This morning we hosted a citizen dialogue in the mARTadero with Evo Morales present and participating.
As you all have probably gathered from my emails, politics down here are complex. When Evo was elected he became the first Indigenous president and caused a lot of consternation among the elites, particularly in the Santa Cruz region. The long and short of it is that his presidency threw into flux the position of privilege that a handful of families in this country have been enjoying for a number of years, though the accompanying frenzy would demonize everyone from Santa Cruz and deify everyone who was raised in the campo, or vice versa, depending on who your media outlet is. Perhaps its the nature of politics in general, but the polarization that has surrounded decisions and convictions and problems here is not healthy or helpful. The country has what occasionally borders on a case of xenophobia, and it can’t be denied that there is a tendancy on the part of a lot of public figures to blame the US, or the Spaniards, or the Cruceños for all the problems that exist, and I have had big gripes with that for the extent of my tenure here.
The event that went on today was a citizen encounter, in which about sixteen civil society groups (social movements, associations of professors, agronomists, women’s groups, etc) were invited to send delegates to the mARTadero, and each group was given a few minutes to address the president and to present whatever praise or concerns they had. After everyone had spoken they gave the mic to Evo, and without notes or prompts or anyone whispering in his ear he gave a very articulate, very thoughtful response to the questions or concerns raised, and explained a little more about some of the decisions he has made. He spoke with humor (rare), and he left ample space in his conversation for shared responsibility and shared credit. There was none of the everthing-that’s-wrong-with-Bolivia-has-to-do-with-Santa-Cruz, or the-Spaniards-are-the-root-of-all-evil or any of that. His criticisms were thoughtful, carefully directed, and reasonable, and therefore easy to hear and appreciate. His political agenda was quite clear but he didn’t paint anyone as the enemy, which is also rare. I was completely impressed by the fact that such a contentious figure could be so seemingly humble, and so inclusive in his talk about what he believes is ailing the country. One comment that sticks out in my mind: “Si no nos cambiamos a nosotros, jamas cambiara Bolivia” (If we don’t change ourselves, Bolivia will never change). I deeply appreciate the sense of responsibility that such a comment indicates. I also appreciate that he acknowledgef frankly that the problem between MAS and Santa Cruz, and even MAS and the United States is not of the politics themselves, but also of Evo Morales as a figurehead.
It’s refreshing, in a time when politics and relationships everywhere are so messy, to hear someone so charismatic speak directly and not fall back on their charisma. Evo’s not perfect, his agendas on gender and the environment (my two favorite subjects) leave much to be desired, but I was extremely impressed with his clarity and frankness. Politics here are rowdy, popular, and inclusive. There is no such distance or padding or insurmountable bureaucracy as exists in the States (while the bureaucracy required in order to, say, get your residence is a thousand times worse), and while this inclusiveness causes a hell of a lot of unrest, it also ensures that no one gets slack or apathetic. Some of my faith has been restored in the idea of political leadership.
And about the soccer with anarchists: I got a call from a friend a few weeks ago saying she needed another woman on their fulbito team because there was a tournament coming up that they wanted to enter. Fulbito is soccer, but played on a concrete court, ie, soccer adapted to city living. So I join the team, an awesome group of young women, most of us are sociologists or psychologists or environmentalists or all three, young, strong healthy, and we don’t give a hoot who hoots at us as we practice. And, practicing in a ratty part of town, we drew a lot of attention. So we have soccer practice a few times a week, and then the other day as we’re sitting on a bench afterwards having a juice, someone whips out the convocatoria (announcement) for the tournament. Across the top in big letters it says: LEAGUE OF YOUNG ANARCHISTS OF COCHABAMBA ANNUAL FULBITO TOURNAMENT, followed by a list of approximately thirty rules for enrolling in said tournament. Now, I knew nothing of the political bent of this event and it seems to me slightly ironic that even the league of young anarchists can’t put on a soccer tournament in keeping with their ideology, but I let that one slide.
Come last Saturday, day of: Of an entire purported whole women’s league, my team is the only women’s team that appears, so we are pitted against a team of men. We actually beat this first team of men, causing many a ruptured ego and many a snotty remark, though we got served during the second round. We play fulbito for six hours out in the searing sunlight at 12,000 feet, and we are all hot and exhausted by the time we gather our things together and limp down the street to the after-party (it must be mentioned that many events in Cochabamba are merely excuses for a good after-party). Our team was awarded different bits and pieces for defending ourselves honorably, and I got an MV goalie award which consisted of a stack of anarchist literature in Spanish, a couple of ripped copies of documentaries of the lives of famous anarchists, and about a zillion patches to be sewn onto clothes or bags, though what immigration officials will say about that remains to be seen. Joke. Some people had brought silk screens of varyious and sundry political slogans, and for about two hours everyone was running around in towels or borrowed sweaters while their newly-silkscreened dirty t-shirts dried on the roof. By eight o’clock the majority of people had drunk so much chicha that they couldn’t even stand. It was one of the more amusing days I’ve had here, and I love that, despite the fact that a lot of the university political groups seem to take themselves so seriously, at the end of the day the more imporant bits are the soccer tournament and the party.
Up where most of you are spring is beginning, and here the rains are stopping and the searing winter sun is starting to appear. Bolivia right now is in a serious transitional period, between seasons for one, and on the political front as well. Floods have threatened the food supply, the cost of living has gone up by some absurd amount in the past three weeks, and the autonomy issue in the east threatens to explode again. I read somewhere that in Bolivia creating unrest was considered ‘national sport’, and while I resent the flip commentary, and while I believe the struggle that the country is undergoing is important and necessary, it does seem like every month there’s some new problem. Gas prices, water prices, autonomy, the capital, coca eradication. I’m adopting a bit of the local go-with-the-flow, ie, the so-and-so’s are blockading again, let’s just have a cup of tea and wait it out.
Between a concentration of holidays and a lot of dumb luck I’ve gotten to get out travelling a little more recently. Some friends and I went out to the Chapare a few weeks ago, the coca-growing jungle region that is the center of a lot of the eradication conflict. It’s a steamy, tropical part of the country full of rivers and water and alligators and fish and enormous insects, and despite the fact that the road between here and there is one of the most treacherous in the region, it’s a fun weekend trip. The checkpoints are fierce and reports of harassment are not unusual (lime is carefully controlled, because it’s used as a fertilizer for coca), though most police don’t give me and my light hair a second look. A funny thing about busses in Bolivia: whenever we they stop, at a checkpoint or to pay a toll or for any other reason, aproned women selling everything from corn-on-the-cob to Sprite to bread to ice cream swarm the sides of the bus. Their voices are shrill, I suppose because it carries, but for a few minutes there are people hanging in and out of the windows buying this and that, and a few enterprising young women usually get on and ride a few kilometers with us while serving up whatever it is they sell. It’s absolute pandemonium for about six minutes.
My friend Diana was here for the last week, and it was an excellent excuse to go travelling and raising a little hell. We wound up in Sucre, which might be, in my opinion, Bolivia’s prettiest little city, and then worked our way down to the famous Salar de Uyuni. The Salar is an enormous salt flat bigger than Lake Titicaca, just an endless stretch of white that dazzles the eyes and makes you feel like you’re on a different planet, literally. The small community that lives alongside one edge of the Salar has ‘mining’ rights—the right to mine salt and sell it at the staggering sum of about $1.15 per 50 kilos. It’s not, as you might imagine, a very good living. The major industry in that part of the world is tourism.
