Greetings from Paraguay! 

 

First, remember that it is winter here.  We finished winter break and started school on July 31.  We don’t have many holidays built into the schedule and summer vacation doesn’t come till early December!  Then we start again in mid February and finish the school year the last of June.  Very similar to the US schedule, reversed.

 

The typical day starts at 8:00 for us and we are in an alternating 4 period block schedule.  That means you have four classes a day, and hour and a half long.  And every other day you change what classes you have.  So you are taking a total of 8 classes, but only meet each class every other day. 

 

After school sports are a big part of the kids lives here!  Sports practices start at 3:45, right after school.  Most practices are an hour long and only practice every other day.  But there are so many sports scheduled, back to back, that practices run until 8:00 most nights.  Even the young primary kids go out for a sport.  Or two!

 

The school is spread out over a beautiful campus with trees and picnic areas for the cafeteria.  There are many small buildings on the campus, most of them house five classrooms.  Then there are covered walks in between the buildings.  I’m attaching a few pictures for you to see a little bit about what I’m talking about.

 

Since this is an American School, we teach the kids of the people at the embassy, business people and missionaries from the US working here, kids from other countries whose families are stationed or working here.  But all of those kids only total to about 20% of our 600 students in grades K4 (4 year old Kindergarten) through 12.  The other students are generally from more wealthy and politically powerful Paraguayan families.  It makes for a very different school than the public schools here!  In a public school, you only go half of the day.  But the public school  teachers teach all day (7:00-5:00), two complete sets of classes!  In spite of what seem like overwhelming obstacles for public education, Paraguay supposedly has the highest literacy rate in South America.

 

The kids, just like in the US, are very social, love to talk and visit.  And occasionally push the limits in discipline!  And they are always late.  Even though they have 6 minutes to change classes!

 

But some of that comes from the local tradition of hora Paraguaya (Paraguayan time).  Everything starts late because everyone is so busy being social!  I went to the Asuncion Symphony concert and all of the newspapers were there (the city probably has five major newspapers!) taking pictures of all of the people who were there for the concert.  The photographers would pose a group and take a photo and move on to the next group while the reporter wrote down everyone’s names and did a quick interview.  Then the concert started, probably 20 minutes late.  Then, it all happened again during the intermission.  They served champagne and everyone had to have their picture taken by the newspapers with their friends, sipping champagne.  Intermission was at least a half hour long.  So a 9:00 concert finished at 11:30.  On a Thursday night!

 

So, there’s a little overview of my school.  How similar it is to the US schools.  And yet how some things are so different because of cultural differences!