Bolivians

I had this idea about a year ago to do a few blog posts spotlighting some of the interesting people we come in contact with in rural Bolivia. I’m just now getting around to doing the first one, and at our current rate of posting, it will probably be the only one. Still, here goes…

Leónides López and Josefa Vásquez Claros

Leónides and Josefa were both born and raised near Abra Grande, one of Moro Moro’s many isolated rural communities. They each married young (not to each other), and were both widowed after their children had all grown up and moved away. They then became a couple, moving into the homestead where Leónides was born, and where he had raised his children with his first wife. Leónides and Josefa grow several acres of potatoes and corn, care for cattle, pigs, and chickens, and tend a small vegetable and herb patch. Leónides is in his 80s and walks with a cane, leaving Josefa (who is in her 70s) with a heavy burden. She does the typical work of rural Bolivian women—cooking, cleaning, gathering of water and firewood, caring for animals, butchering, food processing and storage, and helping with planting, weeding, harvesting, and carrying crops to market—while also taking on the main responsibility for the farm that her husband can no longer carry by himself.

Josefa posing with the mound of purple corn she is tending while it dries in the sun.

Leónides looking thoughtful (he carries needles and thread in his hat for emergency clothing repair situations and for sewing up bags of produce).

We began work on a water project with Leónides and Josefa and four other families in August of this year. The families were worried from the beginning that they had very few workers in the community since most of the residents were elderly. Communities building water projects with our institution’s support are required to dig ditches to bury the pipe (in this case, nearly a mile of ditch had to be dug, all by hand), assist masons in building tanks and other infrastructure, and cook meals to feed the workers (and us). We are normally very firm about this requirement, but in this case we offered to help as much as we could with this work. The first work day began as we thought it might, with a hired mason, Andy, and I doing most of the work of clearing out trees and spiny bushes to make the path where the pipe would be laid. Around noon, Josefa and another woman from the community arrived to the worksite with a mountain of food for our lunch. Josefa apologized for not being around to help in the morning. She told me that she usually gets up before dawn, but doesn’t find time to eat breakfast until midmorning, after getting back from checking on cattle or crop fields, carrying water, and cutting firewood, and after lighting the kitchen fire and peeling potatoes or grinding corn. She spent the rest of the afternoon swinging a machete with the rest of us, then sent us home with two enormous grocery bags full of potatoes, onions, and corn, as a thanks for all of our “hard work.”

Leónides can’t get around on the rough and steep slopes that most of the water system work is done on, so he didn’t do much of that work. However, in spite of his ailing body, he seems to spend very little time sitting or lying around. When we would show up in the morning, he was often already in the field near their house, harvesting corn. Even though he could only harvest at maybe a quarter of the speed of a younger person, he spent every free moment in that field until it was all harvested, shuffling back to the house for meals with his hands bleeding from rubbing against the stiff stalks. When water project meetings were held at their house, while the rest of us sat around waiting on late-comers, Josefa and Leónides never sat still, always tending to the corn they were drying on their patio or carrying food to their animals.

Our last two visits to Josefa and Leónides were for parties: one unofficial and one official ch’alla (celebration of thanksgiving) for the completion of their water system. The unofficial one was thrown in honor of my parents’ visit to Moro Moro. Josefa and another woman in the community both butchered enormous pigs (that's right: TWO pigs were butchered to feed the four of us plus the 15 or so community members). They invited us to bless their tank with them, which required drowning it in beer and chicha. Josefa lugged an enormous basket full of canned beer up to the tank for the blessing, and, as custom dictates, would not let the party end until all the beer was gone. Neither of the four of us felt like drinking much, so that tank got an extra helping of blessing from us.

Andy, my stepdad, and I toasting and looking for a way out of drinking all that beer.

It’s normal to splash a little of each cupful of beer or chicha onto the ground or onto the thing being blessed, and then to drink the rest. But Josefa noticed how small my sips were and how big my "splashes" were, and started watching us pretty closely. She also managed to, without speaking the same language, convince my not-the-dancing-type parents to join in the obligatory one-song dance.

