Ani ejapurrati Paraguaype

Today’s Post: Don’t Rush in Paraguay


1. Time

Within a period of two weeks, the oppressive weight of Paraguayan summer departed for the equator, leaving us with its remains: the cool mornings and evenings and bearable midday of the fall. Summertime made me feel slow and ponderous, like a person made out of molasses. This was just as well, since the long summer days were hard to fill without recourse to a nap or several hours spent drinking tereré with friends. But the coming weather has put the edge back on things: the sharp lines of the deciduous trees, the shorn fields of cotton and corn residues, and even my own intellectual capacities, which often seemed fluffy and abstract during the warmer months. Everything seems to get more compact and energized as the days grow shorter and each hour of daylight seems a bit dearer.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about time and change, both in Paraguay and the rest of the world. Visits from my parents and brother brought me temporarily into touch with the notoriously fast-paced First World. Contentedly immersed in my Prettyview life, I was often moved to wonder, “What’s the rush?” At the same time, the cool weather has also induced me to begin work on a number of horticultural, agricultural, and forestry projects that lay dormant during the summer. And so, I’m often tempted to pack more into a day and a week, ultimately running around and wishing that others would, to quote my mom, “put a wiggle on it.”


2. Tranquilidad

“Tranquilo” – a multipurpose adjective, noun (tranquilidad), command (tranquilízate), and state of being – could certainly contend for the title of Paraguay’s national slogan. Life here is all about calming down and taking things slowly…in some ways.

To this American’s eyes, some things are definitely more tranquilo in Paraugay. Institutional processes, whether public or private, usually take far longer to be carried through to completion. The profusion of official stamps and seals and receipts – it takes three to buy toothpaste at a pharmacy or stamps at the post office – may be to blame. It could also be the uneven digitalization of many institutional processes. Or the prevalence of corruption – a bribe or personal connection tends to speed things up. Personal interactions are also much more lengthy and tranquil here. Paraguayan communication is much more high-context than we are used to in America, especially in the countryside. Though a simple “Hola,” “Adio,” or “Op!” is serviceable as a greeting, the more common greetings initiate a chain of dialogue. “Mba´éichapa´´ (How are you?), ´´Mba´eteko´´ (How is your life?), and ´´Mba´e la porte?´´ (What is the situation?) are all acceptable conversation starters, analogous to ´´Hello´´ or ´´Hi´´ in English. Many of my work partners and neighbors seem put out if I arrive and immediately jump in to a request to borrow a tool or a proposal to plant some trees. Greetings, gossip, and lengthy tereré time help smooth the way to what many Americans would call ´´the point.´´ Finally, the pace of life in the Paraguayan countryside is more tranquilo than the norm for urban Americans because business is inherently limited by economic and technological factors. Cell phone use is relatively more expensive; few people have paying jobs, motor vehicles, or computers; and entertainment is usually limited to volleyball games and talking to neighbors. So much of the fast pace of contemporary First World life stems from making money or spending it and both of these things happen less often in rural Paraguay.

But it would be misleading to portray Paraguay as a lethargic, perpetually sleepy place. Asunción, Encarnación, and Ciudad del Este have all been bustling on my occasional visits. People hop in taxis, scream into their cell phones, push you in line, and walk fast on the sidewalks. And in the campo, there are moments of hustle. One of my early trainers opined that in Paraguay, the best worker is the person who can do the most amount of work in the shortest amount of time. I am perpetually left in the dust when it comes to almost any physical task – hoeing, clearing brush, shucking corn, shelling peanuts, or washing clothes. The typical rhythm is to work at your absolute maximum until exhausted and then tereré in the shade. Eating also occurs at a breakneck pace, especially when everyone is consuming out of the same common dish. To eat too slowly or delicately is to imply that you don´t love what everyone else is shoveling down. And there are refreshing moments of simplicity that don´t come to pass too often in urban life. An oxcart yoke breaks on the way home from the field and you simply cut down a small tree for a new one. Unexpected guests arrive and are accommodated by rearranging children and freeing up a bed. Americans in Paraguay often read ´´tranquilopa´´ as mere slow-motion, when, in fact, it connotes more of an entropic attitude to life, with some elements speeding up and others slowing down.

