Kasia's journal while she's in Bolivia during Senior Project in May.
E-mail Kasia directly at kasiap1@netscape.net.
Sunday, June 01, 2003
As I write this, I am on the airplane from Santa Cruz to Miami, somewhere over the Amazon. I tried to write an entry in a sketchy little internet-rental place in La Paz last night, but the internet was going so slowly that it would have cost more than I wanted to pay, so I gave the woman one boliviano and left.
Wednesday was a long day. I had another class that we had added on at the end, and I had a lot of stuff to do for the University before I left. There were a lot of sad goodbyes and “when are you coming back?”s. Julie and I convinced Leo to take us into La Paz really early in the morning so that we could have some time in the city. So we got up at 5:00 and left campus before the sun even came up over the mountains. Surprisingly, I didn’t get sick the entire trip on the T.M.D.R.I.T.W. (the-most-dangerous-road-in-the-world) and we made it into La Paz basically without incident. I guess I’ve gotten used to the scary cliffs and Leo’s fast driving, so I just spend the 4+ hours talking to Julie and enjoying the mountains. At one point, we picked up a road-worker and drove him about an hour to his post that was on the road right out in the middle of nowhere. The thing about T.M.D.R.I.T.W. is that it goes from one place to another place, but there is absolutely nothing in between except the Andes and the tropical forests and the waterfalls.
We had some work to do in La Paz, so we got that done first thing. We got something fixed on the truck (the altitude up in the mountains absolutely kills vehicles), we stopped by the Franciscan office and dropped off 3 puppies that we had brought with us from the UAC and exchanged them for 3 typewriters, to be taken back to the UAC. Then we went to the American Airlines office to confirm my flight and when we came out, we found ourselves in the middle of a big protest march with flags and megaphones and loud fireworks that sounded like guns going off. In February in La Paz, there were some big political protests that got very violent and a lot of people died, including a friend of Julie’s from the UAC. So this made her (understandably) very nervous and we went to have lunch and sit it out. Then Julie had some calls to make (it’s a lot cheaper from La Paz than Coroico), so I had an hour just to hang out on the street. I walked around and talked to some vendors and saw a little bit of the city, which was really cool. I bought a newspaper and sat and read it until Julie was done and then we went and got ice cream. I had the best ice cream in the world, called cherimoya which is made out of a Bolivian fruit by the same name. You always see this fruit in the markets. The fruit is bright avocado-y green with these spiky bumps all over it, and to see it, you wouldn’t think that it would make a good ice cream. But it actually does, all except for these big chunks that you think are going to be like candy pieces mixed in, but turn out to be the seeds of the fruit that you just have to spit out on the ground as you go.
Then we went to the Cathedral de San Fransisco, which is the oldest building in La Paz, having been built by the conquistadors. I guess maybe I’ve seen gaudier churches, like perhaps in Europe, but this one was incredibly hard to take in. There were gold altars all over the church and huge bejeweled gold panels honoring all different saints and the Spanish themselves. All of this gold was undoubtedly stolen from the Incan temples and melted down to create this shrine to their conquerors. The hardest part about this was the dichotomy between the extravagance and its settings. I don’t know how the Catholic Church can’t look at this Cathedral in light of the country that it is in and not be absolutely ashamed of itself. What that amount of gold is worth could feed the entire starving country of Bolivia for a month, but they have to live with it and worship it as their savior. I just don’t understand. All over the church there are these huge statues of Jesus with real human hair that are so bloody and gory that you can’t help but look away. Julie says that this is because the people of Bolivia, who live with such poverty, identify better with a suffering Jesus than the image of the risen savior. In front of all of these statues, you see old cholita women on their knees praying. I guess all of the gold is a way of honoring their religion, but to me it seems like such blindness.
I had read that the prisoners in the La Paz prison give tours regularly and tourists can go in and look around for a couple bolivianos. Julie and I wanted to go and check it out, but when we got there, we only got as far as the front gate and the guards stopped us and said that they weren’t giving tours. That was probably better, because just at the front gates, we could see hundreds of people gathered in this big room behind bars and it was a pretty spooky sight. I probably wouldn’t have liked a tour anyways.
We spent the rest of the day walking around La Paz, just seeing the city. We walked around all of the real markets where no one speaks English and tourists are scared to go and we saw thousands of cholitas hawking their fruits and fabrics and shoes and spices and bowler hats to each other. It was quite the sight. We were going to go wee a show of professional dancers doing the traditional folk dances in fancier costumes than you see way out in the campo but we were tired and so decided not to go. We had dinner at a REAL Cuban restaurant, which was absolutely amazing after a month of Bolivian food (I’m not making judgments, but let’s just say it’s not the greatest). Julie found out that she had received a counterfeit 50 Bs. Bill (which they’re always looking for here, because I guess they’re really common – even though I definitely couldn’t tell the difference – it had a watermark and everything – but every Bolivian we talked to knew that it was fake right away) and so I bought her dinner. The entire dinner of avocado and tomatoes and rice and beans and yucca and sodas and everything else was under $4, and that’s with a tip that was many many times larger than what is culturally expected. When we came out of the restaurant, there was another protest march going on, but this time it was an army of cholitas, which is about the least intimidating thing you can possibly imagine.
Since we were both exhausted, we decided to go to bed early and we went back and got in bed around 9:00, which gave us 7 hours until we had to get up for my early flight. Julie says that the altitude makes it hard to sleep, which I found to be true. Even though I was so tired, a combination of the altitude and the million things that were going through my mind kept me up until about 2:00 in the morning, which made getting up at 4:00 extraordinarily painful. At the La Paz airport, they open every bag you’re going to check before you do so, and by the time I got to this pint in the line, I was so nauseous from the fatigue and the altitude that really I thought I was going to throw up all of the security guard’s stainless steel table. It got worse when I went to eh metal detectors and the guard there decided to go through my carry-on bags. Thoroughly. Unfortunately, I had packed all of my shampoo and everything in my carry on and she wanted to open up every single bottle and have an in-depth conversation (in Spanish, of course) about its contents. Of course, because of the altitude, the shampoo and lotion and face-wash splattered EVERYWHERE all over EVERYTHING and the security guard and I stood there for 10 minutes rubbing the lotion that was all over into our hands and arms. The line at the metal detector was held up because the guards running it stopped so that they could watch and laugh at us. I guess it was funny. Kind of.
