1/15/12 (Sunday)
Today is bright and shining. The world is refreshed and green
after two days of rain Wednesday and Thursday. It hadn't rained much in a
month. The weather was miserably hot and dry and the air was thick and smoky
from people burning vegetation (in their fields, or even just unused land,
folks seem to be inclined to set fires). All the plants, even the weeds were
shriveled and crunchy. The heat, the smoky air and the orange light all gave me
the impression that the Earth was falling into the sun.
The rain brought a temporary reprieve from the heat and has cleaned the
air. The big white clouds which migrate across the sky this time of year and
the blue sky appear crisp and clear again. The stars and Milky Way blazed overhead last night.
Friday and Saturday I went do to the river near my house (not the one where
everyone comes to celebrate for New Years) with my new friends, two German
student documentarians, to swim and drink beer. It was gloriously blue and
green down there, and the water was still low despite the rain, which allowed
us to cross to the other side on Saturday. Friday evening we had talked to an
old German expatriate named Uli who has lived in town for 17 years. He is
one of two born-and-raised-in-Germany Germans who live here, and he seems to
have lead quite a life. In addition to his wife and two daughters here he has
children in Germany and Norway by different mothers. Before moving here he
lived in the jungle of French Guiana and was involved in various escapades to
finance himself. He now lives quietly in town just two blocks from my house and
works as an electrician.
Tangent: in spanish the words for inner tube, camera, and chamber of
congress are all the same! Camara.
Aren’t languages funny?
In the evening the clouds were the most fantastic that I have seen in my
time here. Summer clouds here are consistently impressive, but that night was
superb. The last remnants of the storm were passsing northwards and scattered
thunderheads were still exhausting their strength. One passed us close by to
the East. We could see the rain falling, shimmering in the sideways sunlight,
not far away, and then the ground and trees misting where it fell.
Later a bigger storm appeared to the South East. It was immense and
multilayered, orange, pink, grey and black, all lit occasionally by its distant
flashes of lighting. Rayos, relampagos. The scale of it was what was
really so impressive, great towers and banks and valleys all put into relief by
that subtle sideways light. We came back up to my house for the last few beers
and watched from the porch as the storm caught up with us and poured down on my
noisy tile roof.
Andreas and Stepan are here for another week and are working on a film
about the descendants of the German colonists that live here. They don't speak
spanish (but do speak english) so I've been helping them with a few interviews
with folks that don't speak German. I've hardly ever interviewed anyone, and
never for a video documentary, so I can't say the interviews we did are going
to be terribly helpful for them. The trick is to get the subject talking under their
own momentum, so that they are just telling their stories. This you can put in
the background while you show footage of the town or of people going about their
lives.
I probably benefitted more than my German friends from the interviews. They
gave me a setting to be candid and ask questions that I would not otherwise
feel comfortable raising. We spoke with my host family, especially Ramon who's
great grandfather was a German settler, and also with my neighbor Claudia to
get an impression of non-German Paraguay.
The interview with Claudia affected me powerfully. She has lived a hard
life. She is very grown up and has two daughters, but I was amazed to learn she
is just 22 years old. Her family moved here two years ago from an area to the
South called Chore. They moved because the river was flooding their home and
destroying their crops. I expect this was a result of the deforestation that
has taken place all around here especially in the last 20 years. She got
pregnant and dropped out of school at 16, but the father was a jerk. She then went
to work in Asunción for a family, cleaning house and washing clothes. She is articulate
in Spanish and sure of herself, which is not exactly common among poor women
here. She is adamant that she won´t let men use and abuse her as they did when
she was younger, and does her best to shelter her daughters and her young
sister. She lives with her mother, sister, daughters, stepfather (who is a borracho,
drunkard) and possibly other young men and women that I cannot quite place
but who seem to always be at that two room house. She plans on going to
Argentina or Chile to look for work as soon as her documents are in order.
I hope Stepan and Andreas are able to incorporate something from that
interview into their film, but I am thankful for the opportunity to have been
the interviewer regardless.
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