Josefa keeping a close eye on me to make sure I'm enjoying my chicha fully.

Josefa, Andy, me, my mom, and stepdad dancing.

Group shot at the first ch'alla. Leónides is next to Andy, and Josefa is out front, posing proudly with her bottle of chicha.

Then, a week later, they did it all over again, throwing the party for the “official” ch’alla. For this party, they cooked and prepared drinks for 50 or so people, hired a DJ, and even got the mayor to drive out and join the party.

We often wonder where we really stand with people like Josefa and Leónides. We spend weeks visiting their homes every day. They cook for us, and we sit in their kitchens or bedrooms and eat with them. We are often present when some of their worst community conflicts blow up. We share with them in the profound experience of seeing water flow out of a faucet at their home for the first time after a life of lugging jugs and buckets up and down long paths. The families we have worked with are experts at hospitality and showing gratitude, so much so that we often finish a water system and feel like more has been given to us than what we earned with our efforts. But still, we’re so different, and it’s sometimes hard to understand what kind of relationship we’ve built when each project is over. However, Josefa, Leónides, and their neighbors are so kind to us and so open with their lives that we feel certain that we’ve built a genuine relationship with them, albeit a nontraditional one. The last time I saw Leónides, he had latched onto my arm and was almost crying because he thought that, since we had just celebrated the end of the water project, we might not go back to visit him. It felt like an expression of real affection, and it made us realize that we might mean more to people like him than we can really understand. Josefa and Leónides know how to take dirt, water, and air and make almost all the food, clothing, shelter, furniture, and tools they need to live--not just to survive, but to live a full and dignified life. I respect them enormously for this, and feel so thankful that they respect two bumbling foreigners enough to invite them into their homes and lives.

Joys of June and July

Here are a few sources of joy that we've been blessed with lately....

Baby goats with our friend Lider and his family (photo: Jeremy Good)

Learning a new skill – threshing oats! The oats are hand-cut and carried to the threshing floor to have horses trample them. We got a kick out of our little friend somersaulting in the straw between hose passes (photo: Jeremy Good)

Building the tools needed (here in Bolivia, we say "solucionando")– tubing, valve from old motorcycle tube, and tire pressure gauge to test water pressure (photo: Jeremy Good)

Celebrating the Winter Equinox by trying to coax the Sun back. After a dinner of grilled chorizos (sausages), churiqui (chicken gizzard), and choclo (corn-on-the-cob), jumping over the bonfire made in the middle of the street is a must!




A hike to the top of the "Pachapata", our local waterfall. After 3 hours of hiking, we hoped to reach the ledge, but it was just too difficult, so we settled for a dip in the stream 20 meters upstream from the 180ft drop!




Visitors to share our work and lives with, and their reminders to stop and enjoy the scenery (photos: Gloria Showalter)

"A very touristy place"

In March we decided we needed a weekend away from our sometimes too-small town. We decided to check out a small city called Comarapa, about a 4-hour motorcycle ride away. We had seen it on a poster promoting tourism in the area. Also, Andy had heard that there was a large man-made lake near it, and he remembered it being described as “un lugar bien turístico” (a very touristy place). I will never again hear the phrase, “un lugar bien turístico,” without laughing uncontrollably.

We decided to head for Comarapa on a Friday afternoon, thinking we’d stay the whole weekend and get back late Sunday night. The four-hour motorcycle trip was uncomfortable; even the small amount of luggage we were carrying (one change of clothes each plus a couple books), when strapped on the tiny rack on the back of the motorcycle, forced me to ride Andy like a backpack (or vice versa). Still, the weather was nice, so we were in high spirits. We arrived in Comarapa at about 2 in the afternoon. Since we didn’t know our way around, we stopped at the central market to get drinks and ask questions. We have discovered that, in rural Bolivia, it’s always best to ask directions from three or four different people (we think this is both because we don’t understand Spanish as well as we think we do, and because for some reason rural Bolivians offer directions even if they have no idea what you’re talking about). So, we asked the lady that sold us drinks, a couple resting on a street corner, and a shop-owner what they knew about the lake. The answers were all the same. Yes, it’s a beautiful lake. Yes, it’s a “lugar bien turístico.” Yes, there are places to swim. There might even be a place to stay.

