Apr-Jul: I'll be in the South Pacific.
Posts about paraguay
Visiting the Aché
Hello from southeastern Paraguay, just about 60 miles from the Brazilian border. This is farm country; the soybean fields stretch as far as you can see in any direction. We’re staying in a little town called Naranjal, which was settled by Brazilian immigrants 30 or 40 years ago when the land opened up for farming.
Before European settlers came to plant soybeans, this land was rainforest, and home to the Aché people, an ancient hunter-gather society who lived in small family groups deep in the forest. But as the forests fell around them, the people had little choice but to abandon their way of life during the 1960s and ’70s. Today they live on six small reservations in eastern Paraguay.
The Aché people’s past is finished, gone with the forest that was their home. How do they respond? How do we? Rage, fear, sadness, helplessness, optimism, joy, excitement, hope — surely all are appropriate. Such immense ecological and sociological change must not be simplified or depicted in absolute terms.
Victor Gómez, a Paraguayan professor, is leading a team to translate the New Testament and part of the Old Testament into Aché by 2015. He and his team hope that their efforts will help the next chapter of Aché history end in triumph, not in sadness. But for now, the pages are blank; the future has not yet been written.
categories paraguay
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