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"

Loneliness and Light

It's been a while since I felt truly lonely.  

The initial loneliness wave hit when I first arrived in Bolivia and posted my first blog.  Funny how "connection" to the world in electronic form actually accentuated the feelings of loneliness and sadness.  Before I posted and read the wonderful emails in response, I could imagine myself completely remade--new life, new home, new world.  But the wonders of internet forced me to look straight in the face of all I lacked.

A night of board games with the collective

The second wave landed 3 weeks in.  Deeply frustrated by my language skills (which seemed to be at a standstill) and confused about my role here, I felt lost.  It was a Friday. The second consecutive Friday in which I fell flat on my face emotionally and physically for no apparent reason.  I spend the afternoon in bed -- a puddle of myself.  I swore that my spanish wasn't improving.  Hadn't improved in 3 weeks. I was growing stupid.  And I missed all of you.  I missed the "home" of community.  I missed a particular love, lost. 

Surrounded by people who "belonged" my visitor status was blatent, heightened all the more by the family dynamic of the collective (those that aren't related in the collective act almost as if they are).  I realized in joining the collective I was jumping into a family that wasn't mine--I had to discern what life outside the collective I would have in addition to my immersive experience within.  The three week mark was also when my oh-so-American desire to feel important, useful, and to max out my time with "the most valuable, important, interesting things" began to eat at me.  I wasn't all that "useful" here. I spoke like baby.  I felt like a baby.  I had to seek my identity outside of my own "impressive usefulness" or I wasn't going to find it.  

Supplementing dinner...climbing the tree
was worth it...the salad was delicious

The third wave swelled this past week:  Holy Week, or "Semana Santa."  (I am, however, resisting its proper title here having witnessed its more superficial manifestations without experiencing the significance underneath.)  The importance of Holy Week snuck up on me.  Distant from my community and the natural home of my usual traditions, I began to feel desperate.  Would the week pass without death and resurrection? (Or worse: a lame death and resurrection)  Would I only taste the week's journey in traditions and language that I didn't understand--grasping for their meaning?  And what about my favorite--beautiful, dark Good Friday?  Would I be surrounded only by Catholic formality?  Or by peppy evangelicals who had no interest in the dark invitation to grief?  How could I possible replace my traditional Sunday meal (four elaborate courses and an blood-thirsty egg hunt) and the company and cause that make the meal worth having?

I needed something to connect me to the best of all weeks in the chrisitian calendar.  I committed to fasting with a friend back home--but this did not ward off the swelling depression (perhaps it exasperated it).  It was almost too real--too physical, setting me in confusion with the world around me.

"Aliya! help!"...shouting to my roommate through the 2nd
story window.  "Could you help me?--the ladder moved.
And...uhm..could you grab my camera--it's in my room."

So it turns out Holy Week is tough in another land, especially among my community here which is harshly critical of the church. Not that I blame them--I share most of their sentiments.  It's what we don't share that week that was difficult.  But there is grace in this church-critical community.  On Thursday I finally cracked: I unleashed my heart and the difficultly of the week to a couple people.  They invited me (if I liked) to share some aspect with them.  My roommate (who's Jewish-American) had been blessed by a similar sharing of her traditions with her previous Bolivian host family--so she passed on the goodwill.  

I decided to hold a sort of Maundy Thursday service (albeit, on Saturday, but whatever).  I love that in this ceremony we put Jesus into our bodies, into our mouths -- and that his last act among his friends was washing their feet.  That was his goodbye party.  It's a party I'd like to share.

I prepared the bread, the wine, and other Mediterraean goodies for our feast.  
I warmed the water.  I practiced the song.

I lit the candles and nervously pulled my prepared spanish liturgy--the "script" for the night's ritual from my pocket.  I shared about Jesus' last passover--his goodbye meal and the beauty of it being a night of service and sacrifice.  I shared about my personal resonance with this sensual, physical sacrament--and eventually we imitated Jesus' service--and sharing of himself--by washing each others' feet.  I never knew how beautiful the sound of water could be.  I sat there in the room lit by candles and soft guitar music--and listened to warm sound of water.  

