Pelé, Hermán and I were up well before the break of dawn. We would spend the morning in the field, from around six until around one p.m. Then we would go back to their home for lunch and a siesta. Sometime around three they would head back to the field and I would move on to visit another farmer or family. This morning we were up early and the weeding had to be done. The cotton field that Pelé and Hermán worked together was a good kilometer away from their home, and we would set out after drinking máte, just as the sky was getting lighter over Misiones to the east.
Before leaving the patio where we often ate together, Pelé took a small plastic bottle from his coat pocket and took a swig. He offered it to Hermán and I, and we each refused, so he took another in our honor. To start the motor, he said. The old soda bottle was refilled on a daily basis with caña, a sugar alcohol like rum only sweeter. Pelé spent a good amount of his time in a mild state of inebriation, and several times a week was stumbling drunk. He was not an angry drunk, nor a mean drunk. If anything he was a happy-sad drunk, who delighted in the company of others, resented his position as the town drunk, and had no idea how to not be seen as a bit of a buffoon. He was a short, strong, and funny man, not a deep thinker, but a quick wit, and despite him being some thirty or forty years my senior and perpetually intoxicated, he was one of the best friends I had in the two years I lived in southern Paraguay.
Pelé was far from the greatest farmer in the world, and he never took to my suggestions of planning crop rotations or using green manures. But despite his alcoholism, which likely inhibited any large leaps forward in his lifestyle, he provided his wife Dominga and daughter Vicki with a decent standard of living. The amount of work done was greatly improved by Hermán’s arrival as the son-in-law, but even without Hermán, Pelé managed. Outside of the occasional day labor on the nearby ranch, he will never be employed by anyone. He owns no land. If he lived in the United States, he would likely be a homeless man.
In the developed world, there are few if any positions in the professional workplace where it is acceptable to arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This does not mean that people do not get away with it, or that functioning alcoholics don’t manage to keep their problems under wraps, or that some people never look the other way at such behavior. Overall, though, in a developed economic system that has amounted centuries of specialization in multitudes of professions, there is no place for a person to be operating as inefficiently as they do when they are drunk.
The world of the small farmer, either at a subsistence or small holding cash crop level, does not have the same professional culture. Showing up on time is not an issue. Of course you go to the field early, because it is incredibly hot in the middle of the day. But if work needs to get done in the middle of the day, it will get done. If that work can be done at another hour, it will likely get done at the other hour. You can hoe a good number of rows with a few shots of hard alcohol in you. You might not do the best you can, but it will get done. You take a break when you want to take a break. You drink when you can afford it. There is always work to do.
A job is a different cultural animal. A job tells you when to work. It tells you when to stop. It tells you how you must be while doing that work. At the organization I work for in Kenya, our extension agents range from those around twenty years old to those in their fifties who have spent all their lives working on a farm, and from those fresh out of high school to those who did not complete middle school. In that population the difference between the developed economy sense of work and the small farm sense of work manifests itself in myriad ways.
Two weeks ago we fired one of our field extension agents for showing up drunk. He apparently is an alcoholic, and his intoxication at work had occurred several times before being brought to the attention of his superiors. Today I ran a training session at his farm, and when I greeted him he seemed cheery and not at all upset over the matter. Perhaps he was covering up disappointment, or perhaps for him the idea of a job was a novelty that just did not work out. I was reminded of my friend Pelé, whom I last saw a couple of years ago while working back in Paraguay. He had not changed too much in the intervening years. He still holds his own in the manual labor department, and still makes lewd jokes at regular intervals. He still spends his pocket change on caña, he still makes a lot of noise or falls off his horse when drunk, and he still gets into the occasional yelling match or fistfight with his rivals of forty years. But he does look older, Dominga looks a little more tired, and Hermán and Vicki have long since moved to Buenos Aires in search of jobs.
Viewed in a harsh light the history of development is one of people being left behind. In a way it is the inevitable flip side of someone getting ahead. You can’t have one without the other. You go to the town; you leave the country. Like the law of conservation of matter and energy, it can appear that development is a zero-sum game. But in the face of that cynical equation stands the human being. The ability to learn and grow is the ability to empower one’s self without disempowering others. It may not always work out that way, but the potential lies waiting, not only in the youth getting his or her first job, but also in the farmer of forty years, open to the possibilities that are out there.
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