A Paraguayan Wedding: Celebrating Karen and Joel

On August 7th, my sister Karen married her partner Joel in the rural outskirts of La Colmena, Paraguay, a small community located 2.5 hours southeast of Asuncion, the capital city.  Karen and Joel met in Paraguay several years ago while serving as volunteers in the Peace Corps.  After a year of readjusting to life in the United States, they returned to the setting of their relationship’s nascence to confirm their commitment to one another.

La Colmena was founded during WWII by a group of Japanese immigrants.  The community today is inhabited by both Japanese and Guarani people, whose cultures remain distinct and visible.  During his time in the Peace Corps, Joel lived and served on the outskirts of La Colmena, promoting sustainable agriculture by planting demonstration crops, starting a community garden, and hosting a local radio show.  He primarily worked with the community’s Guarani inhabitants, who tend to have lower income levels and fewer resources than do the Japanese, who remain well-supported by the Japanese government and relatives overseas.

The cast of characters who attended the wedding ceremony were as diverse as our surroundings.  Joel’s parents traveled from Humboldt county, California; Matt and I came from the Bay Area.  Our two sets of parents and my little brother hailed from rural Illinois.  Karen’s Peace Corps host family traveled six hours by bus and foot to attend the wedding.  Joel’s Peace Corps host family also hosted the wedding: they prepared hundreds of empanadas, butchered and roasted a pig and a cow, made dozens of pans of Sopa (delicious cornbread prepared with lard), and readied the grounds for the celebration.  Several current and former Peace Corps volunteers attended, including Bo, a friend of Joel and Karen who traveled from Florida for the festivities.  In addition, approximately 80 community members joined the celebration, drawn by the promise of a good party.  Add to this mix a polka band, a mischievous goat, and sweet, grapey wine mixed with Coca Cola, and you have a proper Paraguayan wedding.

At their wedding, Joel and Karen brought together a tremendous diversity of individuals; they relied on the hospitality of Joel’s host family and strong relationships built during their time in-country.  They prepared for the wedding remotely and during two weeks in Paraguay leading up to the event.  Despite the challenges inherent in this feat, they managed an occasion that was joyful, inclusive, and unique — a fitting culmination of their service in Paraguay and representation of their wedding vows.

In the days leading up to the wedding, I watched Karen and Joel sip terere (cold yerba mate tea) with their host families, joke with community members, and — in free moments — coordinate the details of the event.  As Peace Corps volunteers, Joel and Karen completed their missions by adapting to their environments, embracing new experiences, and building relationships that spanned gaps in experience, language, and culture.  These same gifts enabled them to host a Paraguayan wedding with grace and love.

As family members, we were given passes into this community based on the time and effort that Karen and Joel had contributed over the course of years.  We enjoyed pre-dinner tastes of roasting meat, embarked on galloping polka dances, and were treated with warmth and respect.  Joel and Karen’s desire to unite two distinctive portions of their lives enabled their families to share a life experience that otherwise would be inaccessible to us.  Their generosity and inclusiveness are only several of the reasons why we love them, and they each other.  These shared qualities undoubtedly form the basis of a relationship that will be both enduring and adaptive over time.

Thank you, Karen and Joel!

Down the Rio Mamore: Welcome to the Jungle

With scores of rivers and lagoons, the Amazon watershed is best experienced by boat.  Matt and I booked four days aboard the Reina de Enin, a slow-floating houseboat that navigates the Rio Mamore.  Although we traveled only a small section of river near Trinidad, Bolivia, one can follow Mamore’s waters into Brazil, the Amazon River, and finally, the Atlantic Ocean.

The river that we rode was a shifting, changing beast: during the rainy season, sandy banks erode and new serpentine routes are cut.  The river regularly uproots both the surrounding landscape and bank-side communities, propelling a cycle of migration and rebirth.  Mature trees are a rarity in the jungle that surrounds the river, which more frequently supports undergrowth and small trees that have yet to fall in the river’s path.

