counterclockwise

I went to BA’s famous Recoleta cemetery. I know a lot of people who would like it very much. It has three purposes:

1.) A place where people mourn their lost loved ones. I think, at least. I saw memorial plaques here and there, but no actual mourners. The live humans were all carrying cameras and park maps. Hardly any flowers in the joint, and most of those are tacky fake ones on Eva Duarte de Peron’s grave. How fitting.

2.) Who’s who of dead Argentinos. There hasn’t been a non-military pauper buried here since about 1890.

3.) World’s largest amusement park for black-and-white photography afficionados.

The tombs are all above-ground monuments of granite and marble. Lots of epic, baroque, and heroic architecture, writ small enough to fit in the viewfinder of your favorite point-and-click. Brooding statues. Draping garlands. Stolid pillars. Arcane ornamentation. Weeping cherubs. You know the genre.

But it’s fun to go and wallow anyway.

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And last but not least, here’s an oddball. The monument posted below is to those Argentinos who fell in a 19th century war called the Triple Alliance War if you ask a Paraguayan or “the one with Paraguay” if you ask anybody else in South America.

I’ve spent two years hearing all about this from the Paraguayan side of things, which is just an eensy bit biased.

It’s *the* defining event in Paraguayan history, when the craziest of their many batshit-loco dictators (one Mariscal Fransisco Solano Lopez) picked a fight against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Paraguay postured belligerently, built up its military, invaded territory it had no claim to, and then almost got wiped off the map. They lost almost all their adult men to the fighting and more than half of their total population to disease, looting, pillaging, etc.

Now no doubt about it, Mariscal Lopez had his ignoble end coming, and worse besides. And if your country is being invaded by a large army, you’ve got a right to defend yourself. But spending six years trying to kill every hostile man, woman and child was not the right response to the situation. A “decapitation strike” is not supposed to start at the enemy’s left little toe and work its way up from there.

You can make a reasoned argument that Paraguay never actually recovered from the impact. Come to it, you can make a credible argument that people would be better off today if Brazil and Argentina had gone all the way into their proverbial Baghdad, divided up The Territory Formerly Known as Paraguay, and held a nice thorough occupation. The “poor” La Boca sector of Buenos Aires that this morning’s tour passed through looks about like a “middle class” sector of Asunción and “an unattainable pipe dream” in Paraguay’s countryside.

But instead, the Alliance leadership spent years obsessing over one unhinged pissant dictator, killed everyone they could find, got distracted by other concerns, and then left the place in ruins. Now this sordid incident is a modest monument at the back of Argentina’s Recoleta cementary, and still at the center of Paraguay’s national identity.

A note about pizza. Buenos Aires has it. It came across the Atlantic with upteen boatloads of Italian immigrants. BA pizza ranges from utter wretchedness to the sublime, and there’s little predicting which you’ll get without getting inside information. And I’m going guidebook-free at the moment, so just about everything is a surprise, for good or for ill. I did hit on a good one this afternoon, though.

La Casona, Calle Maípu, Buenos Aires

The key to Argentine pizza appreciation is cheese. Let’s go ahead and stipulate that any idiot, in any country, can make a decent crust (although whether that crust should be thick or thin is an issue I’ll leave to the debate of consumers more discerning than I am).

Argentinos also generally don’t get as worked up over toppings as Americans do. There are four sanctioned Argentine toppings - ham, onions, hardboiled eggs, and tomatoes. If you really must make it difficult, you might combine two or more of these on the same pie. I would add olives to the list, except that there is no element of choice about them - they just are. You may have some sauce, but it will be applied with a teaspoon, not a ladle.

So that leaves cheese (mainly mozzarella, but I’ve seen Roquefort offered and had the misfortune of getting served one with pre-sliced processed cheese substitute) as the major differentiating factor between a merely adequate slice  and Something To Write Home About. And the cheese this afternoon, I’m happy to report, was outstanding.

OK, wow.

The Iguazú Falls are every bit as impressive as advertised. It’s not just one big waterfall - there are dozens, any one of which would be a star attraction at another nature reserve. I lucked into great weather. Enough sun for rainbows, enough clouds for a bit of drama, chilly enough for clambering up steep stairs, and warm enough to enjoy getting drenched along the way.

For visa reasons, the Argentine side was way more accessible to me than the Brazilian side. Fine by me - Argentinos got the lion’s share of the view.

