How Soccer Explains Paraguay's Underdog Status

“Ves, Erik? Estamos subiendo, Paraguay.”

“See, Erik? We are climbing up, Paraguay.”

-Celebrating gentleman to my friend Erik after Paraguay’s shootout victory over Brazil

Dead silence alternates with wild screams of joy and hugs in the well populated mall as the soccer teams of Paraguay and Venezuela take turns shooting penalty kicks. Our group had come to an exposition to learn about reforestation, but there was no way we were leaving early when the Paraguay National team was playing a game in the semifinals. At least one hundred of us stand around watching the game on a big screen. With every Paraguay goal come screams. Venezuela’s made goals produce a reaction from the crowd not totally unlike a human imitating a cat’s hissing. Paraguay’s goalkeeper, Justo Villar, AKA The Human Wall has already shutout one of the most powerful soccer squads in the world in Brazil days before. But with penalty kicks you never know what is going to happen. Everyone is waiting for the same thing: The Human Wall has to make a save on a kick, no easy feat. If he does, Paraguay will win and cement an advance to the championship of the Latin American Cup.

I diverge for an important and revealing subplot. There is effectively one sport in Paraguay: soccer. Soccer is the sport that is played, watched, and obsessed about by everyone in Paraguay, from little munchkins learning to walk and kick a ball to elderly folks talking about their glory days, and 40 year old dudes who still got game. To help you envision how crazy Paraguay gets over soccer, imagine this: Instead of having 4 very popular sports, each of which has a large fan base, the U.S. has chosen just one sport. One sport and everyone is a part of it: there are no baseball, basketball, football, or hockey fans: only soccer fans; one outlet to channel our evolutionary longings to belong to a tribe by to investing in a sports team. This is a fact: there are no other even mildly widespread spectator sports in Paraguay: only soccer. Picture Chicago cerca 2003 when the Cubs ALMOST made it to the World Series, and you are starting to get an accurate picture of the madness that occurs when the Paraguayan national team plays. I wouldn’t doubt that if there were a Steve Bartman who interfered with Paraguay’s team he would have to get plastic surgery and move far far far away. Paraguay has made to the finals this year in the Latin American Cup, and I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone and their mother is going to be watching the final game today and living and dying with every twist or turn the game takes.

So why does Paraguay put so much stock in their soccer team’s success? To understand Paraguay’s underdog nature we have to look at its history. Paraguay used to be the most developed country in Latin America. In the 1800s it had the first train and opera house on the continent, symbols of wealth and status at that time. It seemed to be on the fast track to becoming one of the most powerful nations in South America. Unfortunately, Paraguay’s dictator in the 1860s got greedy and decided to wage war on its neighbors Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay seeking territorial expansion. The war devastated Paraguay: its population was reduced to 100,000 women and 20,000 men, almost all of them under 12 or over 50. You heard right. That’s a FIVE to ONE ratio of men (and boys) to women. Some suspect that Paraguayan machismo is still recovering from this historical imbalance, which resulted in not a few polyamorous relationships, as one might suspect.

After the Triple Alliance war, as it is called, Paraguay developed an inferiority complex as a country. With its families and infrastructure in shambles,it fought an an uphill battle to catch up to the development and industry levels of its Latin American neighbors. Brazil has 200 million people and loads of industry, on its way to becoming a world superpower. Many Paraguayans go to Argentina in search of work, where they are sometimes looked down upon as ‘indigenous’ or ‘less civilized’ just because they are from Paraguay and may speak Guarani. Somehow Paraguay is always getting the shaft. One of the wonders of the world, the waterfall Iguasu, lies on the border between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Which side has zero tourism revenue? Yep, the ‘guay. Look in any South America tourism book. I guarantee you that Paraguay has the least pages of any country. Most of the tourists that I have encountered in Paraguay are the type that love going to places where no one goes. Leading Paraguayan intellectual and journalist Benjamin Fernandez Bogado’s most recent book is titled ‘The Urgent country,” where he basically lists all the things that need to change in the country for it to catch up with other developed countries. And yea,speaking of comparing yourself to other countries around you, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina have three of the most talented, well respected soccer teams in the world.

