Slash and Burn, and Terere

08-22-10

Last December I selected the song "The Final Countdown" by Europe as my backtone on my cellphone.  Volunteers get about 10 dollars a month automatically added to our Peace Corps phone plan and since we never end up using all those minutes, we can waste that money in the form of annoying ringtones, or in this case, a backtone, so when someone calls me instead of your traditional boring ring, they get to rock out to "IT"S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!" and that awesome beat that follows.   I picked the song exactly 1 year before our completion of service date, and the countdown is approaching.  Not that I am really counting down the days or anything, life has been good pretty good lately.  The garden is full of veggies, bee work is starting up again, everything is starting to grow a little faster, and the temperature is rapidly climbing.

It seems Paraguayan Winter is on its way out and the very few days of enjoyable 70-degree weather are almost gone.  It is getting hot again and that means the ice cold terere sessions are starting earlier in the day and lasting later into the afternoon.  Soon, nobody will be drinking hot mate in the evening, and only the hardcore early birds will drink mate in the early morning by the fire.  It has been dry lately, almost a little bit of a drought.  Unfortunately this is also the season farmers burn their fields and it has caused some nasty forest fires around this area.  One farmer was burning his cow pasture and it accidentally spread to the hillside and he burned away a huge hunk of the forest on the mountain.  Pure foolishness.  Slash and burn agriculture is still very much the standard way of growing food for I would say most of the farmers around here.  They burn back the dry grass every year so new grass comes through, but it very quickly destroys their soil and eventually their fields get filled with more and more woody weeds and grasses that the cows won't eat.  So, they go look for another patch of land to cut down all the trees, burn away what is left and leave it for grass to eventually seed itself so the cows can graze, or they plow it up and plant their corn or mandioca.  Most of the fields in this area are on a hillside so they lose a lot of soil to erosion and in just a couple of years a field can get depleted to the point where no more crops will grow.  Off to cut down another plot of forest and start a new field.  You can see how deforestation quickly becomes a big problem.  One thing I have been working with some of my neighbors on lately is to mark out contour lines in their sloped fields so they can plow against the slope instead of with it, and thus reducing erosion.  We are also planting some semi-permanent barrier lines with trees and shrubs in some fields to help hold back the soil.  Anyways, that has been keeping me fairly busy the past couple of weeks.

Today, in honor of the first really hot day (the mid 90's), I cut my hair, put away all my Winter clothes, and swept out the house.  Afterwards, I sat down to an icy cold pitcher of terere.  And since terere is soon to become a regular part of the day, I figured I would talk a little bit about it for those of you who might not know what I am talking about.  Terere is a cold drink of yerba mate tea.  Yerba mate is a type of tree native to Paraguay and the leaves are harvested, smoked and ground to make a dried chunky powder used for terere (iced) and mate (basically the same as terere but with hot water instead).  It is a stimulant very similar to caffeine in tea or coffee and very bitter at first, but the taste grows on you quickly.  The yerba is put into a cup called a guampa, which means "cow horn" in Guarani, and the tea is sipped through a metal straw with a filter called a bombilla.  Guampas are usually made of wood, metal, or some are still the traditional hollowed out cow horn.  Next, the water is prepared in a pitcher with lots of ice and often times various leaves and roots for flavor and medicinal purposes.  Different types of mints, lemongrass, and citrus leaves are popular for their refreshing taste on hot days.  The first pour of infused water is slowly soaked up by the dry yerba mate and it looks like an invisible person is actually drinking the first pour.  This is attributed to Santo Tomas (for the Spanish word "tomar," to drink) and some say it is bad luck to drink from the bombilla before Santo Tomas has taken the first turn.  Another pour of water goes into the guampa and then the server often drinks first to clean out the bombilla from any chunks of yerba that the straw didn't filter out.  This first sip is the strongest and sometimes the server will spit out the first pour or two.  Then, once the water runs well through the bombilla, the guampa is filled and passed to the first person, usually to the left.  They drink until the water is gone and the straw starts to slurp.  The guampa is passed back to the server to be filled again from the pitcher and then it is passed to the next person in the circle.  When someone has had enough, they say "gracias" to the server when they return the guampa indicating that they are satisfied and the server can skip them from now on.  A session of terere can keep going round and round, sometimes even the pitcher has to be refilled, until everyone has said "gracias" and the server is done.  So that is terere and it is difficult to understand Paraguay without it.  I recently read a cute poem written by an anonymous Paraguayan describing the importance of terere to their culture.  Here are some translated lines from the poem:
"In Paraguay, nobody drinks terere because they are thirsty...
Terere is exactly the opposite of television,
It makes you converse when it is with someone, and it makes you think when it is by yourself...
It happens in all houses.  In the rich and the poor...
Yerba is the only thing that every house always has
Always, in times of inflation, hunger, with democracy or no, in whatever hardship or bad circumstance,
And if one day you don't have yerba, a neighbor will give you some without hesitation.
Yerba is never denied to anyone...
Put simply, terere is a demonstration of values...
It is respect for appropriate times to speak up, and to listen while another is talking and vice versa...
This is the only country where the decision to leave childhood and begin being an adult happens on one particular day.  It has nothing to do with wearing long pants, getting circumcised, going off to college, or living away from your parents.  Here, it starts the day that we choose to drink terere, by ourselves.
It is not coincidence.  The day a boy drinks his first terere with nobody else in the house, in this moment, he has discovered that he has a soul.
None of us forget the day that for the first time we drank terere by ourselves..."

Hope you enjoyed that!  It is a little cheesy, but I think you get a good idea of how important terere is to Paraguayans.  I will leave it there for now.  This week I am doing a presentation on Top-Bar beehives and trying to eat up the beets, carrots, and swiss chard in the garden before it all goes to seed.  Send me an email anytime and I will do my best to get back to you.  Have a great week and hope to hear from you soon!  Peace!