New and old photos...

View of La Paz from El Alto












Exploring a back street of El Alto

Fortune tellers read coca leaves in these small sidwalk rooms. My fortune was disconcertingly accurate.

Swimming in Lake Titicaca

Three girls I befriended on La Isla del Sol. If you squeezed their bear's paw, it sang twinkle twinkle little star. I tried teaching them the words, but instead of singing, they jumped up and down yelling, "canta mas! canta mas!"

Suma looking skeptical as we cross Lake Titicaca. Sea sickness came fast.

Lake Titicaca

Ruins at Tiwanaku

Suma and Val on a free afternoon, hiking in Yotala, twenty minutes outside of Sucre.

Yotala

Visit to a traveling Bolivian music troop.

Exploring the heights of Sucre.

Woman in Sucre, taking a break from selling her textiles to tourists.

La vista del bus on my way to the hot springs.

Young miners on Cerro Rico.

Miners children selling stones from the mine, found us the second we emerged.

Miners on lunch break.

Me looking ridiculous.

An ex miner demonstrating his dynamite. We bought coca and 90% alcohol from the market to bring to the miners and offer to El Tio, the devil of the mountain.

Cerro Rico



Kids playing with our cameras in Potosi.

Three weeks that seem like ten in one post…

Besides slacking off in my blog writing these past three weeks, here’s a tenth of what I’ve been up to since I last wrote: spelunking through the silver mines of Cerro Rico, chewing coca to avoid altitude sickness, playing basketball with miner’s children in the heights of Potosi (while they played hide-and-go-seek with my camera lens), drumming with Argentinean wanderers in the plazas at midnight, swimming in hot springs, chatting with Canadian math-major-dropouts on the bank, riding busses for hours through the Andes, offering red jello through the bus window to child vendors below. (Food is as good as money here and coca an even better substitute). I’ve sipped coca tea with each meal, watched Water War documentaries in Plaza Principal with the anarchists, spent weekend nights around bonfires at a friend’s house in Tiquipaya, been robbed by men in bowler hats and hugged by adolescent glue-sniffers (clefero’s, they’re called here). I’ve been stuck in the city at 3 a.m. due to a temporary gas crisis, met with Oscar Olivera (a leader of the Water Wars), had my portrait drawn by Mamani Mamani on the back of a postcard, visited the World Bank and Feminist Action in the same 24 hours. Few moments alone, no moments bored, many moments tired with no moment to realize it.

This adventure is unremitting – and sometimes overwhelming. Last Thursday I left class at 6, depressed and sobered by a documentary we had watched about street children of Cochabamba. A girl met me at the door – the same one I see each day – in a felt hat and campesino clothes and the sweetest round face, holding out her hand palm up at my pockets. I passed her as I do every day, making a sad face and holding my hands up and empty, when really my wallet was full. I made my way to Ayacucho, passing kids who clutched and buried their noses in plastic containers of glue, and I searched for a taxi that would take me to the restaurant where I would meet my friends. Each one that passed was full, women holding their babies halfway out the window. So I found a microbus, hoped it was the right one and pushed myself through the packed isle just in time to pass a pick-pocketing old man who swiped my phone and hopped from the moving bus. I met my classmates at Comida Hindu (means Indian Food), an original name for what’s likely the only Pakistani restaurant in Bolivia. We ordered and began our work, planning a new project that would investigate the recent floods in Beni that have displaced hundreds of thousands of families. We finished, our depression renewed, and I waited anxiously on the street corner for the last taxi of the night to pass. At home my father said to me, “O hermosa, que grave. Mi pais es tan feo.” And then he told me, at least the guy didn’t hold a knife to my throat and drag me around the city buying things for him on my credit card (which had happened to his friend a few months before). I said, yes, at least that didn’t happen. And then I agreed to spend the evening watching the news with him, which repeated the following four stories three times each: the emerging war between Ecuador and Columbia, the rising floods in Beni, Bolivia’s inflation, and the arranged battles between the two Cochabamban police forces, leaving six injured after three had been lynched.

I asked my family at lunch last week if this was normal. They said it wasn’t. My father is pessimistic about the future of the country – other countries have laws, policemen, constitutions, rights to free speech. This country, he says, has none of that, and if it does have laws, there’s no capacity to enforce them. But it’s a beautiful country, he says – no other place like it in the world.

It is a beautiful country. I’ve never been to a place before where I can sit for hours on plaza cobblestones, chatting with wandering artisans about Latin American social movements. In a plaza in Sucre, I met a young metal-worker named Oscar who invited me to his shop the next day. He spent three hours with my friend and I, teaching us how he makes his jewelry. Before we left, he wrapped our wrists in macramé and said maybe we’d meet again in another plaza someday. I’ve had so many single-day interactions like these. They’re addicting. My friends have told me they’re afraid I’m going to disappear on one of the program excursions – they imagine coming across me one day in a city plaza – hair dreaded and wrapped, wearing stripped pants, big socks and rubber sandals, selling paintings at minimal cost along side the Argentineans. I’ve told them, that’s ridiculous. But it probably is my secret fantasy.