We took a jeep across the flats with a group of young Spanish doctors who had just finished a two-month volunteer period in the flooded parts of the Beni trying to reign in the public health nightmare that the waters caused, and we wound up getting along beautifully for a few days. We stayed in the village of Coqueza which squats at the base of the Tunupa volcano, a little town of twenty families that, during the flooded season, is essentially cut off from the rest of the world by the impassably flooded Salar. Two of the doctors and I got up early one morning and climbed halfway up the volcano in the crystalline, pre-dawn light, and I have to say that seeing the sun rise over that immense whiteness will be a vision that sticks. Though the climb whooped our asses (5,000+ meters, and all of us our young and strong), it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in Bolivia.
Followed by a classic 12-hour bus ride home, in which I got stuck next to a raucous, lewd guy who drank too much beer, fell on his face trying to get down at the pit stop, called me a whore for being a woman alone, and wet himself.
At the mARTadero things continue, and in the past few weeks I’ve gotten a chance to learn a little about how the freelance manual labor market works around here. It’s an interesting system, especially compared to how my father manages his day help in the States. Day laborers are available in a certain corner of the market. You show up in your vehicle around 7 am and wait around coolly until people start to approach, but you don’t get out and ask around. They come up to the truck slowly, and in groups of two or three. They ask you what kind of work it is. You are deliberately vague, and you negotiate a price that is actually less than what you will wind up paying, with lunch and cold drinks included. Your laborers pile into the back of the truck and you take them to the site, where they look at the work and pretend to be disgusted at how you’ve misled them, you pretend to be disgusted with how demanding they are, and a new price for the day is negotiated. At the end of the day you tip them each one Boliviano, with which they go to the tiny store across the street and buy shampoo in a little plastic sachet, and if you have a shower or barrels of water behind your house they’ll wash up and leave. It’s quite an elaborate little ritual, and you must certainly abide by the rules in order for your workday to go smoothly. We’ve had laborers all over the mARTadero, installing our composting toilets and ripping up old cement out back, and I’ve been loving seeing actual, visual results. There’s something very honest and fulfilling about that kind of work.
For those of you who observe it I hope you had a happy Easter. Here Easter is a four-day affair, beginning on Jueves Santo (Holy Thursday) and lasting through Sunday. On Holy Thursday everyone goes out at night visiting churches, and the streets are packed with people as they only ever are on religious holidays. Vendors line the streets with their food stalls, and the whole city circulates merrily, pushing and shoving and eating and talking. You’re supposed to visit fourteen churches (I don’t know the significance of the number, or maybe it’s just habit at this point) in one evening, and it becomes a crowded, noisy, carnival-esque affair. On Easter Sunday the tradition is to cook an enormous amount and eat twelve different traditional Bolivian dishes, one in honor of each of the apostles. I don’t have words for most of the things that appear on the table except for Lokra, which one time I encountered in Argentina (intestine soup). The markets fill up with women selling masitas (pastries) and cookies and bread and those shiny tinfoil Easter eggs. Because it’s late summer here we have all kinds of exotic-looking fruit, and the holiday, in addition to its religious significance, becomes an orgy of eating, despite the jacked prices. Those who can escape to the country or to the outlying towns, and it’s four days of mellow food-filled family time.
I’m working with my dance company on a piece called LagunMayu, which we’re going to perform in one of Cochabamba’s big theaters in the end of April. LagunMayu a 40-minute performance about Cochabamba’s Water Wars in 2000: the government at that time privatized our water and sold it to a French transnational corporation. The ensuing riots put this city on the map, and at the end of the story the corporation’s rights were revoked and water became public again. Water is a hugely charged issue here, and it’s been interesting for me to be a part of this process. For all that the specific corporation in question was French, the US is seen as the enemy in the Water Wars and in many other things, and being a part of the project puts me in a funny place. On the one hand, it’s like my friends and my community don’t even recognize my nationality anymore, like it has ceased to exist. I find that satisfying, because it really means that I’ve transcended whatever cultural barriers exist and that I’m not different enough for anyone to think about moderating their comments. On the other hand, I am and will always be from the States, and I bristle at the knee-jerk anti-US bent that everything takes down here, even in art, even among the people who I love and who love me. It’s as if they don’t notice, or don’t see any contradiction in it. Believe me, I’m all for thoughtful criticism of any government and policy, including my own, and I certainly won’t excuse the conduct of US policymakers and corporations in Bolivia, but it bothers me that we are automatically blamed for everything all the time, and that the thoughtful people with whom I chose to surround myself don’t seem to care. It’s convenient to have an enemy. Hey, we had Saddam Hussein.
However, things are well and healthy. In peace…
As per usual, it’s been an interesting month, and I’m excited to share it.
I want to talk about street culture here, because much of the developing world, and Bolivia in particular, has an entirely different take on things outside the house. To employ an overused adjective, Cochabamba’s streets are ‘vibrant’. To say the least. As with many things here, I have a love-hate relationship with the streets—they can be dangerous, and it gets exhausting having to always be on the lookout for people who want to rob, jump, flash, grope, or otherwise impede your peaceful progress through the day. But the streets are so alive, there is life leaking out everywhere, and lovely little interactions taking place on every corner.So, let’s start with transportation. I live on my bike because it’s a lot more practical, but getting to work and back can be a colorful experience in and of itself, and I periodically really enjoy riding the bus through the market and watching a million small-scale dramas unfold before me. If you take any of the popular routes you have plenty of time to observe said dramas, because traffic is such that ‘gridlock’ doesn’t even do it justice.
Bus/trufi lines are franchised, so you have your own bus or car and buy into the system. If you’re like most trufistas, you’ll paint your vehicle wild colors and adorn its interior with all manner of dangly or colorful things, everything from CDs to crucifixes to inspirational quotes to pinup girls to stuffed animals to curtains that look like they’ve been ripped out of a bordello. To this day I’ve yet to see a woman trufista. You can flag public transportation down anywhere along the route and get off anywhere you like by yelling from the back for the driver to stop, and at the right times of day they stuff an unimaginable number of people into those busses (though not quite as many as the Dominicans do). Unlike the Dominican Republic, however, there are mechanisms for quality control that take the form of women or children sitting under tarps on various corners, getting paid a few cents an hour to punch timecards. I’ve often thought that punching timecards must be the most miserable job ever. Women take their young babies to work with them, and around many of the control points you’ll see a bunch of kids playing on the sidewalk.
There are two types of paros (blockades) here, paro de transporte, which means that the trufistas blockade and there is no public transportation, or paro civicos, in which groups or communities blockade for political reasons. If you try to drive your car or motorcycle around in either of the above situations you run the risk of having your tires popped, but bicycles and people are usually able to move fairly freely. The transportistas blockade when they feel that the government hasn’t been responsive to their complaints about road quality, and they feel this way fairly often. In their defense, the government has not ever been terribly responsive to the road issues…they seem to have other issues on their plate. I’ve heard stories that in the paros of the past people came out into the street and played soccer and hung out—like a snow day, for those of us from New England—but with all the tensions of the last year or so, they have been getting dangerous. Some men from a rural community on a cocaine route killed a few policemen in a town not so far from Cochabamba, and everyone is sort of holding their breath, waiting to see what happens…
Street food: I know I wrote a lot about food and food culture in my last blog, but street food, as most will agree, is different. A buck will get you greasy repast to last you all day from one of the millions of stands all over Cochabamba. Las Islas is one of my favorite places in the city, something between a park and a highway divider that comes alive at night with food vendors. They sell tripe and hamburgers and sausages and choclo and tacos, and people come and sit at the rickety tables and eat dinner and relax, and it’s noisy and companionable and reasonably clean (you don’t last long around here with a delicate stomach).
