Paraguayan History and My Future

Saturday, Nov 10 Carlos de la Sobera gave a guest lecture to all of the current Paraguay Peace Corps Trainees. Carlos is a teacher at the American School in Asuncion and general history buff who lived in the US for 16 years and could, accordingly, lecture in perfect English.

Carlos gave an empassioned, wonderfully informed lecture on Paraguayan history that really helped me put some of Paraguayan culture into context. THe most shockingly vivid part of his lecture dealt with the Triple Alliance War of 1865 to 1870. Many of you reading know of my general disinterest in history, especially war history, and Sr. de la Sobera was able to convey info about this time period and its lasting effects to me in a way that captured my attention and I will always remember. THe Triple Alliance War was an invasion of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay into Paraguay that was provoked by Brazil invading Uruguay for no politically viable reason and PY sticking up for UY. Unfortunatley, UY had a coup that put an anti-PYan into office and left PY allyless. What started as a drastically unfair war turned into genocide in Paraguay with Paraguay loosing 75% of its population in 5 years. From a pre-war population of 400,000 men and 400,000 women in 1862 Paraguay was so devistated that in 1972 (two years after the war ended) there were only 155,000 women and 20,000 men ( yes twenty thousand). Of these men 5,000 were 0-9, 5,000 were 10-14, and 10,000 were 65 or older. These are the people who carried the burdon of repopulating a country. Paraguay was not able to acheive equal gender populations again until 2002. Before the Triple Alliance War Paraguay was experiencing political stability and unity unknown in other South American countries and that unity was followed by absolute destruction; a fact that (combined with many years of dictatorship only ending in 1989) has affected people´s willingness to form groups and left people generally distrustful in many situations in PY.

But on a more personal note, I just got back from 5 days in the campo visiting another volunteer with half of the agroforestry group. I bought a hammock from my campo host mother who makes them, got to visit a wetland and island in the middle with tons of birds, snails, howler monkeys, and parrots, and ate honey directly out of the hive!

On Wednesday I get the big excitement of learning where my site is going to be!!!! Or as my very philosophical technical trainer likes to say, I will have earned a site. More on that once I learn more. Now I´m off to prepare a talk about tree resources Paraguayans have in their yards for tomorrow. The catch, it´s in Guarani!!!