Sexism.

My first chica taxi driver.  Wow.  Woman driver.   Coincidentally it happened to be the same day that in a tienda outside of Cochabamba (Tiquipaya--a "suburb" of sorts) I received unabashed whistles from a table of men as I entered the cafe-store, passing not three feet from them.  There was no chance I could ignore it.  The temperature of my blood shot up.   In broad daylight and with a compañero, I had no qualms about my safety, so I reacted immediately:  "Excuse me. Is there a problem?"  With every ounce of sharpness capable in human eye I stared at them.  The rest of the outdoor patio joined me in stunned silence.  Not least of all my accompanying friend (a male) who, in his state of shock, did nothing.

(Nothing to do with taxis and catcalls...)

Teva, daughter of my roommates Aliya & Marcello, turned one at the end of

March. We celebrated in style...music and dancing, puppets, paint and bubbles.

Here they are singing (Music Together style).

I don't know if those men had ever had a woman confront their harassing behavior.  Their frozen confounded looks obstensibly testified this.  In the short walk back to the fiesta my compañero told me he'd never seen a woman respond like so--he assumed the men hadn't either.  

I was fully prepared to march past the whistlers a second time after our purchase.  My compañero asked if we could leave by another exit.  He was clearly more uncomfortable with the scene than I (one wonders if he would have been as uncomfortable had the men harassed me yet I had done nothing).  The whole event was disturbingly intense to him.  

As a woman I'm no stranger to being objectified by a male-dominated culture.  I can't go to the supermarket without whistles from a stand of magazines instructing me that my greatest worth is my body: my role first and foremost is to serve the visual pleasure of male citizens.  Frankly the "disturbingly intense" scene was a relief.  I can't as easily talk back to the magazines.  I can't as easily forgive glossy paper.

This is why one elects to be born in a family of puppeteers and musicians.

In the safety within the doors of the tienda, while the woman filled our bottles with chicha, my compañero regained words: 

"I've never seen that before.  That was really intense. You're so angry."  

"Of course I'm angry," I articulated, "I'm not an animal, I'm a human being.  They treated me as an object."

The woman filling our bottles had seen the episode as well.  She silently brought me a complimentary mug of chicha and looked me in the eyes.  She said nothing as I justified my "shocking" behavior to my compañero, but quietly nodded.

It's not always a winning day in the "lucha" against sexism.  The mayor of Santa Cruz (who also has known drug ties) fondled the rear end of a female city council member on camera, yet instead of calling for resignation, many Bolivians are applauding him.  Probably the man who told me in the midst of my morning run yesterday that he "thought I was a dog--that is why he whistled at me" would be among the applauders.  "...Go back to your country if you don't like it."

The female cab driver who brought me back to Cochabamba is the only woman she knows driving cabs.  "It's difficult," she explained, "because all the men think women should only be in the house and in the kitchen."   

But she didn't want the leave the country to earn enough as a single mother to support her children, so she took up a job as a driver.  She is a thousand times braver than I.

My super cute "roommate"