Paraguay’s freaking amazing soccer team provides it with an outlet to gloat over these other countries. In some ways it is the same kind of gloating that I did towards my friends who are Chicago Cubs fans after the White Sox won the World Series in ’05. That is, I know the fact that the team I support has won it all doesn’t make me a superior person, and most of our jesting is in good fun. But the Paraguay vs. Argentina or Brazil or Uruguay or Venezuela or Chile games have more of a feel of the Olympic hockey games between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war. (An interesting side note: none of these countries have Peace Corps volunteers anymore.) In other words, soccer is more than ‘just a game’ here. Much more. It is a status symbol, and Erik’s friend’s quote is a perfect example of this mentality: “See, we’re climbing up, Erik.” Their soccer team’s scrappy style of play aligns really well with their country’s personality: seemingly against all odds their underdog team manages to pull off victory after victory against teams much more talented and flashy. It is Paraguay’s way to gain respect in the international scene.

Now back to the story. I’m standing surrounded by one hundred or so people, no one’s eyes moving from the big screen. The Human Wall made a save against a Venezuela goal, so Paraguay’s penalty kick specialist just has to drill this goal and it’s lights out for Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. He approaches the ball, kicks left, keeper goes right...

“Goooooooooooooooool!” Pandimonium hits the crowd like we just averted a nuclear attack. A guy and gal next to me make out like it’s New Years, and total strangers are hugging each other and jumping up and down. Chants of “Par-a-guay WoooOOooo” and “He who doesn’t jump is Argentine/Uruguayan etc.” (sounds way better in Spanish, trust me) rip through the crowd.

On the five hour bus ride home, I couldn’t distinguish the college students from the volunteer network I was with from the 50 year old Agroforestry Engineers who were traveling with us. Everyone was so rowdy—they were partying as if... well, as if Paraguay had just made it to the finals of the Latin American Cup. For at least two straight hours on the bus home celebratory beers flowed and the PAR-A-GUAY chants were kept up with impressive volume; at one point people were so gleeful that they insisted I sing them English songs so they could chant along. (After hearing me, and trying once to imitate me, they reverted back to PAR-A-GUAY!). I chanted along, but I could not seem to match the intensity of these guys who poured their heart and soul into every syllable of the chants. Yea, the behavior might normally have been considered a little debaucherous or excessive by some, but who is going to be a party pooper and tell everyone to Please Keep the Volume Down when your upstart country has just made it to the finals of the most prestigious soccer tournament in Latin America?

We’ll see what happens in about an hour when Paraguay faces off against Uruguay in the battle of the ‘guays. It would be Paraguay’s first Cup win since the 1970s (while countries like Brazil have won like they are the Yankees in the World Series.) I love rooting for the underdog.

It's All About the People

Conveying the real Peace Corps experience to people outside of it can be difficult. The day to day work is explainable: go to the school, make materials, promote new teaching techniques, etc. Day to day explanations, however, miss what really defines the PC for most volunteers: the relationships built with people. Crossing cultural and language barriers can sometimes make forming meaningful friendships difficult. Nonetheless I have fallen into some wonderful people here. Sometimes when I think about how the people in my life right now often seem like they could be the makings of some kind of zany small town novel, the plot of which would be not unlike the Little House on the Prairie novels, but with motorcycles and electricity and in Guarani. A few of my following posts will attempt to explain a few of the wonderful people I have fallen into, starting today with my host dad, Antolin.

Antolin

Most PCVS have that one person in their community who is their go-to guy to talk to or hang out with. If things aren’t going so well, or you are getting weird vibes from someone in the community, you have that one person from the community who you'll be able to ask questions about other people in confidence. For me since I have arrived here it has been Antolin, my community contact and host dad. Picture a decently well built 50 or so year old who has had his skin an body shaped by a lifetime of working in the fields (without a tractor). His left eye is made of glass, but remarkably looks quite similar to his right. Only a few stray gray hairs infiltrate his still full head of black hair.

