The Plot Thins

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Paraguayan politics is back in the news again, with the death of presidential candidate Lino Oviedo yesterday in a helicopter crash.

For a little background on Lino, check out this post on the shell game that often seems to be Paraguayan presidential politics. 

With Lugo ousted last June, his successor Franco unable to run in the upcoming election, and Lino now deceased, April’s election will come down to Cartes versus Alegre – red versus blue, Colorado versus Liberal. The current outlook is that Cartes – football-club-owning, banking, tobacco, soda and juice mogul – will prevail, even given his less than stellar reputation as what many might call a criminal and others might call a prerequisite to participate in this field.

That is of course unless the investigation takes an interesting turn. 

Sitting on a Bench (in Bolivia)

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If I had to pick a favorite part of South America, it might be the plaza.

It’s something we just don’t really have in the states. Yeah, we have our parks and public spaces, but the plaza – at the center or heart of any town or city – just doesn’t seem to be something we value all that much. It’s not to say they’re not there, but they’re certainly not used, not enjoyed, like here.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia doesn’t really stand out as a model of much. A tranquillo town – the biggest in the country – that to me most closely resembles its nearest international neighbor, Asuncion. The Plaza 24 de Septiembre though, does stand out. One reason being that the entire city is designed to make it stand out. It’s truly is at the heart – the rest of the city radiating outward in concentric circles like some sort of antipodean water-less sprawling Amsterdam.

Ok, so it’s nothing like Amsterdam, but the circle pattern thing draws comparison.

I was reading recently that successful public spaces – like many of the world’s more famous plazas – are sized at around 450 feet, which is coincidental because that’s about the same distance from which we can distinguish another approaching person and determine their sex, dress, gait, etc. In the plaza in Santa Cruz last Sunday, it would have been hard to draw a straight line 20 feet without hitting a family or a couple, an old man drinking coffee, a vendor selling it, or a band of children chasing after something. The most multicultural city in the country has a lot of excellent people watching going on any given Sunday, not at any sort of event or at any particular hour or for any particular reason, but available all afternoon from any of a hundred benches.

The thought of Bolivia for a lot of people conjures up an idea of a certain type of dress: the pleated skirt, the leggings, the shawl, the extraordinarily undersized bowler hat pinned to braided hair. Searching that 450 foot urban horizon, a few women in that dress might catch the eye, but nearly all are transplants from the Altiplano region, a journey away. So on this day, in this place, this image, this idea of Bolivia needs reassessment.

Travel comes with a lot of preconceived notions. By the time you find yourself on the ground, a place never seems to fully fit your notions or expectations the way you thought it would. It turns out it’s the places that do, that sort of in a way are the most disappointing. These places tend to become the biggest let down because they almost got it right – but not as good as your imagination did. It’s the places that hit you out of nowhere – the market in Sucre and it’s fresh made juices up for sale along size dozens of varieties of potatoes unknown to any supermarket; the vineyard you stumbled upon while lost and asking for direction; the perfect sandwich shop hidden in an alleyway; the hike that starts in someone’s backyard; they city you hadn’t even planned on visiting – that always wind up the most pleasantly surprising, and daresay most enjoyable.

And that’s what makes us want to go back out. It’s not the brochures and guidebooks and the adventures promised by our imaginations – it’s the stuff hiding in plain sight: the everyday. Only it’s a day different then we’re used to, and far different from what we expected.

Checking your expectations at the door is a lesson South America has been trying to teaching me for the past three and half years. I forgot for a moment or two earlier this month and was swiftly reminded that that’s something you can’t just forget about – and if you do your time won’t be nearly as enjoyable. Maybe that’s why the plaza is the best place to remember this kind of lesson – it comes with no expectations, except maybe to have a seat, hopefully in the shade, and let the world pass you by for a moment while you get to have  a window on everyone else’s every day and make it part of your own. 

 

kb 

 

Hello, Goodbye (part ii)

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39 months of Peace Corps service in Paraguay. I’m not even sure that’s a complete sentence – and it’s certainly not complete enough to even begin to capture the experience it has been. These three-plus years of writings have tried to give some sort of glimpse into my life here – not so much the daily goings ons, but some larger picture to place it all in. At times I feel I was able to convey that, other times I feel short, and even more often I ignored the goal because I thought there was something more important to say, but I’m still happy with the results.

I have so much more to say about my time here and what I’ve walked away with (if that could ever even be quantified) but packing up and saying all the goodbyes doesn’t leave much room for writing. Soon enough though. As I’ve said before, I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading all this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I hope you’ll keep reading, because I plan to keep writing.

