Carolina Peace - July 2, 2006

July 2, 2006

Written by Michael Berg

Saturday, 01 July 2006

I haven’t written for a while, because I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t been taken notes every day on what I have been doing. But I’ll write you now some of the things I’ve been doing.

I went to Paraguari last month to see my friend Smoot. Paraguarí is an interesting place. The Municipality is a tiny, run down building, even though Paraguarí is the capital city of the large Department of Paraguarí. The Colorado Party Sectional building is far larger than the Municipality. In fact, the Colorado Party owns a large city block, which contains the towns only library, not owned and run by the Municipality but by the Colorado party.

Smoot and I were walking down the street in Paraguari and we were followed by police officers as we passed the Colorado Sectional building. We eluded them and then went to eat. On the way back my brother called the cell phone, so I was talking to him on the phone, just as we passed the sectional building again.

As we were walking, some police officers chased after us. One of the officers was Palmiro, a former English student of mine from Paso Yobai, 19 years old. We ran in the race in Ciudad de Este together, he far, far faster than I. Seeing that he was now a police officer in Paraguarí, that explained to me where he disappeared too. He called me by name and we talked about running and Paso Yobai a little. Then, after all this, another officer asked to see my ID and Smoot’s ID. I gave the man the ID, as did Smoot, and the officer than said, “OK, now we’ve got to go to the station.”

At this point Smoot acted intelligently, grabbed our Peace Corps IDs from the officer’s hand, and said, “This is not going to happen. We weren’t doing anything wrong, we need those IDs and we’re going to sleep.”

I talked to Palmiro a little more, and the other officer went to get his boss and soon they were coming back to us. At this point Smoot and I quickly walked away. I’ve heard a lot of stories about officers refusing to believe that the Peace Corps ID is real, in an attempt to extract a bribe. They didn’t follow us. Smoot thinks that this is because he lives behind the house of someone who is a Colorado and was high ranking in the military for a long time.

In Paraguari I sprayed on Off to avoid mosquitos, but it turns out that I’m alergic to Off and I broke out in horrible welts all over my body. I would have been much better off being bitten by mosquitos.

A couple weeks ago. I heard a great story from Ña Carmen, who has the town photocopier. She told me about a person who wanted to pass off some fake 50,000 Guarani bills. So he drove into a small town and went to each house saying that he wanted a puppy. Pretty much each house had unwanted puppies. The man offered the people at each house 10,000 Guarani for one puppy. So he gave someone at each house a fake 50,000 Guarani bill, and they gave him four real 10,000 Guarani bills and a puppy.

At the outskirts of the town, on the way out, he released all the puppies. When everybody’s puppies all returned to their home, they began to suspect that something fishy was going on. Then they realized that they’d been duped.

I also talked to a man who possibly has lived in the district longer than any other, Mr. Humplemeyer. He’s a German-Paraguayan who as a child came with family to the area in the late 1920s. His family had come to Argentina because of the bad economic situation in Germany during that time, and they were planning to settle there, when someone told them that the Paraguayan government was giving anybody who wanted it 20 free hectares of land, fertile land in an area which never froze.

None of this was a lie, but he said that nobody had told his family that it was miles and miles from the nearest road, in the middle of a jungle with ferocious insects. Humplemeyer had a pretty thick German accent, despite living in Paraguay almost 80 years. My friend Don Kiko said that Humplemeyer and some of the other Germans in his area (Sudetia) are racists and refuse to integrate with the greater society. This is certainly not the case with some other people of German decent in the area, who are very much a part of the town life here.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday, after working in the Municipality for the morning, and \ although I really wanted to read, play guitar and write, I decided not to be anti-social, so I went to Planchada with Paso Yobai’s youth soccer teams, led by Paso Yobai Municipal Treasurer Wildo Escobar.

I was with about fifty youth in the back of a giant truck as we drove the bumpy road to Planchada. When we got there I ran into some people I knew from previous visits, so I started talking to people and ignored for the most part the soccer game.

Near the end of far too many soccer games, I was talking to one of the students I knew from the high school, Ninfa (Spanish for Nymph) and her cousin Sixto. Sixto knew some English, and when I told him that I was from St. Louis , he knew exactly where it was. That was amazing to me, because I haven’t met anybody else here who knew where St. Louis is, and Sixto’s never lived anywhere but Planchada.

While we were talking, Ninfa was standing on a stump. She’s usually around my height, but standing on the stump she was really tall. When she got off the trunk, I wanted to be tall too, so I tried to stand on the stump. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t a stable stump. I have no idea how Ninfa managed to stand on the thing. I fell off it immediately, and my right thigh collided with a jagged edge of the stump, producing a lot of pain, and large a bruise. I lot of people saw the fall and thought it was funny. I didn’t think it was that funny until the pain subsided a little. Then I realized that falling off a log can be funny.

On the way back, as we were driving back, the people in the truck from Paso Yobai and the people on the road from Planchada were yelling insults at each other. Then I felt a whack on the side of my head. Because the boys had been fighting and jumping on each other, just playing around, I figured that one of them had decided to get me into the playing. I was not about to do that, so I said to some kids, “Who hit me in the head?”

One of them said, “No, no, it wasn’t us, someone threw a mandarina (an orange type fruit) at you head.”

Sure enough, I had mandarina juice dripping from my hair.

Next thing I know I feel this whack on the side of my face. A mandarina nailed me hard in the side of the jaw. It hurt. My ears rang. I felt like fighting back, or talking to whoever did it, or doing something. But the place was so chaotic, and there were so many people in the truck, and it would have been dangerous to leave the back of the moving truck or even try to communicate with the driver. So I ducked as low as I could in the truck and waited until we were clear out of Planchada.

I wasn’t the only one hit by the mandarinas coming from the arms of Planchada boys screaming about how great Planchada is and how bad Paso Yobai is. A lot of kids were hit by the fruit too. I hate the way sports and sports rivalry is used by people as a cover to do things that everybody knows are wrong. Nobody’s ever thrown fruit at me in Paraguay before. That’s not how people are supposed to treat each other.

Perhaps it’s somewhat unrelated, but it made me think of a chant we had when I was in high school for the football games. “Rah, rah, ree, kick him in the knee. Rah, rah, rass, kick him in the other knee.”

This was supposed to be funny because rass rhymes with ass, and ass a bad word. But instead of saying the bad word, we would say, “other knee.” Get it? I see the chant is a testament to a perverse morality. Somehow it’s wrong to say ass, but there’s nothing wrong with advocating the kicking of a person in both knees, which is likely to render the person incapable of walking. At least the ass has some padding.

I teach English every week in Planchada now, in the High School. The kids are pretty motivated. I’ve also made some progress helping the librarian at the Elementary school improve the community library. The last few days I’ve been running around Asuncion delivering requests to various newspapers, embassies and book distributers for donations, and it’s been going well.

I also finally made a fogon, with the help of Miguel, the king of Fogons, and his friend Celso who came from Caazapa. We made it for Enriqueta and her family of four children. It was nice to get the thing made because the family really needed the it. She is a widow and owns a tiny shoe repair shop in Paso Yobai. The five year old boy Juan Bautista helped a lot, carrying and washing bricks. Enriqueta got all of the materials together before had.

So I’m working on the library, the cadastre, English and now am looking to try to help the yerba growers with their cooperative, because there have recently been conflicts between them and the German yerba factory owners who process the yerba. The growers want 850 guaranies per a kilo of yerba and the factory owners will only pay 750.

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