Ellen in Paraguay

This entry marks a new epoch in the life of my blog. My family has been encouraging me from the beginning, telling me that it’s not boring and they hang on to every word, but this week I realized that there more than 50 people reading this and ones that I don’t even know. Now I am even more humbled (i.e. embarrassed) than I was previously. I hope I still write honestly and don’t worry too much about who’s reading it. It’s good though because now I feel pressured to spend more time and write well, as opposed to the usual stream of consciousness. By the way, if my diction seems strange and a little bombastic, it may be because I’m starting to use more and more Spanish-English cognates. Probably when I go back home for a little while until I get accustomed to it (see? I said “accustomed to it” instead of “used to it”), I will say “a moment please” instead of “hold on a sec,” or that something was realized instead of saying it happened.

Here are some things about Paraguay that are interesting and neutral and suitable for a broad audience. First of all, I think I wrote before that out of all the capital cities in the world, Asunción is the cheapest place to live. I read that a person can live here and pay one-sixth the amount for the same standard of living in New York. When you think about it though, the comparison is someone ludicrous – you can’t just base it on money. One of the best things about Paraguay is the free sunshine and lush vegetation. You can’t grow pineapples in your backyard in New York. As well, even in the downtown area, it seems like there is so much space. Everyone has a yard and there are not very many tall buildings.

Conversely, there are many things Asunción doesn’t have that you could do in New York. This became very apparent to me the day that my roommate and I watched “The Chorus” (a French film in the style of Mr. Holland’s Opus about a man who goes to teach at a school for troubled boys, but a million times better) and were listening to the choral music playing at the end while the credits were showing. She said to me “Oh yes, I like this kind of music. I went to a concert once and it was wonderful.” ONCE she had the opportunity to go and hear professional live music, and who knows if it was even very good or not? I thought about the myriads of times I have attended musicals or other plays and concerts and how much richness it has brought to my life, and I was sad that the people here don’t have the opportunity to appreciate things like that.

There’s an implicit sermon in that last sentence but I’ll just make it explicit: if you live in a big city in North America, you’re really lucky to have access to good art and music. One of the more uppity malls in the downtown always has a little art display. The art I saw was fairly weak, but Ben said last time he went it was really good, but still no one seemed to care about it. All this concern for good taste trickles down into everything from clothing to perfume to table settings. I feel extremely snobby writing this, but the Paraguayan style is pretty ridiculous. In a way it works out well for me because I am a missionary without a lot of money and this way I am never tempted to buy anything.

Maria, in response to your question, there are movie theatres here. I’ve asked about them and have been told that it is a popular past-time more or less, but by evidence of the fact that I have never seen one nor heard anyone ever suggest “hey why don’t we go watch a movie?” I think it is safe to draw the conclusion that there are not hundreds or people crowding a theatre on a Friday night. Ben said part of it is that by the time movies or concerts end, the busses aren’t running anymore, so you either have to have a car or take a taxi, which is “expensive” and thus the people are separated into classes, if they weren’t already by those who able to afford the price of entry to the event. But even so, there just aren’t as many entertainment options available. As far as I know, this capital city with about 600,000 people has one bowling alley. And no ice rinks!

The major source of revenue for the country comes from the hydroelectric plants along the rivers. However, in the past week there have been two major power outages. Karen thinks that the people in charge do it on purpose to conserve electricity (just like how they also make it so people can use the water in her neighbourhood during peak hours of the day). The first time it happened back in October it made me cry because it must have been the hottest day and we couldn’t use the fan and my sister had just called on the phone but she was cut off. On Friday night we were practicing music for the weekend church services when all of a sudden the keyboard stopped working and all the lights went out. The bad part is that it can be very dangerous and a lot of looting goes on. I was running down the street to catch up with the others who were walking some girls to the bus stop when I totally tripped on the “sidewalk” and gashed my toe. (I put sidewalk in quotation marks because their existence is unreliable, even on main streets, but sometimes people have concrete alongside their fence.) Then again today I was at the cabinas and just about to use the internet when the fans stopped working and the computers were silenced. It turned out fortunately enough though, because I got to sit and talk with the ladies there while we waited.

To me, occasional power outages or the lack of a movie theatre aren’t very big sacrifices, because I am very entertained in other ways, plus I only plan on staying for another year. But I wonder what effect it has on the society as a whole. Are the people worse off because they can’t hear a full orchestra playing the hallelujah chorus or see original etchings by Picasso? How sorry should I feel that my friends don’t get to watch a live production of “Fiddler on the Roof?” Not to mention that that the good movies they do get to watch are all dubbed or in subtitles (usually with more boring formal language). I feel like these experiences have largely shaped who I am and made me a better person. The three hours I spent in the Winspear Centre listening to Handel’s Messiah were the three best hours I ever spent in mediation on the greatness and goodness of God. I am very grateful that God has given humans creative abilities and that we have the luxury of time for such things. The Paraguayans entertainment is playing and watching sports, and drinking terere and talking, which may or may not be very beneficial for inspiring one’s soul. (I heard some jokes here for the first time this week. I think Paraguayan humor is pretty lame. It might just be because I don’t share the same cultural knowledge, but I’m pretty sure it’s because the people will laugh at anything. I know this, because I told them this joke and it went over WAAAYY too well: A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “why the long face?”) The characters present in jokes are a Paraguayan, and Argentinean, and a Brazilian. I think they are most prejudiced against Argentineans, because Paraguay is really “back-country” whereas Argentina is very European and snooty.) I guess the best I can do is appreciate whatever beauty is available to me, to be creative myself (with my blog!), and encourage the people here to be interested in some “high-culture” that they are presently missing out on.

I dedicate this blog to my friend Andrea, who loves art and music and is very creative, in return for smuggling me into her art history class and inspiring some of these thoughts. Plus she would probably laugh at Paraguayan jokes. I’ve been writing awfully long blogs lately, sorry if it doesn’t fit with your tight schedule, but I am anticipating not having any time to write one for at least another week, so you can savor this one for awhile.

# posted by Ellen @ 4:50 PM