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September 1, 2006 PDF Print E-mail
Written by Michael Berg   
Thursday, 31 August 2006
Hello everyone! I haven’t written for a while, I was in Colombia for a few weeks; I think I will write about that later.
Right now things are pretty chaotic at the Paso Yobai Municipality. Luis Dure, the mayor, is running for reelection. He won the Liberal Party primary, and thus legally had to step down three months before the November general election. He stepped down. By my reading of the Ley Organica, which defines the way Paraguayan Municipalities function, the Municipal Council President should then take over as interim mayor, and then is supposed to call a meeting of the Council in order to decide a more permanent interim mayor.
This did not happen. The Council President, Petrona Cardozo, never got a chance to be mayor. Instead, five council members, allied with the mayor, appointed Amancio Cristaldo to the position of temporary mayor. They claim they had the right to do this. Petrona disagrees and is fighting the appointment. So there is disagreement on who should be mayor and even who should occupy what positions on the Council.
The Municipality is functioning at very low capacity. Somehow the phone bill didn’t get completely paid, so the Municipality can accept calls but not make calls. This is a district of 25,000 and there is no functioning phone.
I have finally gotten everything together to get a team together and to ground work for the completion of a Municipal Urban Cadastre. Don Tata, the Secretary General of the Municipality, he got me some more maps and now I have almost completely digitalized the layout of the entire town. I just need approval to go forward by the Municipal Council. Last week it rained, so the council didn’t meet. Tomorrow I will leave Asuncion, where I am now located, at 3am in order to get back to Paso Yobai in time for the Council meeting. Hopefully it will meet and people can put aside their differences to approve the project.
In other news, I have started English classes again in Paso Yobai. Lots of young people this time are in the class. Also I grew a moustache, which I am going to get rid of today, because people have stopped calling me by my name, they just say – Hey, here comes the moustache! Either that or they call me by the name of famous people who had moustaches, like “Hitler” or “Stroessner” or “Saddam Hussein.” Actually, though, it’s true I was looking at an old 250 Iraqi Dinar note that I have and I do bear a striking resemblance to Saddam at his peak.
Oh, in case you didn’t hear the news, Alfredo Stroessner is now dead. He died in Brazil.
In the little town of Planchada, I continue to help with their library and teach English at the high school. This is going well. After teaching in the down last week I talked to Don Higenio, who teaches at the elementary school. He is also the president of the Planchada water committee. He told me how people in Planchada have been used to receiving free water from the community water system for ten years. But the commission keeps having to drill deeper and deeper for the pumped to suck up the ground water. So they started metering the homes that receive water from the community system.
About 25 users refuse to accept a meter. They say they should continue to get free unlimited water. According to Higenio they are using way too much water, mostly for irrigation. So Higenio wants to mediate with the over users to get them to stop overusing and get them to accept meters.
Higenio asked me to talk to his kids about water. I told him, look, I don’t know any more about water than you do. He said, well, they like you so they will listen to you. So I thought, why not, and I talked to the class about water and why it is good to conserve. It wasn’t that great because I had only 5 minutes prep time. While I was talking Higenio left the classroom. After the talk he came back and he was pale. I asked him what happened. He said that this lady had asked to get water installed in her property, and she was approved, but the commission told her that she had to accept a meter. She said that the meters didn’t work right and wouldn’t accept the meter. So they wouldn’t give her water.
Higenio told me that while I was talking to his kids, this lady got some people together, got some shovels, then broke the main water pipe for the town. She sabatoged to Planchada water system.
Last Wednesday was Children’s Day. I was a clown again on the unicycle again, in front of the church. I opened for a professional clown. The kids were all swarming around and I chased them around. It was fun. The amount of sugary foods consumed by the kids was impressive.
Then two days ago was Police Day. The police in Paso Yobai all had a celebration and music and a lot of beer and wine. I joined in a little, but just a little, because I had to teach that night. The police in Paso Yobai were wasted. I’ve been talking to people, and people all over the country were celebrating Police Day and the police were getting drunk. I’m not sure about the wisdom of all of the police in Paraguay getting drunk all on the same afternoon. My friend Walipe just told me that one of the celebrants of Police day in the town of Fram, and armed guard, got drunk on Wednesday and shot himself with his machine gun.
That’s the news from Paso Yobai as I see it. If you see it differently, come to Paso Yobai and tell me what’s going on!
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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."
 
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