While experiencing a bit of writer's block (or lack of writer's will- no one talks about that problem much...) over the past month, I happened to be reading over the posts that make up this blog currently. I realized, much to my chagrin, that nothing was really put up here about Paraguay as a country. This is a short attempt to remedy that with words and links...
A commment that I have received in Asunción more than once is that somewhere along the line, someone down here met a North American who foolishly confided in a Paraguayan that he was pretty sure before his trip that Paraguay was in Africa.
Well it is not. And shame on him for exposing the shaky nature of our geographic education up north.
In fact, Paraguay is one of only two landlocked SOUTH AMERICAN nations (the other being its northern neighbor Bolivia). Although it is far from an ocean, water abounds here. As you might be able to see from the best online map of the country I could find, Paraguay is surrounded by rivers of a pretty good size. Now, we're not talking the Mississippi here, but one of them, the Rio Paraná is powerful enough to run the largest hydro-electric dam in the world, Itaipu.
The Rio Paraguay cuts the country known as the heart of South America in to two distinct regions. The northwestern one is known as the Chaco, and is dry as all get out and hot to boot about year 'round. Many of you may be familiar with this place as the land that the Mennonite immigrants from Europe (see history post) turned in to an agricultural/economic miracle while simultaneously pretending that there were no idigenous inhabitants already on the land. "Oh! Look! Here we were trying to develop a plantation and these laborers just showed up out of nowhere! What luck!" (This is a slight over-simplification, again, await the history post.)
The southeastern section of the country, home to the capital of Asunción, is still hot as a 4th of July Barbeque, but gets a decent amount of rain per year. The country is generally considered to have a sub-tropical climate, which means that 115 degree days in the summer months of December, January, and February (no, not crazy - Southern Hemisphere, remember?) are not unheard of.
From the map you can see that Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina are hugging this little country. It is the size of Montana, slightly smaller than California, and home to roughly 6 million people. These 6 million people largely congregate in the southeastern part of the country. The aforementioned Chaco is only home to about 2% of the population, even though it is 60% of Paraguay's land.
There. If you stuck out that geography lesson, you're a trooper. And now you know that Paraguay is not in Africa.
2 comments:
Good information guys! And although I'm not "sticking up for" the European Menno's, I'd like to point out that even though they developed their communities fairly quickly and in a VERY organized fashion, they didn't completely ignore their indigenous neighbors. Many German Mennonites have spent much of their lives working with and alongside these groups. Have you had a chance to visit Yalva Sanga yet? Schools, a hospital, and a seminary have been in operation there for years, an effort that was begun by Mennonites. So anyway, I also know that there have been and still exist some prejudices among both indigenous Paraguayans and German-speaking Mennos, but there has also been a lot of good in all of that.
I'm enjoying your blog! Happy December! Stay cool...(temperature cool) ;)
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