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.
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.
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.
