An Introduction

I know that of the faithful handful of blog-followers out there, there's a small contingent that's wondering what I spend my days doing. This one's for you. Cheers.

For more information, please refer to the (newly reformatted) website here (http://altorefugio.org/en/). In short, I work at an AIDS ministry started by my relatives here in Asuncion. I might have let on earlier that I would be working at a clinic. That's because I was mistaken. Alto Refugio is, in fact, located across the street from one of Paraguay's main AIDS wards, but the center is drop-in only and provides for needs like clothing, medication, support groups, etc. As in many countries, AIDS in Paraguay carries a heavy stigma. Many patients who are found to have AIDS are disowned by their families and singularly discriminated against, leaving them with no form of familial support and little chance of employment. Many of these cases are single mothers with up to five or seven children to feed. The needs are great and Alto Refugio helps meet the needs of (I think) a remarkable number of patients each day. Still, like my work with impoverished families in Tucson, I find the days emotionally draining. There's always more need than one nonprofit can hope to fill.

My responsibilities at Alto Refugio range from chief of IT to chief rotten tomato sorter to floor-mopping underling. My latest project has been to revamp the website, which is really three websites, in each of English, Spanish and German. In the downtime (during the frequent internet black-outs) I've also been acting as the in-house carpenter, photographer, and lifter of heavy objects.

The day starts with devotions at 7:30. Being a project of the Canadian Evangelical Mennonite Church, the organization is faith-based and faith-permeated. (I should probably make some sort of claim here about my views not reflecting those of Alto Refugio or EMC) But what this often means for me is sitting in a circle of middle-aged women listening to a devotional (still outside the grasp of my language comprehension) and drinking maté. I could think of worse ways to begin a day, but I still laugh at myself when I actually describe it.

The rest of the day, until sometime between three and five, is spent trying to interpret what people are asking me to do. Recently, it's been spent in my own little world of web-design with the occasional interruption from kids who walk into the office and want to know what you call something in English. By all evidence, English is a hilarious-sounding language.

On other occasions, I accompany staff members on charlas: AIDS education presentations they give at schools, churches, even to regional sports teams and the military's top brass. Alto Refugio seems to average 5-7 presentations a week, even as they're turning down more requests. Let's see...if a normal presentation has 50-100 attendees, and the country has seven million people, that makes for a sizable chunk of the population. A charla includes some basic AIDS prevention information, anti-discrimination training and testimony from a current AIDS patient. But most striking to me is the challenge to prevent AIDS through abstinence and marital faithfulness...not striking that Alto Refugio would take an abstinence-only stance, but that they would be invited to present it to such a broad audience (like regional sports teams and military top brass). In a country where the prevailing theology seems to mirror the American “religious right,” such values, if not widely practiced, don't seem to be widely challenged.

I'm including a [clandestine] shot of a charla in progress (that's Dave, giving the presentation)

And also a picture of the school where this was held. Relatively speaking, this is a really nice school - the classrooms have desks, the blackboards have chalk and the bathrooms have flush toilets.