Teofilo Marin

Teofilo Marin first met his wife as a mita-y, as a child. Of course, he didn't know he would marry Ursulina then, they were just playmates. But years later, just back from his 20-month stint in the military, Marin saw his old playmate at a party in a nearby compania.
"I don't remember it at all," says Ursulina, his wife, and the mother of their eight children.

As it happened, he had an in - Marin's brother had already married one of Ursulina's sisters. He would travel by foot or horse to her house, 5k distant.

Marin is just one of the many inhabitants of Potrero Pucu, a village of about 400 on the outskirts of Caballero. Like his fellow townsfolk, Marin works in the chacra (fields), cultivating maize, peanuts, mandioca, beans, and other cash crops and basic foodstuffs.

It's what he always imagined he would do, but it's still difficult.

"There's not anything easy about working in the chacra," he says. "Its heaviest (or most difficult) in the summer because of the heat.' He wakes at four to avoid the hottest part of the day. The years of farming have left their mark. Marin is lean and wiry. His hands look and feel like baseball mitts, and the hot sun has carved seams and canyons across his face that crease and ripple as he laughs at a joke or casts a concerned glance at Albertito, his grandchild.
Marin and his neighbors have lived in Potrero Pucu on and off their whole lives. Marin lived in Asuncion for five years, commuting weekly or monthly to visit his wife and children. Life was different, he says.

"In the era of Stroessner, there was more security," he says. But even if life seems more uncertain now, he still prefers it.

"We didn't have the opportunity [we have now]," he says. There was no high school in the community - the nearest was in Caballero, 7km away. "There weren't buses, you had to go by horse, or at times, on foot...and we didn't have sandals. We went to school barefoot," he told me.

There wasn't radio, nor light. "We didn't have electricity before - we had a little light made of metal that used kerosene. We didn't have cell phones either," he said.
"So there are advantages and disadvantages," he says.