Birthday Bash

It’s Holy Week here and around the world, and in Paraguay that means a week of vacations in remembrance of Jesucristo’s death and resurrection. Nearly everyone from the church is taking advantage of the time to visit relatives, so I, too, have decided to use this holy week for a vacation to see and hear the sights and sounds of the country I normally don’t have the time for. The things I’ve done the past few days will take up a few pages to explain, but I think they’ll give you and me a better understanding of Paraguay and her culture.

The first big day was last Saturday, the 15^th, and coincidentally my birthday, too. Paraguayans make a big deal out of birthdays, and the custom is to greet the birthday boy or girl with kisses and blessings and all sorts of show. Everyone asks for weeks ahead of time what your birthday plans are, and then for days after the fact they ask how it all went down. As for me, I hoped for a quiet birthday without much show, so I decided to visit Pilar, my Georgetown friend serving with a Catholic organization about an hour and a half bus ride away in Itagua.

I got off the bus around eleven in the morning along the main route, where Pilar was excited to greet me and show me around town. Itagua is known as a center for fancy Paraguayan needle and stitchwork, so nearly every local shop has windows full of beautifully colored and elaborately patterned fabrics. The town is far more colonial, and beautiful, too, than most of the neighborhoods I’ve seen in Asuncion. The central church and plaza are still the central parts of town where everyone comes to relax and do business, and the lazy streets are all lined with beautiful columned porticoes and Spanish-looking architecture. While Lambare, the neighborhood where I’m living, feels like New Jersey with its strip malls and endless, poorly-organized neighborhoods, Itagua seems like a beautiful, purposefully-designed New England village with life centered around the church.

Pilar then showed the ministry where she works, a serious neighborhood helps organization run by three serious nuns called the Good Shepherd. The ministry has several arms, each reaching out to embrace and serve the lives of many poor people in Itagua. One seeks to improve the livelihood of exploited women in the needlecraft industry, providing a co-op and network of help through which they can sell their crafts and earn fair wages. Another branch, the one Pilar is involved with, is a sort of microfinance enterprise that loans families money to raise animals and sell at profit, all the while offering the encouragement and training to continue growing a business responsibly. A third ministry, finally, matches poor Paraguayan children with donors from North America to provide the little ones with health care, educational materials, and decent daily meals in the context of a Christian community. I was very pleased to see all the ways these three Catholic sisters, and their three American volunteers, are so wrapped up and tied into serving the community as a witness for Christ. Their work, like the school project in Lambare, is having real good effects on the entire neighborhood around them.

After being showed around the ministry center and nunnery and actually being invited to a second lunch with the Paraguayan nuns, we went to visit a family being helped by the loan/education program Pilar helps coordinate. We went with the purpose of seeing the family’s first pig, Bonita, before they butchered her and sent her carcass off to market. When we arrived, though, we were already too late. The butchering had taken place at 6 in the morning, not at 6 at night as Pilar had thought, so instead of getting to see a real live breathing pig, we were invited to have a bite to eat. The family had kept and cooked Bonita’s fatty skin with some corn flower, making it into a delicious treat along with some boiled mandioca and red wine. Pilar and I were disappointed not to see the pig alive, but not too disappointed, because we left mighty happily with our stomachs full of rich fresh pork.

After our visit with the family who butchered their pig, I returned home to Lambare once again and went to Saturday night church, where everyone greeted me with great emotion and smiles upon my completion of 22 full years. Afterwards, I spent my evening just as I would have liked to: quietly, with a few friends, and with plenty memories of a birthday well-spent in Paraguay.