I'm not sure how it happens, but I have no doubt that when you leave your personal belongings alone in a room all day for several months, they find a way to reproduce. I'll leave the scientific explanation to someone better equipped to analyze such phenomena but suffice to say that the three bags with which I came to Bolivia have no chance of containing the contents of my room. Hence the decision to blog at three o'clock in the morning, since certainly no more packing will be done until I can procure another vessel for my things. I'm moving into a new apartment tomorrow for the last month of the program, and in the meantime getting a taste of what packing to go home will be like. It's going to be difficult to avoid the impulse to give away half of my clothes around midnight of December 21st.
I should probably be going to sleep but in addition to the packing-induced adrenaline coursing through my veins, I'm kept awake by the excitement of the Leonids shower that I might get to see in an hour or two! My host brother is the only other person in my family interested in getting up before dawn (or staying up most of the night, in my case) for the slight chance of seeing the meteors. It's cloudy here right now, and the shower isn't expected to start until around 5, and all of the articles I've read about it say that the places to see it are North America and Asia, yet I am holding out hope that the skies will part and the sun will wait a half hour or so to rise and the Earth will tilt a little bit back on its axle and the sky will be ablaze with streaks of fire. We'll see.
In all honesty, half of my excitement about the meteor shower comes from the fact that my brother offered to wake me up to see it. Before yesterday, we had exchanged approximately thirty five words throughout the whole semester, most of which occurred when my host parents and I came to a language barrier during lunch and all eyes would turn to the end of the table, where Bruno would glance up from under the brim of his baseball cap and enlighten us all with a single utterance: "meat-ball," or perhaps "goblin". He speaks English and German in addition to Spanish, plus he studies medicine, so he is the source of all answers that the rest of us seek. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but he is certainly intelligent and chooses very select moments to reveal the information he hides under his long black hair. But as of last night, he suddenly decided to be my friend! My host dad had been waiting all day to watch "Inglourious Basterds" as a family, which seemed to me a peculiar choice for family movie night, but nonetheless we all piled into the living room for the movie. Before my host dad could get the machines all working, Bruno asked me if I had a program called Mojo on my computer. I said no, and he explained that it's a program for downloading music from someone whose iTunes library is on your network. Apparently he's been listening to my music all semester and wants to take some of it. For those readers who are not of the music downloading generation, asking to steal someone's music is a pretty big compliment, ranking up there with what I imagine asking to borrow someone's groovy polyester top would have been in your generation. So needless to say I was flattered, and he tried to copy the program to my computer after the movie. It didn't work, but the seeds for friendship had been planted. Then tonight he came into the kitchen while I was eating dinner (mini tuna melts on crackers) and began to prepare his own meal. We don't eat dinner as family, and as we both have had a lot of work this semester, I rarely see him at night. I offered him a tuna melt cracker, and he not only obliged but made a face of sincere enjoyment at the new snack, and then introduced me to his concoction: octopus with "salsa golf" (mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together), also on crackers. Food has a lot to do with social relationships here, far more than in the US, and I think our sharing of dinners was the second step to our new friendship. That's when he took the third step, inviting me to watch the Leonids shower with him tonight. It might just be my tendency to look for patterns, but something makes me feel like now it's concrete. I feel so accomplished, but a little disappointed that I'm leaving tomorrow. It's not as if this whole time I was longing for him to be my friend, but as awesome as Lucia (my younger host sister) is, she is fifteen and thus the pastimes we have in common are limited. It would have been cool to have someone closer to my age to go out with, since the law, my host mom, and rules of age-appropriate behavior all prohibit Lucia from coming out with me at night.
The one other event of note from today also has to do with showers, but this time the literal kind. Earlier tonight, I went into my bathroom and noticed a peculiar shape on the floor of my shower. I leaned towards it a bit to figure out if it was a strategically arranged pile of dead pill-bugs, which is commonplace in my bathroom, then jumped back with what I'd like to say was an uncharacteristic yelp upon realizing what it was: a scorpion, its translucent tail poised delicately above its back. I haven't seen a scorpion in my whole time in this country, and now on my last night in this house, there it was, taking a rest in a place where I soon would be barefoot without my contacts in. Even right now, hours later, the thought of it makes my stomach flip. I have no idea if the scorpions here are deadly or just sting like wasps, but I would very much like to avoid both of those experiences. I regret to admit that rather than dealing with it the way I could have (I was wearing sneakers), I sheepishly went into the house and asked none other than Bruno to help me deal with the situation. Judging by the look on his face, he was no more confident about squishing the creature than I was, but in this case I was thankful that machismo lives on in this country, because he seemed to feel obligated to rescue me. Before stomping it to an indiscernible smear of what might as well have been the pill-bug pile after all, he took the opportunity to educate me about the lifestyles of scorpions, including the oh-so-encouraging fact that they travel in pairs, and that the smaller ones have the most potent venom (this one was no more than four centimeters long). Hopefully this one's partner will hang out somewhere outside until after I leave tomorrow afternoon. I want to feel that it's unlikely that I'll see another one in my time here, but something tells me that scorpions don't follow the the same myths that govern lightning. I might make it into a saying just to comfort myself, though. "Scorpions never bathe twice." However, as with everything else here, I can't plan on that. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Food policy, school observations, and the long weekend
Getting behind on this blog is fatal because I feel like so much is happening all the time that I never get a chance to catch up. I realized I wanted to write at least one more thing about my experience in the rural village: my experience in trying to explain the problems with US food policy. It was really surreal, in a way. One night while I was there, my family and I were all sitting around after dinner before we went to sleep and someone asked me what it was like in the US. I feel like it's hard enough to describe and explain (and defend) my life at home to city dwellers here, let alone to people for whom half of my daily activities have absolutely no relevance. As foreign as it was for me to live in a house with a stove made out of mud, washing clothes on the rocks outside, I'm an anthropology student and these things at least exist in my mind, if only in readings that I've done. But when my host dad asked me what products we grow where I'm from and I just answered "corn," we got to this surreal point in time where I knew I couldn't possibly explain the way the food industry works. It's just so absurd. The conversation went something like this:
Dad: "What products do they grow in your country?"