I read passages from the night of that dinner in Jerusalem, shared a Luis Espinol (a radical priest who was martyred in Bolivia during Liberation Theology's heyday) poem and one of my favorite Thomas Merton prayers. We feasted in candlelight--talking gently as water, reflecting.  

I recieved many thank yous from the small crowd gathered that evening.  It seems to have blessed my community, but I can't tell you how important it also was for me.  
Late in life, Jesus had a powerful encounter with a woman--a stranger--at a well.  It began with him asking for help. Please. Give me something to drink.   I asked of my roommates in my deep thirst on Thursday night...and the dinner and ceremony was the result.  This act, this ritual, this sharing fed me deeply -- as I hope it did them.  I am so grateful for the chance to have shared part of myself with them -- a part that previously did not feel free and certainly felt misunderstood.

That night my roommate put her Hebrew to excellent use, blessing the bread and wine.  We also read one of my favorites passages to bless our meal:

Vengan.  Todos los sedientos,    Come! all you who are thirsty,   

vengan a las aguas; come to the waters;

Y los que no tengan dinero, vengan, and you who have no money,

 compren y coman.  come, buy and eat! 

Vengan, compren vino y leche Come, buy wine and milk

Sin dinero y sin costo alguno. without money and without cost.

¿Por qué gastan dinero en lo que no es pan, Why spend money on what is not bread,

Y su salario en lo que no sacia?  and your labor on what does not satisfy?

Escúchenme atentamente, Listen, listen to me, 

y coman lo que es bueno, and eat what is good,

Y se deleitará su alma en la abundancia.      and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

(Isaías 55)

We closed with one of my favorite prayers:

Cochabamba's Cerro del Cristo at dusk

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart  from that desire. And I know that, if I do this , You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.

(Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude)

Carnival and the Mines

At this hour, I ought to be sleeping, but this thunderstorm is as wild as Carnival -- it should not go unappreciated.  So awake I am.  Long crinkled highways of electricity run across the sky.  The thin tin part of our roof is played like an enormous drum:  wind, stray apples stripped from the neighboring tree, water -- all possible percussion. 

So I write.

Traveling across the Altiplano to Oruro

The week after I arrived in Bolivia began Carnival.  Bolivianos wait all year for this festival. When it arrives they party -- hard.  (So hard that Bolivia lost its coastal land to Chile during...yup, Carnival.)   What was a religious festival for the devout in the rural "el campo" has been appropriated by urban Bolivianos (and beer companies) as cause for a week long party. 

Getting sprayed at Carnival

Our favorite -- the Afro-Bolivian drummer-dancers

All of Bolivia parties, but nowhere can compete with Oruro -- a mining town that sits at about 12,000ft elevation.  Oruro is quiet--almost desolate in the cold, high altiplano--for most of the year, but this one wild week makes up for the other fifty-one.  The streets bustle with visitors, street stand vendors and never-ending crossfires from squirt guns, foam spray and water balloons.  I hopped a bus at 4:30am in Cochabamba with Dani--a member of Colectivo Katari--to arrive in Oruro around 8:30am.  Dani came with drum in hand, prepared to play and march with his group in the parade later that evening.  At 9:00am Saturday morning the 4km parade begins--thousands upon thousands hailing from every corner of the country--dancers, musicians and the most elaborate costumes I've ever seen--all unique to their region.  The parade runs till 2am.  Then they do it again Sunday.   All this dancing and music making occurs at the altitude of volcanic Mt. Adams back home.   I didn't stay for all 17 hours....if you linger into whee hours of the morning you must also brace yourself for the inevitable drunken brawls.  

