Trip to Argentina and back to Modern Amenities

Buenos Aires

        The middle of November is a significant period of time in my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer because it marks the halfway point of my total time here in Paraguay. Up until the second week of November I had yet to take a single vacation outside of the country, and considering every volunteer is allotted 48 during their service I figured it was high time to take advantage of those vacation days I had yet to utilize. Given Paraguay's location in the middle of South America it is in many ways an ideal location to be based for someone who wants to travel around the continent. For many volunteers, Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital and largest city, is one of the more common destinations. In addition to being relatively easy to get to by bus or plane from Paraguay, it also has a large number of Paraguayans living and working there. For me, Buenos Aires was not a destination that was high on my list of places to go, my father is from there and I had been there several times growing up, but it was an ideal location for me to meet up with my parents having not seen them in over a year. So it was decided that my first trip outside of Paraguay would be to Buenos Aires with the principal idea being that I would have the opportunity to relax in a city that I had been to with my family. However, despite all my preconceived notions about what type of experience I would have in Buenos Aires given my prior exposure to the city when I was younger, my time there proved to be much more of a unique experience than I had previously thought.
        I was lucky to find a travel companion in the form of my friend and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Jimmy. We were both looking to cut back on costs of transportation, and given Jimmy's location close to the Argentine boarder town of Formosa we decided that it would be a cooler and more cost efficient for us to cross the Paraguay River into Formosa from Alberdi located in the southwestern part of the country. Alberdi is located in the Paraguayan departamento (state) of Neembucu, which is considered one of the poorer departmentos in Paraguay. Unlike Alto Parana, in Eastern Paraguay where I live, Neembucu has very little infrastructure or large towns. Despite the fact that it shares a boarder to the North with departamento Central, the most populated department and home to the capital of Asuncion, Neembucu is remarkably isolated. Alberdi, the largest town in the northern part of Neembucu, is only 150 KM South of Asuncion, but takes over 4 hours by bus to arrive. This is primarily because almost immediately after you enter the departmento headed South from Asuncion the road becomes a white sandy dust bowl. To make the ride all the more exciting the older model, non-air conditioned buses that travels on this road motor as fast as they possibly can causing high amounts of dust inhalation for the passengers lucky enough to be on board. Once you get to the end of the line and get off in the sprawling metropolis of Alberdi the town comes off like something one would see in a old western movie except with more cement buildings in place of wooden ones. The existence of the town is dependent on commerce between itself and the Argentine city of Formosa across the river. I would even argue that if Formosa didn't exist that Alberdi would never have been founded. The testament to this is the fact that the town of Alberdi was named for the founder who was in fact Argentine. So it was on these sandy shores that our adventure into Argentina began.

Ferry

Customs Dock Alberdi

       It is remarkably easy to get to Argentina from Paraguay even if you go through the process the legal way. The only thing that separates the two countries is a river that is very easy to swim across, and honestly quite easy to cross into illegally if one is so inclined. However, for the law abiding members of society all one has to do is go to the small customs agency on the Paraguayan side of the river, get some stamps, buy a ticket for about $2.50 to cross in a small vote, and repeat the process on the Argentine side of the river. The biggest differences in the crossing process is Paraguay still uses typewriter technology to document the purchase of your ferry ticket while Argentina has upgraded to computers. as Jimmy and I were going through the customs process in Formosa we could already begin to tell the differences between the 2 countries. For starters, we had trouble understanding the customs agent on the Argentine side's Spanish. Both of us have only lived in 1 Spanish speaking country, and to hear someone speaking differently threw us for a loop. After we go through customs our language troubles continues when we got on a bus and asked the driver to go to the bus terminal. He looked at us like we were complete yokels and simply ushered us to take a seat. THe bus ended up going in the complete opposite direction we wanted to go, and it wasn't until we slowly spoke in the most basic and clear Spanish we were capable of that he laughed and said we were going the wrong direction. To be honest, it wasn't until the end of our trip that we felt like we were finally able to get a grasp on Argentine tendencies in Spanish. I never though that I would struggle as much as we did. I figured that the Spanish between people in Alberdi and Formosa would be similar given their proximity, but that proved not to be the case at all. The differences were stark not just in language, but the appearance of the cities themselves.

