Ñamono´o

We Harvest

The harvest started Wednesday. The day after we added the final touches to the new factory. The day my boss and his assitant came in the morning and a trainer and language teachers came in the afternoon to see my site and to place trainees to stay for a week in July. That day saw just under 3000 kilos of green leaf (hoja verde) pass. The next just over that number. Today, we should have about 4000 arriving for processing. And when I get back to site we will probably work until about 2 in the morning before we leave the full barbacua to toast the yerba slowly for the next 24 + hours.

La ka´a oime kokuepe ha lo obrerokuera oikyti la partehovynte yvyrahegui. Ha upei ha´ekuera omohënuhe petei camion ha ogueraha la ka´a fabricapeve camionari ikatuva oraha 5000 kilopeve. Ha oñepyru omonandihina la ka´a camionhegui. Uperire la ka´a ojupi petei cinta automatico ha ho´a tataari. La ka´a okai sapynte. La tatahakuiterei ojavyhatä la ka´a ha oipë´a 50% la y yvyraroguehegui. Ha upei, la ka´a osë la sapecador ha petei carai omoi la ka´a barbacuape. La barbacua oreko petei tatakangyi. Ha kotata ojavymbegueiterei. Upeare, la ka´a oikotev´ë tiempopukuite ohoopahagua. Ha 24 horakuerarire, lo obrerokuera oipë´a la ka´a ha koaga la ka´a orekonte 36% ygua. Ha´ekuera oikytïjey la ka´a ha ojapo ka´a mborovire. Ha upea opytata ikotype petei te´ä mokoi año ha oïma ho´uhagua.

Bueno. The yerba is in the field and the workers only cut the green parts of the tree. Then they fill a truck that can carry up to 5000 kilos and bring the hoja verde to the factory. There they begin to harvest the yerba of the truck. After that the yerba goes up a conveyor belt and falls over a fire. The yerba burns for a second. The very hot fire burns the leaf with force and removes 50 percent of the water of the leaves of the tree. And then the yerba leaves the sapecador (the first over) and a guy puts the yerba in the barbacua. The barbacua has a small weak fire. And this fire burns the leaf very slowly. Because of this the yerba needs a very long time to finish. And after 24 hours the workers take out the yerba which now has only 36% water. They then cut the yerba again and make mborovire (coarsely chopped yerba) And it will stay in its room for one or two years and then is ready to drink.

so that may read weird, but that is because i tried to write it in english with structure more like the paraguayans talk guarani. And that is actually jopara, which is the guarani word for mix, because one never speaks pure guarani unless you visit the actual indians in their few reserves. Or by the side of the road in garbage bag tents or in the plazas of asuncion when they go to protest their land being stolen because some person has a piece of paper that says the land was sold to them fairly from public lands. But thats for another day.

The process at the factory is incredibly dramatic. The fires consume about 10 cubic meters of firewood. Fortunately, the socios manage the forest on the land, like most campesinos but unlike the 200 acres mechanized soy lots that have cut all of the trees except for usually the tajytu´ichave to serve as a reminder of what was there. That is the national tree of paraguay and grows over hundreds of years and once a year explodes in butterfly frequented yellow blossoms. During the winter when they bloom, the forest that remains, is dotted with them as they emerge above the canopy. But again, I digress. It is an incredible sight to see them cleaning the forest. One day, all the socios showed up with machetes and i was like what are we doing today. Limpiando...cleaning, and they still spoke to me mostly in spanish to help with my understanding. So i grabbed my machete and we got to work. Then, it all looked the same to me, and they were just chopping away. So I started and they stopped me and were like andres what are you doing you cut down a tree! because they all looked like weeds to me. But what they were doing was going through and cutting all but the one and two year old saplings out of a jungle. Now, because they´ve taught me, we walk through and see the mbokaja, yvyrapytä, tajy, oveñia, apepu, kurupa´y, paraiso gigante, aguacate, mandarina, guayabi, inga, and the rest. Fortunately a handfull of those either produce edible fruits, leaves you can put in your terere, bark you can make tea out of, firewood for the factory, construction materials, and so on. And I called them weeds what we cut, but they´re really not because they use about 50% of them as remedios. I haven´t taken medicine in 11 months. My throat hurt so I put Tororatï (the seed looks like a bull´s horn) in my mate in the morning. I had flu like symptoms so vervena went in that morning and i drank apepu juice. I had a rash at one point and i used the leaves of the ambay (which have a rough surface and exfoliate) to clear it up. You have to drink the root of the vine mbarakaja py´ape (cat´s paw because the little claws it uses to climb tree look like a feline nail) in your terere if you want a healthy urinary tract. Pynoguasu makes you hungry and has stinging leaves and you smash the roots and wood of it and put it in terere as well. Right now, i´m drinking my terere with lemon grass (kapi´i cedron), coconut tree root, cat´s paw, pynoguasu, and a fifth that i can never remember the name of and always just point to at the herb lady´s stand...its like momombo´u or something in that neighborhood. I only describe that in such dull detail because the yerba is important here. Its part of their livlihood and also what they, and i drink hot as mate every morning (usually husband and wife at about 4 in the morning talking about the upcoming day; me by myself), and twice a day every day cold as terere with groups of friends talking about the weather, whats going on, why venezuela and ecuador want to fight with columbia, and so on.

