Community Spirits

Since the season changed and the building started, Malvina (the landowner and my landlady) has been showing up every weekend. The warmer weather and development of the tourist housing and our office is a good thing, but the downside is that the people who work for her have to actually work and can’t hang out with us anymore. We used to go to parties most Saturday nights, football matches most Sundays and eat dinner or drink with them any other time we fancied.  Now they are so hard at work running the tourist business and whatever other oddjobs need doing around the “ranch” that we hardly ever even see them. I had been enjoying getting out into the community and it was always something the volunteers liked too, adding to their experience.

We had started to build some real relationships with some of the locals including the young people who go to the dance parties, the guys who sell beer and the women who run the shops. We are well respected by many, extremely interesting to others and to some we are just a bit of an annoyance. Maybe those people think we are Brazilian, here to steal their land. There are probably a few reasons we get respect and special treatment. For a start we are white and therefore rich, we have strange colours of hair including yellow and orange, we have pale eyes and legs, we are tall, curly, freckly, loud, pierced and vegetarian. We are also walking around with Rosario – friend, bodyguard and problem solver. He is the man about town yet he doesn’t even live there. When Rosario walks into a shop everyone takes notice. I don’t know why, but it seems like he is just the man to know. Everyone seems to come to him for advice and when they need something fixed – as do I. The people in town who know we are with him make sure we are taken care of wherever we are. It’s very useful. But now he has to work and so our social whirl came to an end. Until yesterday.

Our new cook, Griselda, has been wonderful so far. She cooks and cleans but is also fast becoming my friend. Yesterday she invited us to a gathering. I wouldn’t call it a party, just a bunch of people sitting around in the garden talking and drinking. We were the first people to arrive although we were over an hour late as usual. We went in blind not knowing what to expect but it seemed that we were the guests of honour and after we arrived everyone else was called to come. There was some drinking and sitting followed by football for the boys and bingo for the girls. It was the first time I have socialised with the women since getting here. Normally I tag along with Rosario and do as the men do, but this time I was included in the women’s circle of activities along with Loraine and Emma. It was quite boring if I’m honest, as there is nothing much involved in bingo except translating numbers, but nice all the same to be a part of it. They walked me around the property while I asked silly questions about growing things and animals and they tried to sell me pigs, chickens, corn and a few of their spare children (too expensive though at about $500 each).  It seems the boys were a hit on the football field, mostly because they lost and this meant they/I had to pay for all the beer and cokes. As is always the case with these things, once you go to one, you get invited to more and we ended up being invited to 2 more parties and a birthday dinner.

Three of us went to the birthday dinner as it was the closest to our house. We ate chicken and rice with the men while the women served us (back to being treated as a male in the society again). I really wouldn’t like to be a female in this place. They are expected to do all the cooking cleaning, serving, fetching and general pleasing. When we asked the host of the party for beers and he would pass the message on to his daughter (whose birthday it was) to fetch them even though he was closer to the fridge. Seemed weird to me.

The night was really nice though. After we ate, one of the guests played guitar very very well and sang even better. He sang about 30 mariachi songs, all pitch perfect. I have known the singer, Elias, for a while now, although don’t really like him as he calls me all the time and even though I never pick up the phone, he doesn’t take a hint. Cheesy as it sounds though, there is something about a guy playing a guitar and singing love songs in Spanish that seems to get me. For some reason it seems more believable than The Kooks with their easy English accents, and even though I watched Elias pull a knife on one of my friends one night back in June, I kind of forgave him for a few hours. I guess that’s just how it goes here. Even in this tiny forgotten corner of South America where dirt tracks connect them to the world, they love and fight with the same passion as you would expect from any Argentinean, Brazilian or Latin American.  One of the interns said to me, “this is what I expected Paraguay to be like”.

So for the day we were a part of the community again. While we sit in our house on the top of the hill, looking weird and doing strange things they have a community complete with spirit. It’s something I want to be a part of much more often. 

