Crossing the Boarder

We live close to the Paraguay Argentine boarder and there are about 5,000 mbya living across the boarder from us. A worker from another mission was going across to visit a believer who used to live in Paraguay. He invited me to go along with him. It only took about an hour and a half to get there which is a lot closer than some of the settlements we go to here in Paraguay.

Tito, pictured below, was traveling with us. He is a school teacher in a mbya community. The man we went to visit is his father. He had not seen his parents for three years. This is very common amongst the mbya here. Family members will travel far from each other in order to find work. When Tito and his parents saw each other, they hugged and had tears in their eyes. That was the most emotion I have seen from any mbya. They tend to be very reserved, but in this case you can understand the "emotional outburst."

Here is a picture of the ferry we crossed. They can fit four cars on that thing.

A mbya family crossing the boarder. We gave them a ride to the bus stop about 4 miles from the ferry.

A typical mbya house next to where we stayed. We expected to do a lot of visitation and cultural research, but it rained literally the whole time we were there.

We were stuck inside the whole time. The view from the house. It was a huge red mud pit. The dirt in this area is loaded with iron and acid making the dirt red.

This is Brijito, the man we came to visit. The good thing about the rain is that we had a lot of time to talk with him about culture and the situation of the mbya in Argentina.

This is Brijito's daughter. She liked drawing animals in my notebook and then making me guess the name of them. It was fun, but the mbya in Argentina speak more Mbya than Guarani and I don't know many animal names in Mbya. Well, I know more now thanks to my little teacher.

This is were we spent most of our time. I forgot to mention, but it was freezing. We huddled around the fire talking most of the day. This is Brijito's wife.

Ok, so it stopped raining for an hour or so, which gave us plenty of time to kill trees with sling shots. I always cary one with me because it is the main toy for boys. It's incredible how accurate they are.

Overall, it was a good trip and I'm glad I finally got to see some of what's going on across the boarder. Hopefully, we'll be able to go back soon.