I’m enjoying my program too much to want to abandon it. I spent hours this week at the La Paz office for the national climate change program, interviewing the directors there and getting ideas for my ISP. My final project will take me back to Lake Titicaca – hopefully to investigate the politics surrounding a petroleum deposit that the government discovered beneath the lake. My directors are as crazy as ever, and I’ve found some close friends in the group and in the city. And I find the strangest connections in unexpected places (Chester, I met your next door neighbor at a party last weekend; Aaron, your good friend Valerie is one of my closest friends here; Emma people, the brother of that girl who ran away with the biology teacher right before we were freshmen is on my course.)

So, life is swell, and I hope yours is too. Thanks to all of you who have kept me updated – for no apparent reason, I’m feeling confident that I’ll reciprocate by being a better blogger from now on. Now I’m off to play some street ultimate, then out for the night at my director’s house for his birthday party. Carino!

Wilsterman v. Santa Cruz, more projectiles…

I spent last Sunday at the stadium with the neighbors (who happen to be the former owners of the local soccer team) and watched Cochabamba lose to Santa Cruz 2-3 in the last two minutes. I wore blue by accident – not the right color in a solid red crowd – but soon turned the shade of the home team anyway, since it was 80, sunny, and I forgot my sunscreen. Fun nonetheless. Highlights include empanadas from the Quechuan women in the stands, Bolivian sport event harassment (whistling instead of booing, and lobbing half-full Coca-Cola bottles at the other team during corner kicks), and the bicycle kick that Cochabamba scored in the last 5 minutes of the game.

Soccer’s everywhere here, though Cochabambinos will admit to not being very good at it. Not like the Argentineans, they say. I pass pick-up games along my running route every Sunday, but I’ve yet to join a game with guys my own age (haven’t seen a single girl playing soccer here). I’m working my way up, though – ten year olds in the street last weekend, and next time I’ll search for some middle-schoolers.

This party’s getting long…

Today’s the last day of Carnaval. Thank Pachamama. If Carnaval lasted much longer than this, I have a feeling people would soon be throwing rocks in place of water balloons. I’ve given up on wearing my rain jacket and hood – it’s too hot out there. I've tried a new technique of retaliation. My friends and I have stocked up on cans of espuma and keep ourselves armed. This warfare has turned dangerous (already a few Cochabambino eyes lost). Gangs have graduated from the plazas and now prowl the city in the backs of trucks, not lobbing, but heaving balloons at anyone they see. If only baseball was a sport here...

So I’m starting to realize what Ismael meant when he said everything here contains the best and the worst of Bolivia all at once. The markets smell like decaying meat and fresh flowers. You’ll get jumped in a gated community and offered lemonade in a slum. And there’s little boundary between rich and poor – all go to the same market, drink the same beer, eat the same foods (though some eat more meat than most can afford), ride the same trufis and busses – and it seems that all live in the same neighborhoods. It’s not uncommon to see a concrete apartment building, gutted and crumbling (but still intact enough to house a family) beside a beautiful three-story, one-family house. The house I see from my bedroom window looks like a miniature monastery - yellow stucco with a tiled roof and a citrus garden surrounding the patio. The apartment building beyond it is six stories and crumbling.

But the fact that bankers and beggars walk the same streets doesn’t shrink the economic disparity. The gap is just more visible. The rich know how the poor live, and the poor know the same about the rich. The poorest of Cochabamba generally come from el campo, the Andean foothills that surround the city. Most who move to the city are Aymaran or Quechuan women; they set up their carts on the street corners, selling brazil nuts, puffed rice and roasted lima beans (usually to gringos like us who are in constant search of something that’s not meat or potatoes).

Other camposinas come to work as empleadas for the middle and upperclass families of Cochabamba. Empleadas are live-in maids – most of my friend’s host families have one. They keep the house clean, wash clothing, cook meals, and in return, they’re paid a few dollars a month and given food and a bed. From what I’ve seen, some are treated like slaves, others like family members. My family’s empleada (whom they refer to fondly as Empi) has been part of the family for years, her mother having worked for my mother’s family more than 30 years ago when they lived in Sucre. Unlike other women in this line of work, Empi is allowed to participate in conversation, watch TV with the kids, and go on family excursions. But she doesn’t eat with us. She waits behind the counter to refill my glass or take my plate when I’ve finished.

On Friday, the family was out for most of the day, so I had two meals alone with Empi. I love to talk with her – she laughs after everything she says, listing my host brother’s guapos amigos who she thinks I should meet and telling stories about her own family. She’s from an indigenous community in the northeast of the country, along the border of Brazil. Her father died when she as little, leaving her mother to raise Empi’s 26 brothers and sisters, 23 of which were brothers. She says her mother is the strongest person she knows. No kidding.

I love my family, though they’re quite a bit more western than I expected. We live in very nice house in the northwest of Cochabamba, and my bedroom window looks north to the mountains. Every morning my brother (he’s 24) takes me to the city center, since my classes are just a block away from the bank where he works. My 20-year-old sister also lives at home (kids in Bolivia don’t move out of the house until they’re married), and she’s studying at the local Catholic university to be a journalist. She never seems to go to class, so she’s around a lot, but she’s always a lot of fun to hang out with.

