Andy in the Andes

Bye

2009-05-05T06:08:00.001-07:00

Monday, May 4, 2009
22:06

To the extent that this blog has ever been a travelogue or research field journal it certainly has transformed into something quite different. My friend Lucy at Cornell suggested I start this blog last May before leaving for Bolivia. It was intended to be a way for me to keep track of my experiences exploring research possibilities in the country and share them with friends and colleagues. The blog was linked to a website of a student group that I belonged to and with which I shared research interests. Soon after returning to Bolivia this year I asked that the link be removed because I no longer wanted to write about my research or graduate work in any direct, descriptive way. Instead I found myself writing about my spiritual struggles, lessons from my past, and the overwhelming, uncertain relationships I developed with the landscapes and people I encountered during field excursions.

It feels like the right time to end this blog now. I don’t want to write about myself anymore as someone in the Andes. I’m sure my location on the Earth will continue to motivate some of the daily discoveries that prompt me to write, but it’s certainly not of principal importance in my life anymore. I’m grateful to anyone who took the time to read the sentences and stories I posted here. It’s been a real gift to have this outlet. And it’s been a humbling experience trying to scrounge the courage to stay honest and share something real knowing someone out there might read it. I haven’t always succeeded. People’s stories keep me going though. Their ascents and their falls, their loves and their fears, their quirks and their hang-ups. Their voices. The more stories I take in the more human I seem to feel. And the more human I feel the closer I get to God. So I believe in stories. I believe in people telling their stories to as many as want to listen. That’s why I want to keep trying my hand at blogging. Check out the new one at:

http://framesfigureground.blogspot.com

Good-bye “Andy in the Andes”.

Drip Dry

2009-04-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 24, 2009
7:15AM

In the morning I walked to the beach. Oceans have always been a novelty for someone like me—born and raised in a state with no coastline and somehow fated to work and volunteer in landlocked countries. I had to descend some imposing sea cliffs this day to arrive at the beach from the tourist district of Lima, Peru where I was holing up for a few days. Staying true to my inherent obliviousness, I completely missed a long, winding set of concrete steps leading down to the shoreline and instead hopped a park railing, stumbled down a steep, eroding and lazily-landscaped hillside and spilled out onto a sidewalk to the incredulous stares of several morning joggers. I followed the path a short distance to find it abruptly ended in a construction site. Ducking under fencing and navigating past the giant maws of various dirt-moving contraptions I arrived at a ten-foot high concrete median wall that separated several lanes of heavy, opposing traffic as well as pedestrians from the beach. I followed the shoulderless highway against the flow of traffic for several hundred yards, bobbed and weaved around racing motorists to cross to the other side, and stepped down finally from a raised sidewalk onto a shallow beach of black, polished rock.

There was only one thing left to do at that point—take my pants off. It wasn’t my intention when leaving the house nor was I prepared with a change of clothes, bathing suit or towel. However, after walking down the coast for a half hour I spotted a loan swimmer drifting amongst the deliberate currents of a sheltered inlet. The first rays of sunlight were just beginning to peak over the city cliffs behind me. The morning was cool and slightly humid. And the water called out invitingly. I waded into the crashing surf. The few times I’ve swam in the Pacific Ocean it has always awed and intimidated me. Perhaps because the beaches of Virginia and North Carolina were regular summer destinations of my youth, the Atlantic Ocean feels familiar and approachable. To me however, the Pacific conjures up the esoteric, the hidden; it is a forbidden dream space of secret currents. I’ve always come to it as an outsider, neither having paid the dues of living on its shores nor traded the time and patience to allow its expansiveness to seep into my being. It has therefore revealed nothing of its wisdom to me. As its waves now forced me into a violent dance, tossing me about like an eager child playing a bit too rough with a fragile new doll, the name of these waters suddenly struck me as absurd. A towering wave crashed down overhead propelling me shoreward and planting my face and chest firmly into the rocky sea floor. The feeling was somewhat less than pacifying.

I swam parallel to the beach for long, exhilarating moments allowing a force vast and incomprehensible, an irresistible, ancient will to supplant my own for a time. The sun now high enough in the sky to share some warmth, I eventually made my way back to the beach and stood pale-skinned in my boxers facing the water, my back to Lima’s morning rush hour crowd several yards away. The tide rolled in clawing away the face of a high berm on the rocky beach. The retreating waves dragged with them plump polished pebbles and large, rounded stones creating a raucous, earthly applause amidst incoherent guttural grumblings. Dreadlocked surfers paddled out into the distant breakers. These movements of man and nature began long before I arrived and would carry on undeterred long after I left this place. They weren’t the least bit concerned with the rising and falling tides of my thoughts, words and actions. They fulfilled themselves. The scene felt timeless for a few fleeting instants.

Shadow Travelers

2009-04-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, April 22, 2009
8:05AM

I left the United States for the first time when I was a sophomore in college. I joined a study abroad program in South Africa and remained there for the entirety of the fall semester. My fellow students from the U.S. and the backpackers I met while traveling there all seemed to share an unspoken, common perspective on the whole business of traveling and leaving one’s home country. On the surface everyone was a beautiful flower child—adventurous, open-minded, and embracing life with loving abandon. We were all free spirits acquiescing to the capricious cosmic current that carried us where it pleased. But the reality was, we just were collecting experiences. Every new point on the map, every mile of bush country traveled, scenic vista captured, novel dish sampled, every hostel hook-up, phrasebook saying, bazaar purchase, and whitewater, high-flying thrill fed that feeling. We felt the gravity of our personal dramas was amplified simply because of our privileged locations far from family, friends and the familiar. We were enlightened, worldly—we floated above the dregs caught in the daily grind. Our “specialness” exalted us. Many folks I met actually made a point of inserting into each and every conversation a tidy list of the countries they had visited. It was a race to tread the four corners and everything in between; and only a select few would finish. I quickly bought into this mindset and soon began polishing my own mental list to enter the competition. I felt horribly inadequate in the presence of other wanderers and frequently envisioned myself fumbling in last place struggling to catch my breath let alone place in this ridiculous race. I wonder if I stopped to ask myself “why all the fuss” during this period?

The outward self can “have” much, “enjoy” much, “accomplish” much, but in the end all its possessions, joys and accomplishments are nothing, and the outer self is, itself, nothing: a shadow, a garment that is cast off and consumed by decay.

The guests at the backpacker hostels I’ve been staying at over the past week in Peru while trying to scrounge up a visa to get back into Bolivia seem to have gotten younger since the last time I did this bum-around-foreign-lands thing. They don’t seem all that wise and free-spirited to me anymore despite their best attempts at apathy. I’ve been getting earfuls of country lists again and mystifying accounts of unique experiences viewing saturated attractions that these folks would have distinguish them from the thousands of other tourists packing travel agency offices to sign up to hike the same trail, ride the same rapids, and view the same ancient ruins.

For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one’s own contingent and exterior self, cannot exist where one is incapable of reflecting on a separate “self” living apart from God.

This week I’m thrown back into that world from a time when I was different, younger, more immature. How I’ve grown! How I’ve matured! How far I've come! And yet this world from my past feels uncomfortably familiar. Fortunately, hundreds of miles of overland bus travel allow one to ponder the “uncomfortably familiar” as well as every other minute mental formation that bubbles up from the unconscious aether. I’ve come to see I’ve exchanged one golden idol for an equally vacuous substitute. My ego’s appetite hasn’t abated in the least. In fact, it’s grown, if not changed its diet. Though still amusing, travels and adventures no longer sate it. Sexual gymnastics and the intrigue of romance aren’t enough to satisfy it. Harvesting worldliness is no longer sufficient to glorify it.

I’m still busy seeking my merit badges though. Each one whose sole purpose is to praise this marvelous space suit I stepped into at birth. Greed for prestige: a praised publication, a winning idea, a glistening degree, a fancy title. Lust for knowledge: another article read, a colleague conferred with, a piece of datum extracted, a novel statistic pocketed. Pride: a bit of resume slipped into conversation, comparisons of talent and will with friends and colleagues, a lovely book shelf full of complex and diverse knowledge, the rush of praise, the thrill of achievement, the descent into spiritual self-righteousness. All iron-on Boy Scout badges I seek with a fervor that burns, but does not purify.

How can a man be proud of anything when he is no longer able to reflect upon himself or realize himself or know himself? Morally speaking he is annihilated, because the source and agent and term of all his acts is God. To think that a man could be proud of this joy, once it had discovered him and delivered him, would be like saying: “This man is proud because the air is free.” “This other man is proud because the sea is wet.”

[These men] see God. He does their will, because His will is their own. He does all that they want, because He is the One Who desires all their desires.

I’m beginning to see my body and personality more and more these days as a marionette. And the “I”, the third eye, that is neither my body nor my personality, is the manipulator. This shift in consciousness unfailingly brings my awareness to the millions and insidiously subtle machinations of my ego that manifest every moment of every day. It exposes the chains that bind me firmly to the whims of this “outward self” and to the leash carried by my wayward master that pulls me along an endless path I’m convinced will lead to pleasure and fulfillment. I feel myself slowly wakening to an acknowledgement of the suffering I impose on myself every time I attempt to raise myself above another person either through thoughts or words; every time I chase fulfillment in the purely (or partly) selfish; every time I write a word in this blog to bring praise to the mind that conjured it or the personality that cradled it. What empty pleasure! What a vain struggle! What divine grace to be given the courage to begin to step out from the shadows and travel the Way having embraced true, timeless, selfless joy.

Let us throw off the pieces of the world like clothing and enter naked into wisdom. For this is what all hearts pray for when they cry: “Thy will be done.”

The italicized text in this entry was taken from the book “New Seeds of Contemplation” by Thomas Merton.

Comforts

2009-04-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 16, 2009

16:27

An old man draws slow and steady on a pipe,

wisps of tobacco smoke tumble out around him.

The air smells of vanilla.

His skin folds loosely around his bones.

His eyes twinkle at the horizon,

the sky now a familiar face.

The days wane but he smiles because

he knows this eternal moment is broad

and endlessly renewing.

I wake up on the living room sofa.

A fever has set in, and

a dull ache creeps through my body.

I feel a cool hand on my forehead stroking it.

My groggy, 7-year-old eyes look up to see my mother.

She is soft and open, her eyes reflect concern.

“How do you feel, hun?” she asks me.

I am the most loved and protected boy on the planet, Mum.

The night altar is laid solemn before the empty pews.

A lone lamp casts its light

throwing eerie shadows on the holy crucifix.

A teenager sits head bowed in prayer;

the silence is deep and complete.

It tunes his ear to the Lord and the Lord makes himself known.

His faith has not yet faltered,

the temptations of life have not yet worn and broken him.

His chest gently rises and falls.

He is home.

Still lifes are all that remain now

in the far reaches of my memory.

A forest green plastic cup

with a brim that bows out slightly.

A reclining chair and the daily crossword puzzle.

An assured two-handed grip

on the inside bar of the steering wheel

as we drive to church on a carefree Sunday morning.

I've longed to know you for so long now—

you’re the only loss I’ve felt.

In my low moments I think of you watching

and feel ashamed;

in my high moments I reach out to grasp your steady hand

to know you’re with me.

But I always think of you and smile, Pap,

and wonder if you’re proud of me.

Joni Mitchell’s voice.

Three brothers slurp cherry slushies from the 7-11

on a mild summer evening.

The world is calm, predictable

and asks nothing of them.

They grin red-stained smiles;

their imaginations dance.

Grass stains and diving boards,

comic books and fantasy worlds fill their heads.

There is neither the burden of politics

nor the sting of righteous pride to weigh on them;

only innocent awe and wonderment.

A distant world where magic reigns

and strange creatures hide in the shadows.

A world of secrets and adventure,

a world created solely by imagination and

what passes between nerdy friends at a kitchen table.

An escape from reality.

The open country ahead and

the excitement of the unknown as a cast of characters

plunges into this world of mystery.

She turns to me and smiles in the half light.

I pass my arm around her waist,

pull her close.

I can feel the silkiness of her skin under her shirt.

I inhale.

She whispers softly in my ear,

the warmth of her breath fills me completely.

The moon is brilliant.

A steel city at the meeting of three rivers.

Black and gold banners, blue collars turning white,

smiles and friends, familiar feelings and family.

A secret tongue for those who know:

gumbands and nebby neighbors,

jag-offs and jagger bushes,

slippy roads and runnin’ cricks,

redding up and worshin’ clothes.

The Stillers, Pens and Bucos,

DVE, the T and EP,

mullets, pierogies, yins ‘n at.

The spot on Earth closest to my heart.

The only place I call home.

Naïve killers

2009-03-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

Saturday, February 21, 2009

10:05

I love killing mosquitoes. Probably not that revealing of an admission. I’d imagine most folks have no qualms about squashing the things. However, I seem to take a certain pleasure from it and recent experience has led me to question why.

A little less than two years ago I spent 10 weeks working in India as an intern. It was summer there at the time, and though I was assigned to a city in eastern India that because of its topography enjoyed a somewhat cooler microclimate than nearby cities in neighboring states, the weather was still hot. Quite intensely at times. And it was the monsoon season so most afternoons brought lengthy downpours—perfect conditions for mosquito procreation.

I remember the afternoon medical session during the week-long orientation we received upon first arriving in the country. The doctor leading the session raised the prospect of us contracting all sorts of scary illnesses. Nearly all were vector borne, transmitted by mosquitoes. Dengue fever in particular was a threat in New Delhi at that time. One particularly outspoken intern from Germany stood up to protest the prescription of powerful pharmaceuticals, relating that she’d spent a considerable amount of time in sub-Saharan Africa without ever having taken anti-malarial drugs and never had any issues. She added we didn’t know enough about the long-term effects of these drugs to be passing them out willy-nilly to people on extended stays in hazard regions. I bent down in my chair and reached into the front pocket of my backpack and felt around for the little white pills encased in plastic with the foil backing that I’d placed in there the week before when packing. My fingers ran over the surface of the crackling case. I counted 15 pills. More than enough I thought. I felt better right away.

