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…