My host father and mother are as loving as ever – Lilliana takes me on walks through the neighborhood or the city market, and Jorge will spend hours with me at the lunch table, discussing politics and global warming. Coincidentally he’s one of Bolivia’s experts in environmental issues and indigenous affairs, and he’s always wanting to tell me the latest stories of floods in the north and land rights conflicts in the east.

Life is still fast paced – I feel like I’m just starting to realize I’m here. I was in a club on Friday night when Like a Prayer came on. Everyone knew the words, everyone’s shirt stayed on, and my first thought was, “yes, this is definitely not Vermont.”

Más agua…

It’s Monday and a national holiday in Bolivia – a pardon from the government to get wet, get drunk, and sin for the sake of Pachamama, Earth Mother. The party my sister took me to began at noon and lasted eight hours. The moment I arrived I was doused in a bucket of water and sprayed with foam, looking whiter than I already was. The host family had ordered a water truck – they shut down the street, backed the truck up to the house, and placed a bathtub beneath the spout. One grandfather wandered the party with a red bucket, drenching those distracted by conversation or hiding away from the mayhem. By four, the street was a river, and by five, the grandfather was lying in the gutter as women in tight, wet jeans danced around him, kicking waves over his body. One woman grabbed my hand, and I found myself spinning circles to reggaetone. By six the truck ran dry, the neighborhood sobered (momentarily), and a friend of my sister’s took me to the patio for a lesson in salsa dancing. People love to dance here, though with the exception of my brother, very few of the guys I’ve met will admit to loving reggaeton - I offended my sister’s novio today when I told him I didn’t like Metalica.

Cochabamba on three hours of sleep…

Four days ago I departed slushy Troy for Miami, spent ten hours in the airport eating almonds and contemplating palm trees, flew the night to Cochabamba, Bolivia where our program directors (one with freckles and the other with extensive tattoos) herded us onto a bus, sat in a hotel conference room taking notes on 101 ways I might die this semester, lost myself and my friend in the city center, flagged a taxi but forgot how to argue the charge, wandered the Cochabamba bars in a pack of gringos, got pelted with water balloons, rode a bus to Oruro over the mountains, found myself in a crowd of 400,000 drunk Bolivians, watched a parade for 38 hours, followed the dancers until (almost) dawn, ate saltenas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, boarded a bus back to Cochabamba but forgot to sleep, ate more beef than I’ve eaten in my life, and to end this run-on sentence, found an internet café so I could write it all down before I fall into a deep sleep and forget what I’ve done in these four, awake days.

So I’ve arrived and am in a daze. But having never lived in a third world country (nor a city, for that matter), I’m happily out of my comfort zone. It feels good to be shaken. From the little I’ve seen of Cochabamba, I’m in love with this city. There’s no order to traffic – you could pass a car to the right or the left, and it makes no difference. Vendors line the sidewalks, and the plazas are packed with protesters and dancers. It’s warm here and generally dry with the exception of the occasional water bucket dumped on your head from an apartment above.

The country is in the midst of a very long party – Carnaval in Oruro this past weekend and here in Cochabamba next weekend. This week I´ve had to avoid the city plazas, where gangs of kids like to stand waiting at the entrances, armed with water balloons, super soakers and cans of "espuma" - soapy foam that they spray like whipped cream at unguarded passerbyes. It´s actually hilarious to watch - Bolivians take "water wars" to a whole new level. You´ll see mom´s sitting in cars, pumping up super soakers and handing them to their toddlers in the front seats. Unfortunately my hair has made me a magnet for water balloons and machismo – I find myself dodging projectiles by day and comments like, “You. Me. Not work why?” by night.

I spent the last two nights in the city of Oruro, just about 5 hours west of Cochabamba. Oruro is the traditional host for Bolivian Carnaval - Ishmael (my program director) explained it well - he said Oruro Carnaval takes the best and the worst of all of Bolivia and condenses it into one weekend and one 10 mile street. I´ve never seen Mardi Gras, but I have a feeling there´s no competition in size and energy. The central event of Carnaval is a parade that lasts five days straight, 8 a.m. to 5 a.m., with three hours in between for the bolivians to sober up and start over again. The street the marchers take is nearly 10 kms long, lined with bleachers where thousands of onlookers stand to watch, dance, and lob baloons at innocent victims during breaks in the parade. The costumes are more colorful and elaborate than any I´ve ever seen - they must cost nearly an entire year´s salary for an average boliviano, and each participant buys a new costume each year. I´m not sure where they come from or how the bolivianos pay for them, but Carnaval is such a foundational part of the culture here that perhaps these costumes are the most important annual investment.

I spent last night following the dancers to the end of the parade route, where thousands gathered to watch the alba, or the sunrise ceremony. And now I´m writing on three hours of sleep, having to greet my family for the first time tonight.