I had brought with me a ten-week supply of Mefloquine, a rather potent anti-malarial drug with the well-known side effect of inducing intense dreams, often nightmarish and psychotic. Individuals with depression or a history of psychosis are usually prescribed an alternative drug. I’d taken the drug before however, and actually enjoyed the vivid dreams. Going to bed was like sinking into stadium seating at a movie theater and preparing for a cinematic adventure. Whatever the unknown, long-term side effects were, I was willing to chance it.

That summer I shared a sparsely furnished dorm room at the Xavier Institute of Social Service with a fellow graduate student named Tomo. Tomo, two other students and I worked as a team that summer on our particular internship assignment. Tomo was an unflappable, subdued, and carefree fellow. I couldn’t keep up with his intellect or work ethic, but I also couldn’t grasp how someone performing at that level could be so unfettered by concern or worry as to almost seem whimsical at times. Tomo and I became quick friends and traveled together a good bit that summer. He always got a kick out of the many quirks that came packaged with my anal personality. When settling down in whatever room we happened to be staying in, I’d pull toiletries and clothes from my bag and arrange them at right angles on my respective shelf, drawer, or bunk. Tomo called it “setting up shop”. I was particularly anal about mosquito bite prevention. My bed net in our room at the Xavier Institute was locked down 24-7, tucked under the mattress at all corners at all times. I had a routine for getting in and out of the thing so as to minimize the likelihood of mosquito penetration. The shower room adjacent to our dorm room had an open window with no screen or glass. Naturally, mosquitoes found their way in and in no small number. I developed a 3-minute shower routine to cut down on exposure time. I wore long pants. Most mornings after getting dressed I’d coat myself down with a layer of Deet. This was all endlessly amusing to Tomo who seemed immune to structure, routine, and any fear of environmental hazard. And yet, with all my precautions, the inevitable mosquito bite would appear now and again. Tomo made sure to remind me at those times that infection with dengue was highly probable.

___________________________________________

The personable, pretty doctor at the Cornell Travel Medicine clinic calmly plunged the needle into my arm. A weakened strain of the yellow fever virus made its way through my body.

“Will you be traveling to any low-lying regions while visiting Bolivia?” she asked me.

“No,” I told her with a smile. “I’ll be up in the mountains above 2500 meters.”

I smiled because I knew what that meant. No mosquitoes. She traced her finger along a thick black line on a map of Bolivia that was included in the “these-are-all-the-ways-you-could-die-or-be-maimed-if-you-leave-the-country” travel pamphlet that you receive free with your vaccination visit. The line skirted the eastern border of the province where I’d be staying.

“West of this line there’s no need to take malaria medication,” she informed me. “You’ll be high enough were it’s not a problem.”

“Thank you.” I said. I smiled big and wide.

______________________________________________

Female mosquitoes are the hematophages, the blood-feeders. They’ve evolved quite elaborate mechanisms for injecting their saliva into their host and extracting a blood meal—a meal which they do not even require for their own survival, but which supplies them with a surplus of iron needed for reproduction. The seemingly simple blend of proteins in the mosquito saliva disrupts the host’s immune response in ways we still do not fully understand. A mosquito's peculiar physiology allows them to carry and transmit viruses and parasites without contracting the diseases themselves—like some naïve messenger of destruction, intent on her task, unquestioning and diligent, unaware of the horrific consequences of her actions. Malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Rift Valley fever, Ross River fever, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, epidemic polyarthritis, the filariasis worm, and bacteria, protozoa, and helminthes of all kinds are transmitted by these creatures. Malaria alone kills 1.2 million people per year.

I returned to Bolivia this January to the news that dengue fever was breaking out in Santa Cruz, the largest city in Bolivia with a population of 1.5 million. As of a few weeks ago there have been over 1,000 reported cases of dengue fever in Bolivia and an unusually high number of deaths. Santa Cruz is located in a tropical lowland below 500 meters in the eastern part of Bolivia. I took selfish pleasure knowing that the central highlands where I was now living were sheltered from that kind of disease threat. Tucked in nice and comfy one night, with the window to my room open to allow in the cool evening breeze that is the norm here in Cochabamba, I drifted off to sleep. A distinctive, high-pitched buzzing woke me some hours later. The sound instinctively wrenched my stomach into a knot before I could gather up enough of my scattered consciousness to make sense of what had awoken me. It only took a moment. I could see nothing in the darkened room, but my mind’s eye saw clearly and in slow motion the mosquito effortlessly hovering at the cusp of my ear. It whispered to me in its strange, maddening language. Its torso sagged now with the weight of my blood. It’d just enjoyed a grand feast and this prideful leech couldn’t depart without gloating. It taunted me. It assured me that it would’ve indulged even more if only there were room enough in its belly. Its hunger was never sated. And yes, it would be back for more just as soon as I dropped my guard.

I spent the rest of that night and the next two nights engaged in combat with midnight mosquitoes. I don’t know how much sleep I lost or how many I killed, but I emerged from my room the morning of the fourth day battle weary, and somehow unsettled. My window was now closed and bolted shut. Splattered, flattened mosquito remains plastered my bedroom walls in odd patterns. I approached my host family incredulously, feeling more than a little betrayed at not having been warned about this obvious threat. They told me that during the rainy season mosquitoes venture even into the highlands. My naïveté was bolstered by my stay in Bolivia last year during the winter season when I encountered absolutely no mosquitoes. Without the conditions for their breeding grounds, they didn’t come calling. Now however, it was a different story.

On the night table next to my bed is a copy of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient holy book from the 5^th century B.C. Tucked inside it is a tri-folded, cream-colored certificate confirming that on a day in April three years ago I committed myself to following five practices, five trainings. The first of them reads in part:

I am determined not to kill, not to let other kills, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.

Sounded easy enough at the time. I didn’t consider myself a killer. But I struggle now, as I have in the past (albeit to a lesser degree) with the consequences of my actions when killing mosquitoes. These creatures cause so much death and suffering in the world and their existence seems so bereft of meaning. It’s so difficult for me to drum up even a whisper of compassion for their plight. But yet at times, the faintest of whispers creeps in. It hasn’t stayed my hand yet, but I wonder at the suffering they cause and if perhaps there’s some purpose for it. I certainly wouldn’t give it to anyone, but then again, there it is. And I’m left questioning it. I know it’s not given me to know the “why” in this game, but my nature draws me in to ask the question anyway. To the extent that I have to make choices about what actions to take in this life, understanding that “why” would provide such a useful map to guide me. But I suppose that’s what giving yourself wholly over to compassion, to God, is all about. A leap of faith. I fear I’ll spend my entire life on the precipice frozen in doubt and confusion. Especially when it comes to mosquitoes.

We Are the Champions

2009-02-03T17:05:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 2, 2009
9:34

Oh to bleed Black & Gold on a day like today...

A Familiar Blanket

2009-02-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

Saturday, January 31, 2009
18:54

We climbed and the mountain flexed. A hazy blue veil draped the sentinel peaks on the distant horizon. Brown and shadow gave way to myriad shades of earth tones the closer the landscape drew to our vehicle. Purple-flowering potato plants and brilliant yellow wildflowers wove intricate patterns in all directions. The dusty hill country I had known six months ago had been restored by the recent summer rains into a canvas of verdant canyons and lush pastures. As I looked out over this stunning scene my mind filter forced a discernment of areas and edges, light and shadow, and crests and troughs. The separateness of form was unquestionable—to my mind. But when I took a breath and listened from a deeper place that view lost focus. Now, an unimaginably thick, earthen blanket stretched out for endless miles, doubled over in places like a scrunched up rug to form arching ridges, pulled taut elsewhere revealing broad, flat plains, and even extending to the continental shelves and plunging into the depths of the ocean. From this vantage point, the rocky soil of the road under our tires was the same as that which lay covered in snow at this moment in my hometown many thousands of miles away. The crops it bore undifferentiated from my flesh and bone, and the rivers that finally carried it to the sea no different from the blood that coursed through me. It felt like home. But I didn’t really experience that. As profound as the imagery was at the time, it was still only my mind at play. Through the mind all knowledge is possible. Unfortunately though, you cannot know Truth. You can only be it.

__________________________________________

4x4 utility trucks, the modern-day incarnation of hunter-gather masculinity, are depicted as unstoppable mammoth machines on the TV ads that break up Sunday afternoon football broadcasts. They clamber up the sides of volcanoes, navigate glacial fields, and explode through fireballs and wrecking balls. The one I rode in, however, seemed more like a pesky flea as it circled the switchbacks of the dirt road that led us higher and higher on the back of this behemoth landform. The mountain didn’t even take notice of us. It was nice to be breathing mountain air again, thin as it was. I wasn’t yet weary from the long, bumpy ride and the work ahead wasn’t threatening. I arrived in Bolivia about two weeks ago with the intent to stay planted here for most of the year to continue my research from last summer. The familiarity of the country upon first arriving was unsettling. My host parents met me at the airport with hugs and kisses, once home, they led me to the modest bedroom I stayed in the previous year, and then swiftly sat me down to a full lunch spread in their backyard garden. We talked about simple things. I remembered the smell of their house, the shouts of the fruit peddler from the street outside, and the gentle hospitality of these people.

I then hopped in a taxi to the office of World Neighbors, the non-governmental organization with which I’m working here. I was again met with smiles, hugs, and handshakes. Some faces were familiar, others were new. Their team is quite small: four office staff, a driver, and the director. The driver, Edgar, an affable fellow, had been hired only after I’d left last July. He refers to himself somewhat disparagingly as a gringo, a term I thought was reserved for foreigners. His skin is pale, he keeps an impeccably cropped moustache, and he speaks as if he just finished gargling gravel. When addressing you he ends his sentences by stating your name in a desperately pleading tone, as if he would gladly hurl himself off a cliff if you would only take to heart whatever it is he’s suggesting to you. He’s got the soul of a servant I seek.

It was as if I hadn’t left this place.

The strangeness of my comfort here soon wore off and I was left with the comfort alone. Not long after my arrival we left for a week-long trip to northern Potosí, the area of the Bolivia where World Neighbors dedicates the lion’s share of its time. The communities of the region are largely isolated farming hamlets scattered over rugged, eroded terrain that reaches altitudes of over 16,000 feet. Poverty is ubiquitous and infant mortality rates rival those of sub-Saharan Africa. And so we drove the seven hours to this place through endless mountainous terrain, freeze frames of farmers tending fields and mixed flocks of sheep and llama passing by our windows as we traveled back through centuries. We did our work for the week. Yesmina, the soft-spoken, kind-hearted World Neighbors nutritionist, and I collected data on hundreds of young children from various health posts and hospitals. We did our work and left. And throughout this I continue to ask myself the same question. The same question I’ve been asking myself for seven years. What am I doing in this place?

Salutations

2008-08-05T07:00:00.001-07:00

Dear all,

Many thanks to those of you who have tuned into this blog over the past two months. It's been a real pleasure and privilege to have a venue in which I could post my thoughts and goings-on. Thank you for the time you spent reading my ramblings and for being so thoughtful as to send comments.

I wanted to apologize for the complete dearth of entries throughout the month of July, I was able to keep writing throughout the month, but was unable to post the entries as I had very limited access to the Internet for several weeks. I've posted some new and final entries below that were written in July, and relate a bit about my last month in Bolivia.

I'm signing off for now from "Andy in the Andes", but will continue posting entries here next year when I plan to return to Bolivia for another stretch of research. So, I hope you'll stay tuned.

Thank you all again!

Trial by Fire

2008-08-05T06:48:00.001-07:00

Saturday, August 2, 2008
6:24

Harley King operated his bulldozer calmly and mechanically as he had done nearly every day for the past three months now. The giant machine cleared brush effortlessly, uprooting in quick succession the numerous California chaparral species, so stubborn and prone to combustion, that endlessly appeared in the dozer’s path. Thick dust clouds kicked up from the earth in the wake of the dozer’s maw. Harley King worked alone. Had he anything to say it would’ve been drowned out by the drone of the dozer’s engine and the enormous racket caused by his work. Harley King didn’t have anything to say though. So, he worked.

Then he saw something crest the peak of the ridge that straddled the eastern face of the valley in which he now worked. A tiny glint at first that competed with the sun’s glare to wash out the view of the horizon. Then something more. Harley King new instantly what it was. He shut off the engine of his dozer where it stood. He jumped down from the cab and hurried around to the rear of the vehicle to grab the collapsible spade and fire shelter he had stowed in a storage compartment. He extended the blade of the shovel and ran to the center of a wide swath of ground that he had cleared of brush just a half an hour earlier. He began to dig.

Fire moves much faster uphill than down. The heat radiating from a conflagration advancing up a slope preheats fuels ahead of it thus exploding them in flame before the main wall of fire even reaches them. Harley King counted himself lucky that the phalanx of flames that was now moving swiftly toward his position was at least rolling down a slope; he might still have time. He continued to dig. Still, he had no delusions that he was going to make it out of this one. He knew the statistics and hadn’t joined the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection because it was a safe bet. It was risky, and at times exciting. And mostly it was steady work. But firefighters died out here every summer. Even dozer operators. Now was his time he thought as dug calmly and mechanically.

The fire swept through the valley with an unexpected intensity. It swallowed the bear clover and the scrub brush, it licked at the trunks of the Jeffrey and Ponderosa Pines, it marched on the yuccas. Harley King glanced up one final time from his crouched position in the tiny trench he had dug. The sun was blotted out by smoke and he could already feel the unbearable heat encroaching. He pulled the front flap of his fire shelter over his head, thought of his boy, and waited.

Harley King told me his story as he drove me from Visalia to Porterville, California in June of 2002. I’d arrived in Los Angeles the previous morning from Pittsburgh and had taken an overnight bus to Fresno, then a train to Visalia. I was now on the second-to-last leg of my journey to California Hot Springs, an isolated mountain community of less than 100 folks, where I’d be starting a summer of work with the U.S. Forest Service as a firefighter in the Sequoia National Forest. Porterville was the closest I could get to California Hot Springs using public transportation, and even it was a trying, hour-long car ride along winding, dusty mountain roads from my final destination. I didn’t know that at the time though and hadn’t quite figured out how I’d get to the ranger station in Hot Springs where I was to start work in a couple days. I trusted though. And God came through with Harley.