3. Change

The dark side of tranquilidad, however, is a conservative outlook toward individual changes that, over time, aggregates to stifle progress. Saying ´´otro día´´ or ´´angamie´´ (later) doesn´t hurt once or twice. But these standard excuses, used over and over again, may be a vestige of the past that needs to be discarded in some instances.

Historically, Paraguayans have had little opportunity to embrace change. At the inland heart of South America, many indigenous ethnic groups remained isolated from Europeans long into the colonization of the continent. Difficult to access and traverse, colonial Paraguay was relegated to the Jesuits and then abandoned by the Spanish 200 years ago. Since then, the country´s three most beloved leaders - Doctor Francia, Fransisco Solano López, and Alfredo Stroessner – have ruled by keeping Paraguay isolated from its own neighbors, much less currents of critique and change in the wider world. All dictators, these men opposed political change, adopted protectionist stances toward the economy, and liquidated three generations of homegrown intelligentsia. This is to say that in the fairly consistent, isolated world of pre-colonial Paraguay, adapting to fast-paced change was not necessary. In the country´s post-independence history, such change was often not possible.

Normally, I would be hesitant to trumpet progress for the sake of progress or to valorize Paraguayan skepticism of different ways of doing things. But I have come to believe, after living in Paraguay for more than a year and a half, that Paraguayans must begin changing or face dire consequences. I will give a couple of concrete examples of why I believe this.

Trash always comes quickly to mind. Many people in Prettyview were raised in a time when all trash was decomposable. Some types of common garbage just didn´t exist (electronics, disposable milk cartons, many synthetic materials) and others had simply not reached the interior (food wrappers, light bulbs, plastic bags). Every day, the grandchildren of these people receive a school snack clad entirely in disposable, inorganic containers. They eat lollipops wrapped in foil and plastic, play with discarded compact discs, and wear holes in cheap rubber flip-flops. What does the pre-trash generation, as well as their children and grandchildren (who, after all, learned how to manage waste from their parents and grandparents) do with all this waste? Throwing it in the nearest body of water often does the trick, as does gathering it up and burning it. This often strikes Americans (especially visitors) in Paraguay as reprehensible. The littering and constant stench of the byproducts of burning plastic, rubber, and metal is unbelievable to a society used to watching its trash ´´disappear.´´ The hard-to-internalize truth, which it took me well over a year to understand, is that many Paraguayans believe that that plastic bag is going to decompose as though it were an especially thick banana leaf. Likewise, many believe that the smoke a plastic bag produces is just as harmful to humans as the smoke that burning wood produces. I challenge you to think for a minute. How would you know any different without being told? Many of us simply come from cultures that have been dealing with inorganic waste for slightly longer. And our solution – producing lots of it and hiding it in landfills – is both unavailable to people in Prettyview and, arguably, not much better than burning or burying trash. Yet burning and burying are not excellent solutions. And if Paraguayans (and Americans, for that matter) don´t want to live in an ugly, unhealthy world full of soda bottles and obsolete computers, they need to begin thinking realistically and creatively about not only how to manage trash, but also, more importantly, how to produce less of it. This will require people to make a number of changes, such as freezing ice in recycled yogurt cups instead of disposable plastic bags and working together as a community to manage trash instead of leaving it up to each family to choose whether to toss all their refuse in the street or arroyo.

