A season of goodbyes

We are leaving Moro Moro soon.  We know a lot of people here—hundreds, perhaps—and all of them are exerting a lot of energy to send us off right.  They beg us to make time in our schedules so that they can make a lunch for us.  They load us up with bags and bags of corn, potatoes, eggs—whatever gift they can give to express that they appreciate us or will miss us.  They pull us aside to say things like, “We’ve gotten used to having you around,” “Surely you can stay another year,” and “Who will visit us after you leave?”

So we know that we need to say goodbye, and we need to do it right.  Many of these people have done an extraordinary thing in accepting us—strange people—into their lives.  Granted, they had to do so in order to receive the services of our organization, but they didn’t have to do it so graciously and with, as in many cases, so much genuine feeling.  So we need to do this right—to say all the right words with the right emotion, to eat more food than we feel like eating, to drink more than we enjoy, to accept gifts that we can’t take with us (“surely they’d let you take just these 25 kilos of potatoes on the plane, right?).  It’s hard, though.  Sometimes we’re ashamed to realize that our hearts are just not in it.  We feel deep appreciation for our friendships here, but that doesn’t change the fact that we would gladly skip all the goodbyes if we could.  I suppose maybe that’s just the nature of goodbye.  It’s no good.

Since our attitudes are somewhat in the dumps, we’re thankful for those rare moments when we find ourselves actually living in the moment rather than in the future.  Sometimes the powerful mountain scenery we’ve enjoyed for several years can still break through and amaze us, reminding us to soak it in while we can.  Sometimes, in conversation with families who built water systems with us, someone will say something like, “If it weren’t for you, I would be lugging that bucket up that hill right now,” and we realize that this is not just something people say, but rather a fact that demonstrates the importance of our work.  And sometimes we are reminded that Moro Moro culture is so distinct from our own, and we have to admit that we’ll actually miss finding ourselves in hilarious situations on almost a daily basis.  This was the case today.

Last year we helped build a water system for 16 families in a community called Las Lagunas.  Most of the on-the-ground work was done by a local mason and plumber, so we spent a lot less time in the community than we had for other projects.  For this reason, we assumed a simple visit to say goodbye would be sufficient.  That was a silly thing to think.  Through a series of convoluted channels, we received word that we would be expected at a lunch in Las Lagunas today.  We agreed, and we headed out this morning.  As we expected, there was lots of delicious food, a bit of chicha, plenty of time to sit around and enjoy a beautiful sunny day, lots of words of appreciation that made us feel a bit awkward.What we didn’t expect was to arrive to the home where the lunch was held—a patio in the middle of three small mud rooms with no electricity—and find a tower of speakers taller than the tallest house in the area.

But no one else seemed to think much of the enormous speakers, which belonged to the host’s son, who makes money as a DJ in his spare time.  We managed to ignore them all through lunch, and we assumed there would be no music since there was no power source.  But after lunch, just as we were trying to start our goodbyes, the host’s son dragged a generator out of a back room and started fiddling with it.  An hour or two later (after Andy finally got involved and fixed it) the generator fired up, and the music started.  It was extremely loud.  So loud that the sheep tied up on the other side of the valley began running in circles on their ropes, trying to get away from the noise.  And yet, the hosts seemed delighted to sit eight feet in front of the speakers.   

We’ve come to understand that on these occasions there are certain tasks required of us—cultural hoops to jump through, you could say.  If we don’t complete these tasks, the party just goes on and on and everyone refuses to let us leave.  We knew that, as soon as the music started, one thing that was required was that Andy sit with the men for a while and shoot the breeze.  So that’s exactly what he did.  He sat himself down beside our host, a few feet in front of the speakers, and they shouted to each other over the din, telling jokes and discussing music preferences.

Andy enjoying a nice peaceful conversation.  Just to be clear, this photo pretty much captures the entire party.  There is not a crowd of 200 people standing off screen somewhere.  It’s just a few people, and a few hundred decibels of sound.

Then we said our final words of thanks (amplified through the speakers, of course), and our host said a few nice words as well.

Then we tried to say goodbye again, and instead, Andy got invited to dance!

