Shared Conversion

Spanish colonist, pinning down a native Quechua.
 By Guaman Poma de Ayala, from his illustrated
chronicle Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno
which was sent to the Spanish king to denounce to
the horrid treatment of native Andes people in
hopes that the King would prohibit such treatment.
The chronicle never arrived.

I belong to a faith whose central figure demonstrated an exemplory life and teachings.  He also called his followers to "make disciples of all nations."  This is a befuddling call in our modern world after centuries of brutal colonialism justified by those five words.  How, in Bolivia, can one talk about the goodness and love of Jesus sitting on a history of brutal exploitation, violence and (even) continued subjugation?   (I note that the USA shares an equally horrid past between Native Americans and the colonizing force of the church, but with a smaller indigenous population, it is easier to deny.)  Living in San Francisco I wondered "What does it mean to be a Christian among my friends here--many of whom have been hurt, deceived or rejected by the American church?"  In Bolivia I ask a related question, but with Spanish conquistadores in mind.     

In my search to understand the diverse and complicated spiritual pulse of this land (not to mention, find spiritual oasis myself), I've recently encountered a particularly incarnational sect of local missionaries who insist theologically on "living with the people."  The MaryKnoll missionaries arrived in Cochabamba 100 years ago after China expelled them along with various people of unwanted faiths.  As Catholics arriving in an already (even if colonial version of a) "Catholic country" they had to ask themselves what it meant to be Catholic missionaries among, well, Catholics.   Their reflection brought them to the convicition that "conversion is a shared experience."  (A notable contrast with the original sword-to-throat-conversion methods widely implemented in South America, which--it should be noted--if you're going for numbers this method is proven wonderfully effective.  Talk about megachuch success.)   

Early morning markets, waking the day in La Paz

If it's not clear from my previous entries, I'm boggled by (some of) the Christians and missionaries who apparently have a completely different read of Bolivia than what I've experience in my (albeit brief) time here.  "They look down on and shelter themselves from real Bolivia" as my friend and long-time Bolivia resident (and technically a "missionary" herself) noted of many, "If you only shop at western-style supermarkets, don't want to ride trufis, and don't respect indigenous culutre--why do you live here?"     

On the other hand, MaryKnollers study Bolivian culture deeply.   They study the Andean theology which continues to guide both Catholics and non-Catholics in Bolivia (If you have any doubt of that, take a walk the night of the first Friday of every month--the air is thick with the smell of the Koa, a traditional Andean ceremony to the Pachamama).  All the more, MaryKnollers expect to be changed by the culture and theology they encounter.  

Downtown La Paz, surrounded by mountains

I knew two other Christians in the theatre community in San Francisco, which inevitably meant that most of my "spiritual conversations" were with friends who'd left the church--violently turned off by its attitude or actions, thought it was full of freaks, or simply were generally uninterested.  I realized early on in my time that if I was interested in sharing my spiritual perspectives or my personal sketch of reality, I had to be equally willing to listen.  I had to listen with the same kind of openness, curiosity and humility with which I hoped my friends would listen to me.  Love your neighbor as yourself.

Thus, I'm drawn to the MaryKnoll idea of conversion as a shared experience.  In the 1970s "conversion as shared experience" drew a number of priests and nuns to identify deeply with the people--"el pueblo."  Due to insistance on an incarnational "living with the people" many of them were drawn into the suffering and human rights struggles of the day.  I've begun reading the poem-prayers of one priest in particular, Luis Espinal's Oraciones a Quemarropa.  Espinal claimed that "to be a priest means a constant communion with the disinherrited of the earth." ("Ser sacerdote signifcaba una comunión constante con los desheredados de la tierra.")  He backed this statement with his life.  Few of our spiritual leaders today--of whatever version of faith--follow this ethic.  Our spiritual heros write books that become movies, they give conferences and have fancy websites.  They are heros of happiness, not necesarily heros of empathy and incarnation.

