Bienvenidos

So, we made it to Paraguay.... 27 butt-numbing hours later. Travelling around the globe is amazing, but getting there is always such a pain. Two nights of no sleep, 6 meals of airline cuisine, long lines, one McDonald's breakfast, and Mandy squeezing my hand off every time the plane bumped. What an adventure.

Paraguay is amazing. We are loving it here already. We were picked up at the airport by Michael Graham, the intern director, at 2am. He's a great guy who is native to Paraguay, but ironically enough graduated from K State. Come to find out, Kansas and Paraguay are sister states/countries. Citizens from Paraguay pay instate tuition in Kansas. They formed a partnership in the 60's. They are both landlocked. They are both agricultural. Therefore, they love each other. We have met a couple people now that went to school in Kansas. Random.

We spent the morning at Fundacion Paraguaya's main offices. The employees and management are awesome. Everyone is passionate, hard working, and laid back. We really like the people here. We'll spend a few days touring around, meeting people, visiting the school etc. to get a good feel for the organization. We talked about a few projects we can work on over the next few months. Mandy and I will most likely work together the whole time. It'll be fun.

The language will be a bit of a challenge. Mandy has taken a bunch of classes in Spanish so she can usually get the gist of what people are saying. I'm pretty much clueless. This morning everyone was telling me "bienvenidos". I assumed it was a form of greeting so I repeated it back to them. Come to find out it means "welcome." So, I have now welcomed everyone to their own country. Take luck? The first of many linguistic blunders I'm sure.