Ellen in Paraguay

A continuation of the history of Paraguay…In addition to having the longest-lasting dictatorship in the western world, this country has suffered one of the worst wars in the history of humankind. During the war of the triple alliance in which our fearless Napolean wanna-be Francisco Lopez somehow incited Paraguay’s neighbours on three fronts, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, to join forces against the Heart of South America, fully half of the population died, including nine out of every 10 men. Even women and children fought in this war, in which Paraguay ended up losing a good chunk of land. And yet we celebrate this man as a hero (see my blog shortly after heroes’ day on March 1.) The Paraguayans held out for a long time though, as Lopez on his last leg fled deeper and deeper into the country, with his ridiculously elegant courtesan who insisted on carting along a grand piano to the various battlefields until the very end. The story goes that somewhere along the way, or perhaps in various places, the leader tried to procure a comfortable future for himself by burying treasure.
This past weekend I went to one of the cities which at one time he declared the capital city when Asuncion was taking over by the enemy. It’s called Concepcion. And at the very places I stayed, people think it is a possible site for where Lopez may have buried his treasure! However, instead of searching for treasure, we did other adventurous things, like butchering 2 chickens, 1 goose and 1 duck, fishing with homemade rods and cheese for bait, cooking in a clay oven, going into the bush to find mandioca root, and canvassing the neighbourhood to invite everyone to the evangelistic campaign. Well, it was adventurous and exciting for me, but for some people this is their life. I told Karen I will never feel sorry for any housewife in North America again. For these country women, getting a meal ready, washing the clothes by hand, tending the garden and sweeping the dirt is a full-time seven-day a week job. I think if I had to go through all that work to eat a chicken I would probably just be a vegetarian (although, I guess didn’t become a nudist when I was washing my clothes by hand.) I can’t even imagine what life must be like in some of the indigenous communities that we passed, where all people had was a lean-to and a fire to cook the food that they hunted and gathered. My favourite part of the weekend was when a neighbour lady who has a reputation for being somewhat cantankerous, seeing all the company that our hosts had, came and brought them a chicken. I am really grateful for the lush, fertile Paraguayan countryside, the generousity of the land and how it inspires the people to be generous to each other. We really can survive happily and healthily on very little material goods, it is much more important to cultivate good relationships and community. My least favourite part was being woken up in the middle of the night by mice scratching around in the room. I like to think of myself as a pretty adaptable person, using those country outhouses and cleaning up the poultry innards, but finding mouse poop in my bed in the morning really gave me the willies!

On Friday I successfully completed 24 years of life. It seems like a fairly good-sized number, but on that day I felt more light-hearted and youthful than ever. There was a big conference for all the Christian school teachers in Paraguay, and I went with my co-workers to attend workshops, learn how to be better teachers and, most importantly, get inspired to keep persevering. I went to a workshop specifically for English teachers and was surprised to find that only the British lady leading the session and 2 or 3 others were native English speakers. I saw a guy wearing a hockey jacket that said “High River” on it and I thought he might be from Alberta, but was disappointed to hear a strongly accented voice. It turns out though, that he did receive it from a Canadian friend. I took advantage of the opportunity to pretend we were kids as we played games and sang songs, and was inspired by the teacher who has traveled all around the world, places like Spain and Egypt, teaching English.
The guest speaker was Dr. John Walsh of the Christian Storytelling Network (For those of you who know Dr. Jerry Shepherd from Taylor Seminary, if I closed my eyes while listening to Dr. Walsh I could have tricked myself into thinking it was Dr. Shepherd, their voices are so similar. Plus Dr. Walsh has a similar white santa claus beard). For two days I got to listen to someone speak in English on a very interesting topic – it was the best birthday present I could have imagined. He had an excellent translator too, and I think if I could spend more time listening to a speaker and a translator like that, my Spanish speaking skills would improve considerably.
Before people had their own copies of scripture in their homes, they learned what it meant to be a Jew or a Christian by hearing the stories of the Bible. Today we have lost that because we can just hand someone a Bible and tell them to go home and read it. According to Dr. Walsh, the Bible contains 525 stories, and 75% of the Bible is in story form. His solution for all that ails the church today is for people to “hide the word in their heart” by learning the stories and telling them. He told about a group of illiterate people who learned 150 Bible stories from some missionaries. Representatives from Southwestern, a big seminary in Texas, went to test them, and their findings were that these people who couldn’t even read had as much biblical knowledge as one of their seminary graduates. Thinking there must be some kind of mistake, they returned for a second round of testing. This time, they decided that their comprehension of the Bible was so complete, there was no reason not to award them seminary degrees. The only problem was, the people couldn’t read, so they had to put pictures on the certificates so the people would know which way to hang them on the wall!
Some people at the conference seemed nervous with Dr. Walsh’s idea of simply telling a story and not interpreting it or taking a lesson out of it. I agree with Walsh that the story doesn’t have a point, it is the point. He told me about a group of women in Iran that meets every morning at a missionary’s house to listen to a story. The missionary woman doesn’t read the Bible or give a lesson, she simply tells the story. Because there are no Bibles and no “teaching” it is perfectly legal. Then the women go home, and that night they tell the stories to their kids! Storytelling is also very effective in Buddhist communities where people would be shunned for going to a Bible study, but this way they are just going to hear stories.
However, they are not really “just” stories. Stories have power to influence our decisions and the things we value, our opinions and our lives. There are a few things I have taken out of this weekend: 1. I want to enjoy Bible stories again for being so strange and interesting and well-written, not always having to think “what is the application?” 2. I am considering a professional storyteller as a possible future career. 3. I want to always have a few stories in mind that I could share with people. I suppose I have lots of opportunities to write stories in my blog; I can’t wait to come home and tell them!

