May the Odds Be Ever in Their Favor

The year is 3050, and the time has finally arrived. It's everyone's favorite part of the year: the 84^th annual Hunger Games. You enter the arena confidently: after all, you have a solid Hanover College education, about $700 in your bank account, and you're in, like, the greatest sorority ever (shout-out to my sisters watching at home). “You're fine, you've got this,” you think.. Until you see the competition. It's a 20 year-old member of the Guarani community. This is about the time you start thinking that you hope he takes credit cards or will trade 35 used text books for a chance to live. Otherwise, you're screwed. That's that. I don't know how to trap my own food. I don't know how to fight, and I don't run fast. In this setting, these are the things that matter. However, these are not the things that my life in rural North America has taught me because these are not the things we value. We often mistakenly use our title as Americans interchangeably with “better.” Because we are “civilized,” we MUST be better than a tribe in the rainforest. However, while their definitions of good/bad, important/useless, edible/inedible vary from ours, that does not make ours better. There are so many things that our culture could learn from theirs, if only we could admit that.



There were so many things in this chapter that stood out to me about the Guarani way of life. One of them was their independence. Because of the farming and hunting abilities within the communities, they are able to operate completely autonomously from market systems. They know that they can grow or catch what they need to survive, so buying from retailers is an option that they avoid when they are unhappy with prices. I don't know of anyone who can do this. (In fact, while reading this chapter, the closest comparison that I could make with the Guarani tribe was Wendell Berry. I then realized how strange it is that Wendell Berry has received years of national publicity and praise for choosing to do with his life what every Guarani man and woman has been doing for generations.) The importance of their economic independence is that they have not become slaves to the market. While people in the Global North may feel sympathy for these people for being constrained by the forest or for lacking our level of freedom, we voluntarily lock on the handcuffs of society and capitalism every time we purchase at Walmart what we could have grown in our own backyards.

The second thing that interested me about the Guarani culture was that one third of the daylight hours are spent "resting, relaxing, and socializing" (52). As a North American college student always striving for more (just like I've been taught and told to do), I feel fortunate if I interact with people for more than 30 minutes between 8 am and 10 pm. The Guarani people are able to spend so much of their day socializing because that is something that their culture values. Yes, there is emphasis placed on success and production, but what are the benefits of these things if there are no friends with whom to share them?

This summer, I had the privilege of volunteering with an organization in the Peruvian Amazon called crees. This organization serves two purposes: one is to research the rainforest's biodiversity in order to gauge the rainforest's ability to regenerate after deforestation (which, it has been concluded, is almost fully). The second goal of the organization is to improve the lives of the forest's inhabitants. Given permission by the homeowner, the organization plants gardens in yards and teaches civilians how to grow food and tend to their garden. A second part of this community education focuses on agroforestry, which is something that the Guarani seem to have perfected. However, not everyone is as knowledgeable about the rainforest as the Guarani. As the chapter stated, the rainforest actually has very infertile soil and in order to reap its benefits, a worker of the land must know how to interact with nature rather than against it. Unfortunately, many people in the forest do not know how and are not willing to learn, preferring to continue planting unprofitable banana trees than to integrate more profitable plants, such as hardwood trees, into their agroforestry plots. The following video shows Reynaldo, a crees employee, practically begging his fellow forest dwellers to practice agroforestry and choose to live in harmony with the nature around them, much like the Guarani have been doing for centuries.