Announcing the New Regional Office Coordinator…Me

Yes, I am the new volunteer coordinator at the Peace Corps’ regional office in San Ignacio, Misiones. Unfortunately, the previous coordinator had to leave before his full term ended in December, so the position suddenly became vacant. I applied, was interviewed, offered, and accepted the position on Monday, April 11^th.

I will be leaving my current and much loved home, Campo 9, on Monday, April 18^th. Peace Corps will be sending a truck to help me move. We’ll stay in Asuncion for the night, and then make the trek to the new office the next morning. I’ll be moving in during Holy Week, so I’ll get to play house and set things up while most people are taking a holiday. That will help me get my sea legs before the big work starts.

I don’t have a house yet, but the lady I’ll be working with, Adrianna, is looking for one for me.

Yes, the animals are coming with me. I noticed the new office has a nice grassy yard, so Lila may live at the office as the mascot during the week, especially if my house doesn’t have good space for her. My little street bastard, Tucker, is also going to be coming. I intend to have plenty of Benadryl on hand to keep him calm during the trip, since he’ll be sitting in my lap. I have a travel crate for Lila, but not for Tucker.

The office consists of Adrianna, who will take care of the administrative responsibilities, Victor, the driver, security personnel, and me, the volunteer coordinator.

I’ll be in charge of about 50 volunteers.

I’ve been told I get my own office J

I get a raise!

San Ignacio is 4 hours south east of the capital.

My job will consist of supporting the volunteers in the area, especially during their first 3 months. I’ll visit volunteers, help with projects, plan joint projects, and build relationships with local organizations.

I’ll be working with volunteers in all of the sectors, Community Economic Development, Agriculture, Education, and Health. Basically my job is to run make our office into a miniature version of the main office in the capital. I don’t know much more than that because I’ve never been to the San Ignacio office.

Initially I’ll focus on getting to know the area and the volunteers and pick up and projects the previous coordinator was working on.

I told the women in my exercise class today that I was going to be working with them anymore. They seemed sad and a bit nervous about the future of the competition. I'm going to write up all of our exercises and script Friday's class and next week for them, so hopefully that will give them some confidence and they'll be willing to run things themselves after that.

Life is about to get very very busy

Back By Popular Demand

By popular demand, I’ve started up the exercise class again. We’ll have one more week of class, and then begin the competition on the 18th. Thus far we’ve had a pretty low turnout because we had to change the time from 6:30 to 6:00 because the sun sets around 7 and the field we use doesn’t have lights. Fortunately we were able to get permission to use the city government owned multi-purpose center, which does have lights. That means we’ll be able to change the time back to 6:30 on Monday.

I’ve made it to the interview portion for the Regional Coordinator position. I go in for it on Monday.

Tucker is officially bigger than Lila. She usually weighs between 10-12lb and he weighs about 16. There was a notable change between when I left on vacation and when I returned. His aunty Julia must have been feeding him well. I’d guess he is about 4 months old now. Having a dog again has been really nice. He needs two walks a day to keep his energy levels in check, otherwise he is unbearable. But it is good to have something to make sure I don’t lounge around in bed until noon. One of the reasons I wasn’t too keen on getting a dog was I was concerned about my little yard getting overwhelmed with poo. I grew up with 2 large dogs and 1 small one. They were quite an efficient little poo factory and I wasn’t looking forward to getting back into the business. But thankfully having one small dog is very manageable, especially since he usually poos when I take him for a walk. Considering there are cows, goats, stray dogs, chickens, etc using the streets as their latrines, I feel no need to clean up after him and it helps keep my yard clean.

[Tucker! Lila is not a chair!]

Lila is doing well. She wasn’t happy about the addition to household, but they have learned live with each other. Lila doesn’t avoid Tucker and Tucker knows that he’s in deep trouble if he chases her. Still trying to get him to stop sitting on her. Oh well, no one is perfect.

For size comparison purposes:

[Tucker and Moe sharing 1/2 the bathroom mat. He is just a bit larger than one of the floor tiles]

[Tucker taking up most of the bathroom mat]

Back in Campo 9

One of the best things about Argentina was how nice everyone was to the street dogs. In Cordoba in particular the dogs were huge and clearly well fed. In Iruya we were adopted by a dog that followed us around. In Humahuaca there was an adorable dog in the hostel we named Cooper because it we were watching Anderson Cooper report on the Japan Tsunami. In Cordoba we had the deaf dog in the hostel, Jorge’s dog Rulo. But everywhere we went the street dogs were nice, would come up to you if you encourage them. Actually as far a street dogs go, they were quite clean.

It was refreshing. That is one thing I will always hate about Paraguay. People there treat animals like shit.

