Family in Haiti

My sister and brother-in-law, Ruth and Steve Hersey, are missionaries serving at Quisqueya Christian School in Haiti. I've been trying to call them ever since I heard about the powerful earthquake last evening, but haven't been able to get through yet.

Today Steve was able to get to a computer briefly and sent the following update:

Quick message while I have email at a guest house.  Most communication
is down.  Little phone contact.  No internet at school or home.

This is terrible.  Spent last night outside on soccer field with
family.  We are OK.  House is structurally OK, but a mess.  School
will be closed indefinitely.

Dead bodies everywhere.  I've contacted all but 6 teachers.  Several
good friends are missing.  Many big buildings collapsed. Hopefully
we'll get communications back soon.

Many teachers involved in search and rescue.

We are OK, but please keep us in your prayers.

They will be dealing with an overwhelming amount of need over the next few weeks. They already live in a hugely needy place, and now the little that many people have has been taken from them.

Air Conditioners Make You Sick

Today's ABC Color, a Paraguayan newspaper, reports that the Paraguayan Ministry of Health has warned citizens of the danger of using their air conditioner too much. The cool air, they advise, can cause respiratory diseases. Doctor Margarita Ojeda, director of the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias y del Ambiente (INERAM), the National Institute of Respiratory and Environmental Diseases, advises Paraguayans to turn on their air conditioners before lying down to sleep, cooling down the room, and then "maintain the temperature with the fan."

Keep in mind that night-time temperatures in Asuncion are expected to dip tonight to 88F, and that daytime temperatures are in the upper 90s and 100s.

A friend told me yesterday that they had resolved not to turn on their air conditioner but when their upstairs bedroom hit 108 they had to relent.

Interestingly, the same newspaper reports that ANDE, the national electric company, had the previous night reported a record peak in power consumption. At 10 pm last night Paraguayan consumers were using 1,830 megawatts, up from last year's peak of 1,713.

My understanding is that 100% of Paraguay's power needs are supplied by three hydroelectric plants, one of which, Itaipú, has the highest output of any power plant in the world.

But an aging distribution system means that Paraguayan consumers can't always get the maximum benefit from their dams. Transformers blow, switches fail, and inefficient power lines cause significant losses.

The coincidence of the two articles appearing on the same day was not lost on Paraguayan readers, several of whom commented that the government should just be honest about where the request for moderate air conditioner use was really coming from. A couple even challenged the Minister of Health to follow her own advice and try to get a good night's sleep.

Some New Features

I've added a link to our latest newsletter, which you can access at the bottom of the left column. And be sure to check out our photos by clicking on one of the slideshows in the right column!

Dos mil diez (2010)

Our New Year's Eve was pretty tranquil. Since we're in the US this year we're living near my family, which means we get to spend time with them. My parents and my brother and his family came over for dinner.

Lizet made salteñas. Salteñas are a delicious pastry from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where Lizet's from. They're a version of the pan-Latin empanada, a flour pastry filled with chicken, beef, cheese, or other things, and often deep-fried. The salteña, though, is baked. It can be filled with beef, either fresh or in the form of charque, which is sun-dried. Or it can have chicken, which is how Lizet usually makes it, along with raisins, boiled eggs, onion, garlic, olives, cumin, salt, and pepper.

One unique feature of salteñas from Santa Cruz is that the pastry has an orange tint. This comes from the addition to the dough of the extract of the urucú seed. Urucú is the achiote plant, which grows in Bolivia and Paraguay, and from which the international food industry gets the natural food coloring anatto.

Lizet's salteñas are delicious and always a hit. In fact, she's really a talented cook, which is something I didn't realize until after we were married!

After dinner, Mom & Dad left, we put the boys to bed, and my brother and his family stayed until shortly after ten, playing 'Whoonu' which we had never played before. Anna and Lizet and I stayed up for a while watching the celebration in Times Square but Lizet and I were in bed well before midnight.

In Paraguay we would probably have been up adding to the cacophony of fireworks, though in our neighborhood, as rural as it is, the cacophony is pretty subdued. We shot some off last year but Timothy was pretty scared of them, and Oso didn't like them at all. Lizet's parents and her sisters were there to share the celebration with us.

Here's to a surprise-filled 2010!

Learning Guarani Online

There don't seem to be a whole lot of good resources online to learn Guarani. Recently a colleague sent me a link to LearnGuarani.com, a site that's under development by Stephen. So far so good. I'm hoping this will develop into a useful resource for beginning Guarani learners.

If you want to learn Guarani not just as a linguistic exercise--that is, if you're interested in actually communicating with mother-tongue Paraguayan Guarani speakers--you need to keep a couple of issues in mind:

First, there's a movement to "purify" Guarani by removing as much Spanish vocabulary from it as possible. There is a sense in this movement that Guarani is somehow weakened, corrupted, or made less beautiful by the inclusion of loanwords. Whether that is true or not is a subject for another posting, but suffice it to say that if you want to use a Guarani that actually communicates, you should focus on "Guarani-Jopara," (mixed Guarani,) or Paraguayan Popular Guarani, which does include a lot of Spanish loanwords. The words that academics have either created to reference new concepts or revived from archaic sources will leave most Paraguayan speakers perplexed and instead of promoting relationship will tend to increase distance between you and your listener.