In accord with Bolivia's synchronistic culture, Carnival blends Inca beliefs with local and Catholic beliefs.  Saturday's festivities begin with a Virgin Mary festival, and the festival ends on Tuesday with a majority of Bolivia's population making offerings to the Pachamama.  Carnival is observed in honor of the legendary appearance of the Virgin in the richest silver mine in Oruro in 1789.  "Danza de los Diables" (Dance of the Devils) is the central dance of the festival, honoring the underground gods (devils, or "tios") of the mines, of under the earth.   Picture a hundred or two performers in devil masks and costumes (which cost a few hundred dollars each).  I'm still grasping for a less hazy understanding of Bolivian relationships with these so-called devils--or gods--which seem more like a pantheistic assortment of deities: of music, of each lake and hill, of sex, etc.   Nevertheless it's clear that the devils bear particular importance in the mines.  For those working--some living--under the earth, their belief is split into worlds.  Many follow the catholic God as their savior, but it is thought that when they enter the mines, things change--they are entering the realm of satan.  If the underground devils ("tios") are not appeased, they punish miners "with falling rocks and explosions."  The "tios" will kill miners, then eat their souls.  Therefore though they pray in a Catholic church and trust the cross to keep the devil trapped inside the mines, they continue to make regular offerings to the tios and paint llama blood on the door of the mines, so as to spare their own blood and souls while they are under the earth.

Oruro

My reflection on Bolivia's mines continues beyond dancing costumed diables and religious fear in mining communities.  The mines are historically crucial in Bolivia.  Spain built its Bolivian fortune here on the backs of Indigenous, Afro-Boliviano (African slaves captured and brought to Bolivia much like in North America) and Mestizos.  My understanding is that the Spanish also invented the tios--to keep miners in line.  (And you wonder why Liberation Theology was born in Latin America?)   Miners eventually became a powerful political force in Bolivia--a populist power the Bolivian Government was forced to recognize.  However, the mining unions were all but completely dissipated when the mining companies fired and relocated (with government help) the majority of the mining population in the mid 80s when the global price of tin fell.  (Ironically, much to the dictatorship's and the USA's chagrin, many of these wandering former miners later regrouped in the Chapare region to form the powerful Coca Growers Unions).

After my trip to Oruro I spent an evening in candlelight (thanks to our burnt electrical wires--we were lucky the house didn't explode) talking of the mines with Marcello -- one of my new housemates.  He comes from a family of miners in the high-altitude Postosi mining region, where Marcello was born.  His grandfather not only worked, but lived underground in the mines.  No sunlight.  Inhaling mining chemicals day in and day out.  Living on next to nothing.  Marcello's father lived underground until he was five years old.  His father and all his aunts and uncles have either passed early, or suffer from health problems.  His family finally moved from within the mines when a two ton rock crushed his grandfather.  To this day, his body cannot be recovered.


I highly recommend the film The Devil's Miner (click to watch the trailer) to get a sense of the conditions in Bolivian mines.  The film is captivating.   While the main character in this documentary is no longer working within the mines, other Postosi children are.  Additionally, Postosi has become has sort of "tourist destination" for mine-curious foreigners (and filmmakers)--but this has not necessarily benefited the community.  Some would argue it has continued the exploitation--turning their horrid living and working conditions into an exhibition.   Travel thoughtfully.

I will think of this history the next time I hear Marcello sing Yo soy el dueño de todo in the Katari presentation Otras Mirados, Otra History (Other Perspectives, Other History).
Hear a brief clip of the song here. 

Yo soy el dueño de todo, I am the owner of everything

pero nunca tengo nada. but I never have anything.

Yo hago la luz, hago el fuego I make the light, I make the fire

hago el viento y hago el agua I make the wind, I make the water

yo soy el dueño de todo, I am the owner of everything

pero nunca tengo nada. but I never have nothing.

....

Yo hago la silla y la mesa I make the chair and the table

y no tengo ande sentarme, and I have no where to sit myself

total, si ya no me queda Overall, I have nothing left

ni el derecho de cansarme; I've lost the right to get tired.

Yo hago el palacio y mis hijos I make the palace and my children

duermen en ranchos de lata; sleep in tin cans

soy martillo, hacha, tenaza I am hammer, ax, pliers

pinza, cuchara y azada: pliers, bucket and spake

yo soy el dueño de todo I am the owner of everything

pero nunca tengo nada. but I never have nothing...

El día que yo me canse, On the day I get tired

van a arder las llamaradas!... the flames will burn...!

Treehouse (More Poetic Mediocrity)

 Climbing the tree 

Climbing the tree in my pink skirt

(someone taught me skirts were ideal for every day's climbing)

strong branches with ample footing

filling my shirt with as many ripe purples ones as I could find

before descending

where I knew you'd be waiting

to share the figs

Did you know about fig leaves?

