When Being a Good Parent Means Going Away

My apologies for the paucity of posts. I have been absolutely swamped at work. One of our communities is having a leadership conflict, which was substantial setback for us. So I’ll share some of what we’re working on. These issues just scratch the surface.

Migration is globalization at its most intimate. Displaced and dispossessed by the neoliberal economic system, unable to make ends meet, families are forced to make difficult choices.

Bolivia has high levels of both internal and external migration. When the mines were privatized in the late eighties and early nineties tens of thousands of workers were laid off and migrated from Potosi and Oruro, primarily to Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. With the second round of agrarian reform and the encroachment of huge estates, during the same era, many people lost their landholdings and migrated from the altiplano to El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.

The prospects for work aren’t much better in El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. The official unemployment rate is 70%, and the underemployment rate just as high. Most people work in the informal economy, as street vendors, day laborers and domestic employees. Education seems to have little effect. Taxi drivers often have university degrees. Even the employed don’t earn enough to feed their families. Minimum wage works out to about $70 a month. With such bleak prospects in Bolivia, many go abroad.

Approximately 30% of the population lives abroad. About a 1.5 million Bolivians have migrated to Spain, and a million more to Argentina, and half a million to the US, leaving around eight million people in the county. There are smaller communities in Chile, Brazil and Italy, and pockets in Peru, Ecuador, Israel and Japan. Approximately 50% of the population is expected to live abroad by 2020.

Families see migration as an investment for the future. They will borrow huge sums, up to $10,000, to travel abroad. Sometimes the investment pays off, and the migrants save enough to send their children to school, to provide for their families, to build new houses, and eventually, to invest in small businesses, taxis, and rental properties. Other times the migrants are unable to find work or adapt to life abroad, or, in the case of illegal immigrants, are deported, and the investment, plus interest, is lost.

Migration’s effects on families are the most marked. Last week I was interviewing a woman in her garden while her two year old son played nearby. Every time a plane passed overhead he would point and say "Papa!" An eight year old boy I talked to told me that he didn’t have a father, even though his had only been in Argentina for a year. The effect is even more pronounced when mothers migrate. Since most of the Spanish demand is for domestic workers almost 60% of Bolivian migrants are women. They are forced to leave their families behind, in the care of relatives, or in a few cases, alone. I interviewed one sixteen-year old in charge of four siblings. I’ve meet other teenagers who live alone and receive remittances from their parents. In these cases, children have little incentive to stay in school and on the straight narrow. As a result, Cochabamba has high rates of teenage drug and alcohol abuse and pregnancy, and child abuse and molestation.

Migration also has huge effects on communities. In the barrios where we work we often see huge houses, made of brick, painted bright colors, with one-way glass windows, red terra-cotta roofs and tile floors. They stand in stark contrast to the other one-room casitas, constructed of adobe, with scrap tin roofs and dirt floors. Unfortunately, the nice new houses are often empty, their owners abroad, while families of six or seven squeeze into the more humble houses. Returned migrants also invest in their communities. Migrants sponsor schools, churches, health centers and parks. Oftentimes, this is a huge help for the communities. Other times it’s conspicuous charity, benefiting the donor more than the community. When the migrants return for fiestas like Carnaval or Independence Day they’re often the patrons of lavish parties, with abundant alcohol, food and entertainment, which last for days on end. These parties can also create competition and division within the communities.

The most damaging is the brain drain phenomenon. Migrants are generally younger, closer to middle class, more educated and competent, and most able to improve their communities. I talked to one returned migrant, who had a college education, but moved to Spain to pour cement because wasn’t able to find work. Losing their best and brightest slows Bolivia’s development even further.

It remains to be seen, the benefits of migrant’s remittances will outweigh the costs of their absence. It just seems so unfair that some of us are forced to make such difficult choices.

This picture was taken in La Paz, of an internal migrant from Achacachi.

Saving the Rainforest and Avoiding Rabies

Despite its chronic instability, the Chapare is an absolutely amazing place. Villa Tunari has a lazy, laid back feel, with abundant cold cerveza and swimming holes. For me, the main attractions were the national parks and tiny villages outside of town.

Getting to the Parque Nacional Carrasco proved a challenge, because it’s a few miles out of town and I couldn’t find a taxi. Luckily, the owner of my hotel lent me his moto. A gringa, riding a motorcycle through the countryside, skirt and long hair flying, stirring up dust and scaring everyone’s chickens, made for quite a sight, but it was super fun. Getting inside the park was also an experience. There’s a huge river between the ranger station and the protected area, which we got to cross in a zippy little cable car contraption.

Parque Nacional Carrasco encompasses over 600,000 hectacres of cloudforest, starting in the altiplano, plunging down the steep Andean hillsides into the rainforest river basin. The tiny bit I explored was home a rainbow of birds, reptiles and insects. My favorties were the blue morpho butterflies, which are impossible to photograph, and the bullet ants, which indigenous communities used to use to punish people guilty of serious crimes. They would tie them to a tree and stir up the ants, which would kill most people in a few hours. My guide also insisted on surprising me with “algo super cool,” in a cave, which turned out to be vampire bats. He was a little taken aback by my response to the bats, running screaming out of the cave. I was more interested in walking around the rainforest, just taking the unique jungle smell and the cacophony of crazy bird, bug and snake sounds.

While the part of the park we explored has had more human impact, the interior of the park is so impenetrable that it’s still pristine. Jaguar, tapir, peccary, tropical bear, giant anteaters and thousands of other species live in the biodiversity hotspot. Its home to over a hundred species of orchids. There are even reports of an uncontacted Yuracaré tribe in the interior. Unfortunately, the edges of the park are quickly being eroded by logging, hunting and settlement. Enforcement is virtually impossible with a few dozen rangers for thousands of hectares. The threats come from all sectors, from major multinational corporations to subsistence farmers trying to scratch out a living.

Corporations are an easy culprit. In the Chapare, they’re really only involved in hardwood logging. In the Beni, Pando, and Santa Cruz, soybean cash cropping and cattle ranching are bigger issues. In Santa Cruz and the Chaco, hydrocarbon exploration and extraction cuts huge access roads through the forest, never mind the effects of oil spills from poorly constructed and cared for pipelines.

In the Chapare, poor people are often the unwitting culprits. In many cases, the parks are created around communities who live in or off of the forest. In other cases, migrants from the altiplano, desperate for a little scrap of land, illicitly settle in the parks. Some are modern hunter-gatherers, poaching plants and animals that fetch high prices. Others are farmers, whose slash and burn agriculture and grazing animals contribute to deforestation. Once cleared, the nutrients in rainforest soils are quickly depleted and the settlers have to clear more land, creating a cycle of deforestation and the eventual loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, disruption of the water cycle and climate change, making cultivation even more difficult. The tensions between sustainability and subsistence for those on the edge were aptly illustrated in Parque Machia and Villa Tunari.

Parque Machia is a refuge for rescued animals that have been poached and kept as pets. The better part of the park was closed, damaged by the recent rains. Fortunately, the park’s monkey population had relocated to the ranger station. Since they’ve had so much human contact, they actually wanted to be closer to humans. They were super inquisitive and sociable. The squirrel monkey pictured here was absolutely adorable, until he stole my sunglasses. When I tried to take them back, he bit me! Fortunately, it didn’t break the skin, and he finally agreed to swap my sunglasses for some grapes.

Back in Villa Tunari I went to a local comedor for lunch. As is the norm, there was no menu, just a special of the day. After a few bites, unable to identify the animal, I asked what it was. I was eating jochi, or agouti, an endangered animal akin to a guinea pig. The next day I went to a different comedor asked what the special was. “Taitateu,” I was told. When I asked what kind of an animal it was the proprieties claimed it was chancho, or pork. Unfortunately, when the plate arrived, it was clearly not pork. “Chancho de monte,” the woman clarified, which is peccary, an endangered wild pig. After that I finally wised up and just asked for fish.

There’s a new picasa album up with more pictures. Unfortunatly, they, like playing Amazon Trail as a kid, can't quite do the jungle justice.