Used-clothing vendors also appear en masse in the evenings along the main streets, with piles of sweaters that they buy in bulk from US exporters who are making a mint (by the way, Planet Aid—those big yellow boxes in parking lots—doesn’t donate. It resells, to a bunch of aproned women trying to eek out a living hawking people’s old nightgowns). Informal commerce picks up considerably after dark—the market in La Paz is never more active than it is a ten o’clock at night. Prostitution is legal here, and women line Avenida Aroma selling their services, or stroll from beer den to beer den, pausing outside just long enough for the men playing dice inside to take a good look.
Bus stations are also favorite places of mine, because of all the activity at strange times. The country travels at night, because it just doesn’t make sense to spend twelve hours on a bus during the day, and the amount of food vending, diaper-changing, peeing in corners, laughing, fighting, and stealing that happens at bus stations in the evenings is enough to blow your mind. I love it; I love the chaos. Women appear with large pots of api (a sweet, hot, blue-corn drink) and fried pasteles, little greasy turnover things, and all kinds of unidentifiable things to eat and drink. Enterprising folks will climb aboard the busses at checkpoints and give very compelling schpiels about why we should buy this remedy or that lotion, or who will regale us with sad stories about how the truck importing their stock crashed in the mountains, and only these eighteen bottles of perfume survived and they are willing to let us buy one at half, ladies and gentlemen, but half of their normal cost! Speaking of performance art…
Public bathrooms, in bus stations and beyond, typically charge one Boliviano for the privilege of peeing in their overflowing holes. Not surprisingly, most people just squat wherever they can get away with it. Your one Boliviano will buy you a little fold of toilet paper and a paper ticket…perhaps if they did away with the paper tickets we could get in for fifty cents? Toilets in these banos publicos are the stand-up kind, with two foot supports and a large hole, and they are characteristically uncared for and smelly as shit, no pun intended. An artist could do a hell of an installation based on the graffiti found in bathrooms here, plenty of your typical Diego-I’ll-love-you-forevers, but a few that I have written down. My favorite: Paredes limpias, mentes en blanco (clean walls, blank minds). Walls, in bathrooms and all over town, are an accessible and much-used propaganda tool, and if I were to list the slogans…well, there are a lot of them.
Cleferos are children and youth who live on the streets. They are huffers. There is a huge number of them here, clef (glue) being the cheapest and most accessible drug and, one would suppose, the cheapest way to forget about hunger and thirst. Those kids are very sad cases, and often violent. They periodically attack in bands, and even adults can’t really beat of a dozen ten-year-olds bent on relieving them of their valuables. Clef is toxic enough to cause very severe brain damage, especially when applied to young bodies and developing nervous systems, and most cleferos, if they reach even adolescence, are suffering bad and irreversible physical and mental effects as a result of huffing.
In the same vein, but not quite as sad, are the kids who come from café to café at night selling candy, flowers, and or cigarettes. Most of them aren’t homeless and most of them are well-fed, but often their parents are sitting right outside. They send their children in because they think the appealing young faces will garner more business; it is manipulation of the worst sort, and it makes me furious. The kids create good relationships with the café owners and the regulars; sometimes they sit down and play cards with us; they don’t steal, and are typically just doing what they’re told, but they ought to be at home in bed. In my humble opinion, any adult who is healthy enough to prod their kids from café to café ought to be selling the damn gum themselves.
Also going from café to café at night are the mochileros, backpackers from Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile who make enough selling their jewelry to keep travelling. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful earrings in the world dangling off improvised screen exhibition panels, and these folks are easygoing and chatty. I guess you have to be, to survive in that business. You’ll also get musicians, who’ll come in and ask the café owners to turn off the music, and they’ll play a song or two and come around with a hat. As might be expected there’s a lot of terrible, fingernails-on-a-blackboard-and-ice-on-you-neck stuff, but a lot of really lovely, skillful playing as well. I’ve seen jugglers, fire-eaters, and belly-dancers all come through—it’s a pretty good system for everyone involved. Café owners rarely hire live entertainment, people can donate or not as they choose, and artists have can make as much as 300 Bolivianos in a night. Unfortunately, the kids don’t make nearly as much. Perhaps what I like about the artists is that there’s not the air of desperation that poverty lends the little children, or the air of manipulation.
And one last comment, related less to the street and more to the general state of affairs: the more I travel, live, or hang out in the world, the more I begin to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with how men and women interact, and a basic lack of respect and understanding between genders that I find very troubling. This month has included a few run-ins with flashers and exhibitionists, many more still with professional machismo, a couple with personal machismo, and some very interesting conversations with other women about their takes on it all. I have to remind myself to stay angry—that sexual and gender violence is not okay under any circumstances, that it’s not okay to let it slide as ‘part of travelling’, and cultural relativism be damned. How we deal with issues like these requires thought and nuance and cultural context, yes, but the result of a few difficult weeks has been my very clear understanding that things need to change here in Bolivia.
This type of thing is very typical of international attitudes towards Bolivia. I find it absolutely repulsive and socially irresponsible. As I consider which way my career will go, I am less and less inclined to take organizations like USAID seriously, if the ‘work’ that they do actively undermines the only successful, democratic leader that Bolivia has ever seen. I find this very telling, both of the Bush Administration’s objectives, and with US imperialism that has caused so many problems. Please take a minute to read the article below.
Undermining Bolivia: A Landscape of Washington Intervention
Written by Benjamin Dangl
Sunday, 10 February 2008
A thick fence, surveillance cameras, and armed guards protect the U.S. Embassy in La Paz. The embassy is a tall, white building with narrow slits of windows that make it look like a military bunker. After passing through a security checkpoint, I sit down with U.S. Embassy spokesman Eric Watnik and ask if the embassy is working against the socialist government of Evo Morales. “Our cooperation in Bolivia is apolitical, transparent, and given directly to assist in the development of the country,” Watnik tells me. “It is given to benefit those who need it most.”
From the Bush Administration’s perspective, that turns out to mean Morales’s opponents. Declassified documents and interviews on the ground in Bolivia prove that the Bush Administration is using U.S. taxpayers’ money to undermine the Morales government and coopt the country’s dynamic social movements—just as it has tried to do recently in Venezuela and traditionally throughout Latin America.
Much of that money is going through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In July 2002, a declassified message from the U.S. embassy in Bolivia to Washington included the following message: “A planned USAID political party reform project aims at implementing an existing Bolivian law that would . . . over the long run, help build moderate, pro-democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS or its successors.” MAS refers to Morales’s party, which, in English, stands for Movement Toward Socialism.
Morales won the presidency in December 2005 with 54 percent of the vote, but five regional governments went to rightwing politicians. After Morales’s victory, USAID, through its Office of Transition Initiatives, decided “to provide support to fledgling regional governments,” USAID documents reveal.
Throughout 2006, four of these five resource-rich lowland departments pushed for greater autonomy from the Morales-led central government, often threatening to secede from the nation. U.S. funds have emboldened them, with the Office of Transition Initiatives funneling “116 grants for $4,451,249 to help departmental governments operate more strategically,” the documents state.
“USAID helps with the process of decentralization,” says Jose Carvallo, a press spokesperson for the main rightwing opposition political party, Democratic and Social Power. “They help with improving democracy in Bolivia through seminars and courses to discuss issues of autonomy.”
“The U.S. Embassy is helping this opposition,” agrees Raul Prada, who works for Morales’s party. Prada is sitting down in a crowded La Paz cafe and eating ice cream. His upper lip is black and blue from a beating he received at the hands of Morales’s opponents while Prada was working on the new constitutional assembly. “The ice cream is to lessen the swelling,” he explains. The Morales government organized this constitutional assembly to redistribute wealth from natural resources and guarantee broader access to education, land, water, gas, electricity, and health care for the country’s poor majority. I had seen Prada in the early days of the Morales administration. He was wearing an indigenous wiphala flag pin and happily chewing coca leaves in his government office. This time, he wasn’t as hopeful. He took another scoop of ice cream and continued: “USAID is in Santa Cruz and other departments to help fund and strengthen the infrastructure of the rightwing governors.”