When I first got to San Blas I lived in his house for almost 6 months and used to drink mate with Antolin and his wife every single morning. Like a true farmer, he enjoys his mate very strong and bitter. He is the president of the neighborhood commission and also president of the citrus cooperative. He donated part of his private land for the community’s water tank. Antolin attends church more than just about any other guy I know. I have heard a lot of gossip about a lot of people since living in Paraguay, and never, not once have I heard a bad word spoken about Antolin. “That Antolin knows too much how to work,” people say (love how that Guarani translates). Whenever I am over at his house he is working; watching TV and cracking nuts to sell at the farmer’s market, separating cotton from the cotton plant, shearing corn. Almost too rarely does he take a break from working. Antolin doesn’t drink, although I have seen him take a sip or two of wine when he is playing cards. I can tell it is just a tiny taste just for courtesy, though. He speaks Guarani almost all of the time with his family, but luckily for me he also speaks good Spanish after having worked for a while in a larger city of Paraguay in his 20s.

Born and raised in the rural community of San Carlos, which is 3 miles from where he now lives, Antolin has been a farmer his whole life. I can’t imagine the amount of awesome stories he must have, but unfortunately it is hard to prompt him into story-telling mood. I am never sure exactly what to say to elicit these stories from him, and usually our conversations just focus on the present. One night though, he told me how he got his glass eye:

Antolin “I don’t know if you can tell, Miguel, but my right eye, it’s made of glass.”

Miguel “It does seem a bit different. How did you lose it?”
He proceeds to tell me this story using the same tone I would use for say, summarizing what I bought at the grocery store. I don’t mean to infer that he is a boring story teller by any means but that to him, this story wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Antolin: “Well I was in the fields one day harvesting soy. We were in the middle of working when a bug flew in my eye. He got in there pretty good and didn’t want to leave. Well, I finished up the soy harvest that day and by that time my eye was hurting pretty bad.”

Miguel: “Wow did it hurt a lot when it first got in there? Wait did you just say you finished the harvest first???”

Antolin: “Yea, it’s got to get done. By the time I got back to my house it was hurting really bad, so I went to the hospital in San Juan. I kept getting worse, and next thing I knew I was in a hospital in Buenos Aires, and they were taking my eye out. Luckily they had this color.” (points to eye.) “just about the same color as my left eye!” (Taps eye with index finger.)

Miguel: “What kind of bug did you say this was?”

Antolin: “just a little bug. Not sure what kind.”

When Antolin was a kid his dad got bit by a snake while working in the fields. The snake was venomous and, given the fact that there were no hospitals in the area 40 years ago, he died that same day.

The guy has a perpetual smile wrinkled into his face from being in such a jovial mood all the time. If I ever get in a weird mood here I always know that I can head over to his house, drink some terere with him and his family and in a short minute I’ll forget whatever was troubling me.

On numerous occasions, Antolin has said some of the deepest, most profound things to me that I have heard in Paraguay, although unfortunately I can’t remember all of his quotes.

One example of this is when after spending a morning chopping down a vast amount of weeds with machetes in the back of Antolin’s property, we paused to suck the nectar from some oranges. Within 20 feet of us stood the remains of a raggedy old shack. Spitting out an orange seed, Antolin tells me how when he first married his wife Erma over 20 years ago, they used to live in that shack for a couple of years before moving into their current house. “We used to sleep their, tranquil, with no fear of being robbed or anything. If anyone stole a cow, you would report them and they would go straight to jail. So no one stole cows. Of course that was during the epoch of Stroessner (Paraguay’s dictator until 1989). Now we’ve got democracy and you have to watch out for yourself...” Right here Antolin pauses, kind of looks in the distance but the way his eyes were defocusing I thought I saw him looking back in the past. Then he delivered one a quote I will always remember on democracy post-dictatorship: “Democracy is nice, but you’ve got to use it right” (“Democracia es linda, pero hay que usarlo bien”) A lot of people actually looking longingly back on the period of the dictatorship as a time of more stability.