The Chapare and the Coca Conflict

I decided to take a weekend during the week, since we work on Saturdays and Sundays, and venture out to Villa Tunari, in the Chapare region. The Chapare has gained notoriety for its coca crops. While the coca of the Yungas is widely chewed and central to the Andean cosmovision, the bigger, bitterer leaves of the Chapare are generally processed into cocaine for first-world consumption.

In the Chapare coca is grown by peasant campesinos. Then it’s bought by narcotraficante networks, and collected in clandestine labs deep within the Chapare and Beni rainforests. There it is processed with ether, hydrochloric and sulphuric acid into a paste. The coca paste loaded into light planes and flown from hundreds of hidden airstrips to Colombia for more processing. Finally, it’s smuggled into the US, where it sells for a thousand times more than the cocaleros’ take.

Ironically, the US inadvertently encouraged coca cultivation for cocaine production. In the 1970s USAID monies built the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway, opening the Chapare to colonization. In the 1980s, thousands of miners were laid off in neoliberal labor-flexibilization programs promoted by the US and their multilateral interests, and as many altiplano campesinos were displaced by neoliberal land reform that dispossessed them of their lands. Encouraged by the government, many of them migrated to the Chapare, where they found the perfect new cash crop. Coca grows well in the Chapare’s poor soils (since most of the nutrients are stored in the standing rainforest), provides immediate returns, requires little work, and has a high price.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when structural adjustment was in full swing and the economy in shambles, illegal coca export earning equalled or exceeded all legal export earnings combined. Two-thirds of all cocaine snorted by yuppies stateside came from Bolivia. Cash from coca crops kept thousands of campesino families from starvation. By all accounts, Bolivian governments, democratically elected and authoritarian alike, benefited from their blind eye to the coca boom. The city of Santa Cruz was by and large built with drug money by cronies of President Banzer.

In the late 1980s, under pressure from the Regan administration to fight the War on Drugs, the Bolivian government made an abrupt about face, and began going after coca growers. Originally, they paid the cocaleros to eliminate their crops, but the policy had little effect, as people replanted their crops. Alternative development projects have been equally unsuccessful. The government began eradication without compensation under the paradoxically named Plan Dignidad. In response, cocaleros organized to defend their meagre livelihoods. They organized mass protests and blockades, paralyzing the region. A number of unarmed cocaleros were killed in clashes at blockades in blatant violations of human rights. As such, some cocaleros have become more militant, killing a number of DEA agents with booby traps. The situation has improved somewhat with the election of cocalero Evo Morales, evidence of their influence. The Bolivian army and DEA agents have backed down a bit, and are now uprooting coca crops by hand. It's a particularly painful example of the stupidity of supply-side economics.

After my run in with the Aymara militants, I was concerned about meeting cocaleros while hiking in the isolated Parque Nacional Carrasco, which is also a popular coca smuggling corridor. However, the cocaleros’ syndicato was kind enough to write me a letter, affirming that I was not a DEA agent and stating that I was friend to all campesinos and cocaleros, which they signed and stamped with their official seal. I never needed to show it, but it makes an excellent souvenir.

I did see some more obvious signs of the coca conflict, like the highway checkpoints. There the police search for precursor chemicals for cocaine coming into the Chapare and unauthorized coca coming out. They make everyone get off the bus and show identification, while they search it top to bottom with absolutely un-Bolivian thoroughness.

The next sign I was in coca country were the blockades. While blockades in the Chapare have been scenes of violent standoffs between cocaleros and police in the past, the one we ran into was not a big deal. The protesters had left for lunch, so all the passengers helped remove the rocks and tree trunks from the road, and on our way we went. The driver assured me that after a siesta, the protesters and their blockade would be back, which was very Bolivian.

The effects of the coca boom were especially apparent when I arrived in Villa Tunari. The town has seen better days, before the eradication campaign. Most of the people in the outlying areas are desperately poor, living in small shacks, subsisting on small kitchen gardens and sporadic hunting. In town there are huge houses, built in a narco-baroque style, which have since been abandoned. All the fancy hotels and nice restaurants, which used to cater to narcotraficantes, now depend on DEA agents and occasional tourists for their due. The residents are trying to turn Villa Tunari into a tourism destination, but with the incredible political instability, it seems unlikely. All they have to show are a bunch of signs proclaiming Villa Tunari a Pariso Ethnoecoturistico.

For more information about the coca conflict, please check out the Acción Andina website. It’s run by my amazing boss, Theo Roncken, who has filled books on the subject.

Swingin'

Bolivians don't do Valentines Day, but in honor of the occasion, I though give a little anthropological account of another courtship ritual, La Festival del la Wallunk'a. Wallunk'a marks the commencement of the rainy season, celebrating fertility of the fields and the vitality of the community. It's commonly associated with the Day of the Dead, since they coincide in early November.

Wallunk'a means swing in Quechua. Giant swings are are constructed of eucalyptus trees and cured leather straps. Entire indigenous communities come together to construct them, with pre-Colombian engineering. They're blessed and bedecked with wreathes of flowers.

Young Quechua women from the Cochabamba Valley take turns showing their daring and prowess on the swings, soaring twenty to twenty-five feet off the ground at their apex. Bunches of flowers and baskets of food and other prizes are put just out of reach, forcing the women to swing higher and higher. With short skirts and long braids flying, it makes for quite a sight.

Suitors stand below, serenading the women. One ballad starts with "Sobre mi sombrero, ay palomitay, una flor rojita, por vos viditay," or "Over my hat, little dove, a little red flower, for you I live." The suitors encourage the women to swing higher, until they can't stand it and they scream stop. Then they're received by their suitors, and the courting and celebrating continues with abundant chicha.

Thanks to Arnd for the photo of a more modern Wallunk'a

Political Participation, Bolivian Style

Missing Super Tuesday and the Washington State Caucuses made me a little sad. Instead, I've been participating in Bolivian politics, which is almost better. Besides, Barack didn't need my vote.

Political participation here borders on pathological. Everyone, from taxistas to campesinos, priests to professors, is endlessly discussing Evo, the constituent assembly and the Santa Cruz autonomy movement. While Bolivians love to talk politics, but they're even more disposed to participate, as the 2000 Water War , the 2003 Gas War and the current conflict aptly illustrate. While the protests are striking, they're actually less impressive than the local popular participation.

Bolivians are very well organized, out of necessity. Historically, indigenous communities were organized into kinship-based ayllus, and all land was held and labored communally. After the republican revolution labor unions played an important roles providing for families and protesting for change. The 1994 Ley de Participation Popular formally decentralized planning power, transferring 20% of the government budget to over 15,000 Organizaciones Teritoriales de Base. Still, in the outlying urban and rural regions, if you want something done, you need to do it yourself. Neighborhood groups dig ditches for pipe, put up light posts and pave their own streets.

Attendance at the weekly block meetings is mandatory. Absentees are fined about $1.50, a day or half-day’s pay for poorer people. Most meetings start at 7am on Sunday mornings. In many communities they're held in the street, rain or shine. There are also emergency meetings, summoned with gunshots. We don't have to go to our block meetings because we rent. Instead, I go to the block meetings in our informant barrios. At the meetings, they organize community events and work projects. When they have more pressing issues they appeal to the president in personal letters. If that fails they plan protests, often storming the municipal buildings a thousand strong.

The meetings can become somewhat militant. In one of our communities there’s been a clash over leadership. They had a vote of no-confidence and kicked out their dirigente, but they’ve been unable to elect a new one. They’ve been discussing it for weeks now. Most meetings degenerate into arguments in Quechua and one evening fistfights even broke out between rival factions. Ironically, the factions are almost idegoligically identical. Most everyone in our barrios are MASistas, or Morales supporters. Some of them also identify themselves as Trotskyites or Anarcho-Syndicalists. They refer to me as Compañera Allison, the equivalent of Comrade Allison, which amuses me to no end.

This mural was painted by the Marxist Front of Universidad Mayor San Simon, a lovely reminder that we are living in a revolution.

El Milagro de Mira

I finally put up some photos up on Picasa. I just couldn't do Carnaval justice describing it. There are just a few favorites because my dial-up is super slow. Again, after all, this is Bolivia.

Fire for the People

I had an amazing experience today. A moment where my time here in Bolivia, if not on earth, made complete sense.