Wildlife within Mamore and the surrounding jungle is just as lively and abundant.  Communities rebuild on the river’s banks because food is so plentiful: a net pulled behind a boat gathers fish for three days; crocodiles and turtles are harvested for their meat; and mango, banana, and coconut trees produce copiously.  During our time on the boat and in the jungle, Matt and I gawked at river dolphins, piranhas, caimans, turtles, monkeys, eagles, countless water birds, an anaconda, and capybaras (the world’s largest rodent!).

Our boat was managed by Barbara, a multi-lingual Portuguese native who moved to Bolivia after marrying a Bolivian.  Despite coordinating all food and activities for the boat – which on average generates $1000 USD in revenue per day – conducting all recruiting, and managing a staff of up to 25, Barbara earns what to our standards is a trifling sum – $600 USD per month.  I found myself reflecting on how capital begets capital (the boat’s owners purchased it 25 years ago and likely have enjoyed very healthy returns), whereas work typically begets only more work, with very little opportunity to save.

Barbara shortly would be traveling to recruit staff for the boat, and she complained to us of the difficultly she faces in recruiting local staff who demonstrate the work ethic that she wishes to see.  In Barbara’s words, “Most Bolivians live in the present, not in the future.”  Barbara believes that as a result of this orientation towards the present, many Bolivians are not economically ambitious regarding their futures: they do not attempt to get ahead in the same way that Westerners might.

Given the likelihood that Barbara’s staff earn under a third of what she makes – and perhaps do not earn a living wage – I might argue that local people’s lack of economic ambition derives from the absence of a path by which to increase their living standards.  I find Barbara’s comment about present and future orientation ironic, given that stressed out Americans frantically practice yoga in an effort to live more “in the present.”  Surely, there is an equilibrium to be found between these two worlds.

Tiwanaku and Isla del Sol: Remains of Civilizations

In past travels, I often have made a point of visiting the ruins of ancient civilizations, including Angkor Wat (Khmer – Cambodia), Machu Picchu (Inca – Peru), Teotihuacan (Maya – Mexico), Tikal (Maya – Guatemala), and my personal favorite, Monte Alban (Zapoteca – Mexico). In Bolivia, we again sought to learn of civilizations that thrived in earlier times by visiting Tiwanaku, a pre-Incan site near La Paz, and Isla del Sol, an island in Lake Titicaca scattered with Incan ruins.

Constructed around AD 700, Tiwanaku is thought to have been a ceremonial, religious, and political center for the Tiwanaku people, who dominated western Bolivia prior to the rise of the Incan empire.  Due to financial constraints, only 10% of the vast ruins have been excavated, despite their cultural and historical importance.  The Incan ruins on Isla del Sol are notably less impressive than is Tiwanaku, though their setting against deep blue Lake Titicaca and the Cordillera Real mountain range is incomparable.

As Matt and I explored the ruins at Tiwanaku, we found ourselves drawn to half-buried pillars and mysterious carvings: the most fascinating aspect of the site was its unknown quality.  The seductiveness of ruins derives from the questions that arise from viewing fragments of the past: what happened to these people and to the lives they had constructed?  Why did their world disappear?  And then, there comes the corollary to these questions: how does what I am seeing apply to my own world?  Our curiosity originates from witnessing the remains of a failed civilization and acknowledging that in their time, they too believed their world to be the one true existence.

In part out of a spirit of self-preservation, we are compelled to understand what remains of a people once they are gone.  The Tiwanaku people built their ceremonial center with an eye towards permanence and workmanship: great slabs of up to 25 tons each were hauled over 60 miles and then intricately carved.  The center was developed over the course of lifetimes, drawing on the labor of thousands of people.  As a result of their toil, the site remains, honoring their gods long after they have ceased to exist.

Today, we rarely build with an eye towards longevity.  We seek speed and mobility in our communications and our lifestyles.  I wonder what traces would remain of our civilization in thousands of years, if we were to cease to exist.  For me, literature and art are appealing for the permanence that they suggest – the act of recording and documenting leaves a small footprint of our existence in the great transient history of the world.