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!