Excited by the prospect of a dip in a real live lake and maybe even a boat ride (Andy had heard there were boats for rent), we headed toward the lake, another 15 minutes passed the city on a dusty, bumpy dirt road. We arrived at a point overlooking the lake and could see that it was, indeed, a real lake. We could see the dam on the far side, and a couple buildings near it. “Hey maybe that’s where they rent boats!” I exclaimed. Andy nodded hopefully inside his helmet.

Comarapa lake: great views…and that’s about it.

As we neared the dam, however, we started having doubts. There was no one there. No one. And it was a beautiful, hot, sunny day, perfect for swimming or boating. We got to the dam and stopped to look around. No one. We were close to the buildings now, and both suspected but did not voice what turned out to be the truth: they were abandoned. Nothing. Nada. We pulled into an overgrown driveway at one of the buildings. “Where’s the boat launch?” Andy asked no one in particular. We both started laughing and shaking our heads.

Comarapa Lake Boat Launch and Resort...or not

He turned the motorcycle around. “Surely there’s a place to swim,” I said. We were still hopeful. We stopped again on the dam, this time appreciating it as possibly the only thing worth seeing.

Comarapa dam: "Worth the trouble."

“Hey look!” I said, pointing at a little outcropping of land about halfway down the lake, back the way we had come. “There’s a road leading down to that little peninsula, and it looks like nice grass right up to the water. I bet we can swim there.”

“Let’s check it out,” Andy replied, firing up the motorcycle.

We found the entrance to the road and followed it down to the water’s edge. I stripped down to my bathing suit and sandals. Andy removed his shoes. We walked closer and looked around.

There was nothing to do but laugh. The whole area surrounding the water’s edge was covered in cow patties and discarded condoms. Just next to what I had, from afar, declared as the “swimming beach,” a line of rusty barbed wire filed into the water and disappeared. We could see more fence-posts farther out. Everything smelled weird. We laughed again.

The swimming beach.

“But look!” I said, pointing at a trail running off into the woods and toward the other side of the peninsula. I dashed down it, hoping beyond all reason that something more promising would meet me on the other side of the trees. I got about 5 steps before a giant thorn bush reached out and snagged my leg. I started bleeding. Moving forward, pushing more thorny branches out of the way, I heard Andy mumble something about piles of used condoms. A few more steps, and the path ended at another shoreline. This one was more open, fewer trees, no barbed-wire, less stink, but definitely not a beach, per se. As hot and dry as we felt, we couldn’t bear the thought of putting a single body part into that water, not knowing what tetanus or STD agent was waiting on the lake bottom. We found our way back to the motorcycle.

“Well, we’re here,” Andy said. “We may as well relax a bit.” He took out his book and, laying his jacket down for a pillow, lay down and started reading. I did the same. “Watch out for that cow patty,” Andy warned me. I scooted over a bit, sitting myself down in the only cow-patty-free spot available. “It’s a really nice day,” Andy said, salvaging. “Yeah,” I agreed, enthusiastically. We read for another 30 seconds. Ants began invading every part of my clothes. I said nothing, forcing myself to read. I glanced up at Andy over the top of my book. He was swatting at them, too, but, like me, pretended he was cool with it. We read for another 30 seconds. “Okay, okay, okay,” we both said at once, standing up. “Enough.” We beat the ants off of each others’ backs, put our clothes, shoes, and helmets back on, and got out of there.

