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Life in Paraguay is essentially life lived one-handed. The conductors on the buses as well as most of the passengers, the pedestrians in downtown Asunción, the motorcyclists in Concepción, the police, the shopkeepers, the idle knots of men in the plazas all manage to go about life using only one hand. Their other hand is forever occupied in clutching a tereré or maté cup; the accompanying thermos is always close by, wedged in armpit or crook of elbow.
Maté is not unique to Paraguay. In northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and in every street in Uruguay people sip on the strong infusion of tea through metal sieve-straws called bombillas. Paraguay, though, is the home of tereré, the same infusion served iced, sweet and packed with medicinal-or-otherwise herbs.
The prevalence of tereré, especially given the inconvenience of relinquishing forever the use of one hand for the sake of lugging it about, defies logical explanation. At all hours and in all situations, tereré is sucked upon in an almost preconscious, unintentional way. It reminds me of the relentless consumption of coca in Bolivia. It reminds me of a child fastidiously, resolutely dragging his security blanket with him at all times.
Perhaps because of this one-handed lifestyle, or the assurance gained by the touch of the tereré flask, or the properties of the tea and herbs, Paraguayan life takes place at a permanently sedate pace. It is a land in which hours and decades disappear easily, where things change slowly and horsedrawn carts still clack along the uneven paved or dirt streets. It is also a place in which people can hide, a haven of obscurity where people can do things they wouldn’t do elsewhere. In the 17th century the Jesuits set up camp here, building their reductions, their missions, and melding their culture with that of the indigenous groups to produce successful, syncretic communities utterly at odds with the exploitative style of other colonial projects in the Americas. In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territories, and their little utopia came to an almost overnight halt.
Later Paraguay became the site of New Australia, an attempt by Australian leftist outsiders to build a socialist Utopia, This project in time also fell apart, as its members bickered and formed factions and breakaway communities. Eventually the Paraguayan government put an end to the project, dividing up the land among the community members. Apparently Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister tried to start an all-Aryan New Germany shortly after this.
More successful and showing no signs of disappearing or being disappeared are the Mennonites. The promise of unsettled land and complete seclusion drew them groups of Mennonites from the persecutions of the norths down to the wilds of Paraguay, where they could and can practice their religion in peace. Other groups (eg Japanese, Korean, Jewish refugees, Nazis, the Moonies) have also found their havens down in the obscurity of Paraguay.
The country is not always a sanctuary, though. A long history of dictators-acting-with-impunity has kept Paraguay a paradise of corruption, and at times cruelty and barbarism. It has long been a haven of contraband and cut-throat, cut-price shopping for big brothers Brazil and Argentina. Most of urban Paraguay hugs its river-borders, as close as possible to potential customers and commerce. Paraguay’s largest export is hydroelectric power, of which Brazil and Argentina enjoy vast amounts at criminally low prices.
The isolation of Paraguay has also preserved pockets of wilderness and wildlife, and perhaps most curiously of all, a language. Prior to European colonisation, Paraguay was inhabited by many small indigenous groups speaking a variety of languages, many completely distinct form another. Today though, Guaraní is the language of choice, and is more widely spoken than Spanish, with which it shares official language duties. This is the only case in the Americas of an indigenous language being adopted on a widespread scale by non-indigenous speakers, and stands in awkward discord with the plight of indigenous people and culture at large. Several indigenous groups today are on the brink of extinction, their entire remaining populace living in roadside shanties that look out across land they are legally entitled to, but still are powerless to inhabit.
I spent a good deal of time not quite sure of what to do in Paraguay. Its only superlatives, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and the world’s largest aquifier – a huge underground source of freshwater – are not the most thrilling prospective destinations. This is not to say that Paraguay is short on things-worth-looking-at; they are just little known or publicised outside of the country. I spent much time on buses or in plazas watching one-handed life trickle by me. The people I encountered were both shy and eager to help; they would point me in the right direction, pause as though to say more, and then quickly slip away. Although Paraguay has long been a haven for outsiders, these have tended to keep to themselves. The volunteers and tourists that turn up in Paraguay, hoping to find rather than lose themselves, are curious specimens for locals. Even the owner of my hotel in Asunción asked me what was keeping me there (for four nights).
Sometimes the cautious hospitality was incredibly helpful; in Encarnación I was eventually escorted by police patrol to the house of a friend of the couchsurfer I was supposed to be staying with but couldn’t contact. Other times the best-intentioned help didn’t work out; trying to leave Ybycuí I was told that Paraguayans always stop to offer a ride to anyone in need. This is true, but most Paraguayans aren’t on long-hall journeys from town to town. The few available rides on that empty road were mostly over the next hill to the next farmhouse.
The languid pace of life slows even further out there in the suburbs, the towns, the villages, the little concrete houses lost among overgrown gardens and herds of long-eared cows. On that night when I couldn’t find my couchsurfer I stayed in the poorest house I will probably ever stay in, a thing of corrugated iron and crooked-fitting wooden pailings and dirt floor. This was also where I received the warmest welcome fo Paraguay, where I was given a bed and plied with traditional food (including the chicken that had just had its neck wrung). It was here in this least probable of settings that I was finally, fully welcomed into the world of the one-handed, sipping on hot maté to counter the rain drumming on the iron roof and staining everything with brick-red mud.
