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Published: June 11th 2007
This is my final week as a TPA volunteer and it will be my busiest, most probably. I have been invited to go to Puerto Villaroel, a settlement in the Chapare near the Amazon, with Carmen, Ximena, Daniela and some of the volunteers, leaving Thursday. so I have four days in which to write three smallish features for Cocha-Banner, but I also want to do something on at least one of these stories for Los Tiempos. I feel bad that I havent had any time to do work for Maria Julia, LT´s economics editor, since I have been kept busy with other things: oddly, and unexpectedly, I have been drawn into doing mostly social or cultural journalism for LT and for Cocha-Banner. I am enjoying it but it means a fairly significant change in the way I work, think, and write, which is a great opportunity for me to develop my journalism skills as well as a great chance to really dig my hands into the somewhat complex soil of Bolivian culture and politics. Whereas I always feel confident setting out to write a financial or economics piece, because I feel that my instinct for analysing and understanding these issues is strong, being sent out to investigate the kids who work in the local cemetary cleaning graves and taking the money back to their dirt poor families living in the mountains, six to a room, is totally different and I have no real training in this. I guess what I´m now doing is reportage!! which just sounds so fucking cool, no?
The stories I have to do for this week are about the reunion of returned Peace Corps volunteers, who came to Bolivia in the 60´s as graduates, into a very different country: I have to write an article about this nun who has set up a project to monitor the kids in the cementerio, and about their lives: and I have to write an easy article profiling some of the host families at TAPA, why they do it and so on. I so wanted to do more economics work this week but it´s really impossible.
I also saw Luz Marina this morning for the first time since she made this work offer - her kid was very sick and in hospital so she was away. She says she hasnt slept in one week! I dont know how she does it. I attended my first LT editorial meeting today with her permission, and to be honest I understood maybe only 10% of what was said. The big cheese editor was there and he asked me a question, which I really didn´t understand... but it was about my piece on secondhand clothing. I felt like a teenager on her first work experience. I wonder if people here think, how can she write for LT with her crappy spanish, I wonder if they maybe think I somehow cheat and pay some Bolivian to do it for me. Sometimes Im not sure myself how I managed to do it. But I have a lot of help from my Bolivian friends and I work hard. That´s it. However I may need the help of the gods to succeed this week. My aim is just to file the three stories for Ximena and CB - and be able to leave for Chapare without worrying about it.
My love for my host family grows by the second and I am supposed to leave them on Thursday, the end of my placement. Last night I felt the tears beginning to form and I hope they dont come out on Thursday. Really, I got so lucky being placed with them. I spent most of my time at home chatting with my host sister Andrea and my host mum Angelica, who are both endlessly cool and sweet. Even though my Spanish has got worse, yo creo, due to my shit Spanish teacher teaching me wrong stuff and giving me homework that is far too advanced for a beginner, messing with my slowly growing confidence and confusing me, they are both patient with me and I learn the best when we sit around the dinner table chatting. But much of our communication is really without words - I think a bond has been established between the three of us that has more to do with mutual instincts of one another and trust than anything else. And my host mum´s niece Maria Jose has become a really good friend, someone I will miss when I go as well as Angelica and Andrea. As a guest in someone´s home I was unsure about where the parameters were, where I could go, what I could do or say, what was appropriate, how close I could get. But they did away with all those rules and let me in. I felt I could get close to them and that we had a lot in common, as much as we don´'t have in common regards our backgrounds. There are lots of little things that have helped create an easy friendship: I will take home with me lots of cool memories of me and then not doing much but having fun, like for example, getting up on Saturday after a heavy night out in town and crawling into Andrea´s bed to watch VH1 or cartoons, while both in our pyjamas: or when I had flu and Angelica came into my room and unexpectedly attacked me with a jar of Vick´s... or my weekly appointments with MJ and the dinner table for another heavy afternoon of unrelenting discussion at a rate of knots (and a fair bit of swearing from MJ... she´d do well in London). Only one thing I would rather forget: last night over pancakes, I tried to copy a new word that Andrea said that meant something toally innocent, but I mixed up the order of the vowels and I said the word in Spanishm meaning to suck someone´s tit. In front of my host family for christ sake! Everyone pissed themselves laughing, so at least they got some amusement out of my mistake.
