by John Bechtel | Oct 29, 2017 | Argentina, Entrepreneurship, Ibera Wetlands, South America
The Insane Traffic Situation
In the remote village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini and the roads leading into it, there are few rules that I am aware of. Humans and animals share the same spaces and seem to accommodate each other’s idiosyncrasies. No one knows whether the normal traffic pattern should be driving on the left or the right side of the road. It all depends on the depth of the mud and the ruts. There is a really big farm tractor with a winch that routinely extracts cars that get in over their head, so to speak. On the 120 kilometer dirt and sand washboard road leading into the village from the town of Mercedes, the drivers of cars, vans, buses, and trucks all drive wherever they think they will find the smoothest section of road. I haven’t quite figured this out, because going south we drive on the left side of the road and going north we drive on the left side of the road, which means we prefer the “wrong” side of the road no matter which way we are going. It also means that going in either direction the drivers prefer the side of the road they were avoiding at all costs when they were headed the other way, if you get what I am trying to say here. If I spoke better Spanish I would ask them about this. When a vehicle approaches from the other direction everyone seems to play a very polite game of “chicken” with warm smiles and hand waving all around.
RUSH HOUR. If you’re checking your rear view mirror, these two are pulling up on you fast. They are known for hogging intersections and road rage. I saw one of them kick a dog, except the dog was faster and got out of the way. As you can see, the filly is tailgating at high speed.
CAUTION: DUCK CROSSING. Not maintaining minimum speed and approaching traffic.
RAPID TRANSIT. Juvenile, joyriding, probably without a license.
PASSING IN A NO PASSING ZONE. Reckless driving. The horse’s back legs can do some serious damage to that bike. Never mind the driver. (Avoid night driving if you have cataracts.)
SLOW DRIVING IN THE PASSING LANE. Blocking oncoming traffic.
ROAD RAGE. No idea what’s going on here. Avoid eye contact and keep moving. It might get ugly.
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by John Bechtel | Oct 15, 2017 | Entrepreneurship, Ibera Wetlands, South America
Kids learning self-confidence and self-esteem, the most valuable languages in the world.
The school in our little village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini has no textbooks, no workbooks, no internet, and a painted sheet of composition board that is resistant to chalk. There are three instruction books, one for each of three grades, but there are no copies of the pages because the printer cartridges for the printer cost too much to use for anything but essential business. So every activity and exercise used in teaching has to be written out on the “blackboard” and then copied by each of the students in their notebooks, much as medieval copyists did before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. So at least half of all teaching time is spent copying. You could call this a dreadful waste, except the kids are always learning, even when you were sure they weren’t.
There’s about 15 kids who are learning English as a second language. Some of them are not yet old enough to learn how to write in their mother tongue of Spanish. They all speak English at different levels of proficiency. Their worst English is better than my Spanish. Their brains are like hungry sponges and they learn without trying, as long as it looks and feels like fun.
Learning the basics of entrepreneurship from a vegetable stand
Last week we studied some basics of business and entrepreneurship. The parents of most of these kids are entrepreneurs, although I don’t think anyone ever told them that. They just do what they do. It’s called survival. This is a village of about 1,000 people confined in an area about ten blocks by nine block square at the end of the world. The village is completely isolated, with only two terrible dirt roads leading in or out of the village. It’s hours to the next place. Virtually everything is trucked in from outside the village. Everyone in the village in one way or another is part of the support system for tourism, and the big attraction; indeed the only attraction, are the birds. Everyone comes to see the incredible birds. And a few other things like caimans and rheas and of course the capybaras, big, fat, overgrown rodents that sort of look like giant groundhogs.
So about one out of every five houses is a tiny country store selling a few vegetables or meats or pasta or bread or cerveza (Argentine beer). When there are no tourists they seem to sell to each other in the village. There are no banks and no ATM machines. To the best of my knowledge there is only one bar in the village, but it must open after I go to bed, because I rarely see it open. The electric, which is brought into the village from over 120 kilometers of soggy wetlands is erratic and goes out about every other day, for a few minutes or a few hours. It was on one of these dreary, rainy days, when we were sitting in the semi-dark one-room school with no lights and a chalkboard that was not cooperating, and I was wondering what to do with these kids who had way too much energy for the situation.
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by John Bechtel | Oct 15, 2017 | Argentina, Ibera Wetlands, Nature
Technically, it’s not murder–at least not yet. The victim is an aging beauty, a former home-coming queen, well past the first bloom of youth, but one of the rare ones that acquires in grace and stateliness more than what they lose in freshness and energy. You’ve heard about people poisoned with arsenic so slowly that the possibility of murder is never discovered. They just seem to wither and die of natural causes. The process of dying is so slow no one suspects the truth of what happened. This is worse; what’s going on outside the front door of this schoolhouse is death by slow suffocation. Silent, deadly, unbelievably stealthy. It must be what it is like to be eaten alive by an anaconda. I read that the green anaconda, the big one, the largest snake in the world, always puts the head of its victim in its mouth first, so that the kicking and struggling legs don’t get in the way of progress. The anaconda can unhinge its mouth so that it can open it wide enough to ingest victims many times wider than its own girth. That’s what’s been happening here. The strangler is youthful and energetic, a friend of the family, you might say. And the victim has no concept of danger. It doesn’t suspect. This is like a preying mantis that mates and then kills its lover. An embrace, a light touch on the shoulder that ends in death by strangulation; not as in a sudden snap of the neck but in slow motion, one frame at a time. It’s creepy. To have the life force squeezed out of you so slowly no one notices, no one rushes to the rescue. They walk right by you, barely noticing that you don’t look your usual self. The victim keeps presenting herself in public as if all is well, but just looks a little more piqued than usual. There’s no cry for help, no dramatic terminal event.