A little while back Ben wrote about how when he was a kid he complained about the seemingly useless job of drying the dishes when they could just air dry, but as an adult he has become obsessive about immediately drying dishes due to a shortage of counter space (At least you have a pantry, Ben). It made me think about how, whenever I complained about being cold, my mom told me to wash the dishes to warm my hands up. Since we don’t have hot water here, my mom’s advice has been rendered useless. Lately I’ve been trying to take my showers between noon and four in the afternoon, preferably after some activity such as running to the grocery store. If not, I have to do jumping jacks or at least rapidly sweep the house, anything to get my blood pumping, in order to withstand the somewhat less than lukewarm temperature of the water. When I’m finally clean, I feel like I’ve really earned that shower.

The closest thing we get to snow days here are when it rains really hard and no one wants to walk to school. Although it was raining really hard last night, this morning it was only trickling, but still some students used it as an excuse to be late. I hope all my students come tomorrow to write the English exam even if it is raining. I used the occasion to teach the song “the wise man built his house upon the rock.” They especially understood the part where “the-floods-came-up,” because often a low street will get flooded and become impassable (see I think the second or third lastest entry in Ben’s blog www.suddenlysenor.blogspot.com). A girl in first grade lives just down the street, and her parent’ brought her in their bare feet so as to not soak their shoes; mom carrying the backpack and dad carrying the girl.