In August 2007, Morales told a diplomatic gathering in La Paz, “I cannot understand how some ambassadors dedicate themselves to politics, and not diplomacy, in our country. . . . That is not called cooperation. That is called conspiracy.” Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said that the U.S. Embassy was funding the government’s political opponents in an effort to develop “ideological and political resistance.” One example is USAID’s financing of Juan Carlos Urenda, an adviser to the rightwing Civic Committee, and author of the Autonomy Statute, a plan for Santa Cruz’s secession from Bolivia.
“There is absolutely no truth to any allegation that the U.S. is using its aid funds to try and influence the political process or in any way undermine the government,” says State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey. USAID officials point out that this support has gone to all Bolivian governors, not just those in the opposition. Despite Casey’s assertion, this funding has been controversial. On October 10, Bolivia’s supreme court approved a decree that prohibits international funding of activities in Bolivia without state regulation. One article in the law explains that Bolivia will not accept money with political or ideological strings attached.
In Bolivia, where much of the political muscle is in the streets with social organizations and unions, it’s not enough for Washington to work only at levels of high political power. They have to reach the grassroots as well. One USAID official told me by e-mail that the Office of Transition Initiatives “launched its Bolivia program to help reduce tensions in areas prone to social conflict (in particular El Alto) and to assist the country in preparing for upcoming electoral events.”
To find out how this played out on the ground, I meet with El Alto-based journalist Julio Mamani in the Regional Workers’ Center in his city, which neighbors La Paz.
“There was a lot of rebellious ideology and organizational power in El Alto in 2003,” Mamani explains, referring to the populist uprising that overthrew President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. “So USAID strengthened its presence in El Alto, and focused their funding and programs on developing youth leadership. Their style of leadership was not based on the radical demands of the city or the horizontal leadership styles of the unions. They wanted to push these new leaders away from the city’s unions and into hierarchical government positions.”
The USAID programs demobilized the youth. “USAID always took advantage of the poverty of the people,” Mamani says. “They even put up USAID flags in areas alongside the Bolivian flag and the wiphala.”
It was not hard to find other stories of what the U.S. government had been doing to influence economics and politics in Bolivia. Luis Gonzalez, an economics student at the University of San Simon in Cochabamba, describes a panel he went to in 2006 that was organized by the Millennium Foundation. That year, this foundation received $155,738 from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) through the Center for International Private Enterprise, a nonprofit affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Gonzalez, in glasses and a dark ponytail, described a panel that focused on criticizing state control of the gas industry (a major demand of social movements). “The panelists said that foreign investment and production in Bolivia will diminish if the gas remains under partial state control,” says Gonzalez. “They advocated privatization, corporate control, and pushed neoliberal policies.”
That same year, the NED funded another $110,134 to groups in Bolivia through the Center for International Private Enterprise to, according to NED documents, “provide information about the effects of proposed economic reforms to decision-makers involved in the Constituent Assembly.” According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by muckraker Jeremy Bigwood, the NED also funded programs that brought thirteen young “emerging leaders” from Bolivia to Washington between 2002 and 2004 to strengthen their rightwing political parties. The MAS, and other leftist parties, were not invited to these meetings.
The U.S. Embassy even appears to be using Fulbright scholars in its effort to undermine the Bolivian government. One Fulbright scholar in Bolivia, who wished to remain anonymous, explained that during recent orientation meetings at the embassy in La Paz, “a member of the U.S. Embassy’s security apparatus requested reports back to the embassy with detailed information if we should encounter any Venezuelans or Cubans in the field.” Both Venezuela and Cuba provide funding, doctors, and expertise to support their socialist ally Morales. The student adds that the embassy’s request “contradicts the Fulbright program’s guidelines, which prohibit us from interfering in politics or doing anything that would offend the host country.”
After finding out about the negative work the U.S. government was doing in Bolivia, I was curious to see one of the positive projects USAID officials touted so often. It took more than two weeks for them to get back to me—plenty of time, I thought, to choose the picture perfect example of their “apolitical” and development work organized “to benefit those who need it most.”
They put me in touch with Wilma Rocha, the boss at a clothing factory in El Alto called Club de Madres Nueva Esperanza (Mothers’ Club of New Hope). A USAID consultant worked in the factory in 2005-2006, offering advice on management issues and facilitating the export of the business’s clothing to U.S. markets. In a city of well-organized, working class radicals, Rocha is one of the few rightwingers. She is a fierce critic of the Morales administration and the El Alto unions and neighborhood councils.
Ten female employees are knitting at a table in the corner of a vast pink factory room full of dozens of empty sewing machines. “For three months we’ve barely had any work at all,” one of the women explains while Rocha waits at a distance. “When we do get paychecks, the pay is horrible.” I ask for her name, but she says she can’t give it to me. “If the boss finds out we are being critical, she’ll beat us.”
***
Benjamin Dangl is the author of “The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia.” He received a 2007 Project Censored Award for his coverage of U.S. military operations in Paraguay. Email: Ben(at)upsidedownworld.org
After a year here and then a month back in the States, I was not surprised to feel an unmistakable twitch of homecoming when I got back to Bolivia, although it’s a remarkable difference in the air. Coming back into the country is literally like walking into a wall of tension—not all necessarily negative tension—but an entirely different energy.
By some unbelievable stroke of luck I wound up spending the last two weeks of January sailing in the Bahamas with some friends and family, and a major theme on that boat was food. Vegan versus vegetarian versus omnivorism, health benefits versus sociological implications, etc. Very well. I read a book called the China Study, which essentially makes a bulletproof case for a vegan lifestyle from a health perspective, and spend a lot of time mulling over how food is so very integral to peoples and cultural identity—as an old man in Cochabamba’s only vegetarian restaurant said the other day, ‘food is like religion’.
So let’s talk about food in Bolivia. People here eat a lot of meat, and they eat a lot, period. Maybe it’s the altitude, maybe it’s the farming tradition, but a Bolivian lunch typically consists of an entrada (salad or some kind of shredded vegetable), sopa (soup, in an almost vat-sized bowl, with some piece of meat or gristle floating around in it), segundo (which is the main plate, a mountain of rice, plus an additional mountain either of meat or meat gloop), and postre. It’s widely believed that if you haven’t had meat on your plate, you haven’t really eaten. As such, it’s very difficult to find anything on the street without meat, or at least cheese in it. Since refined sugar hit the market soda, cheap chocolate, candy, and other things like that have appeared en masse on the corner s. Yu can’t walk a block without running into a little tarp-covered stand whose six-year-old attendant is hawking potato chips or cookies at the top of her young lungs. There must be a subsidy that I don’t know about, but sugar is cheaper than some of the fruit that is grown locally.
Food is sold in the markets. There are a few ‘western’ ( I can’t stand that term) supermarkets floating around, but everything in them is way out of the price range of a typical Bolivian family. Meat is sold out in the open air, and you can find pretty much any cut or any entrail that you could want, from cow tongues to guinea pig (a local specialty) to intestines and liver and things that I don’t even have names for. In the spirit of not wasting anything, everything that’s left over is ground up and dyed red and called ‘chorizo’—the only thing here that has had me on my knees puking.
