Paraguay Journal by Michael Berg
June 29, 2005
Hello!
Another week of training has gone by here in Paraguay. It has warmed up some and started raining more. Here in Villeta, on the banks on the Paraguay river, the abundant mosquitos are an ever present threat to one's sanity.
Last week as part of what the Peace Corps trainers call a ¨Dia de Practica¨, I was sent to a nearby Municipality to find out how it functions, along with another trainee who speaks a little Spanish and a third who speaks almost no Spanish. So we go into the Municipal at J. Salvidar building and ask tosee the mayor. When the mayor wasn't in we pretty much interrogated (interviewed) all of the people in the building. I ended up doing most of the talking. I found out a few things, like that this Municipality of over 40,000 people had no catastre (a list of property owners and the tax status of their land). I am sure that this makes it hard to collect property taxes. I also found out that a lot of Paraguayan Municipalities make a women their Treasurer, because of the idea that women Treasurers are less likely to eat the money (this is the job of the mayor, who is usually a man, and not the job of the Treasurer.) In the case of J. Salvidar, the Treasurer was the Mayor's daughter.
We ended up talking to the official Archivist, a middle-aged woman who was also a Guarani teacher. Her job seemed to be to watch the old receipts and files so that they don't fall of the wall or disappear.
After a couple weeks here it dawned on me how absurd this assignment is. For thirty-five years the United State of America backed the Stroesner dictatorship diplomatically, economically and with military training. The dictatorship was a cespool of corruption and terror. It was also a one-party patronage system, where the only way to get good jobs was through the government, and the only way to get those jobs was to be part of the Colorado Party. America backed this regime in the name of anti-communism, even though the way it was run in many ways resembled East Germany and other Soviet-block countries.
Although the days of extreme state terror are no longer here, the corrupt patronage system remains. And although other parties are legal now, the Colorado party still rules the roost. As I wrote last time, Paraguay is considered by Transparency International as the sixth most corrupt country in the world. Two years ago it was ranked number two. According to Stuart, in the town of Quiindy people were really upset when Paraguay went down in the ranking, because Paraguay was doing really well at something and then it slipped.
Against this background, I have been sent by the United States Peace Corps to promote open, transparent municipal government and community involvement. Hmm. Many people think that we are here as spies, scouting out the terrain so that for the Marines who are coming to take of the country in order to secure American access to Paraguay's water supply (Paraguay has some of the best and most abundant easily exploitable fresh water in the world).
Last weekend I went to three San Juan Festivals. If I was really with it I would tell you why people celebrate the festival of San Juan, but as it is, you'll have to make due with a description of the what without the why. At San Juan the people clothe the head of a cow on a stick and run around with it on fire. Then they burn a hanging scarecrow, called the Judas, and they burn it. It represents someone that people don't like. At one festival it was the head of the Paraguayan soccer team, at another I went to it was a gay man (people are exceedingly homophobic here). Inside the scarecrow are all these fireworks. They go BOOM!
Then people light a ball on fire and the kids all kick around a burning ball. Meanwhile, they have a man dressed like a woman ¨marry¨ a man dressed like a man, which I thought was strange to see at the same festival where they were burning the gay man. During the festival people are eating empanadas and all sorts of special and strange things. Adolecent boys put hoods over there head and become jailers. They act hyper-macho and leer at and taunt all the young women. If you want your friend to be thrown in the plastic tarp 'jail', you pay 1000 Guarani and one of the jailers will grab your friend and throw them into jail. The person gets out of jail when someone posts bail, which is also 1000 Guarani (there are 6000 Guarani to the dollar).
Actually, you probably are more likely to have your enemy thrown in jail than your friend.
Yesterday myself and a couple other trainees visited the Villeta community forestry and garden project, where they plant trees to distribute around the community. They also teach young people about how to garden and about environmental issues. It seems like a great project.
My Guarani is coming well, and everybody in Villeta seems to know me know, I believe due to the unicycle riding.
I've been getting updates that the reprehensable American occupation of the soveriegn state of Iraq is rapidly losing support every day, especially after the release of the Downing Street memorandum. Keep up the fight - now is the time to push even harder to finally bring our troops home.
June 21, 2005 I just got back from my five day site visit in Quiindy (pronounced keen-duh, not kwindy - its the Guarani y).
