Yerba Mate

Is Paraguayan tea, drunk through a metal straw with a little filter spoon on the end. I had read about this in a book called "Forgotten Fatherland" a few years ago. This book was the story of Neues Deutschland (New Germany) a settlement of Germans in the jungles of Paraguay founded by Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth and her fanatically anti-Semitic husband in the nineteenth century. Their descendants had taken up many local habits such as drinking this yerba mate all hours of the day. Many of them still speak some sort of nineteenth-century German. I had had a fantasy about sitting around on a Paraguayan porch drinking this tea, chatting away in nineteenth -century Chemnitz dialect and warming my belly in the Paraguayan sun. My office-mate Dane very kindly bought me a yerba-drinking kit all the way from Paraguay, so now in the comfort of my office in Canberra, even though it is not particularly warm today, I can enjoy part of that fantasy, and very nice the tea is too.

I reckon they could market it in New Zealand as "Yerba Mate" (a drink that you have with your mates) to some pakehas (that's Maori shorthand for "NZ white folks"), but when I first heard it, it sounded like "yerba death" in Maori.