growth

The New York Times has a good article about the huge economic growth some parts of Paraguay are experiencing right now. My part of the country specializes in the kind of modern, mechanized, GMO agriculture that is leading this growth and many of my students and counterparts make their living, and live well, from monocultural GMO soy, wheat and corn production. I think the economy in my area is somewhat more equitable than in the cities; there are a few mansions here, but there does seem to be a fairly large middle class in my town. There seem to be relatively many smallish land-holders who can make their living in this way, and there few desperately poor people here.

On the other hand, this morning I rode my bike out to do literacy activities in a tiny school about 6km outside of town. The school is only open in the morning and has 9 students (and two teachers!). They say that there are so few students because more and more families have sold their small plots of land to the larger land-holders and moved into town. The teachers told me the families often aren't able to manage their money though, so now they all come out to work on the land that they used to own. 

It's hard to say that this boom is a bad thing for the country overall. The article "notes the overall poverty rate has fallen to about 32 percent in 2011 from 44 percent in 2003, said Roland Horst, a board member at the central bank" and that "the government had been trying to reduce poverty, noting that a program of giving small cash stipends to people in extreme poverty, begun in 2005, now included more than 75,000 families".

But the shamelessness of the rich can be really shocking: "“How is it possible to reconcile the fact that hundreds of people survive each day by sifting through garbage in the municipal dump of Asunción while Paraguayans are also the biggest per-capita spenders in Punta del Este?” said Mr. Rojas Villagra, referring to the Uruguayan resort city where rich Paraguayans vacation alongside moneyed Argentines and Brazilians."

and the government has little resources (in tax revenue) or interest in major poverty-reduction programs:

" Paraguay’s social welfare programs remain meager compared with antipoverty projects in neighboring countries, which have lifted tens of millions of people out of abject living conditions. They blame Paraguay’s relatively weak state, with tax collection corresponding to only about 18 percent of gross domestic product, a figure lower than that of African nations like Congo and Chad."

As Americans, we volunteers occasionally have the opportunity to rub elbows (is that a phrase?) with the wealthy elite of Asuncion, and some of the places we frequent in that city principally cater to that class. It's usually an interesting experience and we're always surprised how little they know about life in the rest of the country, how they speak English but not Guarani, how they've been to Disneyland but not Santani. 

Soy field after harvest, September 2012

names

I'm feeling run-down, worn-out, numb. Some good will still come of my being here an extra month, but not every day. Sunday I could have been in the US and nothing would be lost. Most of yesterday and today tooñ I'd like to be able to commute in to get those couple important tasks in, and then fly home to sleep in a bed on Vashon, or Seattle, or Portland.
It seems that the very act of getting to know someone and liking them determines that they will go to some far off place.
Lyda, Antonio, Ña Dolores, Francisco, Claudia; the San Pedro volunteers: Chris, Dion and Evelyn, Carol; the German filmmakers Stepan and Andreas, Brian and Emily in Asunción, G-34: Hannah, Matt, Sybil; almost everyone in my G, including: Nicole, Johnny, Zach, Travis, Johanna and Jeremy; in Itapua: Stacy, Benito, Rick.
Who is left? From my G Nicole, Katie, Champe, Claire and Ellie haven´t left the country yet. Lydia is still in Itapua and I may yet make it out to see her in Fram.
The successive waves of goodbyes make me all the more apathetic about my own farewells here in site, which ought to be the most important goodbyes of all. Then there will be the long-delayed return and farewell to Nueva Germania, and at last a farewell to Paraguay and Peace Corps.
I just don´t know

I was talking to Carolina, the librarian, about all this and she told me at least I'm lucky that on one has died. I haven't lost these friendships, I just have people I love in many places.

on a completely different note, I was talking to Denis, who studies English with me about the results of the recent election, in which one of the richest men in the country with no political experience won the presidency. Denis said that he won't be corrupt because he already has all the money he needs. I'd never heard that argument made before. I hope he's right.

happy four twenty!