Politik Kills

I just stepped out of an amazing shower. Wish I had realised 6 months ago all I had to do was clean the shower head. Tonight, instead of standing under a sort of drip, switching at regular intervals between scalding hot and sharp inhale cold, I had a full lukewarm shower. Like showers should be. I can’t describe how happy it makes me that showers can be an enjoyable experience again instead of a daily inconvenience.

The Colorado Party (right wing) won the local election on Sunday. I have no idea what that means. Probably that no one cares about politics. We went to a party a few weeks ago which had a live band and a lot of liberal party people talking about change, progress, children, money, jobs etc. Well, that part wasn’t much of a party, but the messages were good, if very boring.  A few of my friends were working for the Liberales which is encouraging, but the Colorados still won. I really think though the people here just don’t care and sometimes I think why should they? What benefits do they ever see?  They don’t even have a proper road to their town. Many of the houses are still without electricity and the ones that do have it have probably stolen it off the main power line at great risk. The government have been promising a better road since I arrived here and probably for longer than that. From their point of view all I can see is broken promises so they must do too.

The road to get to Laguna Blanca from the main Routa 3 in Santa Rosa is 30km of dirt which changes to sand about halfway down. It has 3 bends, 6 hills and 4 bridges. The bridges are made up of a row of planks parallel to the streams they cross with two or three more planks running perpendicular which you can line up your wheels with. Much of the time (depending on the weather), the edge of the bridge is a few feet away from the road so your wheels kind of fall into a hole and come back up onto the planks. It’s fine in a camionetta like the one I drive which has huge wheels or for the trucks transporting wood and coal to Brazil but not so great for the motorbikes with their wee wheels which is what most of the local people drive.  A few months ago Jeni and I were called on to bring life jackets (which they have here for people hiring kayaks) to one of the bridges. A woman and a girl had fallen in the stream after her motorbike had fallen down the hole and she lost control. Unfortunately, they went into the fastest flowing and deepest of the four. When Jeni and I arrived, the whole community was there. The girl had been found and rushed to hospital with some injuries and the woman was still missing. Some men had gone out on a boat to look for her and shortly after they returned with her body. She was found 80m downstream of the bridge and turned out to be the Aunt of Concep - one of the guys I work with. Jeni was quite upset but Rosario made her feel “better” by saying that this happens all the time and you just accept it and move on – asi nomas. Explains why the Paraguayans in the country here have 10 brothers and sisters.

To compensate for the loss, the municipality pledged to build proper bridges over the streams. So far they have drilled about 25 30ft concrete blocks into the mud near the existing bridge. Each one is a different height and at least 20ft above the road. Every time we drive by there, the volunteers and I speculate on how exactly this bridge will work. Will it have a lift into the sky? Is it a suspension bridge? Who knows, but they would have been better hiring ants or termites to build the thing. It’s been nearly 6 months of putting concrete posts in the ground. In the meantime they put little pieces of wood at either side of the bridges, perhaps to help the motorbikes catch some extra air as they soar off the edges. Probably luckily, these have since fallen off and never been replaced.

The local government has done some good things though. The most notable is the new bus terminal which is excellent. The buses used to stop (a bit dangerously) at the side of the road in Santa Rosa. There was a row of cassitas or little huts selling barbequed meat and mandioca at the opposite side of the road. To get to the houses you had to climb a sort of muddy hill, and they had no running water, no electricity, holes between the planks in the floor and the playground for the workers kids was the main road. I liked going there but Paul always refused stating he really wasn’t up for getting dysentery. Now they have built an actual terminal with a sign that says so and everything. The huts are now concrete houses around a central square complete with a statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle. Each house has light and water with seating etc. while the kids have a safe place to play. There is even a place where you can wait for a bus. There is still no ticket stand – you just have to know the right guy to talk to, and there is still a healthy quota of drunk, homeless people hanging around, but it feels better.  