When I got into the terminal, I bought a Mate de Coca at the coffee bar and after a few sips, I felt completely better right away. The United States, in my opinion, should seriously think about legalizing it – at least in this medicinal form, because it’s like a miracle cure.
I had a window seat from La Paz to Santa Cruz and then . . . well, it’s a long story . . . I ended up in a middle seat on the flight to Miami. That’s 7 hours in a middle seat. Honestly, it’s like my worst nightmare. Oh well, I guess I’ve had worse experiences . . .
On the flight from Bolivia to Miami, all of the flight attendants and just about all of the passengers speak only Spanish, yet the security precautions video is only shown in English and French. I would be annoyed with American Airlines for this faux-pas if it weren’t for the fact that they are the only American airline willing to fly into Bolivia and that in the in-flight meal, they served almost real-tasting campo cheese.
It’s hard to imagine NOT being in Bolivia. I guess you can just get so used to things. Yet, I have begun to think about all of the things at home just like I would have. I’m getting nervous for my graduation speech and worried about how the Bolivian-bugbite-scars all over my ankles are going to look with my prom dress. Still, I can put a lot of things into perspective and much of what would have tormented me a month ago seems utterly silly now. But I’m excited to see family coming for graduation and I miss my parents and friends, so I guess I’m ready to be home.
Now they’re going to show a Kevin Kline movie that I’ve never heard of, and I think I’ll watch it because I have a lot of other time to do nothing.
we shall never cease from our exploring,
and the end of all our exploring,
will be to arrive at the place where we began
and to know the place for the first time.
-- t.s. eliot "four quartets"
AFTERWARD: ok, I don’t want to go into great detail about this because it’s a sensitive subject, but my flight from Miami to Chicago got in late and so I missed my flight home! It was awful! I almost had to spend the night in the Chicago airport, but my parents’ friend Fred came and picked me up and let me sleep on his couch, and then dropped me off at the airport in the morning. The travel time in total, from La Paz to St. Paul, took over 30 hours. It is SO GOOD to be home.
The nursing students go out every Tuesday and Thursday into the communities surrounding Carmen Pampa for “Practicas.” This means that they meet with everyone in the community to get first hand experience with nursing, and doing so, they treat people’s diseases and sicknesses, and just generally check up on people’s health. It’s a really cool program. This morning, I got up at 5:00 to go with two of the girls to Chovacollo, which is a community very near Carmen Pampa. We walked all over the mountain to people’s houses, talking to them about their health, and particularly doing all sorts of regular psychical-exam type stuff to their kids. This was an a amazing experience. I can’t help but wonder what these people would do without these students. I met a man who had a tumor on his eye bigger than a pea – you could actually see it. The girls said that they’ve been telling him that he really needs to go to the hospital and get it operated on, but I guess it’s hard to get there and incredibly expensive. He could never pay for the operation himself, but there is an organization that I understand has offered to pay for it, or at least most of it. I met another woman who had a sore that covered almost half of her foot that was bright purple. The cholas spend most of their time walking around the mountain barefoot, so I can understand how they might get an infection. Dora (one of the girls) had already prescribed some cream for her, but it didn’t work, so she was going to try something stronger. As they were standing there examining this woman, Dora looked and me and asked what we do for a fungus like that in the United States. I had no idea what to say to her. I didn’t know the words to explain that, even though we complain about the state of American health care a lot, I really don’t think that something that extreme is very common.
At one of the houses we went to, there was a little old chola working a small field in front of the house. When we walked up, she stared at me for a while and started to talk really fast in a language that I didn’t understand. Pretty much all of the old women in Chovacollo, and all of the campo for that matter, speak only Aymara and not Spanish. Dora told me (in Spanish) that she was saying that she really liked my earings, or something. After they did the exam, she shook hands with the two students and then came towards me like she was going to shake my hand. All of a sudden, she took off her bowler hat and started to swing it at me violently, like she was going to hit me. And then she came after me; she was chasing me down the hill and since it was really steep and rocky, and she was more used to that then I am, she caught up to me and started to pinch me. She was grabbing me all over the place, really hard, too – like, I think I have bruises. It was so incredibly weird. The girls grabbed her and held her back and then we left. They told me that she was saying that she never met a gringo before, and she just wanted to see what I felt like. Then (and this is AFTER we left) they told me that she lives up on top of the mountain all by herself because she has some kind of dimensia. The girls apologized if she scared me, and I told them that it was ok and that it would be a nice story to tell my friends when I get home. When we got back to the campus, I told Julie and she laughed hysterically. She was like “Kasia got chased by a chola!” I have to admit, it was kind of funny, but at the time I was pretty terrified.
Today is the Dia del Madre, and they have a big festival at the highschool all day long to celebrate. We went in the afternoon when they had some of the traditional dances. The coolest is this one where the girls put on about 10 big chola skirts and then swing their hips all over the place and it makes the coolest colors. It was a lot of fun. They also had all sorts of contests between the mothers. My favorite was musical chairs – there were about 15 little cholas strutting their stuff right there on the concha in front of hundreds of people to this horribly beat-less cumbia music. There were prizes, too: wash buckets, sardines, dry pasta, rolls of toilet paper . . . at first I thought it was funny that they would give a roll of toilet paper as a prize for a carnival game, but then I realized that it’s a good idea to give them something functional. These campo women could never use any stupid cheap carnival stuffed animals. The musical chairs got pretty cut-throat: women were pulling chairs out from underneath each other and wrestling to get a spot in the last chair open. It was a lot of fun. Bolivian festivals are exciting. Tonight, most of the night will be spent drinking, as is the case with every big Bolivian festival. I thought that it was funny for Mother's Day, though; "Hey Mom, happy Mother's Day! Let's go get trashed!"
