Anita Little Peace (Corps)

  One month into 2025! Welcome back. As the summer sun tries its best to melt everything and everyone down here - Paraguay was just deemed the hottest point on the planet at the World Day of Action against Global Warming, so I assure you I'm not exaggerating - I'm slowly starting to build up my sense of community and integrate more and more. My favorite part of my day is wandering around the neighborhoods and introducing myself to people. To my host family's delight, I usually come home with armfuls of fresh fruit, eggs, beans, and whatever else my new friends have a surplus of and are happy to share. The other day, as I was sitting in the school waiting for my class to start, one of the workers doing construction on the roof came in with two beautiful ripe papayas ("mamon" down here). The Paraguayan people never cease to amaze me with their generosity and kindness. My English classes have been going well; I teach about four weekly classes, which keeps me busy. M...

  Hello all! Happy holidays, and welcome back to the next installment of my Peace Corps experience. I'm finishing my third week  in  my site as I write this. However, before we get to that, let's recap what's happened since the last time you heard from me. I finished my training, so I'm  officially  a Peace Corps Volunteer!  As we wrapped up our last week of training, it was full of exams - what to do in an emergency, who to call, how to record your in-site projects, and also what types of trees are monkeys afraid of? Thankfully, I passed them all and was allowed to swear in. For those of you wondering, monkeys are so scared of "Yvyra Ju," and it's also a pioneer species of a tree down here. The swear in itself was a very emotional morning. We heard speeches from multiple Peace Corps officials and even an inspiring few words from one member of our cohort (big props to Andrew; you rocked it; I was in tears). After a beautiful ceremony during which we took t...