Me: "Well...corn."
Dad: "That's it?"
Me: "Some other things, but mostly corn. You see, we make lots of things out of corn."
Dad: "Like what?"
Me: "Like sugar. And food for other animals, like cows."
Dad: "Your cows eat corn?"
Me: "Well, yeah, to make them fat. Even though it makes them sick, and then they have to give them medicine."
Dad: "They should just let them eat grass."
If only Cupertino Guzman could talk some sense into policy makers.
Anyway, once we got back to Cochabamba, we had a crazy week of work ahead of us. We had our group projects due last Friday, so Nicole and I spent most of the week observing in classrooms around the city for our comparison of urban and rural education here. I was sort of bummed because I had missed my family (the Cochabamba one) all week and my older sister was here from La Paz with her beautiful baby daughter, but the school observations made it so that we barely had time to make it from one school to another, let alone to come home for lunch. We spent the mornings in a K-8 school in the center of town and we got to see a fair where they displayed all of the "manualidades" which are like crafts I guess, but practical ones like tablecloths and ponchos and home decorations and things like that. I was really impressed by the level of work that even the fourth graders were doing, but Heidi told us afterwards that a lot of times, the mothers do a lot of the work for them. I'd like to think that at least some of them did their own work, though, so I'm still impressed.
Then in the afternoons we went to a school in the Zona Sur, which is further south than the city center and requires a 30-minute trufi ride to get there. It's the school where Heidi's husband works in the morning, so he got us the personal connection, which we found was so important. The director of the school in the morning was the aunt of Nicole's host mom, so we had a personal connection there as well. Without the help of those people, we wouldn't have been able to do any observations, despite the fact that we have official authorization from SEDUCA, the public school board of Bolivia, to observe in the classrooms. Anyway, the school we went to in the afternoons was a convenio, which is a public school sponsored by the Catholic church (the government gives them money to sponsor the schools). I don't understand how that works, but apparently there is not exactly a separation of church and state here, because every public school we visited had an obvious Christian or Catholic influence. The school is great though, and we got to observe in a fourth-grade class, which was simultaneously so helpful for our project and so emotionally enriching. The kids were so endearing and the teacher had great classroom management skills and they all seemed genuinely happy to be there. What a great experience. At recess, the girls would all fight over who got to hold our hands (mine and Nicole's) and drag us out to the playground and then just fawn over us. They would ask us how to say their names in English, and how to say our names in English, and play with our hair. They even told Nicole she had pretty arm hair. Such a crazy but lovely experience. We are going back for the last week of classes (they're about to start summer vacation) when we get back from Santa Cruz next week, and despite the sometimes overwhelming attention, I'm looking forward to seeing them all again.
This weekend was a long weekend because of Todos Santos, the holiday when you remember your deceased relatives and friends. My family didn't go to the cemetery to celebrate, but traditionally the celebration is huge, especially if someone has passed away in the last year. They stay in the cemetery all night with a sort of altar dedicated to the person and celebrate the person's life. It sounds so beautiful and I really wish I had seen it for myself but like many city families, my family doesn't get so into the traditional ways of celebrating Bolivian holidays. We did have company yesterday, though, which was nice. They came over around lunchtime and I assumed they were just guests for lunch, but more and more people showed up and they ended up staying until around 10:00 at night. It was a lot of fun and by the time the evening came around, we had brought out the guitar and we were all singing along and it was really my favorite type of party. I even played a few songs at the request (insistence, really) of my dad, although it took me a while to get up my nerve, and although I couldn't play anything they knew the words to. But I genuinely enjoyed myself and was kind of sad when everyone finally went home. I think the hardest part about being here is being alone at night, because college is such a social place and I'm used to having people around at all times whether I like it or not. Here, I find I'm always alone by 10 or 11, unless I go out to a bar or club. It gives me a lot of time to think, which is sometimes good but other times I wish I could be doing something else. I've taken to playing the guitar a lot, though, which helps, and hopefully by the time I get back I'll have improved.
