Day 2

I walked around and took some pictures of flowers.

I like to arrive with a day to spare on international trips because I have found that the quality of “computer labs” varies widely. It is common to find a large proportion of machines too antiquated or virus riddled to run the software we are teaching. Arriving a day early gives me the chance to negotiate and trouble shoot this before the students arrive. This desire is not always understood, and I have learned to roll with it. If nothing else it gives us an extra day to acclimate and explore and, since it is a weekend day, doesn’t add to the cost.

Our sponsor has been a very kind and accommodating host. I worked in the morning and then he and his sister in law took us out to lunch. His English is good, but his sister in law teaches math at an English school and so she came to translate. We went to a Brazilian Barbeque, which was similar to The Carnivore in Kenya…men carrying around spits of meat and carving them onto your plate. It was phenomenal. Paraguay is known for their beef. It is a country with 6 million people and 12 million cows. We talked a lot about hydropower. Paraguay is #1 in hydropower per capita generation. Currently, they use all that they can[1] and still give most of their allotment to Brazil for a nominal fee. But most of their development plans revolve around attracting energy intensive industry. Apparently the Paraguayan economy grew 12% last year and while we were in the car, our host’s brother was on the radio talking about fuel cell technology he is working hard to spin up.

The computer lab was setup at 6 and we had the usual problems…but got everything in place by 11. We also met our translators. Guillermo (who is an American with the Corps but of Peruvian decent and lived in Peru from ages 15-21) who set the trip up and invited us to teach, and Aleix, a post-doc at the University of Arizona from Spain.

Amanda and I got Google Video Chat working and I was able to see and talk to the girls. It was a much more fun way to interact with toddlers during an extended trip.

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[1] The restaurant was outdoors and air conditioned.

Flight and Day 1

So, I’m off to Paraguay and it has kind of become a bit of a tradition for me to keep a little online journal on these trips…so here it goes. I’ll be gone for about two weeks and will get into the details of why in later posts.

The day started with a very comfortable noonish flight which meant that I got to read books with the girls and take them out to breakfast before I left. The flights and layovers added up to just about 24 hrs: SacramentoàHoustonàSao PauloàCiuadad Este (stop – no layover)àAsuncion.

The flight was uneventful. I got some work and a decent amount of reading done. I read a couple hundred pages including at least a chapter from each of the books that made the backpack:

Exclusion and Embrace – Miroslav Volf [1]

Goldengay’s Genesis Commentary (Vol 1)

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig – A Paraguay travel memoir that I am sure to cite early and often in this journal

Foundations of Restoration Ecology [2]

The overnight flight was a reminder that I am not getting any younger. I am finally old enough to realize what that phrase means. But the up side of “not being 25 anymore” is realizing the benefit of “not being 45 yet.” I’ve decided that if you always look backwards at what you can’t do any more, you’ll always feel old but if you look forward to what you someday won’t be able to do, you are more likely to feel gratitude for current capacities and make the most of the moment. [3]

We flew over the Parana River (possibly the coolest river name of all times [4]) and the hydroelectric project that motivated this trip (which, until Three Gorges totally spins up is the highest wattage hydroelectric project in the world). Both the river and the project were impressive even from the sky. The dam releases created a huge plume of water and the river downstream was more sinuous than any I seen.

We landed in Asuncion to find four American C4’s conspicuously parked in a relatively small airport (they were the only other large aircraft besides ours). Apparently Obama was coming to Brasilia and the Secret Service et al. were using Asuncion as a staging ground.

My first evening in town was really nice. The head of the renewably energy program of Paraguay picked us up personally from the airport and gave us a tour of Asuncion. First impression, Asuncion is a surprisingly lovely and clean city. He ordered us dinner at the hotel… steak/egg/ham/cheese/olive sandwiches…which were amazing. Then Chan and I drank Paraguayan beer, and ate in the cooling equatorial air as the sky darkened and the unmistakable siluette of bats began to flit across the darkening sky.

In my ecology class this quarter, we exchanged papers to review, and I got to review a paper by our cohort’s bat expert. Cool bat facts: they are the most widely distributed mammal group on the planet and second only to rodents in mammal diversity? This is one of the

reasons I love being in an interdisciplinary scientific “group” rather than a classic department.

I called my family using google video. They saw me, but I didn’t see them. It worked out, though, because the girls were highly entertained by a tour of my hotel and a look inside of my mouth, nose and ears. Then I flipped on the TV hoping for the Wisconsin Basketball game. 60 channels, 7 soccer games, no March Madness. Fortunately, reason #538 “Why I love the internet” – I was able to watch the game (in fits and starts but watch it none the less) on ESPN.com.

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[1] My reading group is taking a break from NT Wright. I have LOVED everything I have read by Volf and this is his seminal work. If the opening chapters are any indication, it is going to be fantastic.

[2] The text for one of the coursed I am taking when I return. I also have Bruggerman’s Genesis commentary and a Jonathan Edwards (the old misunderstood one, not the contemporary, kind of doushy one) reader coming off the ‘bench’ (and by bench, I mean checked luggage). It is the sign of endless optimism to always have 4X as many pages as you could possibly read with you at any time.

[3] So that when we look back on the current years we can say “I can’t do that any more, but I made the most of it while I could.”

[4] Yet somehow not etymologically related to the famous South American fish.