Formosa

       Formosa as a city has a population of 210,000 people making it a pretty large city. Alberdi's population on the other hand is microscopic by comparison with a little over 7,500 inhabitants. Alberdi has a couple of paved roads and one large double avenue. Formosa on the other hand has paved roads throughout the city, with air conditioned public buses, well maintained parks, and a variety of restaurants. Alberdi's economy is dependent on Formosans crossing over to buy cheap goods. On the other side of the coin I don't think the livelihoods of people in Formosa would be impacted at all if Alberdi ceased to exist. Obviously these differences speak to a a variety of differences between the two countries, which I have discussed in previous blog entries, but reading statistics is one thing and seeing the actually differences between the 2 countries is a completely different experience. I could ramble on for hours about how the food is better, how much better organized the city is, and the noticible difference in wealth are, but I'll refrain to prevent a boring diatribe. All I'll say is that I was more shocked to see the differences than I had expected initially.

Formosa

It was about a 18 hour bus ride from Formosa to Buenos Aires. The trip is entirely on paved roads, which is not often the case in Paraguay. I am not sure why I was surprised by the start differences in development between the two countries. After all Argentina is the 6th largest country in terms of land area, and has over 40 million  inhabitants making it not only one of the biggest Spanish speaking countries, but also one of the richest. These are all things I knew going into this trip, but for some reason I couldn't get over the differences. Buenos Aires is a beautiful city. It has a very educated population, is extremely cosmopolitan, and has its own unique cultural heritage. If you couldn't classify Argentina as the developed world as a whole you could definitely make the case that Buenos Aires is. Aside from the obvious infrastructure differences the thing that stuck me the most between the two countries was the people and how they acted. In Buenos Aires people were much more closed off. It wasn't easy to strike up a conversation, and seemingly everyone spoke a bit of English. In Paraguay we rarely to never overhear people speaking in English, and if we do an immediate conversation ensues. Argentina is much more of a tourist destination, so I personally felt more distance from the locals likely because of the high amount of tourists that go through annually has diluted the stangeness of overhearing English in a restaurant or a bar.

Buenos Aires

        That got me thinking about the reasons why Argentina is so much more developed, and whether it is their level of development or their culture that causes the people to come off as more individualistic? I think what it boils down to is that because Paraguay is a landlocked country in the middle of South America prevents it from developing at the pace of a country with a massive coast line like Argentina. A better comparison is Uruguay whose population is half of Paraguay's with a smaller area, but it significantly richer. Wealth gives a country more ability to buy things, which in turn makes individuals more money to buy things. There is a fine line between having too much and having too little, but I think many of us from America, especially older generations, can remember a time when families didn't have much but they did have each other. Nowadays millions of Americans live in suburbs, commute to work, and barely know their neighbors. We have reached a point where we have so much stuff we are longing for human contact that people in Paraguay have a surplus on. Americans and Argentinians to generalize might have more things, but do they have the same level of human interaction that makes the people in Paraguay come off as happy? My response to that is no. Paraguayans might not know a ton about the world outside their borders, and they might never travel more than a couple of hours their whole lives from where they are from, but what they lack in material wealth they more than make up for in human contact.
        It is easy to list the reasons, as I did early, as to why Argentina is wealthier than Paraguay. One could argue that Paraguayans are happier because they don't know what it is like in the rest of the world. This ignorance is bliss argument has a lot of validity, and I would venture to think that if Paraguay remained the way it is for the rest of eternity the people within would probably be happier than they would be in other more developed countries. Through my travels from Alberdi to Buenos Aires in a period of 24-hour I was able to see multiple stages of development that ran the spectrum from poorest of the poor to richest of the rich. It wasn't just that I saw that, but I lived it. I went from a wooden house in the middle of the Paraguayan country side to a luxury apartment in the center of a wealthy Argentine neighborhood. Personally, I loved the fact that I was able to take a hot shower, have air conditioning, and all the modern amenities imaginable, but I couldn't help by feel like something was missing from my trip to Buenos Aires that was being able to strike up a conversation with anyone and have them treat you like they have known you their whole lives. That is not to say I didn't have a wonderful time with my family, but after having lived a year in a place like Paraguay it sort of makes one reassess what are the most important things in one life that makes it fulfilling. To me the material possessions while awesome might not have the same value as they did a year ago, and all it took was a week away in a more developed place for me to have that realization.

Mormon Missionaries

                The other day as I was sprinting to catch a bus back to site I happened to stumble upon a group of around 10 Mormon missionaries getting on board the same bus. They were all dressed up in their white shirts, ties, dark pants, and name tags looking like they were all moving somewhere. As luck would have it, my assigned seat was surrounded by five of them looking at me with some curiosity as I was them. At first, I was addressed in Spanish, but after a phone call the charade was up and conversation ensued. On several occasions prior to this particular incident I had come across a Mormon and his companion, but I had not had not received a ton of information as to how their missionary work is conducted and the logistics of their time in a given country. To their credit, they were equally curious about the Peace Corps, how I ended up here, and the work I was doing.

