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I am living with the family Garrido in their lovely, homely 2nd storey house down by the Blanco Galindo about 4 kms outside of the city centre. It takes me about 20 minutes to get into town by thumbing down one of several buses or trufis (another type of bus, much more colourful but otherwise seems the same), simply by standing in the middle of the motorway. That´s transport bolivian style. It is always rammed on the bus - I love that office workers, tiny schoolkids and campesinos with their tall bowler hats and velvet skirts sit side by side - but they always stop for you anywhere on the road and there is always room for one more. They also play loud music on the bus, usually something cool. But there are pickpockets who try their luc k as everyone is crushed up together, one tried me out today (or was he trying to touch my arse) and I have my own device for getting rid: the stare out, at point blank range.
I started my one month journalism volunteer placement today and it seems that it could be so much more educational and useful for me than I had anticipated.
This morning I rode the bus to the offices of Los Tiempos, a rather snazzy glass building with grey marble interior and security guards and everything! I met my co ordinator there, Ximena, who used to be a radio journalist. We waited for the other new journalism volunteer, a girl called Lucy also from Blighty, but fresh from uni. We had both done a mad dash for smart clothes the night before as we were told the LT is v formal and we were meeting one of the main editors under whose care we would be placed - who also happens to be one of the owners and a member of the much respected Canelas family (yep, its a family owned business). I cant get across just how important this day and this opportunity is to me and how much I wanted to make a good impression and for Luz Marina, the editor, to have some confidence that I could be of use to her somehow. So I bought some smart black trousers (I wish I had my Zara suits and shirts with me...) and this morning I made sure I looked like someone who has interviewed CEOs all over the world. Now I dont want to sound like a bitch but it seemed when we got to meet Luz Marina that she totally ignored Lucy and focused on me, on my background, on what I wanted to do at LT (in my broken Spanish, I tried to explain how excited I was to be there and what I had been up to in London): She had seen my CV and one of my articles before, and I think I am the first volunteer who is a working journalist so I think she was feeling excited too. Anyway, Luz Marina called in one of her economics hacks and explained that I would be working with her. Which was unexpected as I was told several months previously that I would not be able to do any business or political reporting as it could be too sensitive. After, Ximena told me that Luz Marina said she liked me and decided to give me that opportunity. TOUCH!!!! (as Dal would say)...I had a meeting with Maria-Juliam the economics editor, and I was assigned a 3000 word feature (**actually, i got that wrong - it was about 3000 characters, or 450 words!!! they dont work in word count here, they use character count.. luckily i checked this when i started writing) for the saturday economics pages about la ropa usada, or secondhand clothes, which is a huge industry in bolivia what with the poverty here, but is a big political problem all over which has gone right to evo morales´desk, because the new clothing manufacturer s and their unions and industry reps, who are powerful, have complained that they are being undermined. Which is bollocks I say but in a ctual fact it seems that a large part of the problem is that bolivians believe a lot of the secondhand clothes sold are american brands. And bolivians no like yankees right now, what with their anti coca thing. So I think it might be the case that industry is pissed at not making enough c ash because campesino families buy second hand clothes, probably not gving a shit is they are american labels or not, and to get the a ttentions of evo, have added the word ámerican into the mix, knowing it to be a red rag to a bull. thats my uneducated guess. There is a general strike tomorrow so no one can get to work - however i have been drafted in to rescue a piece about a dying amazon tribe which has been made into an eco project by some german dude and he just happens to live near me so I am interviewing him tomorrow morning for press day on monday (I met him today and he brought a mate who is living with this tribe and I think he is writing about it for National Geographic because this tribe is so small and isolated that they have never been visited by any anthropologists- but next week I have to interview the head of the industry body and then go to the market to interview some of the vendadores y consumadores ( sellers and buyers) of second hand clothes to get societal opinion, and i have a proper press photographer to come along. It is an odd coincidence getting this story b ecause when I was looking for cheap work clothes I was looking out for second hand stuff and only saw one or two stalls, but loads and loads of new stuff being sold, but a pair of basic smart trousers was 80 bolivianos, while the average wage per month is 500 bolivianos... and you can probably half that for campesinos... so no wonder la ropa usada is muy populare. (the bus is 1 boliviano and 50 centavos for any ride anywhere one way, and most people ride the bus four times a day a t least between going to and from work in the morning, for lunch and back, and back home in the evening - thats 30-odd bolivianos a week out of an average wage of 125 (or I am guessing 75 for campesinos selling orange jiuce for a living). Its a lot for the average Bolivian. But I digress...