I was sitting in a cafe, working on my laptop, listening to some Seattle hip-hop, the Blue Scholars. A lustrebote approached me and asked to shine my shoes. I declined, but he stuck around, trying to strike up a conversation, as they often do. After chatting for a bit he pointed to my laptop and demanded "Let me listen”. He put on the headphones, listening tentatively at first, then smiling at the strange words, slowly swaying back and forth. ”What does it mean?” he asked when it was finished. So I translated:

50k deep, and it sounds like thunder when our feet pound streets. ● Cincuenta mil profundo, y suena como trueno cuando nuestros pies golpean las calles. ● Still demanding a share, refrigerator’s bare, they wanna see trade get free and not fair. But we are not far, we are not there, we don't got time left to spare, to not care.

His face lit up. “Are they talking about El Alto?” he asked. “What?” I replied, a little taken aback. As it turns out he was referring to the 2003 Gas War, and the overthrow of Goni, the hated neo-liberal puppet president.

A bit more background:

Like the Water War before it, the Gas War was by and large about neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, especially privatization. In 1996 President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, or Goni, privatized YPFB, the state hydrocarbons authority. It was broken up and auctioned off to private investors, who were required to pay 50% royalties. In the late 1990s he renegotiated many of these contracts by reclassifying them, lowering royalty rates to 18%. The cost of finding and developing a barrel of gas averaged $8.58 worldwide, $5.66 in Latin America, and just 40¢ in Bolivia. Gas revenues, the primary government revenue, decreased seven-fold. Paradoxically, privatization and structural adjustment widened budget deficits in Bolivia.

In 2003 Goni supported a $6 billon plan to build a pipeline through Chile, where the gas would be processed and shipped to California. There is a lot of bad blood between Bolivia and Chile because Chile permanently annexed Bolivia’s only coastline in the 1880 War of the Pacific.

Anger over petroleum privatization, the pipeline, US imposed coca eradication policies, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the suspension of community justice and representation systems, the absolute poverty and inequality and other injustices came to a head in October 2003.

My small friend and his family, along with thousands of other campesinos, industrial and mining unions members, indigenous ayllu members, urban alteños and university students marched on La Paz, demanding the repeal of the 1996 Hydrocarbons Law, a popular referendum on hydrocarbon revenues, and the convocation of a constitutional assembly. When Goni refused to negotiate with their leadership, they escalated the situation.

Blockading the roads to the south in El Alto and the north in Villa Fatima, they besieged the La Paz. In one instance, hundreds of men, women and children dragged train cars several kilometers, before shoving them off the tracks and onto the main La Paz’s-El Alto arterial. Not even tanks could get through. The uprising spread to the countryside. In the altiplano Aymara community militias, armed with slingshots and guns from the 1952 National Revolution drove the army and police out of Sorata, Achacachi and Warisata. Eventually, over 300,000 people marched on La Paz, and hunger strikes numbered in the hundreds. In a country of only eight million people (and four million llamas) this is astounding.

In response, Goni declared a state of siege. In El Alto twenty-eight unarmed civilians, including a number of children, were massacred. In the ensuing protests, another thirty-nine were martyred, on civilian and state sides.

Eventually the protests became so large and state control so small that the security forces refused to suppress the populace. The Vice President, most of the cabinet and all of the neighbouring countries withdrew their support. With the US as his only ally, Goni was forced to resign and flee to Miami, where he still lives in impunity.

My new friend, Calixto, was just a little kid during the 2003 protests, six or seven years old. But he remembered the experience so vividly, and recounted his role passing out cups of coffee with so proudly.

Eventually, I explained that the song was about a protest in Seattle, in solidarity with Bolivia. "People in America care about Bolivia?" He asked, amazed. I was so pleased that I could honestly answer that some of us care. I even found a photo of the WTO protests. "It looks a lot like El Alto" he told me. And while Seattle is usually a world apart from El Alto, they sure felt close together today, while we sat, listening to the Blue Scholars, having lunch and talking about our lives.

This famous photo was borrowed from Reuters.

Caray for Carnaval!

I didn’t think holidays could get any cooler than Alasitas, and then along came Carnaval. A UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, it mixes tradition, religion, humor, heavy drinking and indiscriminate water fighting into one crazy fiesta.

It’s held in Oruro. Oruro is usually a miserable, cold and gray altiplano mining town, but once a year its population triples and it’s transformed into a riotous, rollicking party city. Steve and I, and thousands of others, made the five hour pilgrimage by bus to sleep on someone’s floor in subzero weather. And it was well worth it.

Oruro Carnaval is a reincarnation of the Pre-Columbian Ito festival, celebrated by the Uru people. When the Spanish outlawed Ito, the indigenous people co-opted Carnival, mixing indigenous traditions and Catholic spirituality. Today the parade is dedicated to the Virgin del Socavón, patron saint of the mineshafts. Dancing in the entrada is considered a religious duty and requires a commitment of three years and thousands of Bolivianos.

While Carnaval festivities began months ago, and continue for another week, the main event is the entrada, or parade, held on the Saturday before Lent. The entrada includes upwards of a hundred of floats festooned with silverware, over 20,000 elaborately costumed dancers and more than 10,000 musicians, spread over four kilometers and eighteen hours. All of the troupes do one of the same six or so dances, each interlacing myth and tradition, imbued plenty of satire and snark. A little about them:

Las Diabladas wear huge masks with bright bulging eyes, twisted horns and long hair tangled with serpents. Temptresses with lascivious masks and short skirts dance alongside them. They represent the Christian struggle between good and evil, as well as the Pre-Colombian god of the underworld, known as Huari or El Tio.

Los Doctorcitos wear silver masks with hooked noses, warts and long white hair, glasses and pipes, tailcoats and tophats. They satirize Spanish mine owners, bowing and shaking hands as they dance.

Los Caporales wear bright velvet and sequined suits, knee-high boots with bells up the side and carry a whip in one hand and a hat in the other. Alongside them there are young women in equally bright and bouncy skirts, thigh-high boots, evening gloves braids and feathered hats. They represent the Spanish overseers, stomping, clapping and cracking their whips as they dance.

Las Morenadas and Los Negritos, pictured above, wear grotesquely exaggerated masks with big bug eyes, huge lips, and bushy black beards. They are encumbered by huge costumes, which force them to stumble stupidly down the parade route. They are the stereotype of African slaves brought over by the Spanish.

Los Tinkus wear long rainbow colored robes, adorened with sashes and capes. The men wear raw cowhide hats, shaped like the Spanish Conquistadores’ helmets, and adorned with feathers and bells. The women wear bowlers with feathers sticking straight up, like some sort of avian fountain. They act out ritual combat that still occurs between rival altiplano communities.

Los Suri Sicuris wear gigantic hats-halos of feathers, three to five feet in diameter. They wear equally oversized breastplates, which makes them look like birds. The do less dancing, more bowing and dipping their heads, barely able to right themselves.

Las Llamaderas wear traditional altiplano costumes, including polleras, bowler hats, sashes and carry slingshots. They do a very traditional altiplano dance, accompanied by little llamas.

Las Tobas wear brightly painted faces, huge, elaborate feathered headdresses, fur cuffs and ankle adornments, bare chests and midriff baring outfits, and carry spears and slingshots. They are supposedly the indigenous peoples of the orient.

The entrada is about as well organized as the Fremont Solstice Parade. There are gigantic gaps in the parade, during which huge water fights break out. The madness, which has been mounting for weeks now, included water balloons, supersoakers, buckets, and spray foam. Unfortunately, about halfway through the parade Mira, my Canon Rebel and constant companion, was hit by a water balloon and stopped working.

I felt a little like I had been shot. I was standing on the sidelines, struggling not to sob, when one of the dancers saw my expression. She invited me to dance with her troupe to cheer me up. Having watched different incarnations of the same dance for the past six hours, I had it down and was feeling better in no time. However, I did not have the awesome outfit, as pictured below. I’m planning to buy myself one when we get back to Cochabamba.

The parade continues into the wee hours of Sunday morning, when some of the dancers breathe fire, and most of the spectators are so drunk they can no longer sit in their seats, jeering at the dancers, singing and dancing in the streets, fighting and peeing everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon the dancers do the entire parade over again, hung over or still drunk. They stagger and stumble along the parade route, half-costumed, leaning on one another, occasionally dropping out to throw up.