We arrived back in Comarapa and decided to look for a hotel. We passed a pharmacy with a lone woman attendant at the counter. I decided to fake a need for ibuprofen in order to get some (hopefully) accurate information. I went in, asked for the ibuprofen, and started asking about the woman’s baby, who was sleeping on a couch nearby. She asked where I was from, if I had any children myself, and what we were doing in Comarapa. I told her we were looking for a place to stay…might she have a recommendation? “Oh yes,” she said. “There’s really only one nice hotel in town.” I felt hopeful. She seemed to know what she was talking about. She told me where the nice hotel was.

“What else is there to do around here?” I asked. “You know, are there places to see, museums, lakes, fun things like that?”

“Oh…” she replied. “Yeah, there are a few things.” She listed off the following tourist attractions, declaring them all “worth the trouble:” the lake, the boat rental shop (“go to the hospital and ask for so-and-so”), the cactus forest (back the way we came), and a place up the valley where you could rent a cabin for the night.

“Cabins?” I asked. “How do we get there?” She described the trip: two more hours up into the woods, and you have to go to the mayor’s office to ask for the key.

“Key? Key for what?”

“For the cabin, of course.”

“Oh, so there’s not a person there that runs the place?”

“No, no,” she replied, smiling. “It’s just an empty cabin, but you can take your own blankets and food and cooking pots and stuff. It’s really nice! Oh, and while you’re at the mayor’s office, ask them for the tourist pamphlet. It has pictures and information about all this stuff.” Thanking her, I went to report my findings to Andy.

“So you can rent boats!” he exclaimed. “I knew I had heard that somewhere!”

We checked into the nice hotel. “Nice!” Andy agreed. “You know what the trick is,” he declared. “You have to have an actual conversation with someone, and then ask them for directions and information. Maybe if you don’t actually have a conversation with someone, they don’t feel obliged to answer your questions.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She really unloaded some information on me, and look! She was right about the hotel.”

We headed for the hospital, jabbering about how nice and relaxing it would be to paddle out to the middle of the lake and just float all day. We found the hospital. Asking around to anyone who would talk to us, we received the same response from all: “Boats? What kind of boats? No, no, there’s never been any kind of boat rental place here.”

Dejected, we headed for the mayor’s office, deciding we may as well check out the cabin thing and the pamphlet thing. The mayor’s secretary seemed busy, so we looked around a bit, hoping we might see a stack of pamphlets for the taking. “Can I help you?” she finally asked. We asked her about the cabins. “Yeah, that place is really run-down. You don’t want to go there.” And the pamphlets...? “…” Blank stare.

“You see,” I explained, “we heard that there was a pamphlet describing all the tourist attractions in the area.” Nothing. She directed us to the office of FDF, an institution that we have experience with and that works in tourism development. We found the FDF office. No pamphlets. We stood in the street outside the office. “Well….” Andy said, “what now?” It was late afternoon, too early to eat dinner, give up, call it quits, and just go to bed. We had seen an internet café near the mayor’s office, so we headed there. I googled “turismo Comarapa.” When the spotty connection finally spat out the search results, I was not surprised: cabin rentals, beautiful man-made lake, boat rentals, pamphlets available in the mayor’s office, all of it almost word-for-word what the pharmacist had told me. I began to wonder if the people doing research for tourism websites had also stopped and consulted the pharmacist. An hour into our internet time, Andy’s computer still hadn’t accomplished so much as opening one email, so we called that quits, too.

We weren’t hungry yet, but the one thing we were sure of finding was food, so we ate dinner and bought some snacks, planning to spend the rest of the evening in the hotel with our books. We flipped on the 15-inch TV to find that English-speaking HBO came through on the hotel’s cable. We were so pleasantly-surprised that (I kid you not) one of us declared, “This is awesome!!” A new movie was just starting: the one where that wrestler/actor plays a soldier who returns home to find his town being controlled by an evil casino owner, and the wrestler/actor/soldier gets together a rag-tag bunch of high school drop-outs and takes down the bad guy’s mob and becomes sheriff and makes all his drop-out buddies deputies and whisks the small-town beauty (who had given up on love) off her feet. You know? That one. Great show.