Technology Part 2: Techniques for Selling Produce

Before leaving for Paraguay, my sister and brother-in-law blessed me with a laptop computer. I got it all set up to use wireless internet, and planned to install skypes.com once I got down here and be able to talk over the internet for pennies a minute. I told my long-distance friends and long-distance sisters that our relationship wouldn’t even change because we could still talk on the phone whenever we wanted. I had dreams of sitting in a foreign internet café, being able to talk about whatever I wanted in public because no one would understand me anyways. Upon arrival, I discovered that wireless internet doesn’t exist in Paraguay, except in downtown Asunción. And while everyone else is chatting away on their cell phones, I am still waiting to get hooked up with a land line that I signed up for almost a month ago. It costs almost 50 cents to get a photo developed, more than 3 times as much as I would pay at home, and it can be seen from the advertisements in the photo-developing place that digital prints from pictures taken by a cell phone are much more popular than those from a camera. Two of my best friends here earn their living by reupholstering cars with leather interiors, but not a day goes by that I don’t see a man or some boys riding by in a cart pulled by a single skinny horse or a skinny horsed paired with a short hair mule. Sometimes they are collecting trash, Sometimes they are sorting through the trash looking for bottles or other “valuables.” Sometimes they have a load of big white sacks pile two or three meters high. More often than not, they are shouting into a megaphone “¡Piña! ¡Mandioca! ¡cebolla!”, advertising the pineapple, mandioca root or onion or whatever kind of produce they might be carrying. In Oscar and Karen’s neighbourhood I once saw a wagon piled with meat for sale. Ben once told me that the true test of Spanish comprehension would be when I could understand the megaphone-cart-guys, but all I really had to do was learn produce names. One day when I had a hankering for pineapple juice, a cart came back and I could just make out the word “¡Piña!” I asked for “dos” the driver said “two” to me and probably took advantage of my non-native naïveté by giving me the smallest, most tasteless pineapples of the bunch. Two days ago as a skinny horse trotted by with its load, I saw 2 CDs affixed to the rough wood on back of the cart. At first I thought it was a strange decoration (yet in keeping with Paraguayan style) until I realized they served as reflectors. I am still giggling when I think of it, but it is a good reflection of two different worlds converging in this place.
The thing about the produce-carrying carts is that it’s a pretty inefficient system. For example, if you need potatoes, do you risk it by staying at home and waiting for a cart instead of going to the store? What if you needed potatoes and onions, but the cart only had onions? You would have to go to the store anyways. I totally understand how you could walk past someone selling hot-greasy empanadas and you would buy one on a whim and eat it right there. But who is sitting in their house, makes out a barely intelligible “¡Piña! ¡Mandioca! ¡cebolla!” yelled into a megaphone, and decides they want some raw vegetables right then? I should add that the guys who sell newspapers use bikes, but not megaphones “¡ABC Color! ¡Crónica Popular” And the people who sell chipa walk with a basket on their head. “¡chipa! ¡chipa!” My favourite is the ladies selling pillows who go door to door. Everyone says Americans are the ones guilty of impulse buying, and making purchases they don’t really need, but I think the temptation is just as strong here.

Techonological Tuerto
Every once in awhile I like to learn some not-so-common Spanish words. Tuerto means one-eyed, and not even my fourth grade students knew that until I taught them. I am trying to read “Alicia en el pais de las maravillas” (Alice in wonderland) but it has impossible vocabulary. I now know the word for some objects that I am not even sure what they are called in English, for example, the kind of telescope or whatever that a pirate uses that can expand and collapse, that is a “catalejo” in Spanish.
We love to use powerpoint here. Every Thursday I bring my computer to school so we can show fancy slides with song lyrics, and every Saturday for the little kids Bible story time as well. Although my computer is a little heavy to carry and I sometimes worry about it getting stolen or damaged, it’s not that big of a deal. My main concern is that it has become absolutely essential for our times of worship. The point of kids’ songs is that they are easy and stick in your brain, not to mention the kids sing many of the same songs every week. They don’t really need to look at the words. If anything, it is sometimes a distraction and creates a lot more work to haul out all the equipment. I am afraid we have fallen into what Neil Postman calls “techonopoly,” where we are one-eyed technophobes, and don’t consider in what ways the use of technology might be an encumbrance. When I suggested that maybe we don’t always need the songs on powerpoint, the response was that since we have it we’re going to use it.
Just because a technology exists, we are not compelled to use it. Sometimes I would rather walk to my friend’s house than use the phone. Sometimes I would rather sit in a circle and sing along to a guitar than have microphones and powerpoint slides. I am writing this in my blog because I realized people here won’t understand me. For most of them computers still invoke great interest and they especially love their cell-phones (the one widespread technology due to an underdeveloped infrastructure which makes it a pain to get a land line.) I always want to tell them that they aren’t missing out on that much. One of the things I have come to like about being here is my lack of technology. The times I get to talk on the telephone with my family are oh so precious, and because I only use the internet one or two times a week, I always have a new email waiting for me! I get a lot of exercise not having a car, and my water and electricity consumption are probably really low, from never using a TV or a pressure washer or clothes dryer. In the words of napoleon dynamite’s brother “I love techonology” because it enables me to communicate with my family and friends, but I see how life goes on without such conveniences, and sometimes they can hinder the good life. I suffer the most out of anyone when there are no song lyrics, but if they are always there I am never forced to commit the song to memory. I miss microwaves and the good things you can make in them, like nachos with melted cheese, or frozen burritos. It is a small price though, something I can easily give up knowing that I am doing God’s will by being here.