Hello from hustle and bustle of Ciudad de Este! I’m here to get a GPS unit so that I position exactly the city blocks of Paso Yobai. I found a good deal from one of the many Arab electronics equipment sellers here. The high rise shops are full of little stores, many run by Lebanese who all have satellite channels on right now and they are working as they watch on TV their country get pounded by the Israeli invaders from the south. The US State Department claims that Ciudad de Este has a lot of supporters of Hezbollah, but then the US State Department claims a lot of things, with their claims having a lot more to do with political goals than facts. I have no idea whether or not the State Department is right. Whatever the political affiliations of Lebanese people in Ciudad de Este, nobody likes to see their people turned to corpses and their country turned to rubble.

I’ve been working a lot lately. I’m mapping out every block in Paso Yobai using the AutoCAD computer program used by all over by architects and urban planners. It’s fun. It’s all about aligning lines and shapes and tangents and perpendiculars and parallels and circles and that kind of thing. A much more intellectually challenging and less mentally damaging version of Tetris. I haven’t used my geometry much since I studied it as a sophomore in high school. All I remember definitively about the class is that the textbook was red and that I liked Geometry because Chris Ellioti was in the class. He was really funny but he kept skipping class to go to the gym and play basketball.

I also made another fogon a couple days ago with Jorge Brizuela, out in Curuzu. It’s the third one I’ve been involved in. Fogons are brick ovens and stoves that are one unit and they are of great use in saving firewood and protecting lungs from smoke. Jorge’s wife had been coughing a lot because her kitchen was full of smoke because she was just cooking on the floor with charcol in a thing called a bracero. Jorge and I got the fogon done in 9 hours of work. I’m starting to get the hang of mixing the mud and sand, laying the bricks, breaking bricks with a trowel, and cutting holes in walls. You just got to get the suction right. Fogons are good things for me to build because there is a reasonably large margin of error with each brick, and each step. If it’s a little jaggedy, well, in the end you’re going to cover it all up with a mix of white sand, red earth, water and cow dung so it doesn’t really matter. At least that’s what I think, and luckily Jorge was in agreement. I’m not a perfectionist, and neither is he.

I’ve been riding the unicycle around a lot lately, to stretch out the legs in a non-bicycle, non-walking way. Don Villalba, the guy who runs the bike repair shop took a good look at my unicycle. He now claims he in going to build one.

Last week I rode the unicycle for the kids at Escuela San Cosme, as asked of me by the school’s teachers. They kids loved it. I gave them all pony rides on the unicycle. You just stick them on top and wheel them around. It’s not hard, but after kid number forty it gets to be a little strenuous.

I also played a lot of soccer with the kids. I think the last time I played soccer for two solid hours with elementary school kids I was in elementary school. Back then I was half the size of the other players with twice the energy. This time I was twice the size of the other players with half the energy. The main similarity between the experiences is that I can’t play soccer, and I couldn’t play soccer. I should have figured that out long before Coach Hilton cut me from the high school team.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."