At least the anaconda hunts because it’s hungry. But this–this is evil.
It’s happening here, in this bucolic schoolyard:
The scene of the crime: in front of the schoolhouse Eco Taller Timbo, in the village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, Corrientes province, Argentina.
A Tale of Two Trees
I am of course talking about two trees, one well known, the ceibo, the national tree/flower of Argentina. An aging queen. This is the ceibo in full flower.
The Ceibo tree, and national flower of Argentina with carmine red flowers. Gorgeous, isn’t she? She’s also called the Cry Baby Tree. Turns out she’s got good reason.
The Legend of the Ceibo
The ceibo has inspired tangos, poetry, and folklore music as a symbol of courage and strength in the face of adversity. Once there was an indigenous woman named Anahi, who lived on the shores of the Parana River (pronounced pah-ra-NAH). If you know anything at all about the local history here, a lot of very bad things happened on the shores of the Parana. Anahi was small and not particularly pretty; however she was forgiven her defects when she opened her mouth to sing and her mellifluous voice filled the summer nights with melodies about her tribe, their gods, and land.
When the conquistadors came a-conquering, they took Anahi and others from the tribe as prisoner. When her guard fell asleep, Anahi seized the opportunity for escape. The guard woke up and Anahi stabbed him in the ensuing struggle. She was condemned to be burned at the stake as punishment for his death. The night of her sentence Anahi was tied to a tree and a fire was lit. As the flames roared higher, Anahi began to sing about her land and tribe.
The next morning the soldiers were astonished to find a flaming ceibo tree in full bloom where Anahi’s ashes should have been.
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by John Bechtel | Sep 16, 2017 | Argentina, Ibera Wetlands, South America
It had been raining for days. Successive waves of storms rolled over and through us, lightning alternating between turning nighttime into day with sheets of light and sudden bolts cleaving the sky into halves for nanoseconds before engulfing us in darkness again. Incessant rolling thunder rattled the panes and the nerves as everything that breathed ran for cover. The sky played mind games with our heads as the gray clouds broke up in bright promise and then reformed darker than ever. As another soggy night descended upon us, the posadas of the village looked every bit the outposts of civilization that they were.
As the downpours continued day after night, the manicured lawns became ponds and lakes. Even the most raucous birds grew quiet.
The special native mud became deeper and more treacherous than ever, sucking at your boots and slowing your pace as the rain pelted harder. Running for cover was impossible for those caught unawares. At least one tourist that ventured out that week, beguiled by a break in the rain, fell and broke a bone in the mud streets. On one occasion I saw a handful of bored and determined tourists leave the safety of their posada, only to turn back in frustration after taking less than a dozen steps.
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by John Bechtel | Aug 27, 2017 | Argentina, Freelance Writer, South America
The Ibera Wetlands, and the Ibera Lagoon, the second largest pristine wild paradise left in the world.
I am in Mesopotamia. No, not that Mesopotamia. Not the location of the ancient Babylonian empire and the modern state of Iraq in the Middle East. In another time and place I would have put that Mesopotamia high on my bucket list because the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were one of the cradles of civilization and history holds special fascination for me. Unfortunately wars and conflict of the last twenty years have been very effective in obliterating not only the present lives of that Mesopotamia’s inhabitants and their culture, but in many of its areas, travelers are beheaded for the unforgivable offense of intruding on their world.
The Mesopotamia where I now find myself in the far northeast of Argentina was originally populated by tribes that found their way here from another, less well known cradle of civilization known as the Amazon basin. They spoke variations and dialects of a language called Guarani. Other tribes from the Amazon basin migrated westward to the mountains and highlands of the Andes, and which in many parts of South America are today collectively referred to as the Quechua cultures.
The Guarani however migrated gradually southward through what is today Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. This long preceded the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries and the Spanish conquistadors. Many of these Amazonian tribes also did a lot of beheading, and we know this because archeologists have discovered large caches of shrunken heads, with the skulls and other contents removed, and stuffed with various materials. A quaint custom indeed, and one of technology’s first experiments with miniaturization. So the victors shrank heads, and the losers ran for cover. No one knows for sure why the Guarani were moving south through the continent, but it’s pretty likely they were running from someone. One recent and authoritative source says head shrinking is still taking place in some remote parts of the Amazon.
This story began in the Amazon basin
There is far more known about the highland, Andean cultures in South America because the artifacts of their civilization were often made of stone, found everywhere in great abundance. Buildings and tools made of stone, left undisturbed, such as in burial tombs, last for thousands of years. However the forebears of the Andean peoples lived in the jungles, rainforests, wetlands and swamps of the huge Amazon basin, and the jungle reclaimed most vestiges of those who once lived there. It is only in the last twenty years that evidence is surfacing of vast Amazonian civilizations with causeways, roads, and irrigation canals that stretched for hundreds of miles, and which radiocarbon dating is placing thousands of years before the Egyptian pharaohs.
Now let’s fast forward to August, 2017 when a certain enterprising (or delusional) travel and culture writer named John Bechtel decided to backpack around eight regions of Argentina in the hopes of creating a comprehensive English-language survey of the history and cultures of the country. The sojourn begins with an introduction to an intellectual who is retiring this year as the director of the Argentine version of Junior Achievement, well known everywhere in the U.S. for introducing young people to the possibilities of entrepreneurship and to real entrepreneurs, people who have successfully built businesses.
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