Cambaland

I went to the campo of Santa Cruz this week to help my friend start a community bank. San Jose de Chiquitos is a town of red dirt roads and spring greens even in the dead of winter. There are bulging trees that are said to hide duende, leprauchan-like creatures that play tricks on people. The Bolivian town is dotted with pocket communities of fierce indigenous nomads and Mennonites, tall Europeans related to the Amish that speak low-German and mostly farm (think Children of the Corn, in dark denim overalls, light blue dress shirts, and straw hats). In the hills you can hike to a great rock formation called Valley of the Moon and collect a fruit that tastes like dates and looks like smooth brown rocks on the ground, but you have to watch out for the crazy three-fingered man that lives there looking for gold. It feels like a fairytale land, or maybe a Hayao Miyazaki film.

The students are on winter vacation, and it´s quieter and cooler than the last time we were here in the stifling spring heat. Cooler meaning, you still don´t have to sleep with a blanket and cold bucket baths feel great in the afternoon. Jenny´s counterpart is a priest named Brother Melchor. He is like a jolly little elf and claps and shouts “Ánimo!” after each of our ideas. He lives with two other priests in a cozy little house in the ghettos of San Jose and they are all teachers at the Catholic Marista high school. The hermanos Melchor, Nacho, and Francisco are wonderful. They feed us lunch and tell us animated stories with exaggerated facial expressions like cartoon characters. I miss the fireworks and BBQ´s of a real 4th of July, but we bake a lemon pie for the brothers and spend the evening playing basketball with the orphanage kids Jenny works with. “Basketball” is any number of kids grabbing the ball and running halfway across the court before dribbling it twice and throwing a wild pot shot. There are 2 full-court basketball games and a soccer match taking place on the same court, miraculously without any casualties.

It is a nice break from malingering in my office, trying to track down people who don´t want to work with me. But it´s a short break; the blockade rumors begin in the afternoon. A paro near the border of Brasil, which will block the train from arriving in San Jose. Then, protestors demanding “autonomia indigena” close in on all roads to Santa Cruz. By the time we catch the last spots on a 2 a.m. train back to the city the miners have locked down the altiplano and the students are blockading Sucre roads. It´s an all-star week of civil unrest. Back in Santa Cruz I gorge myself on all the food and shopping I don´t have in Sucre. The city is decked out in green and white; the departmental colors of Santa Cruz and the autonomia movement in general. July 2 was the anniversary of the movement and everywhere banners and t-shirts scream “100% Camba” and “¡Autonomia, Carajo!” I assume that´s what the demonstraters on the street are saying too; the cambas drop their s´s and slur and I cannot understand a damn word they say.

Somehow, the only road not blockaded is the old, unpaved road between Santa Cruz and Sucre, so I am able to get back home via a 14-hour rattling wreck of a bus ride. When I left Sucre last week, police were lining the streets to protect the Constituent Assembly from torch-bearing students protesting state control of the university. In typical Bolivian fashion, it flared up and died down within the week. Now the new constitution, originally due August 6, has been postponed to December. So we can look forward to another half year of come-and-go blockades until the constitutional blowout. Ánimo!

FUN FACT / QUOTE OF THE DAY: “This would be SO much better if we had, like, a 40% chance of getting kidnapped.”

Dear Diary

Cold. Undercaffeinated. Irritated. Bolivian work partners ignoring me. Feel like I´ve accomplished nothing. Insert new date and repeat.

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: The plaza was tear-gassed last week while students were protesting for university autonomy. Oski would be proud!

Haikus for Bolivia

Got hit by a bus
Because in Bolivia
They don´t share sidewalks

Ahorita means
In 5 hours or a month
But never right now

Que lástima que
no traduzca en inglés
“capacitación”

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: Today is the anniversary of the revolution for independence, or the “first cry for liberty”

From Santa Cruz

This is from my friend Jenny, another volunteer. Note that 1) snacks come before medical attention, and 2) no one is surprised.
Ahh, Bolivia:

..I got on my normal train at 2am from San Jose to Santa Cruz. I fell somewhat asleep until I was woken up by the intense bumping and terrible train sounds. Then I woke up to see all my stuff from the right side of the train fall and smash into all the people sitting on the left side of the train. Then we were stopped. No one seemed to be getting upset or freaked out at all which I was more in shock about than this train problem. Well the people in charge started yelling not to move or we would tip the train over. This is when I started to wake up enough to notice that out car was almost completely sideways. People slowly starting getting out of the train one by one with the help of the guys who were pulling us out of the train. Of course my pants got stuck and I was sort of hanging from the train there for a second but the some nice guy caught me. The car behind mine was even worse and was completely sideways and the people were climbing out the windows. Somehow during all of this no one was hurt, no one seemed to express anger or fright, or even annoyance. The Bolivians just seemed to take it as oh damn our train crashed time to hang out and wait. I was thinking holy shit I was just in a train wreck this is so cool and crazy.

