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Well, if you ever wondered what it would look like to transplant an Alpine chalet into the subptropical rainforests of South America, I’ve got an answer for you. Actually, it works out rather well. Among other things, it makes a nice venue for bringing about 200 Americans together for Thanksgiving.

I had a blast - ate too much, learned about the nesting habits of red-rumped blackbirds, experimented with carving figurines into mandioca roots, spent hours in the pool, and spoke more English than I have at any time in the last three months. I wouldn’t have changed a thing about it, although next year I might sign up for the cooking committee and try my hand at roasting a Paraguayan gobbler.

Now I’m back in Asunción for two short days before beginning my three-month inservice language training. I didn’t have much of a plan for today, but it’s hard to go into the office without finding something to do. My something ended up being helping to reorganize our little library.

Your typical Peace Corps Volunteer is the sort of person who can leave friends, family, home, career, language, and all manner of creature comforts for two years, but cannot go more than a week without recreational reading. Out here it’s a survival adaptation, because when you’re rained out of work, play, and electricity for five days at a stretch, you can only straighten out your sock drawer so many times. So we have a little ad-hoc library in the head office, filled with all the books that previous volunteers didn’t want to drag through an airport on the way back home.

It’s a very eclectic collection, ranging from War and Peace to trashy chick lit to pulpy genre titles that have been gathering dust for half a century. There’s no catalog, no checkouts, no limit on the number you can have out at any given time, no due dates, and no waiting lists. Turnover is absurdly fast and people are generous with the contents of their care packages, so there’s always something new to find. After six weeks or so in the campo, it’s like passing the gates of paradise to come in and change out your titles.

The Guaraní word of the day is guyra, meaning bird. We devoured quite a few of them over the holiday, and passed no shortage of hours watching the blackbirds attend the odd hanging nests they’d woven into one of the hotel’s palm trees.

I do have a lot to be thankful for. Certainly I’m thankful for all of you being in touch by e-mail and snail mail alike. Or just reading and wishing me well. I’m living a pretty good approximation of the high life out here, doing good work, enjoying some adventures, and I’ve got more to look forward too when I finish my service.

In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to this trip. By volunteer standards, I haven’t been doing much traveling. Also, I haven’t been doing a whole bunch of sleeping since I sighted a few rats brazenly moving through my bedroom. So a couple of nights in a hotel should do me some good.

The Guaraní word of the day should mean “thanks”, but Guaraní as it’s presently spoken doesn’t much have its own term. The Spanish word is used much more frequently, albeit modified to “gracia” or “graciamante” to accommodate the Guaraní speaker’s accent.

The word of the day, then, is jopara, meaning mixture. The vast majority of conversations in this country take place in a jopara of the two principle languages, heavier on the Spanish in big cities and formal occasions and leaning more towards Guaraní when you’re telling the kids to go feed the chickens.

During our two-day staging event in

A pessimist says the glass is half empty.
An optimist says it’s half full.
A Peace Corps Volunteer says, “Hey, I could take a bath with that!”

This past week was an outstanding example of the phenomenon. Volunteers in each region of the country get together on a monthly basis at something called a VAC meeting. We get announcements from HQ, do a little student-government type work, solicit each other’s help on projects, and take the opportunity to laugh and gripe a bit in English. This month’s VAC meeting was held in Tacuatí. Lori, the other Volunteer in Tacuatí, and I were going to split the crowd between our two houses.

But then it rained and a tree fell on the power lines near my house. The whole pueblo lost both power and water for about a day. Out here, everything shuts down when that happens. People lock their doors and don’t peek out again until the radio starts back up. So it ended up that all eleven of us stayed overnight at Lori’s house (all 100 square meters and one waterless bathroom of it). We boiled pasta with rainwater, roasted marshmallows over her stove, and drank warm beer by candlelight. And everybody was up and ready for the 5:30 AM bus without so much as a word of complaint or a misplaced toothbrush. We’ve got a really awesome group of people down here.

The Guaraní word of the day is the verb (a)reko, meaning “to have”. To say “We (exclusive) have rain” is oreko ama. To say “We (exclusive) do not have power” is ndorekoi energia.