Chapter 15: A Long Left Turn / Paraguay

John Steinbeck says that a journey has a personality of its own, that it is debatable whether you take the journey, or the journey takes you. Perhaps this explains our long left turn into Paraguay, and a detour that was never supposed to happen. A detour which would not only become one of the most memorable parts of our trip, but one on which we would bring to the surface a long-lost piece of family history.

We have descended from the cold heights of the Bolivian Altiplano, and find ourselves in the Jujuy province of Northern Argentina, where the acclimatization is easy thanks to good beef, cheap Malbec and much more pleasant temperatures. They even have proper campsites in this province. After so much hard travel, it feels like the Promised Land, and we tour from one small town to the next, enjoying a corner of the country largely devoid of tourists but full of good food, cheap prices and easy roads. We soak up the warmth and the empanadas and let the strain of the last several months slowly wash away. Since Ecuador, gastro bugs seem to be tag teaming their way through our family, with one or the other of us under siege. In Argentina we slowly but finally purged ourselves of these unwanted guests.

We have also rid ourselves of another guest….since Ecuador we have been carrying a colony of ants, who have hitchhiked their way south from the Amazon in the walls of our camper. For three months we had tried everything from baking soda to flamethrowers (literally) to eradicate these beasts, but nothing worked. Every time we made some headway, they would pop out of another seam in the camper somewhere, having successfully relocated their eggs and their queen to a new safe haven. I learned more about “hormigas” than I ever wanted too, and they were driving us crazy. In the face of constantly changing environments and unfamiliar spaces, our camper is our refuge. Nothing violates that sense of refuge like pulling back your blanket and finding a column of ants running marching drills on your bed. It appears, however, that Bolivia and a few nights at -20C has finally put an end to the plague, and we are enjoying the sanctity of our little home once again. I enjoy pleasant dreams that night of crunchy frozen corpses entombed forever between the sheet metal walls.

Our itinerary has a new goal – we need to be in Bariloche by the beginning of October to meet my parents, with whom we will spend two weeks touring northern Patagonia. This creates a few extra weeks of space in our calendar. Like many other overlanders, we are hovering in Northern Argentina, waiting for the weather to shift so we can chase the good weather down into Patagonia. One particular landlocked country to our east beckons, and we decide to head to Paraguay, which does not feature heavily on the South American tourist card and is bypassed by most travellers. Paraguay has an easy geography to understand. Everything west of the Paraguay River is the Chaco, a dry desert dominated by scrub brush, snakes and just about anything that will grow thorns or kill you. Everything east of the Paraguay River is slightly more fertile, flat, and farmed. All of it is intensely hot.

 In the early 1930’s Paraguay become the destination for thousands of Mennonite immigrants fleeing religious persecution under the Bolshevik government in Russia. Mennonites are a distinct group of evangelical Christians that hold to a strict doctrine of pacifism. Since their early persecution in Holland they have travelled throughout the world, establishing “colonies” in countries that would allow them to practice their faith and maintain their unique culture. The Mennonites are a hardy lot, and had developed a reputation for being able to farm almost any kind of country. Paraguay opened its doors to them and decided to see what they could do with the dessicated soil of the Chaco. They were  turned loose with no government support and the simple promise that their religious beliefs and their way of living life as a community would never be threatened. They had been made this promise before by Catherine the Great, so they made sure to get this one in writing.

The story of the Mennonites is one of a resilient faith and perpetual pioneership. Today they thrive in the Chaco, but it came at a heavy cost. They say (translated from German) that the first generation has death, the second generation has trials, and the third reaps the rewards. Today the Mennonites preside over a prosperous community of cattle ranches, soybean, peanut and sesame farms, and townships. They live life with a strict adherence and dedication to their community and supporting each other. Daily life is governed by the Cooperative, which forms the backbone of their economic world. These are not the kerchief clad, traditional Mennonites from Pennsylvania or the infamous colonies of Bolivia. These are modern day Mennonites who have separated their faith (which most have retained) from culture, which has adapted and evolved to the Chaco.

