Welcome to the Working Week

I’ve finally started work, settled into some semblance of a routine and have a shaky understanding of what we’re doing.

My team consists of Theo, a Dutch ex-pat and President of Acción Andina, Yeshid, director of the migration project at the Centro Vicente Cañas, Cristina, a Chicana-Filipina Berkley PHD candidate and Oscar, a University Mayor de San Simon undergraduate student.

We work for Centro Vicente Cañas, but we never actually work at Cañas. They recently fired an entire department, but they have been unable to evict them from what would be our offices. So we work at home, occasionally meeting at Theo´s office. My teammates are incredibly kind and caring, explaining everything and helping me adjust. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever entirely adapt to everything starting an hour late and people chewing coca in meetings.

We are writing a report, which will eventually become a book, on the effects of external migration on social, economic and political development in the Zona Sud of Cochabamba. We work in four barrios: Mineros San Juan, Lomas Santa Barbara, Nueva Vera Cruz and K’ara K’ara.

Founded in the last fifteen years by internal migrants, the barrios lack basic services and the people are desperately poor. None of them have running water, so they have to rely on periodic tanker trucks. Parts of the barrios have electricity, which only works when the rest of Cochabamba isn’t consuming much power. Transportation only runs when the roads are dry and even then it’s infrequent, uncomfortable and overcrowded. Only a few of the barrios have schools, and only elementary schools. The government hasn’t paid the teachers in months, so the communities have taken up collections to keep them from striking. There are no hospitals or pharmacies in the communities, so people don’t get much healthcare. In Lomas, people bought their land from shady speculators, so none of them have legal titles and they are often threatened with eviction. K’ara K’ara is located between the dump and the airport, which is almost unbearable, between the stench and the sounds of planes, which pass a few hundred feet above.

In all four of the barrios about one in five families have someone abroad. Most of the migration is to Spain and Argentina, with small Bolivian communities in Chile and the States (specifically Arlington, Virginia). It’s already clear that the migration has both positive and negative effects. Remittances send children to school, start businesses and help people survive with a little more dignity. At the same time, they strain the social fabric, as families are separated and children are left alone of with other relatives, the community is segmented and class divisions created.

Right now, we’re trying to define our informants and set up interviews. So Sunday morning, at 6am, in a rainstorm, we were out and about in Lomas, asking after the community leaders. It was pouring out, none of the roads and paths are paved and the barrio is built on steep slope, so everything was mud, and we were slipping and sliding down the hills. We were soaked to the bone and filthy, unable to find any of our informants, because there are no addresses. To make matters worse, feral dogs would periodically attack us, forcing us to retreat. As horrible as it sounds, everyone seemed to appreciate that we were there, and the team made it fun. Fieldwork is awesome.

Unfortunately, a significant part of my work is solitary and academic. I spend a lot of time in an archaic library reviewing loquacious literature, all in Spanish. I also spend tedious hours transcribing thickly accented, colloquialism-spattered, barely intelligible interviews, also in Spanish. My Spanish is completely inadequate for the work, but it’s forcing me to catch up quickly.

Here’s the home office I’ve set up. Please note my new goldfish, Sashimi and Yoshimi.