Update: After drying out, Mira is fine. After drying out, Ally has an incredible headache.

Al Gore, Bring on the Ark!

I hear Seattle is having snow! Here, it oscillates between seventy degree wether and severe rainstorms. Sometimes I sun myself on the roof in a swimsuit, and sometimes I need an umbrella to get to the kitchen.

While this is normal for the season, the severity of this shifts is not. By all accounts, the rains are coming earlier, in November, and La Niña is hitting harder. This is the third year of catastrophic flooding. So climate change seems pretty real from where I'm sitting.

In the Chapare, outside of Cochabamba, the town of Villarroel has been submerged. In El Alto, outside of La Paz, mudslides have buried entire barrios. It's the worst in the eastern lowlands, like Santa Cruz and the Beni. People's adobe houses have been destroyed, their animals drowned, their crops decimated, their lives on the economic margins made infinitely more difficult.

There's no aid. Even if there were, the is no way to get it there, as the already pitiful infrastructure has been destroyed, and the airforce is too poor to have long-range helicopters. And so we wait and pray.

Picture credits to the AP. I'm trying to stay as far away from the flooding as possible.

Happy Tinku!

I was shopping in the Cancha today when something spectacular caught my eye. This pirated DVD cost me all of 3bs (50¢) and may be my new prized possession. Although it may be hard to appreciate if you haven’t lived in both Bolivia and the United States, a Happy Tinku is the most hilarious oxymoron imaginable.

Tinku is a traditional dance, which I described during Carnival. But the dance is a representation a very real ritual. Tinku is traditional combat between indigenous communities. Tinku is rarely practiced these days, and is found primarily in rural Potosi, Oruro and Sucre. Few outsiders have seen Tinku, but the people I know who have described it as absolutely terrifying. A fellow I work with actually invited me to a supposedly tamer Tinku in nearby Tapacari, but I declined, having learned my lesson with cockfighting in Nicaragua, Mexico and Guatemala.

During festivals, different communities come together for days to trade, sing, dance and above all else, drink. As different communities drink themselves stupid, latent hostilities and rivalries can rise to the surface, and people become increasingly aggressive. Young men don leather helmets like those of Phujllay and bind their hands with leather belts, sometimes with stones in their fists. They supposedly strike at each other with sickening ferocity, until one combatant is unconscious. Most years someone dies during a Tinku. Their blood is considered an offering to Pachamama, in lieu of a llama. While that may be hard for us to understand, Tinku does serve an important purpose, both asserting indigenous identity and diffusing conflicts between rival communities.

Occasionally young women also fight, but it’s generally a more subdued affair, with scratching, hair pulling and clothes ripping. So I suppose one might be able to draw a parallel between Jerry Springer or brawling fratboys in our society and Tinku in Bolivian society, but I’m still not a big fan of either.

Alasitaing It

Yesterday I took the day off of work and spent seven hours, each way, on a bus La Paz to experience Alasitas. And it was well worth it. Alasitas is already one of my all-time favorite holidays, right up there with Guy Fawkes Day and Bloomsday.

Alasitas means buy from me in Aymara. During the festival Bolivians purchase tiny items they hope to receive in the coming year, bless them and offer them to the household God of abundance, Ekekko, in hopes of receiving the real thing in return.

Alasitas used to fall on the autumnal equinox, celebrating the fields’ abundance. Thunupa, a pagan god, was offered foodstuffs, household goods, construction materials and such. When the Spanish came they shifted the date, so the annoyed Aymara changed the festival into a kitschy mockery of the real deal. Now Ekekko, which is Aymara for dwarf, is offered wallets full of cash, cellphones, first class tickets to Miami, lowriders and so on and so forth.

There was miniature everything. Petite pastries and salteñas. Little cigarettes and coca leaves. Diminutive newspaper editions. Enchanted by the adorable, itty-bitty objects, I joined in the hustle and bustle, as everyone rushed around, trying to buy everything before twelve. As midday approached the activity in San Francisco reached an apex and it was so crowded that we were unable to move, a sea of people smiling, singing and sharing the abundance. Unfortunately, neither peace nor forgiveness were for sale, so I settled for stuff.

At exactly noon, when the blessing is supposed to be most effective, I purchased for some of the best magic money can buy. In a ceremony that involved burning incense and monopoly money, ringing a bell, chewing coca, doing a shot, confetti and streamers, and spitting on me, a Yatiri blessed me and my things for the coming year.

The photo reminds me of an I-spy. If you expand the picture (by clicking on it), can you find the things I want?

A thesis and diploma?
Firecrackers?
Laundry soap and a broom for a clean house?
Trigo y mapuey?
A Bolivian visa and airline ticket for safe travels?
A crate of beer?
Music?
Toilet paper for no tummy troubles?
A rhinoceros?

Hungry Ally Haiku

Juicy, spicy, sweet.
Oh savory salteña.
Fill my mouth with mmm.

Piping hot, pica.
A perfect little pastry.
Meat and veggies, POW.

Only three b’s.
At a simple streetside stand.
Stop, snack, chat, no más.

Of course, your calle culinary options aren’t limited to my midmorning snack muse, the salteña. Other favourites include chocle, gigantic corn on the cob and a hunk of queso fresco, cordero, a sort of lamb and potato shish-kabob, and charque, llama jerky, often served over quinoa. To wash it all down there’s chicha, a think, tart fermented corn beer that campesinos brew in their backyards. Basically, Bolivia is a paradise for those with the uncommon combination of a strong stomach and a sophisticated palate. Take that, Tom Douglas.

Scared and Psyched to Shop

La Cancha, the market here in Cochabamba, is the biggest market in Bolivia. It makes going shopping simultaneously one of the most fantastic and stressful things about being in Bolivia.

The Cancha goes on for acres, block after block of covered stalls and street carts. On Wednesday and Sunday, market days, it seems to double in size. You can buy anything, but it will take you forever to find it, pawing through gigantic piles of cheap, tawdry tat. (Everything in the picture in the previous entry, excepting a few books, was bought in the Cancha.) Everything is also extremely cheap, but you have to haggle relentlessly, which I absolutely hate. It’s all extremely unhygienic, dogs, dirty children, mud and trash mingling to create a singular stench.

Thus far, I’ve had incredible Cancha karma.

First, I bought a laptop. I didn’t bring mine, but a computer was quickly becoming a necessity. Now, buying a laptop in an open air market would normally seem strange and stupid to me. But there is was, a Toshiba Satellite, sitting in between some tennis shoes and sacks of potatoes. Brand new, in the box, for a fraction of what it would retail for in the States. I tried it out in the street, the guy added some pirated software, and away I went. My apologies to whomever it was stolen from.

Then, on Tuesday, I got robbed. I was buying cherries from a little cholita and she kept stalling, arguing with about how much I wanted, counting and recounting my change. I slipped my wallet in my front pocket to arrange my purchases. As I turned around, thinking how strange it was, someone picked my pocket! I took off after him, screaming. As I ran, two guys joined in the chase. Three blocks down one of the good samaritans tackled the thief, knocking him flat on his face, in a mud puddle, in the middle of the street. Everyone stopped to stare, swearing at the guy, summoning the police, calling me a stupid gringa. I felt a little sheepish, getting pickpocketed, but all’s well that end’s well, and it felt good giving the guys the money.

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.

And An Entirely Other Waterwar!

Carnival is quickly approaching. Here in Cochabamba, that means only one thing: A gigantic, all-out, no-holds-barred, city-wide waterfight. It gets worse on the weekends and on especially sunny days.

It dosen’t matter where you are. Walking down the street, sitting in an open air cafe, or riding in a taxi with the window rolled down are all perils. Waterballons are lobbed out of car windows, super-soaker snipers perch on balconies, sometimes people simply dump buckets of water off of buildings. These shenanegans are not confined to children. Sometimes, a middleaged businessmen will have squirtgun up his suitsleeve or an elderly cholita will have waterballoons in the gigantic bundle she carries on her back.