And speaking of animals, you may wonder what I did with. Lila stayed at my house and my landlady came by to give her vegetables, oatmeal, and water. Other than that she just ate the grass in the lawn. She doesn’t use the bathroom in the garage ever, so there was no worry about clean up.

Tucker went to my neighbor’s house across the street for a couple of days, and then he went to stay with Aunty Julia at her house. Evidently he was a pain in the ass, poor Julia isn’t quite experienced enough with dogs yet to handle one like him yet. But I brought her Alfajores and a scarf to make up for it.

I missed both of the terribly, especially towards the end of the trip. I kept having nightmares about dogs attacking Lila.

Fortunately I came home and they were both safe and sound. The whole family is together again the house. Home sweet home.

Going Home

After bumming around Purmamarca for a while, we caught the bus to Jujuy (pronounced: who who E ) wandered all over the downtown looking for our hostel, got some food, and settled in for the night.

We hoped to do a horseback riding excursion the next day, but they turned out to be too expensive. When we arrived in Jujuy I began to realize that Courtney was getting a bit road weary. When we left for Salta the next morning I realized it might be best just to catch the next bus to Paraguay, instead of staying in Salta for the night. We arrived around 2pm, the next bus was a 4:30pm. We bought our tickets and used the two hours to take the gondola ride to the top of a hill offering us lovely views of the city. We hoped the bus after that and were on our way home.

The bus ride back turned out to be a real pain in the ass actually. The road between Salta and Resistencia is surprisingly rough, which made it difficult to sleep. They also decided to play some of the worst movies ever made. One was called Yeti. I think a 14 year old boy wrote and directed it. It was terribly and nonsensically violent. I was listening to an audiobook instead of the movie, but it was so amazingly bad the Courtney got my attention and told me I absolutely had to watch it. So it did, and it was terrible.

To make things even worse the movie started to replay after we watched it the first time. I gave them a few minutes to notice, or for someone to inform them it was on again, but it continued to play. I went downstairs and told the bus attendant, who promptly changed it to Forest Warrior, a 1990’s Chuck Norris movie. Chuck Norris plays a forest sprit who help a group of kids save a mountain from a logging company. Basically FernGully in live action Chuck Norris style. It had Chuck in it, ergo it was awesome, or at the very least an improvement upon the previous film.

Around midday we stopped for almost three hours because some people were blocking the road doing some sort of protest. It took them that long to figure out it would be best to just back that bus up and take the 20 minute or so detour around the protesters. After we finally got moving we picked up a group of people from what I would guess was a bus that broke down. This meant I finally had to share the seat next to me. This was unfortunate because I realized there was something resembling vomit a little too closely under my seat. I discovered it after stepping in it with one shoe, putting the shoe up on the seat, resting my leg where my shoe had been, and feeling a wet spot. EWWWWWWWWWWWW. Thankfully it didn’t smell and I had plenty of tissues to cover it up. It was far enough back that I could avoid it when I wanted to, which was good because someone decided to sit in the seat next to me when we picked up the extra bus of people.

After a long while we got to Clorinda, the city on the other side of the river from Asuncion. There weren’t any buses that went from Salta all the way to Asuncion. We missed the stop at the bridge to go through customs and ended up at the normal bus terminal. So we, and two Swedish girls who were also going to Paraguay that we adopted, took a taxi back to the bridge. Finally we stamped out of Argentina, stamped back into Paraguay, and caught a van back to the capital.

I have to say, it was really nice to be back in the ‘guay. I missed the Guarani. I didn’t miss the dirtyness, but the familiarity of it was nice. I liked being some place I recognized again.

That evening Courtney and I went out with the Swedish girls, and the taxi driver tried to charge us 60mil instead of 40mil. Ahh yes, its good to be home.

Salt Flats and Funny Photos

We arrived in Purmamarca, when to the first hostel we came to, and went to bed. In the morning we took a van to the salt flats an hour outside of the town. We proceeded to take advantage of the very flat landscape and took dozens of silly photos.

[They cut holes in the salt so the water drains in to the holes and leaves the rest of the flat dry enough for us to be goofballs on. Proceeding with the goofballery]

Most people go to Bolivia to see salt flats, the largest in the world. However, after seeing the ones in Purmamarca, I think I can confidently check ‘visiting salt flats’ off my list of things to do in South America. There were very interesting, but the one hour that we spent there was sufficient.

Argentina Part 3: Jolley Good Wong Graber

[The boys horsing around in Iruya]

After a few days, our volunteer coordinator Courtney Wong joined us in Cordoba to form Team Jolley Good Wong Graber. Me, Kevin Good, Zach Graber, and Courtney Wong. And yes, the name was my idea. How sad would it have been if we had had someone with a normal name. I think that may be a new travel guideline: Must have fun name.