I was the only person on Harley’s bus from Visalia to Porterville. I slept in the very back seat for the first few hours, but after awhile drifted to the front of the bus to make small talk. Upon hearing my purpose for being in California Harley told me about his own days fighting fire as a dozer operator. His near-death experience deploying his shelter and surviving a burnover didn’t inspire me with confidence or calm to say the least. He asked where I was going to be stationed and then with surprise asked how I planned to get up the mountain to California Hot Springs. I told him I didn’t know. He immediately offered to drive me there himself once we arrived in Porterville. He only had two hours off between shifts and was planning to see his family, but still insisted that he drive me to where I needed to get. I politely declined, but Harley was having none of that. We got into his aging auburn sedan in Porterville and he picked up his son. Harley bought us both lunch at Wendy’s and drove me up the mountain for an hour, his son in the front seat and I in the back. He asked about my family and talked easily about the weather and goings-on in central California. I remember the ride being calm and pleasant. When we arrived at the ranger station, he refused money for gas or his time. He wished me the best of luck and turned around back down the hill.

___________________________________________________

Two weeks ago I was packed and ready for another outing to Northern Potosí where Yesmina (the World Neighbor’s nutritionist) and I were planning to work for nine days to finish up the previous month’s nutrition survey and to begin working with communities on various nutrition topics. No driver showed up at the office that morning however, as we were packing the Landrover with supplies. Our usual driver, Paulo, did indeed show up later in the morning, but informed us that he had a party to go to later that afternoon and wasn’t about to leave for the campo for over a week. Jesus, the other driver who had been hired earlier in the month for a short journey to Potosí was nowhere to be found. The World Neighbors director called his uncle and several other contacts to try to locate a driver for the trip, but none of them came through. So he decided to pursue one final, last ditch option. He came upstairs to where I was working and asked if I had my international driver’s license. I didn’t.

He said, “Well, that’s okay, if you have your U.S. license and your passport you’re allowed to drive for 3 months in Bolivia without having your international license.”

I said, “Oh, well that’s a relief.”

I’d driven only once in another country. The flagrant disregard for cautionary signs and traffic signals in foreign countries and the general chaos on the roads, has never instilled me with much desire to want to drive outside the United States. Peace Corps has some pretty strict rules against their volunteers driving cars or motorcycles, and so I hadn’t driven at all in Kazakhstan. When I was in South Africa several years ago the driver of our car got extraordinarily drunk one evening in Cape Town, and I was the group’s last best (mostly sober) hope of driving us back to the distant suburbs. I drove us most of the way before our driver in the passenger seat became too indignant and demanded that he be allowed to drive. He took it as an insult to his manhood that his passengers insisted he was unfit to operate a motor vehicle even though he could barely operate his tongue and vocal cords. I was booted from the driver’s seat and thus began and ended my international driving career.

Cochabamba’s streets are relatively calm compared to India or South Africa, but they’re no picnic. And besides, it wasn’t Cochabamba’s streets I was concerned with when faced with the thought of driving myself and Yesmina to Northern Potosí. It was the roads in Northern Potosí. All dirt and gravel, some serious switchbacks and slopes, sheer dropoffs down precipitous cliff faces to one side of the road, and lots of ridiculous river crossings through fields of stone, high berms, and mud flats. Plus, I had never learned how to drive stick.

Yes, I’d learned on several occasions. Including the time mentioned above in South Africa (that being the first time I got behind the wheel of a manual transmission), but each time I’d only driven for a handful of minutes, and the feel of the car never stuck. I needed to keep at it for a while longer, and have some repeated practice to really bury the feel of the process in my noggin’. So, here I stood, 28 years old and mechanically challenged, World Neighbors’ last best (and this time completely sober) hope for a driver to finish a nutrition survey. The director’s other contacts fell through and I was elected. We set out at mid-afternoon.

I stalled out in traffic. Many times. I drifted backwards long distances when starting from a standstill on slopes, threatening unsuspecting front bumpers behind me. I struggled to respect lane markings when other motorists sped past me in no man’s land, oblivious to such ridiculous traffic suggestions. Bumper-to-bumper traffic forced clutch and accelerator lessons upon me that usually ended in blaring horns from my rear as I sat stalled in the middle of the road. I dodged pedestrians, venders and livestock in narrow back roads through markets that detours from the main highway mercilessly directed us through. I avoided reverse at all costs.

Somehow though, I got us out of Cochabamba.

By the time we hit the open road scores of kilometers outside Cochabamba, dusk was approaching. I had gotten a better handle of the controls before me and was settling into the drive. My companion, Yesmina, wasn’t gripping the plastic door handle quite as tightly anymore either. Some color had returned to her knuckles. We continued on until nearly midnight until we reached Sak’ani in Northern Potosí where we met up with another Cornell graduate student who was revisiting the area to do some follow-up work to his research, and one of my advisors from Canada who was tagging along to get more acquainted with the region. I was relieved to have arrived safely, and I have to admit, more than a little proud that I’d got us there in one piece. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but at least we’d arrived.

One afternoon, only three days into our trip, we returned to a community I’d visited earlier in June. On my first visit I was sick as a dog and recalled walking long distances up and into the mountains to reach this particular community. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. This time around I felt healthy and confident and was looking forward to the hike and the work ahead of us. I drove the Landrover along an enormous riverbed until the makeshift road we followed disappeared and the path ahead became impassable with large rocks and deeper channels. We parked and began hiking into the foothills. Four hours or so later we descended from the village. I chatted casually with the our companion, Mario, one of the agricultural promoters of World Neighbors, about his family and farm and the trials of managing agricultural risk in such a volatile region as Northern Potosí. The afternoon sun was high in the sky and while the air was dry and warm, the direct sunlight made me quicken my pace to reach some shade. We arrived back at the Landrover and I threw my pack in back. I walked to the driver’s door and saw writing scribbled in the dust that coated the outside of the vehicle. I pointed it out to Mario and chuckled.

“Students,” he said.

I walked around to the passenger side to grab a water bottle and glanced down at the front tire. Deflated. My eyes quickly tracked to the back tire. Deflated. A pile of glass littered the ground in front of the tire. I looked up. The rear window was shattered.

“Mario, look at the window,” I said.

Mario stared mouth agape. Yesmina approached the car now, following shortly behind Mario and I. She too stood silently staring. We all stood around for a few long moments just staring at the car like disapproving parents expecting an apology. Perhaps if we stared long enough we would shame the car into fixing itself. I walked around to the back of the car and unfastened the side panel where the jack and bolt fastener were stored. I started to unscrew the spare tire on the rear door.

Now, anyone who knows me even the least bit knows that I’m a complete idiot when it comes to anything automotive. My older brother is a mechanic, a very proficient mechanic, but unfortunately his mechanical prowess is accompanied by an obsessi…er, outspoken passion for cars that he makes well known to all around him at all times. In the family van en route to the beach during family vacations growing up, he would have to point out the make, model and year of every single car that passed by on the highway during the 8-10 hour journey south and east. Oh, I heard lots about cars in my formative years. So much so that I didn’t want anything to do with them when it came time for me to know something about them. I can relate to what the great, late Mitch Hedberg once observed:

“I know a lot about cars. If it’s night and its lights are on, I can tell you which way it’s coming.”

So, you can imagine my inner horror when as I crawled under the car to prop the jack under the chassis, I heard Yesmina ask, “Mario, do you know how to change a tire?”

Mario responded, “No, I don’t understand anything about cars.”

I had been banking on Mario spearheading this little project. It’s never a good thing when I’m the most mechanically-knowledgeable person in the group. Yesmina and Mario suggested I place the jack under the right-front axle nearest the tire we were changing. I said that would be a bad idea and continued positioning the jack.

Aside from ignorance, we had another problem. We didn’t have the iron to actually crank the jack. Somehow World Neighbors had failed to equip the vehicle with that particular, essential piece of repair equipment. I pawed through our bags looking for something that might work to turn the metal ring on the jack. Nothing surfaced. Then I remembered something. I went into my backpack in the back seat and pulled out my Leatherman. I’d bought this nifty little tool at the request of my crew boss before heading out to California to work in Sequoia. It came in quite handy on several occasions out there (e.g. sawing off pine branches to make a bed for the night, and conducting sundry chainsaw repairs) and was going to prove lifesaving on this occasion as well. I crawled back under the car and jammed the needle nose pliers into the metal ring. The fit wasn’t perfect, but it did the trick. I began cranking laboriously, a half-revolution at a time. Twenty minutes later the jack ran out of lift before the tire budged from the ground. We lowered the jack, propped it on a large flat rock, and began cranking again. This time we got the tire up off the ground and were able to change out the flat tire. I felt like freakin’ MacGyver.

I know. I’m a moron. But let me have my little victory. If only my older brother had been there to punch me in the arm…

We hobbled into the nearby town on three fairly full tires, and one partially deflated tire. We reported our incident to the under-mayor and he was quite concerned by the whole affair. He rustled up the two town school teachers and a posse of about six adolescent boys to reinflate our tires with a handpump. The tires weren’t punctured it turns out, just deflated. And nothing but a bag of bread was stolen from the car. The suspected schoolboy perpetrators weren’t malicious it seemed, just bored and a little hungry.

We remained in Potosí for the next nine days, measuring children, holding focus group discussions with villagers and farmers, and working with participatory video, one of the main methodologies in my research. I remember speaking with one of my professors at Cornell one afternoon last year. This professor is intimately involved in the participatory research process and he told me how incredibly rewarding one particular project was for him where he had the opportunity to facilitate a meeting between opposing stakeholders and have them find solutions to their own problems through dialogue and discovery. I remember how he lit up when talking about the experience. The four video trainings we held over the course of the week were likewise some of the most gratifying times I’ve had working in development. After the first five to ten minutes of each session, I was almost entirely sidelined and the participants themselves were teaching one another how to use the video camera and encouraging different tactics and ideas. Potato farmers who hadn’t ever held a camera before in their lives were now instructing their neighbors on its use and directing them in theatrical scenes; to watch that process unfold was extraordinary. When we left the communities we were always prodded to reveal our return date and the next activities that were planned.

We returned to Cochabamba two days before I was scheduled to leave Bolivia. I attended one final meeting to share the results of the previous week’s field work and to adapt a survey tool on food security I was hoping to administer in the coming year. I said my goodbyes to friends and colleagues, made a final trip to La Cancha to pick up some gifts for my family, and was on a plane to Miami. The summer ended as abruptly as it began. And though I’d only been gone two and a half months, I was quite eager to return home to see my family and friends.

_______________________________________________

I told my Dad the story of Harley King when I returned home to Pittsburgh after that summer working in California. He’s brought it up in conversation again and again over the years pointing out that the Lord’s indifferent to where I go, what I do, or how badly I stray from the path—he constantly watching over me. I felt that presence again this summer, as strong as ever, and as I type these words from the safety and luxury of a friend’s home in sunny Jacksonville, Florida, I have nothing but thanks.

St. Peter’s Party

2008-08-05T05:39:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 30, 2008
7:43

Part I: Pills, packets, and paternalism

A few days ago the team of nurses and the drivers with whom I’d worked earlier in the month on the nutrition survey began filtering into the World Neighbors office in Cochabamba. The town of San Pedro de Buena Vista was holding a feria, a fair or exhibition, in a couple days to showcase the health and agriculture projects in the region, and some of the World Neighbors staff were gearing up to travel there to participate in the fair. They were also combining the feria with a week-long party to celebrate the patron saint of their town, St. Peter. I had been to San Pedro once before as it was the first community we visited earlier in the month. And I’d been told a few weeks earlier about this feria; it seemed like the perfect venue to explore the relationships between agriculture and nutrition that I’d come here to learn about. At the last minute on Thursday evening I secured a spot in the Landcruiser that was traveling to San Pedro the next day. The World Neighbors office staff would be traveling to San Pedro the following Monday for a two-day meeting with their agricultural field staff and as I was going to attend this meeting anyway, so I planned to just stick around San Pedro over the weekend and meet up with the rest of the gang when they arrived on Monday.

The World Neighbors doctor, two nurses and their two children, and the driver and myself squeezed into the Landcruiser late Friday afternoon for the seven-hour ride to San Pedro. It was quite cozy to say the least. The nurses allow few moments to pass without telling jokes and erupting in hearty laughter however, so the hours passed quickly. Half-way through the journey, the doctor suddenly became interested in all things Andy and proceeded to inquire about topics as diverse as U.S. immigration policy, love and marriage in India, and how it was that I’d completed 28 years of living without finding a wife. My 500-word Spanish vocabulary wasn’t quite up to the task of answering these questions coherently, but numerous stumbling moments aside, I got across some basic points. Paulo the driver, a younger fellow with whom I’d roomed earlier in the month, soon began to interject random questions of his own into the fumbling conversation. Paulo speaks faster than a cattle auctioneer, has a bit of a stutter, and no empathy whatsoever for my broken Spanish. While I was trying to explain the complex depths of the socially-liberated, 20-something bachelor in the U.S., Paulo would shout out a question above the blare of the Bolivian pop music regarding the abundance of skunks in New York state, or my relationship with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I hadn’t encountered a need to learn the Spanish word for “skunk” yet, or the vocabulary necessary to converse on many of the other topics Paulo raised. In fact, I don’t think I would’ve known quite how to answer his questions even if he were speaking to me in fluent English.

Shortly thereafter I was coerced into singing “Hotel California” a capella.

We arrived into San Pedro shortly before midnight. A shanty town had appeared since last I visited. Tarps flung over hastily constructed tree limb frames, and impromptu tents that housed five- and six-member families lined the entire lengths of the town’s two cobblestone streets. Many people milled about even at this late hour. The next day’s feria and the two-day holiday that would follow had drawn a large crowd of visitors. We were told there was no room at the inn. Luckily, a woman took us in and provided us a place to lay our weary heads for the night. I fell asleep in seconds.