When the sun came up after an hour of our crash at 5 it started getting hot. So the Bolivians started making fires which I thought was weird since it was so hot already and who packed for food for the BBQ but then I noticed we didn't have any food for that and someone informed me it was to keep away the killer mosquitoes who were eating us alive. Then the Bolivians started picking these huge leaves from the brush and wearing them on their heads like hats to keep cool. After about 6 or 7 hours I was getting annoyed and the novelty of the crash had worn off but I still didn't seem to see any Bolivians complaining. We finally were given some water and a piece of bread about 7 hours in and finally after 9 and a half hours of waiting a train from the other direction came and picked us up. They handed out fried chicken and rice to us and now after 9 and a half hours sent around doctors to check and see if we were all right. We endured the next 5 and a half hours on the train to the bridge near Santa Cruz where they then transferred us to buses to take us the rest of the way. Meanwhile feeling pretty nasty and tried a camera crew and news woman ran up to me and started interviewing me about the crash. I felt so gross and tired I pretended not to speak Spanish and they went away eventually. So at 7 p.m. we finally arrived in Santa Cruz only 11 hours later than expected.

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: "My host mom gave me a gun to shoot the donkey that keeps coming into my courtyard."

Campo Envy

It is the December meeting of a group of our socias (clients) in the community of Ravelo, a two-hour drive via a feo road of dust and rocks clattering over steep, crumbling edges. Our tin box jeep is a Suzuki Samurai with the shocks of a tricycle and the back door held together with a clever knot of the only seat belt and part of the tire jack. I feel like I’m in a pinball machine. And the sensation of dirt between my teeth and my telescoping spine gets old after, oh, 15 minutes. But the town is beautiful, sparsely tucked under an expanse of purple mountains and washed out sky. It looks like the pueblo I imagined living in before site assignments.

The meeting is underway. Having stuttered out my part, I am examining the mud and straw-thatched roof of the room we are in thinking, this is where Chagas disease comes from. The socias are signing their guarantee of the women in their solidarity group, surrounded by children who shuffle restlessly and drift in and out of the room with the dust particles. One child stays the whole time. He constantly has a smile on his face but amuses himself by covering his ears and screaming every ten minutes. It’s unnerving. “Smiles” steals a 1 Bs. coin during the loan disbursement, which no one notices until he swallows it and promptly vomits. I start to panic because I don’t know if you can perform the Heimlich on a two-year old, but just then he swallows the pesito completely and starts bawling. I go home and Google `toddler heimlich maneuver´. This is my “analysis” for the diagnostic report we´re assigned our first 3 months; tagging along with the folks of Pro Mujer and talking to every socia in the campo that will humor me. In 20 dusty courtyards or adobe rooms I have conversations that usually go as follows -

Me: Do you keep any record of the potatoes and corn you sell? Socia: Where are you from, Japan?
M: I am from the U.S., but my parents were born in China. How far do you have to travel to sell your vegetables?
S: Depends, sometimes far. Japan is pretty far, isn´t it?

Sometimes the women even give us fruit, pastries of fried goodness, or refrescos (warmish corn porridge drink with little black specks of suspiciousness, or a neon soda that tastes like carbonated liquid jello). I miss these long days of travel to and from the communities, getting stuck in storms, daydreaming in each town about where I would live if it were my site. The last month I’ve been office-bound, turning my surveys into something measurable. Outside my non-ergonomic holding cell, December passed with another B43 volunteer resignation and a temporary evacuation of our Santa Cruz volunteers when the military took over a few towns to keep rioters from burning the houses of MASistas (political party of Evo Morales). The protest is over the November approval of an article that allows constitutional reform by simple majority of the Constituent Assembly (MAS is 54% of the CA).

Not to be outdone by the cambas, last week Cochabamba marched in a few thousand cocaleros and informally ousted its Autonomía-friendly governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, when he tried to force a revote on the referendum for autonomy. This week marked the Morales administration´s 1-year anniversary, B43’s 5th month, and the arrival of the new bottom rung, B44, in Cochabamba.

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: Bringing large amounts of toilet paper on the bus can be considered cocaine paraphernalia during drug check stops.

White Christmas

The Peace Corps publishes a book of volunteer stories to prep applicants for the challenges of service. Most of them involve overcoming campo living – rough conditions, unhurried pace of life, slow-to-change attitudes. I was ready. Then came site announcements.

For the next two years I will be living in Sucre developing the rural credit program of Pro Mujer, a NGO that micro-finances women´s enterprises. It is a great organization and I didn´t think I would get the opportunity to do something like this. But while I´ll be travelling out to our rural communities for work almost everyday, it will be a much more structured, fast-paced, and professional city environment than my campo expectations.

