Christian Quiñónez and Éver Pereira go to a private university Monday through Thursday in Vallemí. To get there, they must cross a river in a small boat. Photo by Nicolás Sáenz, borrowed from the Kurtural website with permission. The series Cows That Fly, Schools That Crumble, published by Paraguayan economic and cultural news site Kurtural, explores the ways in which Paraguay's education system fails students. Below is the latest installment, written by Patricia Benítez. It will be republished on Global Voices in two parts. Monday through Thursday, between 7 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon, Christian Quiñónez works as a secretary in the court system in Puerto Casado. The city shows up as La Victoria on Google Maps, but its real name comes from Carlos Casado del Alisal, a Spaniard who, in 1889, became the owner of practically the whole region after buying 5 million hectares of public land; an area larger than Costa Rica, Slovakia, Switzerland or Belgium. It was here, near the Brazilian border, where Casado established the first tannin extraction company in the Americas. Back then, tannin was a coveted substance, due to its role in the leather-making process. The source of this powerful natural astringent was found in the bark of the quebracho tree – a group of species native to South America that in those times covered a significant portion of the territory acquired by Casado. A territory he acquired with both Paraguayans and indigenous peoples living inside. In the first decades of the 20th century, the exploitation of the quebracho forests helped Puerto Casado to grow like never before. The town even got electricity before Asunción, the country's capital, thanks to a self-sufficiency system: the ground sawdust from the quebrachos fed fires to boil water and produce the electricity that the factory required. The surplus energy was distributed to the homes in town of high-ranking employees and foreigners from Argentina, Germany, Hungary and other countries. The whole town, or at least a large part of it, worked for the company. According to Valentina Bonifacio, an Italian anthropologist who has been studying the town's history for years, Paraguayans filled the lower ranks of the company's hierarchy. Although they did not hold leadership roles, they did acquire administrative and accountancy skills. Below them, at the very lowest level, natives from various ethnic groups from other parts of the region (which makes up part of the Paraguayan Chaco), who had moved to Puerto Casado served as laborers and factory workers. Today, the majority of Puerto Casado's 7,000 inhabitants are descendants of the old company's workers. Among them is Christian Quiñónez, who, when the clock strikes 3 p.m., prepares to leave his white-walled house with its large patio. The house is held up with massive columns; trunks of a tree whose wood is so strong it breaks axes. This is where it gets its name: quebracho, Spanish for axe-breaker. Christian grew up under this roof, and he still lives there today, together with his family. The house is the legacy of his father's labor and a period of abundance in the land. But, unlike his father, an ex-blacksmith for the old company, Christian didn't grow up knowing tannin and never watched the trains run on the railway built by the company in 1927 to move the timber bolts from forest to factory. Today in Puerto Casado, there is neither a public nor a private university. This means that for Christian, a staff member of the city's court of peace and a third-year law student, the only hope he has for obtaining a degree is on the other side of the river, in the city of Vallemí, in Concepción, the next province over. To get there, he crosses the river four days a week—Monday through Thursday—along with Éver Pereira, a friend of his since high school. Both of them attend the Vallemí branch of the María Serrana University, a private institution founded in 2009 whose degrees are still not accredited by the National Agency of Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation. If he had had the option, Christian would have gone to a public university. “Everyone who wants to be a professional dreams of going to the National University of Asunción,” he says as though stating the obvious. But in his experience, dreaming is almost never the same as doing. The public university closest to his town is the National University of Concepción, located in the city of the same name, a little more than 200 kilometers away. The availability of higher education in Paraguay is limited. There are seven public universities in the entire country, with satellite campuses in a few cities. Meanwhile, there are 47 private universities with a very high number of subsidiaries all over the country.