I was staying with Municipal Services Development Volunteer Stuart DeCew. He's been working in Quiindy for two years. His job is to promote civic education and municipal government transparency is a place which is run by a corrupt one party dictatorship (the Colorado party). And the mayor of Quiindy is mean.
In 1989 Gen. Rodriguez deposed Stroessner in a coup, ending the reign of terror and torture. Which is good. But the same system of corruption, croneyism and one-party rule continued and continues. In many ways it intensified and got worse, even though there is now a free press to report it. Paraguay is considered by Transparency International as the most corrupt country in Latin America, and second most corrupt in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti).
When I got to Quiindy it was raining. Which means that nobody left their house. When it rains in Paraguay, nobody leaves their house. I'm talking even a little mist, nobody leaves the house.
Stuart's neighbors, with four adults and six children in a not so large house, had just killed a pig and were cleaning it out. The dogs were chewing on the pig's skull all throughout my stay.
The next day was Saturday and the chief justice of the Paraguayan Supreme Court was in town to speak to the politicians and other bigshots from Quiindy. All of them were in their suits, introducing each other, praising each other, giving boring meaningless speeches for two and a half hours. The head of the Supreme Court talked about the need for capacitation, education, honesty and accountablity in government.
Then everyone drank fine wine, ate beef, potatos and other good things, at a private function, at the expense of the Quiindy taxpayer.
I was allowed to enter, I believe because I'm American, but I'm not sure. Other uninvited people were not allowed in. I didn't eat or drink much.
The head of the Supreme Court, Mr. Fretes, got his job due to his connections. He is famous for something he did when he was working with the Quiindy Municipal governement. There was a man with 150 hectares of land. Mr. Fretes wanted some of the land. So he went to the official land register, erased the 150, replaced it with 60, and registered the other 90 hectacres in his name.
While at the shindig I by strange coincidence ran into the first person I met in Paraguay, a woman named Norma.
When I first arrived at the airport in Asuncion, I had to go to bathroom (it's a long way from Miami to Asuncion via Sao Paolo.) There were two bathrooms at the area to wait for customs in the Asuncion airport. Neither said something obvious like ¨Mujer¨ and ¨Hombre¨. Instead, one had the figure of a fat person and the other a slightly skinnier person. They both looked like men-type people to me. So I went into the room with the fat figure. A woman was in it and said said, ¨This is for women!¨ That was Norma.
I ended up talking to her, using a few Guarani phrases and such, she gave me her telephone number and address and told me to call her up when I got to Quiindy. I forgot all about it during the first couple weeks of training, but now here she was, at the Supreme Court wine and meatfest, chastising me for never calling her. It was a little strange that I was randomly sent to the city of the woman I walked in on in the Asuncion airport bathroom.
So she took me to a second lunch at her house with her husband and kids. She did ask me to marry her and take her back to the US, which I though was a strange request in front of her husband and children. I wisely declined the offer.
Once it stopped raining in a couple days Stuart and I went all over the place meeting people, eating their food, and generally competing to see who would be the biggest clown in Quiindy. I would say that I won, but Stuart was pretty tough competition.
People are generally extremely hospitable, friendly and welcoming in Paraguay. They always want to feed you. And they are really proud of their foods, the same foods they have been eating since the time of the Guarani. Sopa Paraguaya is what everybody has on Sundays, and every other day. It is the only soup in the world that is not liquid, it is cornbread cooked with cheese and milk and then drenched in pig fat. The first ten or so times you eat it you have to work really hard to not gag, but eventually it gets to be almost edible.
I talked to teachers, coffin builders, garbage pickers, farmers, municipal workers, librarians, and all sorts of other people. Everybody I met had a different story of corruption (except the mayor, who wasn't talking). I even heard a story about police officers that give change for bribes. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody wants to band together and challenge anything. Paraguayans are famous (or infamous) for being tranquilo, calm, and just living with whatever is going on.
Quiindy is right on the main highway from Asuncion to Ciudad del Este (formerly Ciudad Stroesner - it was created by Stroesner in the 1960s in order to serve as the contraband smuggling point for Argentina and Brazil).
Once you get in a little from the highway there are beautiful roling farms and little streams. Stuart had a hell of a time working with the horrible mayor in Quiindy. His advice for me is to get on my bike everyday, get out of whatever town I'm placed in, and work with the campesinos.
It's actually kind of cold here now - the cold Antarctic breeze coming up through the pampas.
