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.