Since I’m a young white woman, I might as well have a big bullseye painted on my back. It doesn’t matter if I’m dressed up or down, working on my laptop or reading a book, anytime and anywhere, I am a target. I get wet at least once, usually twice a day. I’ve been trying to develop my evil-eye, unfortunately to no avail. As such, I’m forced to arm myself before leaving the house every morning. Keys, check. Wallet, check. Cellphone, check. Squirtgun, check. Such is the difficult life of Ally abroad.

The Water War

Today, as in 2000, Cochabamba has chronic water shortages. Where I live we can go days without running water. In the outlying and rural areas people rely on periodic tanker trucks which sell water by the barrel, which is often recycled from rich peoples’ swimming pools or siphoned off of drainage ditches.

These water issues came to a head in 2000, when Cochabambinos made it clear that water is a basic human right and that they wouldn’t be bullied into the Washington Consensus by the World Bank or by multinational corporations, in what’s often referred to as the Water War.

To explain the issue, I’ll start with a little macroeconomics lesson:

Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, the result colonial pillage and centuries of political instability and strong-arming. The mineral extraction economy is boom and bust and is often subject to hyperinflation. The government is highly indebted and often unable to provide the most basic services to its people. As such, Bolivia is at the mercy of the World Bank and the International Monetary fund.

The World Bank and IMF subscribe to neo-liberalism, a school of though which sees the market as a panacea for all development issues. They tend to privileges economic development over all else. Thus, social spending should be cut so that debts can be repaid more quickly and currencies should be devalued to stabilize the economy, at society’s expense. They also assume that what benefits developed nations will automatically benefit the developing nations they invest in. Thus, trade should be liberalized and the market deregulated so that developed nations have easy access to the markets in which they have advantages without the hindrance of labor and environmental laws. Finally, they believe that anything government can do, business can do better. Thus, all public services should be privatized, even if that means not everyone will have access.

The World Bank and IMF force poor nations to implement these neo-liberal reforms. They condition loans, development dollars and debt relief on so-called Structural Adjustment Policies. The policies are a package of austerity measures, currency devaluation, trade liberalization, deregulation, a focus on direct export and resource extraction, privatization and governance policies. While these policies can be helpful, they are usually more helpful to developed nations than developing nations, and they are often hurtful.

In Bolivia the cornerstone of structural adjustment has been privatization. The hydrocarbon, telephone, airlines and railways industries were quickly bought-off, the nation’s assets sold away at bargain basement prices. Water was less lucrative. When Cochabamba’s water rights went up for auction there was only one bidder. Water privatization was a condition of a much needed $25 million World Bank loan, so Bolivia was forced to accept the offer.

The buyer was Aguas de Tunari, coalition which included US corporation Bechtel. President Hugo Banzer signed a $2.5 billion, 40-year concession with a guaranteed minimum 15% annual return on the investment. The conditions of the concession required Aguas de Tunari to pay down water authority’s debt, expand and improve the existing water system, and finance the Misicuni dam project. The Misicuni dam project was, by all accounts, impractical, uneconomic and only beneficial to Banker’s wealthy backers, including the corrupt mayor of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa.

The concession and the corresponding Law 2029 gave Aguas de Tunari a monopoly over all water and sanitation in Cochabamba, including campesinos’ irrigation systems, communally built water networks and rainwater collection schemes. Aguas de Tunari was allowed to install water meters on wells residents had dug, charging them for the meters and the water. They quickly raised rates 35%, to about $20 a month. Minimum wage here, which most Bolivians don’t make, is $70 a month, so the hike was a huge burden.

Local residents organized, led by Oscar Olivera of La Coordinadora and Omar Fernandez of FEDECOR. When the government refused to recognize them and their popular referendum against Aguas de Tunari they began protesting. Retired and laid off miners and factory workers, lustrebotes, street vendors, university students, the middle class, cholitas, campesinos, cocaleros and just about everyone else in Cochabamba was involved in a four day general strike. Other protests broke out across the nation, and at one point there were blockades in five of the nine providences and a thousand-person march to La Paz (in a nation of only eight million).

In response President Banzer declared a state of siege, the Bolivian equivalent of martial law. Meetings of more than four people were prohibited, freedom of the press severely limited, and many of the opposition leaders arrested and sent to prisons in the Amazon region. The situation escalated, protesters and police exchanged rubber bullets, tear gas and molotov cocktails, there were hundreds of injuries and five deaths. In one case, which was caught on tape, an army captain fired into an unarmed crowd of demonstrators, killing high school student Víctor Hugo Daza.

After Daza’s death, the political situation became so unstable that the Aguas de Tunari executives were forced to flee the country. Desperate to change the laws in contention and end the strikes, the government rented planes to fly a quorum of delegates back to the capital. Water rights were turned over to La Coordinadora and Olivera declared victory for the people of Cochabamba.

Arguing that they had been forced out, Aguas de Tunari eventually filed a $40 million lawsuit with the WTO claiming compensation for lost profits. In 2006, the lawsuit was dropped. Banzer and the army perpetrators have not been brought to justice for their human rights violations. The water situation here has not improved at all. It’s still expensive, dirty and chronically unavailable.

Still, the water war was an incredible success. People here are proud that they stood up to a gigantic corporation and said no to neo-liberalism. Rightfully so. Bolivia stands as an early example of the other option, the possibilities outside of the Washington consensus. Bolivia is slowly but surely paying off their enormous debt, diversifying and expanding their economy, trying to protect human rights, foster an independent identity and act sustainably at the same time. They’re not alone. Today Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba stand with them and against neo-liberal imperialism.

This mural says ¨Bolivia is not in play.¨ I walk by it everyday, and it always makes me proud to be here.

Cochabambina Cool

After a long and arduous journey which included a no blockade dance, bidding on sold-out bus tickets, sleeping on the stranger in the next seat and a midnight snowstorm, I've finally arrived in Cochabamba.

I am so happy to be here. While there aren't really any tourist attractions, there is warm weather and friendly faces, which is exactly what I wanted after cold, gray and conservative La Paz.

Cochabamba has a mild Mediterranean climate and a bright blue sky, only occasionally obscured by instantaneous and torrential downpours. The plazas are filled with park benches, ice cream sellers and shoeshine boys, shaded by palm trees and bordered by lovely Baroque churches. The Prado is lined with open air cafes, perfect for lingering over Cochabamba's famous cuisine and taking a parade of Caporales dancers, which are almost constant in the run-up to Carnaval.

Cochabama is Bolivia's breadbasket. When the Incas invaded from Peru, they were quick to colonize the fertile valley, so the people here are Quechua, as opposed to the Aymara of La Paz and the Altiplano. The indigenous women wear short velvet polleras, sandals, and wide-brimmed straw hats, adding to the air of eternal spring. Moreover, the Cochabambinos seem to be far more open than their highland counterparts. People are always happy to stop and chat, wanting to know who I am and why I'm here. I'm even a little relieved that the catcalls have resumed.

The openness suprises me, because there are an incredible number of gringoes here, some of them incompetent peace corps kids and others overzealous missionaries. At the same time, I must admit, there are some alright faithful folk. As it turns out, I'm living with two Maryknoll missioner boys, Jason and Steve.

We live in a barrio to the south of town, opposite the lovely Lauguna Alalay, which is Quechua for "Oh, cold!" There are stone-cobbled streets overgrown with weeds, walls covered with graffiti murals and plenty of parks for pick-up futbol matches. Evo Morales has a house a few blocks away. Our house is 'medidas aguas' which means that all the rooms open out onto the patio, forcing you to run through the rain and dodge the crazy annoying dogs to go to the bathroom or kitchen. But, between the showerhead shorting out and the pilot light of death, the kitchen and bathroom are somewhat scary. Fortunately my room is bright and airy, and I'm planning to paint it soon.

This gigantic statute, Christo de la Concordia, overlooks the city. At 33m plus it's a hair higher than the Rio de Janerio statue it's modeled after. While display of one upmanship and evangelism would normally annoy me to no end, it orients me when I get lost, so I've forgiven it.

Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

Today, continuing my death-tourism stint, I tried to visit the infamous San Pedro prison. San Pedro used to have a brusque tourism business, but visits were called off after few too many tourists were caught buying cocaine. In order to visit, I had to have an inmate to visit and official permission.