Team Good Graber when to the Salta region on Saturday, while team Jolley Wong stayed a bit longer in Cordoba, since Courtney arrived a little late.

After riding in the coldest bus on the planet, Courtney and I arrived in Salta and caught a bus to Humahuaca to meet up with the boys. Or so we thought. After receiving some of the most incomprehensible text speak messages from Kevin we finally realized they were in Iruya, a town 4 hours farther north of Humahuaca. Unfortunately by the time we arrived, there were no more buses to Iruya until the next morning. Fortunately Humahuaca is a lovely little town.

[Humahuaca]

I was struck by the fact I could understand people’s Spanish again! It was also amazing at how nice everyone way. People in Cordoba were not particularly friendly, but here everyone said hello to us on the street, locals and tourists alike. Everyone was so pleasant.

[Humahuaca]

Courtney and I caught the 8:30 am bus to Iruya the next morning. I realized as I got onto the bus I had left my travel blanket back at the hostel and asked the driver if I had enough time to go and get it. At first he said no, but a few minutes later he indicated I could go get it if I hurried. I heard a collective groan from the other passengers to which I gave them a mental ‘fuck all yall, I want my blanket’. I ran 2 blocks to the hostel, found the blanket, and was back in less than 5 minutes. The bus attendant hadn’t even started checking peoples’ tickets yet. So there.

[Iruya]

Through our deciphering of Kevin’s texts, we gathered that he and Zach though Iruya was one of the most beautiful places they had seen. At first I was skeptical; the geography strongly resembled Big Bend Park in. However slowly but surely I saw what they saw. As we came closer and closer to Iruya, an astoundingly beautiful, cloud covered valley. Honestly, that view alone was worth the 8 hours of travel.

[Jolley Good Wong Graber in Iruya]

We arrived in Iruya and Team Jolley Good Wong Graber was reunited. I got off the bus and immediately noticed the boys had gotten quite a bit of sun since we left them in Cordoba. Courtney noticed as well. It must have triggered our motherly side because we couldn’t help but asking if they had been wearing sunscreen, did they have sunscreen, did they want to borrow sunscreen. They didn’t seem to believe us that they had gotten quite so sun kissed, but I assure you the Paraguayans will comment when they go home.

[The gals horsing around Iruya]

We only spent a few hours with the boys before they caught a bus back to Salta. Courtney and I did some exploring, though not much hiking. The altitude was getting to me and I'm out of shape for vertical walking. Give me a flat road and I'll walk all day, put a bit of an incline and I'm a goner. That evening we cooked up some tasty stir-fry, chatted with the owners of the hostel, and marveled at the clouds rolling into the valley.

[Iruya]

The next morning we resolved to get up early and go for a hike, but the valley was still enveloped in a snuggie of fog. We abandoned those plans and slept in. I did a bit more walking around the next day as we waited for bus back to Humahuaca and then Purmamarca for the night. As we left Iruya, a storm rolled in from the south and the bus with hit by a short hail storm. Thankfully things cleared up for the rest of the day.

Argentina Part 2: Cordoba-I still speak Spanish right?

[Zening it up at the art museum]

Upon arriving in Cordoba, Kevin immediately pissed off a baggage handler by removing his pack by himself from the luggage area under the bus because it was blocking the rest of the luggage. I had done the same thing moments earlier but because my pack was a bit lighter and the handler’s back was turned, I accomplished the task without him noticing. The baggage handler yelled at Kevin while I quietly tiptoed behind another bus.

[Cordoba]

We decided to find a hostel to drop off our stuff. I’ve hosted several couch surfers lately so I was hoping to be able to use the site myself during this trip, but the hosts never came through, which was very disappointing, so we stayed in a hostel the entire time. Fortunately the hostel was about USD$9 a night, so it is not like we were breaking the bank.

[Church]

I noticed several things.
1) The city was incredible clean. The first day or two I would find myself looking at the sidewalks as we walked, memorized by the lack of trash.
2) Cordobian accents made me question my ability to speak Spanish. I kid you not; I had no idea what those people were saying half of the time.
3) Cordobians are not nearly as friendly as Paraguayans
4) People don’t try to cheat you at the bus terminals. Everyone pays the same price.
5) Cordobians, especially in the downtown area are very well dressed, and the women are very skinny.
6) I love smoothies. Almost every little café and restaurant served smoothies and they were delicious.

Highlights
• Artisan fair
• Being in a clean city were things work like they’re supposed to
• Meeting Kevin’s sister and hanging out with her host family, Jorge and company
• Finding a bank that would change guaranies into pesos
• Cooking jambalaya and risotto in the hostel
• Adorable deaf puppy at the hostel
• Awesome art museum

• Zoo

[Baby Hippo at the Zoo]