I am confortable enough with my host family that I can stay all Sunday in my PJs and smudged eye makeup from the night before, as I did this Sunday, and at the end of the night Andrea and Angelica came into my room to take out the excellently braided plaits that Andrea had done for me on Saturday: as they worked I asked Angelica (I was nervous about putting her in an awkward position) if I could leave my big backpack at her house when I went to Chapare on Thursday and pick it up on Monday, even though officially my placement is done and they dont have to put me up anymore. But she was like, of course, why do you even ask? then she said that she was really sad I had to go and asked me to stay when I come back to work for LT in July. I was so touched by that, and the situation was sort of intimate because the two of them were in my bedroom brushing my hair, it felt nice that someone somewhere wanted me around so much they asked me to stay. It mifght be advantageous from a practical viewpoint, since Luz Marina lives 45 minutes out of town and it will be easier to stick with my familiar bus routes that take 20 minutes max to get home. We will see. And MJ told me that the amount of cakes Angelica makes every week os only for me, not a regular thing! I can´t believe that woman´s cake output - seriously, on Sunday she produced not one but three orange flavoured pasteles, and we devoured one that night, fresh from the oven into my tummy with tea as well. It will be quite hard to revert to cold, damp, noisy, dirty hostels after this.
Not only will it be hard to survive again without a regular supply of fabulous food and cakes, but due to a small (read: large) cashflow issue my time outside of CBBA for the rest of my trip is going to be super frugal on every front. I think it will be salteñas for lunch and dinner. Last week I was invited to a party in which we were going to buy the stuff to make guacamole. I tried to take money out of my account with my card but I wouldnt let me. As it said I didnt have the funds to take out 300 bolivianos, which at my rough calculaations would be about UK Pounds 60, this means I am officially broke. It is lucky that I am here in CBBA with a host family and friends to support me - I would have been up shit creek if I was travelling alone as usual. All I have now is traveller´s cheques (Visa ones- it seems no one on this planet has those and so I sprnt nearly three extremely panicked hours last friday walking round CBBA looking for a place that changes those - of the various cambios and banks,only one cambio does - even the banks refuse them) which means I have to be tighter than a mutherfucker for the rest of my trip, and I was already super jewishly tight with my cash as it is. I dont think I bought a single drink the last two weekends, maybe one coffee for carmen but everyone else keeps the beers flowing. I will be bothering editors back home for more freelance and I need still to find out what or how much I will be paid for working at LT in July. Seriously, if anyone reading won the lottery recently, please can you take pity on a single girl travelling all alone with no cash and send her a charitable donation? I still have three countries to go and I need to pay for the Mchu Picchu trek, Foz de Iguazu and Buenos Aires...I´m loathe to ask my dad and make a sham of all that bitching I´ve been doing about the teenage volunteers at TAPA whose daddies have paid for everything.
So, what else is new? Well, for this story on the nun/cementerio thing I had to work on Corpus Christi (a national holiday, last Thursday). I visited the cementary to meet with Hermana Mercedes and one of her foreign helpers, a German girl whose name escapes me but who was very nice. While we were there, there was a big funeral, a party of about 50 people paraded in behin çd one of those long black funerary cars - oh, its called a hearse, of course - and a marching band. I have only ben to ne funeral before and that was a small jewish affair, with not much showing of emotion or big displays of anything. This was a catholic and a south american funeral so it was a lot of loud wailing, and we watched them put the casket into a comprtment in the top of four-high wall of coffins fronted with little glass windows with flowers and candles in (and a lot of them had those music thingys that you get in really chesy greeting csrds, the tiny electronic thing that plays one tune over and over and kps going until you shut the crd - well these ones had no card attached and go all day and night, hundreds of them all next to each other, at different paces since some of them are running out of battery - would be hilarious if it wasnt in a cemetary), after a viewing of the body.