Sebastian, a Dutch tourist awaiting trial on cocaine charges, and a friend of a friend, invited me to visit him. Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain official permission to visit him. Apparently, Sebastian was on some sort of probation, I was suspicious because I was white, and the person I needed to bribe was away on other business.

Instead, the guards let me stand at the gate and talk to Sebastian. Being a white woman and bearing a carton of cigarettes, a bag of chocolates and bars of soap, the inmates clamoured at the iron gate to talk to and touch me. The majority of the men I met were awaiting trial, almost all of them on drug charges. Some of them have been stuck in the stalled judicial system for years.

Inside the prison there are no guards, no uniforms and no real rules. The 1,500 or so prisoners must resolve disputes among themselves. They organize into unions and elect leaders. The prisoners are also quite political. Posters of Evo adorn all of the walls, and candidates campaign inside the prison. Problems that can’t be resolved peaceably are usually settled with knife fights. Prisoners accused of commiting particularly heinous crimes are often killed in vigilante violence. There are an average of four deaths, from 'accidents' and natural causes, each month.

San Pedro is divided into eight separate barrios, each centered its own patio. Some areas are better than others, and each has a hotel-style star rating. While wealthy inmates can buy or rent cells, poorer inmates sleep on crowded corridor floors. Towards the top of the prison, the cells are quite swank, complete with kitchens and bathrooms. One drug-baron, caught with $420 million worth of cocaine, had a second story built onto his cell. On the first floor, the cells are unsafe, with violence, vermin and diseases running rampant.

To supplement their meager rations, improve their cells and survive the prisoners must earn money. The prison is like a little city, with food stalls, repair shops, shoeshine boys, barbers, billiard halls and everything else you could want. However, the two biggest businesses in San Pedro are distractions from the difficult life: drink and drugs and soccer. Contraband substances seem to flow freely through the prison, the officials easily paid-off. There are cocaine laboratories in some of the cells. Apparently, it is so lucrative that many of the San Pedro guards pay for their postings. Soccer is almost equally important. Coca-cola sponsors the teams, in exchange for exclusive sales in the prison. On big games single bets can reach $1000. Sometimes, players are even scouted out by the wealthier sections.

Family members can come and go freely and some children live in the prison. There are so many of them, San Pedro has its own school. Without other relatives, the children don’t have any options. They offer suffer abuse, and are always stigmatized. However, as one father explained to me, they do their best to shield their kids from the violence and shame, and they are able to provide some stability and normality because they stay together as a family.

The San Pedro prison was an incredibly interesting and ironic place, a microcosm of Bolivian society. The majority of inmates are indigenous, there’s an astonishing divide between rich and poor, and almost everyone is there as a result the War on Drugs. Although I'm glad I visited, I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard as I did on the cab ride home.

For more information and some excellent photos of the inside check out this BBC article and the Marching Powder website.

Bolivian Politics 101

This weekend Tracy and I were determined to get out of the city. We got up at dawn on Saturday morning and slogged up to the bus terminal, aiming for Sorata, a town a few hours north. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the bus station it was closed. There was a blockade. That's how Bolivians protest. There are so few avenues to power and little access to political infuence, people feel so disenfranchised, that they are forced to drag rocks, trees, old cars, burning tires, and so on and so forth into the streets, blocking all traffic from one part of the country to another and effectively paralyzing it.

Apparently, some Bolivian bus drivers are upset at the aptly named Seguro Obligatorio de Accidentes de Tránsito, or SOAT, an annual transit tax. Actually, all of a sudden, Bolivians seem to be upset about everything. Now that Christmas is over, the population of La Paz seems to have doubled, doubled their pace and doubled their grudges. This morning there were three dozen riot cops supervising the demolition of one of the municipal markets, a la the occupied territories. This evening there was a small protest in Plaza San Francisco. I stopped to watch and listen. A small group of indigenous people were stumping for the controversial new constitution and against the Media Luna autonomy movement.

A bit of background:

Santa Cruz and the rest of the Eastern lowlands, collectively called the Media Luna, consisting of the Beni, Pando, Tarija and Santa Cruz are culturally distinct from the rest of Bolivia. They tend to be whiter and more western than other Bolivians. Without exception, those that I've spoken to have been very kind to me, but utterly and unapologetically bigoted, refering to indigenous people as dirty Indians, swine, and a multitude of other unspeakable things. Unfortunately, these people also control much of the wealth and want to keep it to themselves. In recent years, government revenue has shifted from mineral extration, centered in the Altiplano West, to hydrocarbon extraction, agrobuisnesses and cattle ranching, centered in the Lowland East. So Santa Cruz and the Media Luna have begun rumbling about autonomy, if not outright succession.

On the other hand, Evo Morales campaigned promising a new constitution, one that would concentrate more power in the hands of the poor indigenous majority, concentrated in the Western Altiplano, instead of the whiter, wealthier minorty, concentrated in the Eastern Lowlands. After he was elected he conviened a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. Unfortunately the opposition, unhappy with the proportional representation system, boycotted the assembly until the last minute. As a result, the legitamacy of the new constitution is in limbo. This is unfortunate, because it's incredbily progressive, focusing on health and education, increasing indigenous participation in government, redistributing hydrocarbon revenues and idle land, reducing the influence of the church and allowing gay marriage, while concentrating a little more power in the hands of the central government.

The political tension over natural resource revenues is mixing with racial tension and Evo Morales' election and constituent assembly is accentuating it, creating an incredibly explosive situation. The opposition has also begun attacking MASista representatives, preventing them from attending the constituent assembly.Youth gangs, called the Juventud Cruceñista, roam the streets of Santa Cruz beating up Cholitas. A few weeks before I arrived a sometimes revolutionary highland group called Los Ponchos Rojos killed and mutilated a pair of dogs on national TV, as a warning to the Media Luna. People are angry and afraid, and there have been a lot of attacks on individuals.

The speaker was standing under a Whipala, an indigenous flag. I thought it was interesting, and I snapped this photo. Oh, what an error. Immediately, I was surrounded by a gaggle of angry indigenous people, yelling in an unintelligible mix of Aymara and Spanish. "Where are you from?" one of them demanded. "Are you a journalist?" another asked. I explained myself, showing them my passport and pictures, taking care to emphasize my differences with our president and my support for theirs. Once they were sure I was an ally, they were actually quite kind, explaining their positions and posing for pictures. (Apologies for the pun). Apparently, because I was white, they originally thought that I was from Santa Cruz. Had I been, I have no doubt that they would have beaten me senseless and bloody.

All’s well that end’s well and I have learned an important lesson about the liabilities of white skin. Plus, if I’m going to get lynched for a photo, it should be a better one than this.

Textiles and Cholitas

Many indigenous women in La Paz, called cholas and cholitas, have adopted a particularly unique and now ubiquitous costume. It was originally imposed by seventeenth-century Spanish governors, but today it's a fashion, an identity and an outward display of wealth.

The women wear polleras, or gigantic petticoat skirts which emphasize the width of their hips. Over the pollera they wear lacy blouses and colorful shawls, often accented with sequins and fringe. Under the pollera they wear knee-high lace-up boots, or flat slippers. My favorite part are bowler hats, pinned at a jaunty angle over a pair of braids. It's unclear how they came into vouge. Some people say that a businessman imported too many and convinced the Cholitas that is was the latest Spanish fashion.

In general, traditional fabrics have been eschewed by indigenous women in the city as the mark of campesinas and tourist tat. However, I did meet this Cholita spinning in the street, and she told me a little bit about her trade and let me take her picture, which was a rare treat.

She was working with alpaca wool, which is prized over that sheep and llama, but below vicuña wool. She was pulling out clumps of wool, rolling them between the fingers of their right hand and on to a spindle that they keep moving with their left hand in one seamless motion. For everyday threads the spindle is spun counterclockwise. For ceremonial and special threads the spindle is spun clockwise. Eventually, she'll dye the wool with plants and minerals and weave it on a backstrap loom, as she has since she was a teenager and as her grandmothers for generations before her did.

Then she'll sell it for a fraction of what it's worth to tourists who have no idea the back-breaking, blinding work and hundreds of hours that go into their souvenirs.