In the 1940’s a group of Mennonite widows who had lost their husbands in the war boarded a ship called the Volendam and sailed for Buenos Aires. Several months later they were dropped by train into the Chaco with nothing but the clothes on their back and started hacking out a life, acre by acre. They founded a town called Neu-Halbstadt, which exists to this day. There are few other places in history where you will discover a story of such tenacity and of such suffering. A group of single women, pitted against one of the most inhospitable places on earth, creating life and a home through force of will and very little else. Today Neu-Halbstadt is a fully functioning community with several thousand inhabitants. It has bakeries, schools, several churches, a hospital and a Cooperative. A memorial stands on the main street, and testament to the sacrifice made. Daniella’s Oma Loewen was one of these pioneers.

Oma spent almost a decade in Paraguay, then immigrated to Germany with the husband she had married in the Chaco, and a baby daughter barely a year old. From Germany they made their way to Canada. We knew little about her life there, aside from a few stories. Like a thousand other stoic immigrants, she had locked away the memories of those hard times and chose to focus on the future. Oma also didn't speak much English, and it was only after Daniella had relearned her German 10 years ago that she finally heard these stories from Oma herself. None of Daniella’s family had ever visited the Chaco – Oma’s time there remained a part of her that lacked the detail and colour that we knew of the rest of her life. We knew she had been assigned a plot of land, that she had built a house, laying each brick herself and white washing the walls with her own hands. Beyond that we knew little. Where was the property? Was her house still standing? Did anyone there remember her?

Daniella and I were both raised in contemporary Mennonite communities of faith. We grew up surrounded by recent immigrants from Paraguay who had come to Canada, seeking an easier life. They always seemed a bit misplaced, and not just because it was hard to think of a Paraguayan in snow. These are people forged by the hardship of persecution and immigration. Their life is a simple one governed by the pragmatics of squaring off against the harshness of an indifferent land, their customs shaped by a community fighting for survival. Canada was easy living compared to the Chaco, and there was no longer a need to “circle the wagons”.

We didn’t know anyone directly in Paraguay however, so we sought an introduction from one of our Canadian friends. The response was immediate and enthusiastic. “Of course you should go to Paraguay, let me talk to my cousin.” Text messages flew back and forth, and within 24 hours we had been personally invited to 3 different homes. The response from each was almost identical “Yes, come! We will drink terere and eat asado.” Terere is the cold form of mate (green) tea, drunk communally from a cup with a stainless steel straw that is passed around the conversation circle. Asado is beef BBQ. Both are consumed in vast quantities and should be considered the national sport of Paraguay. We needed no further invitation.

Our primary host in Paraguay are Ferdinand and Veronica, cousins to our friends from Vancouver. They received us like long lost family. We are immediately offered air conditioned rooms (it was 40⁰C) and it wasn’t long before the fat from thick beef steaks was sizzling over glowing embers. News of our visit traveled fast. Vacationing is not something that third generation, hard working immigrant farmers do very much of, so the story of a Canadian family (they even speak German!) who had driven all the way from Canada was a curiosity. We stayed barely a day, and suddenly our social calendar is filled for the next two weeks. Families we had met briefly while in Canada, someone’s distant relative that knew our family from so and so….hospitality is fundamental to Mennonite culture, and we feel fortunate to be on the receiving end of it. Even the mechanic who worked on our truck extends an invitation for dinner (asado of course).

The boys feel like they have come home. Kids their age, home-cooked meals, toys, their own beds to sleep in. When someone asks Elias how he was enjoying Paraguay, he responds that he is happy to finally be sleeping on a proper mattress (our kids have no qualms about throwing their parents under the bus). Ferdinand himself is no stranger to raising boys, and digs out his air rifle, handing it to Jonah, who spends hours patrolling the bush behind the house, hunting up birds and lizards. Waldmann, the resident German Shepherd follows along, eager to pick up a free meal when Jonah’s aim is good. We are taken out to visit the far-flung estancias (ranches) where cattle doze in the shade of the 40⁰C heat. We hunt Caiman in the irrigation ponds with shotguns, and drive the dusty roads into the coolness of the falling sun looking for jaguars and tapir. We attend an auction for behemoth Santa Getrudi stud bulls with names like “Vegas Meatwagon”. We sit down at tables laden with deep fried crocodile tail, and fish for electric eels. The boys stalk the pond edges for giant toads. Everywhere we go, we eat more steak than I ever thought possible. I consider myself a fairly accomplished meateater, but I couldn’t hold a candle to the quantities of meat consumed by the Paraguayans.