Rainy day reflection

We woke up this morning to a cold and unseasonably rainy day.   While the bran muffins bake for warmth and breakfast, I am reflecting on past rainy days—how naïve we were at the start to think a rainy day was as eligible for advancing my to-do list as any other.  In our three years here, I’ve come to see rainy days as a blessing.  So I’m going to enjoy today as un-anticipated calm in a sometimes over-committed schedule.  The other option is to attempt overachievement(not too hard when you have access to a 4x4 truck)and head out to a rural community where you had a date set to move materials and finish up a project.  If we pushed our agenda and tried to get things done, we would create more frustration than goodwill.  Unless it’s sunny, temperatures are 45-55, and without a heated space to return to, who wants to get even a little bit wet?

With less than three weeks left on assignment, and a flight out of Bolivia scheduled for July 31, our work these days consists mostly of saying goodbye.   We are travelling around to all of the communities where we have worked to pass out photos of ourselves and invite the people to a going-away reception in a couple weeks.  It has been decided that the vacancy created by our departure will not be filled, so our goodbyes are made a bit more taxing as people make their last minute requests for water systems, latrines, and remind us of any deficiency in what they’ve received, or any little promise that has been made to them over the last several years so that we can help them before we go.

Saying goodbye to people has had me thinking about all aspects of our lives here that I’m likely to miss when we return to the states.  Some of these are certainly possible in our next chapter, but the form they’ve taken here is unique:

• Community atmosphere.   We don’t step out of our door without being recognized, greeted.  Every morning in our 700-person town there’s a bustle of people preparing to head for their fields or getting luggage and packages on the daily bus.  If we’re sick for a couple days or home alone, the neighbor across the ravine notices and comes to visit. 
•  No worries about food, healthcare or other common costs.  Thanks to MCC, we’ve been well covered in these things.  Even if that weren’t the case, our 5$/month electric bill, 3$/month water bill, and the fact that we could almost live just on the food gifted to us by neighbors, would keep our lives pretty free of economic stress.  We just have to worry how to spend our $100/month stipend! 
•  Daily interacting with people who see the world in fundamentally different ways.   While this can be tiresome at times, it never fails to be interesting.  Simple things like being near a TV when Walker Texas Ranger comes on leads to interesting discussions about how the world works. 
•  Fresh, seasonal food.   Not just in our house, but everywhere!  Every bite of food you eat here is just a short step, literally or figuratively, from the ground that produced it.  The fresh wheat ground atour neighbor’s mill, peaches, apples, and avocados from our neighbors in season, year-round fresh bananas and papaya from 150 miles away. 
•  Public transportation available to get you anywhere you need to go.  From across town to the next city to the other side of the country, there’s always a bus, minivan, or Toyota Corolla wagon that can get you there.   The circumstances of a country too poor for everyone to have a car leads to a benefit in that, even if you have access to a personal car, you don’t have to be dependent on it. 
•  Closeness with the natural world.  Whether it’s having every room of the house open only to the outside, or having to go outside to the bathroom, you become much more aware of the rain, wind, and phases of the moon.  With almost every other family we know involved in agriculture, you can’t go a day without talking about what’s in bloom, bugs, moisture.  Observing the cycles that make life possible is humbling as I remember how little control I have over them. 
•  Climate.  7,500ft, cool temperatures, and low humidity – this is the climate where my people must have evolved.  There’s about 6 weeks a year where you add a couple extra blankets to the bed and wear closed-toed shoes more often, but living in a mud-brick house tempers the rest of the year to make it comfortable all the time. 
•  Physical lifestyle and relaxed schedule.  Since it’s just the way things are done here, it’s natural that much of our non-work time is taken up with activities that, while they were sometimes tiresome and annoying at first, are great in that they keep us in shape, give our minds time to wander and process after a hectic day, and keep our hands occupied at useful and peaceful tasks.  Doing some of our own grain and meat processing, walking around town in search for a store with a specific missing ingredient, washing clothes by hand, shaking the ever-present dust out of heavy wool rugs and bedding—these are just some of the activities that seemed inconvenient at first, but that we now rely on to keep us sane and healthy.

 We’ve felt ready to go home for a while now, but making this list reminded me that we have been changed, and that even though so much of our lives here has been difficult for us, in other ways we have fallen easily into a rhythm of life that is drastically different than what we are returning to.  I hope we can figure out how to incorporate the best of both worlds.

Bees, cats, apple cider, cross-dressers! A photo review of the first half of the year.

Here are some things we’ve been up to so far this year:

First, to continue combatting our blog’s tendency to make our life look like a long string of parties and vacations, let us recognize that we have worked this year.  Our team has dwindled to three people, with just the two of us in Moro Moro, and our coordinator, Patrocinio, directing and supporting projects from eight hours away in Santa Cruz.  We’ve dedicated most of our time this year to latrine construction, basic sanitation training, and supporting local officials in their efforts in building and maintaining potable water systems.