The sleepy town that I remembered from only three weeks ago was transformed in the morning. Scores of venders had descended on the central plaza selling handicrafts, fruits and vegetables, housewares, shoes and sandals, and awallos, those ubiquitous brightly-colored blankets that Bolivians in the Andes use as substitutes for backpacks, and sometimes pick-up trucks, for hauling loads of all sizes. Throngs of visitors filed in and out of the massive, white-washed Catholic church that dominated the northwest corner of the plaza and served as the town’s geographic and cultural center. A stage was being assembled in front of the church with large speakers positioned at either end. Around the corner, a rabble of children crowded around a half-dozen foosball tables that had been set up in the plaza’s center. Residents of the shanty town prepared breakfasts of potatoes and corn. Walking venders pushed carts carrying tall stacks of wafer cones and large tubs of pink and white whipped cream. They’d occasionally stop and plunge over-sized metal mixers into the tubs to maintain the cream’s creamy consistency. I became quickly hooked on these tasty treats. Charango players strolled about casually strumming their instruments. The charango is a tiny stringed-instrument, smaller than a ukulele, that has 10 paired strings. Its small size prevents any substantial sustain of the notes, and so it’s played with a tremolo right-hand style. It’s difficult to wander out of earshot of charango music in this town.

Our World Neighbors crew regrouped at the Ministry of Health to prepare for the day’s events. The Ministry doubled as a hospital, and I was introduced to several of the staff there including the one and only town doctor. Later that morning we set up a large tent encircled by a banner reading, Vecinos Mundiales (World Neighbors), and displayed all kinds of posters and materials advertising the health and agriculture projects of the NGO. There were even two Styrofoam jigsaw puzzles for kids to assemble: one of the female genitalia and one of the male. Three of the World Neighbors agriculture promoters were there to assist with the exhibition, and they had brought with them two large plastic tubs full of trout for sale. The trout are farm raised in several communities where their cultivation and consumption are being promoted by World Neighbors. The trout drew much more interest throughout the day than the scores of Depo-Provera contraceptive boxes on display on the main table behind the fish tubs.

I glanced up at one point and spotted the town doctor, whom I was introduced to earlier in the day, manning a table across the way. I walked over. Next to him was an enormous cardboard toothpaste tube display. The tube had eyes, a nose, and a big grin that exposed its pearly white teeth. It was encouraging me to brush at least twice a day. I introduced myself to the doctor as he had forgot that we met earlier. I asked him some questions about the nutrition situation of the kiddies in and around San Pedro, and about his experience with the Bolivian government’s “Zero Malnutrition” program. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, campaigned with this proposed program during his candidacy in 2005. The goal has been to erase child malnutrition by 2010. The goal is impossible to reach in such a short time period, if ever, and the feedback I’ve received from doctors in the region is that the program exists to support the rhetoric of politicians and not the health of the general public. However, the program has managed to provide health posts and municipal hospitals with loads of Nutribebé. Nutribebé is an energy and nutrient supplement that mothers are encouraged to feed to their children twice a day from the ages of 6 to 24 months. The WHO recommends that mothers exclusively breastfeed their children up until the age of six months. This is unheard of in the United States where breastfeeding mothers are somewhat of a pariah, but in most other parts of the world, breastfeeding babies is a fairly common practice. However, very few mothers anywhere in the world feed their babies exclusively breastmilk for the first six months of their life. When mothers begin to wean their children, it is hoped that they’ll provide clean foods with enough energy and diversity of nutrients to satisfy the little ones’ physiological needs for growth and development. Unfortunately, in many places in Bolivia and other parts of the world, such a diversity of energy- and nutrient-rich foods are not abundant or are not culturally-accepted complementary foods. That’s where Nutribebé comes in. Mothers are to receive a new 750 g bag of the stuff every fifteen days and mix 25 g of the powder in with porridges and purees twice a day. If fed as directed, the supplement has enough energy to supply all the kilocalories a breastfed infant needs until about eight months, and a sizeable percentage thereafter. The communities around San Pedro however, like most communities in the north of Potosí, are so far flung, that most mothers don’t actually receive this supplement. They would have to walk many hours to reach the health stations where the supplement is available, and they just can’t spare the time or energy. The health stations for their part, are understaffed with little resources to distribute supplies to the many communities in their charge. As a result, this aspect of the “Zero Malnutrition” program hasn’t had the impact that it intended.

Lack of resources and frustrating geographies aren’t the only barriers to improving child nutrition, however. Nutrition around the world rarely has a home in any one government ministry. Because there are so many underlying causes of child malnutrition (e.g. food insecurity, poor hygiene, inadequate child care practices, unfavorable economic and political environments, misuse of household resources), addressing such causes could fall under the mandate of any number of government ministries. However, no ministry takes sole responsibility for nutrition, and so the nutrition concerns are often neglected (given that nutritional science has emerged through the years from the domain of biochemists and medical doctors, ministries of health have traditionally taken more of a responsibility than anyone for nutrition policy).

The doc informed me, as I had been told earlier by other doctors, that universities don’t really train nutritionists in Bolivia. In fact, the World Neighbors Bolivia nutritionist was trained as a food scientist and is learning nutrition as she goes (and doing an amazing job I might add). The field is nascent at best in Bolivia and medical doctors don’t feel qualified to create or implement nutrition programs in their communities. Back in June, a doctor told me, “I’m a medical doctor, I don’t know anything about nutrition. If we’re going to address nutrition problems in my community, we need to hire someone who understands the problem.” The doctor with whom I was speaking now certainly felt no mandate to do more than hand out Nutribebé, vitamin A pills, and iron drops. He, like other doctors with whom I had spoken, mentioned that he would have to hire a nutritionist in his office in order to make any impact on nutrition in the surrounding communities. Given that his office was understaffed to begin with, he didn’t think there would be resources any time soon to hire someone.

This is the point where sustainable solutions to nutrition concerns become particularly relevant. Where external solutions fail (e.g. energy supplements and micronutrient pills) because of inappropriate targeting, lack of financial resources, or an inadequate distribution infrastructure, I have hope that internal solutions may provide some hope. World Neighbors Bolivia, with its new administration and development perspective, has adopted a decidedly people-centered approach to improving nutrition and agriculture. That perspective deemphasizes paternalistic activities such as seed distribution, or didactic instruction methods and instead prioritizes local knowledge and process management. It’s been exciting to see an organization transform its role in the development arena to one that I’ve been envisioning for myself as a researcher for the past two years—and that is simply a catalyst. We’re neither the reagents nor the products in the chemical reaction equation, but rather the enzyme scribbled in small print above the forward arrow that lowers the activation energy of the entire system. And even that role is transient as it is hoped that the change process, the system, will evolve and become sustainable, finding its own spontaneous path to the desired product. Supporting local famers to step forward and uncover such pathways with resources they already possess is the challenge of such an approach; and the messy, uncertain details of working with people and process through such an approach is why I believe internal solutions are so rarely pursued. I intend to get my hands dirty however, observing, documenting, and understanding this change process, and it’s my hope that we’ll see some change for the better in the children here along the way.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008
20:25

Part II: Special snowflakes

I left the doc and went in search of water. After some wandering I rounded a corner and glanced up the hill in the direction of the town plaza and saw that a large crowd had gathered, choking off the already narrow cobblestone street. I started to walk casually in their direction when a man appeared from an open doorway leading a stubborn cow by a rope into the street. Within seconds the cow was heaved to the ground and a knife was at its neck. The man wielded the knife like a hacksaw tearing through tissue and bone, pulling back on the cow’s head all the time until it appeared unhinged from its body. The animal kicked and lurched, and shrieked in protest. Tremors shook through its body. Its blood ran thick and red down the street, quickly filling the runnels in the hexagonal cobblestones. Another man appeared from a second doorway pulling on another cow into the bright sunlight that now spilled over the spectacle. The slaughter began anew. Five goats, one after another, were then hauled into the killing field and cut open at the neck. I was soon stepping over rivers of blood and piles of feces, the animals having lost control of their bowels when the life was escaping from them.

I looked on in silent disgust when a bloody hand appeared suddenly in my periphery coming quickly at my face. I reeled back to see a woman, three bloody fingers extended, trying to smear blood on my cheek. I kindly declined her offer. She stepped passed me, reached down into a pool of blood that had accumulated between the carcasses, dipped her fingers in it, and proceeded to mark onlookers with a triple streak across their face. I sat down on a small bench next to some children. A man approached me carrying a plastic, turquoise bucket. Inside, a shallow wooden cup floated in what truly appeared to me at the time to be diarrhea. He reached in and scooped out a cupful, handed it to me, and motioned that it needed to go down the hatch. Given that I was currently surrounded by as much death and filth as I had ever encountered together in one place, I was not particularly enticed by this man’s bucket of yuck. I refused. He again motioned that his special gift needed to be imbibed. I continued to refuse his offer for the next five minutes as he stood by indignant, even turning his back on me at one point to show that not only was my behavior unacceptable, but I might even be hurting his feelings. I held out though and he eventually moved on. Everyone around me accepted his liquid refreshment without hesitation, tipping back his cup in one swift motion, and wincing a bit as they brought it away from their lips.

The animals were gutted and skinned. Their heads and hooves were removed. I soon left the crowd and decided to skip lunch for the day.

That evening the World Neighbors’ crew left to go back to Cochabamba. I holed up in the local dormitory/conference center known locally as el centro, and went to meet a recent acquaintance—Rosalia, a nurse in the town hospital who had done contract work with World Neighbors in the past. We had some dinner and then met up with several of her co-workers, including the doctor with whom I had spoken earlier in the day. Our group of six ducked into a shadowy doorway that led into a dark courtyard. As we entered, a pair of men were escorting another fellow out, supported on both their shoulders. His head hung down from his neck like a sock full of rocks and his toes dragged across the ground as he was carried out. We stepped down into the courtyard where a man was loudly serenading a half-circle of friends with song and guitar. A dozen other people milled about and sat chatting. Our group found some empty chairs and formed our own circle. Within minutes a plastic, turquoise bucket was brought out and set in the middle of our circle. A dark liquid lapped against the inside of the bucket as it was set down. I looked around for the bucket man from earlier in the day. I suspected I’d find him crouching in the shadows waiting to see if I’d finally drink from his bucket, having convinced someone else to be the bearer of his twisted beverage. I looked around at the medical professionals that surrounded me. They all seemed quite calm.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Chicha,” they replied in one voice and with more than a hint of incredulity.

Chicha is a fermented beverage made from maize. I read and heard lots about it, but until now hadn’t encountered any. It’s the favorite drink of Bolivians and a must-do activity while traveling here according to the folks from Lonely Planet. The chicha ritual proceeds as follows:

1) the person to your left passes you a wooden cup full of chicha,

2) you thank them,

3) you tip the cup forward slightly to allow some to spill on the ground,

4) you then tip your head back downing the contents as you would a shot,

5) after that, you whip the cup downward and behind you flinging out the chicha dregs and any backwash that might remain in the cup,

6) you dip the cup again in the bucket and pass it readied to the person to your right who then thanks you,

7) repeat steps 2-6.

I’ve done my share of drinking in my share of countries, but I’ve yet to come across a drink whose finer qualities are so totally overshadowed by the manner in which it is consumed. We visited two chicherías that evening finishing two bucketfuls of chicha between the six of us. In the latter establishment I had the pleasure of sitting next to the chicha trash can. All chicha in buckets apparently originates from the chicha trash can. I imagined there must exist somewhere a chicha dumpster or chicha landfill that was appropriated by the wholesalers in a bizarre reversal of the waste disposal chain. The beverage tastes a bit like a weak whiskey sour – not all that bad. But is it really necessary to serve it in containers normally reserved for refuse? Maybe chicha drinkers in the city have infused a bit more class into the process – I suppose I’ll find out eventually.

Campesinos filed into the bar in packs as we drank. They were always led by a charango player strumming a monotonous melody. The point however, wasn’t to be melodic, but rather rhythmic. The throngs of merry-makers that accompanied the musician, danced in chaotic unison to the sounds of the charango. With their hands at their sides they stomped their feet, lifting their knees high into the air and circling one another. They danced as if under the spell of the charango strings’ vibrations. They danced mindlessly. Some sang. Some clapped. All were drunk. When they’d had enough, they danced back out into the street and to the next bar. It was beautiful actually. But something was holding me back from enjoying the evening. On my walk home I realized what it was.

This was the first time I’d drank in Bolivia and the first time since Kazakhstan, a few relatively calm incidents aside in India, that I’d been around lots of drunken men outside the U.S. In Kazakhstan our guard was constantly up in situations like this one because you would inevitably be approached by a drunkard and usually their intentions were not amicable. However, at no time was I harassed or even approached by a drunk the entire time I spent in San Pedro (I’m writing these last paragraphs after the fact). By the evening after the chicha drinking I was stepping over bodies passed out in the street and laying propped up on curbs and in doorways. I felt like the only sober person in town. Fights broke out and women dodged men’s crude advances. The town was thick with debauchery. And so there were plenty of opportunities for unpleasant encounters. But none found me. Perhaps I was lucky, but I do think I observed a distinctly different culture that weekend. One in which a gringo, a foreigner, isn’t a novelty and isn’t a threat, but is rather a constant fixture, a part of the background landscape that deserves no more attention than any other detail that might attract one’s attention.

People keep asking me what I think of Bolivia. I tell them it doesn’t really feel like a foreign country to me. I haven’t been able to pinpoint why I feel that way, why I can’t bring myself to feel that this place is special. And I think I may have just figured it out. I’m not special here. In Kazakhstan, my sitemates and I were the first Americans that the people in my village had ever met. Their previous experiences extended only so far as the boundaries of the Soviet Union, and their knowledge of foreigners began and ended with the whims of the Soviet propaganda machine. Everything we Americans had to offer was new and exciting. A year or so after coming back from Kazakhstan I gained some objectivity on the depression that hit me in the months immediately following my return. It depressed me to be normal. No one stared at me as I walked down the street in the United States. I wasn’t given extra attention or praised for doing ordinary things. All that made me sad. When I realized this I was severely disappointed in myself for having let my humility slip away without even noticing its absence. Here in Bolivia, children in some of the most remote communities will still stare once in awhile. But by and large, my presence isn’t noticed more so than that of anyone else. Gringos are nothing new—Spanish conquest beginning nearly 500 years ago has ensured that. And while I don’t feel that exciting cultural exchange that was ever-present in the East, I find my interactions here are all the more real and meaningful. The cross-cultural exchange that so often lingers in the superficial—rituals, offerings, and observations—has penetrated quickly to dialogue, give-and-take, and mutual understanding. Perhaps most significant of all, I’ve been able to wear my humility on my sleeve throughout the entire process. For someone to whom this does not come easily, it’s been refreshing to say the least.