Frankly, I'm not ready to follow Espinal's steps.  Shared conversion for Espinal meant giving his life.  I am in initial baby steps of shared conversion, sharing my life and listening timidly to those around me.  My friends here aren't particularly disinherrited. It is incredibly difficult to build relationships across class divides.  My community is the urban middle class.  They haven't been afforded all the cool travel opportunities I've had, nor have the funds to buy a car like me, but culturally we share enough points of connection as middle class urbanites--even from opposite continents.  

the colorful streets of Bolivia's capital city, La Paz

Perhaps almost as disorienting as the huge change in my circumstances is actually how similar everything is here--particularly on the surface.  I ride in cars, I buy coffee, I use facebook and everyone around me drinks Coca-Cola.   A third of the cabs I get into are playing American Music (usually horrid stuff).  Western culture's appetite is insatiable, but the almost identical urban/capitalist visual cues rest on an Andean worldview.  And yet, as a gringa, almost whenever I want to I can dodge the uncomfortable clash of perspectives.  I can "shelter myself" from real Bolivia, as my friend would say.

I've been an adult long enough (turning 30 this week) to have developed certain habits and various comforts I depend on.  I want things the way I want them.  I took my first trip to the Zona Sur recently.  We caught the 1 Mirco bus, leisuring rolled through the Cancha (Cochabamba's enormous street market--Why vehicles even attempt to drive through it blows my mind).  Nearly an hour later, we arrived in southern Cochabamba.  For all a knew, we could've been in another country.  The view in this city surrounded by rolling dry hills was unrecognizable to me.  Without the generous city parks typical of the north and central zones, the surroundings felt desolate, brown, hot.  Houses constructed with the bare minimun of materials extended up into the hillsides -- where there is no water.  Residents there wait for the trucks that (hopefully) make the weekly trip up the rocky dirt "roads" with expensive jugs of water for drinking, bathing, washing, life.  We talked at length with a man who'd lived in the Zona Sur for over a decade -- originally in the hills without potable water, now only a few blocks from the major road where we walked.  He identified himself as middle class.  He worked in the central zone of Cochabamba at a hotel, for a boss he described as racist.  (Racism isn't only a subtly in Cochabamba.  In 2007 a group of metizo ("white-er") Bolivians beat indigenous Zona Sur residents with sticks in the streets of central Cochabamba.)  

The end of the Mirco 1 line in the Zona Sur

So perhaps the most exposing impression I had about the Zona Sur was: how boring.  The brown hills and treeless streets were a total drag.  There was a simple market:  food, produce, the normal everything vendors with clothes, extension chords, spatulas, chinese-made hollywood action figure toys.  But there was nothing to do.  No hip pleasant coffee shops to meet with a friend.  No movie theatre.  No restaurants or bars or music clubs.  No cute shops.  The streets all looked the same--the same brown shaddily-built architecture, and rocky dirt streets full of wandering dogs scrounging for scraps.  I thought:  I would die of boredom here.  And it feels dirty.  I was so grateful not to live there. 

In my "rural seasons of life" I may have lacked the stimulating urban scene but I never thought twice about its absence amidst the surroundings of rivers, mountains, lush forrest and animals.  Besides...I could always drive into town for a night at the pub or the movie theatre. So.  Boredom is my defining gringo trait today.  I wonder if the residents of the Zona Sur are bored.  Without the natural riches of the mountains and without the culture which gringos and upper/middle class hipsters afford in the City Center -- are they bored?  Granted I've never tried making a life in the Zona Sur.  Building a community around me in the neighborhood would undoubtely change the tone.  And yet, I don't want to live in the "disinherrited" Zona Sur or to give up my, my, my...

I want to be happy, and I'm afraid of redefining what happiness is.   I didn't think I was as tied to my habits and pleasures as I am.  "I want" are some of the most common words in my vocabularly, and I'm relatively accostomed to my wants being realized.  What if I didn't live in a world ordered by "I wants"?   

Doing gringa things!  The high pass of the Choro Trek
(my highest altitude yet in life - 4859m/15,941feet)
We climbed up, then descended down 4000m into the
jungle (those of you who have hiked with me know
what a big baby I am heading down...ugh.)  But was I
so happy to be in the mountains-- first Bolivian trek!

