Halfway through

Happy Halloween! I just realized that we're more than halfway through the semester now and I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by. I'm starting to tell people that I'm coming back in the summer (although I really have no idea when I'll be back), half as a means of preparing for how sad it's going to be to leave, and half to convince myself that I really will be back. I love this country and I'm starting to feel like I belong here not just as an anthropologically minded gringa but actually as a part of the culture here. I can't imagine what it will be like to go back to the US in December.

I spent last week (the week ending last Friday, not this past week) in a rural village outside of Cochabamba. The bus ride was only about two hours to get there but it's such a world away. We were all assigned homestay families like the ones we have here in the city but they were Quechua-speaking campesinos (I guess the closest translation for campesino would be country people) who are generally subsistence farmers, although some families also sold goods at the market in Punata, a small city about an hour away.

So we all got dropped off with our bags at a school in Pairumani, one of the villages where we would be staying (we were spread out among several communities), and representatives from our families were waiting there to bring us home. The homestay coordinator read off our names and then our family names and they came forward to claim us and it was deliciously awkward as all of these huge white people bent down to greet these short brown people, not knowing if we should kiss on the cheek (the Bolivian city greeting) or both cheeks (an alternative) or do the handshake and the pat on the arm (often the campesino greeting, but not always), or some poorly coordinated combination of the three. Then we all piled into taxis to go to our new homes, and somehow we managed to fit four students and our family representatives into each taxi (at least eight people, occasionally more), and off we went. It was a great introduction into how the week was going to go because we got to see how welcoming these families were as well as how awkward and bumbling we were going to be all week.

My family consisted of: my dad, Cupertino; my mom, Paulina; a 21-year-old sister, Elizabeth; a 15-year-old sister, Aida; a 12-year-old brother, Milton; a 9-year-old sister, Gladis; and Aida's 9-month-old son, Alex. We also have a sister Miriam, who lives in Punata and who I got to meet on market day, but she doesn't live at the house. I loved that they named their kids names that are difficult for Spanish speakers and almost impossible to pronounce for Quechua speakers. Elizabeth was more like "Elizabed" and Milton was "Miltu" most of the time. Aida was the one who came to get me and we got to the house, which is three separate rooms and a kitchen around an open patio. There were about four people sitting outside eating lunch number one (they eat two lunches, one in late morning and one in early to mid afternoon) and I made the decision to greet them all in Quechua. Big mistake. The floodgates opened to a sea of words and verb tenses I haven't learned yet, uttered with a different accent and at a much faster rate than my professors ever spoke. I caught some conjugation of the words "sit" and "eat" so I took a seat on a stool on the patio and someone brought me out a huge bowl of soup filled with pasta, potatoes, chuño (potatoes that have frozen underground before the harvest--they're delicious), and vegetables.

The campesino culture, like every culture I guess, has a large focus on food not just as sustenance but as a means of social interaction, so even though I had already eaten, I couldn't refuse the soup. Unfortunately, I also could not refuse bowl number two that they offered me. I finally managed to convince them that I have a weak stomach and was spared a third bowl, and just as I finished washing my bowl with the water that they bring in with a hose from the nearby river, my sister Aida (the 15 year old) asked if I wanted to go with her up into the hills. She lent me a sun hat and we started the trek up the hill, me with my asthma and her with her 9-month-old son (such a juxtaposition with Lucia, my 15 year old sister here, who seems so young to me) slung across her back in a large blanket. We hiked for what felt to me like several hours but I think was probably less than one, and when I asked her why we were going up the hill (she spoke some Spanish) she said, "We're just walking." It was gorgeous and luckily she reminded me before we left to bring my camera so we stopped every once in a while so I could gawk at the incredible landscape that they see every day. The hike probably should have been good way for me to orient myself and figure out where everything was, but I was distracted and still had no idea where we were or which of the tiny tin roof houses below us was ours.

After we got back to the house I helped my host mom with the laundry. She didn't speak any Spanish but I knew the word for washing clothes so I think I proposed my help to her kind of like a cartoon cavewoman might, saying "I wash, no?" and gesturing around at things. That was how most of my communication went for the week, although my host dad spoke almost as much Spanish as me so talking with him was usually pretty easy. I love to think about what I must have looked and sounded like all week, pointing at everything and saying things like "What that?" and "What dog name?" On the rare occasion that I recalled enough Quechua to say a brilliantly complex sentence such as "Where did your dad go?" I typically did not understand the answer, and the person I was speaking to and I would come to some sort of agreement about what we were talking about via waving around and acting out various verbs. Luckily the days were pretty standard, with breakfast, chores, school (for Milton and Gladis), lunch, going to plant potatoes or beans in the fields, lunch again, more chores, dinner, and then bedtime, so it wasn't so hard to figure out what I was supposed to be doing all the time.