I have to leave for the airport in about six hours so I should really get some rest. We're leaving for Santa Cruz, a big city to the northeast of us (so it's a lot warmer and more humid than here). I'm really excited! We'll be there for the weekend, which is the first time we're getting to spend the weekend in another city, so we'll actually get to experience the social life at its best there. It's our last excursion as a group, which is strange because we've been together a lot for the past two months and the end of the trip marks the beginning of the independent study time. I'll miss everyone but I'm also looking forward to getting started on my book. It's really wild to think we're here already, but I think I'm ready to take what we've learned and go with it.
Dad: "What products do they grow in your country?"
Me: "Well...corn."
Dad: "That's it?"
Me: "Some other things, but mostly corn. You see, we make lots of things out of corn."
Dad: "Like what?"
Me: "Like sugar. And food for other animals, like cows."
Dad: "Your cows eat corn?"
Me: "Well, yeah, to make them fat. Even though it makes them sick, and then they have to give them medicine."
Dad: "They should just let them eat grass."
If only Cupertino Guzman could talk some sense into policy makers.
Anyway, once we got back to Cochabamba, we had a crazy week of work ahead of us. We had our group projects due last Friday, so Nicole and I spent most of the week observing in classrooms around the city for our comparison of urban and rural education here. I was sort of bummed because I had missed my family (the Cochabamba one) all week and my older sister was here from La Paz with her beautiful baby daughter, but the school observations made it so that we barely had time to make it from one school to another, let alone to come home for lunch. We spent the mornings in a K-8 school in the center of town and we got to see a fair where they displayed all of the "manualidades" which are like crafts I guess, but practical ones like tablecloths and ponchos and home decorations and things like that. I was really impressed by the level of work that even the fourth graders were doing, but Heidi told us afterwards that a lot of times, the mothers do a lot of the work for them. I'd like to think that at least some of them did their own work, though, so I'm still impressed.
Then in the afternoons we went to a school in the Zona Sur, which is further south than the city center and requires a 30-minute trufi ride to get there. It's the school where Heidi's husband works in the morning, so he got us the personal connection, which we found was so important. The director of the school in the morning was the aunt of Nicole's host mom, so we had a personal connection there as well. Without the help of those people, we wouldn't have been able to do any observations, despite the fact that we have official authorization from SEDUCA, the public school board of Bolivia, to observe in the classrooms. Anyway, the school we went to in the afternoons was a convenio, which is a public school sponsored by the Catholic church (the government gives them money to sponsor the schools). I don't understand how that works, but apparently there is not exactly a separation of church and state here, because every public school we visited had an obvious Christian or Catholic influence. The school is great though, and we got to observe in a fourth-grade class, which was simultaneously so helpful for our project and so emotionally enriching. The kids were so endearing and the teacher had great classroom management skills and they all seemed genuinely happy to be there. What a great experience. At recess, the girls would all fight over who got to hold our hands (mine and Nicole's) and drag us out to the playground and then just fawn over us. They would ask us how to say their names in English, and how to say our names in English, and play with our hair. They even told Nicole she had pretty arm hair. Such a crazy but lovely experience. We are going back for the last week of classes (they're about to start summer vacation) when we get back from Santa Cruz next week, and despite the sometimes overwhelming attention, I'm looking forward to seeing them all again.
This weekend was a long weekend because of Todos Santos, the holiday when you remember your deceased relatives and friends. My family didn't go to the cemetery to celebrate, but traditionally the celebration is huge, especially if someone has passed away in the last year. They stay in the cemetery all night with a sort of altar dedicated to the person and celebrate the person's life. It sounds so beautiful and I really wish I had seen it for myself but like many city families, my family doesn't get so into the traditional ways of celebrating Bolivian holidays. We did have company yesterday, though, which was nice. They came over around lunchtime and I assumed they were just guests for lunch, but more and more people showed up and they ended up staying until around 10:00 at night. It was a lot of fun and by the time the evening came around, we had brought out the guitar and we were all singing along and it was really my favorite type of party. I even played a few songs at the request (insistence, really) of my dad, although it took me a while to get up my nerve, and although I couldn't play anything they knew the words to. But I genuinely enjoyed myself and was kind of sad when everyone finally went home. I think the hardest part about being here is being alone at night, because college is such a social place and I'm used to having people around at all times whether I like it or not. Here, I find I'm always alone by 10 or 11, unless I go out to a bar or club. It gives me a lot of time to think, which is sometimes good but other times I wish I could be doing something else. I've taken to playing the guitar a lot, though, which helps, and hopefully by the time I get back I'll have improved.
I have to leave for the airport in about six hours so I should really get some rest. We're leaving for Santa Cruz, a big city to the northeast of us (so it's a lot warmer and more humid than here). I'm really excited! We'll be there for the weekend, which is the first time we're getting to spend the weekend in another city, so we'll actually get to experience the social life at its best there. It's our last excursion as a group, which is strange because we've been together a lot for the past two months and the end of the trip marks the beginning of the independent study time. I'll miss everyone but I'm also looking forward to getting started on my book. It's really wild to think we're here already, but I think I'm ready to take what we've learned and go with it.
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