I've observed a curious phenomenom, perhaps familiar to some.  The babies of indigenous families never seem to cry.  At sixteen months they wander the yard or street while mother works, unable to offer extreme attention.  Babies nap under a tree in the plaza while their mothers sell orange juice or fruit.  They live strapped to mom's back, enduring all that she endures during the day.  I recently hiked from Choro trek, descending from the high Bolivian mountiains to the Yunga jungle.  I encountered a baby--or toddler--literally face down in the dirt, unable to put herself upright again.  Her mother was down at the river, busy washing clothes.  She didn't hear the baby cry.  I took obvious compassion on the child, picked her up, put her on her feet. Despite the trauma of having been stuck briefly in the mud and her face (still) painted with dirt and snot, she immediately stopped crying.  She didn't cry for her mother.  She was simply glad to have her face out of the mud.  Her needs were simple.

Near the home of the aforementioned child in the mud.
Descending into jungle...

Inequity is getting to me.  Not just the stinging awareness of how much more I have, but of how much more I've been trained to need.  I want.  I saw it the minute I arrived in Central/South America, but four months I'm still later staring at the difference and still living in comfort.   I wonder--in partial envy--are the lower classes here tortured by their wants?  Are our physologies are different? Or are their wants merely more simple, so they don't share my inequity-guilt pyschological battles.  Like the vender my compañera befriended in La Paz's Plaza Murillo: "I want to sell enough ice cream this morning so that we can eat lunch."  Pretty straight forward.   

Last night I went out for pasta and a bottle of wine, and it was lovely.  In Minneapolis, it makes me feel average.  Here I am palpably aware of this privilege articulates my "otherness" in this country of exploited poor.  I'm aware how I am trapped in my way of life.  And yet shall I despise the joyful and sad celebration of a friend's departure with wine and food? Shall I despise the culinary creativity, experience, artistry, health and education that money affords?

  

We hiked a centuries-old trail -  observe the beautiful ancient Inca path

During college I spent a pleasantly mundane few months working at Costco. It dawned on me one day that it was my summer job. I was taking in the money for a summer so I could enjoy my days off in the mountains and then pay my bills during the school year.  But most of my co-workers were here for the long haul.  They were going to continue selling pizza and ice cream and coffee. I was off to "bigger and better."  Frankly, many of my colleagues lived quite decently--their needs were met, as were many pleasures, even if I could not comprehend spending all my days selling snacks. I needed more from a vocation; as an artist, I realize this is an insistence that not all share.   But among the workers who "sell snacks" here--the disparity is huge.  Some of them don't have water.  They work brutal hours.  They don't have a 10th of the priviledges I've had, nevermind the ability to dream about "vocation."  And how can we change that?  How can I change that? Because I still want to go on living in my pleasantries.  And sometimes the immensity of it makes me crumble. I feel impotent facing its enormous complexity and want to give up. Throw in the towel and who cares--I am what I am--a gringa who likes gringa pleasantries.   I don't want to give up the things I like.  I like them.  Was Jesus talking to me when he asked the rich man to "sell all he had, give it to the poor and follow Jesus"? 

Arhuaco children, playing native instruments

A gringo friend of mine here in Cochabamba spent some time in an indigenous Arhuaco community in the mountains of Colombia.  The community intentionally cuts itself off from globalized society.  They have a small store where they sell a few (about 10) of their community products:  wool items, coffee, some food.  They don't make much money, big surprise, but they don't need to buy much.  They're essentially completely self-sufficient.  As much as they would love to partake of some of world's modern conveniences, they don't want the globalized world to take over their community, their culture.  They don't want electricity -- because that will bring television and suddenly their children will be learning televised spanish in competition with their native tongue.  The want to be self-sustainable, off the grid of globalized dependence.  So they don't have money. But are they poor?  

If you can imagine, picture an 8 year old child -- perhaps a child you know.  Ask that child to write down a few sentences.  The first things that come to mind.  What would the child say?   My friend Tomás invited a few of the Arhuaco children in this indigenous Colombian village to a similar practice.  Write a few sentences--whatever came to mind.  Then they translated them into Spanish.  Then to English.  This is what the children wrote:

The chicken lays eggs.

The moon illumines the night.