Out of sheer luck, Luis, who has become my closest friend in the group, was my next-door neighbor in the campo. It was so strange, because we were all pretty spread out and some people didn't live near anyone at all, but my house was about two hundred feet from his. Our families were related to one another (his host dad was my host dad's brother) so we did a lot of planting together and sometimes I ate dinner at his house. He also had younger host siblings and at night sometimes we would all go to the basketball court at the school (which was about a ten minute walk) and play soccer with the kids. It was so much fun and really speaks to the welcome nature of the people there that we could go with any age group of people and they would include us in what they were doing.

On the last two days Luis and I got to observe a classroom in the school, which was great for me because it was something I'd be interested in anyway, plus it worked as research for my group project with Nicole about rural and urban education here, as well as for my final ISP (independent study project), the children's book. I've now observed in five or six different classrooms here, and the kindergarten classroom in the campo was one of the best.

Okay I'm about to go out but I'll try to write before I leave for Santa Cruz on Tuesday!

End of classes, curse of the Inca, ALBA summit

This is from yesterday, but just before I posted it, the power went out, and I have hardly been home since then! I’ll be living in a rural village outside Cochabamba for the next week so I won’t be writing until at least next weekend (apparently there are still places in the world that don’t have high speed internet—who knew?) so once again, mom and dad, don’t worry!

Today, I am blessed with the treat of a free hour of daytime without rushing through lunch or running to class. It's been a while, and it's really nice. I had my Quechua final this morning and for once, the time they allotted was an overestimate and the exam only took about an hour, although we had anticipated over two hours. So after discovering yet another new route home (I'll explain later), I'm basking in the Cocha sunlight and taking advantage of electricity and downtime in preparation for our trip to the campo (rural village) this coming week.

Last weekend was a disaster for my health. Soon after arriving at my house, I had a bout of the ever so pleasant "Montezuma's Revenge," complete with a touch of the Curse of the Inca, a name I've come up with for the specific series of symptoms that come along with food-borne illness in Bolivia. Luckily I have a bathroom immediately adjacent to my room, and for your sake I will leave you with no more detail than that. Lessons learned? First of all, chorizo from a street vendor, a chicken salad sandwich, an entire bag of fine chocolates, and a dinner of costillitas and poroto (pork ribs and beans) don't treat the gringo stomach very well. The other valuable piece of information I learned was that you can go to the pharmacy and buy yourself an anti-emetic and the pharmacist will give you an injection in your right butt cheek, and the vomiting will cease soon after. Cool, huh? I also have a mini stash of anti-emetic pills (although I'm not sure how much good an oral medicine does when you're puking constantly). Ya pues, enough of that.

This week was the last week of formal classes, meaning the days that I will have to wake up before 8:00 from now on are (hopefully) few! It also meant that I had a large assignment to complete pretty much every night. I can't remember if I wrote about this already but I interviewed a children's author before I went to Potosí, which was really cool and extremely encouraging, and I had to write a report about that this week. It's crazy to think we're about halfway through already. The end of classes means the beginning of the independent study project. I had to write a preliminary proposal for my project this week and I realized how much I really don't know yet, and how much work I'm going to have to do. I found out that public schools go on summer break in a couple of weeks, so all classroom observation that I planned on doing during the official ISP period (the month of November) I actually have to do as soon as possible. It's stressful but I'm hoping it will keep me on track with the project, since I really can't procrastinate at all. I'm observing in a kindergarten class this afternoon! I've chatted with a lot of children since arriving here, but I haven’t really been around a large group of kids interacting with each other yet. I’m really excited, but also a little nervous. If there’s one thing this semester is teaching me, it’s how to have serious social skills.