The next day (Saturday, day 2 of our planned 3-day weekend), we ate breakfast and could think of nothing to do but head home. We stopped at the cactus forest on the way. It was worth the trouble. It was a steamy day, and about half-way home we found a quiet little spot along a river to eat our picnic lunch and go for a swim. All in all, a pretty nice trip.

Crossing the bridge over the river (where we finally got to swim)

Summer Eats

Well we’re deep into the rainy season. We’ve had 5 straight days of rain, keep us largely in the house. Even if the roads weren’t in terrible shape, and we could get out to the communities, it would be too muddy and wet to do anything. People are brewing their Chica (fermented corn drink) for Carnaval next week, and to visit folks, we'd just end up drinking a bunch of that. About the only thing we accomplished this week was a couple meetings and to press 15 gallons of apple cider with a friend.

We had decided early in the week to escape the cabin fever and to travel to a nearby town and see the tourist sights there. Well, the rain didn’t quit, and the forecast says rain for the weekend. After so much rain we just can;t stomach the idea of getting on the bus - the first 2 hours are clay-dirt roads and a lot of guided sliding is involved in getting down the mountain.

So we stayed at home and got caught up on reading, studied Spanish, fixed up our room, and cooked!




Here’s Saturday lunch with all the local produce available in late summer.
Fried lacoyote squash
Nathan’s quick whey sauerkraut
Vallegrande cheese
Apple cider
Api (ground corn hot drink) with fresh peaches
Ají sauce (spicy salsa of fresh ground hot locoto pepper)
The centerpiece is of Broccoli flowers.

Life is good.

Stories

We continue to thoroughly neglect our picture-taking duties, so I will give you the next best thing: stories! Here are a couple that have stuck with us from the last couple months.


Bringing Home My Baby Bumblebee...
Andy has recently ventured into bee-keeping. He bought a bee box, got a little advice and an already-thriving bee family from a neighbor and expert beekeeper, and set the box up on another neighbor's land. A couple months later, the bees seemed to be doing well, and it was time to add on the box they will hopefully use for honey storage. Pressed for time, Andy decided to do this task with less-than-ideal equipment: a pillowcase with a mesh window hurriedly sewn into it for a bee mask, no smoker (which helps to calm the bees down), and whatever clothes he happened to be wearing (instead of light-colored clothes, which supposedly anger them less). When he arrived and set to work, it quickly became obvious that the bees were feeling protective. They swarmed him within the first minute, barely giving him time to place the box before he started feeling them stinging through several layers of clothes and crawling up inside his mask (pillowcase). As soon as he could, he took off running for his motorcycle, hoping that getting away from the hive would end the attack. The presence of a couple bees in his mask (pillowcase) became unbearable, so he ripped it off as he mounted the motorcycle. That's when he realized that the swarm had followed him. As soon as the mask came off, they charged, attacking his face and head. He hit the throttle on the motorcycle, holding on with one hand while desperately swatting away the mob with the other.

When he arrived home, I noticed he looked kind of...puffy. He walked in the house just shaking his head, then told the whole story. An hour or so later, he started complaining that his head still hurt in several places where they had stung him. I had him sit down so I could take a look. I gasped with my first glance. There among the stubble of his nearly-shaved head were half a dozen smashed bee rear ends, embedded with their stingers into his poor swollen scalp and neck. I pulled them out with tweezers, leaving a little bee butt collection on our kitchen table. The swelling didn't get much worse, although he did walk around for a week with one eye half shut. The happy ending came when he told the story to our neighbor and several other experienced bee-keepers. They laughed harder with each rookie mistake he revealed, and kindly advised him how to avoid another painful encounter.


The Princess and the Potato

Our most recent trip to Santa Cruz was begun about 12 hours earlier than expected when, the night before we planned to get on the bus, we caught wind of a truck about to pass through town hauling potatoes to the city. We had always wanted to experience the ride on a potato truck to the city at least once, so we decided to hop on. The advantage of making the trip this way is that you don't have to spend the entire day on a bus, which leaves at 9 a.m. and arrives at 6 p.m. - a whole day lost. Instead, you board the potato truck late in the evening, and then by the next morning you arrive at your destination. But first let me describe what I mean by "ride on a potato truck."