And so what do I think of Bolivia? I’m much obliged to her. She’s shown me I’m not a special snowflake. While we all have our of own unique size and shape, we continue to do our snow-thing regardless of the time or place. We fall. We dance. We rest. We return to where started. And so rather than marvel at how distinct and special we all are, perhaps it’s the dance that deserves our attention. Perhaps that’s the marvel and we should just get on with it.

Monday, June 30, 2008
21:03

Part III: Out of tune

I went out for a short while this evening to pick up some necessities and some frivolities; that is, toilet paper and a charango, respectively. I negotiated a lower price with the charango venders—a saucy overweight woman, her drunk husband and two children. The instrument looks like a plaything, a bright orange-tinted headstock, bare wooden tuning pegs, a tacky paintjob, and horribly out of tune. Prior to purchasing the instrument, I asked the woman if she could tune it for me once I bought it. Neglecting to look up the word for “to tune” before leaving my room though, I did some charades to get my point across. When I finally bought the thing I offered it to her asking again for help with tuning. She started laughing and said something about my hat. Everyone around her started laughing at me in turn. I think she said, “Yeah sure, I’ll tune it for you if you give me that sombrero you’re wearing!”

Granted, I was wearing a ridiculous hat—a black suede cowboy hat I’d purchased in Cochabamba a few weeks ago. These hats are actually pretty common here, but I think my wearing one only accentuates my gringo-ness. But hey, I like my hat. I looked over the entire charango-selling family. They kept laughing. I smiled, said thanks, and walked away strumming my new five-stringed companion.

I made a loop around town. A large crowd packed around some unseen spectacle. Children had climbed up onto nearby walls and terraces to witness the event. Families filled their balconies to get a view. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I instinctively knew it was a brawl. This was an organized brawl though. One that the locals referred to as tinku. Once this particular showdown ended, a new pair of fighters would go at it—women and children not excluded. It’s a tradition.

As I watched, two young men suddenly broke through the wall of onlookers swinging violently at one another. Their faces were already mashed up pretty good. The punches came as roundhouses mostly and both men kept their heads lowered like draft horses lurching forward under some great weight. I spotted a few camcorders around the pugilists, craning up over the crowed, straining for a better view of the bout. I continued to strum my charango.

I’d been hoping to find someone to help me tune my new purchase. And fortunately, I spotted a familiar face in crowd—Rosalia. She was standing arm-in-arm with her nephew taking in the display of fisticuffs. I asked her if she knew how to tune a charango. She didn’t. Neither did her nephew. She then pointed to someone behind me.

“Don Marco knows how to tune charangos,” she said pointing to a man who was descending a light pole wearing teethed metal boot rungs. The man took off his climbing gear and placed a spent lamp bulb in his shoulder bag. He began walking in our direction.

“Don Marco!” Rosalia called out. Don Marco came over.

“What do you need?” he said.

“Could you help this hombre tune a charango?” Rosalia asked.

“Right now?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I offered Don Marco my charango. He began tuning it.

“How much did he pay for this?” he asked Rosalia a few minutes later.

“How much did you pay for that?” Rosalia asked me.

“100 bolivianos,” I said.

“100 bolivianos.”

“He better watch out that someone doesn’t steal this from him,” Don Marco said to Rosalia.

“You better watch out that someone doesn’t steal that from you,” Rosalia informed me.

I nodded. Don Marco tuned. Rosalia left.

I spent a few more minutes watching Don Marco tune the charango and test play it. He cautioned me about some aspect of how the strings were wound around the tuning pegs incorrectly making it difficult to keep in tune. He then instructed me on some other choice aspects of the instrument, but it was all gibberish to my ears.

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

“For what?” he replied.

Now several hours later, the charango still sounds grossly out of tune. At least, I can’t produce a chord that doesn’t make me cringe and want to heave the thing out the window. I decided a while ago to just tune it like a guitar. That didn’t work too well either. So, I put down my Bolivian ukulele, pulled out my laptop, and began exploring long-neglected file folders. In a folder entitled “College Years” I read a term paper I’d written on GoodFellas, a draft of the treatment I’d written for my senior thesis documentary, and a letter I’d written to Kevin McClatchy, then CEO of the Pittsburgh Pirates, asking for a chance to intern with the Bucos. I read love letters that made me sad. And I also came across a stream-of-consciousness journal entry that I’d written in early 2002. I actually remember writing the entry over a two- or three-week period during the Christmas and New Year’s break from classes that year. Here’s an excerpt:

[I was told] last night that you can never see everything. You can never know everything. I’d like to try though. Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want is my problem I suppose. I don’t know who I am. Do I need to know one to know the other? I know I want to be at peace with myself. I want to be happy. Beyond that, I don’t think I’ve ever known. If there’s one thing that I’ve found throughout my college education it’s that I want to do so many things. At the same time, I want to feel accomplished and skilled at them all but my personality won’t allow for it. I seem to want to learn a little about everything and keep moving on. I get bored maybe. Or maybe I’m lazy.

I went on to spell out my dreams, goals, and aspirations in rambling detail. I wanted to be a great filmmaker. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunities I’d been given in life to change the world. I wanted to learn. And find God. I wanted to love with everything I had. I wanted to find peace. And I wanted to be a great mountaineer.

This is all going to be hard work to change myself and mold myself into the person I want to be. It’s going to take me overhauling and dropping many of my natural habits. It’s going to take a lot of work. But I can hack it. I will.

Over six years later and I suppose I still have the same confusions, the same desires (well, maybe I have more realistic expectations now about some day rivaling Tenzing Norgay on the peaks of the Himalayas). It was a strange and humbling experience to read that entry. I sounded terribly confused. I sounded immature. But it was unequivocally me. I laughed out loud several times as I read the words on my screen. I could see the beginnings of my ongoing struggle with religion. And I could see the same doubts and uncertainties that I still cling to today. I’m older now, and my perspective on the world has broadened, but I inevitably remain who I am. You can crank those tuning pegs all you like, but it's the inherent qualities of the instrument that will allow you to arrive at pitch or not, and will determine how quickly you digress from it. The wood and craftsmanship we are provided with—they're unchanging. It's our job to merely wind the pegs, ever adjusting and readjusting them to produce the tones we desire. Funny, I feel like I've been out of tune for so long.

12 Days

2008-06-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

The following entries are notes from the field survey I participated in earlier this month. I was hoping to post some of these entries earlier, but I just didn't get around to it. Looking back on what I wrote, it seems I was most motivated to journal when the days offered up some challenges. However, most of the other days were smooth sailing. The thoughts from those other days are still scribbled down in a notepad and I have yet to translate them into coherent blog entries. Hopefully I'll be disciplined enough to sit down and do that in the coming weeks. For now though, here are entries for three of the twelve days we spent wandering the Bolivian countryside.

Day 1 – Leaving Cochabamba

Friday, May 30, 2008
22:14

Today was a day in transit. I’ve been working eleven and twelve hour days this week in preparation for the field work that will begin tomorrow. Yesterday, I met 4 of the 5 nurses that will actually be administering the food frequency survey and anthropometric assessments that we’ve been planning. We held a training session for them on the use of the PDAs that they’ll be using to conduct the surveys and I led a session on proper anthropometric field methods. The tagline for my graduate school career, “Fake it ‘til you make it,” proved itself valid during the session as most of the field nurses had plenty more experience measuring children’s heights and weights than I. However, I believe I played my role convincingly, pulling together a nice PowerPoint presentation, assembling methods theory from several sources, and handing out protocol reports.

I felt like a fraud.

The nurses aren’t working with some of the recommended equipment for this job, and so many of the methods I was instructing on were only moderately relevant to the actual field contexts in which the nurses will be working. Last summer in India I found myself frustrated and indignant quite often when procedures were operating at a less-than professional level, or when my expectations for rigor were not upheld. However, here I find myself quite calm with the realities on the ground that almost always seem to contradict the theory in the classroom. I wonder sometimes if all my professors are super-researchers that somehow make the field practice match what’s in textbooks and lectures by conquering all the logistical and resource constraints that NGOs and other program-implementing organizations inevitably face. Somehow, the feelings of inadequacy that pervade graduate school are reaching me even here at 16º20'S latitude, 2258m, and 6700 kilometers from Ithaca, NY.

So, back to the transit. Eleven people packed into two vehicles around 12:30PM today and set out for the first of five regions where this survey will be conducted over the next ten days. Six nurses, three support staff (ambiguous term for people like me for whom we’re not sure what they’re doing here), and two drivers. We’ll call the driver for the vehicle in which I was riding (a Toyota Landcruiser with a large windshield sticker displaying the word: “Toyosa”) Miguel. Miguel has been with World Neighbors for fifteen years or so now and is quite the resourceful fellow (as most drivers I’ve met in developing country settings inevitably are). He brought with him on this trip equal parts CD player and CD. Unfortunately for all of us in the car, he only brought one CD player. As inevitable as these drivers are handy (e.g. when the second vehicle in our quasi-caravan broke down a few hours into our journey today, Miguel rapidly repaired the damaged hose that was the origin of the problem with a plastic bag, a wrench, and some twine), they also undoubtedly play their music at volumes that would drown out nearby jet engines. Miguel’s CD, a compilation of about 20 Spanish-language, synthesizer-heavy pop ballads, played on repeat for the entire eight-hour journey from Cochabamba to San Pedro, our destination.

Not far outside of Cochabamba, the more opulent-looking gated homes gave way to communities of one- and two-room adobe shacks arranged haphazardly, and often sheltered behind long, clay walls with a select few disinterested townsfolk situated in front keeping watch over the passing traffic. This outsider’s perspective missed numerous cultural details that I’m sure explain many of my confusions, but there were several conspicuous exceptions to the general decline in wealth that accompanied the increasing distance from the city center. Rather large, well-kept, meticulously gated homes intermingled with the otherwise general landscape of deprivation. It was as if these homes were craned in and dropped into these communities, squashing the unlucky patchwork of the dozen or so shacks whose footprints these homes more than consumed.

We soon turned off the two-lane highway that carried us out of the city and onto a network of arduously-laid cobblestone streets, complete with stone drainage ditches lining their sides. These took us through numerous hamlets, larger villages, and past an enormous reservoir of chocolaty water that was piped through the mountains to feed irrigated lands near Cochabamba. The near-destitute communities that circled the reservoir however, were obviously in need of water for their own parched fields. The residents seemed to be scraping an existence off of tiny parcels of sun-soaked, thirsty earth. But no water came from the nearby reservoir.

Political slogans and declarations of revolution scrawled on every conceivable public edifice are commonplace here in Bolivia. The public commentaries give you the sense that the citizens of this country are constantly fired up about the politicians and their policies that shape day-to-day life. This phenomenon was certainly not absent in the mountain town we passed through. “Evo=Hambre” (hunger) was spray painted on a highway billboard, referring to the country’s current, and first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Evo was elected in December 2005 on a reform platform promising to ameliorate the plight of coca growers in the country and refocus political power to the country’s indigenous minority. I’ve been surprised to find such vehement opposition to the man by so many here, but I suppose that is to be expected. Similar feelings of abandonment and failure of leadership were evident in the early days of South Africa’s democracy as the pervasive poverty of the country’s black African majority, long-persecuted by the apartheid government, was not quickly alleviated by a change in administration. Of course, reversing centuries of oppression and a colonial legacy that impoverished so many takes more than a few years to accomplish. Nonetheless, equally abundant were slogans such as “Evo MAS” and “Contigo somos MAS” (with you we are MAS) advocating for Evo Morales’s party, Movimiento al Socialismo. The constituency of this country is certainly more engaged in the political process than back home.

The cobblestone turned to dirt roads after the first few hours of our drive and stayed that way until we reached San Pedro. We seemed to climb endless mountain roads for endless hours, but upon reaching San Pedro, I was told that we were actually at a slightly lower altitude than in Cochabamba. The spectacular scenes that passed by my window however, gave no clue that we were in the same world, let alone at the same elevation as Cochabamba. Increasingly more majestic mountain ranges appeared over each crest in the road. I hurried to snap a photo or two of a range of peaks that would quickly disappear from view only to find a more jaw-dropping view around the next turn. We entered one valley that was particularly noteworthy.

In my first entry in this blog I commented on the dry riverbeds that carved their way through the bloated ridges I observed from the air during my flight into Cochabamba. These apparently dry washes however, concealed thin spindles of snaking rivers whose now diminished strength still worked at the earth creating cut banks and point bars even though they were cradled by a 100 meters or more of dry riverbed sediment on either side. I was told later that these beds fill with water to sizeable depths during the rainy season (January – March). We entered such a valley and left it hours later as we had to first descend and then ascend the two great walls of rock that this unimpressive river splintered in two. The scene was incredible. The narrow roads we were driving on presented endless switchbacks, crowding close to sheer ascents on one side, and dropping away into precipitous cliff faces on the other side. Our drivers navigated the turns with seasoned experience though. I only occasionally felt as if my life were in danger.

A pit stop to down some citrus and a car repair aside, we were out of that valley and into a highlands region where a resident population began to reappear. Men and women, bent forward from the load they bore on their backs, guided their donkeys along the roadsides. I doubt my spelling or understanding is entirely correct, but the indigenous people here in Bolivia, including the ever-present cholitas I’ve mentioned earlier, carry their cargo in awallos, brightly-colored blankets knit from llama’s wool. These garments are used to carry anything from potatoes to handicrafts to children. They’re quite beautiful and are simply pervasive throughout this region of Bolivia (and most other Andean regions I would imagine). Parades of lambs scattered as we sped by, determined dogs chased us for long minutes, and friendly campesinos provided us with warm smiles and waves despite the noise and choking clouds of dust that accompanied our vehicles’ passing.