Our latest rural programs team photo.  I’m sure it was Andy’s idea to sit on the toilets.  But really, toilets are our life, so it’s fitting.

A boy and his pick-up.  Since we do more coordinating than physical construction these days, we spend a lot of time driving around in our shiny truck delivering materials and tools so that contractors can keep working.  Not bad work, if you can get it.

On a recent campo visit, Andy saw this lovely arrangement of campo accessories (machete, yarn, and a homemade broom) and took this picture.

Since work continues to slow down, we have more and more time to stop and smell the roses.  Fortunately, we don’t have to go far.  Some previous inhabitant of our house planted several rose bushes on our patio, and we just have to step out of our bedroom door to sniff them.

Our friend and co-worker, Camille, came to visit us in April.  We dragged her all over the countryside, and she took some nice pictures of us:

 

A lovely day for a visit to turtle rock, Moro Moro’s tourist attraction.

Luke and Priscilla, friends who live and work in Santa Cruz, visited Moro Moro in May.  They were enthusiastic about bees, so we took them to harvest a little honey from our hive. 

Priscilla and me, ready for some action.  (Yes, my mask consists of a pillow case with window screen sewn onto the front.  What of it?)

Success!  We removed just a few frames, but they were loaded with over 7 quarts of honey.  We lack the proper equipment for extracting honey from the comb, so in this photo we’re rigging up a filter.

Our neighbor, Matilde, taught Andy to make watilla, a sweet stringy mushy treat made from a squash that grows like a weed around here.

Another season of cider making came and went.  Drought kept apple production low this year, so we only got to make cider a few times.  For those who have seen the cider press before, notice that Andy made some serious improvements to the machine this year.  We used to have to catch the pulp in a bucket, and then transfer it to a separate machine for pressing.  With a little inventiveness, a lot of sitting around staring at the thing, and some welding, he got the two steps into one machine, reducing the processing time by about half.  In case you haven’t seen it before, here is our cider-making process, step-by-step:

Get your apples ready.  Cut out the bad parts.  Wash and disinfect them.

Load the prepared apples into the grinder and watch them turn to pulp.

Using a sophisticated machine called a car jack, apply pressure to the pulp to squeeze out the juice.  

Final steps: watch the cider flow.  Drink.

And then this happened…

A couple months ago, a couple high school kids stopped by our house and asked a question we have become accustomed to: “We’re having a xxxxx (words we don’t understand) event at the high school, and we were wondering if you could be judges.”  For once, we agreed.  We figured it was our civic duty.  We later found out that the event was called the “Crowning of the Buffa.”  The closest translation we could find for the word buffa was buffoon, so we were a bit confused, until we arrived and discovered that we were to judge a cross-dressing competition!

 

 The three finalists.

Photo op with the winner: an awkward conclusion to an evening of awkwardness.

Monkeying around

Ken (Andy’s dad) and Alec (my brother) spent a week and a half with us in Bolivia.  The interaction between a 16-year-old and a 60-year-old provided us with some much-needed comic relief (“Hey Kenneth, you wanna know what your sleep farts sound like?”), and as a group we had a lot of fun working and playing.  We spent the first weekend of their visit at a resort near Santa Cruz, where we braved “The Canopy,” an adventure course made up of zip lines and cable bridges.  We spent the next week in Moro Moro, and then stopped to play for a day in Samaipata on our way back down to the city.  Here’s a sampling of the good times (many thanks to Ken for all the pictures):

“The Canopy”

  Ken and Andy suited up for the adventure course.

 Alec and Cassie…doing something.  I´m not so sure what they would do for our safety if we fell out of a tree, but the hats sure looked great.

 Andy daring one of two cable bridges.

 Ken crashing through the tree tops on one of the zip lines.

We were worn after their visit.  We played late Monopoly, Guillotine, and poker late into the night, race an intense go-kart course, and found all kinds of excuses to get tired, sweaty and dirty:

 Racquet ball.

 

 The obstacle course at “The Canopy,” complete with walls to climb over and ropes to climb up and swing on, balance beams, muddy tunnels to crawl through, stairs to climb.  Intense!

 Outdoor ping pong.

 Soccer (mostly getting schooled by little kids).

 Chin-up competitions.

When we weren’t wearing ourselves out, we spent of lot of time playing with animals…

 Andy and the cutest monkey I’ve ever seen.

