Prescilla
Prescilla is the cook and cleaning lady at the ranch. As I mentioned previously, she is usually the only female at the farm, which requires a certain strength of character from the outset. Prescilla, 48, is from Paraguay. She is the mother of 6, grandmother of 3 and acting matriarch on the ranch. In fact, she has two brothers and a nephew that work here. It may seem like a luxury to have a cook at your place of work to prepare breakfast, lunch and dinner daily, keep the house clean, clean the dishes and do the preparations for business guests. However, after working with Diego and Johnny, I have learned it is essential for their efficiency at work. For example, Diego often leaves for work at 6.00 am and returns at noon, then goes out again at 2.00 pm and returns at 8.00 pm. With Prescilla taking care of the cooking, he can focus all his attention on the animal component of the farm at all hours of the day, which he does. Prescilla too is the main station of the ranch. Everyone is connected by radios. At the house, Prescilla has a unit so if ever a message needs to be passed on and someone is off radio, Prescilla holds the message until it can be delivered. She is a very tiny woman with a big personality. She loves to prepare desserts, and after everymeal she stands at the head of the table and offers a menu of different desserts available. And her desserts are great! This I know unfortunately much too well.
Javier
Javier is the accountant and administrator at Salvacion. He alone is responsible for all the purchasing on the ranch, the accounting, centralizing the record keeping and the salaries. Javier doesn't speak English, so once when we tried to communicate he decided it would be faster to type what he wanted to say into an online translator and have me read the translation. It quickly became apparent that those translators are not very effective and we had a good laugh about it. Javier lives in Clorinda and commutes daily to work. The most notable habit Javier possesses is that he puts mayonnaise on everything - all forms of meat, whether they have been flavoured or not, pasta, salad, bread, and I imagine fajitas too if I were to cook them!
Don John
This is Don John, the man who started it all. Well in fact it was his great grandfather who started iit all, but it is John that has passed the ranching business down to the next generation. At 81, John is still involved in the business, though two of his sons run most of the operations. His great grandfather immigrated to Argentina in 1830 from Ireland with very little and died with 200,000 hectares to his name in the province of Buenos Aires. If I remember correctly, at one time the family had a shipping and transportation company to their name but it crumbled many years ago. However the land still remains in BA and it has been used to grow the cattle operations into other territories. At one time Don John even had ranches in Venezuela, but sold the land to a relative with ties to Venezuela at the advice of his children when the political climate became more rough.
Don John speak English impecably, is the father of 5 sons and granfather of many. He continues to be very curious about life, culture and living, which is apparent by his continued passion for education and travel. This week in fact he is participating in a course on how to cultivate tilapia in Argentina as a potential business idea for the future. And he just returned from a multi-week cruise across the Atlantic. John says one of his favourite places on Earth is Venice, and has strongly encouraged me to go - he goes at least once a year.
I greatly admire his stories, his life experience and the life he has built for himself in South America. We had many good laughs, and a very memorable time is when we talked about bats for about 10 minutes then Prescilla, Diego and Johnny came running into the living room with brooms chasing a bat that had got into the house. Unusual timing if you ask me!
Quitolo
Quitolo is the resident mechanic and handyman. Quitolo has had a rough life of late. His wife has been very ill and was recently diagnosed with an infection of the spinal chord, which would have killed or paralyzed her a month later had they not discovered what was ailing her, and he was recently bitten by a poisonous snake at Salvacion and had to be taken to the hospital for emergency care. Regardless, Quitolo is back at work, still sleeping outside but now he has moved his mattress from the ground to ontop of the large dog cages in the open air shed.
The story of his being bitten is really quite something. He was asleep in the shed where the grain, tractors and tools are kept. All of a sudden, the rats that eat the corn in the night started to squirm about and run away. Quitolo reached for his flashlight to see what was going on and instead grabbed the snake that the rats were trying to escape.
Quitolo is a bit of a magic man - definitely one of the gems you want to have on a farm. He is the type of person who has been fascinated with machines and mechanics his entire life. As a child, he used to bring water for terere to the local tractorist just to be around the tractors. Today, he can fix or replicate anything with broken and discarded pieces of wire and metal. In fact, in Johnny's care I reached for a car charger and soon realized that it was a Quitolo construction when I saw it was pieced together from 7 different wires. Above, he is fixing a broken pipe, by tying a wire not currenty in use from the seeding mechanism on the tiller to the pipe and the crossbar. Johnny likes Quitolo because he is able to fix all the broken machines or replicate more expensive machines for very little money - and they work!
Luciano
Luciano is Quitolo's nephew. He works on maintenance jobs around Salvacion, but spends a lot of his time in the west at San Miguel working with the tractors to build the water holding pools for the animals. I understand that he is currently being groomed to be a master tractorist/mechanic and Quitolo wants to keep him close so that he can be the lead on more major jobs.
Alejandro
Alejandro is such a character! He always makes me smile. Alejandro is Prescilla's brother. He is a general maintenance man at Salvacion and gets whatever needs to be done, done. He is trained as an electrician and plumber. However, I know that he did the plumbing at the house I am staying in and in one of the bathrooms both the hot and cold water taps are reversed. Honestly this fact fits his character perfectly.
Alejandro has a few children, not sure how many, but two of them are studying to be lawyers. He has tried to teach me some Guarani and shared many stories. I find Alejandro the easiest to understand because he is the most animated when he speaks. He also talks very loudly and repeats himself often so that I understand.
On the ranch Alejandro is famous for disappearing. He leaves the ranch and says he will be back on a certain day and then doesn't come back! I got to witness this disappearing act as he call it this last week. Alejandro was diagnosed with cancer two years ago and has been using an alternative medicine prescribed in Paraguay to keep himself healthy. The doctor says if he takes the drink he will live 28 years and not the months the doctors in the hospital had told him. So far so good, but finding the essential oil is very difficult this time of year, in the fall, because it is from a leaf that is popular in the spring and early summer. Today all the essential oil available goes to Europe and America in bulk quantities. This is why Alejandro was gone for an extra week, looking for his medicine.
Diego
Diego is the vet at Salvacion. He's also the guy to go to for the operations. He knows all the statistics about the animals at Salvacion which is effectively what helps make the business decisions. How healthy are the cows; what nutrition needs do they have; what was the pregnancy rate; how many will have to be put with the bulls again; how many animals does the estancia have. He is the link between the three divisions on the ranch as well as the field work to the office work.
I have definitely learned the most from Diego. Most of the information I have shared about the animals and the operations are a result of the time Diego has spent with me. He has been very patient and very willing to let me be involved. It is with him too that I am getting the most practical experience as he is the one that goes out into the field every day.
Diego also likes to speak English, even though he thinks many of the pronounciations in English are odd. So on our long drives around the property, we have English lessons. At lunch and dinner, Diego is the salad man. He without a doubt finishes the salad on the table, drinks tons of water and then encourages me to eat the dessert! I have been trying to hold off, so one day when I said no, Diego thought it would be fun to trick me into having dessert with him. I consented and then he didn't have one! He said fat cows are the better cows, so I should eat a dessert. Thanks Diego.
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