The kind of truck used to haul potatoes here is not very common in the United States. I don't have a picture of an actual Moro Moro potato truck, but imagine something like this:
In this particular case, you will need to imagine it a little more run-down and generally non-confidence-inspiring, and that the slatted boards making up the side walls of the bed (which tend to bow out with time) are supported by rubber straps made of used tires. Imagine climbing up the back (there are no stairs, mind you, so you have to make the first step up onto the bumper-like platform in one bound), and dropping down under the tarp into darkness. You feel around beneath you and realize you are crouching on top of potatoes: enormous blue bags full of them. The bags are tossed in willy nilly, so that you have to crawl around in the dusty darkness while the truck sways back and forth, looking for a place where the sacks fell in a way that makes a more-or-less flat surface that you can stretch out on.

In our case, we found acceptable positions with the help of an elderly woman who was also making the trip. She gave helpful advice like, "put that box over there," and, "make sure your neck's not too bent. That hurts." We found ourselves with two traveling companions: the woman, and an older man. He was on his way to visit his wife, and she was going to spend time with her daughter. Since it was nearly pitch dark, we had to ask eachother about 10 times who we were. Once we established that, the man perked up and said, "Now we're going to have a good chat!" And then he and the woman spoke nonstop for 10 minutes about why you can't have a good chat really between only two people, but as soon as there are three or four, well, then you can. This specific good chat covered the usual topics: rain, mud, siblings, potatoes, peaches, city-versus-campo living (the city life is undesirable, of course), bus-versus-potato truck travel, etc. At one point, I retold half-jokingly that Andy and I had been concerned that the tarp over the truck wouldn't allow for much air flow inside. The woman responded with some very helpful information: "Well, no, you see, the air gets in through the open spaces and makes kind of a wind in here, so you don't have to worry about that." (I often find people telling me things that are completely obvious, which makes me wonder if I walk around looking lost and out of place most of the time.)

After the good chat died down, we settled into our places. Sleeping on a bag of potatoes is pretty comfortable at first. Then after half an hour or so, that one tiny tuber that sticks out farther than the rest starts to feel like a tiny fist punching you in the ribs or thigh, and you have to squirm around for a while to find an acceptable new position. At first, too, the swaying of the truck lulled me into sleepiness, but then I started picturing the cliffs and crumbly roads and the possible sleepiness of the driver, and every time I felt the truck breaking or swerving slightly, my heart skipped a beat. Heart skipping is not conducive to sleeping any more than being punched by tiny potatoes. Then, of course, the inevitable need for a bathroom crept up. On the bus, bathroom availability is predictable: there will be one stop in the middle of the trip where there is time to go to the bathroom; that's it. In the back of the potato truck, however, not only did I not have any idea what the driver's plans were, but he was in such a hurry that he never stopped for more than two minutes at a time (long enough for him and his male helpers to jump out of the cab, do their business, and jump back in). By the time I would realize we were stopped, crawl over the potatoes and sleeping old man to the back of the truck, heave myself over the back wall, and identify some tiny bush on the side of the road behind which I could do my thing, the driver's helper would be waving me back into the truck, telling me that the driver was running late and in a big hurry. This happened three times before I resigned myself to the fact that I would just be holding it for the entirety of the 10-hour trip. Have you ever had to go in the middle of the night, but you were feeling lazy and thinking to yourself, "I can just hold it 'til morning, right?" It never works. The longer you lay there trying to convince yourself of this, the more awake you become with the fear that you really will fall asleep and possibly not hold it until morning. You know? I hardly slept at all. Andy, meanwhile, could not be bothered with my complaints about tiny potatoes, imaginary near-collisions, or bathroom issues, because he was out cold almost the entire trip. The next day I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief when our boss told us that, for safety reasons, she prefers we just stick to bus travel.