My thoughts have been too scattered these last two months to come up with anything worth posting. There is much that I would express... I ought to try and write a proper reflection piece on the last two years.

I was travelling a lot the last two weeks and I'm glad to be back in site. I will be around here mostly for the three weeks I have left in Natalio. My main priority is to finish up the big world map I've been painting in the back yard of the library with a 6th grade class. It's really beautiful so far and I'm going to be working on finishing it up this week. I've got a few other things I've said I'd do. We'll see.

I've still got to sell or otherwise divest most of my belongings.  My intention is to ship a box of things, including my computer, some souvenirs and clothes, back to the States and just travel with my medium backpack and a side bag. 

Most of my "G-mates", the volunteers I arrived with 27 months ago, have already left. Friends have been leaving the country every 4 months though, so it's not much harder to say goodbye than it's always been. I'm looking forward to spending a week in Nueva Germania after I leave Natalio, before setting out on my further travels.

Today was election day. The Colorados won back the presidency by a landslide and are celebrating boisterously about half a block from my house. It will probably a loud night. 

going

Semana Santa was last week. I visited three families, rode my bike 43 km to the closest large town, and went to see a fantastic waterfall near my site. Next week my training group swears out. About a month after that I'll leave Natalio, to go visit Nueva Germania for a week before leaving Paraguay from Asuncion. I'll travel three weeks in Argentina and Chile and then fly to Seattle from Santiago June 7th. I'll get in in the evening (though the sun doesn't set until like 9:30pm in June, doesn't it?) on Saturday the 8th. My younger brother graduates from college June 15th and, if Facebook is to be believed, is hosting a music festival at his house called "Return of the Dagobah Sound System" on the 29th. There is a family reunion in Pennsylvania in July. I'll be looking for a job. I'll be riding my blue Schwinn. I intend to ride around golden Maury island with a tub on my rack and pick blackberries. I'll jump in the cold green water off Tramp Harbor dock and at night it will glow like green fire. On grey rainy days, of which I'm sure we'll have this summer, I'll get fresh coffee at the Roasterie along with herbs and roots for my máte. I'm going to walk in forests, smell the moss and the mud and look up at tall trees. I'm going to be with people.

I want to engage with family and friends, but especially family, more earnestly when I am back home. I've spent two years with other people's families, I've talked about other family members, and many of these families have taken me in as one of their own. My own family doesn't even exist as a unit, we're four people with relationships with one-another, who all live in different places. My social life of the last ten years could be visualized as a series of explosions. First our family splits into two houses. I graduate from high school and leave home to go to college. My friends and I attend schools all across the country. I made fast, deep friendships in college, then in a few short years we graduate and move all over the country and world. I live in Portland another year, work in Americorps. My housemates move to New York, I join Peace Corps. I live in Guarambare four months, Nueva Germania for ten, and Natalio for fifteen. My fellow volunteers are constantly arriving and departing for parts of the US I can only vaguely imaging visiting. I am so damn tired of meeting people. I would like some stability, in these next few years.

I've got a lot to do before I leave. Finish work, sell my things, ship a box home, visit everybody, give gifts, plan my travels. I'm working on getting a CommunityEconomicDevelopment volunteer assigned here, but I won't know the verdict until after I've gone.

when it rains

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Every time it rains I'm like

my attempt to imitate the great

http://whatshouldpcvscallme.tumblr.com/

Amesque

The latest episode of Planet Money, Business Secrets of the Amish,  is fascinating. They start to go into a lot of important underlying issues that are almost never analyzed or even acknowledged in public discussions of economics like: the power of real communities, the role of technology in assessing one's standard of living, the relativity of wealth and well-being, the ambiguous benefits of cars, phones, etc., the relative value of labor in a world of mass production, the implications of mass production for craftsmen, the joy of inventing things  vs. buying cheap consumer goods, among others.

