Chaparre is the region in Bolivia where they grow coca. For that reason, Peace Corps doesn’t want us hanging out there. But for a million reasons, I was so glad the car broke down on the way home and we had to spend five hours taking in the scenery. It’s astounding, better than any picture I saw before coming to Bolivia. Waterfalls descend from the tops of giant cliffs, seemingly from the center of the sky. Butterflies, lightning bugs and devil mosquitoes fill the air along with the aroma of wild lilies. It is rainforest at it’s best, and I kept thinking of the kids’ movie Fern Gully, a feeble comparison at best. The forest was alive, moving, breathing, speaking, soothing.
I returned to Cochabamba exhausted at 2am. I didn’t get up until late morning, and as is usual for the weekends my family was ready to whisk me away. Despite ample homework, I hadn’t seen them in a while and was up for the adventure. Seeing as how it was Easter Sunday, I assumed wherever we were headed would include church and food.
So we piled into the car and drove off. First we wound up at Aunt Carola’s, where we piled more people into the car. I sat double shotgun with Kelly. Then we headed in the direction of the highway, but turned off toward my grandparent’s house to wait for the others to gather. No problem – I’ve got this pattern figured out by now. I pulled out my Spanish homework and borrowed a pen. As I was writing, my little cousin Nicole, who is about one, was getting some pre-church beauty treatment from my host mom and making all sorts of googly baby faces in response. She’s adorable, and far more interesting than my Spanish homework.
Uncle Ever, Nicole’s father, is an angry man in general. He never greets me, as is customary in Bolivian culture. He has two young children and his wife lives in Spain, because of which, my family has warned me, he always bitter. At my grandmother’s birthday party one time he yelled at me, or at least in my general direction. I assumed he was angry with my aunt Lucy, with whom I was walking and talking, and that I was just caught in the crossfire. All the same, I asked to leave and did so. My family told me not to worry, that he was just a mean drunk looking for someone to yell at, and that he’d argued with others in the family that night as well. Note to self: don’t drink with Ever. Ever.
So I didn’t really anticipate any problems at 11 am on Easter Sunday until he put himself directly in front of me. Menacingly, he demanded to know, “Por que le mirabas a mi hija?” Why were you staring at my daughter?”
?Perdon?
“Siempre le mirabas!” You are always watching her.
“Por que … es bonita? I stumbled. Because she’s pretty.
Not really sure all that came after that, other than a lot of yelling at me, yelling between my family members, and my host dad grabbing me and saying, “Erika, vamos.” We sat in the car and my host dad took deep, loud, angry breaths to calm himself. I was practically in tears. I told him I was confused – previously I had barely spoken to this man. Kelly and my host mom showed up. “Are you okay?” Erlinda asked. “Don’t worry; he’s just mean. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Kelly turned around in the front seat and explained it all. “Es un racisto.” He’s a racist.
I’ve never been the object of such blind hatred. A million times since it happened, I’vereplayed the event in my head. Is there something I could have said to diffuse his anger? Is there something improper about the way I interact with his children? Should I have tried harder to befriend him in the first place, despite his reluctance? Am I in danger? What about his past causes him to act in such a way?
We went to church in two cars; surprisingly, Nicole came in ours on my grandmother’s lap. In Quillacollo, a nearby city, we separated again into two groups. In church I lit two candles as always: one for me, and one for my real mom, and placed them next to my Bolivian family’s candles. I asked the Virgen de Urkupina, granter of miracles, for a big one. Help me fix this. And got stuck on one phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive those who trespass against us.”
Friday, March 28, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Lost in the Campo
Tech week
First I’ve got to tell you all about my friend Yolanda, my current partner in crime. She’s a Detroit native and chock full of attitude. She knows how to keep a class in line and keep us all laughing till we cry. She’s the first one to dive into just about anything, including street food, which we were told was off limits for our wimpy western tummies. “Erika,” she’d say, “God kissed that sandwich and handed it to me.”
I make a point of rooming with Yoli. I know my experience will be all the better for it. She celebrated her birthday during our trip, and as a mixed blessing that day we couldn’t get to the school where we were supposed to teach. People are forever blockading Bolivian roads in protest of one thing or another; apparently it doesn’t matter where you go because we were surely in the middle of nowhere. And like everywhere else, it’s not a dangerous event. It’s a bunch of taxi drivers drinking chicha and shooting the breeze. We tried another way out. A huge truck sat in the middle of the road and alongside a sleepy couple of cows joined in the fun by planting themselves directly in the way, injury to insult.
But this is why we have four-wheel drive, and this is what I love about Peace Corps, among other things. We literally went right up over the goddamned mountain. Our drivers are used to this kind of thing, but there was definitely one point where we just stopped, looked down, and simultaneously snapped our seat belts. Esteban (the driver) said, “If we don’t make it through, there’s no way we’re getting back up here.”
So we all raised our hands like riding a rollercoaster, and away we went: down the ravine, through the river and up the other side. Through mud that came up over the wheels, through dusty little towns and with random guesses as to which direction to turn, we emerged four hours later – five minutes from where we started, but five minutes means a lot when you’re on the other side of a blockade.