El Chaco, the vast flatland that covers the northern half of Paraguay and sprawls over into Bolivia, has a reputation as a harsh world of thorns and mud (in winter), or thorns and dust (in summer), where few men would dare or bother to try and scratch out a living. Once upon a time Bolivia and Paraguay, each backed by an international petroleum company, went to war over this region, when it was thought that (as yet undiscovered) oil might be lying beneath all that dirt and scrub.
The Trans-Chaco has a reputation as being a rough, tough stretch of highway that jolts and slithers from one nation to the other, but compared to most of the mountain highways in Bolivia, where every nighttime bump had me convinced we were about to topple over some immense precipice, this road feels tame and civilised. On the Paraguayan side of the border it is even asphalted. The endless, dead-straight strip, on which the vehicles appearing out of distant mirages took many many long minutes to finally pass the bus, was utterly unlike anything I had seen in the past six months. It was all so low, and straight, and flat.
This wild wilderness was where I bid my midnight goodbye to Bolivia, paid my expired-visa fine, and entered into Paraguay, a country I had prowled along the border of on my last South American trip, but had been unable to enter. This time I had the visa, and I was welcomed into the country by disinterested customs officials and straw-haired kids asking for food.
The bus dropped me at a big, blank intersection, and I was told that to get to Filadelfia I should hitchhike, and that it wouldn’t be hard because the Mennos were good people. I’d wanted to stop in Filadelfia for exactly this reason; to find out something about the Mennonite communities that had washed up in waves in El Chaco, and that had somehow managed to thrive and prosper out there.
It was a friendly rancher that brought me to the edge of Filadelfia, and into the strange world that the Mennonites built. Filadelfia is the centre of the Fernheim Mennonite communities, which were settled by groups of Canadian, Russian and German Mennonites fleeing various persecutions of the 20s, 30s and 40s. It is also the first town I’ve seen in South America not to have a central, monument-filled plaza. The Mennonites wasted no time with such things; the first buildings erected here were a hospital, an industrial plant, the cooperative centre where goods are bought, sold and bartered, and the town hall, which had to serve for all governmental, social and religious purposes in the early days.
Today Filadelfia is a logical grid of dusty streets, its ‘main street’ being the strip of shops facing the plant and old town hall across a wide avenue. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed children tinkle along on bicycles, and giant pickups roar through the town. A few blocks from the ‘centre’ in any direction and the asphalt once again gives way to dust tracks and wild scrubland of cactus, bottle trees and thorns.
The success of the Mennonites here is a great credit to their work ethic; ‘Faith, Work and Unity’ is the maxim on the municipality sign, and the communities have thrived and brought prosperity to the Chaco through an uneasy mix of disparate cultures and values. The Mennonites are big land-owners out here, and they have cleared vast tracts of land to graze the cattle (this is illegal today but continues) that produce renowned Menno dairy products, but there are many miles of Chaco and not all that many Mennos, and much of the hard and menial work is done by members of the indigenous communities that have existed in some form or other for centuries in El Chaco. While Filadelfia represented a new and remote home for the Mennos to preserve their beliefs in, it is also a successful farm town, full of teenagers on dirt bikes and pin-ups advertising cheap beer to those whose beliefs do not forbid such things. Street vendors sell pirated DVDs, which apparently aren’t overtly prohibited in the Bible. I spent my first night in a rough hotel patronised by brown folk and my second in a neat, clean place patronised by white folk. The town is more or less divided along these lines; the wealthy, white people are greeted in German, and the poorer, brown people are greeted in Spanish or Guaranì. A polite formality exists and maintains the balance between the two groups, and as long as that harmony survives the community flourishes. This is probably the most multi-lingual country town anywhere in the world.
I didn’t do much with my time in Filadelfia; the town can be walked in an hour, its only museum can be seen in a few short minutes (a few more if you can read German), but it is none the less a fascinating place, with its strange ethnic mix, and its rigid formality. A trickle of tourists pass through, and these generate cautious curiosity. Cameras provoke suspicion. I did have the chance to meet a fellow couchsurfer who was doing time as a volunteer out here. As interesting as she was finding her work, there couldn’t be many tougher places to live as an expat; the rigid Mennonite codes and sensibilities imposed upon her because, as a white girl, it is with these that she belongs. And even apart from this there is the simple fact that there is almost nothing out here; the town is as dry as Mennonite aesthetics, or the vast emptiness of El Chaco.
My favourite sliver of Filadelfia life was that although the community has adopted the long, catatonic siesta, this siesta is still commenced and terminated every day by a loud bullhorn sounding from the industrial plant. Not a minute more relaxation can be tolerated, and as the horn sounds the sleepy streets become busy with motorbikes as people rush to and from work, cleaving to their defining work ethic and bringing a few frantic moments to this otherwise sleepy scrubland town.