Second, if you are learning Guarani with a Paraguayan Guarani-speaker as a resource, generally speaking he or she will not be confident about writing in Guarani. Paraguayan children now learn to write in Guarani in school but this wasn't always the case. I do not mean to suggest that Paraguayans are illiterate but most adult Paraguayans feel much more confident reading and writing in Spanish than in Guarani, even if Guarani is their first language. Unless your Guarani resource person has studied Guarani, either he/she will be reluctant to tell you how to spell things in Guarani or he/she will spell it in a way that diverges from the accepted orthography.

For this reason you are likely to come across a number of different spellings for the same word, such as: jaé, jhaé, jha'e, or ha'e, (meaning he/she/it,) only the last of which is written in the currently accepted way. (Just look at any map of Paraguay and you'll see a dozen Guarani place names spelled in an orthography based on Spanish that is diferent from the current official orthography!) This can be confusing to the beginner but it's by no means insurmountable. You have to learn to hear the sounds and transcribe what you hear. With practice you'll do this with little difficulty.

If anyone comes across any good online resources for learning Guarani-Jopara, I'd be happy to know about them.

My students

The people I've helped to learn Guarani are now all over Paraguay doing a variety of different tasks. I thought it would be interesting to link to some of their pages and blogs so that you can see who they are.

My very first student, way back in 1995, when I began writing the Guarani text, was James Arritt. Though he's no longer in Paraguay, Paraguay is still in him, as evidenced by his website offering yerba mate for sale.

When the Guarani-Jopara Institute for Missionaries started up in 2000, the first students were Dan and Christie Reich who now live and work in the town of Yuty, about 140 km from where we live, as the crow flies. The same year we were joined by Lindsay Gilliam who had already been a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay so he knew some Guarani. Although he just moved to Loja, Ecuador, Guarani has turned out to be very important for him, because he married Eva, for whom it's a first language! Check out their video on YouTube. That's the first class above: L to R; Andy Bowen, Christie Reich, Dan Reich, Lindsay Gilliam, language helper Irene Ayala.

Subsequent students now working in rural Paraguay include Jeff and Amy McKissick, who operate a mobile medical clinic in the village of San Francisco; Tom and Kelly Stout, who also work in rural Paraguay, though they're currently in the U.S. (check out this exciting project that the McKissicks and the Stouts are involved in!); John Griffin, in Tobati, and Paul and Marla Fields, who direct the work of ABWE in Paraguay. Their daughter, Shellie Silva, studied with us in the same class--she's married to a Guarani speaker. Another ABWE missionary, Laura Fouser, is now located across the border in Campo Grande, Brazil, having learned Spanish, Guarani, and now Portuguese. A short-termer from the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Church named Tonya VanKampen has since married and lives with her husband Kris Dixon in the U.S., though by the looks of their blog they're still very involved in missions!

Other former students who don't seem to have blogs include Dan and Sarah Hough, who live in Caazapá; Gil and Renita Rempel, in Campo 9; Erna Plett and Esther Goertzen, in Caaguazú (the Rempels, Erna, the Goertzens, and the Zachariases are all members of the Evangelical Mennonite Conference); and Steve and Marilyn Haines, who seem to be living in Loma Plata, in the Paraguayan Chaco. Their daughters Rachel and Rebecca studied with us too.

My current class has four students: Greg Cameron (his wife Vonnie studied last year), Travis and Rosey Zacharias, and my wife Lizet. Here's the current class: L to R; Travis, our language helper Norma, Greg, Lizet, and Rosey.

The best I can tell, I've had 28 missionaries study with me since the Guarani institute opened in 2000. I've invested in their lives and now they are investing in the lives of countless others using the resource of Guarani.

We live in Paradise

There may be other people that think they live in Paradise, but I'm pretty sure we do. Paraguay is semitropical and has an amazingly long growing season.

We throw out seeds and they produce fruit plants. We're surrounded by fruit--bananas of three varieties, mangoes, papayas, pineapples, avocados (they are fruit, right?), lemons of two or three kinds, grapefruits, tangerines, so many guava trees it makes me think I should be marketing them, as well as the raspberries that we've planted and that quickly got out of control so that we had to move them to a bigger space. We have some young loquat trees that haven't born fruit yet, and I've recently planted a pecan, a macadamia nut, a fig tree, a cherry tree, and a pome- granate.

We planted some seeds my father-in-law brought us from Bolivia. In Bolivia they call the two fruits ocoró and achachairú, and one of them grows wild here and is known as pakuri. They took months to germinate and not all of them did, but eventually they should bear some nice fruit. We also have a tamarind that will provide some nice juice and maybe sauces some day. And then there's all the native stuff that grows in the forest that's edible--inga and espuma rosa and yvapurû and yvapovõ and who knows what else.

The flowers have been especially beautiful this year--perhaps because of all the rain this spring. I've never seen so many flowers on the timbo trees (Enterolobium contortisiliquum) (that's a timbo behind our house above) and the inga (Inga uruguensis); and the jacarandas (Jacaranda mimosifolia) and yellow lapacho (Tabebuia pulcherrima) have been stunning. I never even noticed the sapirangy (Tabernae- montana australis) flower before, and this year they were all covered with beautiful white blooms.

There's one downside to Paradise--it comes at a price. Bugs. Of course, for an entomologist it would still be Paradise. And I often wish I knew more about them. I recently read that there are 540 species of ants in Paraguay, and I'm always finding new and bizarre bugs around the house (like the rhinoceros beetle above). Unfortunately--and this is the downside--a reasonable share of them bite and so you have to deal with those. Then there are the ones that lay their eggs on you and the ones that burrow into your kids' feet.

But please don't get me wrong. We live in Paradise.