Eating ‘locally’, something that requires some work in the States, is the default here. Bolivia is essentially inaccessible—we’re in the middle of the Andes, the roads are terrible, and the economy isn’t strong enough to have developed a taste for imported French cheese, so we eat what we make, and what can make it over the treacherous roads from the Chapare region. The market is a riot of color at all times of the year, even though the colors and the produce rotate. The peach crop has taken a hit this year because of all the flooding, but on any given day there are avocados half the side of your head, big broccolis and carrots and more varieties of potatoes than there are names for. Milk, soymilk, soda, wine, and beer (essentially the only drink options) are produced nationally. Quinoa, which is just beginning to appear on the international markets, has been a longtime staple in this country because it’s one of the few things that grows well at high altitudes—it’s a kind of cereal that can be boiled like couscous, or ground and used like flour.
And surprisingly, there’s a fairly strong organic foods movement going on. Food that’s grown on the outskirts of the city is at risk of contamination, because septic waters are used to irrigate, and some folks are beginning to have the time, educational tools, and financial resources to object to that and to work towards new standards. Furthermore, Bolivia’s exportation gets significantly more valuable when it’s organic, whether it’s coffee or quinoa. There are a number of little organic stores scattered around the city; they all do fairly well.
And water: water is glacial runoff which, not surprisingly, presents some concerns as global climate change melts the glaciers. One of the things we’re working on at the mARTadero is an artificial wetland that will filter the water that we use as an institution, making it, if not drinkable, at least usable in other contexts. The Water Wars put Cochabamba on the map in 2000, and it still surprises me that, even though water is such a charged issue here, it’s so poorly cared for. The city’s only river is a stinking mire of trash and feces, and usable—though not potable—water is trucked into poor parts of town at the outlandish price of a buck a barrel (outlandish when you consider that the average per capita income in that part of town is about $700 annually). There are no real water harvesting systems in place to take advantage of the rainy season. At this time of year it rains thrice daily and there is severe flooding all over the country, but I don’t know of any institutions that are trying to collect some of this water for the eight months that we will be without rain.
So I had lunch yesterday with a woman who is in the Peace Corps here in Bolivia, and who, incidentally, went to preschool with me. Apparently her mother ran into my godmother at the library—Meghan and Ann are both in Bolivia, etc. etc. and so there we were, 8,000 miles away from home eating at Cochabamba’s one vegetarian joint talking about social change. As a side note and before I continue: she mentioned that Bolivia has the highest rate of Peace Corps rape in the world. That is surprising to me, but not surprising—I feel like I’ve reeled off this factoid before, but 7 out of 10 Bolivian women have been raped. I’m veering into gender territory again (my favorite subject J ), but as it relates to development, so bear with me here.
Anyway, her initial project was to be working with farming cooperatives (the men) developing better ways to market their products abroad. She spent four months being frustrated that not one of them ever showed up to their own meetings, and that when a few of them finally did all they wanted was a tractor—as she saw it, a handout. She decided to go to the women of the community and see if there was anything that they needed. And they did—so now she’s knee-deep in a basic sanitation project which is up and sprinting, not only because the women are into it, but because they’re the ones teaching the children what’s what. Now, I realize that we need to dissect this scenario from a number of different perspectives. There’s a lot of conversation around here about the role of NGOs, services, and traditional charities that create cultures of dependency instead of self-sufficiency, and that is certainly evident in some parts of Bolivia. I don’t think too highly of the Peace Corps because they are known for doing exactly this: sending a young white woman into a group of men in a culture where neither womanhood nor youth is held in very high regard professionally, and expecting them to do a lot of community organizing without necessarily having the community context to do so. But what’s interesting to me about this (and this hasn’t been the first time this has happened) is that by working with the women of any community, Ann is effecting the quickest and most lasting change, simply because of their impact with the kids and the fact that they manage the inner workings of the household. This model is starting to be recognized elsewhere, and it seems to me a good one, however, my gripe with development as a whole is that it is subject to whatever whim hits the development community. Bolivia, Haiti, Africa, all these places patiently (or not) endure whatever new scheme the brains in Washington and elsewhere cook up. I’m in the development field, and I’m going to go back to school to study it. But I keep wondering how we can make it more responsive, when we’ve already created (and many times imposed) structures that promote anything but lasting change. I am part of a very charged, and historically very irresponsible field, and I know that I need to pay extra attention to everything that I do. How can I make it better? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Again, we’re reaching epic and unreadable length, for which I apologize, again. It’s Wednesday, which means it’s market day, which means that Cochabamba as a whole is an ungodly tangle of traffic and people and honking and colorful bundles and wheelbarrows full of bananas. When it starts to rain, we will add ankle-deep mud and slop and slip to the mixture, but when the sun comes out again the Andes will turn green and soft and the air will be fresh, and I will wonder again at the odd combination of filth and beauty that is our life.
Happy belated Thanksgiving—I hope everyone had a nice few days off saturated with family/friends and their turkey or substitute of choice. My mother and I spent that day climbing around in the rainforest in Villa Tunari playing with Spider Monkeys, big, long, gangly black monkeys with humanlike expressions and ropey tails. ‘Twasn’t exactly pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, but it was wonderful fun.
Though the international media probably hasn’t even registered a blip on the radar, Bolivia has become enormously unstable again in the past few weeks. There have been a few violent protests erupting in Sucre over the signing of the Constitution and over the capital and Santa Cruz is threatening an indefinite blockade if things don’t improve. The issue of Bolivia’s capital has been contentious for years: Residents of La Paz want La Paz to be the capital, and Sucre, presumably, wants it to be Sucre.
The constitutional assembly’s opposition groups were receiving death threats as the assembly worked towards signing a draft of Bolivia’s new constitution, which has been in the works for over a year. A decision was made to move the process inside a military college, ostensibly to protect the threatened right wing. Opposition boycotted the signing because they didn’t want to enter the compound, and then came out saying they had been excluded from the vote. Not surprisingly, protests have erupted everywhere, and what it boils down to are the white elite (opposition) against the Indians (MAS, the current majority, Evo Morales’ party). Racism and fear and hatred and wariness are palpable everywhere, and being in the middle of this mess makes it clear that people have learned exactly jack shit from centuries and centuries of the human experience. Marches have turned nasty—tear gas, killing animals, and a lot of antagonism from both sides. Contention is necessarily a part of this process, as are ideological clashes and power struggles. But violence—and I guess it’s easy for me to say this, not being Bolivian and having a ticket out of here if I want it—is being romanticized as the ‘spirit of revolution’, and the general feeling is, on both sides, that a few dead dogs and nasty confrontations are banners of righteousness under which to march. Let’s have some martyrs, martyrs get attention, and they obviously do. I don’t see any ideological gap in recognizing that violence has and always will be a part of huge sociopolitical change, and actively working against it anyway. If you—if we, if I—don’t tell ourselves that it’s possible to do it better, what are we wasting our time for?
When Mom was here she remarked on the tension that was almost tangible all over Cochabamba as compared to Santa Cruz, for example. Santa Cruz is up to its neck in the autonomy issues: essentially, light-skinned wealthy community desiring local autonomy and, more pointedly, control over indigenous lands in the area. Cochabamba at this point has no such local issue, but Santa Cruz is undoubtedly the wealthier of the two cities, and perhaps what she meant is that the tensions that poverty breed are not so easily felt there. Cochabamba is an explosive mix of a city and, even though it’s smaller than both La Paz and Santa Cruz, it has a much broader variety of Bolivian communities living within its valley. Santa Cruz is much more homogeneous: there are two principal groups suspicious of each other, instead of thirty-six. I am coming to love this city in quite an unbelievable way.