 Alec and Simón, a playful spider monkey who likes piggy-back rides.

 Cassie and an adult howler monkey.  It’s only a little disconcerting the first time one of these guys wraps his tail around your neck for leverage.

 The turtle that lives on the MCC grounds in Santa Cruz.

…we did some shopping…

 The El Torno Sunday market.

 An American clothing market on a rainy day in Santa Cruz.

…we cooked and ate…

 Alec, after downing two plates of chicken milanesa.

 Ken grinding flour for pizza dough.

 Andy with his birthday cake, courtesy of the office staff in Santa Cruz.

..and we also managed to get some work done!

 Andy and Alec loading gravel for a latrine project.

 Securing the load.

Inspecting a recently finished latrine and preparing for a workshop.

On Our Way Back Home

Recently our work has slowed down, and that's given us time to think about the future (what on earth are we going to do now?!?!), but also to think about the past (what have we accomplished?  what have we learned?).  I started writing in my journal the other day about all these ruminations, thinking I might also post those thoughts here.  When I read back through it, though, I was a little shocked by what I had written, and doubted I would post it.  Our blog would probably suggest to most people that the last three years of our lives consisted of just a long string of festivals.  But when I showed these paragraphs to Andy, he replied, "Well, it's definitely honest," and I decided it would be good to set things straight.  So here ya go.

"We left Oklahoma for Bolivia a couple months shy of three years ago.  I remember feeling sad as I hugged my dad and Andy’s parents at the Tulsa airport and told them goodbye.  I also remember that, as soon as we had gone through security and were on our way, we looked at each other and laughed with excitement.  We charged on toward our gate, ready to get started on all the great things we would do.  We both felt a little nervous, a little shocked that we were actually going through with it, and really tired after weeks of preparation and emotional goodbyes.  But propelling us forward and pushing that all out of mind was a feeling of bountiful optimism: something near certainty that we would be awesome development workers; that we would master Spanish in weeks; that people would love us; that, while we would certainly go through this thing called “culture shock,” we would learn to love our Bolivian lives and take all the differences in stride.  We were confident of being two smart, energetic, flexible young people, driven (mostly) by the goodness inside of us and a genuine desire to help the poor while learning wisdom from their perspective.

In the last few weeks, we have begun the process of wrapping up our time here.  All the people we have interacted with in this process seem to confirm that our optimistic expectations of three years ago were accurate.  Our supervisors and co-workers express their gratitude for all our hard work, tell us we've done a good job, and say they respect how we’ve handled ourselves in cross-cultural relationships.  It is hard to deny that the people love us: our neighbors and those who participated in projects with us express good-natured outrage upon hearing we’re leaving soon, offering to sell us a piece of their land so we can stay and farm, promising to pray that God will bless us with lots of money so we can afford to travel back to Bolivia often to visit them, and affectionately presenting us with handmade gifts so we remember them and this place.  Our Spanish skills have developed enough that Bolivians occasionally get confused about our origins: “Did you say you’re from the United States?  No, you must mean Spain.”

On one hand, then, I guess we’ve done alright.  Yet, I feel anything but pride and satisfaction when I think about what I’ve done here.  It’s not that I worry that “I could have done more,” or “I should have done this or that differently.”  It’s deeper than that.  I look back on these past three years and see myself stumbling through life and work, falling over and over again, crawling, and only getting back up to keep up the appearance of knowing what I was about.  I feel pushed around, beat up, worn out, and uncertain of who I am and what I believe.

So when I think of our optimism of three years ago, I know we were wrong, in spite of having done all that others expected of us.  I suppose where we were most wrong was in our confidence that, just like everything we’d undertaken so far in life, this would be easy.  That it would just come to us.  That we would love it.  I suppose it was natural to ignore those feelings that would have just made life harder for us: self-doubt, homesickness, the voice from somewhere saying “maybe I’m not cut out for this.”  But not long ago, when we first began to let ourselves think about going home, I stopped being able to pretend that things have been okay here, that I don’t miss my family and friends that much, that I’m courageous and smart enough to do great work in a place that’s not my own; that the two us can withstand constant physical, emotional, and spiritual trials without support from the people who know and love us best.  No one can.  I’m not cut out for this.  I miss my people.  I want to go home."

To close, I’m including a link to a song that we heard for the first time recently.  A co-worker put it on while she was visiting us, and since then it has felt like the theme song of these few months.  Check it out if you like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI0ekIPIdp8&ob=av2e