Antolin does not conform to the machismo stereotypes that latino men are sometimes guilty of. At a meeting about reading in the home I was administering at the school the other day for parents of Kindergarteners and first graders, he showed up in his favorite orange colored button down. The only male in a crowd of about 20 female moms, he had my back as he made comments to everyone about how important he thought the work I was doing. The guy’s an all-star.

Still, he’ll throw in comment that catches me off guard every once in a while, like when he commented on the volunteer before me’s boyfriend: “She wanted to bring him back to the U.S. but he didn’t want to go. But Luis sure enjoyed that while he was here.”

If San Blas has a local Renaissance man competition, I have little doubt Antolin will come out on top. Did I mention he’s got nine (well-behaved) kids?

Deforestation at the local level

I vividly remember the shocked look on my face (or at least making that look) in 5th grade when my science teacher Ms. Hewitt informed our class that 36 millions acres of natural forest are lost each year. I was so confused; where were these all these trees being cut down? It certainly wasn’t my hometown of Brookfield, where the only tree I had ever seen logged was my neighbor’s when it began to interfere with the power lines. I just simply couldn’t picture how a quantity of trees this large could disappear. Wouldn’t the world have run out of trees already? Where were these places in that let you cut down a tree without a permit as is required in the suburbs? I pictured an evil greedy old man with a team of bulldozers laughing like Jafar from Aladdin as he devastated huge rainforests for profit. After living in Paraguay for over a year though, it becomes obvious that deforestation is much more complex than I first thought. Although my personal experience obviously does not apply to all situations in the developing world, I feel like it is a good place to start for anyone who might be wondering how such a vast amount of trees continue to be lost each year.

First, people naturally remove the trees to make way for houses, communities, and agriculture. I live in a town called San Blas, where almost everyone is a small sustenance farmer. San Blas was founded in the year 1970, and by talking to the old timers who live here, I have been able to reconstruct pretty accurately the beginnings of San Blas. (Sidenote: those are always amazingly interesting and entertaining conversations. Picture yourself trying to talk to an Irish farmer from the boondocks who speaks English with a heavy accent, then imagine that he doesn’t even speak English but a weird sounding indigenous language. Throw in some whiskey and they start talking even faster, making it REALLY interesting. Yea, let’s just say it’s a good time.)

Picture this in your mind’s eye: 40 years ago, from my town to the nearest large pueblo, San Juan, there was no road, no fields being cultivated, not much of anything really. IT WAS ALL SUBTROPICAL FOREST. There were only FIVE houses in the 12 or so mile horse ride from San Blas to San Juan. The director of my school has told me about how, for him to get from San Juan to his house, he would walk for 4 hours to go there during the week, then four hours back for the weekend, carrying a rifle just in case he encountered any funny business on the walk. From 1970 on, outsiders would move here who didn’t have land and wanted to make a living by farming. Often they would burn the forest to get the land ready for cultivation. The fresh land had never been farmed, so it was easy to sow the fields, with Paraguay’s year round growing season you were ready to produce. Just keep get those big trees out of the way and you are good to go.

Currently there exist patches of trees here and there but are vastly less. We haven’t lost an area of square feet of trees the size of Portugal in just this area, but you can see how this process repeated on a large scale could have an extreme effect on the number of trees in the world, making those seemingly crazy statistics plausible.

The second thing I have learned first hand about deforestation in the developing world is that when there is a lack of ‘honest’ or ‘legal’ jobs, and what’s is more those jobs don’t pay very well, people tend to look for other ways to make money such as illegal logging. Even if there are ‘honest’ jobs that pay decently (i.e. farming) but people see the opportunity to make more money doing something else, they will take that opportunity unless they have a strong incentive not to (such as a long jail sentence that will actually be enforced).

