counterclockwise

I’m here! Here being the town of Guarambaré (a suburb of Asuncíon) about once a week and the smaller community of Las Piedras most of the rest of the time. I’m so glad to have arrived in winter; I can already feel the summer heat just from looking at the foliage and the infrastructure.

That was my first impression of the country from the plane window, in fact. We dropped below the cloud cover and the first thing that came to mind is that here we are, at the beginning of winter, but the whole countryside is still a verdant green. My host mother tells me that one of the trees in the backyard is losing its leaves for the winter, but it’s in the distinct minority.

And my host family, Sr. M and Sra. T, are lovely people. They’ve been wonderfully hospitable and very forgiving of my many linguistic deficiencies. I have a very nice room with all the amenities - a warm bed, a private bath, and ample room to make sense of all my stuff. I feel fortunate to have found my way to their home.

Today’s Guaraní entry concerns the suffix ‘í. It’s a diminutive attached to words to indicate smallness. So for example, we do some of our training at the headquarters of the CHP training contractors in Guarambare. But the majority of our training, the part studied in Las Piedras, is completed at the CHP’í facility. Since we’re in a Spanish speaking country, the acronym sounds out like say-aychay-pee-ee.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Guaraní, Peace Corps Paraguay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.