There is a waterfall (a small waterfall, they call it the cascadita) that is a walk away from the lower campus of the University. Today, a couple girls from the dorm decided that they wanted to take me there. Halfway there, the path that winds through the trees and the brush just stops in front of the stream, at which point we rolled up our pants legs and walked straight into it. "Stream" is a deceptive word -- it makes it sound small and tame. To put it simply, it wasn't. The rolling of the pants legs didn't really serve much of a purpose, as our pants were entirely wet by the time we got there, anyways. I don't know if I would go so far as to call this stroll up the river "treacherous," but if my mom had been there, she definitely wouldn't have approved. The rocks were slippery, and there were places that you couldn't see how deep it went, but you had to put your foot in anyways, and the whole thing was so awesome. And it was definitely worth the half-hour hike up the stream, because this waterfall was so amazingly beautiful. It must have been 25 feet high at least, and there were all sorts of different plants coming out of the rocks all over it and the water just tumbled down everywhere like, well . . . I really can't do justice to it in words, but the point was that it was incredible. When we got there, the girls made me climb up it, just to see if we could do it. If the rest of this trip had been safe, this definitely wasn't. But we got almost to the top and then stopped, because my glasses were so wet that I couldn't see anything and I didn't want to lose them if I fell. Once we got out, we were completely soaked, absolutely dripping wet. The only part of this experience that wasn't completely awesome was the drenched walk back, and the realization that I was wearing my last pair of clean, dry pants. And I was wearing jeans, which are NOT fun to walk in while they're wet. Walking back, I taught them the words to "Oh Susanna" in English (they knew it in Spanish, one of the girls' names is Susanna) and we sang it up until "Alabama," at which point they stumbled over the word for a few measures and then we started over. This was peppered with the occasional outburst of "tengo frio!" because the shade made this wet meander particularly cold.
I'd have to say that this was one of the coolest things that I've done in my entire life. At least in the top 10.
When we got back, we washed some clothes and then just hung out. It was good, because I had gotten up early and walked up to the upper campus to take pictures of the coffee processing, which is straight up the mountain and quite the trek. It was a long but very good day.
After writing last night, I went to take one of the infamous cold showers (in case I hadn’t already mentioned this, they’re REALLY cold). As I was standing there, a small lizard (about 2 inches long) crawled up out of the drain. The strange thing about this is that I honestly didn’t think much about it. As it began to crawl up my shampoo bottle, I realized how strange it is that a person could become so used to conditions so different from what they are accustomed to (there aren’t a lot of salamanders at my home in MN). In case you’re wondering, when it started coming towards my foot, I did trap it under a brick lying underneath the faucet.
Last week, I was walking down the road way up the mountain and this really beautiful, multi-colored snake slithered across the road in front of us. As I leaned over it to get a closer look, Eddie, a student who was with me told me something in Spanish. It took me a moment to process what he said, and then I realized it was “that’s called a coral snake. They’re poisonous. It will paralyze you if you get bitten.” So I jumped back pretty fast.
The point is that what you handle and what you THINK you can handle about another place and another culture, I’ve found, is all very relative to your own experience.
The electricity has been off for the last couple days. It’s been alright, because they’re not too dependent on it, but it makes some things tough. We resumed classes, and yesterday it went out right in the middle of a morning class, which was tough because I couldn’t teach them how to use the computer software, so I just had to use the pictures and diagrams from the user’s manual. But it all worked out.
We actually had to add a couple classes, because so many people wanted to learn about the camera. I’ll be teaching right up until the afternoon before I leave.
Someone asked me yesterday what Las Vegas is like. I thought that was funny. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, so I told her I didn’t know. She was like “you don’t know? But it’s in the United States!” I had to explain that it’s a pretty big country, and I haven’t been to a lot of places. Bolivia, comparatively, is pretty small, so this (understandably) wasn’t that easy to understand.
They drink a lot of soda here, some American and some that you can’t get in the U.S. They have orange Fanta in glass bottles, ,which you definitely can’t find anywhere (I know, because I love orange Fanta, especially from a glass bottle, so I’ve looked). As a matter of fact, almost all soda comes in glass bottles here. Out in the campo, where I am, you can get Coca-Cola and Sprite, but no diet pop and no other American drinks – except in Coroico, where you can get Pepsi. One of the most popular kinds of Bolivian soda (there are actually only a couple) is called “Simba.” You can always get Simba in 2 flavors: “Manzana Verde” (green apple) and Papaya. Simba has A LOT of sugar in it. I couldn’t tell you how much, because Bolivian food doesn’t have Nutrition Information on the label. Here’s something else weird about their soda-drinking customs: most people here don’t like their pop cold, they drink it warm, no refrigeration whatsoever. Some places have refrigerators and so they have cold drinks, and if you ask for it cold, the other people around are like “you want it cold? But it’s so COLD that way!” But I like the Papaya a lot, even if it’s not refrigerated.
Today, this boy came to the University who I guess used to go here and then he decided to take a year off. He has been working in a mill in La Paz. He works from 8 to 6 five days a week, and 8 to 12 on Saturdays. For this, he earns 280 Bolivianos a month, which is equal to about 35 or 40 American dollars. He has to pay 50 Bs. a month for the room he rents and since his work is really far from there, he walks a lot of the way to work and then takes the bus, which costs 3 Bs. a trip. He came here to see if he could come back to school. He wants to study Primary Education. Peggy said that she would talk to the head of the department and see what she could do. As is the case anywhere, it is very difficult, however, to enter school halfway into the semester. Even in a third world country like Bolivia, there is no way that that amount of money is anywhere close to a living wage. I can’t imagine what that’s like.