I frequently think about these kinds of issues as I try to put my life in Paraguay in the context of the 21st century global capitalist economy. So much of the way I live here is strikingly different from the way people live in the states just because of the lower price of labor and relatively higher price of material inputs and industrially manufactured goods. Private vehicles, paved roads, supermarkets, telephone lines, instant meals, suburban sprawl, printer cartridges, industrial scale farms and cattle feed-lots are all less common in Paraguay than in the USA because they are relatively more expensive. Bus lines, cobblestoned roads, "corner" stores, food made from scratch, street vendors, shoe-shiners, dense development, and small-scale family farms and livestock grazing are all relatively more common in Paraguay than the USA because the labor involved and the locally-produced inputs are worth relatively less monetarily.  Some highly-useful or desirable technology items are also common such as cell phones, motorcycles, well pumps, electric fans, televisions, and hot pots, because these items justify their high cost (relative to their cost in the USA) .

The value of strong community organization is also quite visible here. The Amish in the Planet Money episode are historically linked with the Mennonites, several groups of which arrived in Paraguay in the early 20th century. The Mennonites (and a couple other Anabaptist groups) arrived in material poverty, many of them fleeing Stalin's USSR, and settled in some of the least hospitable parts of the country. Nonetheless, with their superior community organizational skills and dedication to labor the Mennonite communities in Paraguay are today among the most prosperous in Paraguay. Other "colonies" founded by Japanese and German immigrants throughout the country have similarly prospered.

These communities benefited from cultures that highly value cooperation and strong community organization. Though they have farmed the same lands as native Paraguayans they've managed to prosper while the rest of Paraguay has only stumblingly advanced economically during the last century. I have really come to appreciate how fundamental culture is to humans; how deeply and irrevocably it molds us and how durable it is through the centuries.
{The Penguin History of the World by J.M. Roberts (Penguin the publishing house, not the bird) stressed this point quite a bit. This article about family structure in Europe also illuminates the subtle durability of cultural norms.}

The national Paraguayan culture is essentially composed of the highly formalistic, bureaucratic, and aristocratic culture of the Spanish Empire on top of the loosely organized personal and family-centered culture of the Guarani. The result is a culture which regards official organizations with a certain cynical ceremony, paying homage to formal systems but only putting real trust and investment in personal and familial relationships.

Before I came to Paraguay I imagined shedding my American cultural norms during Peace Corps and slipping into an idealized version of traditional life. I intentionally did not bring a computer or music played because I intended to replace my American cultural consumption with Paraguayan equivalents. Very quickly I realized how deeply ingrained American-ness is in my being, how much the things I like are American things and how alien I find most of what Paraguayans like. The efforts I have made to adopt Paraguayan attitudes and tastes have been valuable and I would benefit from trying to do more, but I'm now somewhat resigned about that project. I will never be Paraguayan and I'm fine with that. I am proud of my American-ness and of American culture even as I'm happy to criticize it and be careful not to impose it (that much) on others.

what is a great day like?

The famous unanswerable Peace Corps question is "what is an average day like?" Unanwserable because each day is so different, or each week, or you forget what is normal and what is remarkable. Or you are doing one thing for a week, or a month, and then never do it again. Or somedays you don't do anything, and you like it. Some days you don't do anything and you hate it.
So, instead of saying what an average day would be, I'd like to write what a great day is like for me.

Saturday 2/23/12

At 8:00am I wake up, reheat some of yesterday's coffee on my gas stove and eat two bananas for breakfast. I sit on my backporch and read La Guerra Civil de 1904, lent to me by the lonely local history buff.

At 9:00am I leave my house and walk around the block to the offices of the two local radio stations, which are side-by-side. I go in and I speak on air with both morning show hosts about an environmental youth group meeting and a public showing of "Toy Story", both at the public library, and about the English class which will start up again in a week and a half.

At 10:15am I ride my bike to library with my speakers and subwoofer in the vegetable crate that is attached to my rear rack. At the library I set up the speakers for the movie this evening and then work on a large welcome sign that I'm making for the library. It is a collage made out of books' dust jackets.

