Gran Chaco With NTM

This past week 4 of us have travelled to the North West of Paraguay into the sparsely-populated, arid Gran Chaco region.  The Gran Chaco spreads into Bolivia to the North and Argentina to the East.  SIM works south of Asuncion with subsistence farmers whilst a lot of NTM’s work is North with the tribal people out in the wilds.  As I’m working 2 weeks with NTM it gave me the only opportunity to see this part of the country and visit some of its tribes.  I’ll write some more about the tribes we saw at some point later, but as much of the adventure was set on the epic road trip there and back, I’ll talk of that first.

Much of Paraguay is totally flat with the occasional hillock, and when we reached the bridge over the river beside Concepcion it really struck home just how flat the country, especially the Chaco, is as there was not a single hill in sight.  What it lacked in hills we hoped it made up for in wildlife since there was such a huge area of scrubland with so few hunters/people, as the rest of the country has been disappointing in the lack of wild animals.

Exiting the bridge we found an immediate decline in traffic (from medium to almost zero) and a steep falling away in the road -literally as huge, 0.5ft deep potholes littered the tarmac road as it cut an almost straight line through the low, thorny scrubland.  Long grasses reached out onto the road and made the 2-lane highway seem long-abandoned, desolate and narrow.  After the bridge it took about 20km until we passed a house, and each further house or settlement seemed to be separated by a similar distance.

As it was extraordinarily flat, the slightly raised road often had long patches of floodwater on either side, not more than 1ft deep but covering large areas.  Some shacks we passed were surrounded by these low floodwaters, but life inside them seemed to be continuing.  Last week we were supposed to have driven out here, but the Chaco was hit with torrential rain which left much of the area flooded this way.  The local news had called it a disaster zone, which sounds extreme until you know how very tranquil Paraguay is with its weather.  It is never struck with the kind of storms the southern states of America get, so what is a bit rough for us in the UK or USA is extreme here.

We drove about 300km over bad roads, through the vast prairie, but in all this distance we scarcely saw anything in the way of animals besides the small herds of cows and goats which crossed the roads, and various vultures and storks.  We were, however, blessed with an encounter with a groundhog who posed for us and bit Jeremy’s leather boots, and later he and Anthony jumped out the car and captured an armadillo.

Here are some more pictures of the things we saw on the roads between Concepcion and Filadelfia.

My rather poorly made 360 of the Paraguayan horizon from the vantage point of the bridge outside Concepcion.

Anthony and Jeremy catching an armadillo

The snared beast.

Set free.

The groundhog photoshoot.

It wasn't afraid of anything.

A dear old tribal lady who hitched a lift.

A field of flowers by a small hut in the middle of nowhere.  Reminds me of how God grows beautiful plants on distant mountains and places no human eye will ever see, all for His glory.

This truck slid off the road into thick mud.

A flooded Chaco hut.

Harvest.

The unloved guard dog who jumped into the car when we stopped at a peanut butter farm.

Windscreen.

The black dots are horrid, big-butt spiders in vast, 20ft webs.

Flowers in a flooded field.

A vile, big-butt spider.  Its tread was like nylon.

A stork hiding in the grass in a rare area of meadow.

Due to the floods and amount of unmoving water, the Chaco was teeming with mosquitos.

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Cotton-Picking and Other Things (pictures)

Here are some pictures from the last week of kids picking cotton, 2 hideous spiders and ants in the 'jungle', a couple of capybara in a Villarrica park, a dragonfly, a tiny dog, another dog giving birth to puppies, and a huge toad.

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Zoo

I skipped 4th period of school today.  Well, a large group of Americans arrived at the academy and said we were all going to Asuncion zoo so I didn’t have any option.  I was only 5 minutes from being done anyway.  10 of us went in the 5-seater and blended in amongst the other Paraguayan carpoolers (some there -none of us- hang onto the backs of 4x4s or perch precariously on the sides hoping for no major bump to wipe them out).

Me and Dexter

The zoo featured what are probably the only Paraguayan jaguars left that aren’t riddled with Paraguayan bullets and hung on walls.  They cut a pretty miserable sight in their concrete dungeons, and one was very flabby (or perhaps pregnant, to be fair).  Apart from the unhappily incarcerated native cats, the zoo was brilliant in many ways, partly because it wasn’t trying too hard, and approximately 15% of the animals had broken out of their cages and ran around us to the concern of nobody.  Loose animals included: one of the vultures, and about 15 small monkeys that had escaped their island with the help of a fallen tree that had bridged the monkey-proof moat.  One of these primates threw a fruit at us which struck an alumni from the school I was working at.  We named him Dexter (the monkey, not the graduate), and Dexter followed us around the small zoo, posed for pictures, ate sticks we handed to him, and even chugged some Coca-Cola from a discarded bottle which impressed us all.

