Ellen in Paraguay

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.