As for my superiors being here, things went well. They got to see the coop going about its business and the community. Fernando, our boss, told me that paraguayan colonies are so dispersed because stroessner would follow a pattern. The people would get restless and he would divy up portions of land and assign them to loyal colorado subordinates. They then would split up a parcel of about 5000 acres into 10 and 20 acre parcels and only give them to people who had previously displayed loyalty to the colorados. The grand design of it all was to put the houses in the middle of their plots so that any attempt to meet and organize required 3,4, 10 kilometer walks. And Stroessner, the megalomaniac that he was, not only prohibited the people from gathering in groups of larger than 3 (as enforced by the police who would arrive and beat the people, unless of course they were from within the colorado machine), but when he did grant them permission to be together, for birthdays, funerals, anything, he made them hang up his portrait in the locale of the gathering. It was fucked up. And the thing that makes me so sad about that, is that paraguayans love eachother´s company. They don´t want things, they want enough to have a pig killed for a rico asado for grandma´s birthday or for weddings, or for a girls quince (they have sweet 15´s here). And when you´re sitting around drinking terere under whichever fruit tree is in bloom or the tree that has the best shade, everyone is laughing, telling stories, new jokes. They never use the word no. When offered something that you don´t want, it is considered very rude to say no. If you don´t want it, you use one of the excuses, the best of which is i just ate watermelon, because they think water melon is worse than pop rocks and soda, the only problem being they´ll ask you why you didn´t share your watermelon. And thats how it is among them, in my experience at least. If you have something, you share it. And with really good stuff, paraguayans know how to enjoy it. With watermelon, everyone gets a spoon or a knife and takes turns going to town on half a melon. With barbeque, they´ll cook it on a spit and you get a knife and cut until you´re full. Which reminds me of the funniest spanish expression i´ve yet heard. All you can eat is said ¨tenedor libre¨ which just means free fork (but libre is generally used to mean free like freedom, not free without cost) , which strikes me as hilarious. Apuka ahendujave upea...I laugh when I hear that.

Back to the land distribution by Stroessner, that ugly legacy is what makes my site Tavapy II special. The mid eighties were marked by the movimiento del campesino, in which poor farmers seeing this land redistribution, which wasn´t only to colorados, but foreigners loyal to vidella and pinochet as well, began squatting on land and calling the tierra colorada theirs. The first people in the Dos, los pioneros, arrived in 1984. The land belonged to a chilean and was all jungle. They lived there, with the women and children sneaking into tavapy uno at night to carry back mandioca and the men working to build houses and school and bridges out of the wood they could cut with their axes and machetes. Periodically the national police would make raids. The people would hide in the forest, in predetermined places where they also held meetings to organize. Se dice...oje´e...they say that the only reason Stroessner didn´t send in the cavalry was because his regime was beginning to draw international attention and whisking 500 people into a plane for one last flight was no longer an option. Maybe it was because they hid well. I´m not sure of the exact chronology of the last chapters, but I know the campesinos, the pioneers, organized at some point and decided to board flatbed trucks and go to Asuncion and demand title to the land. And on May 20th 1987 they won it. The say ¨ganemos la lucha¨ when they tell me about it, we won the fight. And they are always quick to point out that at no point did they use violence, even when harassed and at times tortured. Some of Stroessner´s methods were as foll0ws; electrical shocks, tying men to unbroken stallions, dipping them head first into vats of feces, and of course the various iterations of murder. Fortunately noone in the Dos was subjected to the latter two. So we had a rightous celebration Tuesday. The whole town turns out, people from Tavapy Uno, and also people from all over the country, for as Fernando told me, the fight for Tavapy II is regarded as one of the critical moments of the movement and Stroessner´s loss of total control that culminated with General Andres Rodriquez walking into a cabinet room with an unpinned grenade in one hand and the pin in the other and the subsequent flight of Stroessner loyalists to the other general´s side. Se dice no más. It might be difficult to find that one in a text book, but during training we had a lecture from a paraguayan history professor (who told us that story) whose grandfather saved stroessner´s life in the chaco war in 1934 when they were both leuitenants in the army. And Stroessner sent his family a case of Dom Perignon every year at Christmas with a handwritten note and every year the man sent it back. This continued while the grandfather´s son (an active liberal) worked for the opposition and was sequestered. News of his son´s kidnapping induced a heart attack in the grandfather and yet the champagne kept arriving.

But the fiesta was fun. Some people donated meat for barbecue, there was volleyball, bingo, the whole town celebrating its right to exist; people who have gone to Buenos Aires and Barcelona found a way to come back and see their mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. And I played volleyball with the director of the school and we served some muchachos some pancakes. But, i was the only one eating them that night, when my last working brake on my bike stopped working on a hill and i had to bail. Fortunately i tucked and rolled out of it, but my camera doesn´t have such abilities.

Unfortunately my wrists can´t tuck and roll out of how tired they´re getting. so thats about it.