SIM Paraguay's new dog.

Speaking of animals: the SIM HQ has got a new dog (currently named either ‘Sam,’ ‘Zim’, or ‘FreeToAGoodHome’), and all SIM Paraguay members have to submit names for her.  The suggested names range from the common (Shadow, Wolfy, Indy), to the downright peculiar/Swiss-German (Ueli).  She's a softy but races towards any suspicious people.  My suggestion is the name Twiggy, although 2 year-old Julia’s baby-speak name Hababa is quite good because it sounds funny.  We’ll find out the results soon.

Tomorrow I join students and teachers on a mission trip with Habitat for Humanity (habitat.org) to get some footage of their own mission work.  Should be good.  Would appreciate your prayers, however, that I can be up a 5am when I have to leave HQ.

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Bus to San Francisco

Some of the McKissicks and the Dirks in San Francisco

Arrived in San Francisco (Paraguay) on Monday early afternoon after a not-as-bad-as-anticipated bus journey.  It was relatively straight-forward from Asuncion save for the Paraguayan dude in the seat in front of me who reclined his chair to full-on sleep mode less than 1 minute into the 6 hour journey leaving me with about half as much space as everybody else on the bus.  As he and I were sharing the same personal space I sometimes rested a hand or arm over the back of his seat to overcome the fearful bus cramp, only then in his sleep he would move around and then hold my hand momentarily until he came to his senses.  He never learned.

The bus was high tech: it had those gizmo panels set above each seat with the panel helpfully missing air conditioning blowers.  The panel had the round indent as if to say This is where you are meant to find relief, but no!  Haha!  The relief was found through large windows which had curtains that needed to be drawn depending on which side of the bus was getting melted by the sun.

The journey was nice except for the constant flooding with salespeople out to sell clearly illegal DVDs, bread, newspapers and Coca-Cola (some of the bottles of which were quite clearly fake as the liquid wasn’t nearly dark brown/black enough, it merely resembled dirtier-than-usual water).  I’d have asked for some but I don’t know Spanish units yet (as they are all the thousands).  At major stops such as Villarrica the bus would stop for 20 minutes in the baking sun whilst we could determine the good from the bad.

I was expecting a dirt road most of the way, but that only started from around Caazapa where the bus turned off one tarmac road down some back road and the route just turned to red dust.  Despite it not being many miles from there to San Francisco it was rendered a slog due to the rough road that moved and dropped wherever the rain water had wanted to run in the recent past (I am yet to witness rain here despite the forecast constantly warning of it).  The number of passengers dwindled and the bus began to stop at crossroads with no obviously local habitations.  We crossed a sort of prairie with the occasional tree or a sudden collection of woods and houses, and reached a series of wooden bridges that spanned small, usually dried-up rivers.  The bus would tread carefully onto them, and when sure it was either safe or ready to collapse, the driver hit the gas and all the wooden planks would bounce and rattle like a xylophone.

I arrived in San Fransisco and the bus attendant who had spoken Spanish in Asuncion now spoke to me in Guarani (a language I can’t even pronounce the name of).  Climbing out I felt really self-conscious as it was just a collection of wooden shacks and some cement square shops set amongst trees in the reddish dusty street as there I stood like a total tourist with this stupid big shiny black case and courier bag.  Dr. McKissick was supposed to be meeting me there but there was nobody, well, nobody except a bunch of cowboy-hatted locals sitting on their porches and shop entrances sipping terere, eyeing me up and down like they did to the newbie who entered the saloon for the first time in those John Wayne movies.  The Doc turned up after 2 extremely long minutes.  He greeted me with a smile and took me back to his house a couple of ‘blocks’ away and introduced me to his family.

I’m staying with them for a week before they go off to Bolivia, so I have to come back at some point.  Also, Danielle, another short-termer who I met at my first church service is coming here this week.

The McKissicks have 6 children, 2 dogs, about 15 chickens, several ducks with chicks, a bird chick with a broken wing, 2 toads, 2 or 3 rabbits (one which lives in the chicken house happily, and one which just gave birth to 2 babies).  They do medical mission work and a bunch of other stuff, and they are really part of the community.  I’m here to record their work to make 2 films.

I’d like to post a lot of pictures, but they have slower-than-dial-up speeds here so I’m only going with one and then post more from Asuncion on Sunday night.