Darkness finally came and the power lines we’d been following for hours on end throughout the day demonstrated their worth. Pinpoints of light decorated the shadows of distant homes. It reminded me of the scale-model communities my Dad would set up around the train set under our Christmas tree when I was a kid. I remember staring at the miniature buildings, lit from within, and wondering at the goings-on inside the tiny structures. I wondered now at the daily struggles and uncertain futures concealed in the idyllic settings through which we now passed. A few more times through Miguel’s CD and we stopped at a non-descript structure. I welcomed the chance to stretch and take in some mountain air. I stepped out of the Landcruiser and glanced up at the night sky. I saw the Milky Way clearly, and thousands upon thousands of stars shining distinctly without the haze of ground clutter to dull their presence. The air was crisp. I found out that World Neighbors owns the one-room structure we were stopped at and it served as a stockroom at the fork in the road between two communities the organization serves. We were heading south toward San Pedro. But taking the road the other direction would lead one to Sak’ani, another region that we’d be visiting in a few days. We dropped off several boxes full of Depo-Provera, vitamin A- and E- fortified vegetable oil, and cookies. The vegetable oil and cookies were for families participating in our survey. The vials of hormonal injections are for World Neighbors’ continuing family planning programs.

San Pedro reminds me of Robert Zemeckis’s interpretation of the North Pole in the film, The Polar Express. I hear the San Pedro region has a population of about 10,000 people, but passing through this town you wouldn’t guess that it houses more than a couple thousand. Quaint, narrow cobblestone streets (well, I only ever observed two streets in the whole town) were flanked by one- and two-story boxy structures, some homes, some doubling as stores and residences. Occasional street lamps cast intermittent shadows and the silhouette of mountains surrounded the town in all directions. The town’s presence in this place felt distinctly surreal, as if this assemblage of buildings and people that provided such calm and sense of peace didn’t belong in an environment so rugged and seemingly unforgiving. San Pedro was a specter that only appeared at night.

We unpacked and went to sleep in the dormitory where we’d be spending the next two days. The town was very much there the next morning though as we prepared for our first visit to the communities.

Day 5—Molle Molle

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
18:58

Full court basketball and overly-confident, non-altitude-adjusted gringo don't mix well. Take it from me.

I was sick all night fighting off feverish symptoms, back pain from my mattress that contoured to my body leaving me U-shaped while I slept, my one roommate’s incessant snoring and the other’s soporific monologues. I misjudged my ability to engage in an intense sport at nearly 3000m. I’ve been doing fine these past few days on the long hikes we’ve been taking to reach the participating communities. Granted, it has been more difficult to catch my breath on these hikes, but not incredibly so, and I suppose that left me with a false sense of security about how well I’ve adjusted to the altitude (not to mention that fact that I didn’t have any of the headaches or nausea that I was told would accompany my layover in La Paz when I first arrived). But, I shouldn’t have been so brash. Three half court games later and I was spent. My heart felt as if it were about to explode out of my chest. I sat down to watch the others play a few games on the surprisingly well-maintained court adjacent to the church where we were staying. Every town we’ve passed thus far, no matter how tiny or remote, seems to have made the appropriate funding allocations for a basketball court. And they all seem to be in as a good a shape as this one. Not long after we began playing, a group of local ballers caught wind of the Cochabambinos in their backyard and decided to challenge us. We played a chaotic, full-court game of 5-on-5 in the fading light of dusk. I suppose that game put me over the edge.

I returned to the group in the church courtyard to find my Canadian colleague discussing the plight of aboriginals in her homeland. I joined the discussion for a short time, but found that my entire body was shaking and I felt terrible. I went into my room to lay down and was there for the next 12 hours until I awoke at seven the next morning. I popped some Ibuprofen and felt decent for most of the morning. Today I was working with María and Julia for the first time. María is the most experienced of the six nurses who are conducting these surveys. She was one of the original nurses to administer the survey when it began three years ago. This is the first time however, that Julia has worked with this survey. Miguel drove us a short distance out of town into the enormous riverbed that divides the two ridgelines forming the predominant features of the environment around Toracarí, the municipal zone in which we were now working. As all rivers we’ve encountered thus far, this one was almost entirely dry with only a handful of scattered, shallow streams cutting narrow channels in the rocks and sediment of the riverbed. We were dropped off and walked a short distance up a tributary channel that connected to the main river, and then cut sharply into the mountains to reach our destination—Molle Molle. The hike was not easy and when we finally reached the common house that was to serve as the measuring station for this community, I realized how much it had taken out of me. And the Ibuprofen was wearing off. The next five hours are somewhat of a blur. I was of almost no help to the nurses, only fielding a few questions about the PDAs and checking a few height measurements. Mostly I sat in a daze trying to stay conscious, fighting bizarre bouts of nausea, dizziness, and debilitating weakness.

When we first arrived in Molle Molle, we were told that no one in the community was informed of our visit. That is to say, they were told we’d be coming on a different date. María and Julia have some serious pipes however, and proceeded to shout into the hills calling for the local population to flock to them. I like to believe they were saying, “Come on down here! We have oil!” I’m fairly certain I’m not far off with that translation. After the initial round of yelling, a young woman in a homestead at the top of the hill that was directly above the common house and visible from where we stood, climbed a tree and began sounding a bullhorn. And when I say bullhorn, I mean the horn of a bull. I suppose that’s where the term comes from. She was fairly proficient at blowing the thing too. I half expected the Rohiram to show up in grand fashion churning earth and thundering their way towards us. That didn’t happen, but somehow residents of Molle Molle filtered in and we soon had a full house.

As was the case yesterday, we weren’t about to get a ride back to Toracarí. So, we hoofed it back into town in the height of the day’s heat. I followed behind Frida, concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other. I glanced up into the sky on a few occasions hoping that I’d see a cloud or two that might shield the sun and provide some temporary relief from the blazing heat. But, there’s no moisture in this place though—only dust and stone.

I was smart enough to bring a towel with me today to ward off the sun’s rays that have thoroughly burned my face and neck during the past three days. Just goes to show that you should always follow the lead of the locals. Everyone on our team, except us foreigners, brought along big, floppy, wide-brimmed hats that serve as perfect protection from the sun. For certain, that’s my first purchase as soon as I can find a store. We stopped several times back in the main river channel as María and Julia attempted to catch the ear of one of the mother’s whose child we still had to measure. “Doña Julia! Doña Julia!” they shouted for long minutes at the adjacent ridge where a single thatched-roof home stood shaded by a single tree. Doña Julia never came out, and we carried on walking back.

When we returned to our bunks in the churchyard, I crashed for awhile skipping the afternoon meal. We soon packed up and headed for the next survey region—Sak’ani. In the Landcruiser I learned that there was a mini-mutiny among the nurses. The current survey was planned for a total of 10 days. Two days in each of five survey regions. Past surveys allotted three days per region to allow time to hunt down those families that missed the previous day’s measuring session. Because the PDAs were introduced into this month’s survey, it was decided that only two days per region would be necessary because of the reduced time it takes to administer the surveys using the PDAs. However, time per survey and attendance at measuring sessions are mutually exclusive so that no matter how quickly you’re able to complete the surveys, if certain individuals don’t show, you have to build in time to find them. That was not thought of in advance of this survey. And so the nurses were initially asked to stick around for an extra three days at the end of the ten-day period to account for missing families. They abandoned that plan though. So now, I believe that the World Neighbors nutritionist and myself will be returning to these communities in mid-June to finish the survey.

There’s been a general sense of disappointment in the success of this survey. There have been too many changes happening at once with poor communication and an absence of bottom-up planning. A similar World Neighbors survey was completed recently in Ecuador using PDAs for the first time and the survey was a great success. However, those persons administrating the survey were involved early on in the planning of the survey and in the transition to using PDAs. Here, the nurses were not notified at all that PDAs would be used. The PDA training happened the day before we left for the field, the nurses were told not long before this survey began that their jobs were in jeopardy due to lack of funding, and there has been a sudden appearance of new faces coordinating this survey including myself, and two others. Too many changes, too short a window of time, and not enough inclusion of participating parties. All in all, there are some good take-home messages here about proper communication and planning.

Day 8 – Kisivillque

Friday, June 6, 2008

Today has been a very trying day. I woke up anxious to begin the measurement error exercise that was delayed for the first six days of this field work because it was promised that the communities we would be visiting today would provide the opportunity to carry it out. We reviewed the details of the activity last night with the nurses who seemed less than thrilled about the idea. It feels like I’ve put a lot of effort into planning this exercise and mustering support for it over the past two weeks: a flurry of e-mails exchanged between a professor of mine at Cornell regarding logistics and sample size requirements, human subjects approval documents, discussions with the nurses and World Neighbors staff, and discussions with the technical advisor for the survey. All that has left me feeling quite invested in this seemingly unimportant activity. But no one else gives a damn, and that’s my first and last mistake. Somehow the exercise has come to represent my ability to exert any sort of meaningful, robust research effort in the midst of this nutritional survey and general research environment that is distinctly out of my control. However, the exercise, and my apparent ability to pull any weight here, both failed pretty miserably today.

The Master does his job
and then stops.
He understands that the universe
is forever out of control,
and that trying to dominate events
goes against the current of the Tao.
Because he believes in himself,
he doesn’t try to convince others.
Because he is content with himself,
he doesn’t need others’ approval.
Because he accepts himself,
the whole world accepts him.

— Lao-tzu

I was told last night that we would be leaving at 7:30AM sharp. However, it was nearly 8AM before we were on the road. We climbed anywhere from 500 to 1000m in altitude on our way to Kisivillque, our destination for the day. I’m not quite sure what elevation we’re at here in Sak’ani, but I got a definitive figure for the elevation when we arrived in Kisivillque—3997m. And I was feeling all 13,000 feet of it (my hand shook as I scribbled down some notes, my head began to ache, and short walks made me dizzy). The landscape became more barren at times during the hour-long drive. Bony rock outcroppings pushed up through the last remaining layers of sediment forming a wall of naked incisors. The sky felt within arm’s reach. We passed by two small lakes. On the forward journey, the one was still enough to reflect the tall spine of rock that overlooked it; the other felt more lonesome with a small, red- and blue-painted row boat stranded on its gravelly shore.

I rode alone in the back of the Landcruiser. Several of the nurses in the front two seats tossed candies to children (and adults) that we passed along the way. They were amused, and the kids chased us down like we were the ice cream truck. One boy ran up to our moving vehicle with a “do-or die” look of intent on his face as he reached for the candy in our driver’s outstretched hand. I’m not in favor of giving hand-outs, but candy makes kids happy. ‘Nuff said.

A fellow named Ricardo (as a reminder, I’m changing all the names in this blog for anonymity sake – the blog’s posted on a public website) from the World Neighbors team of agricultural technical advisors met us in a now-familiar dusty courtyard surrounded by a few adobe structures. Looking around it seemed that Kisivillque was the most population- dense village I’d visited so far. I could see 10-20 thatched-roof huts from where I stood, most clustered around a handful of walking paths. The close proximity of the surrounding communities to Kisivillque made this community a good choice for carrying out this measurement exercise. We needed all three nurse teams together in one location to make this thing work. The first news we received from Ramiro however, was that the other two communities, Mallcuchapi and Chiwirita, did not “get along” with Kisivillque and thus would not be showing up. Apparently, Kisivillque receives all the attention from local NGOs and the other communities were jealous of its star status. So, that threw a wrench in things from the get go.

A quick summary of what this whole measurement exercise entails. Ideally, you’d have about fifty kids and all the nurses, or teams of nurses, would measure all the kids twice. You do this to gauge which nurse team is most consistent in their measurements, and then you can compare the other nurse teams to the most precise nurse team to get a quantitative assessment of the measurement error in your study. This still doesn’t really tell you much about accuracy (i.e. the most precise nurse team could still be getting the wrong height measurements, just consistently so), but it is important to report for study comparability, for adjusting your analyses, and for being able to tell if any one team’s measurement error might be erasing potential geographic variation in the data. So, fifty kids, each team of nurses measures 20 of them twice.

The first problem in this context is that the nurse teams are never together in the same place. Because of how distant each community is from the next, it only makes sense to split up and tackle each community separately. Second, most communities are small, with only 10-15 kids under five years of age. But perhaps the largest problem of all is that no one wants to do this exercise. I was told by one colleague that the nurses have been referring to it as “Andy’s exercise.” They see it as distinctly separate from the World Neighbors survey and as some sort of evaluation of their abilities. In fact, they made us pay for lunch for everyone for the day out of our own pocket because they insisted it was not a World Neighbors activity and I suppose it was inconveniencing the group. Plain and simple, they see this as just another change in their routine that they’re being forced to roll with (including the fewer number of days to conduct the survey, the PDAs, the potential loss of their jobs, and the new faces). I don’t blame them at all. I had hoped something like this exercise had been done early on when the survey first started. As I understand it, reporting measurement reliability data is a fairly standard practice and I was surprised to find out it hadn’t been done here. I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the number of assumptions and short-cuts that have been taken in the work here. I’m a perfectionist, granted, but I’m also trying to conduct research that’s going to have to pass some very high quality standards and I’d like to make it the best work possible. So, I was hoping to carry out this exercise for admittedly selfish reasons, but also to make sure the data resulting from the hard work these nurses have been doing for the past three years are more readily accepted by those who might make decisions based on them. You simply can’t walk in with a top-down approach however, and expect things to go smoothly. I knew it then and I know it now. But somehow I always seem to be learning this lesson. I’m not sure what other decisions I could have made in such a short time frame though.

Weighing and measuring a child six times is not an easy task. The nurses objected early on. I suggested a few changes to make things go more quickly and we made it through the first four kids without much trouble. They soon began to stop measuring children twice though and in general just reported the same measurements as they had made previously. Miguel, the driver, then showed up to let us know the other communities’ families were waiting for us and wouldn’t wait any longer if we didn’t leave now to go measure them. I asked for fifteen more minutes with all three nurse teams in the hope that we could squeeze in a few more children (we hadn’t even hit ten kids yet), but one nurse team soon packed up and said they didn’t want to stay anymore. There really was nothing I could do. I have no authority here and the nurses could care less about this exercise. In the end, each nurse team weighed and measured only five children.

I was pretty frustrated and vented in my usually way—going silent. I strolled about the homesteads surrounding the building where the measurements were taking place. Some women were tending to herds of llamas and sheep. A few stray donkeys milled about in a field of harvested wheat. I walked behind an outhouse (which I hadn’t seen in other communities, but were abundant here) to see two woman stomping about in a patch of earth squashing potatoes. Further up the hill an entire family was doing the same thing. I approached them, said hello and looked awkward as they spoke to me in Quechua.

