Chaco? Who knew?

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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, last seen at Canadian conference - and suddenly realize the woman standing behind us was Carol Weaver, whom I haven’t run across since college. All at 5:30 a.m. in Paraguay. Ya just never know.

We were divided into three bus groups and told we’d be heading to Neuland Colony, the one settled mostly by women escaping Russia via Germany after World War II. After stopping at two other rendezvous points to pick up more folks, we were on our way, entering the Trans-Chaco, No. 9, highway. A bridge over the broad Paraguay River, a quick view of the tall buildings of Asuncion in the distance, and we were officially in the Chaco.

This is supposed to be desert, but for the first few hours there seemed to be far too much water to fit the description. Shallow standing water, farm ponds, even big marshes filled with lush vegetation, interrupted by broad fields of low bush generously spotted with native palms and fringed by groves of fine-leaved trees that look a lot like the palo verde trees of Arizona. Cows, mostly of the grey, bony, horned variety that reminds me of African cattle, as well as horses graze everywhere on natural pastures in these low bush areas - I wonder how that diet flavours the milk? Most of the land seems fenced; the occasional ranch-style gate announces the entrance to a large cattle operation, with a red-dirt road leading to a big house set somewhere behind the trees. Between the barbed wire fence and the (very narrow) paved road, squatter homes form a string of hardscrabble villages along the highway, absurdly announced every few miles with a sign advertising that we are entering a “zona urbano.” Most are built of some combination of logs set vertically, red bricks and/or sheet metal roofing. But the poorest people huddle in shelters made of tarps and other bits of plastic, held up by sticks and found materials. You can get embarrassingly close to their lives with a glance: people cooking, eating, sitting on chairs in a communal circle, chasing children … But I have no idea how these people manage to survive - there’s neither the space nor the conditions for subsistence farming, and no apparent source of employment.

And then, the birds: various vultures, what looked like an eagle, hawks sitting on fence posts, egrets lazily fishing in the ponds, ponderous herons, and a smaller white bird with distinctive black wingtips. Also, I may have seen a flamingo. Driving me crazy I still don’t have a book on S. American birds! At our breakfast stop - for an empanada smorgasbord with fresh squeezed juices, yum - I found a couple of other birders with their binoculars out, looking at the monk parakeets screeching in a tree. Yup, I need a book, sooner the better.

As we moved north, the water dried up, the sandy soil began to sift and blow more visibly, cacti multiplied and the birds decreased. It was starting to look like desert, though not any desert I had visited before.

We finally reached Neuland at about 2 p.m., and were ushered into a back room in the colony’s little hotel restaurant, where a buffet was served and we had a chance to meet some of our bus mates. After that, we walked across the street to the town’s co-op centre, the heart of the place, and with our guide, Heinz Wiebe, visited the interesting little historical park across the street, which includes a monument to the courageous women who arrived here with as many as six children, fresh from the trauma of war and displacement, the loss of their husbands to violence or banishment to Siberia, and now facing a forbidding landscape in which to somehow carve out a living. Far more women were involved in the establishment of Neuland colony than men. It’s a bronze, of a plain woman driving a plow. Off to one side is an example of a native (Nivacle’?) hut, a simple beehive-shaped structure of sticks, apparently inspired by the type of birds’ nests placed in a tree nearby. In the shade next to that were two elderly Nivacle women, Regina and Celina, demonstrating the ancient weaving art that Wiebe explained will be lost in the next generation if something can’t be done to revive the younger generation’s interest - something he as the tourism/culture minister for the colony is trying to do. The patterns are in natural brown and beige, geometric animal designs woven in a perfect jacquard out of sheep’s wool (and formerly a natural tree fibre), quite intricate.

Also on the grounds was a monument placed on a huge stone for the colony’s 50th anniversary: atop, a cross and plow, and below a plaque in Spanish and German. Wiebe explained that the colony lives by three principles: arbeiten und beten (work and pray); cooperation (one for all and all for one); and education. The rock was brought from Asuncion because this desert, with its powder-sand soil - once the bottom of an inland sea - has no rocks of its own. Like the colonizers themselves, the rock is from far away, he explained, expanding the metaphor to say its many cracks and scars, the result of the harsh climate’s many extremes, also represent the tribulations of the Mennonites who came here.

Farther on was a piece of equipment used in drilling wells that had apparently been devised and supplied by Dutch Mennonites in the 1960s; he had mentioned it to a group of visiting Dutchmen a week earlier who, as it turned out, included the president of the society that had sent it and insisted on seeing it. So the equipment, still on the job somewhere in the area, was brought to the park for the visiting groups to see. It has helped drill more than 1,000 wells in the area - the fruit also of the labour of native workers.

The grounds were quite pretty, a botanical display of flowering plants including a flourishing jacaranda tree covered in pink-purple blooms. Nearby was the huge bottle tree under which the first meeting of the settlement took place - an event marked with a handsome historical sign showing a photograph of that gathering: 52 women and just 30 men.
Next, we were off to visit a typical farm home, where we watched a blond teenager working the cows through the milking stalls, observed the variety of mechanized equipment on hand, including Volvo and Massey Ferguson tractors, and a couple of the men played a little soccer with the two young lads in the home, pale blond and covered in reddish dust from rolling around in play. They reminded me of myself and my brother back on the farm in Niagara! The farms are set up in Russian style, in little villages of five to 10 families, the houses lined up along the road quite close together and the farms running in long strips back from the road about a kilometer and a half. Most farmers today, we were told, have large acreages somewhere other than adjacent to their homes. Since the early attempts at agriculture proved largely fruitless - keeping them poor for many years - virtually everyone now makes a living at dairy and cattle ranching. The Trans-Chaco highway, built in the 1950s in a unique partnership between the colonies, the government, MCC and ranching groups, made this a viable alternative.

One more stop was at the Freundschaft park, an area left in its natural state to show what the pioneers came to originally. Two trees - here Wiebe got back in metaphorical mode -represent the joining and sharing of cultures that the idealized community of Neuland hopes to be. One is probably 300 years old, the other 30. One is extremely hard wood - it’s known as the “axbreaker tree,” the other very soft (the bottle tree). Yet in reaching toward the sun they have grown up completely entwined, as though embracing. And they provide a home for orchids and aerobic plants.

We were delighted to find that we’d been matched with a couple where the woman, Nicoleta, speaks very good English - having spent a year in London as an au pair! And they have a gorgeous six year old house, with a guest house that reminds me of south Africa: high wood-beam ceilings, tile floors, white walls and dark woods. The main house is similarly designed, with a very modern kitchen, a big stone fireplace and huge arched doorways of beautiful cedar. There’s even a swimming pool. How do we always luck out on these things? We spent a delightful evening conversing back and forth in bits of English and German, asking all our questions about Chaco life and enjoying the perspective of someone who had experienced her own culture shock coming there (as the German-raised wife who returned to the Chaco for the sake of her husband’s health). We sat out on their big stone veranda, sipping mate with our hosts and enjoying the quiet balminess of the evening while wondering if we’d encounter any of the delightful wildlife around here, which they tell us includes poisonous snakes, scorpions, tarantulas and pumas! Slept like babies.

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