The adventure continues, this time in Paraguay’s neighbor to the north, Bolivia, where I’ll be spending the next few months. In the meantime, I’m going to work on a more complete thought to say goodbye to Paraguay.

Until then.

kb

The Book I Read

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I think I first read Into the Wild in 2007. To say I enjoyed it is to confuse it with saying I read it quickly and continued to think about – perhaps too much – long after I’d put it back on the shelf. It’s hard to “enjoy” a story like the one that book tells. It’s quite another thing to be moved by it, which I suppose is the closest I can come to describing the daze it seemed to put me in for the few days after turning its final page.

The difference between a good book and liking a book wasn’t something I was fully aware of until I joined the Peace Corps and was given more time to read than I’d ever encountered in my life. Struggling my way through The Sheltering Sky was when I had the realization. Paul Bowles’ book is no doubt quiet good, but I really didn’t enjoy reading it.

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is another interesting if not more complex example. At nearly 1000 pages it has its share of parts that are highly enjoyable and parts that you’d wish you could erase from your memory. A masterpiece surely, but “enjoyable”, definitely not.

Neither of those two books I’d comfortably say have had the audience amongst my peers as Jon Krakauer’s telling of a young man from Virginia who decided to see if he could make it on his own in Alaska and failed. That readership is probably why it comes as close to any other book I can think of to garnering the amount of strong opinions people seem to have about it. (Case in point: this post).

To me though, the synopsis above misses the larger part of the story. The process by which he met his ends, the realizations along the way and why we as readers – comfortably (or not so comfortably) sitting in our homes – find the need to pass a mark of success or failure upon a complete strangers endeavor.

Like the good book argument the discussion about Into the Wild in general seems to revolve around only part of what’s on offer. The main concern being the liking or hating of Chris McCandless. After a second read (something I’m not sure I’ve ever done – when you read as slow as I do, it’s really an investment) I maintain my original stance: disliking Chris and his decisions is not at the detriment of the story or the much larger themes it contains. It’s still a good book. And it’s still a great story.

The problem arises because it’s very hard to be neutral about where you ultimately stand on Chris’ decisions. You can either see why he did what he did, or you cannot. It would be unreasonable to argue McCandless wasn’t flawed in many of his actions, but it would be equally unreasonable to overlook that we are all flawed individuals – in McCandless’ view, many of us for the reason that we chose not to live out the convictions we tell ourselves we hold.  Where you come down on that decision seems to speak volumes.

Water -> Food

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As a follow-up to the look at water in the previous post, last Tuesday, October 16th was World Food Day. I know it lacks the alliterative appeal of World Water Day, but as they say here, asi es.

Turns out World Food Day has been going on since 1945. This is the first I knew of it. It’s probably hard for the UN to find ad space.

One of things that caught my eye when I was reading through some of the statistics for the water post, was a section about sustainable agricultural practices and their importance in water conservation. For example the 1500 liters of water it takes to produce 1 (that’s right one!) kilo of wheat. Or the 15,000 liters of water it takes to produce a single kilo of beef. I feel like in the States people of my age have grown up with the concept of environmentalism and environmental stewardship all around us (choosing to partake is a whole other issue) – campaigns to save “the rainforest” or against littering or to recycle or images of mustached sea otters reminding us of the importance of clean waterways. The idea of preserving the environment has always been there in the background. More recently the sustainability movement and with it the idea of green everything has become not only en vogue, but also gone from being a mark of corporate savviness to an essentiality.

Agriculture has never been able to reach the level of hipness as environmentalism. Probably why we didn’t know it was World Food Day but all know for sure when Earth Day falls on the calendar. It’s a shame because they’re one in the same. Sustainable agriculture is the cornerstone of a sustainable future – especially in environmental terms. When will it get its Kermit the Frog?

So the World Food Day alarming stats say one in seven people suffers from undernourishment; 3.5 million children die every year from under-nutrition – one every six seconds.

What does this possibly have to do with Paraguay that I’ve taken the time to write about it? Small farmers. As impressive as Iowa is, it’s small farmers who are going to have to feed the bulk the rest of the world’s growing population over the next fifty years. The same small farmers that a very meager amount of Peace Corps volunteers around the world are working with demonstrating techniques on how to be more sustainable producers. The best argument for doing so isn’t even the environmental benefits – it’s that it works, is cheaper and in the long run easier. None of that though makes the effort less difficult.

