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…
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.
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.
