Cash + Song = Paraguay’s Living Cathedral
Teodora’s Forest Cathedral Rises Against Ruin
PROEZA Songs Plant Elva’s Green Legacy
Canindeyú, Paraguay: Dawn in Canindeyú is not a quiet affair. Long before the sun ignites the horizon, Teodora Vera stands barefoot on the red earth and lifts her voice to Ñamandu, the Eternal First Father who once dreamed the world from a single spark of light. Her song is low and resonant, a vibration that travels through root and river, coaxing the cedar giants to awaken. Mist coils around her ankles like smoke from the sacred fire of creation itself; above, the canopy answers with a rustle of a million green tongues. When the final note fades, the forest exhales, and the day begins—exactly as Ñamandu intended when he sang the first sunrise into being.
She sips mate, a tea-like beverage made from yerba mate leaves (Ilex Paraguariensis), from a guampa carved from palo santo, the wood still fragrant with last night’s cleansing smoke. The yerba was harvested by her daughter under the waxing moon, dried over a fire fed with branches fallen during the last windstorm—nothing wasted, everything returned to the karai yvy, the spirit owners of the land.
Thirty-five families gather in the maloca’s clearing of Y’aka Poty, their faces painted with urukú seed dye in patterns that map the rivers of their ancestors and the four primal lights of Ñamandu’s creation.
Today, Teodora, the 55-year-old elected leader, will guide them in opening a new chakra, a garden that is also a prayer: mandioca planted in the pattern of the Southern Cross, avocado saplings aligned with the path of the sun, cedar seedlings placed where the shaman once saw the shadow of a jaguar at midnight.
This is agroforestry in Avá Guaraní terms—not science, but reciprocity with the living world that Ñamandu entrusted to the Jeguakava Tenonde Porangue’í, the First Chosen to Carry the Sacred Adornment of Feathers. “For us, the forest is sacred: from it we get our medicine, firewood, everything,” Teodora says, her words a quiet command to the soil.
Thirty kilometres away in the Avá Guaraní Indigenous Peoples’ community of Fortuna, Elva Rosa Gauto moves like a shadow stitched from sunlight. At 23, she is a mother, farmer, and nursing student, her hair braided with fibres from the karanda’y palm, her wrists ringed with seeds that rattle softly as she walks. She carries a woven basket lined with banana leaves, heading for the forest pharmacy her elders taught her to read. There, beneath a cedar whose trunk is wide enough to hide three children, she kneels to harvest ka’a—the bitter leaves that calm fevered brows—and the pale roots of jaguarundi that mend broken bones. “The forest is our life,” she echoes Teodora’s creed, carved into every Avá Guaraní heart. “We take care of it, and it takes care of us.”
A toucan watches from a branch, its beak a slash of rainbow; Elva offers it a silent nod, the same greeting she would give a karai elder, for in Ñamandu’s dream all beings share the same breath. On her agroforestry plot, she grows cassava, citrus, and beans for home and market, the surplus paying for university fees and dreams of blending medicinal plants with clinical care in the local Family Health Unit.
Paraguay has not been kind to its forests. For half a century, the eastern plains were flayed alive. Soy fields swallowed the chakras; cattle trampled the sacred groves where the avá guaraní once danced the jeroky to mimic the rhythm of creation. Rivers turned bitter with glyphosate, and the spirits grew quiet. Climate, too, forgot its place—frost in flowering season, winds that tore the thatch from malocas, rains that drowned the corn before it could tassel. “It’s hotter and storms are stronger,” Elva notes, her voice steady against the memory of late frosts scorching blossoms. A single failed harvest once meant a winter of yvy’a, the hollow hunger that makes children’s eyes too large for their faces and mocks the promise of Ñamandu’s light. “Before, when the forest was large and had everything, we didn’t need to buy; now that the forest is disappearing, water and fish are scarce, and we have to work harder to feed our families,” Teodora reflects.
PROEZA arrived speaking the language of reciprocity. The name is clumsy—Pobreza, Reforestación, Energía y Cambio Climático—but the idea is elegant: pay people to keep the world alive. Every quarter, crisp banknotes land in calloused palms—small enough to seem like mercy, large enough to buy seed when the sky withholds. The Green Climate Fund writes the cheques; the government of Paraguay signs them; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) technicians—boots caked in the same red dirt—walk the rows with elders, tasting soil between their teeth, matching tree to crop so that neither starves the other.
Every quarter, banknotes arrive wrapped in banana leaves, delivered by FAO technicians who first sit in the opy, the prayer house, and share tereré cooled with medicinal herbs. The money buys nylon cord to tie saplings, but more importantly, it buys time—time for elders to teach children the ñe’eng, the sacred words that coax a seed to sprout, the same words Ñamandu used to dream the world into existence.
“We used to clear everything by hand. But with PROEZA came the tractor. Then, the plot was prepared, the orange trees were planted, and our work became much easier. Productivity has improved, and now I have more time to take care of the land, which motivates me to keep working,” Elva says.
