Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
was intimately known. It was dotted with old camps and houses and
gardens and trails and carefully stewarded reserves of honey and game.
The bulldozers uncovered a traditional Ayoreo
iguijnai
house in the path
of the first planned road. The Nivaclé Indian drivers walked off the job
when they were ordered to bulldoze the dome of mud and limbs. It stood
defiantly for months in the center of the planed earth until it too was
finally crushed.
Such incongruity, at times, could seem typical. If I always felt wel-
comed at Arocojnadi, this wasn't the case at Chaidi. Although I divided
my time equally between the two Totobiegosode settlements, my rela-
tionships in Chaidi were uneasy from the beginning. Most of the people
had only recently arrived from Campo Loro and had not met me during
earlier visits. Few of them were willing to be interviewed. The evangelical
preacher and his family, newly installed by Bobby as his proxies in the
village, were openly distrustful of my motives. The New People, too, were
highly surveilled and controlled. Although I did not know it at the time,
they had been warned against talking to me.
Yet the temptation of my truck—the Giant Armadillo—proved hard
for anyone to resist. The people of Chaidi kept me in constant motion
hauling firewood or sick patients or
dajudie
plants or wage laborers or sup-
plies from the new gas station the Mennonites put up some twenty miles