Bolivia Has the EMP Beat

Today I paid a visit to the Museo de Instrumentos Musicales. While there is plenty of Bolivian guacarock, reggeton, ranchera, cumbia, nueva canción and etc., Bolivia has retained an incredibly rich folk music tradition with all sorts of instruments of their own invention.

We saw lots of charangoes, tiny guitars adapted from Spanish lutes and mandolins. However, charangoes are traditionally constructed out of armadillo shells. There are a few explanations for the unconventional soundbox selection. Some people say that Andean musicians liked the sounds of the Spanish instruments, but could not bend wood into the appropriate shapes and had to use armadillo shells. Others say that the Spanish prohibited Andean music, and that the charango was created because it was easily hidden. We also saw tortoise shell and more conventional carved wood charangoes. Charangoes usually have ten strings, requiring incredibly nimble and slender fingers. They appear and are tuned a little like an ukulele, but is played more like a banjo, and sounds completely different than either. All the strings are tuned inside a single octave, so it creates very full and sustained sound.

We also saw zampoñas, the panpipes so often associated with Andean music. They’re usually made from bamboo tubes of varying lengths. Some zampoñas are taller than the tiny musicians who play them! Pieces of dried corn, or pebbles, are placed in the bottom of the pipes to precision tune them. The pipes are split into two rows, called the ira and the arka, which symbolize the male and female, and together form a full scale. Traditionally, two people play the zampoñas together, but today one musician is more common.

Finally, there were plenty of quenas. Quenas are bamboo flutes played by pinching the top of the tube with your lower lip, and blowing downwards, as I imagine a beaver would. Pinquillo, tarkas, and moseños are similar variants. Other distinctively Andean instruments include the pututu, a ram’s horn, chajchas, a shaker made of goat, llama or sheep toes, and every imaginable size and shape of drum and rattle.

The museum also had a huge collection of non-Bolivian instruments. My favorite was this Peruvian ocarina. Then there were also homemade instruments, including a guitar made out of a spam can, and an exhibit explaining the tin can telephone. Finally, there were some instruments that I can only imagine came from a Dr. Seuss book.

The EMP has absolutely nothing on this museum. They had way more instruments, cooler instruments, tons of stuff to touch and play with. The EMP's only advantage is its amazingly ugly building. Not to be outdone, the Museo had blueprints of charago shaped edifice on display. If only Paul Allen had an interest in armadillo guitar shaped buildings.

Happy New Year!

Unlike Christmas, New Year's Eve celebrations appear to be exactly the same in all parts. Stay up late, get silly drunk. Bolivians generally begin the festivities at midnight, and continue with the drinking and dancing until 6am or so. Paul, Tracy and I weren’t up that much celebrating, so we started a little earlier and went for a more conventional pub crawl.

However, the pub crawl quickly turned into a drunk-girls-in-high-heels-on-cobblestones-can't-find-a-cab-stumble across the city. After a few close calls with me looking up at the lovely holiday lights instead of what was in front of me, oncoming traffic and children with homemade fireworks, we decided to settle on a single club.

At midnight we ended up at Ram Jam, which was apparently the hot place to be, both literally and figuratively. As someone said, if Bolivia had a Paris Hilton, she would have been there. The place was packed with a mix young of foreigners and paceños, in all sorts of bizarre fashions, shaking it to 70s and 80s pop hits. The Bolivians were almost astoundingly drunk, and yet still standing, singing and dancing through the entire evening. There were party hats, noise makers, and streamers that we accidentally caught on fire with a candle. Plus, in a truly ridiculous turn of events we ended up dancing on a raised stage for the local television news.

And despite the incredible, high-altitude hangover that ensued, this New Years, I resolve to take myself and everything a little less seriously, and to let my adventure unfold one day at a time.

And Relaxing at the End of the Road

The town at the end of the World’s Most Dangerous Road came highly recommended, both at home and in Bolivia. Called Coroico, it is as close as Bolivia has to a resort town.

It’s set on a hillside above a beautiful lush Yungas valley. Below you can see a river, lined with coffee, banana, citrus and coca plantations. Compared to the cold of La Paz, it’s the perfect temperature, always around eighty degrees. The square is filled with palm trees, park benches and people selling snacks, making it the perfect place to relax. A short walk along the cobbled streets takes you outside of town and to all sorts of little establishments where you can dine al fresco, overlooking the valley, on all sorts of amazing local and organic food (my favorite being the homemade coffee ice cream).

Coroico was full of Bolivian families on holiday, swimming, playing soccer, chatting and hanging out. There weren’t many other tourists about, so I was left to my own devices. The town boasts hiking, rafting and horseback riding, but I was feeling super lazy, so I spent most of my time relaxing by the pool, reading the last Harry Potter. (Although, to my credit, it is in Spanish). I also got a wicked sunburn and all sorts of itchy insect bites, but such is life.

Coroico was also interesting because it had black people. In this culture, black people are uncommon and a sign of good luck. Apparently, the Afro-Bolivianos are the ancestors of slaves brought over to work the mines. When mining production dropped the slaves were sent to the Yungas to grow coca, where their natural resistance to malaria gave them an advantage. They stayed after slavery was abolished in the 1850s, continuing their farming lifestyle. There are some 35,000 of them in Bolivia, most all of them in the Yungas. While they’ve adopted the Aymara customs and language, they have generally avoided intermarriage with the larger Aymara population. Their subculture also retains distinctly African elements, like plenty of attitude and openness (this family even invited me to take their picture), plus very soulful, rhythmic song and dance. However, not all of the Afro-Bolivianos know of their origins, let alone the existence of the African continent. When I asked one woman if she wanted to visit Africa she asked me where it was!

The World´s Most Dangerous Road

Attention Familiars: This may upset some of you. My apologies. You know me. Anything named the World’s Most Dangerous Something has an unshakeable appeal. Plus, in addition to being the World’s Most Dangerous Road, it’s probably the world’s most beautiful. I couldn’t help myself.

This weekend I went to Coroico, via what has been termed the World’s Most Dangerous Road. The Inter-American Development Bank bestowed the unfortunate name on the road a few years back, when hundreds of people would die enroute each year. In reality, the road is not so dangerous these days. As a result of the title a new $120 million bypass has been built and most of the traffic diverted. Also as a result of the title, there a tourism industry around the road, and most all of the remaining traffic is mountain bikers. All of the towns along the road have been abandoned and there are only a few houses.

I was a little too timid ride a bike down the road, so I talked a taxi driver who lives outside of Coroico into taking me there and back for a small fee. At the start of the road there is a gigantic statue of Jesus, as well as an indigenous rock altar called an Apacheta. Travellers pray for protection before they set off. Some people bless their vehicles with alcohol and feed the dogs that stand like sentinels along the road, in hopes of bringing additional luck. There’s also a sign which directs drivers to honk their horns liberally, which made me laugh.

The road itself is no laughing matter. It’s just a dirt and gravel track. Sheer walls rise above the road and drop-offs fall thousands of feet below. The road twists and turns like a corkscrew, into river valleys and out onto ridges. At points, waterfalls flow over and erode the road. Occasionally, they were so strong it was like being in a car wash. Towards the top of the road the clouds close in, and it’s hard to see the edge and the abyss below. The route is so dangerous that normal road rules don't apply. The downhill traffic always travels on the outside, so that the driver with the best view of their wheels takes the greater risk. The road is so narrow, that when you have to pass, the vehicles lean out precipitously over the edge, leaving you wondering if you’re in a car or an airplane. I felt thankful that I was in a tiny taxi, and not a big tour bus. Even so, on particularly tight turns I would involuntarily scoot towards the inside and my driver would ask me if I was alright.

The road is not so dangerous for its quality, which can be safely navigated by a sensible driver, but for the quantity of traffic it received. It used to be the main link between the Northern Yungas and La Paz, and the Brazilian Amazon and the Pacific Ocean. Each year dozens of downhill passing vehicles would fall off the edge and into the abyss, taking their passengers to their deaths. In 1983 more than a hundred passengers in a single camion plunged over the precipice and met their ends.

The road was dotted with constant reminders of the deaths. Crosses, big and small, singular and in clusters of ten to twenty lined the road. There were even a few memorials in other languages. Most poignant was a man with a little red flag, who would stand at a particularly dangerous corner signalling traffic when it was safe. His entire family, wife, children, parents and in-laws, died there in an accident over ten years ago. He lived where they died, surviving on food donations from passing travellers. The Bolivian government, for their part, took far more extreme safety measures, putting yellow caution tape along precarious stretches.