Che Guevara wrote “it is then, at the end, for people whose horizons never reach beyond tomorrow, that we see the profound tragedy which circumscribes the life of the proletariat the world over.” I think that beyond all of the great things that the UAC is doing here, the best of them all is the options that this education affords people. They stretch horizons much farther than they could be stretched otherwise.
The funeral was today. I can hardly begin to describe it. First of all, it was lucky that there even was a funeral because there is only one priest for the entire region and so he only comes to this community once a week, and that day happens to be Friday. If the days don’t coincide, then they go without a funeral.
The family stayed up all night with the body, and for the mass today, there was a casket. Just one of those plain wooden caskets that is wider at the top. The family wears black, but since people don’t really have nice clothes, everyone pretty much just wears jeans and t-shirts to the funeral (except for the cholitas, who were dressed as always). The guy sitting next to me was wearing a shirt that said “Where the hell is Megadeth?” It’s a very small chapel, and not a lot of people can fit inside, so the doors were open. Dogs wandered in and out throughout the mass. This, actually, is pretty typical of all buildings here, no matter what takes place inside them.
After the funeral, there is a procession to the graveyard. There is just this one pick-up truck, and they put the casket in the back and then they shove as many people as possible into the cab and into the back of the truck with the casket. The people carrying all of the wreaths and arches and flowers and everyone else (hundreds of people) follows the truck up the road, which takes quite a while. When you get to the graveyard, everyone stands around for a very long time and they say a lot of prayers, basically like reciting the rosary over and over and over again. Then, they put a bunch of the person’s favorite things into the casket with them – mostly food and drinks and crosses. Then they nail the coffin shut. They don’t actually put the caskets into the ground, there is a small tomb built (just a tiny bit larger than the coffin) out of cement, and it was in place when we got there. While you stand there, some guys go with machetes into the brush around the area and cut big poles to slide the casket in on. After they put it inside, everyone stands around while they put bricks up in front of the opening and cement it all shut. And then they put all of the flowers and everything on top of the tomb.
What really is the hardest to imagine is how real the whole process is. In America, they put make-up all over the body and fold the hands, and it looks like they’re just lying there. Here, there’s none of that. You have to deal with the reality of a dead body, just the way it is. In the U.S., there’s a hearse and everyone rides in cars with little orange flags behind the policemen who stop the traffic lights. In the states, when you get to the cemetery, the plot is all already made up by people who have no idea who died and there’s all this fake grass spread out to mask what they’re going to do. And then you leave. And not that it’s not hard to deal with any death, but you don’t have to stand around and witness the reality of burying a body. Here, they do it all right there in front of you and you have to watch it and really know and understand that it’s happening. This man’s brother had to push the casket inside the tomb himself. All these people saw all of this happening in front of their eyes and it was so real. This might not make a lot of sense, but if you had seen it, you’d understand. Don Antonio’s widow had her husband’s dead body in her home and she sat with it all night. No mistaking it. This is reality.
Tonight, the family will sit in the graveyard all night, and people will sit with them and mourn until tomorrow afternoon. They smoke and drink and chew coca and just think about how real it all is.
Besides all of this, this woman and her family probably don’t even know what life insurance is. They have basically nothing, and they have just lost an entire person’s income. He was the librarian at the University. He has two kids who go to school here. And another one who is my age. Their youngest child is six years old. This woman not only has to deal with the loss of her husband, but she has to support her family, including two kids in college. She has nothing and she lost everything. I could never begin to imagine what that would be like.
I don’t understand how the world could be like this. Where is the justice?
In many ways, it’s difficult to see the poverty here. I mean, you can definitely tell that they don’t have a lot. But most of the students wear American clothes (they’re from big shipments of donations from the states), and they are going to a University where they have computers and classrooms and good teachers and a lot of nice things like that. They also look pretty well fed: I haven’t seen any obvious signs of malnourishment. The truth is, that they eat a lot of carbohydrates, so it seems like they have a lot of food, but in fact most of the students and people who live around here are anemic. They don’t get anywhere near to the amount of nutrients that they need, outside of rice and some potatoes and bread. Don Antonio had tuberculosis a while ago, which was cured, but he never fully recovered from it and that’s why he died. People in the United States don’t get TB. Americans are sometimes not well fed, but not to the extreme that they would get a disease like tuberculosis. If they do, it’s generally treated fast enough so that they can recover. Peggy says that a death like this in Bolivia is a direct result of the poverty that people here face. I could never imagine what it’s like to live like this your entire life.
This morning a man from the community died, he was the librarian on the lower campus. They don't embalm bodies here, and so everything has to happen right away. They make all of these big beautiful bouquets and wreaths for the chapel, and so I spent the morning walking all over the place with the students, picking flowers and then making these big arrangements. They put the body on a table in the small chapel here and cover it with a white sheet. It will stay there until tomorrow, when they take it to be buried. We're cancelling the next couple of my classes, which makes a lot of sense because there's all sorts of rituals that happen when someone dies.
There are orange trees all over the place in Bolivia. The kind you see the most has a fruit that they call a "mandarina," like it's a mandarin orange. I don't think that they are the same as the mandarin oranges that we get in cans in the U.S., but they are small and sweet, so that's what they call them. The trees produce SO much fruit, you could never eat it all, or even sell it all, because there is so much and it grows so often. Sometimes we go and pick a bunch of oranges and then make fresh orange juice out of them for breakfast. It's really good. Because these trees are so abundant, people are always picking them and eating them. They don't really use them in meals, but it's definitely like a staple of the diet, because they eat them so often. There are orange peels on the ground everywhere you go, because people just pick them and walk and eat them. It gives the entire country (in my experience) this really strong stale-citrus smell. It's a very distinct smell. Especially the dorms, they really smell like oranges.
I've been taking more pictures, working with the computers and teaching lots of classes. That's what I'll be doing for the next few days.