What started out as me being happy about a shower turned into quite a morbid blog. Maybe next time I’ll write something a bit happier – after a few more decent showers perhaps.

Clutter, cooking and compost

So last week I finally got around to doing the rearranging I had been threatening since the start of September. The start of September was the time when Jeni left, Loraine came, we renegotiated our housing situation, the fire destroyed everything and I said goodbye to the last of our winter volunteers. It was a pretty sad time for me, watching everything change as I stood still in the middle and just waited. At the time I had the urge to tip the whole house upside down and start again, instead of having to look at the empty spaces and ash. This week it finally happened, and I managed to rope Emma and Loraine into helping me. Turns out the boys are no good at heavy lifting and ran away at the first  sniff of hard work.

After a lot of talking and meeting over several months it was decided we would stay in the house we are in now, and Malvina would build a new house for her tourists. The new house is right next to the camp ground where visitors stay and we were supposed to be moving there in November. The tourist season is about to hit and I’m really not looking forward to it. They are noisy and disruptive, disrespectful to the forest, drop rubbish, and sometimes interfere with our traps. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after the peaceful quiet of winter and having sole use of all the land for so long. I told Malvina one night (after some beers) that I was really excited for the tourists to come. Since we would be so close to them. I was keen to be able to talk to all the people and enjoy the forest with them, party with them and tell them all about biology. Shortly afterwards she decided we should stay at the other side of the stream, in the house we are already in, as far away as possible! If I wasn’t so happy about this decision I might be offended, but my secret plan worked.

It was also the perfect excuse to turn the house inside out. I had to buy all new beds anyway, so I made a deal with the furniture salesman and got 4 shelves thrown in plus some big tables for eating at. I am going to borrow some more items from the ‘TTU list of everything you could ever need’ including a new sofa, chairs and a freezer which was installed at the weekend. The office is moving out of my room and into the bigger area across from Conception’s room and the museum will go with it. In two weeks time I will have my own space with a door I can close without people walking in and out of it at all times of day - can’t wait. The kitchen has been reordered with a whole table as a preparation area for our new cook, space made for the new freezer and a kind of wall art mural thing to hide the ugly wall on the outside of the boys bathroom. Looks nice and I felt like a Carol Smiley/Rolf Harris combo.

We cleared out the garden and planted watermelons, yellow melons, yellow peppers and cucumber. We also tried experimenting with raised beds so we will see how that works out. Apparently when it rains heavily, it won’t uncover the roots as much. The new bed is composed of the compost from our compost bin, horse manure and sand. I weeded the whole of the vegetable patch, so now it looks like there is nothing growing – but there is! We have picked squash for soup and the first tomatoes are turning red. The garlic is sprouting well and the onions and beetroot are still powering through. Every time I go in there I think of Rosemary and Derek. Thanks so much for the garden guys. If you two ever come back I will have a thousand questions for you on how to grow things – I have no idea what I’m doing.

The new cook started yesterday, but about ten minutes into our conversation about her duties in the house, she told me she doesn’t know how to cook. I asked her to do something simple for lunch – egg mayonnaise (egg salad) sandwiches. I gave her the instructions so she boiled the water then said “now what?” We each ended up with a plate of sliced up egg with some mayonnaise squirted on top. Seems the concept of a sandwich is also a tricky one. Today though I went for something even easier – ham and cheese sandwiches. I was expecting a bag of bread, bag of ham and bag of cheese put on the table which is what we normally do, in a do-it-yourself sandwich type way. Instead we got neatly stacked, perfectly square sandwiches with one slice of ham and cheese in each and all the crusts cut off. She is a fast learner. Tonight we are having guiso de arroz which kind of loosely resembles risotto. She is preparing it now and hasn’t asked me any questions yet so fingers crossed she knows what she’s doing!

So I guess the transformation is nearly complete. Once the office goes, the house will no longer be a work space, but a new improved living area. Para La Tierra is about to become a beautiful butterfly – hopefully one of the really rare ones.