I now realise what a big challenge i have on my hands because the paper has taken an unexpectedly huge gamble on me not least because my spanish is minimal but i am being given a whole page in the saturday edition to fill, and must do interviews and write the article in spanish. I will need Ximenas help but I am helping her out with this eco tourism story so I think its a good deal. So a lot to take on but its up to me not to fuck it up! wish me luck. It is g reat to see that people who dont know me or can speak my language can put so much faith in me. It is a big motivator; this morning i was up at 6.30am - that is unheard of - i had breakfast, showered and left for work at 7.45, and was one of the first in the office. I just need my cool photo pass for the offices now! will make a fabulous souvenir.
Ther other chick, Lucy, is in the photgraphy archiving department, which sounds good to me, but I think may not be as meaty as my job. She does get to go out in the field and see stuff like shoots etc, but I think when office bound its not so great. To be fair, she has no experience so I would have been there too if I was new to the industry. So yes, my job appears meaty. However, it will only be as meaty as my spanish is good: I have classes every day throughout the placement and between living with a spanish speaking family, working with spanish speakers and reading spanish every day, I really, really hope it comes along quick so I can get something published and be useful to LT.
Second fantastic thing: On the university rag which I will work for every afternoon, writing in english, they will be teaching me In Design. Now how come a badly underfunded volunteer agency with two computers and a rubbish modem - and a bolivian one, too boot, one of the top five recipients of foreign aid and a country crippled by daily protests for more money from the government - has the resources and the will to teach me this 110% vital-for-journalists skill, for free, but my employer back home had neither the funds or the will to even install in design for my publication in my four year tenure there? esta es un pregunta mejor. In this job I will be part of all procresses from writing, page planning, editing, de sign and production.
Entonces...
Because of my experience back home (well I have worked pretty hard, Im not going to play it down anymore!) and also my small amount of teaching experience for post grad journalism, my co ordinator here thinks that Los Tiempos may want me to teach either or both english and some feature writing to the journalists there. And aparently that would come with some sort of official certificate from LT, though what exactly I dont know. But all of this is just way, way cool: So far, if all this happens, this promises to be maybe the single best adventure and opportunity of my life so far. So I´m determined to make the very best of it and I told Ximena to work me hard, not least because I didnt come all this way to sit on my arse, and I think working for a daily broadsheet in spanish is going to be a big challenge for me. I dont know if I can do it to the level I hope to. But I am like, so SO ready for my closeup. It is just so amazing to be here and to see how a daily newsroom works, to work alongside the LT staff and to learn from them. But I realised quickly what a disservice in some key ways my last employer did to me by not training me in any other skills that modern journalists just need to have, including in design, and basic production techniques. I feel like a kid on work experience, which is in one way bad but I guess mostly good: I come here with nearly ten years´experience, but four of those was with an outfit with no standards or expectations, no professional pride, no competitive streak, nothing (not my immediate colleagues, I mean the organisation at large, the spirit: a fish rots from the head down!). So I forget what it feels like to work among people who have real passion for their job, who want to hear ideas, who want to learn and improve, and moreover, with perhaps less resources (esp. at the university magazine), but a lot of professionalism. It might sound patronising, but who would have imagined that Bolivia would have something to teach a journalism working in London, one of the world´s top cities and publishing centres?
