I came to this remote village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini hoping for a base of operations to explore the far northeast of Argentina, a region with almost two million acres of wetland (I called it swamp), dense rain forests (I called it jungle), and dozens of abandoned indigenous settlements of the original Guarani indigenous people, many of which have been reclaimed by the jungle (I called them ruins). Others are UNESCO heritage sites.
Why this village? Because I responded to an ad for free lodging in exchange for teaching English to about 15 of their kids. I agreed to a five month stay, and I would teach about three hours a day, five days a week. No textbooks, no plan, a chalkboard that refused chalk, and no internet to speak of. But nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for the kids. I beg of you, please don’t leave this post until you have watched the video at the bottom. The kids’ ages ranged from six to eleven years old. It was hard to understand the spoken English of even the most advanced among them, and some of the younger ones didn’t even know the alphabet in their own Spanish language. And I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. I was expecting to create some memories; some occasional natural beauty, as well as mosquitoes, heat, torrential rain, lots of mud–but never something that touched my heart like this!
Paula, one of my students learning English, at a party in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, Argentina. Paula is a happy girl from a loving family. She is shy, and very, very determined. In preparation for filming her as part of the year’s graduation, she insisted on extra practice sessions, and walked across the village by herself for her lessons. She spoke no English at the beginning, and sometimes we communicated by me drawing pictures. Without internet, I couldn’t even use Google Translate. But I could see in her eyes she desperately wanted to learn.
My young students learning to dance at a party. Laughter, learning, and mischief all part of the celebration of life. Ali, on the right, foreground; Bauty on the right, background; Marco deep background, striped shirt.
We had a classroom, in an old adobe house under a giant tree. The ceiling fans stopped turning when the electric went out, which happened frequently.
Alexa getting her work checked, inside the one-room schoolhouse. (There was an adjacent room, where guests occasionally spent the night). Marco, to the far right, always did his best work with his head on the table.
At the end of the school year I videotaped a final oral exam that I held with each of them, one by one. I wanted their parents to see and hear what their kids had learned. Each of the kids had to read aloud a paragraph in English, and then without looking down at their paper, they were asked to answer my questions to demonstrate if they had understood what they had just read into the camera. They were nervous. They had never done this before. Sometimes I would throw in an unscripted question to see how they would handle it. And one or two of them got inspired and tried a little improvising of their own. Editorial warning: This may be good for your heart! (Video editing provided by famous bird photographer Roberto Ares).
At the party in the photos above, I played their videos on my laptop for their parents to see. A sizable group of parents gathered around behind the laptop, spellbound. I saw smiles and tears of joy and pride in their eyes. It was amazing to watch the results of effort and reward for the kids, as their sense of self esteem grew. For some it was a self-reinforcing cycle, leading away from uncertainty and fear, and towards confidence and joy. With all of them, I realized there was so little that I knew about their young lives, and all of the factors contributing to the development of their character. I decided quite early on that I was only a guide and cheerleader, and they provided the effort. I learned a lot by just watching them, even at play. This is Aricelli, and you will see both her and her brother, Francisco, on the video.
(A brief note: During his part of the video Joaquin keeps looking up and off camera, and I ask him what he is looking at. His answer, in Spanish, was cockroach. He had spotted a giant cockroach up on the wall and couldn’t take his eyes off of it. When I stopped filming him, he jumped out of his chair, commandeered a party of three. They grabbed brooms and went after the cockroach. Two minutes later it was dead on the floor, mission accomplished!)
This early morning photo was taken about an hour after we arrived at the farm.
Jose and Marco picked me up in their pick-up at 4:05 a.m. Jose greeted me with Hola! and Marco said ‘Hi John.’ Marco is 11 years old and he is my student. Jose is his father. After the brief greetings, they continued talking in Spanish. Jose is from partial Guarani stock, and grew up on an estancia, or Argentine ranch. His formal education ended at about 8th grade. He is congenial, with a ready smile, and often a hug. He understands a lot of English but rarely speaks it. At 43 years of age he is still a fit and handsome gaucho.
