Here's what has happened over the last fourteen days.
I arrived into Asuncion at 2:20am and had to choose between two precarious options-- nap in the empty terminal until morning or get a ride from an awfully anxious taxista to stay in a nearby hotel. I chose the latter and ended up in a the Hotel Boggiano. Breakfast was included (I later found out that that is standard in Paraguay) but check out was at 10am so I didn't have much time to settle in. In fact, I was so disoriented that when I turned in my key to the receptionist, I followed the wrong sign and walked straight into a bedroom and thought that the shirtless man lying on his bed drinking mate was the person I was supposed to my key into. He yelled at me and I quickly figured out that I was in the wrong place. I spent the rest of the day walking around with my backpack through different barrios and found my way into Mercado 4-- an open air market that's size of several Costco's. As I would walk by each stand the vendors would hoot at me, "adelante!" or "parece que queres nuevos calzados!" But my favorite one was the man who yelled at me, "Mi Amigo Mochilero! Yo se que queres un nuevo celular!!" (My backpacker friend, I know you want a new cell phone!) I later took the bus from there back to the airport to meet up with my travel buddy, Kimi. On the way we drove by the Asuncion temple and I asked people on the bus, "Oh what is the beautiful building!? Who owns that?" a lady responded, "Son los Mormones" and we chatted for a second about what she knew about the LDS church. I tried to take a picture of it stealthily on the bus but it didn't come out too well.
So I met up with Kimi at the airport and the internship coordinator picked us up and took us to the intern house- just 6 blocks away from the hotel that I had stayed at the previous night. The house is very nice and feels modern. It seems to be located in a wealthy neighborhood of Asuncion and has a gated entry. There are about five other interns here that come and go and hail from various universities and parts of the world.
The next day we met up with the four other BYU MBA students who were returning from doing interviews in another city two hours away called Santani. They had already been in Paraguay for about two weeks and had done 25 interviews by the time we got there. They briefed us on the work that had been done and what we had to do next. Over the next two or three days we spent our time making calls and appointments with graduates from those that lived in the surrounding Asuncion area and went to cities such as San Lorenzo, Itagua, and Luque. We then made the trip to the Escuela Agricola San Francisco which is in Cerrito, a small town just outside of Benjamin Aceval in the Departamento Presidente Hayes.
The school teaches kids between 14-18 about how to be successful agricultural entrepreneurs. It was started by a Catholic congregation a few decades ago but in 2003 it no longer had the funds to keep going and so they sold it to Fundacion Paraguaya which worked primarily in microcredit at the time. FP totally transformed it by changing the curriculum and teachers in such a way that would lead to school to self-sufficiency. The school remains self-sufficient by selling it's products-- milk, cheese, sesame, and vegetables in local markets in Cerrito and Asuncion. They also have a hotel that entertains guests such as the President of Paraguay that want to see the school in action. The model that the school has created has been internationally rewarded and FP has been given donations from the Perry Foundation, Gates Foundation, and Clinton Foundation totaling in tens of millions of dollars to replicate the model around the world. Here is a video about it if you're interested:
The six of us stayed at the school for a few days and did a some interviews and got to know the students. The schedule is rigid there and the meals are basically rice and meat, and hard bread that will only become chewable by soaking it in cocido (sweetened yerba mate mixed with warm milk) for a minute. I definitely enjoyed life much more in the campo as opposed to the pollution-filled Asuncion.
We attended church in Benjamin Aceval that Sunday and were immediately shuffled into the branch president's office to all be given callings. Dismayed by our nomadic schedule, he sent us back to Sunday school and we worshiped with a small group of about forty members. One of the women had just received her mission call to Salt Lake and so I was obliged to prep her for it. I loved church though. You could feel raw spirit, totally purged of traces of the Provo Mormon culture that I'm used to.
We finally made it back the next day to the intern house, just in time for a chat with Martin Burt, president of Fundacion Paraguaya (can be seen in the above video). He has the entrepreneurial spirit more than anyone I've ever met and truly, truly wants to eradicate poverty in Paraguay. He was mayor of Asuncion from 1996-2001 and I recently heard stories of him while in office calling up his secretary at 2am so that they could walk the streets and see where the homeless children are; or he would do the garbage truck route so he could see with his own eyes the fluidity of garbage pick up and could fix any problems himself. He attempted to end corruption in the city government and in-so-doing, he was subject to 23 strikes and marches because he refused to pay people off. Anyway, all the interns chatted with him for two hours over chorizo and bread about the work that we are doing. It was an inspiring conversation and helped me focus my time so that I can be most effective.
That night we took a midnight bus to Ciudad del Este, situated on the opposite side of the country. We got there at 5am and picked up by a friend of one of the BYU students who had grown up there. He took us across to the Brazilian border and we stayed in a hotel there for the next two days. We slept a few hours and then headed to Iguazu Falls, about twenty minutes away. I'll let the pictures do the talking because I've been writing forever, and I don't think you're still even reading at this point.
Eventually we made it back to Ciudad del Este and that's when Kimi and I parted ways with the other four. We took a four hour bus north to the department of Canindeyu. We eventually ended up in a city called Curuguaty and started calling the graduates that lived around there. The plan was to end up at the other school that was started three months ago located on an indigenous indian reservation called Mbarakayu.
We finally coordinated rides and ended up cruising in the back of a truck down a red dirt road for an hour to Villa Ygatimi and did an interview there. Two guys from Villa then drove the two of us on the back of their motorcycles down an even smaller dirt road for 20 kilometers to the reservation where the all-girl school was. We planned on only staying at the school one night but soon found out that everyone that we had planned on interviewing wasn't there and spent the next four days tracking them down or waiting for them to come back to the school. Besides one of the three teachers at the school, I was the only male and so I got quite a lot of attention from the 50 or so girls that were there. One of the graduates that we interviewed is now a teacher at this school. When we asked her for her date of birth, she replied the exact same day and year that I was born! We were excited about that and became fast friends.
We did several interviews during our time at the school. I also taught an English class, worked on the farm, corralled and milked cows, and taught the girls some classic games from the mutual days.
We finally left this morning at 7am and made it back to Asuncion around 8pm.
Love you guys. I don't think I'll have another entry with so much text in the future, just trying to keep you up for those that may want to know a few more details.
