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.