Said city, and the country in general, is experiencing a hell of a brain drain. There just aren’t enough resources, enough interesting jobs, or enough good pay to keep all the bright young things at home. In the last month I’ve lost three friends to the alluring outside: two to Italy, and one to Peru, and it’s quite reasonable for me to assume that all those moves are permanent. In the States it’s not unusual for twenty-somethings to go study or work abroad for a few years, but the vast majority come home. Here when you leave you hug your family real tight—it could be ten years before you see them again. If you are like most, you will come home for a visit when you have enough saved, but you’ll never again live in Bolivia. You find that in Switzerland your job comes with health insurance, or that in Virginia your kids get a better public education than they could ever get here. While certainly not specific to Bolivia, no less sad.
And in local news: we’re trying to put composting toilets in at the mARTadero, perhaps an unrealistically ambitious goal for an institution that sees over 80,000 people a year. There is an organization in Cochabamba called Agua Tuya, dedicated to sustainable and equitable use of water and sanitation systems. Currently the Rio Rocha, Cochabamba’s only river, receives a whole lot of black and gray waters from all over the city, while ten meters downstream women wash clothing and kids play. The thing has the consistency of slip and produces a stink worthy of gas masks. Furthermore, that ‘water’ is used to irrigate most of the crops produced on the outskirts of town, a not-insignificant portion of the city’s foodstuff. Not only do we have human feces and all kinds of sludge floating around in it but plenty of heavy metals as well: city businesses and factories are largely unregulated as far as water contamination is concerned.
Anyway, Agua Tuya builds bathrooms that have very ingeniously (artistically?) designed toilet bowls which separate pee from poop, and which requires that users take a little time to perfect their aim. However, once you have the technique mastered, they’re an awfully simple and practical concept. Pee and poop is separated through the toilet and flow into big drums below. When tanks are full the pee is sealed and stored for two weeks until all the bacteria is dead, and then it can be safely used to water crops. Poop is composted for six months until it becomes ‘humanure’ (human manure), harmless and nutrient-rich and excellent for flowers or food or whatever. Agua Tuya began the project in a very poor neighborhood on the edge of Cochabamba with a little support from a German NGO—the community went halves, and they have 27 families now using the bathrooms. The original issue was lack of appropriate sanitation and a sort of institutional lack of responsible water use and access to water in general, but the bathrooms have a superb environmental benefit. They don’t smell, and they’re clean as a whistle.
Other anecdotes illustrative of life in Bolivia:
I now have a good story to tell when people ask me how I got that formidable dent in my tooth: Meghan decides she ought to take advantage of the readily available and inexpensive dental care available in Bolivia. She goes to the ‘dentist part of town’, right above the market where there are several blocks of indistinguishable dentistry outfits, and picks the one that seems cleanest inside. She makes sure he has a diploma hanging on the wall. The dentist, who looks about eighteen, insists that the stain left a decade ago by Meghan’s braces is removable, and by gum, he was going to just sand and drill and sand and drill until he removed it! I guess it serves me right for going to the market to get my teeth cleaned. I can feel Laura and those of you who are medical professionals cringe. Perhaps I’ll rethink the tattoo idea.
Joke. But in all seriousness (and I’m so glad I have an excuse to talk about this) there’s a strip of tattoo artists who work out of sun-shredded blue tarps by the bus station. Their long laminated demo photos are hung on strings and flap around, and most of the time you see these guys with their hats pulled over their faces, snoozing in the shade. Each stand has a roll of toilet paper, presumably to clean up with, and a ratty, rusted old tattoo needle plugged into a communal generator. I’ve yet to see a customer in any one of those. What a public health nightmare. If I was brave enough I’d try to do a photo essay on them, but being the gringa with the camera around here embarrasses me.
I’m well and safe and involved in my life, and I guess I want to mention this and hope I’m understood. The thing that I find so interesting about the climate of the country–for myself and in everyone else–is how normal things are, despite the fact that they’re not at all normal. I come from a stable country, whose messes are mostly internal. It has been decades since people have been killed in protests in the States, since upheaval seized everything—certainly not in my lifetime. I assumed that teetering on the brink of civil war was going to be much more disruptive than it actually is. I’m being neither glib nor asinine, and I can’t imagine that I’m the first to ever make this observation: that life continues, making concessions, working around the blockades, concentrating on the details of your existence, trying to keep your head around what’s going on, and how to be the most responsible person possible within it.
Link to the text of the constitutional proposal: http://abi.bo/coyuntura/asamblea/asamblea.pdf
From AIN: Things remain quite tense in Sucre and it looks like there may be further conflict. The interinstitutional committee has announced a combination of hunger strikes and active protests beginning Monday. The Morales administration has adopted a more conciliatory tone, and has requested a meeting with the opposition prefects. It is doubtful that this would happen, since they are all scheduled to be in Washington on Tuesday for an Inter-American Dialogue discussion. Morales has also asked that opposition assembly members participate in sessions to approve the individual articles of the constitution, which has not met with much support.
There is tension between the police force and the attorney general, a Sucrense, who prematurely stated to La Prensa on Sunday that he was emitting arrest warrants for the departmental and other police commanders. In response the police have withdrawn all their personnel in the nine district attorney’s offices throughout the nation. The spat comes after several months of friction between the two institutions, as a result of a police proposal to modify the New Criminal Procedures code, including less prosecutor oversight of police actions, and police control of evidence, which is currently kept by the district attorneys.
It’s Saturday, and I’m feeling alive again after a nasty bout with some brief illness. These quasi-tropical fevers are pretty incredible—for two days you have no sense of time or place and your mind wanders all over the place, and when you try to connect to reality it’s like trying to think through a sack of wet cement. Fever and puking leaves all your clothes too big and your wrists feeling weak, and I realize how lucky I’ve been to have been healthy all my life.
I started to make a list the other day of notable Bolivian expressions, that either crack me up or make me scratch my head or both, and it occurs to me that I should share them (skip this bit if you’re offended by the somewhat vulgar). Following are a few choice examples:
‘Medio gradecito’- literally, ‘halfway a little bit big’. People use this when they don’t want to say something is big, but it is. Ie, como la manzana era media grandecita, no pude comer todo…
‘carácter fuerte’-literally, ‘strong of character’. We use this one when someone is has strong opinions, is confident, doesn’t temper their comments with niceties OR when they are mean, abrasive, intolerable, etc. Confidence and meanness are connected (generally speaking, not only in this expression) which I dislike, however, this can also be used medio-admiringly. I am caracter fuerte, obviously.
‘Macha’-‘manly’, but used to describe a woman who knows her %&$^ and isn’t afraid to use it. You all know me well enough to be able to imagine how I feel about this one.
‘Digamos’-‘let’s say’, but used to fill space or make comments seem less direct, and mostly by women, presumably to avoid being called ‘macha’.
‘Que se yo’-literally, ‘what do I know?’, but used as ‘whatever’. See above.
‘Que macana’-bummer, drag, pain-in-the-neck. Suitable for use around the elderly.
‘Emputear’-To piss off. Literally, ‘to bitch off’. Vulgar, but that doesn’t seem to stop everyone ages six to sixty from using it.
‘Buena/mala onda’-literally ‘good or bad vibe’, but used as a noun. Ie, she’s a good vibe, meaning a good person, a sweetheart, a rockstar, etc.
‘Re’-short for ‘recontra’, slang in itself meaning ‘very’. I feel ‘re’ excellent this morning.
‘No mames’-Another favorite. Literally, ‘don’t nurse’ or ‘don’t suckle’, but used to mean, you’re joking, you’re kidding, come on, you don’t say, etc.
‘Casera, caserita’—used to refer to vendors or their patrons. Comes from ‘casa’, ie, those in charge of the house. ‘Que cosita quieres, caserita?’ ‘Tres limones, gracias casera’.