The traditional dress for Bolivian women (the picture in this link doesn't exactly show you what they look like -- it's not as bright and colorful as usual, but you get the general idea) is pretty unique to the area. They wear these skirts that come down to halfway between their ankle and knee that are made of so many layers of fabric that that it makes their hips look incredibly wide (they're usually not). The skirts are made out of the most beautiful fabric, and they're always different. On the top, they wear some kind of generally long-sleaved shirt with a knitted shawl or apron over it. Since they're always carrying something (very often a baby), they all have these big bundles in the most ornately mutli-colored fabric i've ever seen, slung around their necks and hanging like big humps on their backs. They also wear these incredibly uncomfortable shoes that look kind of like low-heel pumps that American business women wear to work, but not exactly . . . I can't really describe these, but they're all almost exactly the same. They all wear two braids and the braids are tied in the back of their heads with one piece of thick black yarn that has tassles at the ends of it, and it is slung between the two braids on their back. The best part is that on their heads, they wear these big bowler hats with short brims, just like the hamburglar from old MacDonald's adds. You don't really see variations on this outfit, except for the combinations of different fabric and colors. You've really never seen anything like it. Most of the girls at the university don't wear this kind of outfit, but some do (minus the big bundle). They call these women who dress like this cholas or cholitas. It's generally accepted that the cholitas are uneducted women, and that once a women goes to school and learns a lot, she starts to wear western dress. This is generally because the chola outfit, while traditional, is not native: it was imposed by the Spanish conquistadors (a traditional andean bowler hat?). Plus, they're incredibly uncomfortable and hot. A lot of men think that this kind of dress is really sexy, which really surprises my western-culture-view of what is beautiful, especially because most women who wear this dress are (or at least appear to be) very old.
I wish that I could get some pictures of these women, but people around here just aren't too cool with having their pictures taken. Julie says she thinks I can do it from far away, and they just won't know. Maybe that's what I'll have to do.
This morning, I got up at 5:00 in the morning to go with Julie into Coroico. She had to get a cavity filled at the hospital (just outside the town) and then we went shopping at the market right in Coroico. It’s not really a big town, but the biggest around here for about 4 hours in any direction, so that makes it a regular metropolis for Bolivian standards. I’d say that it’s about the size of Mankato.
Transportation in Bolivia is universally like the University’s inter-campus shuttles. Mostly big huge trucks, like the biggest U-Haul you’ve ever seen, but with rickety sides and an open top. There are also a lot of pick-up trucks, that are even more crowded (and people can ride on the back bumper, which always scares me, especially when they jump off while the vehicle is in motion), but they are less bumpy, which is very nice. We generally think that it’s lucky to get the chance to ride in one of these pick-up trucks, even though it is much more crowded (think, at least 16 people standing up in the back of a really small, two-person-cab sized pick-up truck). Anyways, it’s about an hour drive into Coroico, which wasn’t that bad because the hospital is about 10 minutes outside of the city, so it was a 50 minute drive for us. It was dark then, and extraordinarily cold because the clouds were coming over the tops of the mountain into the valley, but beautiful, because you could see it all and it looks like a giant waterfall. Also, it rained last night, so the roads were slippery and once, the truck started to slide and we thought for a second that it would go over the edge of the cliff. But it didn’t. And that was good.
We were the first ones at the hospital (they open around 7:30), which was really good because they have this general check-in desk where they give you a number (like you’re waiting in line at the DMV) and then you go to the area where you are to be treated. This is the same line for everyone – dentistry, surgery, and emergency room. There was a kid sitting next to us in line who had a broken arm, with only an ace bandage that his mother had probably wrapped around it for him. He was after Julie in line, who was waiting to see the dentist. When we got to that area, we sat in a weird kind of waiting room for a while. There was this whole wall of pictures of all the different kinds of disgustingly grotesque ailments people at the hospital had had. It was the foulest thing I’ve ever seen in a dentist’s waiting room. There were pictures of elephantitis of all different parts of the body (especially the parts you DIDN’T want to see), all sorts of machete and vehicle accidents that you didn’t want to know about, and this one guy who was laying on an operating table with his foot laying unattached next to his leg. It was so gross. So so gross. Julie’s cavity-filling was uneventful, and then we walked into town.
Shopping for food in the market was interesting. Nothing that special. Maybe I’ll write about it later if I have more time and nothing else to write about.
It’s pretty late and I had a long day. I think I’ll go to bed now.
The electricity was down. And then the internet was down. And that’s why I haven’t e-mailed anyone or posted in so long. I got so many e-mails from people wondering if I had died. Thanks a lot for your concern, and for your stories about home – I really appreciate them. Sorry that this has taken me so long – such is the third world.
I’ve been mostly spending my time working with the cameras. There’s lots to learn and lots to teach. I also have to take a bunch of pictures for the University before I go, that they need for all sorts of different programs.
A couple days ago, we were walking on top of one of the mountains and we saw a really tiny avalanche just above us. We had to run so that we didn’t get stuck in it. I don’t think that we really could have gotten hurt, just maybe pinned by a falling tree or something. It wasn’t very serious, yet kind of exciting still.
Saturday I had my first camera class. I didn’t think that a lot of people would come, but we limited the class sizes to 8 people and the first one was completely full. The others are filling up really fast as well, and I’m excited about the community’s enthusiasm about my project. Julie is sitting in on all of my classes so that she can help translate. Even though I’m learning a lot of Spanish, I think that I would get stressed by having to speak it that much. The class went really well, and everyone was really excited to learn about the cameras. I am constantly surprised by their lack of basic knowledge about technology. I mean, there would be no way for them to have that basic knowledge, but I forget that I need to explain things like how to turn the camera on. It was fun, though and I’m looking forward to the rest of them. I don’t have anther class until next Tuesday (Sundays and Mondays are like weekends here), but I’m going to have a really fun class that day because I have friends who are taking it. After that, I have two classes a day until the Saturday before I leave.
I’ve been helping Julie with her English class (teaching and grading papers) in the time that I’m not working with the cameras. It has been fun, and I’m learning even more about Spanish. Something interesting I learned about Bolivia (from all of the students’ papers that I have graded) is that here, everyone’s last name is a combination of both of their parents’ last names. I thought that was pretty cool.