The sun illumines the day.

The birds eat the fruit of the trees.

Tomás drinks coffee every minute.

The pig eats pica-pica.

The Arhuaco build their own homes.

The hummingbird sucks the flower.

Arhuaco youth, preparing dinner

Sit with those for a minute.  The first thoughts of an eight year old child.  Now return to the child you had in mind.  What would happen if those two children met?  What would they share?  What would they learn from one another?  Would one feel rich and the other poor?

Maybe I feel the guilt because I'm aware of how we--the first world--are taking from the so-called "third."  You can call the Arhuaco community "developing world" but are they not sufficiently developed?  They don't need or want the "development" help of gringos.

Overlooking La Paz, one of the most incredible cities I have ever seen.
Overlooking the city--and the long, steep road up to El Alto "suburb."

In my view there is a painful clash when the Western world begins consuming its neighbors and forcing them out of their way of life, and taking advantage of their vulnerability.  For example, a number of indigenous have fled to Bolivias cities. A large indigenous population lives in Quillacollo, a suburb of Cochabamba, as well as in El Alto, the high suburb (4150m, 13,615ft) north of La Paz of nearly a million residents--notably poorer than the Capital City.  Indigenous don't flock to these underserved suburbs because they enjoy the urban lifestyle, or because Cochabamba's Quillocolla residents get a kick out of the annual (often deadly) floods that plague the city every summer and the droughts that leave many without water in the winter.  They leave their rural homes en "el campo" because other options have been taken away from them.  They leave because of environmental destruction, like in January 2000 when a Bolivian oil pipeline operated by Shell and Enron broke open in the Desaguadero River, spilling twenty-nine thousand barrels of toxic petroleum across nearly a million acres of indigenous farm and grazing land.  (Shell and Enron hid the grave destruction while publicly touting their "exemplorary post-disaster clean-up."  Meanwhile they told indigenous residents that the black substance which had invaded their river and farmland was fertilizer which would aid their crops.)  Indigenous campesinos leave when colonially-imposed businesses like the mines layoff the majority of their workers, forcing the already poor community to seek options elsewhere.  They leave because global warming destroys glaciers (and therefore their water sources) on which they have depended for generations.  The come to the crowded cities, sell vegetables or imported candies, toys, batteries, or orange juice at streetcorner stands.  They are prisoners to a globalized systems which they did not create.  Not all are fortunate or forseeing enough to preserve their way of life like the Arhuaco.  So instead of their self-sufficient homeland they live in underdeveloped suburbs where the lack of sewage or water or schools can be severe.

Choro Trek llamas, chillin at high altitude

Facing these realities 30 years into a life in which I have always enjoyed gringa pleasanties (unavoidably at the cost of others) what shall I do?  Globalized capitalism is inherently exploitative and its appetite huge.  A gringa friend here recently spent a month among coffee growers in the Bolivian Yungas.  In a conversation with union leaders she asked them about Fair Trade Coffe: Is it really fair?  Are their problems with it?   "No, there are no problems" they replied.  "We receive better wages, health access, schools."  But a money-based economy, western-style medicine and education is rewriting their traditions, it's replacing their ways.  And yet it has been so for centuries.  Though they have grown it for centuries, coffee is not indigenous to the Yungas. But Westerners want to import and drink it.  Since human beings began crossing territories and borders, globalization began.  The exchange of ideas, cultures, economic systems and spiritualities.  Typically the exchange is weighted with uneven scales--whether by the economic power of Coca-Cola or the weight of a colonist's boot on the neck of an Indigenous Quechua.  So as a student of my new world and a child of the world's most dominant culture, I must ask:  How is this conversation a shared experience?  

Overlooking the long descent ahead (and Incan ruins) on the Choro Trek

In a conversation about disparities here, a Bolivian friend shared a story:  There was a man on a bus, riding it uphill.  And another man, walking--sweaty and tired from the difficult journey.  The walking man was suprised to see the man conveniently riding a bus, so he chased after the bus and called out to the man:  "How wonderful to ride that bus!  How can I get myself on the bus?"   The passenger replied:  "I so sorry, I don't know--I've always been here.  I was born here."