In the afernoon aftwer meeting Luz Marina I went to see the university operation, for the magazine called ´cocha-banner´. Its a v small operation, two computers, one laptop (with diskettes, not cds!), and one person holding it together, Ximena. It looks like a volunteer magazine: the lack of funding and revolving student staff does show. but not to its detrimentso much: Ximena does a fabulous job on a shoestring staff and budget of producing some genuinely interesting articles and selecting some really cool cover images. The June issue is going to press this week and we have a general strike on Friday, press day . Here you cant just get to work a bit late or walk: they block the roads and throw stones at any one daring to try and venture out. So its a home day. And this happens frequently. But stuff gets done and published to spec and on time, run by volunteers with no experience (and the two I met today didnt know what a standfirst was....) But it is a cool little mag with room for growth and from what I can tell, it is very much respected in Bolivia and widely read. The cover story for June (we are thinking of rolling it to July to make a bigger deal of it) is a peace corps reunion for the people who started the PC in BOL and CBBA (thats Cochabamba) 40 years ago. A bunch of yanks are coming here in June to celebrate it and its a big deal, not least in memoriam to several dudes who, after the PC was thrown out of BOL in the later 70s because of the deteriorating relationship between the states and BOL, went onto serve in various wars and did various important things before (for some) coming back to BOL when they opened the doors for the Corps again in the 1990s. I may be involved in planning a big spread for that if it gets shunted to July. Otherwise right now I am proofing stuff for June. Its good to be back at work for a while and I really feel that people want to use my skills, which is great.
Life as a Bolivian is cool, well at least for one pretending for a month. My family (I really should go now to get home and see them, they worry) is Angelica, my host mum, Andrea, my host sister who is a few years younger than my own sister, and Angelicas husband whose name escapes me (Lo siento!) but he is a lawyer. Angelicas older daughter is 26, lives in la paz and guess what: she is a journalist for a newspaper there. So I may have someone to visit in LP. The family is very warm and I feel really at home. They dont speak english (Andrea is studying and has a tiny bit though) but we manage to chat at dinner about politics, life etc, though I must sound like a spastic with my pidgeon spanish. The schedule here is working for LT 9am to midday, then I go home for lunch (the entire city does this) for 2 hours, then I work until 5 for the cocha-banner, then i have spanish classes until 7pm. So it is a hectic day, not least with four trips on the bus, minimum, each day (and jumping on the bus on the motorway for two of those, squinting in the sun to try and see if my bus is the one speeding towards me, and with my eyesight worse than my granný´s), and because I am still getting used to travelling here, to spealing always in spanish ,and having to get up early and stick to a schedule- instead of loafing like I have done for 7 months- well, its rammed. But fun. For the weekends I want to visit a friend I met on the road who is volunteering in a school in a town four hours away in the chapare region (the coca growing region more into the rainforest - yes, thats the amazon rainforest) called villa tunari, and I am hoping that my friends Johanna and Dal will get bored of Santa Cruz and come here to see me on their way to Peru. I also have a couple of friends I made in cyberspace (no nothing dodgy, all kosher!) who live here who I hope to meet up with. And I hear there are always parties for the volunteers here but at first look, they are a bit green for me! nice though. I hope to make some friends of my own here as I improve my spanish and hang out with locals, who love to eat (cochabamba is the city of food, they live to eat here - johanna, there are cafes WITH TEA AND CHOCOLATE!!!), talk politics, and do all those cool things. Life in BOL is definitely a case of unorganised chaos, from the traffic, to the demos, to the siesta (its not as relaxing as you think to have 2 hours every day, when you have to find a bus home on time, eat and talk at the same time, and find a bus back - thinking and talking while eating isnt my strong point)...but somehow everything operates, people get stuff done, they live. Its muy diferente, y muy interesante (my two favourite expresions aside from ´mas o menos´, ´more or less´).
What else? I have my own room! my own bed!! windows!!! and I have unpacked!!!! it has been too long apart from all these things, these small luxuries. I fell asleep last night to the sound of crickets and staring into the black, starry sky over the urban sprawl of Cochabamba´s city, as it ride up into the valley, the lights of hundreds of houses clinging to the cerro blinking out behind the heat haze.
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Super cec
non-member comment
Good luck mate, seems like an amazing opportunity and I'm sure you'll do very well. Concentrate on what you know rather than what you haven't learned. You're not even 30 for got sake (not like some older friends of yours!!).