LearnServe Paraguay 2016, Day 8: A Break from the Routine

image1July 3, 2016 – We found a smoothie place yesterday! Since we finished up our projects at the Telecentro in the Viñas Cue neighborhood of Asuncion on Friday, Saturday was our chill day. We slept in and then went out for exploring and lunch in Asunción at this great (but extremely slow!) place with waffles and crepes. To be honest, the quality of the food and the half-hour wait didn’t matter at all to me as long as the food was a change. After this past week, I’m done with heavy corn-based foods and red meat for a while. Most of the traditional foods here are easy to make, but are not always totally nutritious (example: empanadas). This makes sense, given the region and many people’s limited resources. But it’s definitely not always what I want. The fresh fruit they had at today’s restaurant was a blessing.

In the afternoon, we drove to the Museo del Barro, an art museum with a lot of pieces in the styles of the native people, the Guaraní. It was interesting to see how deeply Catholicism is ingrained in their culture, and how it shows in their history. For example, there was a room filled with wooden people of different features or or with crosses. My favorite room was one in which a tent had been assembled in the place of walls and a ceiling, with drawings of lifesize people crowded around the edges, and a night sky above. There was a little cushion chair in the middle of the room so that someone could sit down in any position to look at the figures. It felt almost like being among them. The creepiest was a room of masks across the entire wall. One was identical to Gollum, with little wooden ears, and another was a grinning pig. (There wasn’t a description, so who knows what these were for!). The museum reminded me of U.S. history museums that my family and I have found beside the highway, except with a more elaborate architecture. The history of interaction between Europeans and native peoples is one of the many similarities I see between the United States and Paraguay.

Maya E.-D., Bethesda Chevy Chase High School

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