My New Life

Ok, well now that i´m starting to settle into my site, let me tell you all about it. The host family i´m currently living with consistes of a mother and father with at least 2 sons and 3 daughters. One of the sons is studying something in Pilar so I´m living in his old room. The other son helps out dad in the feilds. The oldest daughter is married and has 3 daughters of her own (all very cute, aged from 7ish to 3 i think), and the other 2 daughters are about 9ish and 13ish. The mom runs a little tienda selling mostly beer and wine (with cola of course) to the people who come over to hang out or play volleyball. So theres allways alot of hustle and bustle going on.

Mostly my days consist of sitting around and trying as hard as I can to understand the converstaions going on around me. I can usually pick out about 1 word a sentence. This lasts about 5 min untill im mentally exsausted and my mind starts wondering. I try studing on my own, and i´m getting pretty good at reading guarani, but listening is a whole ´nother bag. Most days I go with my sister and her husband to milk cows in the afternoon. Now this is something i´ve made noticable gains in. There´s this one cow, who I can almost milk at professional level. Thats about it. I wash my clothes every couple days.

I did get to go to the fields to harvest some corn the other day. That was fun. We had to canoe thru the swamp to get to the feilds. and I saw some howler monkeys when we were in the field. Also I ate alligator the other day. My dad and another guy showed up with this 4 foot gator, whose skull had been bashed in by an axe and they butchered it and we had ´gator asado. Not bad.

-till next time