This past
week I went to a very dark place, perhaps the darkest recess of my Peace Corps
experience thus far. As I’ve become more and more integrated into my community
the people have started to open up more and more to me. Several señoras have brought me into their circles
of social knowledge (i.e. chisme),
and have shared with me some of the most intensely personal experiences a
person can share. They share with me their stories of suffering, the suffering
of others, the hatred that others have for them, and the hatred that they have
for others. Relationships of all sorts in the community are truly toxic.
Last
weekend one of the movies that happened to be playing on the 2 channels that we
get out here in the campo was Sin
City, and although I didn’t realize it while I was watching it, I realized this
week that Paraguay is its own metaphoric version of Sin City. Its many warring
factions are not kept in check by the rule of law because most law-enforcers
and other holders of power are indeed members of the various warring factions
and are at liberty to use said power as a weapon when necessary (with little or
no consequences if they play the game correctly).
On
Wednesday after having a conversation with a teacher that I know, I was shocked
and saddened by a story she told me. A very capable and intelligent young
teacher with a toddler son, she applied for an open job at a nearby school. She
won the position (winner is determined by the Ministry of Education based on
resume/ability/interview/etc.), but because she refused to sleep with a person
in a position of power at the school, he and his family mounted a huge campaign
against her, spreading rumors about her, getting signatures on a petition,
holding tiny “demonstrations” against her, and exploiting her disability (due
to a moto accident, the woman walks
with a limp), claiming that it would impede her from performing her teaching
duties. His goal was to get her kicked out of the position she had just won. Several
people who I know in the community turned against her and did and said horrible
things. The first day that she was supposed to go to work, she received threats
by text message from one of my neighbors (who by the way, was 8 months pregnant
with a married man’s baby at the time), who said that if she tried to go into
the classroom, she and other members of her family would drag her out “by her
hair, kicking and screaming” if necessary. She was too terrorized by the threat
of violence to go to school that day. (And indeed, the “protestors”- mainly
family members of the director and community members with personal vendettas
against the woman- had gathered and were stationed outside the school.)
She had
often had opportunities to get a job in the nearby school, but had always refused
to sleep with the director. She told him, “No, if I get a job here it’s going
to be because I deserve it, not because I slept with somebody.” He said “Then keep on dreaming, sweetheart.”
Finally, her day came, and she won the job legitimately. In the end, he still
got her kicked out and put somebody else in the position. “I always knew I
would never be able to keep the job,” she told me. “The director is too
powerful. He has too many friends in high places in the Ministry.” And it’s true.
All it really would’ve taken is one or two phone calls and she would’ve been
out, period.
I had heard
many versions of this story from different “players” in the community (chisme is, of course, the national sport
in Paraguay, people often joke). I’ve also heard some other stories recently
about things people have done to other people. And yesterday I just went into a
very pensive state, wanting desperately to understand what makes people feel
that it’s O.K. to treat each other the way that they do. It’s like we are lost
here; it’s as though there are no guiding values or sense of morality. Even I sometimes feel as though I am drowning
in a sea of confusion, losing myself, desperately trying to grasp onto those
Sunday school values that have always guided me through life… and finding that
they are useless and cannot keep me afloat in this Sin City-like society in
which I seem to find myself. When you live in Sin City, maintaining such “Sunday
School” values can leave you completely at the mercy of others, meaning that at
best you are powerless, but at worst, you become a victim of human nature’s
worst.
It’s a
metaphor because in Sin City, the war is real, physical. When you lose, you die
a real, physical death; your major organs go one-by-one and all your vital
signs stop. In Potrero Baez, the war is mainly social/psychological. When you
lose, you die a no less real, but social & emotional death. And more often
than not, it isn’t a sudden-death, but a long, slow, process of pain and suffering
that lasts a lifetime. Like they say: As soon as you’re born, you start to die,
and you keep dying your entire life.
And that is
how the game is played, ladies and gentlemen. Life in rural Paraguay is a
minefield of social foibles (starting with who you’re born to) that can make or
break your ability to avoid extreme social/psychological/economic/physical suffering…
but the reality is that the social war is constant, nobody is safe, and nobody
goes untouched. At some point, everybody is excluded, everybody is abused,
everybody is used… and if you refuse to exclude, abuse, and use, then You.
Lose.
What really
shocks me is that not only is there no practice
of good and ethical values (honesty, integrity, compassion, responsibility,
love, respect, equality, etc.)… but there really is not even a rhetoric, a pretense, or even the most minimal consideration for those values. They are considered useless,
period. One who adheres to them is naïve, period. One must become letrado (i.e. understand the rules of
the REAL game) as soon as possible, in order to survive, period. There is no time
or use for Sunday School chatter in a dog-eat-dog world. Nobody pretends to be
good- the most they try to do is show that others are worse than they are.
Morality here
is an option, a luxury, that is often only comfortably available to those who
do not know necessity. And those who do not know necessity are precisely those who are MOST likely to
abuse their relative power to get what they want, when they want it. No ethical
or moral scruples to worry about.
Welcome to
Sin City… my house is the 3rd one on the right.
“So many soldiers on the other side… I take
their lives so they can’t take mine.” (Avenged Sevenfold, “M.I.A.”)