There are other ways in which change is being pressed on the citizens of Prettyview and is therefore, for better or for worse, not optional. One of my Paraguayan ´´uncles,´´ Epifanio, told me that when he was a boy (sixty years ago), Prettyview was essentially a forest with paths cut between the few houses that had been built. Giant lizards (teju), deer (guasu), and armadillos (tatu) wandered along the paths and provided a reliable source of meat. To grow a crop of corn, mandioca, or cotton, you simply went out into the forest, set a big patch of it on fire, planted your seed, and came back in several months. The soil was so rich and responded so well to burning (at first), that it was not even necessary to cultivate the earth or clean the fields with a hoe. Now, most of the native forest has been chopped down. The soil is worn out and has both poor physical and chemical properties from years of cultivation. Land rights have been rationalized and the population has exploded. Families now have parcels of land that they cultivate every year, seldom allowing the fields to lie fallow and never allowing forest to regenerate. The only wild mammal I have seen in Prettyview or the surrounding fields is a rat. It is necessary to hoe corn two to three times to beat back the weeds that are virtually unknown outside of agricultural fields with poor soil. Invasive grasses grow everywhere and erosion is common. It would be nice if Paraguayans could return to the old days (in this case, the 1950s) when a small population exploited a dense forest. But this will never come to pass. Yet many Paraguayans continue to act as though they are living in these times. Burning fields prior to planting becomes progressively less productive and more damaging the further you get away from native forest, but many people still do it, much to the detriment of their own soil and, if the fire burns out of control, their neighbors´. All but the most unsavory animals are killed on site if a gun or other weapon is handy. And only the most perspicacious are willing to admit that there are fewer trees available than there were in the past for firewood, construction, and tool-making. Again, I do not make these claims from a privileged position. To wit, Americans continue to drive copiously despite peak oil, consume what the Coneheads called ´´mass quantities´´ despite the obesity epidemic, and chronically undervalue education and research despite China. We, too, have failed to adapt to changing circumstances. Yet for rural Paraguayans, the stakes (food on the table versus the continued luxury of believing in American Exceptionalism) are much higher.

I believe that a big part of my Peace Corps work in Paraguay consists of acting as a culturally sensitive agent of responsible change. But this is often difficult in Prettyview. To begin with, there is a conservative attitude toward new things that, for reasons mentioned above, has a long cultural pedigree. Lack of education is also a persistent barrier. Education through the sixth grade is now compulsory, but, I estimate, over half of the adults I work with have less than an elementary school education. Most are technically literate, but have not had much practice reading or writing. Paradoxically, due to the Stroessner administration´s suppression of the teaching of Guaraní, most are also illiterate in their preferred language. They can read and write, but in Spanish, a language they prefer not to speak. Thus, communication is often complex, especially about technical topics which come across best when presented through textual as well as oral communication. Agricultural communities are also famously, and justifiably, resistant to new ideas. Americans often forget that some new things are, plainly speaking, bad. A good, new idea about farming may help a family to save some money or manage their land more sustainably. A bad, new idea may lead to crop failure and hunger. Unless overwhelming proof or, more commonly, peer pressure comes to bear, most people will say ´´otro día´´ until I get fed up, go home, and begin my 132nd book since arriving in Paraguay. Then there are the difficulties that I have to take responsibility for. My behavior, appearance, skill with farm implements, and language skills usually range from ´´different´´ to ´´egregious.´´ Most Paraguayans are good enough to still hang out with me and offer me enough food to feed a team of oxen, but would you really take the advice of someone who looked, acted, and spoke differently than anyone else you had ever met?

4. If not now, when?

All of this frequently leaves me thinking of Hillel´s ubiquitous rhetorical question, ´´If not now, when?´´ This ultimately has become my bedrock in Paraguay, or one of them, at least. I ask myself this question when I am demoralized and just want to stay at home or drink maté with my host mom. It often gets me out of the house to teach a lesson in the school or visit a family that might want to work with me. And it´s a question that I often ask my work partners. I usually couple it with a translation of the English adage ´´Make hay while the sun shines.´´ This is an apt saying since so much of our work takes place outside. And sometimes, it works! Paraguayans are, I think, hard workers who respect it when volunteers are kyre´ŷ (ready to work, not lazy). Showing up with a shovel and a bunch of tree seeds often accomplishes what grammatically perfect Guaraní does not. But we have to seek these opportunities out and be open to them when they appear.

