Tesho, my host dad, really likes to eat fish.
I find this surprising, since Paraguay is a landlocked country, and can’t haul delicious clams and cod, and other famous marine delights from the oceanic depths. (There are a few tasty fish in Paraguay’s rivers though, namely “merluza.) A roving truck sometimes sells fish, and markets in Paraguari – a city about 30km away) – sell fish, but both cases are cost prohibitive.
Of course, there is a creek about a half a mile from our house, and Tesho is an avid fisherman. But those fish are stubborn little critters, and sometimes he comes home with eight or nine tasty pescas, other times, nothing.
In retrospect, it’s not all that odd that he decided to take matters into his own hands. A few months ago, I noticed Tesho and Andres tearing up a section of earth behind his banana plot.
“We’re building a tajamar,” he said, after I asked him what the two were up to.
A tajamar is a man-made pond. Normally, Paraguayans dig them, or hire a tractor to excavate one so that grazing cattle will have a reliable water source. But Tesho, in his typical ingenious (or crazy) way, decided to dig a fish pond.
First he and Andres dug out a small pond, perhaps 5m x 10m, and 2/3 of a meter deep. However, over the next few months, whenever there was a spare day, Tesho would excavate the pond a little bit more, until it had tripled in size. Then he dug two smaller ponds adjacent to the first. In the next couple of weeks, he will probably remove the berms separating the three ponds.
When he wasn’t digging his pond, Tesho would go fishing. Any minnows became instant pond fodder – over several trips to the nearby arroyo, Tesho must have caught about a hundred fish that he used to stock his pond, now well filled with rainwater.
I mention all of this because the other day, Tesho decided he wanted to have a nice fish dinner. Andres and two neighbors fashioned a net out of a piece of black plastic netting they normally use to shade their vegetable gardens from the fierce summer heat, and hopped into the pond. They trawled the bottom of the pond and within 20 minutes had pulled out six fattened ex-minnows.
