| November 27, 2005 |
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| Written by Michael Berg | |||||||
| Saturday, 26 November 2005 | |||||||
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Hello from Asuncion! I’ve got a week of In Service Training in Guarambare starting tomorrow. There’s been a lot going on in the last week.
Last Sunday I went to the creek (Arroyo Gasory) and swam around. Well, I waded around – it was not very deep. About half of the town was there, wading around the creek on a hot Sunday afternoon. There was not soccer game in town this Sunday. I personally much more enjoy wading around the creek with people than watching a soccer game with people, but the soccer game can pleasant if there is some good chipa to eat.
A few days ago a couple of my strings broke on the guitar. I changed them, but they sounded bad. It was frustrated, and Gladys suggested that I get help from Pastor Nestor, the Pastor of the Evangelical church. So I went to his house after lunch. It was a good chance to get to know him some, and showed me the proper way to change guitar strings. His son Rolando is a fantastic guitarist.
The way the weather works in Paso Yobai is that every day is hotter than the previous, until there is a big rainstorm. After the rainstorm it cools down considerably, and then slowly the temperature creeps up again every night.
We had a stretch of about five days where the heat was almost unbearable. During one of my English classes I almost fainted, but I had to keep the energy up and pretend I was not hot. I had to remind the students that we were all alive and we were learning English. Last Wednesday even the night was only slightly cooler than the day, and the process of opening all of the doors to my apartment didn’t help cool me down hardly at all.
That is, it didn’t help until it rained and winded tremendously in the middle of the night. This woke me up, at which point I had to close all of the doors because everything was getting wet. The process of closing all of the doors reminded me that I had just washed my clothing and then hung them on my clotheslines on the roof, where they had been drying. I realized that they were no longer drying, because clothing cannot dry in the rain, so I thought about ascending to the roof in the middle of the rainstorm to bring down the clothing and hang it on chairs and tables. But after looking out of my window and seeing lightening striking all over, I decided not to go up to roof. It occurred to me that my clothes would serve me little if I had no body to put them on.
By noon the next day the rain had cleared. I went to the roof, and half of my clothing was strewn about the roof. By some miracle none of it had blown off the roof, into the muddy streets below. (Can not losing a sock be considered a miracle, or is it just good luck?) I hung it up again and it was dry five hours later.
Two days ago I finally got a chance to visit the largest indigenous community in the district, Santa Teresita. The Carmelite nuns have told me that they would take me several times to an indigenous community, but they still haven’t done so. So I took advantage of an opportunity to go with the Planchada High School. I imagine that a trip with the nuns would have been different than the trip with the high school students.
I was working in the Municipality on the database when all these people came into the building. I came into see what was going on, and it was the teacher, Humberto, from Planchada, and some of his students. Planchada is one of the companies, or rural communities, which makes up part of Paso Yobai. Humberto asked for, and received from the Municipality 150,000 Guaranies (around $25) in order to buy food for lunch and as gifts for the people of Santa Teresita. I asked Humberto if I could come along with them, and he was happy to let me come. So I put away the old tax receipts, and joined the excursion.
The students were standing around in the back of a truck – a large truck that is useful for carrying things such as sugar cane, mandioca or students.
It took a little bit of time to leave – everybody was running around Paso Yobai buying things to eat. But finally we loaded into the truck and made our way to Santa Teresita. On the way there we all sang songs and waved at people. The students taught me how to sing “Nde Pora Che Paraguai” (You are Beautiful, My Paraguay). We passed the Perierra family, who I stayed with a couple weeks ago. The truck stopped there for a bit, and it was good to get a chance to see them again.
Eventually we got to this place where a man came out and saw us and opened a barbed wire gate. We entered an area where the road was different then the road we had been on previously. Where previously we were on a dirt road, here we were on a road that was mostly grass. We went for a bit and we had go open another gate, and then another. Finally we got to Santa Teresita.
Santa Teresita is a community of Mbya Guarani people. They are a tribe of indigenous Guarani people who have resisted integrating into modern Paraguayan society, and continue to live by their traditions. They speak Guarani, just like most people in Paso Yobai, but everybody says that their Guarani is much purer, without the Spanish mixed in. They also grow mostly the same crops as everybody else. Still, it is as if within those three gates they are living in a different world.