Over the next few days we worked hard. We visited an experimental farm, a radio show and a tree nursery. We delivered charlas, or lessons, to several different groups. For my part, Ben and I talked biofertilizers with farmers, the whole group divided environmental education with teachers (part philosophy, part identification of problem areas, part practical application: for example using recycled materials in the classroom, which is not only better but combats the lack of materials in many if not most schools).
I wrote a puppet show with Yoli and Andy on reforestation that was a big hit in the primary school (the kids understood Spanish but spoke Guarani!). Then we collected nearly two thousand dead batteries in various remote villages without adequate trash disposal. I wrote really silly mad libs about it and the kids chose Michael Jackson and Shakira as the main characters. Yoli and I were in stitches along with everybody else.
Toward the end of our long journey (ten days, more than 30 hours cooped up in a Land Rover), the current volunteers along with one of the host families threw us a huge barbecue. Animals were sacrificed, beer was flowing and sweet wine went from mouth to mouth all night long. Music filled the night air, slightly cooler and more magical than the stifling heat of the afternoon. Clouds meandered slowly by an almost full moon as we learned native dances but mostly tripped over one another. I smiled so much my face hurt. I remember thinking: God kissed this world and handed it to me.
First I’ve got to tell you all about my friend Yolanda, my current partner in crime. She’s a Detroit native and chock full of attitude. She knows how to keep a class in line and keep us all laughing till we cry. She’s the first one to dive into just about anything, including street food, which we were told was off limits for our wimpy western tummies. “Erika,” she’d say, “God kissed that sandwich and handed it to me.”
I make a point of rooming with Yoli. I know my experience will be all the better for it. She celebrated her birthday during our trip, and as a mixed blessing that day we couldn’t get to the school where we were supposed to teach. People are forever blockading Bolivian roads in protest of one thing or another; apparently it doesn’t matter where you go because we were surely in the middle of nowhere. And like everywhere else, it’s not a dangerous event. It’s a bunch of taxi drivers drinking chicha and shooting the breeze. We tried another way out. A huge truck sat in the middle of the road and alongside a sleepy couple of cows joined in the fun by planting themselves directly in the way, injury to insult.
But this is why we have four-wheel drive, and this is what I love about Peace Corps, among other things. We literally went right up over the goddamned mountain. Our drivers are used to this kind of thing, but there was definitely one point where we just stopped, looked down, and simultaneously snapped our seat belts. Esteban (the driver) said, “If we don’t make it through, there’s no way we’re getting back up here.”
So we all raised our hands like riding a rollercoaster, and away we went: down the ravine, through the river and up the other side. Through mud that came up over the wheels, through dusty little towns and with random guesses as to which direction to turn, we emerged four hours later – five minutes from where we started, but five minutes means a lot when you’re on the other side of a blockade.
Over the next few days we worked hard. We visited an experimental farm, a radio show and a tree nursery. We delivered charlas, or lessons, to several different groups. For my part, Ben and I talked biofertilizers with farmers, the whole group divided environmental education with teachers (part philosophy, part identification of problem areas, part practical application: for example using recycled materials in the classroom, which is not only better but combats the lack of materials in many if not most schools).
I wrote a puppet show with Yoli and Andy on reforestation that was a big hit in the primary school (the kids understood Spanish but spoke Guarani!). Then we collected nearly two thousand dead batteries in various remote villages without adequate trash disposal. I wrote really silly mad libs about it and the kids chose Michael Jackson and Shakira as the main characters. Yoli and I were in stitches along with everybody else.
Toward the end of our long journey (ten days, more than 30 hours cooped up in a Land Rover), the current volunteers along with one of the host families threw us a huge barbecue. Animals were sacrificed, beer was flowing and sweet wine went from mouth to mouth all night long. Music filled the night air, slightly cooler and more magical than the stifling heat of the afternoon. Clouds meandered slowly by an almost full moon as we learned native dances but mostly tripped over one another. I smiled so much my face hurt. I remember thinking: God kissed this world and handed it to me.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Lasagna Boliviana
Yesterday Kelly and I made oatmeal raisin cookies from a packet I found at the gringo grocery store. Not that I can’t make them from scratch, but everything is just more complicated here and the packet looked so easy. Just add butter, water and an egg, it said, alongside nifty little pictures. Save that my family doesn’t have a cookie sheet and it took me two weeks to find one, or something resembling one, and we never use the oven so that was a new experience, too. It has five different temperature settings, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Worst case scenario I thought I’d have to do the math between Fahrenheit and Celsius (or like, email Hilary and ask her to do it for me). Instead I played the guessing game with the first batch, and made some adjustments for batch number two.
