Sunday, October 30, 2011

Finally, Another Post

Well, it's been over a month. It's about time Tim posted to his blog again.

It's hard to believe I've been working a month already. I am currently working at Alto Refugio, the HIV/AIDS hospitality center mentioned in the last post. Andrew from my team is also working there. In the morning I do different things every day. A common task is batching food such as rice, flour, or beans in the pantry. Alto Refugio takes donated food and gives it out to patients. My job is to repackage the food from the 50kg or so bags it's packaged in into smaller plastic bags. In the afternoon I have been working on Alto Refugio's website. The website is a source of many donations to the organization. It was built on WordPress, but it has had some custom code added to it. I'm mostly working with the WordPress interface, but I'm attempting to do some things with the coding as well. A third job that Andrew and I just recently found out about is taking care of the pool. Last December, a small hotel property was donated to Alto Refugio. The eventual plan is to turn it into a hospice. Andrew and I will be cleaning and maintaining the pool there this summer so that the children and teenagers who come to Alto Refugio during the day will be able to use it. Of course, this job has a perk, which is that Andrew and I will also have nearly unlimited access to the pool throughout the hot Paraguayan summer.

I take the bus home from work, but in the morning I ride with my parents and two sisters. My dad passes by Alto Refugio on the way to his work. I don't really have to be at work until about 7:15 or 7:30, but I usually arrive around 6:45 because other family members need to be at their jobs earlier. When I'm tired I sometimes wish I had a different situation, but the bright side is that I never forget to do my morning devotions on work days.

I've been getting a little involved in some musical activities here in Paraguay. I'm playing bass once a month with a worship band at my church. I also just found a small group to play my French horn with. It's a random assortment of wind instruments. We'll be performing some German Christmas music at a church in December sometime. I've also been playing soccer with some guys from the church for a couple hours every Sunday afternoon.

For the sake of not uploading photos a second time, I'll probably just put the public link to my most recent Facebook album here. It has some photos of my house and the neighborhood I live in.

My Spanish is nowhere near fluent, but it is getting better. It is still frustrating at times. The presence of the native language, Guarani, complicates things. Almost everyone here speaks it, including my whole family. Sometimes I can't tell if I'm just not understanding any of the Spanish or if they've switched to Guarani. Maybe I'll just have to learn two languages this year...

Last week was COICOM, a giant Christian conference. It is held in a different South American country every year. This year it was Paraguay. I attended a couple of the free evening sessions. It was very similar to a U.S. Mennonite Conference, except that everything was in Spanish. It was held in the same place that the Mennonite World Conference was held a few years ago. I was glad to get a chance to see that space. It's a mega-church. Unfortunately I've never been to a mega-church in the States so I have nothing to compare it to. It had a parking garage beneath it and seating for around 10,000 people. The last night, Steve Green performed. Most of his music is in English, but he lived in South America for a time and has a few Spanish cds, so this concert was entirely in Spanish. I recognized the melodies of a couple of the songs though. Alto Refugio received the offering from one of the evening worship sessions, which is a huge gain for them both monetarily and through the publicity it gives them. They are relatively small compared to some of the other groups that were receiving the offerings.

I just got internet in my home, so hopefully the blog posts will be coming a little more often now. Thanks for keeping up with me! Everything's going great!

-Tim