I am often cavalier, and have spoken fondly, of the Latin American safety ethic. Driving the World’s Most Dangerous Road was a reminder of how unacceptable it actually is. In the late nineties they made the road one-way on alternating days, which saved hundreds of lives, but generated so much opposition that it was scrapped. A bit before I left, the Bolivian BBC correspondent was killed in a car crash in La Paz. It’s insane that people drive drunk, without seatbelts, at night, in overcrowded camions over these sorts of roads. I was glad for my driver, who actually snapped at me for sitting with my feet out the passenger-side window, in classic Ally style.

Santa, All I Want for Christmas is Better Spanish

Unlike many Latin American nations, Bolivia celebrates Christmas in a big way. The malls are full of wealthy people, while the plazas are filled with makeshift market stalls selling every imaginable bit of Christmas kitsch. Tinny music, tons of blinking lights, tiny nativities, and Western-style Christmas trees are everywhere. Christmas centers on the Nochebuena, or Christmas Eve. Families stay up until midnight to attend mass, toast the birth of Christ, eat dinner and exchange gifts.

My family didn’t attend mass, but there is the Misa del Gallo, so-named because a rooster was supposedly one of the first creatures to witness baby Jesus' birth. In some towns, especially Sucre, baby Jesus is carried around town, with everyone dancing, carolling and generally adoring him.

For dinner Bolivians have picana, a special holiday soup with a spicy white wine broth and hunks of corn on the cob, whole potatoes, and chunks of lamb, chicken and beef. We also had encholata, a stomach churning solution of beer and coca cola. With the food, the alcohol and the hour I ended up falling asleep before either of the kids.

Gift giving here is straightforward. Adults give children gifts, but don’t really exchange among themselves. While they’re opened at midnight and all the squealing is in Spanish, the flurry of excitement and flying paper is exactly the same as at home. I made my family a basket of wine, chocolate, nuts and cheese, including some swiss cheese, which confused my abuelita to no end.

Christmas day is a more subdued affair. Some families attend mass a second time, but we were having none of that. Instead, we slept late, ate leftover picana for lunch, and then relaxed around the house. Because we live in Zona Sur we’re at a significantly lower altitude than La Paz proper and we had wonderful weather today. It was about eighty degrees outside, and we sat in the garden and talked politics and economics while the kids rode their new bikes around us.

Festivities continue through New Years and until the 8th, El Dia de los Tres Reyes Magos, when the wise men come and it’s time to put away the tree and nativity and start making good on those resolutions.

Feliz navidad, próspero año y felicidad a todos. I miss and love you all and I hope you’re having a merry Christmas. Know that I’m happy and healthy and all the rest.

Into the Yungas and Onto the Aqueduct

We woke early on the second day of the trek, anxious for and early start, food and clean water. We had reached the edge of the yungas the night before, but today the trail plunged downwards and into the steamy swale below.

As we descended it got warmer and more humid by the minute. The vegetation grew taller and more verdant and the wildlife more abundant. The air had a sweet floral scent, with eucalyptus trees abounding. Bird and cicada sounds competed with the roaring river below us. The Precolombian paving disappeared, overgrown by the flourishing foliage.

We wound up and down the mountain sides, in and out of the river valleys. When we crossed the Rio Takesi for the last time, over a dam, we began hiking along this aqueduct. We had beautiful vistas out over the lush subtropical landscape, down the river and into town.

We hiked though a gold mining camp called Chojilla. It was astounding to see the rape of the landscape; the bright green turned a dingy brown, a sulphur smell permeating everything and dirty water draining into the river. Look for another entry on the effects of mining sometime soon.

After Mina Chojilla we continued on to the tranquil little town of Yanacachi. In Yanacachi, everyone was out and about in their Sunday best. There weren't any busses running from Yanacachi but some of the local kids offered to show us a shortcut the highway. They lead us down a footpath out of town, through their families’ banana, coffee and coca fields, peppering me with questions about the States, Santa Claus, and my sunburn, which made me look somewhat like Rudolph myself.

When we reached the highway, we flagged down a bus headed for La Paz. The drive back felt like an extension of the hike, an exposed dirt track, winding around the mountains, with cliffs and gorges extending thousands of feet above and below us. An extension of the hike, except that we were speeding down the hill at 100kph, able to smell the brakes. Imagine my surprise when I learned that we weren’t on the world’s most dangerous road. That’s next weekend’s adventure.

Trekking Takesi

This weekend I was determined to get out and explore Bolivia. As it is Christmastime there aren’t a lot of other tourists around. It’s a blessing, since you get the sights to yourself, but it’s also a curse, since there aren’t any organized tours. I ended up hiring a private guide to take on the Takesi trek. The two-day trek links the highland altiplano with the lowland yungas through a low pass in the majestic Cordillera Real mountain range.

The owner of the trekking company drove us up to the trailhead on Saturday morning. We got stopped on the way there, outside of the town of Ventilla. I know this sounds silly, but I was really excited to see my first Bolivian roadblock. However, in reality, it was road construction. There was one fellow standing in a ditch, chucking stones into a wheelbarrow, while another one laid them up on the road, using the same strategy the Inca had hundreds of years before.

We began trekking off of an access road for Mina San Francisco, where wolfram and tin are extracted. The rocky trail climbed steeply, and at altitude, I was quickly exhausted. The only respite was the short distance to the summit. As we rounded the last switchback to the 4600m Apachetas Pass a gigantic ornate iron cross came into view. It was so ironic, because all I felt like doing was falling to my knees and begging for more oxygen. We stopped so I could leave a stone I carried all the way from Seattle. In the Aymara tradition it's good luck to bring stones from lower elevations and leave them at higher elevations, in piles called Apachetas.

Unfortunately, there was no reprieve after the pass. Instead, there was an absolute whiteout on the other side. So instead of resting, we began running. Eventually the snow turned to rain, and then to sunny skies, and we slowed down. I found myself in some of the most breathtaking countryside I have ever seen. We were in a valley with steep, smooth, stone walls on either side. Waterfalls ran down the rock faces and into a little river that wound down the basin the basin. Everything was a bright emerald green, accented with splashes of gold groundcover, and it was amazingly lush for the altitude.

Equally as amazing as the surrounds was the road. We were walking along a Precolombian paving, constructed by the Incas. The trail was a vital economic and political link between the altiplano and Yungas. It’s one of a number of such trails, which archaeologists believe may have been linked La Paz and the Beni at one time. Indigenous highlanders still use the trail for everyday transport, and we passed a number of them on their way to La Paz for the holiday. The road was perfectly paved, often accompanied by culverts and low stone walls. It was awe inspiring to see such engineering and effort, and the way it has lasted. However, the Inca were not so concerned with ADA accessibility. The cobbles were super slippery and I did a lot of falling down.

We walked through huge herds of llama and sheep. I was extremely excited for the animals, and insisted on stopping to take pictures of every last baby llama. This irked my guide to no end. The livestock belonged to the residents of Estancia Takesi. The town consisted of a dozen or so small stone huts with thatched roofs and stone enclosures for the llamas and sheep. Most of the buildings had been co-opted from the original construction, by the Incas, if not earlier. It certainly created a sense of history to see structures inhabited continuously for the last half-century.

We hiked out of the highlands, and down into the yungas. (More on that in the next entry.) The trail traversed around the Loma Pali Pali, high above a river gorge. We stopped to camp in Estancia Kakapi. Normally, there are a number of basic alojomientos in the village, but it being Christmastime, the town was closed. Everyone had gone to La Paz for the holiday and there was not a soul in sight. Just vicious dogs that we fended off with sticks and a sad little donkey. We found a level spot, set up our tents and got out the stove to make supper.

It was at this point that my guide realized that he had forgotten matches. We had no way to light the stoves, cook dinner, or breakfast, or, most importantly, purify water. Instead, we had the crusty bread that I had been carrying, and water from the Rio Takesi below. And while drinking out of the river was beautiful and picturesque, I’m not as excited for the giardia that I probably got. Check back soon for an update on the state of my stomach!