At 11:30am I ride my bike home. I find that my bread is all moldy. The bakery won't make any more until Monday morning. I buy some hamburger buns, ham, and a liter of coke in a cold glass returnable bottle at the store two doors down from my house. I make a sandwich while I listen to NPR's news update and see what's happened on the face-book.

At 1:30pm I ride my bike to the library. I forget the key. I ride the four blocks home, get the key and return to the library. I work on a presentation about how to deal with trash and why not to burn it, for the environmental youth group meeting. I set up the speakers and projector (which I picked up yesterday at the school district office, on the same block as the library) and my computer and rock out to Eddy Grant and the Gipsy Kings and Sidney Bechet while I make color coded dividers for the book shelves.

At 3:10pm Fatima, the leader of the youth group comes in for the meeting. She is starting her Junior year at the local high school. She loves Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. I regale her with stories about Seattle and what I remember of local music growing up (very little). I tell her she might like Modest Mouse and I put on the Moon and Antarctica, I tell her it's called "La Luna y Antarctica" and it's their best album.

At 3:45pm Fernando shows up for the meeting. Fatima asks me if I know the bridge which Kurt Cobain slept under. I say I didn't. She asked if I knew the Jimi Hendrix statue. I say I did, it's up in Capitol Hill in front of an Everyday Music store. We talk about the group, if anybody else is coming, about how cool it is to have free, thrice weekly trash pickup. We watch a movie clip about a community near Asuncion that has a student orchestra that builds instruments out of things found in the the giant landfill. We end up planning to meet n my front yard in two weeks to make drinking glasses from old wine bottles. I try not to stress just how many old wine bottles I have.

At 4:25 Carolina, the librarian arrives on her dirt bike with her leopard-print purse in one hand and a large plastic grocery bag of fresh popped popcorn in the other. She's also got her brand-new thermos, with her name, the name of her university, her major, and the coat of arms of the university embroidered in the black and blue pleather. It's about 90F in the library, we've got all the fans on full blast and some doors and windows open, but we'll need it to be dark once we start the movie. The three neighborhood kids come. I put on Planet Earth: Mountains to test out the projector and sound. Twice the power regulator overheats and shuts everything off. I'm not sure if anyone else will come.

At 5:25pm we start "Toy Story". About 20 kids and 3 moms have arrived. We're charging 1,000 Gs. or about 25 cents at the door. Popcorn is also 25 cents. I'm able to figure out the technical difficulties such that the projector only shuts off once during the movie. Another 6 or 7 kids come in later. In total we make just four dollars after we pay the woman who made the popcorn.

At 6:45 the movie ends. I get a text message that my samba drum group is meeting at 7:00pm, that we'll be playing tonight at the Carnaval parade in Maria Auxiliadora, which was rained out last weekend. I clean up with Carolina. We walk out to the gate and she tells me she doesn't like it how I roll up my pant legs when it's hot. I tell her it makes me feel like a pirate.

At 7:00pm I ride my bike to Manu's house. There's road work (cobblestoning) on several of the streets, and I maneuver carefully with my messenger bag and laptop in the cargo crate in back. At the meeting we decide we'll meet up again at 9:00pm to board the bus. I ride home. I pass a wild-haired girl wearing purple pants and a light-green dress. Grey clouds stand out against against an orange sky in the east above vines and banana trees as I ride down the road from Manu's. A 10 year-old student of mine named Cristian is riding behind his father on a motorcycle, they turn onto my street and then pass me by. Cristian and I make faces at each other as they accelerate and leave me behind.

At 7:30 I am home again. I take of my shirt and pour a cold glass of water from the green bottle in my fridge. I reheat Thursday's pasta. I put on water to make more coffee, to help keep me going until 5am or so when we'll come back from Maria Auxiliadora. I'll try and write a blog post and take a shower before we leave.