Tuesday. Woke again to roosters, and later to three military helicopters buzzing over our heads. Strange. I spent some time reading out on our balcony, listening to the neighbourhood slowly awaken. Another lovely breakfast in the garden, overlooking the little pool on the side of the hill. We tramped up the hill to Largo dos Guimaraes, where we caught the wonderful old tram (called the bodinho) almost immediately and hung on as we hurtled all the way down the hill, clackety-clunk, past magnificent old villas decaying in that tropical way, with vines and flowers covering the old stone w [View Full Entry]

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Monday. Woke quite refreshed, to the sound of roosters. Amazing how quiet it was after all the racket of the evening. A bit of a panic this morning - after the camera was dropped we discovered we were having trouble downloading photos, and couldn’t figure out why. Decided the only solution, given that both my disks were full, was to seek a new one. Breakfast left out for us was delightfully Brazilian - ham and cheeses, various breads and toppings, granola, yogurt, fresh papaya (yummy!) and watermelon juice as well as coffee - all enjoyed in the lovely tropical garden down [View Full Entry]

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Sunday - on the road again. A long day of travel after a rather less than refreshing night on the bus. We reached Sao Paulo at 8:55 a.m. as promised, and found ourselves in a huge station of the size and caliber of any city airport, with the restaurants and souvenir shops to match. More than 80 gates! We’d soon bought our tickets for Rio and were back on the bus, “convencional” this time. At least the weather was gradually clearing as we went along, from rain and lightning to patches of blue sky as we rolled through increasingly mountainous terrain, [View Full Entry]

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Thursday. Up early again to catch the 7:30 a.m. bus to Foz do Iguacu, which our Chaco busmate Sondra (a young Dutch woman on her way to three months on a Brazilian dairy farm, after an advanced degree in soils science!) had put us on to. Good thing, too, because most of the buses go to the Argentina side and we didn’t want to be bothered with that. A six-hour trip rolling through southern Paraguay, so much greener than Chaco that it’s rather beautiful despite the obvious poverty here. With shades like PEI’s: rich red earth, green hills, blue skies. Villages [View Full Entry]

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An excellent breakfast with Helmuth and Nicoleta: yogurt and soft-boiled eggs, juice, tea, and hugs and pictures as we said goodbye, with promises to put them up should they come our way. We couldn’t really say we’d love to come back, much as we’ve enjoyed our visit with them. Not enough to draw us back to the Chaco! But we had a great morning getting a lot of our questions and misgivings about the Mennonite work with the native people answered. Heinrich Ratzlaff was there as we arrived at Yalve Sanga, the original native settlement, to explain the work of ASCIM [View Full Entry]

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Up early to be back in Neu-Halbstadt in time for the day’s tour, supposedly starting at 7 a.m. Our hosts fed us a full breakfast of buns with (guava!) jam, wild honey, cold meat and cheese, and tea. We were sent off on the bus to Menno Colony, where Walter Ratzlaff, a former mayor of the town, gave us an illuminating view of life in the oldest colony; the highly conservative one that left Manitoba in the 1920s over disputes with the government on education just as my own family was gratefully fleeing to Canada! Though he disavowed Jeff’s view that [View Full Entry]

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Up at 5 a.m. to catch our taxi to the Hotel Excelsior, already waiting for us in the Casa Mennonita parking lot, chatting with the guard. “Tranquilo,” he said about our general anxiety, offering me a sip of his mate. The Excelsior turns out to be a very fancy hotel - no wonder the price (over $100) we’d been quoted, which seemed outlandish for Asuncion. A long wait in the hotel lobby gave us time to chat with several people we’d bumped into over the week - Dave and Millie Dyck from my MCC days, and Tom and Rebecca Yoder Neufeld, [View Full Entry]

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I hate writing about this almost as much as I disliked living it, but today (Sunday) was a crashing disappointment. I almost wished I'd been one of the Machu Picchu people after seeing a morning service hijacked the way this one was. We arrived early, anticipating a great morning with a whole lot of Paraguayan church folk joining the paid attendees for our final service. The "chapel" -- a good sized room that had been devoted to musical stuff all week -- was set up for overflow viewing, so we made sure to get our seat early (not hard, since our [View Full Entry]

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Breakfast is finally warming up at the Casa! Actually had a conversation this morning at the table, with folks from Chaco. And the morning started out great with a surprisingly good performance of the Faith & Life Men's Choir from Canada, with a soloist from Paraguay who used to sing with them when he lived in Canada. Sithabile Ndlovu of Zimbabwe was a most interesting speaker - a young black woman taking part in the south-to-south YAMEN! exchange program in Brazil, where she had learned a good deal of Portuguese (I'd heard her in the ladies' room earlier and wondered about [View Full Entry]

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A sterling choir from Switzerland started off "Serving Like Christ" day well. One of the cool things this morning was a report from Melani Susanti, a young Indonesian woman who served as an intern with MWC at the MCC UN office -- wearing her pale blue UN t-shirt. She reminded me of all those incredibly capable, confident Indonesian girls I've met over the past few years. I don't know what their secret is, but I figure the Indonesian churches are in good hands as long as they let women like her and Yanti Widjaja -- who we joyfully met up with [View Full Entry]

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