Sunday

The church here is fantastic. We went to a ward that hardly has its equal anywhere. The lessons were well prepared, the people had solid things to teach that were easily applicable to my life. There were so many things that reminded me of home. There was even a person playing the piano who was a native Paraguayan. The lessons covered topics from parenting to staying firm in the gospel. After a wonderful family, the , invited us to lunch and gave us a ride home. That way we avoided the taxi fees.
I sure appreciate meeting firm families like this. It gives me hope for Paraguay. The father works in the government and the mother is an IT professional. The daughter is a ballerina instructor and artist and the son is an up and coming nationally recognized footbol athlete.
The father and I talked at length about our project and his take is that the country has a culture of handouts and not handiwork. The culture of begging is so prevalent and coupled with the corruption that the culture has begun to shift in that direction. He also was quite critical of the leftist nature of the government as a cause of some of the hand-out ready people. We also talked about the export of soy to Brazil. Large companies buy huge parts of Paraguay and farm soy and then export the product to Brazil for further processing. This fellow believes that if they could move up the value chain to some of the post-harvesting processing that this would make them less dependent on foreign commodities markets, reducing price volatility. We agreed that there is too much risk for a foreign firm to come and invest money in a factory because of land seizures that have occurred from time to time. The constitution apparently guarantees the people a place to farm, and the government occasionally allocates land to them that is privately held. On the other hand, there are many youth here who are graduating from technical schools with no place of employment to use those skills, so there is an opportunity to take advantage of that labor in a factory. Interesting stuff...