In the early nineties, right around the time some of us in elementary were peddling those tee shirts in the name of endangered species, there was a brief period where we had these little white cardboard cubes, of some sort of origami construction, to collect change for the famine in the horn of Africa. We all know how that turned out. Ridley Scott jogged our memory and tired to open some eyes about a decade after the fact with Black Hawk Down. It’s a perfect reminder that the problems faced with thirst and hunger and extreme poverty don’t happen in a vacuum. They just don’t happen under our noses.  Or they do and we chose to smell brighter stuff.

I reckon to say we’ll hear a lot about Iraq and Iran in the final presidential debate on foreign policy tomorrow, but not a word about the larger scale issues standing to pose much greater problems and in desperate need of greater advocacy – everywhere.

We’ll see.

kb

Good Good Water

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I recently revisited a community I first went to on March 22nd. The only reason I happen to know I was there on March 22nd is because I later found out that happens to be World Water Day.

Like anyone else, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice (or even once) about that day’s moniker had I not been in a, how shall we say, uniquely ironic situation that day.

Several times on the drive, my boss and I found ourselves saying how we felt like we were in a different country. That’s how remote the settings were. I had a Paraguayan telling me it felt remote and removed. We were driving about as far off the beaten path as I’ve been in Eastern Paraguay – and by now I’ve been a few places. It’s definitely not the farthest away in hours or in kilometers, but in that other so hard to quantify measurement – feeling. Sometimes you just plain feel far from everything else. Most of the time it’s because it’s true. (Or because you’re lost).

The “road” (I use the term loosely) we were on cuts through the campo alongside the Parque Nacional Ybycui – the  borders of which seemed rather ambiguous, at least as far as the scenery was concerned. We were carrying with us, in the bed of the Hilux, a 200- liter blue plastic water barrel. For those of you reading in Liberia, Myanmar and  the United States that about 52 gallons. Like an oil drum. Only plastic. And filled with water.

On a side note. Water weighs 1 kilogram per liter. That’s convenient isn’t it. Or 8.35 pounds per gallon. Either way, there were 200 kilos worth of water standing up back behind our headrests.

The volunteer we were headed to visit had no water. When volunteers talk to each other and say they have no water, it means their community or their house doesn’t have running water. Some places do, some don’t. If you “don’t have water” you have a well. And bucket. And a pulley. Problem solved.

This particular fellow though, really didn’t have any water. His well dried up. Such an interesting expression. More like the land around his well dried up.

It hadn’t rained beyond a spit in certain parts of the country since before Christmas, almost four months earlier. The drought resulted in the nation’s soy exports falling by 60 percent this year according to one newspaper – a remarkable statistic given that it is the top export and the way this country earns its GDP. A very small handful of people lost several ocean freighters full of money, but the effects of the sequia reached well beyond crop production and began to hit families – ones with nothing invested in soy or anything else beyond the small plots of land they live on – directly.  Beyond personal consumption crops failing, wells in higher elevations began to dry up. Drinking water was carried from luckier, or lower-laying neighbors, or from the occasional meager and less-than-clean spring in the woods. Gardens, and with with them the source of any vegetables, shriveled in the sun. Laundry lines hung empty.

Turning on the faucet is something we take for granted, just like so many other things. Volunteers in Paraguay are spoiled you could say because lots of us have running water in our communities. Paraguay is a lucky spot in the world when it comes to h20 (I’ll resist the temptation to talk about the aquifer, again). In the Peace Corps you don’t expect to have running water – well let me rephrase, you shouldn’t expect to have running water. So you use a well. I won’t belittle it, using a well everyday for all your water needs (and they add up) isn’t easy or particularly fun. But you get used to it. You learn some of its benefits (always chilly drinking water that doesn’t rely on a pump to power it) and eventually you do the same thing as the rest of us: take for granted that it’s out there. Then one day, it’s not.

780 million people in the world lack access to clean drinking water. That’s two and half times the population of the United States. That’s one out of every nine people on the planet. Diarrhea – not heart attacks, not car crashes – is the leading cause of death in the world, mostly due to dehydration and lack of proper sanitation that relays on water. It claims the lives of 3.4 million people each year. That’s the population of Los Angeles. Drought has claimed more lives in the last century than any other natural disaster.

That was the alarming statistics section of this post. I’m not trying to say that the dried up well of a volunteer in Paraguay is causing kids to die of thirst. That wouldn’t be true. Or that the drought earlier this year caused any deaths. I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that it took me trying to unload a 440 pound barrel of water from the back of a pick truck four hours from nowhere, to begin to not take what comes out of the faucet for granted. Not sharing that seems like a disservice to those with buckets in their hands.

A few weeks after our delivery the rain returned and so did water in the well. As of this morning that volunteer’s well had again dried up.