‘Andar a la mierda’-literally, ‘to walk to the shit.’ To indicate to someone or something that they ought to fuck off, though the expression is not nearly as vulgar in Bolivian Spanish as in English.
‘-ito, -ita, -itos, -itas’-diminuitives. Bolivians love their dimuinitives. These endings are used to make things smaller, ie, piecito (little foot), dedito (little finger), manzanita (little apple), and they’re used all the time with both nouns and adjectives, not just when something is physically little, ie, estoy resfriadita (I’m sick). These have the effect of making everything much more tender, which I very much like, but people hide behind them when they’re trying to make a point, which I don’t like.
‘Chango/a’-kid, dude, guy. They use it like we say ‘you guys’.
‘Chola’- Indigenous woman. Refers to dress, sobretodo.
It’s probably not lost on you that I’m a little hyped up by how that slang relates to women. Smith is ever with me—la Condicion Femenina is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially with respect to my friends and community here. Here’s a statistic to knock your pants off: seven out of every ten Bolivian women have been sexually abused. Seven! We also know that the number is probably a little higher than that, given the nature of statistics. Whether or not treatment qualifies as abuse, women’s lives down here are very hard; the closer I get to people, the more they trust me and tell me, the more horrified I am. The balance of something is off. A few illustrations:
A coworker of mine had a child at twenty-two (the child is now seventeen), the dad ran off and left them when the baby was a few weeks old, and my friend moved back in with her parents. Meanwhile, her own father beats up on both her and her mother. Her parents made her take the newborn infant and walk around in the streets all afternoon and evening whenever her aunts or the neighbors came to visit, because they didn’t want a visual reminder of the shame of keeping a fatherless baby in the house. And the thing that kills me is that Mr. Deadbeat Dad can just walk off and start a new life somewhere with no stigma whatsoever, which is probably exactly what he did. When my friend finally moved out of her family’s house, the parents kept her child and refused to give him up. There is no such thing as family court down here.
There’s a Bolivian tradition called Viernes del Soltero (Single’s Friday) in which men, coupled and married or not, go out on Friday nights and drink together and take young single girls home. The prevailing message is that those existing partners and wives should just accept this as part of the male character and deal. Not to mention the issue of STD´s.
My dear friend Claudia just moved out of her mother’s house. That’s still a very big, very risky move for women down here—you are expected to live with your parents until you get married, at which time you move in with your husband. When you move to a different city to study you stay with family or friends, and if you don’t have family or friends, well, people feel sorry for you. For some families this system works very well, and it counteracts this weird phenomenon of dispersion that takes place in the States. Claudia’s mother, however, is severely depressed, bordering on abusive, and Claudia decided that if she was ever going to have a healthy, productive life, she needed to be on her own. Claudia is twenty-eight, a licensed, experienced professional, and had never even moved house before, much less lived alone. So she found some rooms around the corner from me and two of us helped her move—her mother wouldn’t say one word to any of us while we were there, and almost two months later still won’t pick up the phone, hasn’t been over to see Claudia’s new place, and won’t answer the door when she comes over. Needless to say, no one makes nearly as much noise when men make similar decisions.
All of this puts me in an odd position. Just by virtue of who I am I break many of these prevalent cultural taboos, and they’re forgiven without exception because it’s understood that 1. I have no choice, and/or 2. Foreigners are weird and can’t be held accountable for their actions. My life, consisting of I-don’t-know-how-many moves, languages, countries, jobs, friendships, educational opportunities, living conditions, etc, is seen as simultaneously enticing and absolutely unhinged. When traumas occur my friends come to me because chances are good that I’ve encountered something similar, not because I’m intrinsically any wiser, just because life has dumped a different set of experiences on my lap. It makes me feel good that I can be a support a lot of the time, that I have something valuable to give, but it gets me thinking a lot about the nature of friendships. I ain’t a-gonna lie, it’s been a struggle for me to just relax and believe that people’s intentions are pure, that I’m not being taken advantage of, and then when I do relax and give myself over to a friendship, there are the ever-tricky waters of cultural context to navigate. Claudia can come to me when her mother is misbehaving, but I can’t really explain to her how restless I sometimes feel, like this is my home and I want to be here more than anywhere else in the world, but that I feel the same way about a handful of other places. Her reality is clearer to me than mine is to her: I know her mother and her brothers, I’ve seen the house where she has grown up, and all of those things help her make sense. I just don’t make sense to people, because I’m here out of context. I don’t want to be the gringa who is always talking about herself, so I’ve had to wait until we have enough similar ground, ie, almost a year of friendship, to reference. Additionally, it’s an odd balance to strike between foreign ideas, and just plain old supporting a friend. There are those who say that I shouldn’t encourage Claudia to move because I don’t fully understand the culture of family life, that it’s not my place to encourage someone to change, the whole dialogue on cultural imperialism, etc. But at the end of the day this is my reality and Claudia is my friend, so, culture aside, my first responsibility is to her. I’d be interested to hear what folks’ opinions are on all of this.
Todos Santos was yesterday, All Saint’s Day. I’m not sure how they celebrate this in the States, but here it’s a day to go to the cemetery and clean up the family plot and to essentially appreciate the presence of the dead in the lives of the living. Those families who have lost a relative within the year cook that person’s favorite food and collect their favorite things and make a little shrine to them within the house. Neighborhood children come singing–caroling?–to the homes of the bereaved, and in return for their songs get goodies and cookies and biscuits, similar to Halloween. The cemetery is like a big fair, flowers and bread and cookies and mariachi and chicha and colors everywhere, quite celebratory and not at all sad. I can count on two fingers the number of times I’ve been to my grandmother’s grave, and it’s nice that people here make maintaining that connection with the dead a priority.
Work is good. It’s very rewarding to see physical changes in a space (I’m building urban gardens with some local kiddos)—it’s been a while since I’ve had a job whose results manifest themselves visually, and I like it. The mARTadero just won one of MTV’s seven prizes for Agents of Social Change in Latin America, which got us a lot of good press internationally and hopefully will attract some funding. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I’m also consulting for the Andean Information Network, an informational organization who publishes on-the-ground news updates about Bolivia about three times a month—if you want to receive them go to www.ain-bolivia.org and sign up. They’re in English, they’re concise, and they boil very complex dynamics down into a comprehensible format.
I had a few backpackers staying with me this week, an Australian woman and a guy from Holland who are friends of a friend, and it was great fun to tap back into the vagabonding twenty-something set, despite the cramped quarters. I forget how easy and open that world is. I have very few expat friends here, which was a good, conscious decision because it allows me to be entirely part of this reality, but these two were so relaxed and fun; we had a terrific time. If you all have friends bumming around South America who need a place to stay, send them my way.
My temporary residency papers are in process, finally, which is a frightening, daunting task consisting of a million fees and stamps and tramites and signatures and notarized forms, and I just keep reminding myself that it would be twenty times harder if I were a Bolivian trying to go to the States. My mom is arriving in a little over two weeks, just in time for my birthday (how cool is that), and I’m really looking foreword to seeing her and showing her around. It’s spring here, the rains are beginning, the flowers are blooming, and the sun is fierce. I’ll be home for a few weeks in December and January, so I hope I’ll see those of you who are based in the northeast.