The girls in the dorm have been asking me to play them my American music, so I’ve been introducing them to all sorts of different American bands, which they really like. Two of my best friends from home have a local band called Look Down, and I played the girls their CD. They loved it so much, that they won’t stop playing it. It’s on when I go to bed and night and when I wake up in the morning and all the time in between. I really am going to get sick of it soon. I thought that was pretty cool that people here like local music from Minnesota.
The ankle swelling is going down, which is good. I can walk around all up and down the mountain now, no problem. I’ve started to wear bug spray religiously, which is helping.
I can’t believe how much of a foreign language you can learn when you are completely immersed in it. I can have almost full conversations now, without even opening a Spanish-English dictionary. It’s really amazing. Beatrice, woman who works in the office here who doesn’t speak a word of English, has started to teach me Aymara, which is the indigenous language (and it’s her first language). It’s weird to learn a language that you don’t know through another language that you don’t really know. I have to translate words from Spanish into Aymara, which is sometimes quite the task. I’m still working on Spanish, though – so I think that I’ll only come out with a few Aymara words.
To say “hello, how are you?” in Aymara is “kamisaki” (I don´t know how to spell anything in this language because it’s an oral language – I’m not even sure if Beatrice herself could spell it). The response (very well) is “waliki.” It’s a very beautiful language. I love hearing them speak it, even if I don’t understand it.
If the internet and electricity are still working, I’ll write more again soon. If I don’t, that doesn’t mean that I died: just that technology isn’t working. (Mom, this means you: don’t worry so much!).
Yay! The electricity is temporarily enabled and someone found a clean disk . . .
On Monday night, there was a school dance. it was interesting. Kind of like American dances, but different in a lot of ways, too. First of all, you must have a partner. You cannot dance unless you have someone to dance with you. Also, if you start dancing with someone, you are required to dance with them for the rest of the night. period. One of the reasons for the partners is that they dance in rows. I guess you might say that it’s something like line dancing, but it’s not really that coordinated, not like some specific partner-changing, spot-switching thing. So there are about 4 lines of two rows, all dancing in this room. Every once in a while, someone will walk along through the rows with a tray of food (popcorn, crackers, candy) and you can take some. There aren’t breaks, so I guess that it’s important that they bring the food to you. Not that the music that they play in the typical American high school dance is very good, but this music is really really bad. It´s mostly traditional Bolivian music called “cumbia”, and I feel really bad saying this, but it’s absolutely awful. They do have some amazingly beautiful music here. It would blow you away. But some of it (cumbia) just isn’t. The beat isn’t very rhythmic (even though that doesn’t make a lot of sense, since that seems to be the definition of a “beat”), so it makes it virtually impossible to dance to. And you just keep doing the same exact one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-and-back-again step over and over and over again for every single song. Except for some songs, there are a few very specific moves at the chorus, and you just have to know them, otherwise you’re lost and you will mess up and look dumb. That was me. Something interesting that I observed is that in Bolivia, the men are the ones who are expected to do sexy things with their hips. They like to show off, which impresses the girls a lot. But the girls generally just keep doing the one move and nothing particularly special. Except on the special dances, where they know all the steps (unless the girl is me, in which case she is just lost). I was pretty lucky because the guy I was dancing with knew all of those special steps pretty well, so I could at least attempt to follow him. On the flip side, he made me look pretty dumb because he obviously knew what he was doing and I obviously didn’t. I actually had a lot of fun, though (despite my ineptness for the dance steps). I had to stop a little early because my ankles were so swollen that I couldn’t dance anymore. They really are getting better now, though.
On the subject of meat, because someone wrote a comment that I haven’t been fully diving into their culture by not eating it. The thing is, that if you’re going to start eating meat after 7 years of not eating meat, you probably don’t want to start with Bolivian meat. Yesterday I ate lunch next to a girl who had the foot of a chicken sitting in her bowl. It was just there, in the middle of her food. Toe nails and all. I didn’t have a problem with it, I just don’t think that my stomach would feel the same way. My vegetarianism isn’t really a problem at all, actually. It’s actually kind of a nice conversation topic. Most of them have heard of vegetarians, but none of them have ever actually met one, so it gives us something to talk about. It’s nice.
Last night I helped Kirstan grade tests from her English class. Afterwards, she took me for a walk up to the health post. The university has set these up in all of the communities around Uchumachi (which is the big mountain where the campus is). It’s really an amazing operation. They give all sorts of immunization shots and they treat all kinds of illnesses. Perhaps the most important thing they do is that they educate about health – especially about the importance of vaccines and about diseases like AIDS. Right now, the university nursing department is in the process of developing an emergency response system, which would serve people all over the mountain and extended areas. It’s really cool, but they don’t have any funding for it, so it’s not going to start until they find some. They are doing such great things here, it completely blows me away.
As it turns out, coffee doesn’t grow on the tree already French-Roasted. Coffee trees grow “coffee cherries,” the seeds of which are the coffee beans. I got to try a coffee cherry, and they’re really good. You suck the beans out of the little round red pod and then there’s this jelly stuff wrapped around the beans. You suck on the beans to get the jelly off of them. It’s sweet and it tastes kind of like coffee. It’s really fun.
There are a lot of high school and elementary school students hanging around campus recently. The teachers union is on strike, and so all of the teachers went to La Paz for the protests. They say that it will probably get violent. The violence definitely won’t spread here, but the kids still aren’t in school, which is never good.
Preparation for classes is going pretty well. I've read almost all of the guidebooks on the cameras, so I get most of what I'm going to be teaching, which is good. I think that there are going to be 10 classes (so they can be small), and I start two a day this Saturday.
