RAID Works!!!

So let me start off by complaining and then I promise it gets better :)

I woke up one morning to find thousands of ants building their colony in the corner of my living room. I showed my neighbor and luckily she had some insecticide. So I used the insecticide--well the ants didn't die, but they did disappear. I thought--Woohoo! Problem solved! (NOT QUITE!!!) For the entire day, I put insecticide all over my house until I wanted to vomit from the fumes. The ants would disappear and then reappear 15 minutes later in a different place!! It was the most frustrating thing ever. I was about to burst into tears and call home saying that I was ready to go home--but I didn't ....Instead I rode my bike 15 min to a store to buy something stronger to kill the ants and by chance I found RAID. So I huffed and I puffed my way uphill back to my house to kill the damn ants--and guess what? It worked!! RAID actually killed them in seconds--so I'm currently grateful to RAID for saving my sanity :) hehe the next day--I still had a lot , but I sprayed them showing no mercy...hehe....Right now no ants--Thank God!!!

So I mention this whole ordeal because I am honestly scared of the next time that I am going to feel like quitting and going home. It's tough--for me it's hard to live by myself in a community that speaks a language that I barely understand....it's lonesome too!! I just hope I make it out of this sane!!!

So on a brighter note:
It just barely hit me the other day that I will be doing something that I wanted to do for a while--doing development work in Latin America. Work thankfully is staring to pick up. Since my cooperative has some money saved up--it is going to buy a new computer for the office. They want me to transfer a lot of the paperwork onto the computer and help modernize the cooperative....Also, they want me to teach computer classes to children of the members of the coop--children that hopefully will work in the coop someday. I'm really excited about this project because I get to transfer knowledge and it's a sustainable idea!!!

The next huge project that might happen deals with Kaa'hee (Stevia) which is a natural sweetner. An organization from Japan (OISCA) and the InterAmerican Development Bank basically are showing up in my community and choosing 100 families and donating a watering system and putting up half the cost of the seeds. Honestly, I'm intimidated by this project because everybody thinks I'm an expert with Economics and Business since it is what I studied and of course I'm from the U.S. AYA! there is a huge market analysis that has not taken place at all. The Paraguayan mentality is to grow your prodcut first and then find a market for it and it needs to be the other way around!!! So this project if it happens will be a handful and I would have to find a way for my contribution to be sustainable...

Social life: I spent this past Sunday with 2 families that I lived with and I had a blast with them!! Both families make sure that I'm doing ok and take care of me :) Also, I've had some time to spend with my Peace Corps buddies--who of course I absolutely adore and respect--and are the main reason for my still being sane in Paraguay...hehe!!

Anyways--one thing you should be grateful for is electricity!!! I do have, but it goes out a lot of the time and recently we went 1 whole day without it and the day before I bought so many groceries, which I had to throw away because of the 90 degree heat and lack of electricity spoiled them :(

So seriously if you are reading this and you haven't updated me on what's going on with you please do!! Aside from me wanting to know---I need any form of entertainment that I can get especially since I have no tv or radio.....

Anyways take care and huge hugs!!!!

Peace out!!....hehe