The Stinky Girl Travels

This summer I'm working for Amigos de las Américas as a Project Supervisor (P-Sup) in Paraguay! So far, this week we have been training at the staff house, cooking meals together, and getting to know the tranquil city of Villarica. What am I going to do as a project supervisor? To be brief, my job will be to take care of our high school summer participants, who will each live in a community with 1-2 other participants. They'll have to do their own CBI (Community Based Initiative), plan out activities with local youth related to our project themes (Community Health and Children's Rights), work with our partner agencies, and overall, integrate themselves as fully as possible into a warm and welcoming community, a new culture, and a very different way of living. Each week, I will be traveling on a route and visiting our participants in their communities. Monday through Thursday I'm going to stay the night in each community, and Friday through Sunday I'll be at the...

My first two weeks were spent traveling with family from Modesto, hitting up some of the tourist sites of Hong Kong and eating lots of wonton mein, the famous Cantonese noodle dish featuring a savory soup broth oftentimes containing some delicious MSG (it does Make Soup Great, after all), yellow wonton noodles that are chewy, eggy, and have that characteristic gum may, or "golden flavor" from the alkaline solution it is soaked in, and of course, the won tons themselves - glorious little packages of shrimp, pork, and seasonings. Being a vegetarian, I was happy with just the mein and soup with some vegetables. The next week, we headed to Huanan, China for my aunt and uncle's wedding reception. A few days before our flight, I came down with this terrible flu that had been floating around Hong Kong. Many people in the streets were wearing hospital masks, especially when riding public transportation, and at times it felt like we were in the set of a movie about a horrible p...