We also spend hours in various museums, which detail the Mennonite story meticulously. The boys are piecing together another dimension of their heritage. They have always known they are Mennonite, but now they too have trodden the dry earth, and they know what it means to pray for rain. One afternoon we are invited to visit a nearby school established to provide education and training opportunities for the Indigenous communities in West Paraguay. The founders of the school were some of the first in the country to set down the Guarani language into writing, and students are taught first in their native language with a view to safeguarding it in the face of increasing Latinisation. The school is proud of their track record….the first generation of Indigenous teachers is now working at the school with the goal of eventually transitioning the entire leadership and governance into local hands.

The Mennonites have a reputation for being hardworking, but the Chaco has no sympathy for those trying to toil through the afternoon heat. Even the Mennonites have adopted the Latin siesta, and we spend hours in circled lawnchairs, sucking ice cold terere through sweating steel straws. Terere is the drink that underpins the social fabric in Paraguay. No gathering, important conversation or business deal happens without terrere. Thermoses of cold water are tended and refilled carefully, and come with shoulder straps to make them mobile. The highly respected thermos maker “Stanley” has developed a custom line of mate “guampas”. Church service includes a terrere break. COVID very nearly destroyed Mennonite society, not because of the illness itself, but because it became clear that the practice of sharing a common mate guampa could no longer continue (although it appears, three years post COVID, the shared cup has also survived. We were offered cups from others liberally).

During our time in the Chaco, Daniella held out a small glimmer of hope that we might uncover some remnant of her Oma’s time there. We weren’t quite sure what we were looking for, but we had the right man for the job helping us. Ferdinand is well connected, has held almost every position in the Cooperativa, and cultivates his own fascination with history. He fires off a few text messages. The next evening, as we sat in the shade (the only place you will find a Paraguayan for any length of time), he grunts. We might have something, he says. Tomorrow, we go to Neu-Halbstadt. 

Neu-Halbstadt has a main street wide enough to turn around a team of oxen, with neatly tended properties lining it for a distance of about 1 kilometer. It is laid out in the same manner that our Prairie towns were, following a simple grid laid down by a happy surveyor who has little opposition from the topography. We pull up in front of the office of the town registrar, and are ushered into the offices of Mr. Goosen. Mr. Goosen is a history keeper, not the kind who write grand books or give lectures, but the kind that through fastidious attention to detail, and an uncommon love for paperwork has safeguarded the stories of this town for generations. He asks a few questions about the birth names of Maria Suderman, then pads over to a wooden sideboard, which is filled with stacks of ledgers. He opens the door, and runs his finger along the spines until he stops at one of the very first volumes. With practiced fingers he flips the yellow pages slowly, then pauses. “Ah yes”, he says, and lays the open ledger gently on Daniella’s lap. There, in spidery blue ink, is the original signature of her Oma, indicating her consent to the marriage of Henry Loewen, in the Colonia Neuland. Daniella’s eyes filled with tears. Her Oma had passed away two years ago in Winnipeg, and here we were, on the other side of the world, holding a new, very delicate fragment of her life. It was more than a signature. It was a stake planted into the hard earth of the Chaco that said, I came, and I survived. Remember my story.

