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!
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.