People are only permitted to enter the community with the permission of the cacique, the group’s leader. His name is Oscar. We met Oscar at the school, which was the only modern building I saw in the entire community. The rest of the buildings were huts made of earth and a little bit of wood.
The cacique stood around 4 foot 10 inches tall, and the rest of the people I met were similarly short. Don Oscar and his father Don Adolfo showed us around the community. They both understood Spanish, but they wouldn’t speak Spanish. The rest of the community neither understood nor spoke Spanish. Because my Guarani is still pretty limited, the students from Planchada translated for me when I couldn’t understand the indigenous people.
Except for the road from the outside to the school, there are no roads in the community. We traveled by foot, walking around paths through brush, through fields and through the few patches of jungle that still stand.
We visited people in their huts. People were cooking over open fires. I saw neither beds nor dressers nor cabinets in any of the homes. Although maybe 1/3 of the huts were connected to electricity, I saw no appliances of any type in the homes. I saw neither tractors nor any modern farm equipment. People get there water from a couple wells and a creek that flows through the middle of the community. Every home has a collection of dried mud pellets outside of them. The people used to pellets to hunt birds with their slingshots (there are no rocks in Santa Teresita.)
We all went into a rectangular building that Don Oscar said was their church, but it lacked every feature I’ve every associated with a church (there was no cross, no pews, and no alter). It was a small, empty building with one tiny door. We also visited their cemetery, which is quite different from any other cemetery I’ve seen in Paraguay. The graves were all identified by mounds and a simple cross without any name. Groups of graves were scattered about a large field of different types of grasses, so it wasn’t a compact area of graves, the way we normally think of a cemetery.
After the tour, I helped the students from Planchada and the teacher prepare lunch at the school. The students were pretty organized, and were all willing to pitch in to get things prepared. We made hot dogs, put them on buns, and shared them amongst ourselves and around forty Mbya people who had come to the school.
After lunch we presented the community with gifts – clothing, spaghetti, and packages of yerba mate. After that the cacique thanked the students and teacher for the gifts, for wanting to learn about his community, and for bringing so many pretty girls into the village. Then the teacher and some students thanked the cacique for allowing us to visit the community.
Next we played games with the children, like duck, duck goose and elephant, elephant, giraffe.
After playing with the kids we all piled into the truck again and headed on back to Paso Yobai, which is between Santa Teresita and Planchada. In Paso Yobai we bought wine, mixed it with ice and soda inside thermoses, then headed for the creek. I joined the teacher and the high school students in drinking wine and wading around in the creek (Arroyo Gasory). They were celebrating the end of the semester (for some, the end of high school). Unfortunately, it wasn’t really the end of the semester because all the students had one last final exam the next day, but they didn’t seem very worried about their upcoming exam.
The relationship in Paso Yobai between mainstream Paraguayan society and the indigenous Mbya Guarani is an interesting one. On the one hand many people respect the indigenous people because of their pure Guarani and because they have held on to their traditions, despite extreme difficulties. Humberto and the students I was with from Planchada were excited about the visit to Planchada because they said it was a great opportunity to learn about their own heritage. One student told me it was like being able to go back in time, to learn what his ancestors were like. Mainstream Paraguayan culture comes from the mixture of the Guarani and Spanish people, and people are generally very proud of their Guarani roots.
On the other hand, people also look down upon the indigenous people. I’ve heard people complain that the Mbya like to accept gifts but they make no attempt to improve their own situation themselves. I’ve heard people call the Mbya lazy and stupid. In fact, it is common here for someone to insult someone else by calling that person a Mbya.
Later in the same day in which I went to Santa Teresita, I ran into Nelida, whom I had given some soy meat from Villarrica last week. She ran into her house and gave me a little tupperware bowl full of soy meat balls, rice and vegetables that she had cooked her family for lunch. It was delicious.
I’ve now learned how to play on the guitar Nights in White Satin, by the Moody Blues. I got the words and chords off the internet in Villarrica. The song makes more sense now that I have seen the words written, although it is mentally less visually interesting. Before I had always thought it was about Knights in White Satin.
Goodbye!
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