Passing Views

I had just managed to get a seat in one of the sweaty rolling greenhouses that are the buses of Paraguay when I heard tires screech, screams, and lots of glass shattering.

Startled, I looked up from my book and found the windows of the bus were still intact.  Looking through them I found the wreckage: a demolished side of the road fruit stand where crates upon crates of glass soda bottles laid overturned.  A man sat on the asphalt with a solid back of dripping blood.  Another man pulled a child out from the crates bracing his neck, blood dripping down his face.

The bus erupted in shouts and chattering in Guarani– I couldn’t make out enough of any of what was being said to understand what was going on.  I couldn’t even see the vehicle that crashed into the fruit stand, but odds are that it was a motorcycle.

People ran around outside looking for help and trying to call the police, who could arrive anywhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours.  An ambulance may have come, but would really only be a transport vehicle, as ambulances in Paraguay are not equipped with EMTs.  If towns are lucky enough to have an ambulance they are usually driven by a random townsperson who volunteers to do so.

The chaos remained, but we did not, and the bus began to roll forward again.

The scene of the accident was all too well-known to me, it was the single stoplight marking the entrance road into the community where I lived for 10 weeks during training.  Every morning we volunteers nervously crept our way to the edge of this international highway in order to cross and catch the bus on the other side.

I’m sure that “international highway” calls to mind a much different image than the actual reality of this 2-lane road with a small shoulder on each side…yet Paraguay seems to be like that time and again.

When you hear that Paraguay is the second poorest country in South America you expect to be met with in-your-face poverty like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil or the comunas of Medellin, Colombia.  Instead, you’re met with an extreme lack of countrywide infrastructure and safety measures, schools that kill creativity, and rampant corruption, so that when something goes the slightest bit wrong (and mind you, it always will) you will be hard-pressed to find a way to fix it in a timely manner, if at all.

While walking around an outdoor market in Asuncion a few weeks ago a friend and fellow volunteer who had just returned from the U.S. said: “I missed this while I was home…everything in Paraguay is just so much closer to death.”

The words hung heavy in the air as I tried to process what she meant.

We wound through horn-blaring traffic under the 100-degree hot sun, lost in a chaotic marketplace where minutes before my friend was punched in the side by a pickpocketter after notifying the pickpocket’s target to move her bag to her front of her body.

“Seattle was far too clean and orderly for me,” she said.

I thought about seatbelt laws, Amber alerts, food and health inspections, emissions testing, city grid planning systems, electric shock hazard warning labels, crosswalks and crossing guards, citywide water filtration systems…would these things ever exist systematically and with regularity in Paraguay?  Do these things make an entire society further from death?

Scenes like today’s out the bus window can make one long for the safety and security of the United States.  At the same time, it can’t overshadow the feelings of accomplishment and success that Paraguay has to offer, however far and few between they may be.

But may they never be too few, nor too far between.

Tags: comuna, favela, order, paraguay, seattle, south america