Of Bolivia...

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.