I started out on the lower circuit trails, getting up close with smaller side falls like Salto Bossetti, which was almost too bright to behold when the sun hit the spray.

Then I took the boat (included with park admission of 60 Argentine pesos, about $16 USD) to San Martin island. Lots of wildlife, and then there was this:

Those big falls drop into a tight little channel and send up huge plumes of spray as they churn down to the river below.

And then from the Upper Circuit you get a broader, more tranquil view of the falls and river that feeds them.

But all the ones so far are just the small fry. The park’s star attraction is the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil’s Throat. This is a U-shaped shelf of rock where an incomprehensible volume of water plunges down from the main channel of the Iguazú River. It doesn’t really photograph well:

You walk over a footbridge to get to its head. The only way to see the bottom is to jump off, and believe me that’d give you a brief glimpse at best. As I crossed the bridge over, it was raining. When I crossed back, it was not. But I couldn’t tell you when the rain stopped - I’ve stood in showers less drenching than the viewpoint as a windy weather front blew in. So you mainly just have to experience it. The noise, the spray, and the grandeur of it all.

I’ve arrived in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina. This is the Argentine side of the tri-border region with Brazil and Paraguay, at the joining of the Paraná and Iguazu rivers. The Paraná drains out of Brazil to form the border between Argentina and Paraguay. This is the river that was dammed to form the Itaipu reservoir. I’m not going to have time to visit the dam, and it’s a good thing my father the ex-TVA civil engineer won’t have to suffer hearing me say that. Only China’s controversial new Three Gorges Dam has more generating capacity, and Itaipu is something of a legend in the engineering world.

But the border crossing today was a fairly major pain. I got through it OK, but have no urge to do it twice more to bear witness to the stately majesty of millions of tons of concrete. Thank heavens for one good-natured Brazilian cop, who let my missing passport stamp slide when he could have made a six-hour cavity search ordeal out of it. Besides, my last flight into Paraguay went directly over the dam on a cloudless day. In a way, I feel like I’ve been there already.

But if Itaipu is a star among engineering works, the Falls of Iguazu are a wonder, period. Or at least so I’m told. I staggered out of the terminal this afternoon in a sweaty, shell-shocked, sleep-deprived daze. I’ll go tomorrow, I promise. Tonight’s mainly been good for getting to know the town of Puerto Iguazu.

Interesting place. It seems to be evenly divided between three different kinds of buildings: quirky hostels full of backpackers, ordinary suburban houses, and steak houses. If Mendoza, Argentina, was built on the expectation that everyone wants to have at least three croissants and cups of coffee per day, then Puerto Iguazu was built to the philosophy that your day hasn’t really started till you’ve had a slab of high-quality animal protein seared over an open fire.

I like the way these guys think…

Pictured above, steak at Aqva Restaurant. Image file shamelessly lifted from their website.

I’m finishing my Peace Corps service and starting my trip home from Asunción, Paraguay. The weather’s great, I know by now where to find buses, grub, and ATMs, so all in all an auspicious start. We had a group of about forty volunteers go out for dinner, drinking, and dancing last night. Today there’ll be a benefit concert for the Ahecha youth photography project.

Seen above, downtown Asunción seen from the hotel balcony. We’ve lucked into a corner suite with all the bells and whistles this time.

This is it - I’m leaving Tacuatí for as far as I can see early on Saturday morning. After two years, I’m scared and relieved and sad and excited. I’m having cake with my host family tonight. Tomorrow I’ll throw a little party for my friends around town with sopa paraguaya (think corn bread, but with cheese and onions - Paraguayans are inordinately proud that this is their best-known contribution to gastronomy), coke, and still more cake.

I’m going to let the kids draw lots for turns at picking and choosing among the toys you kind souls have sent over the past two years - there should be plenty to go around. The semi-salvagable parts of my wardrobe and assorted gadgets are up for grabs to the adults.  And then Liam and I will load the last of my furniture over to his house, and then Opama cheroga. Ndaikoi Tacuatíme.

Above, my bathroom window. Since the climate here is so swampy, there’s more need to let drafts pass than keep them out, and most windows don’t have glass. They made this one by  sinking a bottle crate into the brick wall as they built this part of my house.

The Guaraní word of the day is potí, meaning clean. I don’t think cheroga has been so potí since I moved in.

