emigration thoughts

Guido’s been in Argentina nearly a month now, and tonight a good friend told me that he’s leaving for Spain tomorrow. Every family here with even a bit of money has someone who’s gone abroad to work, sometimes even to New York! It’s such a complicated issue, more poignant perhaps now that I’ve been personally affected by it. But it seems to be true – the people with ganas, desire to work, need to leave Paraguay to better themselves. Here there aren’t many options beyond a subsistence storefront or pharmacy – even those who have the money to go to law school (a six year, outrageously expensive endeavor) find themselves upon graduation without a job. And in my town, even the richest families can’t afford to send their kids for more than a couple years – scholarships for higher education are sorely lacking. Guido says that electricians and other skilled workers work twice as hard in Paraguay as in other countries for half the pay, and that’s if they’re lucky enough to find work. It should be true that those who invest in an education and who are willing to work hard will get ahead, but it’s just doesn’t seem to be the case here.

So all arguments point to leaving Paraguay, until you consider the alternative. Estimates show that half of all Paraguayan women in Spain survive as sex workers. There’s no guarantee that arriving undocumented they’ll be able to gain resident status and then be able to bring over their families, as my friend Guillermo plans to do. I saw firsthand in Brooklyn how life for people in any country who are undocumented can be so tough, without access to health care or police protection or scholarships. And then poor Paraguay is left without anyone to do what work there is here, a true “brain drain.” One PCV told me of his site where there is no economy, no males or anyone working outside the home – the women survive based on payments received from abroad. It’s such a difficult situation, and I wouldn’t want to say that people like Guido need to stay here when there are so little opportunities for them. But then what’s the answer?

When asked, these two guys both told me the answer was a guy named Oviedo who’s a candidate for President and was recently released from jail for plotting a coup and alleged assassination of a vice president a few years ago (they say he was framed). He doesn’t seem to stand any chance in next year’s elections, with Nicanor’s hand-picked successor pretty much guaranteed to win. So they each would support a coup, even an all-out war, to bring about change in Paraguay. I resisted like any good social studies teacher, with quotes from Gandhi that “you must be the change you seek” and that democracy in itself is valuable and that change is a process. Both shot back that democracy sounds nice but it doesn’t actually help the people, especially under a corrupt president, and that Paraguayans lived better under the Stroessner dictatorship. My protest that the human rights violations and lack of basic freedoms couldn’t have been better was quickly shot down – people don’t care how much they can talk against the government if they can’t eat. People were content then and are suffering now, and all the free speech in the world doesn’t change that. This may just be the opinion of two guys I know, but it’s not uncommon here and kind of makes sense. It’s hard when everything you learned and even taught starts to not feel like the absolute truth any more.