This is Jose, Marco’s father and mentor. Jose got his education in a one-room schoolhouse. Book learning was a luxury and took a distant second place to practical matters of survival.
As a student, Marco spent most of his class time with his head on the desk, acting as if he was asleep, and he would intentionally scribble his answers illegibly to an exercise, making it impossible to determine what his answer was, or whether it was correct. If I marked one of his answers wrong, he would invariably claim I had merely misread his writing. He was an exhibitionist, and loved to jump out of his seat to act out his responses to any questions. Fun loving, perhaps, but still a kid. Today I saw a side of him I had not experienced before.
We stopped to pick up another gaucho, whose face I couldn’t make out in the darkness of the back seat. Just outside the village, the car stopped, and Jose and Marco switched places. Marco, my boyish, mischievous, and bored student, carefully adjusted the rear view mirrors and we headed down the rutted country road with his head barely visible above the back of his seat. I idly wondered how long it would take the authorities to identify my mangled body and contact my next of kin. So this was how it all was going to end.
We stopped a few more times to pick up some more ranch hands, who sat in the back of the pick-up, bouncing around and hanging on to whatever was available as we recklessly zipped along at 35 miles per hour. It occurred to me that Marco and his dad had switched places outside the village to avoid problems with the village police. Even then I think their risk was small, since the village seemed to have no crime, and no one had any idea how the two local cops amused themselves while on the clock. The streets are dirt, and there are no traffic signals or signs. Not even any street signs.
We got to the farm at about 4:50 a.m. Besides Jose and Marco, there were five other gauchos with their boots, chaps, and debonair hats. They had more stuff hanging from their belts than a telephone line staffer. One on horseback rounded up half a dozen horses and backed them into a corner of the corral, where one by one, the gauchos outfitted their mounts.
One of the gauchos selects his horse for the day.
Before dawn’s first light they rode off in all directions to find the cattle. Marco rode beside his father.
Marco, all dressed up for action. Marco’s father was, and still is a gaucho, and Marco often shadows his father like any good apprentice.
Adobe houses are an example of vernacular architecture, meaning housing that wasn’t actually designed by an architect at all, but was built from natural materials found in abundance locally by workers with no formal education in the building arts. These days we don’t call it primitive architecture out of respect for the intelligence required to adapt and use what you have.
There is irony in the fact that modern architects frequently borrow ideas from the vernacular, or local constructions, incorporating the latest modern technology when creating the traditional “look” of the end product. And so it is that in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, where architectural design is frequently on display, the village building codes require that only local building materials be used with traditional methods, thereby assuring that no well-heeled investors come in and build gaudy McMansions that clearly do not blend with the landscape and look of the village.
So buildings are only allowed to be one story high, and local blocks or adobe may be used for the walls, and the roofs can only be made of the corrugated metal in evidence everywhere. All of this is good for the villagers, most of whom could not get financing for anything ostentatious. The more elaborate projects do employ architects, but simple and inexpensive homes are often built with adobe, or houses made with mud, boards, and wire by the men, women, and children who will live in them. They build as they have time, and there are no mortgages to pay. In this manner, and over time, someone with the usual plot of land can add dwellings, one at a time, until they have a motel (posada) finished. The education begins early and everyone uses whatever they have handy, beginning of course, with the ubiquitous mud and espartillo grass.
The new apprentices were enthusiastic as they piled into the transport. The 4WD vehicle should get us through the marshy fields and ant hill city to meet the two local experts, who are bringing the bags of flexible grass that is so essential to the project.
Apparently the shortcut to the construction site is through this field of ant hills. Since the ants would drown if they dug down into the marsh, they build colonies above ground and these colonies are remarkably equidistant from each other. Humans can’t seem to live that close together without killing each other, but the ants seem to manage it. I am unaware of any ant wars.
These two men are the grass gatherers, which they cut and bring in large bundles on their backs to the construction site.
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.
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.
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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