Being available is critical to our work. This is one gratifying but also, sometimes, frustrating aspect of volunteer life. Though to a lesser extent than surgeons, we are always on call. A lot of my biggest successes stem from being willing to work on Saturdays, Sundays, mornings, and evenings. It kills me when somebody is ready to go on a given project and I have other plans already scheduled. A chance visit in the street may turn into an invitation to come over for lunch, which then turns into a discussion about gardens, which turns into working in the garden together, which turns into the creation of an abonera (a compost heap). Where did the socializing stop and the work begin? So what if it was a Monday afternoon and you didn´t get home until sunset? In many ways, ´´If not now, when?´´ is a volunteer´s interpretation of tranquilidad, the transformation of a change-averse attitude to one of open-ended possibility.

5. Balance

Yet Americans have a lot to learn from the tranquilo mentality. More than ever before, I find myself shocked, at least on a superficial level, at how little contentedness most of us have achieved given our vast wealth and almost unlimited access to information and possibility. Paraguayans often ask me, ´´Are there poor people in America?´´ Of course, I always answer yes, and try to explain how that is possible given my obvious wealth. Yet often my rationalizations (´´The cost of living is higher. You can´t make a living off the land anymore. Expectations are different.´´) sound hollow when I think about the reality of life here. Since I moved to Prettyview, I have seen kids drop out of elementary school so that they can do roadwork for pay, people die of acute illness because of lack of medical care, and families split up so that one or both parents can go work in Argentina or Spain. Still a good radical at heart, I continue to believe that a full education, medical care, and safe, dignified work are all basic human rights. But this belief has worn thinner as I have witnessed people who are unable to exercise these rights live full, if sometimes difficult, lives. What is a human right if a majority or significant portion of humans alive during the most materially prosperous time of our history doesn´t enjoy it?

Perhaps the most feasible approach is to continue to work with and on behalf of people who do not enjoy these basic rights or privileges while also understanding what our access to them means in context. If anything can be said in a general sense of contemporary life in late capitalist, democratic countries, it seems apropos to say that we have allowed our sense of proportion to become distorted, especially in terms of time. We are notoriously resistant to the idea of limits – to growth, power, or what have you – but the temporal counterpart of this is a resistance to waiting and patience. In this sense, we could learn a lot from Paraguayan tranquilidad. To be tranquil doesn´t mean to be fatalistic or conservative, but rather to accept that everything has its appropriate time. Critics on the left and right already hound President Obama for his ´´failure´´ to reduce unemployment, evacuate American forces from Afghanistan while leaving behind a stable government, and provide for affordable, adequate healthcare for everyone who wants. It is irresponsible to pretend that any one person, even a president, could accomplish these things. Though hard to swallow, the truth may be that doing big things well takes time.

What I am trying to get at is my hope that both Americans and Paraguayans can strive for a sort of balance between stasis and constant change. It is easy to think of myself as a volunteer coming to Paraguay to teach or change Paraguayans. Though this is occasionally the case, I also feel as though I will return to the States with a different attitude about some aspects of living. Maybe I will be more appreciative of the optimism and openness that many Americans show toward new ideas. But I also hope that I will be a little bit more tranquilopa.

Today's Post: Let's Plant Yerba mate

Hierba Mate. Or just yerba. Or just mate. Ka´a. Tereré. Cocido. What is it? Unless you have lived or traveled in the Southern Cone of South America or adhere to the devoted health food cultures of the North, you may not really know. Yerba mate is obviously central to Paraguayan culture and national identity. But a second glance also reveals its economic and ecological importance. Though I´ve already written a bit about yerba in my blog, I think that the topic deserves deeper scrutiny.

First of all, what are we talking about? Everything mate-related begins with one plant: Ilex Paraguariensis, a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae, and native species of Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil. This plant is called yerba mate in Spanish and English and ka´a in Guaraní. Its Guaraní name suggests its centrality to the cultures of the region. Ka´a also just means ´´plant´´ or ´´forest.´´ (It is a common word in Paraguay. The cities of Caaguazú, ´´big plant,´´ Caacupé, ´´behind the plant,´´ and Caapuku, ´´tall plant,´´ attest to this.) But if you say ´´ka´a,´´ its primary connotation is usually mate.