Anyway, they turned out fine, maybe a little sweeter than I would have preferred. My host mom, beaming, invited four people over to share cookies with us but made me set aside one each for my aunts, uncles and cousins to try out the next day. Apparently the 20-minute act of producing cookies from a plastic pouch puts me on par with the Iron Chef, which, if you think about it, has the same general theme: find all the ingredients/supplies you need and put them together in a strange kitchen which may or may not have utensils while six hungry Bolivians wait downstairs for the official taste test. No pressure.
It’s no secret how much I miss American food, especially since I’ve been well (tummy-wise) almost as much as I’ve been sick here. So today my Aunt and Uncle took me to a restaurant where the daily special was, of all things, lasagna. Even though it was a tough call between that and the other two reasonably normal albeit Bolivian items on the special board, I wanted to humor them so I went with lasagna. So did my cousin Carla and my aunt Carola, probably out of curiosity and, you know, solidarity.
First came the salad, which I vacuumed. Most Bolivian food comes sans vegetables. The previous day I ordered some specially to share with the whole family, a big plate, and wound up eating the entire thing by myself. No problem. It’s not just that they rarely eat veggies here; they don’t even like them!
I had a choice of two soups, corn or peanut. The peanut soup, or sopa de mani, is something I might actually miss someday. I went with that.
Then came the lasagna. Take a moment to consider what you might put in lasagna, or better yet, what you might find inside one. The first curiosity was the layer of mashed potatoes on top of the noodles (*whimper* Where’s the cheese? QUESO!?) I was hungry, and took a big old bite. Chomped right down. Stopped. Started chewing again slowly. Something sweet. A … raisin?
Cause for more examination, to say the least, so I pried that sucker open. Noodles, pretty standard. Minced meat. Carrots? Holy crap, is that an egg? “Alexander, que es esto? Un huevo?”
Alexander (aka Oscar or Chino, since everyone has three names here and some people have four), is my cousin who is about 7. He and I made an English-Spanish list of what exactly we found today in my lasagna: olives-aceitunas, beans-beines, carrots-zanahorias, raisins-pasas de uva, potatoes-papas, meat-carne and pasta-fideos.
It really was a detective game because the items listed here are in no way ‘the filling’ of the lasagna; they’re more like finely diced additives sprinkled sparingly into the usual meat and potatoes (and potatoes, and potatoes) that I eat every day.
Were I not salivating for a mound of mozzarella cheese and tomatoes, I might have actually liked my lunch. The moral of the story is, next time I may as well order something Bolivian, because at least then I’ll know (and this is an improvement on language and experience on my part), at least now I know in that case what I’ll be getting.
Anyway, they turned out fine, maybe a little sweeter than I would have preferred. My host mom, beaming, invited four people over to share cookies with us but made me set aside one each for my aunts, uncles and cousins to try out the next day. Apparently the 20-minute act of producing cookies from a plastic pouch puts me on par with the Iron Chef, which, if you think about it, has the same general theme: find all the ingredients/supplies you need and put them together in a strange kitchen which may or may not have utensils while six hungry Bolivians wait downstairs for the official taste test. No pressure.
It’s no secret how much I miss American food, especially since I’ve been well (tummy-wise) almost as much as I’ve been sick here. So today my Aunt and Uncle took me to a restaurant where the daily special was, of all things, lasagna. Even though it was a tough call between that and the other two reasonably normal albeit Bolivian items on the special board, I wanted to humor them so I went with lasagna. So did my cousin Carla and my aunt Carola, probably out of curiosity and, you know, solidarity.
First came the salad, which I vacuumed. Most Bolivian food comes sans vegetables. The previous day I ordered some specially to share with the whole family, a big plate, and wound up eating the entire thing by myself. No problem. It’s not just that they rarely eat veggies here; they don’t even like them!
I had a choice of two soups, corn or peanut. The peanut soup, or sopa de mani, is something I might actually miss someday. I went with that.
Then came the lasagna. Take a moment to consider what you might put in lasagna, or better yet, what you might find inside one. The first curiosity was the layer of mashed potatoes on top of the noodles (*whimper* Where’s the cheese? QUESO!?) I was hungry, and took a big old bite. Chomped right down. Stopped. Started chewing again slowly. Something sweet. A … raisin?
Cause for more examination, to say the least, so I pried that sucker open. Noodles, pretty standard. Minced meat. Carrots? Holy crap, is that an egg? “Alexander, que es esto? Un huevo?”
Alexander (aka Oscar or Chino, since everyone has three names here and some people have four), is my cousin who is about 7. He and I made an English-Spanish list of what exactly we found today in my lasagna: olives-aceitunas, beans-beines, carrots-zanahorias, raisins-pasas de uva, potatoes-papas, meat-carne and pasta-fideos.
It really was a detective game because the items listed here are in no way ‘the filling’ of the lasagna; they’re more like finely diced additives sprinkled sparingly into the usual meat and potatoes (and potatoes, and potatoes) that I eat every day.
Were I not salivating for a mound of mozzarella cheese and tomatoes, I might have actually liked my lunch. The moral of the story is, next time I may as well order something Bolivian, because at least then I’ll know (and this is an improvement on language and experience on my part), at least now I know in that case what I’ll be getting.
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