Last Monday I traveled with two teenage girls from Moro Moro to Santa Cruz. There we met up with a teacher and three students from a Santa Cruz high school, as well as two other MCC volunteers, and we all headed to Sucre together to attend the third International Congress of Young People in Defense of Water and the Environment. Our students had all prepared a brief presentation: the Moro Moro girls wrote a general description of sources of water contamination in the Moro Moro area and potential solutions, and the guys and girl from Santa Cruz prepared to talk about their experiences in raising awareness about various environmental issues across the city. I´m pretty sure none of us had ever been to Sucre before, and I know that the Moro Moro girls had rarely traveled out of the department of Santa Cruz, so we were all pretty excited about the trip.
Tuesday: boarded a bus in Santa Cruz at 4:30 p.m. Rode all night (with one eating break and one bathroom break)
Sorta cruddy picture of Sucre from a few kilometers off.
Wednesday: arrived in Sucre at 7:45 a.m. Organizers from the Congreso were there to herd us into taxis and get us to the Villa Norita, a nice bed and breakfasty type place with a meeting room big enough to fit the 70 people who attended. The Congreso started mid-morning Wednesday, so we were all pretty ragged and gross-feeling most of the day. The first events were an opening prayer session and talks on water as a human right, including some pretty powerful statements about the necessity to completely change our society´s way of being and thinking, especially the need to stop thinking about everything--especially water--in terms of economics. During the very first session (the prayer), they called for two members of each delegation to come talk about what water means where they live. Somehow I got chosen to represent our team, so I had to say something pretty profound in Spanish with about 3 minutes of prep time. I think I managed okay, and all the North Americans there told me later they were jealous of my Bolivian accent, which I didn´t really know I had.
After a heavy afternoon of lectures, we hung out over dinner and volleyball games with our group and with other people from the U.S., Peru, and various cities in Bolivia. I was a bit confused at first because very few of the people who were talking and running things were what I would call "youth." It turns out that, in Bolivia, youth can apply to anyone under the age of, say, 45, or older depending on the person.
Thursday: Presentation day. Each group gave 15-minute talks about their experiences and then answered questions. Both our groups were among the youngest that presented, and both did well. My girls were even more composed than they had been in any of our practice sessions, and they even ventured to answer some tough questions.
Friday: Feria in the plaza of Sucre.
All the groups presented graphic displays of their work. Here are Silvia and Judy, the Moro Moro girls, with their displays.
The fair also involved whatever schemes the different groups thought up to attract attention to their booth. One of our guys, Oliver, is really good at stilts, so he brought them along and walked around all day dancing with ladies and patting people on the head (see pictures).
Juggling was another favorite attention-getter, although less popular than the guy on stilts.
Also on Friday, we took a guided tour around Sucre and saw 500-year-old buildings, spectacular views, and a replica of the Eiffel Tower (which moved a lot when you climbed up it).
And then, because we hadn't quite had enough, we danced the night away. First a band composed purely of different sized drums and hand-made flutes played some tunes to get us going. Then, each group participating in the congress presented a dance from their region of the world, some of them including elaborate and beautiful costumes, and all of them well done. After that, they put on song after song of the kind of latin american music that you can't resist, and the dance floor stayed full until 1 a.m.
A group from Peru getting ready to dance.
Saturday: Reluctantly, most of woke up early to close out the congreso with discussions about what conclusions we'd reached and how we could proceed from what we'd learned. Bolivian democracy, while to me still frustrating, is at least....well...seriously democratic. Therefore, it takes a long time. We missed our bus out of town by something like 3 minutes and had to pile into taxis to chase it down. Thankfully, we made it, but not without a lot of shouting and running and shoving money into taxi drivers' hands. The first stretch of the ride home passed fairly quickly. When we weren't sleeping, the younger members of our group were playing music on their cell phones and either singing (if the song was in Spanish) or begging me to sing or translate (if the song was in English). I finally gave in a thrilled them by singing along with Avril Lavigne's Complicated. They thought it was so great that they made me sing it twice.
At about 5 a.m., the bus stopped to let folks use the bathroom, which turned out to be wherever you could find one in the dark. I stumbled off the bus half asleep and apparently wandered pretty far looking for the perfect spot, because before I was done I heard the bus engine revving. I instantly became wide awake, realizing that all my companions sitting near me who might notice I was missing were dead asleep, and I hadn't said a word as I crawled over them to get out. With visions of a dark night spent wandering alone along that road with 50 Bs (6 dollars) in my pocket, still hours from anywhere where anyone knew me, I sprinted toward the bus while still trying to get my pants in order. I saw as I emerged from the bushes that, thankfully, the bus wasn't moving yet, although I was pretty sure that if it started to pull away before I got there, it would be too dark in the mirrors for them to see me. However, none of my fears came to pass. I bounded through the open bus door to find 5 or 6 Bolivian men waiting for me with laughing faces. Apparently they had known all along I was still out there and decided to have a little fun. One of my fellow travelers had noticed I was missing and was banging on the door to the driver's cabin, but (I assume as part of their prank) they pretended not to hear her. Thankfully, the rest of the trip went a little more smoothly.
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