A Day of Instruction...

  While posting another thrilling History of Paraguay post (some university will publish it... you watch), I realized that much to my chagrin, there is nothing on here about what we do here or how it's going.  I'll give you a quick run-down.

   It's Tuesday morning, and the cheap cell phone Krista and I bought starts an obnoxious beeping to inform us that it's 6:30.  After counting my new mosquito bites, I shower quickly and sit down to eat breakfast quickly with Krista and Berta before I have to be out the door by 7:00 or 7:15.

  It really doesn't matter exactly what time I leave.  This is because it will always be 30 seconds too late and the Line 18 bus will pass by while I'm waiting to cross the road.  Then I wait 15-30 minutes for the next bus 18 to come and whisk me away to the Mennonite World Conference headquarters about 30-45 minutes away.

  Krista and I have started volunteering there lately with our free time in the mornings entering registrations into the database.  It's a decent excuse to sit somewhere for three or four hours and listen to NPR on the internet.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I make sure that some combination of buses and walking gets me to Emanuel Mennonite Church by 3:00pm.  The conference offices of CONEMPAR (the Spanish-speaking Mennonite conference) are behind the church and that's where class #1 takes place with Dario.  He's the conference treasurer, and requested an individual conversation class to keep up his nearly fluent English skills.

  At 4:00 my first class of beginning English students arrive.  Lisa, Antonio, Jemima, Dámaris, Joanna, Graciela, and Yolanda come through the door with a "Hello teacher!", which is something that I've gathered everyone in Paraguay learned in high school English.

  I generally run class like this:  We spend 5 to 10 minutes talking about what day it is, what day yesterday was, next month, last month, etc., and about the weather.  Then, 15 minutes is devoted to grammar exercises.  After the grammar, I try and wake them up by having a 15 minute section of responding to commands.  The guys in the picture below (from the class at my other church) are going up the stairs and down the stairs.  We spend the remainder of the one hour class working at vocabulary through a Bible reading or sometimes songs. 

  This process gets repeated at Emanuel at 6:30, and at Amistad Mennonite Church on Mondays and Fridays at 6:30 pm.  Generally, the students who are taking time to study and practice outside of class are improving very quickly.  

  After class, I typically take two buses home because of the dark, and end up back at home for supper at 9:00.  All the time spent on buses (at least 2 hours a day) has been a good opportunity to keep up with reading.  I just finished John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" in spanish, with bus tickets as my bookmarks.  

  Curious about something else that we do?  Shoot me an e-mail and I'll tell you about it.

 

HISTORY OF PARAGUAY, PART III: No, Oligarchy is not a Butterfly

  

After about a hundred years of galavanting across the continent, the Spaniards finally managed to firmly entrench their system of governance throughout most of South America.  Now, I know the title was slightly more specific, but this portion of the History of Paraguay could really be expanded to include the history of the whole continent, even Portuguese Brazil.  You see, to overly generalize as this thread has been good at doing, the Spanish really came to the "New World" for three reasons.  In no particular order, they were:

-God

-Gold

-Glory

  Taken in reverse order, many a young explorer was led to step on a ship outbound from Europe in order to make himself famous back home.  Be the next Cortez, Pizarro, or Coronado.  (If you don't know those three, don't worry, they aparently didn't do their job of becoming well known well enough.  Just know they were famous at the time.)  They were driven on by the stories of riches and particulary, cities made out of gold.  And, in order to legitimize their ventures further, a lot of ships drug along Catholic missionaries.

  When the Spaniards set up their colonies in South America, they imposed the then current medieval feudal system on their newly declared native citizens.  Known as encomiendas, this system "employed" (let's be honest: enslaved) native South Americans on farms, in mines, and in other domestic labors in exchange for the protection and the "Christian Civilization" that the Spaniards provided.  It also VERY IMPORTANTLY, set the precendent for the Latin American geo-political reality of oligarchy.  This word just means that 10% of the people own 90% of everything, and everyone else has to deal with it.  Trust me, this will come back to haunt our discussion more than once before I manage to catch us up to 2009.  

  The colonists were required to instruct the idigenous population in Catholicism.  However, aside from this religous favor, life on the encomienda was generally the opposite of heaven.  Stories of oppression from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean or the gold and silver mines of Peru are not really for your child right before bed.  But Paraguay's idigenous population managed to escape the harsh treatment that was found elsewhere in South America.  Why?

  In short, there was nothing in Paraguay.  Really.  No sugar plantations, no gold or silver mines.  But like I've said before, there were women, and the fact that the Spanish married more than one of them often enough meant that if they oppressed anyone, it would most-likely be their mother or father-in-law.  Now, the book I'm using calls the encomiendas that existed in Paraguay "benign" because of this.  I suppose the term is relative.  Being enslaved and forced to work so that your colonial master can be rich, own the land, and eat all he wants while you live on scraps is probably "benign" when compared to having your hands chopped of for not harvesting sugar fast enough.  But I'm still not sure if the worker in the first setting would refer to his lot as "benign".        

  So once again, Paraguay was different from the rest of the Spanish New World.  Racial integration, "benign" feudal system.  Two more things to note on this theme before I close up shop.  In the rest of Central and South America, the discriminatory policies of the Spanish Crown applied also to the racially mixed offspring of the colonists and their new found friends.  However, in Paraguay, everyone ignored these laws and treated Paraguayans of mixed origin as though they had the same rights as purely European Spaniards.  Secondly, reliant on this racially progressive outlook, Paraguay appointed its first "mestizo" govenor in 1602.  Things were looking good for interracial cooperation.  Could it be derailed?  Find it out in, HISTORY OF PARAGUAY, PART IV: Blame the Jesuits.

A Note About Demons:

  Before coming to South America, I had spent a good amount of time around religious functions in the U.S. and even studied at the Elkhart seminary.  However, I must admit that though I had heard talk at these functions of demons sent to plague good Christians and entice others into all other sorts of diabolical acts, I was still highly skeptical of their existence.

  No longer.  I have been in Paraguay for four months now, and one thing I can say for certain is that demons do exist.  In fact, the remains of one of thier ilk is splattered on the wall in front of my computer as I write to you.  Now, I am trying not to diminish the other-worldy aspect of these encounters by talking so crudely about one's demise, but the imps do seem to be somewhat more common here.  

  For example, it is a rather weekly occurence to kill upwards of twelve to fifteen demons in the shower.   (I was surprised to learn that they seem to like humid places where they can breed others... I had always assumed that fire was involved.)  You may think me brave, but I still need to bathe, so one of us has to go.

  If you have never seen a demon, let me describe its common form and habit.  It has wings that make an irritating high pitched sound like an over-worked food processer when it's trying to whisper sweet subversive nothings in your ear.  It is nearly impossible for a novice to determine from whence it came and wherefore it is going.  That means it's fast.  It also would like nothing more than to suck a mortal human's blood.

  The news media here has even picked up on the existence of these other-worldy forms, commenting the other night that they carry something called Dengue Fever.  I can only assume that this is some sort of curse that hampers the physical and mental faculties of the victim.  The expert on the program suggested burning an incense to ward off the evil presence, but Krista and I have yet to see any demons really driven off by Raid Country Fresh.