“I don’t speak Quechua,” I said in Quechua. That’s my one and only Quechua line.

They continued speaking to me in Quechua. I smiled.

“What are you doing?” I asked in Spanish.

More Quechua.

I said, “Papas.” That’s potatoes, not daddies.

They said yes and laughed at me.

Peace Corps provided ample time to become accustomed to being perceived as a twenty-something kindergartener. And so none of these fumbling conversations do much damage to my ego.

I walked over to a man bundling wheat and we exchanged a few words in Spanish. The men in these communities usually speak some Spanish. In this case, it was enough for me to understand that the women were making chuño, a popular dish here that is basically dehydrated potatoes. I tried to ask some questions about legumes, but all I discovered was that they grow fava beans and a little tarwi, the local lupin variety we’re promoting. I said goodbye with a smile.

Everyone had their World Vision gear on in this community as in the last two communities I visited. I was told before coming here that there were really no other NGOs working in these areas other than World Neighbors, but it’s been pretty apparent that World Vision has a pervasive presence in these communities. World Vision is a Christian charity organization. Their method of working with communities seems to be giving out lots of stuff: hats, bags, posters, food, clothes, you name it. I definitely get the feeling that this irks some of the World Neighbors staff because their perspective is one of empowerment (though they give out vegetable oil and cookies to mothers and children who come to participate in this survey and have been pushing free birth control for a few years now in participating communities). In the room where we were measuring the kids, a World Vision poster hung on the wall, the same one I’d seen in nearly every common house we’ve visited. It has a photo of a man walking up a mountain road wearing traditional Bolivian garb, a colorful pointy hat and vest, holding his son’s hand and smiling. Written across the photo in Spanish read:

“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’”

—Matthew 3:17

Next to it hung a different poster—this of a woman exposing her breasts advertising car parts.

A soundtrack for the commute

2008-06-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
21:18

I rode my bike around campus a lot when I was in college. It was a green Murray mountain bike. A veteran 15 speed that should’ve been sold for scrap years before. I received it as a gift in 8^th grade and just couldn’t let go. I remember the first time I threw in headphones while coasting with the “Murr” down Shortlidge Avenue on Penn State’s campus. I must’ve been toting a portable CD player, one of those ones that skipped when you rolled over even a pebble in the road while driving with it hooked up to your car’s tape deck. I could be misremembering, but even if mp3 players were out back then, I’m too much of a luddite to have bought one. I remember the music changed the landscape as I rode. It was like watching scenes from a movie colored by a soundtrack that lent a major or minor key to whatever images rolled by—the director’s way of communicating dissonant emotions from otherwise ordinary pictures. Except these scenes were live, playing out in front of me as I cycled by on my rickety bike. I was hooked.

I threw my mp3 player into my travel bags last week almost as an afterthought. The postage stamp-sized gadget didn’t make it onto one of my famous lists—this one outlining the necessities for my trip to Bolivia. But it arrived with me here nonetheless and this morning it accompanied me to work for the first time. The Garden State soundtrack. Coldplay. Who would've thought the music from Zach Braff’s “love letter to New Jersey” would have had relevance in the Bolivian Andes, but I felt the pull of those musical brush strokes as strong as ever. Today it was Chris Martin’s apathetic pleas assuring me “we live in a beautiful world”, Jonny Buckland’s slippery solos, and that soft underbelly of bass painting the comings and goings of the everyday people who passed by as I walked. The music gave contrast to what might’ve otherwise seemed dull. It brought down a hush on the noise of the traffic.

___________________________________

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
18:49

The moon was full and sluggish this evening. Walking home it seemed to be trying not nearly hard enough to lift itself skyward. Instead it settled off in the distance, almost eye-level, content to perch lazily above the horizon and expose the full face that it had displayed infinite times before. The walks to and from work this past week have been uninteresting. I think because I haven’t been present to enjoy them. I’ve been mostly scattered and distant since returning from the field last week. My mind has trouble focusing on a task for longer than a few minutes and I seem to have lost my sense of purpose in being here.

Yesterday my host father drove me to the large market area in Cochabamba known as la Cancha. He needed to pick up curtain rods and I was aiming to replace a few of the items that I had lost. We entered a cramped store, open to the street and seemingly jammed in sideways among an endless row of similar shops that extended off into the distance of a long consumer corridor. The store’s mp3 players were variously labeled with tiny white price stickers. Some had dollars signs before the numbers, others the Romanized symbol for the Japanese yen.

“Are the prices in dollars?” I asked.

“The prices are in dollars,” replied the storekeeper—a woman whose lunch I was interrupting.

My host father poked around behind me looking very interested at the assortment of electronic goodies sprayed about the store behind glass cases.

“Do you have any others that are around that price range?” I asked. I pointed to a music player that read “$20.” The woman pointed to a row of players tagged with the numbers “150.”

“Do you have anything in the $20 price range?” I asked. I wasn’t at all confident I’d gotten my message across the first time in Spanish.

“Yes,” she replied. She again pointed to the pricey models at the front of the case.

My host dad broke away from his gadget-gazing and interceded. “How much are those ones there?” he asked, pointing to the same items the woman had drawn my attention to.

“150 bolivianos,” she replied.

I looked at the symbol next to the “150” on the tag of the mp3 player she was pointing to: “¥.”

A boliviano is the local currency (as well as the adjective for a native Bolivian) that exchanges at about 7 bolivianos to the U.S. dollar. And though it must be confusing for the currency speculators on the foreign exchange market, it seems to have the same symbol as the Japanese yen. You learn something every day.

Regardless, I’m now the proud owner of a fluorescent green QBOS mp3 player. Little fish swim by blowing bubbles to introduce the next tune on the LED display. And there’s a menu to file away the names of your personal contacts, though I’ll be sticking to my little black address book for that particular task. I threw in the headphones of the player as I walked home this evening. The moon lounged. When the music faded up my eyes immediately opened to the street life around me that I’d somehow overlooked for the past seven days. The shallow, sewage-filled river I cross reflected nearby streetlamps with an iridescent toxic glow. Bottom-dwelling plants waved excitedly as a steady stream of water flowed by. A man with thick glasses stood on the corner of a busy intersection with his hands clasped comfortably behind him staring into the oncoming traffic. His disinterested gaze suggested he could have been counting headlights as easily as he could have been waiting for a ride. A mother and daughter exchanged easy words outside their convenience store, enjoying a lull in the flow of customers and putting aside the sewing needles that had occupied their in-between time all day. Their aprons matched. Two school boys held hands to cross the road, their near-empty backpacks bounced up and down as they skipped across the street and bounded up onto the opposite curb. The adolescent crew of a tire repair shop toiled away under the harsh light of a single bulb, inverting a massive chunk of rubber with an iron bar. Their hands and faces were black from their work.

I brought my arm down and my wrist snapped a snare shot on the air drum kit I was playing just as a ferocious, snarling bark broke the trance the music and parade of images had cast over me. I jumped with a startle. The snarling continued in the deep shadows behind the gate I slowly passed. But the music played on, extricating me from the outside world, but somehow rooting me more firmly in it than my unassisted senses had allowed.

____________________________________________

Colin Hay was there with me too that first musical morning a few weeks ago, spouting his poetry and playing his melodies. I’ve been feeling his chorus so often these days. You’ll never read these words. But I suppose they’re meant for me, like Colin’s were meant for him.

A quantum leap...in place

2008-06-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 12, 2008
18:21

Sam Beckett disappears into a halo of twinkly blue light. But instead of leaping into his next charge, he appears as himself. He looks around calmly and finds himself in a tastefully-decorated living room. Ray Charles sings “Georgia On My Mind” from a record player. A woman in the next room with short brown hair curled up in a bob slow dances with no one. Sam says her name.

“Beth.”

She turns with a startle and looks at Sam. She’s crying.

“I want to tell you a story, “ Sam says. “But instead of starting with ‘once upon a time,’ I want to start with the happy ending.

“Al’s alive,” he tells her. “And he’s coming home.”

I’m singing the theme song to Quantum Leap in my head as I write this. Why was I thinking about the last scene of the last episode of one of the last great shows on television? Well, probably because all references in my life seem to come from cinematic scenes and scripted dialogue. That episode in particular has always moved me. But more than that, I’d like to start with the unhappy ending to the story of my past two weeks here in Bolivia.

A bunch of my stuff was stolen.

How’s that for drama? I have a pile of scribbled field notes, half-conceived journal entries, complete entries, a spattering of memories, and a host of images that I’d like to compile neatly into this blog. At the moment though, I’m not nearly that together. So, I’ll just tell you what’s on my mind.

_________________________________________

It snowed in the mountains last night. Walking to the office this morning the highest peaks encircling Cochabamba looked like they’d been dusted with powered sugar. The sun just set behind those same mountains about thirty minutes ago and clouds, a rare sight here, pressed up behind the craggy summits scattering the sun’s rays in bursts of orange and red. I went for a walk to take out some money and buy chapstick—the first of the stolen items that I was hoping to replace. I walked into a store with a sign out front reading Farmacia. The woman behind the counter turned to me holding a crying baby swaddled up like a cabbage.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Good afternoon,” she replied.

I looked inquisitively at the items behind the glass counter. She stared at me.

“I don’t know how to say in castellano,” I said, “but I’m looking for, well, for the lips.”

She looked up at me confusedly and paused. The baby cried. “Oh,” she said. She walked away. A moment later a younger woman came out. I pointed to the rack of brightly colored “Chap-Ex” tubes on the other side of the counter.

“The lips,” I said. “The lips.”

She pulled the rack closer to me and I chose “key west lime” flavor with aloe, vitamin E and SPF 15. I handed over the money and said thank you. “For what?” she replied. I didn’t have a good answer to that question so I left the store and walked back to the office. A young man on the sidewalk a few hundred meters down the road from the pharmacy was making preparations to load a severely handicapped, wheelchair-bound man into the back of a car. The man in the wheelchair looked up at me and I looked back at him. I’m not sure if I gave a smile, or how I looked. But the ache I’d been feeling at the loss of my possessions quickly faded and my attention focused suddenly on my legs, moving across the pavement one in front of the other as seamless as could be.

On the car ride back to Cochabamba two days ago I felt broken. Myself, a team of six nurses, two drivers, and for a large part of the trip, two other support staff, had traveled to thirty communities in five regions of Northern Potosí over a period of twelve days. This area of Bolivia is where I’m planning to carry out my dissertation research, and is one of the poorest regions in all of Latin America. The car ride was tedious. I hadn’t showered in a number of days I’d rather not relate, I’d been struggling with GI problems for the entire week, and less than 24 hours prior my fleece and all its contents had been lifted from the shared dorm room I’d been staying in for a few nights. My camera with about seventy photos on it remaining to be copied to my computer, my mp3 player, my digital voice recorder with two hour-long interviews stored on it, a baggie with some ibuprofen, and of course, my chapstick—all gone. Why do I know the exact contents of my fleece pockets? Because I’m incredibly anal. I kept all those things in there precisely because they were valuable and I wanted them close to me at all times. I wore that fleece pretty much all day, every day. But, that afternoon, the last of our trip, I left it on my bunk. Within a window of ten minutes, it was gone from my room and was not to be seen again. It was sitting right next to my computer. Curious that a thief would decide to nab a crappy looking fleece and not an obviously pricey laptop. My suspicions about the identity of the thief will remain anonymous here, but I think it was no outsider.

The broken feeling has lasted. I’ve never really been a victim of theft. I recall many fellow volunteers in the Peace Corps having valuables taken from them in Kazakhstan, but I somehow managed to escape any serious violations; there were a few incidents. On one occasion, a group of police stopped some friends and I in a public bazaar in Almaty, one of the major cities in Kazakhstan, and took us into their van for questioning. 5000 tenge (about $40) was taken from me in some sleight of hand by one of the pi…er, police officers. It was part of some grant money we’d applied for to build an English language resource center in our community. That didn’t feel so good. I felt taken, embarrassed and helpless. A street urchin in Moscow stole a few rubles from me several months later. I caught him moments after the act and let him go with a scolding. These two encounters didn't stir me up all that much. The incident here has had a much greater impact on me however. I spent the morning prior to the theft taking scores of photos, more than I’d taken on any single day of the trip thus far. The two communities I visited that day had an absolute idyllic beauty and I couldn’t help but capture frames of nearly everything that came into view. One thatched-roof home in particular stood out. It sat by itself on a gentle slope facing a towering wall of rock and a deep, shadowy canyon. The sun was shining down on it flatly lighting up the field of harvested wheat that stretched out in all directions. There was a slight breeze. I crouched to take a photo and thought to myself, “I’ll look at this during the Ithaca semesters and remember what peace is.” I suppose the energy I put into taking the photos and collecting the interviews I lost sealed the importance of those possessions for me. The event turned the whole trip sour for me.

It’s been three days and things are coming into perspective. My initial reaction (surprise, surprise) was to assume I was being punished. I moved on from that and told myself that possessions are only possessions. Tyler Durden reminded me repeatedly, “the things you own end up owning you.” I knew how I wanted to react—with calm, control, and forgiveness of the person who took what was mine. But, I couldn’t. For numerous hours in the car ride back to Cochabamba I replayed the scene in my head, wishing I could have only caught the thief in the act, planning my payback, and holding tight to my anger, the hot coal that only burns the bearer. Hours six, seven, eight of the drive allowed a welcome respite to my internal churnings as exhaustion overtook all other emotions.

When we arrived back in the city, I walked into my host family’s house and a new family member had arrived. He’s the father, grandfather, great-grandfather (depending on your generational point of view in the house), and is the Cornell professor who invited me to stay with his family in Cochabamba for the summer. I’d only met and spoke with him once. He came out of the kitchen with everyone else. He grabbed me by both arms and said something along the lines of, “Look at this man.” My pack was weighing heavy on me, I thought the dysentery I’d been battling might not wait its turn for this greeting to come to an end, and I felt dizzy from the walk back from where the car dropped me. But, I stood in the living room chatting with him and the other family members for long minutes. I felt lucky to come “home” to such a warm welcome in such a distant place, among people I’d known for barely two weeks. It was remarkable.