Hermana Mercedes and I spoke (in Spanish of course) about the problems the children have, the work they do, and we met a few of them (as you might envision, they are usually very small kids, very young - maybe the youngest I saw was about 5- boys and girls, all dressed in la ropa usada, without their parents, with mucky faces and cute pigtails) whose job it is to basically come down here and stand at the entry to the cemetary, asking all visitors if they want their graves cleaned or if they want a song or prayer done for their dead. One tiny little girl with pigtails and a grubby pink top toddled up to me and wanted a cuddle, which I was happy to give because she was so cute. Her brothers and friends hung around nearby, calling out to townsfolk coming in to visit their dead on this very important religious day. The parents of these kids are the campesinos you see on the streets selling orange juice, working in the markets, and so on. At the end of the day they all meet at home, in this case on Cerro San Miguel - poignantly, I thought when I visited, a hill that is much higher than the Cristo Redentor which looks down on the city below with arms outstretched, ready to give and to bless the city folk, but curiously with his back turned to the poor people living on the hill closer to his heaven than his city folk - from San Miguel´s viewpoint it looks as if he is posing ready to cradle CBBA, but really has turned his back on them. The families pool their cash and use it to survive. For the conditions in which they live here in San Miguel, they really need next to nothing - and that is all they have to live on even with all members of the family working (it is common here to see campesino ladies sitting on the streets selling stuff while at the same time breastfeeding what looks like a very newborn baby, or accompanied by kindergarten school age kids who sit with their mum all day and all night, often wrapped up in thick fleece blankets, shivering as they sell chocolates or bottles of cold Coke to passers by). After visiting the cementerio Mercedes and I got on a bus and travelled a good 45 minutes away to San Miguel, to visit some of the families of the kids I had just met. I was stunned by the difference in living conditions just a few miles out of the city.
The first family I met lived in one tiny house which consisted of just one room, about the size of my bedroom in Brixton, made of bricks and mortar with one window, a cement floor with no carpet, lino or other covering, bare walls with no plastering, no furniture save for a tiny wooden stool which the family gave to me for my visit, and a bed fashioend from two wooden pallets with a very thin mattress on top, and some blankets. The family - mum, dad, three kids under 10 and their newest, a baby who was born in that same room just two days before I visited - share this tiny, uncomfortable and cold bed, shunted bext to the deathly cold cement wall. Opposite, next to the door, was one small gas canister for cooking, perched on a wooden box, with some dirty plates and cups. That was their family home. A gaggle of small chickens who all had natural mohicans and were obviously very malnourished were scratching around, avoiding the dogs running around the place. Outside, a group of tiny boys with dirty faces were playing with marbles on the ground, laughing and fighting off little sisters half their age who would spontaneously run up and throw themselves at their brothers, for fun, and show far more strength than a little girl of 5 or 6 should usually have. Not all of them have shoes. Around 10 families seemed to be living closely together in this way. I thought about the people I spoke to for story on la roa usada and how so many people are convinced that the market should end, and that bolivians can afford to buy new bolivian made clothes. I was so angry because it is clear when you come to this place that it is a miracle these people can afford any type of clothing, on the money they make. They cant afford to be picky and refuse american clothes. This existence is one of survival, not luxuries. It is hard to choose development for all by eradicating this market when it means plunging a large percentage of the country folk into even more dire financial straits.
Really, if I can write about these issues more while I am here, I feel that this will be the most valuable contribution I can make as a volunteer and it is really the responsibility of every journalist who comes here to bring these things to the attention of the world at large, in whatever way they can. Mercedes and the family I met asked me to take photos to show other people how they live, and I did. I hope to put them here soon. These families are really amazing. One sad thing is that recently there was a big story in the paper about a scandal whereby they (whoever theyare) found that large amounts of gold, silver and anything else precious or sellable was being nicked from off the graves and mausoleums. At first they blamed the little kids becuase they work there and they are poor: but they found out that it was a bunch of drug addicts who snuck in to the cementery each night, to fund their habits. But a lot of people were ready to blame these little kids, who do an honest days´ work to help put food in their families´mouths, when it was the bastard junkies.