My friend and neighbor Mary Cinadr has gotten an article published on the Boston Globe’s website. Want to check it out? She’s one of Peace Corps’ beekeeping volunteers, and she’s done awesome work with africanized “killer” bees.

Above, the girl who cat sits for me. A while back, she put on a full-on wedding for her tom cat and my cat. It involved a twenty kid guest list, snacks, marriage certificates, costumery, and scrap-lumber pews assembled on my front porch. The marriage, unfortunately, has been on the rocks lately. But maybe they’ll put it back together - I’m giving both my cats to this family when I leave. 

The Guaraní word of the day is akeké, meaning leaf cutter ant. Which are really cool to watch at work, provided they’re not working on your garden. They like basil.

Not much news.

Wanna see some pictures?

From back: me, Mitra, Nina, Anita, Charlotte, and Barbara.

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Danita feeds a puppy

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Liam Winters and Rachel Newby - oenophiles nonpareil

The Guaraní word of the day is vai vai, meaning “not well” or “poorly”.
- ¿Reñe’é Guaraníme? (”Do you speak Guaraní?”)
- Vai vai. (”After two years, I can understand basic phrases and pick the key grammar structures out of some sentences, but I can’t speak it worth anything. Although I am sure that your dirty old man of a grandfather just said something really nasty to me by the way he’s looking at me and snickering behind his hand.”)

If you use the word vai just the once, it’s an adjective meaning “plain” or “ugly”.

I’m back to our old stomping grounds of Guarambaré this week, where Peace Corps Paraguay trains its volunteers. In particular, all the new volunteers to my project group come in May to spend the winter training, so we’ve got a new crop in class right now. The training contractor, an organization known by the cryptic initials CHP, is big on hands-on, interactive education.

This means a whole lot of bus time to me. This weekend, Liam and I were privileged to host two trainees doing a field visit to Tacuatí. And then today, I was invited to come to Guarambaré a do a session on accounting in Paraguay, with lots of emphasis on lessons learned from actual practice. Because if there’s one thing true in Paraguayan finance, it’s that the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and what you can accomplish with local resources are often not at all synonymous.

It was interesting to look back on what I’ve done, fun to meet the new people, and good to see what all I’ve learned since I came. When all’s said and done, I’m glad to be who and where I am. Dues paid, check. Bus schedule learned, check. Ticket home, check.

Speaking of which, I’ve taken the mail call page down now. I recommend against sending anything else to Paraguay in the time I’ve got left - if you’ve got a letter or a card or such for me, my mother’s home address in Knoxville is the best place for it. If you need to know it, e-mail me and I’ll be happy to tell you.

The Guaraní word of the day is ahata aju, literally “I’m going to come.” But the phrase is actually used to mean something more like “Bye, see you later.” Go figure.

Post-vacation and post-COS-conference, life has been quiet. Since I’ll be the last Peace Corps volunteer to work at my financial cooperative, I’ve been trying to prepare them to operate independently. To that end, I’ve been writing an operations manual for the administrative council and the secretary I hope they’ll eventually hire. It’s turned into a monster project - I’ve got about 15 pages written and at least another 20 to go. Which doesn’t sound like that much, really, except that it’s all got to be in Spanish.

That means that lately my dictionary and I have putting in plenty of quality time. It’s edifying but not in a way that gives me lots of interesting news for the ol’ website. Most interesting thing I’ve done all month is a dinner party for some librarians in the region. The German aid organization GTZ donated a few dozen books a couple of yours ago to a youth group in town. The youth eventually drifted off, but recently the folks at the judge’s office have taken it on themselves to set the library shelf up in their waiting room and try to start up circulation again.

So it was our great good fortune that my friend Rachel and her Paraguayan counterpart Fany were able to come out for dinner and expert advice on how to build a library that’s sustainable and user-friendly. One of the biggest problems they’re up against is reading level.

The current collection is heavy on reference books and weighty classics, so not very encouraging to novice readers. And in rural Paraguay most of the population - adults included - are  novice readers by the standards of developed-world bibliophiles. The good news is that almost everyone in Tacuatí can decypher short passages. The bad news is that very few people get the opportunity to develop the fluency and concentration skills that you need  to read a whole chapter book.

It’s definitely something for me to keep in mind as I write my manual - part of the reason it has to be so long is that I can’t take much background for granted. But on the whole, I’m glad to be in a situation where using very simple language is more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

The Guarani word of the day is moroti, meaning white. Cool moroti markings on the frog, aren’t they?