San Blas is a prime example of the above. Not far from my house is a National Park, filled with old growth trees. Except not anymore, because they’ve all cut down and sold for profit. Some people from my town work full time harvesting the trees and selling them to buyers in San Juan. Of course they know it’s illegal, but that is beside the point. They also know that if the representatives come to enforce the law and get them in trouble for logging, they can just pay off the law reps. The park rangers have a certain price, and then the departmental public prosecutor representatives have another (much higher) price. Even if every once in a while they get caught, economically they are always going to come out way ahead. After being here for a year and learning about the price of old forest wood and the price of cotton, and the work-money made ratio by doing each of those two jobs, I will just say you can make a hell of a lot more money by just cutting down trees. And in a lot less time. To give you an idea, I can live decently here on my PC stipend, and those guys make at least 4x more than me per month.

This system is ridiculously unsustainable and unfair, of course. How would you feel if you made an honest but modest living by the sweat of your brow, and then continuously saw your neighbor making renovations to his house with the money he was money through illegal industry? My guess is pretty pissed off, at least I would be. Then there is the fact that the trees are going to run out sometime soon. THEN what do you do? Go find more trees in another area?

But here is just how institutionalized the corruption is: last Friday, several people from my area were arrested when the public prosecutor came to the park and found them, chainsaw in hand. I am talking about prominent community members, guys who I like to hang out with. How did they get out of jail? A payment of approximately $600 per head to the public prosecutor and they were free to go. Kind of makes me thing of what Chicago must have been like during prohibition. As the old adage goes, crime exists to the extent that the law lets it. Unfortunately this mindset of corruption is very ingrained in the mentality of people in power.

I empathize to a degree with the people who live here in the boondocks and have taken up logging; the reality is that there is a real lack of opportunity for upward mobility for those who continue to live in the rural areas as opposed to the cities. It makes perfect economic sense that they turn to illegal logging to make a living on a lot of levels. However, this is something that clearly needs to NOT happen. A sustainable solution to the problem does not lie in just enforcing the law, but also in changing the attitude of the community toward natural resources via an educational campaign or something like that, and also in enhancing the quality of the local schools so that the students/future workers that live here have the ability to become qualified for a variety of jobs.

One of the biggest disadvantages of illegal logging is that the revenue is not taxable. My opinion is that the powers that be need to make up their mind: either ban logging and enforce the law, or legalize it and tax it and put the money into the quality of the schools. This is a tragedy and huge irony of the 3rd world: in spite of all the primary resources that are taken from San Blas, the schools scarcely have any books or even paper.
So there it is, a little example of how deforesting work on the micro scale. After being here for a year it has become all too normal for me to see trucks going by with ridiculous amounts of wood, or at least hear them at night as they sneak by.

On another, perhaps oppositely related note, it is world environment day, and the theme this year is Forests: At our service. Happy World Environment Day everybody! Hope this post helps you appreciate trees!

Swinging for the Fences

Sometimes, in life, you just have to swing for the fences. How else does Barry Bonds hit home runs? (I mean before steroids.) At some point in our lives, we all move to L.A. try to become an actor, apply for a job you probably won’t get, ask the super pretty girl out. Or something of that nature. Finally, of course, we might present a series of professional development workshops to your superintendent for possible use in the whole district that would have high impact in the local school district. Any guesses on which one I attempted today?

Yep, since LA is just a little bit out of my current budget, I had a meeting with the superintendent of my district today. I presented him and his technical team an idea for professional development of elementary teachers grades 1-6. In this presentation, I showed him the results of my reading evaluation from the previous year: 31% of kids in first grade couldn’t read, 25% in second grade. Then, I showed him the positive results from this years work in the school where I am mostly based: all first graders can read. IN APRIL already. From my perspective the correlation with new teaching reading methodologies and was crystal clear. I felt that the positive results that I have had thus far in my school were significant enough to warrant this presentation. Basically my idea was to give monthly workshops based in different teaching reading topics, something that Education volunteers very commonly do. Well, unfortunately my results were evidently not clear enough, or something did not go precisely right in that presentation, because the super did not like my work.