As for the ALBA summit, remember the Día del Peatón I wrote about when I first got here? Well, apparently they liked it so much that they decided to institute it again in my neighborhood and surrounding area. Okay, so it’s actually just that they closed all the roads around the hotel near my house to protect our dear Hugo Chavez (who is staying a block from my house!) from terrorists or something. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose is, but it’s really frustrating because I haven’t been able to get a taxi to bring me to my house in a few days, and they’ve rerouted all of the public transit in a completely illogical fashion so that I have had to learn several new routes to my classes. I’m going to be a Cochabamba public transit expert by the end of the summit. Anyway, the ALBA cumbre is essentially a summit of important leftist Latin American leaders. I can’t believe it’s happening right here in this city! I literally haven’t had a free moment to see if there is anything going on that is open to the public but it seems like everything is closed off with pretty high security, so I’m going to assume that the best view I’m going to get during this thing is a line of police dressed in riot gear (yeah, seriously, that’s what I walked home past this morning).

Now I’m off to grab lunch before my first classroom observation! Uj ratu kama!

Casa, dulce casa!

We're back in Cochabamba and I'm happy to be home. Potosí and Sucre were great (especially Potosí) but so much traveling gets exhausting! I feel like as soon as my ears stop being clogged after one flight, we're on another. It's really incredible how many places we get to experience here, though, and I am grateful for the diversity of the trip. I'm just happy to be back in my own bed.

I can't even think of where to start. As soon as we arrived at the Sucre airport, we got on a bus to Potosí, a "three hour" bus ride, which in Bolivian time meant something like five, although I didn't keep close track of it. Actually, now that I look at the schedule, I'm realizing it says "aproximadamente" (approximately) 3 horas, so I should have known then that we'd get in late. Anyway, the ride was gorgeous, and we even crossed a bridge that Simon Bolivar crossed during the fight for Bolivian independence (this is a picture from the top of one end of the bridge) so it wasn't so bad, but even breathtaking scenery doesn't make an entire afternoon on a bus completely worthwhile. We got to Potosí around 8 and had dinner in the hotel, accompanied by a traditional Potosina music group with pan flutes, drums, charangos (little string instruments), and other folk instruments. We all danced for a while and then went to bed as early as we could. Potosí is the highest city we've been to so far (I think it might be the highest city in the world, but I'm not positive), so just walking up a flight of stairs wiped us out.

On Monday we visited a mine in Potosí (this picture is of the entrance). It was a really intense experience. Miners work under some of the most abominable conditions in the world, with very little improvement in conditions since the mining began in the colonial era. They don't have health insurance, the pay is pretty awful (since many of the mines are now cooperative mines, they don't have salary or hourly wages, they just get paid for whatever minerals they can find), and the life expectancy is around 40 or 50 years because most miners die of silicosis, a lung disease, at which point their children take their places in the mine. We were in the mines for two hours and we all literally breathed a collective sigh of relief when we got out, half because we could finally get a decent lungful of air, and half because of how dismal it was inside. At one point, we turned off our headlamps (we were all dressed in mining clothes, including boots and helmets) and it was unbelievable how dark it was inside. You can't see half a centimeter in front of your face. We had all read about the working conditions of miners, but seeing it and experiencing a little bit of it was a different story. I think it took everyone an hour or two to recover from it afterward. It really was very intense.

That afternoon, we visited a school for children of miners and it definitely lightened the mood a lot. The kids were really excited to see us--almost as excited as we were to see them. They gave us a tour of the school and then we danced with the kids for a little while and played with them in their playground. They don't all come from great home situations but they are lucky because the school is very integrated with the families and tries to incorporate the parents in a lot of the programming to help give the kids a better chance at life than entering the mines, which is what an overwhelming percentage of miners' children end up doing. It was so much fun just running around with the kids (who range from 6 to 18, although most of the students are between 8 and 12) and listening to what they had to say. One little girl took my camera around for an hour and just took pictures of her friends and the other students on the program and it was really great to look through the pictures afterward and see what she had done. I think I might go back and visit the school during my ISP, but I'm not sure if I will have time or if it's exactly pertinent to my topic.

The next morning we swam in aguas termales (hot springs) that the Incas used to use. It was so amazing! The laguna is in an inactive volcano, which is why the water is heated, and we just swam in this warm pool in the middle of the mountains all morning. It was so gorgeous and so relaxing. We even gave ourselves spa treatment with the mud. It was extremely refreshing and such a nice recovery after such an active day the day before. We ate lunch there, llama meat on a grill and potatoes cooked underneath the ground. It was so rich! I love the food here so much. It was especially exciting for me because we had just learned in Quechua class about that way of cooking in the countryside, by creating a hot pit in the ground and burying the potatoes for a few hours. It was delicious. Then we had the afternoon free, and since we accidentally missed the tour at the Casa de la Moneda (which is supposed to be one of the best museums in Latin America), we went to an old convent that's been around since colonial times and is still in use. It reminded me of the monastery that Ali and I visited in Arequipa. It was a convent where the richest Spaniards would send their daughters for the rest of their lives, and it was so interesting to see how they lived in luxury at the same time as living very strictly structured, solemn lives. Plus our tour guide was a blast and kept asking Nicole if she would stay and become a nun there. It was a lot of fun, and made missing the Casa de la Moneda a little less painful.