Left to grow without human interference, the evergreen yerba mate plant can reach heights of 10 to 20 metersand a diameter at breast height of 20 to 45 centimeters. Naturally an understory plant with dark green leaves that can soak up the light filtering down from higher strata, yerba mate grows best in moist, shady environments. Its flowers are small and inconspicuous, but its berries, when ripe, are dark purple and resemble American huckleberries.

The majority of Paraguay’s mate plants, however, grow in carefully managed plantations rather than forest understory. Generally spaced several meters apart and trimmed every year into a tall bush, cultivated mate plants look more like their ornamental ivy relatives than wild plants. Like coffee and chocolate, mate is a shade crop. In fact, young plants grow better in the shade than in denuded fields. This makes yerba mate production a valuable agroforestry crop and non-timber forest product (NTFP), when farmers are willing to incorporate it into more holistic systems. Sadly, much of the time, mate plantations look a lot like monocultural citrus or corn fields, denuded except for the mate trees themselves and the normal agricultural weeds.

Cultivating new mate plants is quite difficult. I’m still trying to master the technique. My hopes are flagging after being told by my next door neighbor that yerba mate seeds won’t germinate if anybody other than their owner has ever seen them. If true, this belief certainly militates against my attempts at yerba mate extension, which involves inviting people to see my ka’aty (mate vivero) and asking to see others’.

Many farmers follow the traditional, but necessarily low-intensity system of seeking out mate seedlings in the forest and transplanting them. But for more extensive production, cultivation from seed is a must. The first step here is harvesting from ripe berries. Most of mine came from my former host dad’s ka’aty, where he also keeps his bees.

Let me stress the following: beekeeping, though a sustainable and environmentally friendly agricultural activity, is not spatially compatible with many other production systems.

The decision to go gather mate fruits in the bee field was accepted but not celebrated by Prettyview’s Peace Corps volunteer. We collected the fruits and then I soaked them for a few days in a bucket of water. The soft fruits were easy to squish. Volunteer Heather, my contact Derlis, and I used mesh frames and repeated washings to clean and isolate the seeds, getting rid of the fleshy fruit that encased them. I then soaked the seeds in hot water prior to planting in order to further speed up germination. Finally, my summer campers sowed them in special, shallow wooden boxes, using cow feces and soil as a medium. I then covered them with bamboo sticks to provide maximum shade and commenced watering (mate needs to remain damp). Even with all of the tricks I employed, the seeds may take between two and six months to germinate. The only problem is that I don’t really know what a mate seedling looks like. I guess that was a slight deficiency in my training.

After a year in containers, mate seedlings can be transplanted to the field. After three or four years, they can be pruned. The pruned shoots are then roasted over two different fires for hours on end, or sold raw to local buyers. When farmers roast their own leaves, they follow up the roasting by grinding the mate branches and leaves and storing it for personal use or sale. It is said that 11 or so plants can provide enough mate for an entire family’s annual consumption.

Most mate in Paraguay is produced in the southeastern departments: Itapúa, Alto Paraná, Caazapá, etc. And, like American beer, mate can be purchased under many different brand names. Big national brands like Kurupi, Norte, and Pajarito are sold everywhere. But there are also smaller, regional brands: the microbreweries of Paraguayan mate. I usually look for the pink wrapping of Capiibary, the mate from San Juan Nepomuceno, the nearest large town to Prettyview. When you buy mate, you have to choose not only a brand, but also a taste. Most of the bigger companies sell mate mixed with dried yuyos, medicinal herbs that spice up tereré or hot mate. I used to be a fan of Kurupi “Digestive” mix with mint and boldo, but I’m starting to think that it may, paradoxically, be behind some of my occasional gastrointestinal woes. Recent experiments with Pajarito “lemon grass-mint” have proven tasty but milder than Kurupi.

I have dreams of Prettyview farmers someday selling their yerba to Capiibary or making their own mate. If the grant that my agricultural committee is applying for comes through, 18 farmers may be planting about five thousand new mate saplings and even marketing their product together. Of course, the harvests will take place years after I leave. I’ll just have to come back after awhile and try the Prettyview special blend.