Close encounters of a Menno kind

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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 - the indigenous/Mennonite organization that works at social development.

This was illuminating. Turns out there are actually 9 different indigenous languages/cultures they’re working with, and most can’t understand each other without Spanish (or even Low German!! - there’s something I’d like to see) as a lingua franca. Language instruction happens in schools and is working well, he said; for the first three years, children learn to read and write in their native tongue, then Spanish is slowly introduced.

Yalve Sanga was founded in 1936, for people known then as the Lengua (now Enhlet); the Nivacle speaking people arrived later, from areas around the Argentine border. We were shown a monument celebrating 50 years of the Mennonite work with these groups - significantly, it is inscribed in four languages.

ASCIM’s budget doesn’t get much from the government: Paraguay pays for teacher salaries, about 20% of the total of about $1.5 to $2 million a year. Another 10% comes from IMO and MCC, with the rest donated by Paraguay Mennonites or earned income.

It strikes me as amazing, having been to Massachusets a few years back and learning more about the first encounters between Europeans and native peoples three centuries ago, that essentially the same kind of encounter occurred between the Mennonite settlers in the 1930s and these people, who were hunter-gatherers essentially living in a stone-age culture - or “sand age,” Ratzlaff says! The natives were introduced to metals only after the Chaco War around the same time, when the Bolivian and Paraguayan armies left their stuff lying around the desert. Amazing to think that people who just two or three generations ago were carrying stone tools handed down for generations (probably from the Andes, as there are no stones in the Chaco, an ancient seabed), now carry cellphones!

The Enhlet had some agriculture - sweet potatoes, corn, squash - but some native groups didn’t. The Nivacle were historically fishers, but came to the dry Chaco looking for work planting cotton.

The first encounters with the Enhlet were peaceful and, said Ratzlaff, they are generally more peaceful people than Mennonites, given easily to sharing and unwilling to fight for their fare share, which put them at a serious disadvantage with the neighbouring Ayumoro? people - the ones who had killed an early Mennonite missionary. By Enhlet standards, Mennonites aren’t peaceful because they are known to raise their voices. Those who have come into the Mennonite fold like to refer to themselves as “the brown Mennonites,” Ratzlaff said.

We visited the offices of the Indigenous Foundation for Agriculture Development (FIDA), a purely native owned and self-sustaining organization. It offers a loan program that is given to five-family groups who want to start their own farms; for 10 years at low interest, it requires the families themselves to bring a contribution of a certain number of cattle. FIDA provides machines used for clearing land and digging wells to build tanks, as well as general road maintenance. The loans are also used to build fences and corrals and seed grass. An indigenous run computer system keeps track of how the 45 such family groups already running are doing in paying off their loans; once the farms are paid off, they belong fully to the native families.

Sesame seed has been the most profitable crop in recent years, and is ideal for these farmers because hand-harvested seed gets the best price. Sesame looks a bit like corn plants!

The FIDA program, while it received initial donations of machines from Germany, is profitable because the rental equipment is also used for projects on German Mennonite farms.

Ratzlaff, in response to a question, said the Mennonites are well aware of the controversy in the anthropology world over whether these native groups should really be “brought into the 21st century” or encouraged to retain their traditional ways. One side recognizes that culture “as a zoo” isn’t workable; the other “wants them back in the bush.” Of course, the ASCIM view is that the people need to leanr to live in the modern world, but to do so without the significant losses of language and personal dignity that occurred in other such encounters. Wilmer Stahl started an anthropological group to study this issue as it applies to the Chaco.

Everyone agrees, however, that it’s important “to maintain their languages so they have a cultural home,” Ratzlaff says - and in this, the Mennonites are far more enlightened than the Canadian government (and churches) of recent memory. Guarani is, of course, a national language, but the southern Paraguay tongue is unrelated to the Chaco languages, so perhaps this will be a challenge in the future. It strikes me that the German Mennonites have learned a thing or two about keeping a minority language alive in a foreign milieu!

There are no similar projects elsewhere in the country, says Ratzlaff; the government occasionally makes a big show of sending truckloads of food into a hungry native community, but that’s about where it ends. “We don’t believe in that kind of aid,” he said, of pressure on the Mennonites - now a relatively wealthy generation - to simply hand more money over directly to the natives.

MEDA Paraguay started a bakery project 15 years ago that we visited, which the indigenous folk took over later (there’s still a Mennonite adviser). We visited the community’s general store (where said baked products were sold, alongside the dairy products produced by the Mennonites). We also visited the little Mennonite church there, with its outdoor baptismal tank, simple cemetery, and asado (barbecue) area for community feasts under a huge spiny bottle tree. I suggested we sing something, this being in a church, and we did. Our guide, intrigued by the three young Ukrainians in our group, suggested “Kyrie Eleison” and we sang it in Spanish, Greek and Russian, echoing from the tin rafters!

Ratzlaff remarked that the native kids are crazy about soccer, and good at it. Some have even made it to the pro leagues. “If they play against our boys, they always win!”

After lunch at a restaurant in Filadelfia, we headed back down the Trans-Chaco highway for the long trip back to Asuncion. I used the book on Paraguay wildlife I bought in Filadelfia the day before -- at the Mennonite bookstore where one of the girls was excited to see my Mastercard! -- to identify quite a few birds on the way back. We stopped in again at the empanada place and ran into several people we'd been separated from during the tour (on other buses), including Jim and Terri and Carol Weaver. We said our goodbyes and thought that was the last we'd see of those folks, until about an hour later when, wham, there was a strange noise under our bus and we made an abrupt stop - an inner tire blown! The other two buses, plus the independent one Jim and Terri were riding with, pulled over to help, and soon there was a roadside party going on, with all the uniformed drivers working to pull off the tires and find the appropriate spares in their own boxes, and all the passengers on the side of the road gabbing and opining about their days in the Chaco. And Jeff and another guy directing traffic around the crazy turistas!

Finally, the tires were back on, we all cheered and applauded, and everybody got back on board. We finally arrived back at the Excelsior around 9 p.m., exhausted after dropping off all kinds of people on the way in, only to discover that two of our three bags were missing! Panic ensued, but was relieved when the other couple with missing bags found them all sitting in the middle of the Excelsior's lobby. Apparently they'd been shifted around to another bus in the tire shuffle, and the previous bus had just left them there, hoping somebody would find them. Good thing we were all present at the last stop!

Back to Casa Menonita, home not so sweet home. (As Nicoleta had said, "it's a nice, friendly place -- well maybe not so friendly!") But against all predictions, they gave us a cama de matrimonio, with an actual tv in the room, and a balcony from which we greeted Paul Dueck and his lively family reunion group, back from three days in Iguazu, with great cheer. Tomorrow, Brazil!

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