Right now there is a full moon so I'm hyper. On Thursday I've got to give a talk to our training group on corruption in Paraguay, so I was preparing throughout the site visit.
Love,
Michael
June 12, 2005 Hello All!
After a extremely busy training week, I woke up this morning at six thirty to blairing patriotic music, all sung in Guarani. Today was the big parade in Villeta, like all over Paraguay. The celebration of the Defenders of the Chaco! The Chaco war was fought against Bolivia in order to defend the northern half of Paraguay, the Chaco, where few people live. The Chaco is considered a hellish wasteland by many, but the Bolivians thought there might be oil, so they invaded in 1932, with funding by Standard Oil.
The war lasted four years and cost well over 100,000 Paraguayan and Bolivian lives. Paraguay successfully defended the Chaco from the Bolivian invaders, who were better armed and had more training. However, most of the Bolivians were Aymara and Quecha people from the highlands. The flat desert of the Chaco wasn't exactly what they were used to.
So I tried to sleep a couple more hours. Dona Blanca was already gone when I awoke. That's the woman I'm staying with. Homestay is not exactly something I relish, but Blanca is not controling whatsoever of what I do, she's real nice, and she''s helping me with Guarani, although often her words don't match those of my dictionary.
She had to march in the parade this morning. This was not good, because she is 60 years old and has feet that look like basketballs. Something is severely wrong with those feet, and it hurts her to walk. I told her just to let them know that she was medically unable, but she said that there was a lot of pressure.
So I finally got up and ate some greasy, old tortillas that Blanca had left me, along with fresh apple juice. Paraguayan torillas are fluffy egg things with algie inside, they are quite unlike Mexican or even Nicaraguan tortillas. She also left me some greasy fried eggplant, but I couldn't even contimplate eating something that greasy. I also ate a banana.
The food is greasy, but I have gotten her to stop cooking so much meat, which I ate last week for the first time in many years. She said, yes, I was wanting to cut back on meat anyways.
In general Paraguayan food is bland, greasy and unhealthy. But it is a source of great pride, as most of what people eat are the same food that the Guarani people ate even before the time of the Jesuit missions.
I left for the parade (three blocks away) and found some friends, include Walid. Walid is a Peace Corps volunteer and the only person I ever met whose hometown is Mecca. He is Saudi-Arabian American. He is the only one here who after only one week is wearing a Paraguayan hat, and he goes around with his equipo de terere. Terere is the cold herbal tea everyone drinks all the time, it is an essential part of Paraguayan culture. They put the mate in a wood cup, then pour the cold water, then drink out of a filter straw called a bombilla. Remember, the terere is COLD, so it is very different then what the Argentinians do, when they drink HOT mate.
Walid has decided to make his name more Paraguayan he will change it to Walipe. And so he has. When I get there he is in the middle of everything, photographing the Villeta Prefecture's eight surviving Chaco War veterans as they slowly walk or wheel there way to the stage, carrying Paraguayan flags. (I will see where Walipe puts his pictures on a website, and try to send that information.)
Then the parade begins! Fireworks, bands, high-school girls in army shirts, extremely short mini-dresses, and high-heels, marching behind high school boys pounding on drums.
Then came tiny kids, half dressed like Paraguayans, half dressed like Bolivians. The boys were evey wearing the famous Bolivian hat in the hot sun, and the girls in polleras (I'm talking about kids between the ages of two and five).
The thing got repetitious and I felt really sick. Feeling like I was going the fall, I left the throng, started back to the house and then vomited profusely near some unsympathetic cows. I laid down for hours.
Perhaps it was because I was out of sorts because yesterday I walked six miles in the sun and then played football. Perhaps apple juice still doesn't do me good. Perhaps all the grease. I don't know.
Blanca got back. She had taken my advice, and had sat on the side for the whole parade. Then she made me eat a little bread, which was good, and I refused her attempt to have me drink more juice and eat more fried.
Then we studied Guarani a little. I am learning the body and the verbs. Ipòraminte!
I was going to go to a soccer game, to watch the great match between Villeta and Naranhaisy, but I've spent all afternoon setting up this Yahoo account, which is MUCH BETTER. One afternoon of work will save me hours in the long haul.
Tomorrow more language lessons and meetings with the Paraguay Peace Corps director. Tuesday to Asuncion, Wednesday in Guarambare, then five days at the site of Stu, an actual volunteer.
Send this to whoever you think would enjoy or want it.
Love,
Michael
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