The electricity is probably going to be down all day tomorrow (at least) and so I might not be able to post for a while.
for an idea of how slow their internet connection is: it took me 45 minutes to load this one web page. i´m going to be going through some serious internet culture shock when i get back.
i have this really long post about the last two days, but i can´t get it to load and floppy disks just don´t seem to work around here because of all the dust. i don´t have the time to write it all again, so you´ll hear about it sometime in the near future when i can get the internet to work better. it might not be that near, though: the electricity is scheduled to be down for the next two days (but nothing that is ever scheduled here if for certain . . .).
Thanks to everyone who has written me comments and e-mails. it´s so good to hear from you. sorry i haven´t written in so long -- i was gone, and then the internet wasn´t working. anyways . . .
One of the hardest parts about being here is the altitude. you wouldn´t think that it would make THAT much of a difference, but it really does. i´m not sure what the altitude in mn is, but here it is so high that just walking up a hill is like getting the wind knocked out of you. especially when we´re walking somewhere, i get dizzy and my head starts to spin. we have to stop a lot and take a break just to breath. the good new about that is that the air here is SO pure and unpoluted, that taking a breather feels really good. and also, people are very accomodating and understanding about my altitude sickness ("es muy alto, aqui!" -- it´s very high up, here!).
On sunday, we went to see the goat project at coroico viejo, on the other side of the valley. wow, what a walk. the worst part is the sun. but i still can´t get over the amazing view, and there was much of that on this 2-plus hour hike. once we got there, we took the goats out to graze. i wonder how many people in the world can say that they have hearded goats in the bolivian andes? the cool part was that we just got to sit there for a few hours, looking at the view and watching the sheep. the problem was that the place we were sitting was in the middle of this coca field. there is this kind of bug (like a tiny fly) that lives in the coca fields that bites a lot. for some reason, it bit me particularly a lot, all over my arms and feet and ankles. i got so many bites on my ankles (they´re pretty big -- dime sized) that they swelled up a lot. it´s completely disgusting. and also it kind of hurts, but now that we´re back at the campus and i have benadryl, it´s getting better.
that night, kirstan taught me how to milk goats. it was possibly the coolest thing i´ve ever done. she let me do it in the morning, too. she says that i´m pretty good at it. it´s somewhat of an art.
after the goat-milking, we built a fire and this family near the project came over to hang out with us. we brough marshmallows up with us, and so we were roasting them over our bonfire. the whole family (two parents and five kids) got really excited about the concept of s´mores and the process of making them. it was so cool to watch this family of aymaran goat hearders sitting around a fire roasting marshmallows. it´s funny, but it made me really proud of america. the little kids kept running over when they wanted another one and yelling "gringita, gringita!" it was cute.
the next morning, we took a goat to this campesino woman down the mountain. the university´s project is so cool: they raise these goats, teach the campesino women how to milk them and breed them and everything, and then they give them a goat on the condition that they give the first baby goat back to the project. it´s really cool because then they can use the milk to feed their children. anemia is a serious problem around here, especially among children.
then we walked to a closer town to take a truck into the town of coroico, so that we could take a different truck back to the university (the idea being less walking). unfortunately, there wasn´t a truck in coroico, so we had a THREE hour walk back to the university. it was tough with the swollen ankles. and also no water, because you have to boil it and we weren´t expecting the walk.
the one thing that i don´t think that i ever could get used to is the cold showers. they´re not heated. not even a little. this is like really really cold water. you´d be happy to have drinking water this cold.
Yesterday Julie (a volunteer from America who has been here for a couple years) and I took a walk up to one of the peaks from where you can see both campuses and a lot of the mountains. it was an absolutely amazing view. on our way back down, we decided to take a short-cut that Julie knew that would take us all the way down to the lower campus. after walking a couple miles down a swampy, brambly, sometimes hot and cactus-y slope that was at least 60 degrees steep the whole way, we found ourselves standing in the middle of a coca field. we walked around the edge of the field for 1/2 an hour trying to find where the trail continued. but it didn´t. that was it. it was just two miles of trail that lead into a coca field. if i ever was going to feel sorry for coca farmers, it was then. because i couldn´t believe that these people would go through all that trouble just to harvest these crops. and it really was awful trying to get back up. we kept slipping and getting stuck in thorny branches. it was seriously an experience.
last night, the nursing students had this big celebration. it was some kind of anniversary of florence nightingale, i think. anyways, they had a big celebration and there were speakers and skits and lots of dancing. it was all kind of a show, so we got to sit and watch. but it was really cool, because they had these costumes and they did a whole bunch of traditional bolivian folk dances. they all had stories, and they were really fun to watch. one of them, they made me get up and dance with them. i wasn´t that good at it, but it was fun.
this morning, i heard the Titanic song on the radio IN SPANISH! it was pretty weird.
today i´m going with kirstan (the other american volunteer) to the see the goat project, which is a couple mile hike away, so i´m coming back tomorrow.
The plants here are really amazing. There are ferns all over the place, and every once in a while you´ll see a bright red one mixed in with all of the mossy green. They also have plants with the most amazing flowers. There is this one plant called the "mujeres trabajar" which has the most beautiful flowers I´ve ever seen, and they say that it grows here almost like a weed. Impatients grow on the side of the road like dandelions in America, but they are all different colors. There are hibiscus trees all over the place, which are SO beautiful, and they´re all different colors as well. They also have red pointsettia trees, which are really weird because they´re huge and the flowers are a lot bigger than we get them in America at Christmastime.
Everyone at Central: have a really great time at prom tonight!
Most students at the university eat all their meals in a "co-op," where they share in the responsibilities of cooking and everything. they always have one course of soup and one course of meat over rice. when i ate with the students at lunch today and i asked for rice without meat on top (i´ve been a vegetarian for about 7 years now), they were astonished. they didn´t seem at all insulted, otherwise i would have taken it. they just couldn´t believe that i didn´t want meat. it was like i was turning down money. they all laughed at me. i didn´t mind, it was just funny. for some reason, their rice is really really good, too. i don´t know what it is, but it tastes really great even served plain by itself.
today i helped a student translate a chapter out of an english book into spanish. a lot of it was hand signals, but a lot of it was also just me using the spanish that i´ve learned so far. it´s really amazing. i couldn´t believe how much i knew already. now i know all the spanish words about agronomy and soil errosion.