Sleep, a shower, a toilet seat, the teachings of Lao-tzu and Jesus comforted me that night and the next day. I did laundry. I went to work. I read e-mails from friends and family. I still felt a hollow pain though. It’s beginning to wear thin today. What was deep has become shallow and I’m beginning to release what I’d been holding onto. I’m unskilled at this practice though. In some ways I’m thankful to be challenged in this way. But it’s not easy.

_________________________________________________

Andy disappears into a halo of twinkly blue light. But instead of leaping into the reality he wishes would be, he appears as himself. He looks around calmly and finds himself just where he needs to be. Just who he needs to be.

La Cancha

2008-05-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

Sunday, May 25, 2008
15:48

This morning my host parents took me to La Cancha, the largest market area in Cochabamba. The market reminded me a lot of other open-air bazaars and markets I’ve been to in Central Asia, but the types of produce were obviously different. The trip was rather frenzied. I mostly followed my host mama through a circuitous labyrinth of stalls and vendors, almost all sheltered by low-hanging tarpaulins. However, the term “low-hanging” is certainly relative. Initially, I found myself being constantly clotheslined by all manner of objects hanging with about 4’ of clearance. I soon learned my lesson however, and developed a permanent sort of crouched amble as I struggled to keep up with my short-legged but swiftly-moving mama. Looking around at the other shoppers, no one else seemed to have this problem. It was then I realized I am a veritable giant in this country. Men, women and children alike don’t seem to sprout vertically much beyond five and half feet here. The nutritionist in me immediately thought: stunting. But I doubt the numerous well-fed individuals roaming about the market were exposed to such insults as kids—especially in this town where the cityfolk are known for their great appreciation of food and mass quantities of it.

My host mother continuously stopped at each sequential vendor inquiring as to the price of each item they were selling. And she rarely refrained from buying something at each stop too. I was soon carrying two rather heavy rice bags full of produce, only about a quarter of which I recognized. The quantity and variety of potatoes here is pretty spectacular. I’ve long heard about this aspect of Andean markets, but seeing it was still surprising. I soon realized how much I missed the abundance of fresh produce in other countries and couldn’t wait to start eating meals served up fresh with quality ingredients. For all our wealth, there certainly seems to be a dearth of affordable, good quality food in the U.S. What an enigma. Why should wealth bring with it an abandonment of the most basic of necessities? False idols I suppose. And the real kicker is that most people from my generation probably don’t even realize the toxic food environment that we live in in the States because they have nothing to compare it to or receive little information about the relative merits of that environment from the popular press. I’m quite eager to get out into the mountain communities where I’ll be working over the next couple months so I can observe the kinds of foods they eat, and their origins. I understand the diet is quite monotonous in the Andes, but the fact that many hundreds of generations have thrived and now exist at all in such harsh environments is a feat in and of itself. I doubt many of us could survive for long in places much more verdant and bountiful.

Road blocks and salvation

2008-05-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 24, 2008
20:50

Work is moving along quite as expected. That is to say, nothing’s going as planned. I spent the past two days with Jo-Anne and Ross working on the programming of the PDAs we’ll be using to conduct the nutritional survey in the weeks ahead. However, both Jo-Anne and I are concerned that we’re putting the cart before the horse by moving forward without any buy-in from World Neighbors or acceptance by the field nurses who will actually be administering the survey questionnaires. We found out just Friday that the nurses were not even aware that they would be using PDAs to carry out the research. The absolute necessity of clear communication is agonizingly apparent here. And once again, its importance has been downplayed. I’m fairly certain communication is the number one obstacle to the successful implementation of programs (or progress in almost any setting). In the short time I’ve been working in the so-called “development” arena, I’ve seen time and time again that communication is taken for granted as part of any programmatic process when in fact, it should be priority number one.

World Neighbors has undergone a significant turnover in its administrative staff in the past month. I’m not entirely clear as to the extent of the change, but I do know that there is a new director in the local office, and the direction of some of the programs may be shifting. I also received an e-mail today from a colleague in Canada mentioning that he was informed that the two head nurses who have been carrying out the nutritional surveys over the past three years didn't know about the upcoming field research; another good example of miscommunication. Two years worth of diet recall and food frequency survey data from past years are also MIA. These potential set-backs are just those for the part of my proposed research which already has a budget, established support network, and precedent. The lion’s share of my research has yet to be discussed with key World Neighbors players in any depth, and the logistics of accomplishing several of my goals seem extraordinarily out of reach if this established survey work is already producing difficulties.

In a journal entry I wrote a day before leaving for Bolivia, I wrote: “Plastered across the top of the ever-expanding computer file consisting of a list of notes, ideas, and musings I’ve ambiguously titled “Research Notes” reads the reminder in all caps: BE HONEST, OPEN & CALM – KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. I suppose that will be my mantra for the months ahead. Experience tells me that when the pressure is on, self-deception, self-fulfilling prophecies, anxiety, and complexity tend to rule my world instead of those themes spelled out above.”

My mantra is coming into play already. I’m well aware that nothing ever goes as planned. And so I feel fairly calm about the hurdles we’re facing right out of the gate. I’m not quite sure where the winds are guiding me right now, but handing over control to God has never steered me wrong in the past.

Speaking of God...today I was wandering the back streets of Cochabamba with no particular destination in mind when I came across an aged church, sun baked and crumbling at its corners. It reminded me very much of what I envision the Alamo to look like (although I’ve never visited that place). A large plaza stretched out in front of the building and a crowd of children and cholitas (i.e. indigenous women dressed in traditional garb) had gathered around a man playing guitar. The guitar player and a few other men with him were leading songs talking about how God and his glory were great. One man broke into prayers on a few occasions, closing his eyes and reaching up to the sky giving thanks to Jesus. The songs were catchy and the mood was quite pleasant. It was nice to hear children’s voices. I sat on a curb behind the crowd for twenty minutes or so listening to the children, and watching mothers caring for their little ones. Children not yet old enough to walk crawled about on the plaza in little more than rags, their mothers with sores on their legs, filthy clothing, and hardened soles gathered them up if they wandered too far. As I walked away from the scene a man on the outskirts of the crowd looked over at me and smiled. I smiled back and said hello and he came up to me with an extended hand. He asked where I was from and we chatted for a few moments about my work in Bolivia, and the reason for the songs and prayer in front of us. The church we stood in front of was a Catholic church, but he explained that they were Evangelical Christians. Of course, I find the Evangelicals in the country of 95% Catholics. I often wonder if I previously met Evangelicals or came across their gatherings with as much frequency as I have since my brothers’ conversions. Perhaps they were there all along and I simply didn’t notice them. It certainly feels like just the opposite, however. I am constantly approached by these individuals seeking my conversion.

The man with whom I was now speaking was named Manuel. I didn’t find this out until later in our meeting, but Manuel was not about cutting me any slack with the pace of his speech. I caught a great deal of what he said, but not enough to say no to the question that must have been something like: “Do you want to accept Jesus into your heart? Do you want to be saved?” I heard the word quieres a good deal and every sentence included the word Jesus at some point, but when I replied, “Sí,” I have to admit that I wasn’t quite sure what I was saying yes to. I soon found out though. Manuel placed both of his hands on me, one on either shoulder and made me repeat after him a series of phrases, many of which were thanking Jesus, asking for my sins to be forgiven, requesting salvation, and the final one of which had me asking God to write my name in his book of life. Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that awkward. I did my best to mimic what he said, but I know I got many of the words wrong, and understood only about half of what I was saying. I wonder if this experience is very different from that of anyone who is “saved.” I wouldn’t know.

Manuel gave me his card and told me that their group gathered on this plaza every Saturday and that I was most welcome to come back every week. I thanked him and bid that plaza ado. Manuel probably walked away thinking he saved a soul and was due his heavenly credit for the day. I wish I could have obliged him. I’ll never understand the concept of salvation as some words spoken on a plaza, or the exclusivity that comes with rejecting the validity of all others’ relationships with the Lord.

My host brother just walked into my room wearing a full gorilla outfit.

Bienvenidos a Bolivia

2008-05-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 22, 2008
21:51

I thought I’d get around to writing a blog entry before now, but life in Bolivia moves pretty fast. Actually, not so much. I arrived here yesterday afternoon and slept for about 13 hours before waking early this morning and taking a walk around the city I’ll call home for the next ten weeks: Cochabamba. The town doesn’t have the feel of a big city, probably because it’s not one. In response to my comment that the office where I’ll be working is not so far from where my host family lives, the daughter of my host parents commented, “Nothing in Cochabamba is far away.” My host family is really wonderful. When I exited the baggage claim area at the airport, Ruben and Alcira (the mom and dad) were anxiously waiting arm-in-arm as if they’d lost one of their flock with a sign reading: “Andrew Jones, Cornell University.” It was pretty freaking adorable. They’re both very patient with my broken Spanish and are all too ready to ensure my stomach is full at all hours of the day. My room is modest with brightly-painted green and orange walls, and a trim of alternating lions, zebras, elephants, and turtles sketched as if with crayon and surrounded by wandering paw prints. I feel right at home.

I met the director of World Neighbors Bolivia (WN), the NGO with which I’ll be working this summer. Nice fellow. Soft spoken and humble. He was off to La Paz today for the next week or so, but I had the chance to work with two other colleagues: a Cornell grad and an Andes Rep for WN in Quito, Ecuador, and a programmer working with HealthBridge (the Canadian organization helping to facilitate the nutritional survey here). (I'm going to refrain from using names - or perhaps real names - in this blog as it's posted on a public website). They’re both great people and I’ll be working with them preparing and carrying out this month’s round of the ongoing nutritional survey in Northern Potosí until they leave in mid-June. Northern Potosí is the region here in Bolivia where World Neighbors works and where I’m hoping to carry out my dissertation research. It’s one of the poorest regions of the country, which ranks it up there as one of the poorest regions in all of Latin America. Flying from La Paz to Cochabamba, I strained to peer out the window past the woman in the window seat next to me. I’m fairly certain we passed over some of the regions where I’ll be working (at least the landscape appeared similar to photos I’ve seen of Northern Potosí). The view from 30,000 feet was austere. The former river beds cutting through high ridges were all dry washes now filled with sediment. Even a bird’s eye view allowed a sense of the landscape’s thirst. I’ve rarely seen such beauty and was kicking myself for not vying more forcefully to occupy the window seat (both my neighbor and I had “12F”, the window seat, printed on our boarding passes – I didn’t push the issue but I’m sure if I had demanded the window seat she would have relented; she barely picked her head up the entire flight from the book she was reading).

I feel quite calm in this country. Even in the waiting area at the gate in Miami, I felt at ease with the Bolivianos who were about to board the plane with me. Lots of smiles to go around, much ease in speech and manner, and a general friendliness that was subtle yet palpable. And those impressions remain intact after forty eight hours in country.

I ventured into La Paz yesterday with an acquaintance I met on the flight from Miami. We both were waiting out the eight-hour layover in the La Paz airport (and I was enduring some lightheadedness from the altitude) so we decided to accompany one another into the city; that turned out to be a very good idea. Our taxi driver into the city doubled as what I’ll refer to as the “best tour guide ever.” He wasn’t much for slowing down to allow his passengers to take pictures (or slowing down for pedestrians or anything else for that matter), but he sure knew his way around town and was more than willing to offer historical, political, and whimsical commentary on all things La Paz. He dropped us off in the main plaza without accepting a single boliviano (the local currency). He left us only with his name and cell phone number and a promise to pick us up at 1:30PM “gringo time”, that is, on time, at an agreed upon corner of the plaza. I have to admit I was in shock. Yes, my heart was racing a few thousand beats per minute faster than usual to keep my system from succumbing to the hypoxia, but that’s not why I was in shock. Taxi drivers in every other country I’ve ever visited, well, I’m thinking of Kazakhstan here, are misanthropes that would never think to part ways with their fare without cash in hand. This dude wasn’t just extraordinarily nice to us, but promised us a lift back to the airport without accepting payment up front. This might not seem overly altruistic to those who haven’t endured the avarice of Kazakhstani taxi drivers, and to be sure, this guy was getting paid, but nonetheless the honor system here impressed me greatly.

I can’t say enough about the spectacular backdrop of La Paz or the general layout of the city. Flying in before dawn, the rugged crags of the Andes were visible in silhouette surrounding the city lights of the basin they surrounded; this itself was jaw-dropping impressive stuff. Seeing this same landscape in the full splendor of the early morning sunrise was something else entirely. Snow-capped peaks, and endlessly rising slopes huddled around steep cliffs housing layer-upon-layer of residences, all edges that seemed direct extensions of the red and brown earth of the near-vertical faces. After seeing this sight I couldn’t believe I considered sitting in the airport for eight hours. We crossed a cobblestone plaza into a magnificent Catholic church. I thought of my mother and her unceasing quest to find new churches in which she can exploit the “three wishes” that are due to anyone daring enough to enter a new church. I didn’t jump on this chance to wish for world peace again, but I did learn that my traveling companion’s father had attempted to convert her to Catholicism when she was nine years old through what could only be called coercion; and this being the first time she’d met the man.

I learned about cholitas in our wanderings about the city – those being the indigenous women, mostly poor, who make a living by hawking handicrafts to passers-by or selling gathered fruits by the roadside. They all dress similarly, though with their own flare and distinct style. Some save for years to purchase their custom-made polleras, or long skirts made of intensely thick material, that fly up all too often when the heavy load that the women carry becomes too burdensome and topples them over backwards. Absurdly-undersized bowler hats sit atop the heads of many of the women and I wondered at the evolution of such an item so plainly without utility. I thought the cholitas were beautiful.

One woman approached us while we were people- (and pigeon-) watching on the steps of the main city plaza. She sold us both brightly-colored hand-woven bracelets for ten bolivianos apiece (about a $1.30). I bought mine without paying attention to what was embroidered on the bright red band. When examining it afterwards I couldn’t quite make out the letters sewn across it. I assumed it was Quechua for “great soul” or “observant one”, but when I flipped over the bracelet the letters took on a more distinct pattern and I read the word: “DIANE.” I was told that sometimes tourists will “commission” a bracelet to be made with their name, but won’t show up to purchase it. It seemed that Diane never came back to pay up.