I have been lucky enough not to have many overtly negative experiences in Paraguay, but this was definitely one of them. After my hour plus presentation, I asked the Superintendent and his panel what they thought of the results, the professional development ideas, and what kind of support they would be willing to give me. At this point, the supervisor turns to address his panel and proceeds to say more or less the following: “The Americans from the Peace Corps always come here and do the same thing. They have their four years of special academic preparation, and they think they know everything. Honestly, this idea would not work. This guy will not be able to run workshops. Personally, I think I’ve understood about 80% of this presentation...”

Anyone who knows me knows I am one of the most hard-to-piss-off people around. One of my best friends Elwood will tell you that the only time I have ever been pissed was when he stole my TI-89 calculator and refused to give it back. Well; my fuse was done here. Cultural barriers and Paraguayan indirectness be damned, I could not take this man passive-aggressively and openly ripping on me, while seated right next to me, less then two feet away from me. So I go, as he is speaking: “If you have some to say to me or about me, I much prefer that you say it to my face. I am right here.” At this, he starts to go OFF on me. I say one more thing right as he starts to speak (forget what it was, but it was not anything of note), and get the reply, “See, the problem with you, Miguel, is that you have no respect.”

And I’m spent. I spent the next 10 minutes smiling and nodding as the Superintendent criticized me, my methods, Peace Corps, etc. I wish I could remember the dialogue but I was busy spacing out thinking about other things...
Unfortunately, I think this gentleman had a bad experience with a PCV in the past who tried to work with him (wasn’t an education volunteer). I have heard bad things about this volunteer, even from PC, so yea what he’s saying is probably true, that volunteer didn’t do her job well and it has seemingly soured him on working with us. I understand that these things happen; sometimes PCVs do not uphold the standard of professionalism that is expected of them. He brings this previous volunteer just about every single time I try to work with him. It is unfortunate though, whatever the reason, that this gentleman in question seems almost combative against me, as if I am an enemy of his. As I explained to him privately after the meeting, I think and hope we both have the same goal: all kids read.

So I designed a series of workshops based on the best teaching reading techniques in existence, using my year of experience in the schools here to tailor the program specifically for the teachers here. I hoped that I might be able to reach out to a larger quantity of teachers and have a more rippling impact. And I got a resounding no, we don’t want them. Swing for the fences...aaaaand it’s a big swing and a miss. I’m alright with that, though. At least I got my hack in.
It’s just a little sad to me because, from my point of view, I have the knowledge, knowhow, reading techniques, whatever you want to call it, to create a vastly different educational opportunity and environment for students here. Still trying to figure out why, but the powers that be in the area don’t seem very open to new ideas and don’t even want me attempting to present those ideas.

This little story is a pretty good example of the countercurrent volunteers and other development workers encounter in their work. One of the hardest things to deal with in the developing world is seeing a problem, and, from your perspective, being 100% sure of the solution, but being utterly powerless to change it. Tends to happen alot with health problems, environmental stuff, and of course education. Yay for learning about the difficulties of grassroots change the hard way.

On another note, my host mom and sister INSISTED on randomly coming over today to clean my entire house. My sink, stove, and fridge are now spotless. Not to reinforce gender stereotypes, but they did a hell a better job than I ever could have done. They still couldn’t get the family of 3 mice out of my stove though.

My walk home today

“Raise your hand if you have ever pushed your bike home.
Through 6 km of caked red mud.
In the dark.
While carrying three bags of groceries.
With handle bars that don’t point forward.

Anyone?

Didn’t think so.”

I just had a flashforward to me saying the above to a whiny high school class when I am teaching Spanish back in the states. It would be followed by me mumbling something about ‘suburban cream cheese’ (in reference to the students, not an actual cheese reference) and how ‘you kids just don’t know how good you have it. I know you all have really difficult lives, but how about concentrating on this matching worksheet for 5 minutes.’ Hopefully some of my old RBHS students read this.