We took our tests and swore our service oaths the first week of November, a month after site announcements. I thought it would be hard to leave B43 but the first month has passed at warp speed. Travel to Sucre from Cochabamba is a 10-hour night bus via a sometimes paved road with less than pleasing accident statistics. It isn´t that bad besides the inconvenient angle of the seats that is constantly sifting its occupants down into the footwell, and the ridiculous heat blasting along the walls. As many Bolivians believe all sickness comes from cold air, opening windows have been known to start flota brawls.

Sucre is a beautiful city. Tiny, at 250,000, and clean by Bolivian standards. Some volunteers find Sucre too small and tranquil but I love the colonial architecture, which gives it its name of “The White City”, and the fact that unlike Cochabamba I have been able to break bills larger than 10 Bs without playing the change game. The pristine white buildings and internationals thronging the town center cover up a city that´s said to rest more on past reputation than present. Established by the old money of Potosí, Sucre is now one of Bolivia´s two official capitals in name only. I´ve also been told the University San Francisco Xavier, famous for its incubation of independence ideas, has been losing its edge to newer private universities. The current debate whether the new constitution should be approved by 2/3 vote or simple majority of the Constituent Assembly has brought in some activity, but aside from the older families and students Sucre has seen a lot of migration to more progressive departments like La Paz and Santa Cruz.

I love my project, as painful as it was to reacquaint myself with an office setting. Imagine deleting documents several times while relearning every keyboard shortcut in Spanish. But since that first week I´ve spent some happy, spine-wrecking (more on this later) weeks with our rural groups for my project diagnostics. To get along in the campo I am also learning Quechua, an aggregating language of the Andes that was never meant to be a written language. That means different regions of Bolivia have differing ways of writing Quechua, and by aggregating I mean you tack an increasing number of suffixes onto a base word to indicate adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. So killa, the word for month, becomes qhepankillakama for “until next month”.

There are Christmas lights up in the main plaza now, and I am homesick.

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: Jabba the Hutt speaks a language based on Quechua in Star Wars.

Falta

Faltar is my new word, by virtue of its use to answer every other question I´ve asked recently (not quite as much as the use of pues though). It means to be lacking, as in:

Me: “Why is there a blockade today/do you serve rice and two types of potatoes in one meal/is that child pooping on the sidewalk?”
Bolivian: “Por falta de plata/educación/[insert any other element of infrastructure here], you jerk.*”
(* Bolivian does not actually say “you jerk”, but that is the feeling I get)

I use it more to tell how adjusted I’m feeling, since at any given moment I might be feeling falta my family or friends at home, pad kee mao (with tofu, spiciness level 7 on a scale of 1-10), water pressure, privacy, red velvet cake, etc. But it’s more a factual lacking than a terrible missing, so as B43 hits month 2 I think I’m settled in. I have stopped feeling a little sick after every meal and can brush my teeth without filtered water. Trips to the hospital are no longer a shock now that more than half the group has had amoebas or bacteria or giardia. We’ve also passed the milestones of getting out of robbery set-ups and the first resignation from our group last month.

Training winds down with a technical week running a business simulation, this year in the department of Santa Cruz. It was the first of the media luna, the half moon of departments that passed referendum on the Autonomia movement for political decentralization last summer. To get to Santa Cruz we drive through the Chapare, the dominating province of the department of Cochabamba. It is lush mountain valleys of green, wrapped in cloud and that great simultaneous smell/feel/sound of damp, breathing jungle. In the 80s cholitas would sell cocaine in piles by the roadside. Today, anti-U.S. hostility over coca eradication and DEA activity mean Peace Corps volunteers aren’t even allowed to travel here.

Santa Cruz city feels like another country. It is tropical, modern, sprawling. We arrive at 1 a.m. and I am hotter than I have been my entire time in Bolivia. The hostel shower shoots one stream of water at the ceiling, the other at the towel rack, and delivers a mild electric shock if you try to adjust the showerhead. Luckily, we leave the next morning for San Jose de Chiquitos, a small town on the Jesuit Mission circuit, via a hellish 10-hour rocky dirt road. It is so hot in Santa Cruz I take cold showers for sanity. On the bright side, cold showers give me the best water pressure I’ve had in Bolivia, since in our host community every shower in town (all three of them) gets hotter the lower you turn the water on.

Within Bolivia there is regional rivalry between the Cambas of the tropics and the Collas of the highlands. I’ve decided the Collas have got it on climate and this heat-humidity just destroyed my life goal of living in a rainforest. We ooze through the week teaching classes and understanding why nothing moves between the hours of noon and 4 except the hammocks strung up in every open shaded space.

If I had a project that could afford me lying in a tub of ice for 6 hours during the middle of the day, I would love to live in Santa Cruz. The humidity (or heat delirium) intensifies every color, there is constantly the sound of living things, and the weather is wild. Heat gives way to freezing surazo winds that roll in unchecked by the flatness of the Chaco to the south, or the humidity topples over into explosive tropical storms. It’s almost neat enough to make you overlook being hit in the head by careening, giant horned beetles every night.

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: In Bolivia, it’s good luck to pinch black people.