock hard bread or fried flour and milk and egg (they call them tortillas, they´re disgusting).
also, there are a few men who walk around either with massive sombreros on their heads selling chipa which is corn flower bread, and they have a little chipa chipa chipa chant. theres also a man with panpipes who walks around selling ice cream...and starts at about 7am. and god, their diets are sooooo unhealthy, everything is fried, you cant buy anyhting apart from burgers in the evening, so far so good though haven´t got any paraguayan fat...family is really quite poor so they dont eat for pleasure, just so that they´re not hungry.
there´s another recognisable figure around the town, his name is simon, he walks around barefoot all day long normally with one or 2 whips in his hands. he looks demented and bovine and if you get too close he grunts and flicks his whip but we asked the locals about him and they seemed to think he was harmless and told us that he sometimes walks to the next town 15kms away barefoot on the tarmac in 45degrees. simon is actually just a cafe hopper and goes into all the ice cream shops and gets what he wants for free apparently.

bizarre.

right, thats enough for now, sorry if it doesn´t quite make sense but paraguay doesn´t quite make sense so maybe i´m being dragged down with it!

hope all´s well back at home, love to everyone XXX

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Comments

[Iain Gibson]

Visiting soon
Hi Sophie, I enjoyed your blog, glad to see I'm not the only Brit to visit the country. Will be in Asuncion from 12 till 24th April on holiday, might even come out your way and say hello. If you have a mobile or ladline e mail me at [e-mail] Maybe see you soon, bye for now and take care