Mr. Goosen was kind enough to issue an official marriage and birth certificate to Daniella’s family, acknowledging both the marriage of Oma Loewen but also the birth of their daughter Marianne. Neither of these documents had ever existed. The documents were sealed with gusto and affection, a smoothing over of a bump in history’s long forgotten paper trail. in He then turned his attention to the location of where Oma might have lived. Once again, the ledgers provided a clue. The town grid was laid out with about 50 parcels lined up along the main street. The parcels were long and narrow. The uncommon thinness of the parcels allowed for the homesteads to be placed close together along the street to preserve community, while ensuring enough space to farm. Back then community was not optional luxury, it was a survival mechanism. The registrar indicates that Maria Suderman’s parcel was the third from the corner, north side of the street. We jumped in the truck. It was difficult to know where one parcel stops and another ends, but Ferdinand helped us decipher, and soon we were standing in front of the property. This must be it.

There are a small handful of black and white photographs that exist of Oma’s life in Paraguay. The best one shows her standing in front of the buildings she built with her own two hands. She is holding the lead ropes of a team of horses. In most photographs from this day and age it would have been a man. In the background are a small collection of buidlings with clean whitewashed walls, tin roofs, and framing a neat yard. Many of the locals don’t bother with the whitewash, but Maria Suderman was raised otherwise. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” she might have said, and spent the extra effort to paint her buildings a tidy white. One of the few stories that she told about her homesteading years was how she had built her buildings with handmade bricks. Bricks mixed with water and the fine, bone-dry Chaco soil and laid in the old style.

The house no longer stands, that much is clear. In its place there is a low, modern brick building currently occupied by a restaurant. We ask the owner for permission to wander. The thermometer has climbed to 44⁰C, and even the beetles are scuttling for shade. Bottle trees dot the yard, throwing a mottled shade onto the dirt. Behind the squat brick house is a small timber framed building. Through open doors I can see the usual collection of old wheelbarrows, splintered shovels and broken transmissions that seem to be found on every former homestead. This would have been a barn in the early days. It’s a simple post and beam with uncomplicated joints and brick infill walls. At some point the roof has been replaced with more modern, manufactured clay tiles. In one corner the bricks are beginning to crumble and fall away. I pull a fragment out to take a closer look. Across the flat top face of the brick there are the curving lines that a wire cutter would have a made, squaring off the excess mud from the mold. These are handmade bricks. There is not enough information to know for sure whether this is the barn that Oma Loewen built, but the location, construction style and the handmade bricks all make sense. Piece by piece, her life here is beginning to fall into place. You can see the place where it would have made sense to plant the vegetable garden, where the wagon would have stood and the way the original house would have fit between the shade trees.

It is a strange thing, to know a person all your life, and then a fragment of brick, or a signature in a ledger brings an entirely new part of their existence rushing into fulling living colour. We had travelled all the way around the world, to a place that had never really featured in Daniella’s mental image of her family history. It was a place she knew from a few old photographs and a handful of stories, but bit by bit this location became a place, one with meaning and connection. The Oma Loewen we knew only from the tidy suburban kitchens of Winnipeg was now here, making bricks in the heat of the Paraguayan sun.

We have spent more time than we had planned in Paraguay. It was easy to slip into the comfort of home-cooked meals, a weekly rhythm, and the friendliness of our hosts. The boys in particular have become attached to this place and not just because of the comfort. We have experienced much kindness from strangers on the road so far, but here we were taken in like family. We have learned much about our own history and about a place I had only known from childhood stories.

 So what is Paraguay? Paraguay is a slow drive down a dirt country road in the delicious coolness of dusk, with the boys riding in the pickup bed on lawnchairs. It is pot-bellied bottle trees, squatting in the bush, their crowns throwing a welcome shade over a hot land. Paraguay is looking to the horizon, hoping for rain. Paraguay is unlocked front doors and open invitations. It is sheet cake eaten straight from the pan, quantity and quality, but no frills. It is building a life the hard way, one brick at a time. It is an uncompromising ethic of hospitality born of necessity, that has now become a way of life. It is a story of faith, hardships and fighting the odds, and slowly winning. Paraguay is a circle of lawn chairs set out in the shade of a tin roof, where there is always an empty chair waiting for you.