I was holding my breath when I took this new job, wondering if I’d made the decision on the rebound, thumbing my nose at failure and all that, but I’m happy to report that I couldn’t have landed in a better operation than the mARTadero. No, I’m an administrator, and I don’t miss either the control or responsibility at this point. I have my own project and all the flexibility and discretion I could desire within the environmental profile of the organization, I’ve wound up with some wonderful, wonderful people, and a boss who is one of the more formidable intellects I’ve ever encountered, without question. Recycling+art+plants+environmentalism+community development+kickass coworkers and boss=Meghan is happy. Life is good, and includes such highlights as these:
A few weeks ago I discovered about 3,000 old license plates that had been left in one of the mARTadero’s storage rooms, and with the assistance of a few ‘local artisans’ (read, lecherous men with soldering guns who harassed me for being a woman out and about in that part of the market alone) we created 25 recycled art ‘macetas’ (planters) and put them to use. They have been such a hit among visitors and public that we have decided to make an additional quantity to sell, as a means of consistent funding for the project. An agronomist from the Facultad de Agronomia de la Universidad Mayor de San Simon was involved in picking out a number of locally/spatially appropriate plants which have exploded into growth (our rainy season has just started) and are already changing the atmosphere of the place. A friend of a friend has this wild riot of a garden behind his house, and has been generous with all kinds of clippings and seeds—I’m learning a huge amount about local species. Cochabamba, interestingly enough, has a lot of variations on the same things we cultivate in New England—honeysuckle, for example, grows like green net all over the city, all kinds of ivy and jasmine and such.
We’re working on planning a ‘Rincon Ecologico’ in the back of the mARTadero, a little corner/greenhouse/community model; it’ll have recycling and be constructed of sustainable or reused or recycled materials, a composting operation—the mARTadero’s Café Ithaca will use the pile, and the finished compost will be used in the garden and for the plants, and a small vegetable garden built on top of one of the existing concrete structures, and a system of water recycling/reuse. The mARTadero is not lacking in design and presentation resources; all the graphic designers are going to town making aesthetically and professionally designed signs explaining the background and significance of each process. I may have been fighting to get my hands on some old barrels for the last six weeks, but goddamnit, we will have pretty signs!
After endless phone calls, the oil refinery (of all places) in Cochabamba has agreed to donate the necessary materials to make recycling barrels, and we’ve reached an agreement with a local junk collector who will be responsible for the purchase and resale of these recyclables. The environmental sociologist in me loves how Bolivia reuses everything—everything—but I miss the days when it was possible to borrow my dad’s truck an go over to the dump and help myself to any kind of container I wanted. Considering bureaucracy and pace of life and all, we might actually have them finished by June J
In an effort to wed environment and culture, we are working on one more, very interesting project. Inspired by a brand of candy that has messages printed inside its wrappers (thank you Josh Brown, for sending them too me here) I began to consider the most effective way to get our public to think about environmentalism, and decided to collect bits and pieces of Bolivian environmental thought (many of the Quechua and Aymara legends have environmental morals, and characters that act as caretakers of the earth), and post them in unexpected places all through the mARTadero. To inspire thought: instead of, for example, posting something like ‘Verde es vivo’, which is blatant, easily digested, and enables people to assimilate the ditty without comprehending it, we’re trying to ask questions that require the reader to dig around in their cultural memory to understand the message. For example, ‘Be careful, or Padre Selva will come after you.’ The person asks: ‘who is Padre Selva?’ They’ll go back to the stories they have been told as a child, and remember that Padre Selva lives in the forest and keeps an eye on the hunters and the animals and the relationship therein. The Bolivian educational system as a whole is not big on critical thinking (kids learn by rote—a classroom looks and sounds like something out of the 1890’s) so we’re trying to put these questions in unexpected places (like in bathroom stalls) with the hope that the element of surprise will force people to consider them more carefully.
The mARTadero has also been hosting something called ExpoSIDA for the past two weeks, a huge exposition on HIV and AIDS and awareness and protection. AIDS is an enormously taboo subject down here, and people with AIDS are very much ostracized, abused, discriminated against, etc. A friend of mine is a Reiki practitioner and works in an AIDS clinic, and some of the stories she tells are terrible: that of a young man who tested positive for HIV and, along with his young daughter, was immediately abandoned by his family. They have been living together in this ‘Cuidad de Niños’ for a few months, but the girl will have to go into an orphanage before too long, which are very grim places down here. The government requires an HIV test to get temporary residency here, and you’re automatically denied if you’re positive, that kind of thing. Anyway, I was at work yesterday and they had brought in several hundred soldiers from the local air force base to go through the exhibition and play some of the educational games, and it was really refreshing to see all those macho dudes letting themselves go; I sat on the gate and watched all these soldiers (who are young men, probably only 18 or so) let themselves get into this learning, and I was very impressed. The operation in charge of the exposition has done a terrific job of making it non-threatening, and of providing really good, really honest, and really non-sensationalist information.
Ok, enough about work. In other news…I got a bicycle, and have been loving ripping around through the inconceivable tangle of Cochabamba traffic like the hinges of hell. Those of you who have lived/visited the third world will have an idea of what I’m talking about when I say the traffic is bad, and for the rest of you: picture the worst rush-hour clusterfuck you’ve ever seen in Midtown, or on the Beltway in DC, and multiply it by six. Then add two thousand bicycles and six hundred motorcycles, several clots of white-uniformed school kids and a handful of hapless adult pedestrians weaving their way in and out, and you’ll have an approximate idea of what downtown looks like here. Needless to say, I can go much faster on my bike than I can in any kind of public transportation. And she’s a classic conglomeration of burgled parts, painted blue and red camouflage blotches, named Rocket II, after my sister’s old white beater that she had in high school.
I wrote about Urkupina last month, but it turns out that the best part of the celebration was actually a few weekends ago. Hundreds of people turned out on Sunday by Urkupina, and the tradition is this: Whatever you want in your life you can buy in miniature, have it blessed by the priest, and supposedly those miniatures will bring you realization of good fortune in life. And you could buy anything: tiny cars made from tin, little houses, brooms, bicycles, miniature diplomas in every academic field imaginable, money, passports, plane tickets, tools, bricks, babies, food, even tiny bars of soap and toilet paper. I looked and looked and looked for a visa to stay in Bolivia, without any luck (apparently I am the only one crazy enough to want to flow the opposite way of this immigration current—I shall do you all a favor and restrict social commentary here). Anyway, you make your purchases and then go into the church where the Father blesses them with holy water, and that’s that. My landlady was grousing about how people start to depend on gimmicks and objects instead of making things happen themselves, but I think that visualization of those desires must have some effect. If I look at my mini carnet de identidad every morning (national ID card—I eventually gave up on finding a visa), I’m reminded much more often of what I want, which might, in turn, light a fire under my ass. Just ideas….but either way, the fair in which they sell all this stuff is absolutely unreal.
My dance company performed at a huge ritzy party a few weeks ago, in an old hotel. The piece was half in the water and half on stage, and, to usurp a popular phrase, was hallucinante, all of us with wet hair and scarves flying and disco balls rotating and all that. It wasn’t a terribly artistically inclined audience, but it was great fun. And, we’re performing in the mARTadero in a few weeks more, on Women’s Day at the Festival of the Feminine, which will be an interesting conjunction of the two most important parts of my life here.
Other than more fighting with thieves (I am so tired of people trying to rob me, and it’s worse because they’re inept about it. I could manage a grain of respect for someone who pulled something deft, but if I can beat off a would-be thief twice my size in the market, something is wrong), reading of Paulo Coelho, and absent contemplation of what life might look like after Cochabamba, if indeed there is life after Cochabamba, things have been following themselves much at the normal rate of speed. For the first time since I can remember, I am feeling entirely plugged in to my life, not looking ahead to the next thing, content with where I am and what I’m doing. It’s not unusual for me to enjoy things greatly, to the point of unrestrained joy, but it is very rare to feel rooted and content, which is how I’ve been feeling. So nice.
