Sevoi'i Crap (How are you? in Tai) and Bot Flies

Greetings from Asuncion. This weekend I took a trip up north to
Concepcion to visit another Volunteer. Her mom is down from Hawaii
and her town threw a big party for her arrival. We got to experience
some amazing Tai food while listening to Mitra and her mom speak Tai.
"Sevoi'i (which means "worm" in Guaraní) crap?" or something like
that, means "How are you?" in Tai.
So now I am back in the city and getting ready for another trip… to
Buenos Aires! An opportunity just came up to go to Argentina with my
friend Mandi this Thursday! It was totally unexpected, but my boss
said it was no problem so I think I am going to go. We will visit the
zoo, the natural history museum, and spend a day at the beach in Mar
de Plata. We are taking a bus down on Thursday and will be back
Tuesday so it will be a quick trip, but I am looking forward to it.
The new site is going well. I enjoy being able to ride my bike into
La Colmena and the people are nice. They are currently working on
building a small house for me and should be done in a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile I have been living with my contact and his family. It will
be nice to have my own place again and do my own cooking. The town
has an agriculture committee and the members collectively work on
raising tilapia so that has been fun to learn about aquaculture and I
can go fishing any time I want and consider it working hard, haha. We
make dough balls with flour and water and fish with cane poles. I
want to try putting a spring on the hook to keep the dough on better
like Dad showed me when we went carp fishing one time and see if it
catches more fish. When a buyer comes in a truck on the weekends we
get out big volleyball nets and 2 guys wade back and forth in the
ponds to scoop out the big ones and I run around with my leather
beekeeping gloves to untangle them and throw them in a bucket. It is
pretty fun. Other than that, I have been harvesting some honey with
people, getting ready for garden season and getting settled in to the
new site.
On Monday mornings the Volunteers in the La Colmena all get together
and do a radio show in town and I think they have a website where you
can listen live online. I will let you know when I figure out the
website and if it works. You can hear us jabber in Guaraní and
Spanish about whatever topic we get on for that week.
In parasite news, I picked out 2 bot fly larvae the other day from my
inner thigh. I think these little flies bite and then lay their eggs
under your skin. They like dark, damp spots so you usually get them
in private places. It was basically just popping a pus-FILLED, or
purulent sack (this in reference to a previous typo I made describing
another parasite experience in my foot) and pulling out the little
worm. Kinda like a splinter that wiggles, haha. Sort of interesting.
My neighbor pulled one out of his dog about the size of a quarter!
Thankfully I got to these when they were still tiny.
Well, back to "work." I guess I don't really have anything to do
today except pick up kits for making homemade detergent for the
women's group in my site. Then I just have to start planning for my
trip to the big city. Peace Corps is a hard life, haha. Hope you all
are staying warm up there. It was 115 degrees here last week! Peace!

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