Three new British volunteers are arriving in Santa María at the start of July, and will be helping with two exciting new projects as well as the usual ongoing classes. One is to take a short, basic English course out to the remote secondary schools located deep in the countryside: the volunteer will ride out there on the back of a motorbike, because there are no buses.
The other is to begin piano classes, thanks to two volunteers arriving in quick succession who both have Distinction in Piano Grade 8 – an opportunity too good to miss. But pianos are expensive in Paraguay because they have to be imported. The first piano arrived in Paraguay around 1860 with Madame Lynch, the Irish-French mistress of the future President Francisco Solano López, and they have retained a legendary fame of being exotic, foreign and exciting.