On that note, it is important to get the balance of how I portray what I see in Bolivia accurately. Not everyone in Bolivia is destitute and in need from foreigners. It would be easy for those reading from ´what Bolivians term (sometimes sarcastically, sometimes not) ´first world countries´ to conclude that, on the information above. Bolivia is much like deepest, poorest Africa. It is not. Bolivia is a place of wild diversities in every sense, from geographical, skin colours, and financial status. The cities, like everywhere else on the planet, are the concentration of the middle class, the ruling class, and the wealthier people, who ride the same buses and walk the same streets that the very poorest and often marginalised people do. London is no different: those of the more fortunate classes can choose to see what they want to see. But here somehow poverty is more evident, more desperate, and to me, the visitor, I could take away the idea that Bolivians are all poor, uneducated, desperate, living on foreign handouts (Bolivia is in the top five recipients of foreign aid). It isn´t that clear cut. Everywhere you look here are people advancing themselves in any way they can - Bolivians are incredibly intelligent and hard working people, in all classes, always seeking education, discussion, experiences, understanding, and often, escape from the restraints of their home country to Europe or North America where they hear that opportunities await them. A friend here, a Bolivian guy called Pablo, told me when I asked him to tell me what Bolivians think of foreigners visiting here, that often their idea of Bolivia and their idea of what they are brining here degrades Bolivians. Bolivia is a popular place for charities, NGOs and volunteers from all over thw world, and these organisations are looking to do good. But oftenm, he says, foreigners coming here for this come with the attitude that they are from the ´´first world´ and they are coming in on white horese in their chain mail to save the people of the third world.: they believe that their way of living and thinking is the way to save these poor destitute ruffians of the third world, and they beliewve that they have all the answers because they have all the money and education that the third world doesnt. This translates as arrogance on the part of the gringos, which has a two fold effect on bolivians¨: firstly, the Bolivians are commonly quite reserved, even shy, and they dont like to be seen to brag or show off. The gringo attitude is counter to this and causes some ebarrassment sometimes. Secondly, accepting charity means admitting that help is needed, which those in need cant provide themselces or that their governments cant or wont give them - and if the charity needed involves fathers being able to find work to feed their families, or mothers needing clothing handouts for their children, the issue at stake for Bolivians in this position is one of pride. For a country still going through the psychological and economical fallout from the Spanish (read: European) invasion, even from the encroachment of neighbours like Chile - one of SA´s richest countries and an ever closer ally of America, Europe and in terms of military might, China and Russia - accepting help or handouts from nations of colonisers means that the pride of those in need takes a severe battering. And when pride is gone, what is left for a person, for their soul? Thats why, when one of two specific volunteers at TAPA keep referring to campesinos as ´peasants´, it really makes my blood boil and I have to try hard to keep my mouth shut. Saying that, a lot of volunteers coming here are very young and they come from a place that doesn´t teach much global politics or history - I never heard of the Spanish Conquest at school, which is amazing considering how important it was for Europe, not just Spain, and how it shaped a lot of issues that continue to haunt South America today - so really they canñt be expected to know the background of the place they´re coming to. I believe also that countries wirh imperialist pasts (or presents) teach their own history with a somewwhat more positive lilt than the facts provide, so scholkids are effectively being given an imperialist mindset with which they will go on to live and control their own world, and perhaps other worlds too. - with all the over confidence, arrogance and ignorance that comes with that method of teaching, even if people come here solely with intentions only to help.
For the english and american, it is important to come here without any solid mindset or beliefs about what they will find: Bolivian history, politics and culture is far too complex for that and this attitude that we carry, without even knowing, damages our chance to really learn and understand, and enjoy bolivia and its people. We come here with our fabulous exchange rates and our first world psyches, to see how the other half lives: but we need to come here like children, with our eyes open, without prejudice, and be ready to meet a place that is more diverse, most amazing, richer in many ways than our homes will ever be. To help, you have to learn: to learn, you have to listen. In a lot of important ways, it´s us, the so called first world people, who suffer the effects of poverty. Another type of poverty: intellectual, life experience, cultural understanding, and more.
Amen..... 😊
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Daniel Semper
non-member comment
OMG
You have surprised me. The Queen should award you after these lines once you are back at home. Mel, you are very smart and you fit here very well, I would like to have you more time around. I take my hat off to you. Daniel.