Happy Mardi Gras!

It's Mardi Gras season, so it's hard to get much done around here right now. Most people are working on their costumes for the big day or hanging out with friends diving for beads at parades. It's amazing to me what a family and community-oriented event Mardi Gras is. Before living here, I thought that Mardi Gras was that gross thing of drunks and women flashing their breasts on Bourbon Street. That happens, too, trust me, but only on Bourbon Street. The parades that roll down St. Charles Avenue and along Canal Street are attended by families and children of all ages.
One of the devices I particularly like are wide viewing ladders that people set up so that the kids can sit above the crowd and see the floats --- and be strategically positioned to catch "throws." These ladders are generally about 3 feet wide, and they have a board across the top (between side railings) for sitting. The structures are positioned along the neutral ground, and they're an excellent tool for parade watching.
Yesterday, my friend Liz Lew and I went to see the NOMTOC parade, New Orleans Most Talked About Club, in Algiers. It was fun, although truly long and slow. We were fortunate to have a rooftop spot, so we had a pretty good view of all the bands and floats, but the power lines did deflect a large number of the beads and other throws hurled our way.
It started to rain during the parade, so we moved inside. At a certain point, since Liz wanted to get a printer cartridge, and I wanted to go to another friend's pre-parade brunch, we headed off on our bikes for the ferry. The rain, however, hadn't actually stopped.
So, we got to the ferry and hid under the walkway until it arrived. Unfortunately, at the same time, the rain grew more intense, turning the Mississippi River into a mist-covered, swirling expanse with more droplet-induced freckles than a tub in a shower.
When we reached the other side, I gave up on the idea of going to Liz's to do some porch sitting and have dinner, and I decided to strike out for home.
My glasses, which were covered with rain drops, were not particularly helpful, and the fact that the streets were flooded was also not encouraging. A clanging noise frightened me as a I approached St. Peters from Canal Street. It was a manhole cover that had come out of its rim and was bouncing up and down as water gushed out from the sewer. This was the first time I saw one of these on the way home, but not the last. This scary thing, however, was juxtaposed with the brassy call of a marching band that continued to wind it's way along Canal Street, in spite of the torrential rain.
Although the rain was pretty warm, I thought about what it must be like to go through a hurricane. No fun. I pedaled along at a pretty steady pace, but the water on the edge of the street would come up to the middle of my tire. Clearly the road sloped down from the middle, so I tried to stay as close to the high part as possible while leaving room for the cars that were also trying to get through.
One advantage to being on a bike in this, I have to say, was the knowledge that the water wasn't going to flood my engine.
Oh, I should mention that the garlands of Mardi Gras beads that I had collected at NOMTOC added an oddly cute clinking sound to this whole scene.
While I did manage to stay up long enough to peel off the beads and water-logged clothes to take a hot shower, I did completely crash into a long, afternoon nap, which, I guess, is part of what this whole Mardi Gras thing is supposed to be about.

En la Pampa Argentina

Last weekend I traveled to Irazusta, a tiny town in the Province of Entrerios, about 3 hours North of Buenos Aires. It was like traveling back in time. The roads leading to Irazusta are dirt, and when it rains, they turn into mud. In fact, one of the problems that we had navigating them, although it was dry, were the deep furrows that had been created by trucks traveling on these roads when they were muddy. The bottom of the car was definitely not happy about those ridges of hardened mud.
The train travels through Irazusta twice a week. Only about 300 people live there, and, as you can imagine, everyone knows everyone.
Irazusta is one of the places where the train still travels after Menem privatized the Argentinean railroad in the 1990s. The country went from having 40,000 Km of rail lines to having about 8,000. One of the results was that many small towns like Irazusta simply disappeared because once their connection to the outside world was gone, the railway, they couldn´t survive.
It´s hard to imagine what people in Irazusta do for a living, but there is a local butcher who slaughters cattle that graze in the surrounding fields. There are also people who do light construction work. A few people have factory-style chicken farms, which are a stark contrast to the area´s old-fashioned pastoral scene. I saw a rooster and a couple of hens taking refuge from the sun in the shade of a bush by the side of the road on Saturday morning. What a different life from that of the chickens who never got to walk freely and who are pumped up with antibiotics and hormones.
Making a living is a big issue in the area, and not just for people from Irazusta. As a result, many people who own tracts of farm land are renting those tracts to large companies that use them to plant soybeans. The last census reported that 17 million hectares in Argentina are being cultivated for soy beans. The majority of this is shipped abroad for use as animal fodder or other products.
While farming soy allows smaller landholders to earn something from their property, the cultivation requires immense areas without trees or other vegetation. It´s no surprise then that flooding and landslides have become an issue in different parts of the country. Last week, in fact, one of the main news stories in Argentina were the flooding and mudslides that had taken out a large chunk of an area called Tartagal, in the Northern province of Salta, which borders Paraguay and Bolivia. Roughly 60 people died, not to mention all the destruction to the land, like the loss of topsoil. The same thing happened in this province last year, so people aren´t holding their breathes for "La Presidenta", Christina Kirchner, to do something that will produce a substantial change.
Again, the issue comes down to money. Soy creates a cash crop for Argentina, and people need the money. Renting 6 hectares of land for soy cultivation will bring in the equivalent of the minimum government pension. Obviously, the more land someone has to rent, the more money they can make, with no capital investment.
What will happen to Argentineans, though, if the soy market crashes, or if the crops are destroyed? The country no longer produces the food that it needs to be self-sufficient, an irony for a country known for its gauchos and rural life.