                I won’t take the time to dive into all the details of Mormonism, the largest sect of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints, and the religion itself, but essentially it was explained to me that Joseph Smith is a profit of God who was told that he must show the path of the true church. Basically the book of Mormon is a supplement to the Bible that answers contradictions that the Bible had as a result of how it was written over hundreds of years. Each Mormon believes that their church is the one true church, and it is their duty to show people the path to righteousness. The Mormon mission, according to the guys I spoke to, worldwide consists of between 50,000-60,000 missionaries in 153 countries. Worldwide there are around 14 million Mormons with about 6.2 living in America. The other heavily populated countries are Mexico, Philippines, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina. Service is a 2 year commitment and selection where one is place is done when a council of Elders read the applications and prays to God to show them where that person should serve. People can do their service at any age, but predominately it takes place right after high school graduation between the ages of 18-21. For the most part, the missionaries come with no language except for a 5-10 week training program in P Utah.

                As for the missionaries in Paraguay, I was told that there are a total of 400 split into two groups of 200 half serving north of the Parana River and the other serving south of the river. They typically live in apartments or houses of 4 people and every 6 weeks all the world’s Mormon missionaries go through a rotation where they could potentially be called and told they are being sent within the countries they are serving. The reason I happened to be surrounded by 5 of them that day was because it was the day of the rotation. I was told that in Paraguay there are a total of 80,000 Mormons. I think that is a bit of a stretch, but after hearing them talk for longer I was starting to believe that number might be closer to being true than I initially believed.

                I asked them how their living circumstances worked, and what their average day was like? I was told that they get dressed and start walking every day, with the exception of Sundays, from 10:30am to 9pm. They live typically in a small house with the other missionaries and are given 750,000 Gs.a month from collections back home. From what I understood they are sort of sponsored by either a congregation or family back home for part of their living allowance with another part coming from a giant slush fund that I think comes from the international organizing entity of the missionary church, but I am not totally sure. To be honest, they weren’t really sure about a lot of the logistical components of their work. When I asked what they do if they get sick they said they call the President of the missions wife, who I assume has some kind of medical training, who will recommend something for them to buy. In an emergency that would warrant serious medical attention it is usually their families from back home that take point in making sure they get the necessary medical attention. I couldn’t believe how casual they were about all those aspects of their life. Sure your chances of getting hurt in a serious accident are small, but it isn’t unheard of at all. 750,000 Gs. a month isn’t much, but when you have no vices, don’t pay rent, nor allow traveling casually it seems like a lot more. It seemed to me that they had some sort of trust in the higher power that everything was going to be okay because they were doing God’s work. If they got hurt it is all a part of His plan.

                We were talking for probably about an hour before they started asking me about my faith. I was asked “where do you think the knowledge of God comes from?” My response was “I have never thought about it.” I proceeded to ask what he thought, and an hour later I got a full rundown of the Mormon missions and their purpose. I could go on for a while about the details of what they said, the fact that the truly believe with all their hearts that their beliefs are the only correct ones, and their passion in their work, but that wasn’t what stood out to me. The thing that I was astounded by was the similarities between their work, and the feelings about their work and my work as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

                They leave their families and everything familiar to them for 2 years, but not only that they can only call their family twice a year. They can write letter whenever they want, and use the computer from time to time to write emails, but for the most part they have no contact with their families. The work they do is trying to convince someone that what they are preaching is correct, and doing that is extremely difficult. In the same way we try to convince people that brushing your teeth will make you healthier, or planting abanos verdes will improve the quality of your soil, they are trying to show that believing in their faith will give you a better quality of life. Obviously what we promote of Peace Corps volunteers are things that have scientific proof or years of research that demonstrate that that our projects will do the things we promise, but they believe wholeheartedly that their faith in God will do the same things that we promise if it is God’s will that it is to happen. Their faith in God is absolute, which is remarkable because I can’t say I believe in anything as strongly as they do. The feelings of being alone, struggling to connect with people and missing the comforts were the home are almost the same except more extreme because they don’t have phones, Internet, TV, or radio. Needless to say this interaction made quite the impression on me. As hard as it was for me to up and leave America for 2 years in Paraguay at the age of 23 I at least had a college degree and some life experiences outside the United States. These guys and I say guys because the majority of them in Paraguay are men, often come here with nothing but a few white shirts, a nice tie, and their faith. So next time you run into a Mormon try giving them an update about things going on at home and try not to get all bent out of shape when they try to ask you about your faith. At the end of the day they are a lot of them are just a bunch of kids who miss their families and their lives back home in the same ways we do here.