In exchange, families plant not just trees but stories: a lapacho where a girl once dreamed of her future husband, a cedar where a boy buried his first hunting arrow under the gaze of the four lights. The forest grows thicker with memory, and the carbon stays locked in living wood as Ñamandu intended.
A hunter returns from the green with a tapir slung across his shoulders, its hide still warm. He lays it at the edge of the chakra, where the women will portion the meat and bury the bones with tobacco and song—an offering to the forest that provided. The children swarm like bees, their fingers sticky with the sweet sap of wild mangoes they have gathered while trailing their fathers through the undergrowth. One boy, no taller than a mandioca stalk, proudly displays a feather dropped by a guacamayo; he will tuck it into his hair tonight when the community gathers to chant the Ayvu Rapyta, the Foundation of the Word that tells how Ñamandu first adorned humanity with plumes of light. In this way, every meal becomes a sacrament, every hunt a conversation with the divine. Teodora, who helped secure public pensions for elders, renovate the school, and install a 10,000-litre water tank through the Indigenous Women Leaders Network, watches with quiet pride, her hands still from a morning of pruning.
At midday, the heat presses down like a hand on the crown, but beneath the new canopy, the air stays cool and moist. Teodora walks the rows, checking the drip of resin from cedar saplings, the curl of avocado leaves for signs of thirst. She pauses where a single pindó palm has volunteered itself among the planted trees—its fronds fanned like the headdress of a karai ru ete, a sky lord. She presses a seed of corn into the soil at its base. The palm will shade the corn; the corn will feed the palm’s roots with fallen husks. Nothing is accidental in this garden; every placement is a verse in the endless poem the Avá Guaraní recite to keep the world turning. Both Teodora and Elva chose the same model: native trees for shade and medicine, citrus for fruit and income, eucalyptus as windbreaks and sustainable firewood, its prunings feeding the soil while sparing sacred cedars. “Then the PROEZA technicians arrived. The engineers showed us again how to treat, how to control, how to work,” Teodora recalls. “Here we breathe cleaner, healthier air. In a few years, it will be more advantageous.”
Teodora’s community is proof. Where once a single failed harvest meant children with bellies swollen like drums, now granaries brim with diversity: mandioca, maize, beans, avocado, timber. Where once the forest retreated like a tide, now it advances—seedling by seedling, hectare by hectare—its frontier marked not by fences but by the laughter of children chasing morpho butterflies between rows of green. The cathedral grows a new wing every season. Its walls thicken with cedar and lapacho; its roof rustles louder than any storm. And beneath it all, the soil—once exhausted, once poisoned—begins to sing again, a low, fertile hymn that only bare feet can hear. Elva sells her watermelons, maize, and cassava to cover fuel, school uniforms, and meat, while dreaming of her daughter seeing the forest return: “This project helped us a great deal so that our children, as they grow, can once again see—and get used to—what our culture is: they will see the forest return, understand how precious it is and guard it with us.”
By dusk, the chakra is complete. The families gather for the arete, the feast of gratitude. They roast mandioca in coals, pour cauím fermented from maize into hollowed gourds, and dance the jeroky until the fire burns low—each step a re-enactment of Ñamandu’s first dance across the void. Children fall asleep beneath avocado leaves still wet with evening dew, dreaming of Yvy Rapyta. Teodora returns to her maloca, the mate gourd now filled with cold tereré. Fireflies drift between the cedar pillars like slow embers from Ñamandu’s original spark. Somewhere in the dark, a jaguar coughs—a reminder that the forest is never truly tamed, only borrowed, and that the Avá Guaraní are its chosen guardians.
In the quiet that follows the dance, Elva sits with her youngest on her lap, tracing constellations on the child’s palm with a stick of charcoal. She tells of the time before time, when Ñamandu stood alone in darkness and dreamed four lights into being—one for each direction, one for each heartbeat of the world. The child’s eyes reflect the fire’s glow, and in them Elva sees the future: a forest that will outlive soy, outlast drought, outlast every forgetting. “This orange grove is help for a lifetime,” she murmurs, her voice a bridge to the nurse she will become.
The PROEZA payments are only paper, but the stories they buy are eternal—nearly 1,500 households stronger, capturing 2.2 million tons of CO₂, greening eight departments under Free, Prior and Informed Consent. The cathedral breathes. Its walls are cedar and song, its roof the laughter of children who will never know yvy’a. The Avá Guaraní have not saved the forest; they have remembered how to live inside Ñamandu’s dream, how to pay rent in stories and sweat and sacred sound. And the forest, in turn, keeps every promise it ever made—returning light for light, abundance for reverence, and a home that will outlast every storm.
“My dream, as a leader, is for my community to move forward,” Teodora says. “To become a nurse and serve the community,” Elva adds. In their voices, the world moves forward too.
(Editor’s Note: As midnight deepens in India, the fire still glows in the Atlantic Forest, 13,500 km away. Their songs travel farther than satellites, carrying lessons for a warming world.)