There are two campuses here which are about a 30 minute walk away from each other. There is something like a shuttle that goes from one campus to the other 3 times a day. The cool thing about the shuttle is that it´s actually just like a big huge truck with walls that go up and a few bars over them. when the truck comes to pick people up, everyone climbs to the top of the truck and jumps in. you can hold onto the sides or the bar that goes over the top, but you have to watch out so that you don´t get hit by branches on the road. It´s not exactly your traditional campus shuttle. It´s pretty crowded (body to body), and you have to stand. But I think that it´s so much find to ride because it´s kind of like a virtual reality ride or something like that and especially because the whole way up, you get this really amazing view of the mountains and the villages around them. also, all the way up the trail there are tea plants and coffee plants and they smell really good. I think that it´s fun.
Last night I had a conversation with the girls in the dorm about American music. Turns out, they listen to a lot of it. They asked me if I knew Aerosmith, and when I told them that I had seen Aerosmith live in concert, they thought that was really cool. I don´t think that they really understood the concept at first of seeing a live band in concert like that, but once they figured it out, they were pretty impressed.
Today, I´m working on the cameras and taking some pictures of the college to send to people. I can´t post pictures to the websites, but I can e-mail them.
right now I am sitting in the student computer lab at UAC. The keyboard is a little weird and it is going to take me a while to get used to it. I´ve just had the longest day of my entire life and I have no idea where to begin.
First of all, my flights were pretty good. Except on the flight from Miami to La Paz, it was pretty empty, so I was supposed to have my own row. And then this really creepy guy came and sat next to me and started telling me how if I wanted to sleep, I could put my feet in his lap. So I moved. It was weird.
I slept on the plane and got into La Paz at about 6:00 this morning. La Paz is a beautiful city. It looks like a big bowl, because it is surrounded by mountains and the whole city is on a slope coming down to the center. Also, it´s really cold there, which I wasn´t expecting.
As a sidenote, interesting observation that you didn´t expect from a third world country: there are semi trucks all over the place here, but every one I saw was made by Volvo or Mercedes Benz. Isn´t that weird?
When they picked me up, we started the 4-ish hour drive to the college. The "two lane highway" (AKA the most dangerous road in the world -- literally) that we took is the only road into the Yungas, which is the region where Carmen Pampa is located. I honestly have never been so terrified in my entire life. really. It´s actually a dirt road, which is barely wide enough for one vehicle. Bolivia has rainforests, but this area is what they call a "cloud forest" because it has less plateaus or something. Nevertheless, it´s still really rainy, so the road is really muddy and slippery. This is compounded by the fact that there are lots of creeks which run right through the middle of the highway, and you just have to drive through them. I wouldn´t really say that there is a "side of the road" here. It pretty much just drops off. If you go over the edge, you are over the edge. It´s a sharp cliff that goes straight down. The road also curves A LOT, so when you come around a curve, you generally just honk the horn a few times to warn whoever might be barelling down the other way. If you run into another car, you either stop at a point that the other car can squeeze by (not really two lanes, but close enough, I guess), or you back up your car until you are at one of these points so that the other car can pass. The problem is that since this road runs through a "cloud forest," there are a lot of clouds. And since you are a mile up in the mountains, you are actually driving through the clouds. I´d say that the visibility is about 100 meters. That´s a generous guess. You definitely find yourself backing up a lot. Perhaps the worst part about this road is that all along the road there are crosses marking graves of people who died in accidents at that spot. There are a lot of crosses. A lot. Needless to say, perhaps due to the scariness of all of this, or the extreme bumpiness of the road, or my lack of sleep, or the altitude sickness factor, I was pretty sick the whole ride.
The upside of this, is that this is the most beautiful place that I have ever been in my entire life, or even seen pictures of. The mountains are amazing. Because it´s so undeveloped, there are all of these really beautiful rock formations all over the place. I keep thinking about how excited my 9th grade Earth Science teacher, Mr. Ertl, would be about all of them.
The other upside is that I made it to the college, which is a really cool place. I´m staying in a dorm with the students. There are about 20 girls in bunkbeds in this one room, and they´re all really nice. None of them speak English, and as it turns out I don´t speak any Spanish, which is proving to be a bit of a problem. I´m already learning really fast, though, and I´ve been able to communicate pretty well with them. I wouldn´t say that we´ve had a "conversation," but there have been questions back in forth in Spanish, which I´m pretty happy about.
I´m sure there are a million other things that I could write about, but I want to go and spend more time with the students. I set up one of the digital cameras today, and they´re really excited about it. They all want to have their pictures taken. Once I get them all set up, we´re going to have classes for faculty and students. They´re going to make some kind of certificate that you get once you go through the class, which means that you can use the cameras. I think that it´s going to work out really well.
Yesterday was spent running around all over the place getting stuff ready for the trip. It was crazy. I also got two more donations that I didn't know about before, which turned out to be enough to buy another camera. So now I have three of them, and I think that's pretty cool. Now I'm going to go pack, which is good because I leave in a few hours (wow, really should have done that a while ago). I have to be at the airport about 12:00 and I think that my total travel time will be approximately 23 hours. That includes a stop in Chicago, Miami, and finally La Paz, and then a 4 hour car ride through the mountains, on what I've read is "one of the most dangerous roads in the world." I'm trying my hardest not to be nervous for this.
I have the greatest friends. It was so cool of them to have a party for me. There were a bunch of people there and it was really exciting to hear how everyone's projects are going so far.
Today I got 2 Canon digital cameras and all the accessories for Carmen Pampa. I spent so much time reading all sorts of Consumer Reports about what kind of camera to buy, and this seems to be the best one. Right now I'm going to a going-away party that my friends are throwing for me. I thought that was really nice of them.
