I can’t believe I officially have a future home. We just spent the past 5 days visiting our future sites and I’m so excited to move in and start getting some projects together! Right after I swearing in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer (PVC) I will grab all my luggage for the next two years, hop on a bus that (hopefully) takes me close to my site, and then my two years of service officially begins! It’s crazy how fast training is flying by….
ANYWAY before I let the feelings hit, let me give you some info about Curupayty since I’m about to be LIVING there!
Location: Curupayty is located outside of the pueblo Arroyos y Esterros, which is in the Department of Cordillera. Specifically, Curupayty is 7 kilometers down an unpaved road from Arroyos y Esterros. Arroyos y Esterros itself is a pueblo of around 8,000 people. There is another volunteer from my G in the Community Economics Development (CED) section who will be living within the pueblo and another health volunteer who is 12 km down a different road (in another direction) as well. Pretty much just letting everyone know that I am not completely isolated all alone by myself for the next two years.
Size: According to the census I was given, Carupayty consists of 273 houses with a total population of around 800 human beings.
Amenities: There is no post office, super market, police station, etc. within my town. For all of that stuff, I will have to purchase a bike and head into Arroyos y Esterros to run my errands. There is an Amandau (like the Dairy Queen meets Baskin Robins of Paraguay) in town so I will for sure be heading there at least once a week.
Okay so now that you’ve got the basics of my site, what am I going to be doing there?
Ha, that’s easier to ask and more difficult to answer.
Let me try to explain some things and hopefully the things come together to explain more about WHY I am being sent to this site and WHAT I will be doing there.
I am a follow-up volunteer in my community. So that means a Peace Corps Volunteer already did two years of service in my site. That’s great for me because everyone in the town already knows about Peace Corps from her and already understands what her role in the community was. Also, that’s kind of difficult for me because this volunteer was SO hardworking and literally EVERYONE just adored her, so I have so pretty giant shoes to fill.
There’s this pretty amazing Paraguayan non-profit organization called DEQUENI that works in my site. They built a community center in the middle of my community and have been operating out of there for some time now. The previous PCV did a lot of work in this community center with DEQUENI. However, the organization is finally leaving the community this May, so they have requested a volunteer to help ease the transition and make sure everything is still running in place after they’re gone.
The cool news about this is my host mom, Ña Elsa, lives directly across from the community center, and is one of the supermoms who works with the center. She is the keeper of the keys and always knows what’s going on at the center, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Another awesome thing is the volunteer that was there before me fixed up the house directly next to the center (which I found out used to BE the original center) and the house is fully furnished and ready for me to move into it!!
Cool. I’m going to be working with the community center!
Curupayty also has a Puesto de Salud (health post) which has a doctor and a nurse working there. My contact is the nurse at the puesto, so I plan on doing some work with them as well. My site also has 3 different schools, so I also will most likely be doing work in the schools. I was only there for 5 short days and unfortunately it RAINED a lot, which didn’t leave too much time for activities. BUT DONT WORRY! I will have two years to get to see everything and do everything and meet everyone and become completely Paraguayan.
So those are some things about my future site! On May 6th I will move out there for good!!!! AHHH I can’t believe how close it’s getting……..