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First Sunday in Paraguay

Today I attended my first Spanish-language church service.  It was attended 5 minutes late as a localised power outage made my ride get stuck a while a few blocks away behind an electricity-run gate.

But getting there I found that I understood about 32% of the songs, 7% of the sermon, and 100% of the reason why they have 2 major air conditioning units blasting the congregation from North and South.  Even with the air conditioning there was no true climate control, it was only climate wrestling and we were on the valiant but losing side.  The service was attended by Hannes, a Swiss SIM worker who uses his mechanical skills to help people in Paraguay.  Him being from the north of Switzerland -a place of high snows and cold weather- similar at times to Edinburgh, I expected him to be feeling like an ice cube in a microwave, but Hannes came in wearing a black jacket, darkjeans, and dark socks (3 things I will never even think of wearing here).  He was dressed for a mild British winter despite it being 35C outside.

‘It gets freezing in here,’ he said, so he dresses accordingly.  However, even the Paraguayans didn’t attire themselves in such a manner but wore roughly the same few things as me: t-shirt, shorts, flip-flops.  After much interrogation from me regarding dealing with high heat I got to spend the day with Hannes and the American family, and 2 Taiwanese kids for my last day of getting used to the surroundings before work really starts.

We played football with a square football (I won’t explain), got beaten up by a laughing small girl named Romy, had lunch, then went to a huge park in northern Asuncion called Botanica, a park filled with trees and a zoo which is never open at the right times.  It was still 35C and the park had thousands of people all staying under the shade of the trees.  Even the couple of football pitches in the expansive grounds were played upon in only the shaded corners.

We drank tereré under one of the biggest and therefore most shaded and cool trees.

Hannes (now dressed for summer) and Romy in the tree.

This is the park on the map.

I am now on a bus to Yuty, a nice air-conditioned, uncramped bus, the kind of bus that is highly favoured unlike the daytime buses which are stuffed full of people and chickens like a hellish kitchen.  You don’t want to be on a daytime bus, I was told.  You’d stew.  The worst time for travel is 10am to 3pm when the sun is hottest.  I’m glad I’m on the night bus instead.  Well, I was glad, and I was meant to be on that bus, but the plan changed and now, due to a series of unfortunate events, I am leaving at 8am tomorrow morning on the 5 hour journey which nicely fits inside the (closed) window of the furnace hours I had hoped to avoid.  The Christian life isn’t always the comfortable one.  However, as Hannes and I parted ways earlier, he shared how when he first came here and was learning Spanish, he couldn’t communicate and nobody knew his native German so he felt very alone, but it was ultimately a positive experience in the hands of God because He made it a time for Hannes to become closer to the One who could understand the German language, and being alone: Jesus.

Before I go out to the countryside, here are a few pictures of my base in Asuncion:

Down my street is this awesome car.

A little off the main street (Santisimo Sacramento) I found a crew of chickens roaming around.

Along the street I walk often is a gaping hole in the sidewalk that goes over a river.

There are a bunch of dogs that hang in the SIM garden, including this cute puppy.

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Mosquitos!

Twilight: this is the time that mosquitos come out so doors are closed, windows shut, and small warps in the frames are fret over and stuffed with available objects.  Somehow this doesn’t stop the tiny blood-sucking insects getting in.  Every day I have awoken with a new bite.  15 seems to be the total by day 5, which is 3 a night.  As each bite lasts about 5 days and itches like undiluted mad, the doers of this have become the enemy.  2 nights ago I was awoken by the itch at around 3am and I started scratching myself like a cartoon character: fingers splayed and clawed, with pure fury and determination etched on my face; a sort of non-blinking madness.  The problem is that giving the bites a good scratch only makes them worse and the more you want to scratch; a vicious circle.  The internet told me of various soothing aids for mozzie bites at 3:30am, and I went all out in experimentation: vinegar, salt paste, mint toothpaste and dry soap.  The toothpaste worked the best, and soon I was plastered in the blue-green stuff.

My unfortunate arm with bites highlighted.

With forms of relief discovered, yesterday I looked into preventative measures.  One is DEET, a truly vile chemical spray that must be sprayed over the entire body at night.  After a liberal applying of it last night I felt that I was both living inside an oil tanker’s exhaust funnel, and highly flammable.  It worked, but I felt it was the extreme option.  Today I went in search of the natural alternative: Lemongrass Oil (or aceite hierba de limon) as I had to say to the pharmacist.  She gave me an alternative, Eucalyptus Oil.  It smells nice.  I put it on my arms, neck, and lower legs and promptly got bitten further up my shorts in Untreated Leg Territory which suggests it is good at driving them into different realms.

Countries that don’t have the flying peril are truly blessed.

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