We went to Sucre that night and just went to bed, and the next morning went to Asur, a museum and organization that is working to recover the ancient art of Bolivian textiles. They have an indigenous art museum and also hire women to come to the center and learn how to create the art as it used to be done. It was really gorgeous and so impressive to see the women working so intently. It takes them a day to finish about 1-2 centimeters of a piece, so I can't even imagine how long it must take women in the campo to do it while they're also working the fields, taking care of their children, and cooking all day. It's extremely impressive. That afternoon we visited a cultural center of musicians. We spoke with the director of the group and then ate dinner and watched the musicians perform. There is a core band of them called Los Masis ('friends' in Quechua) and then younger students who study and work there during the day. It was so exhilarating and really a lot of fun. We dance so much in this country! It's exhausting, but it's so much more fun than just sitting and observing all the time. I really love the energy.

Yesterday we went to the Zona Tarabuca, which is an area just outside of Sucre, where they make textiles and play traditional music and essentially incorporate all of the different cultural aspects we learned about all week. It's in the country, so the people speak Quechua, and Luis and Nicole and I got to practice a little with them! We helped chop onions for lunch, then participated in an offering to Pachamama, then watched them perform some music and traditional dances, then ate a delicious lunch once again. I haven't been disappointed for a single meal in this country. I also bought a bag that they had woven right there. It's gorgeous and I feel great about it because I know the money actually went to the artist. It was a really warm experience because the people were so welcoming to us, despite the fact that for all they knew, we were just another group of tourists barging in to examine their quaint customs. I had a great time and I think they appreciated that we were trying to speak Quechua, although the experience made me realize just how useless I am when trying to speak. I need a lot more practice before our rural homestay in a week.

This morning Luis and I explored a bit before we had to leave for our flight at 1. We checked out the famous chocolate place, Chocolates Para Ti, and I bought way more than I should have ("for my family," though of course I've eaten almost half of it already). Then we ended up getting lost and having to take a taxi back to the hotel, which was embarrassing and frustrating, especially since we are supposed to be two of the three excursion leaders. Whoops. Ismael and Lupe were understanding, though, and we made the flight with plenty of time to spare. Now this afternoon I've just relaxed in my room and snacked on expensive chocolates and I'm really happy to be home. We have so much work to do this weekend and I spent so much money this week that I think I probably won't go out much. I'm happy to be here just to relax. I really love this country.

Potosí and Sucre tomorrow!

My mom and Lucia and I were going to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies this afternoon but Lucia had too much homework so it's going to have to wait until I get back from Potosí and Sucre on Friday. Bummer. We leave tomorrow around noon for the ancient mining city and what was once the capital of Bolivia (it might still be the legal capital of the country, although the government is now in La Paz). I'm excited for another excursion! This time, I'm not at all reluctant to leave Cocha because I know I'll be back next weekend.

I interviewed a children's book author on Thursday night for an assignment for our field study seminar class (essentially an applied anthropology course--how to interview, how to ethically research human subjects, etc.) and it was so excellent! Her name is Gaby Vallejo and she was a famous adult author, having won a national prize for one of her novels, for years before she even thought of writing for children. She was struck by the lack of children's literature in the country and decided she'd do something about it, and has since written something like 15 books for children, opened up the only children's library in Cochabamba, and started all sorts of literature programs around the country. Her NGO even has a "sister library" at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. In other words, she's one of the coolest people I've met, and she's a terrific resource for my final project. I can't wait to meet with her again.

Last night I met up with Kirsten, a girl who did this same program a year and a half ago, for dinner and drinks (okay, dad, dinner and one drink, don't worry). She's now working in Punata, a town just outside Cochabamba, in a maternity home where women can go to give birth using traditional methods that are often not honored in hospitals here. I love meeting people who did this program and came back to Bolivia. It's so encouraging and indicative that living here really is a life-changing experience.

I'll probably write from the hotel sometime this week but if not, hasta viernes!