It is a wonder Eve and Adam chose this leaf

(I pity them now more than I had before)

They itch.

I learned this as the minutes accumulated

each sticky itchy spot 

transferred to my body

worth every pound of figs

I hope Eden's expats walked away with several pounds

before the gates closed behind them and their itchy underwear.

a woman picking apples from the tree out our window

My New Home

There's an apple tree a-front my house, 

a guava tree behind.  

I climbed the wooden ladder

twisted 

and pulled myself a snack.

Last night the man who advises neighborhood organizations

advised us on Marxism
I got "infastructura" and "superstructura"

and forces of labor

but not much else.

This is a country of revolutionaries

a people of who've struggled for livelihood 

despite 500 years of colonial or (casi)-colonial rule

Here I am a student of everything

Even yesterday's advisor articulated that marxism 

in ideology 

is different than marxism 

embodied

(Yes, I understood that part too)

A marxist equality in salary means something different to me

than to the woman selling my papayas

and growing my coca

living on $2

a day.

I will tell you also

that I almost adore the leak 

in my bedroom ceiling.

I've made good friends with the blue plastic bowl

who catches drips

and only comes out to play 

when the rain is tan fuerte

The rain that sings the most lovely song I know 

sobre el techo

(the song my lover once sang to me).

Meanwhile the distant kind sounds of love being made

(don't tell them I'm writing this)

Is there not something good --when you pass quickly by any discomfort--

of a couple renewing their vows in breath and touch

while their hija sleeps by the side

That is a home.

So I sit here saying Bless them, Bless them, Bless them.

A couple clips of rehearsing in our living room for Desde los Sueños.  The bad singer who joins at the end is me, trying to learn the song!

Contradictions

Traveling by Trufi

Tonight I visited with Miro, my newest amiga from "La Comunidad" -- a church recommended to me by a friend of a friend.  (As a side note, this church as a fig tree out back--heavenly.)   Miro has been an angel of hospitality since I met her.   On my first Sunday she met me at my house to personally show me how to travel to Comunidad Cristiana Cochabamba via public transportation (Cochabamba's charming, yet random, and map-less Trufi system).  She has continued to issue invitations and kindness since then -- she is a paragon of warmth and hospitality.   

Tonight she was housesitting for missionary friends who live in Cochabamba.  The house was incredible, beautiful.  Three stories high, three bathrooms, and all the charm and amenities of an american suburban home.  I didn't know what to think.  I could not help but wonder: "to whom are they missionaries?"  The wealthy in Cochabamba?  I don't technically know where their quality of living falls on the Cochabamba wealth spectrum, but it was the the richest home I'd encountered in all my time here.  Missionaries.

On the high-altitude road toward a lovely church camp in the hills--which
is uncomfortably surrounded by a very different standard of living.

I've been known to spend (what is to some) a week's wages on one bar of chocolate, so let's keep that in perspective as I liberally judge the lifestyle of others.  Wandering the missionary house's many flights of stairs I recalled the cognitive dissonance of friends who traveled the globe for 6 months (an incredible luxury in itself -- much like my own current travels) and housed often in the home of generous missionaries.  Yet amidst their gratitude for all the hospitality, they were repeatedly stunned by missionaries who lived in comparative opulence to the people around them, or by missionaries who, while living in a Muslim culture, had never visited a mosque and had no Muslim friends.  How could this be?  How the disconnect with the culture?  

Crossing the coffee-colored Rio Rocha near my house

For those of us who claim any degree of compassion or solidarity with the poor, or alliance with Jesus (who, according to Luke audaciously began his ministry with the words "The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor..."), this disonnance is unnerving.  How much can we have before we start loosing our sense of what it's like to not have?  

Jen Hatmaker, in her book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess writes of her community's tiny, four-month-old church that took in eighty strangers--evacuees of Hurricane Ike.  Her family personally housed twelve:

We moved our three kids into our bedroom, washed sheets, blew up mattresses, rolled out sleeping bags, and readied the house for an onslaught.  As carloads arrived and we welcomed them in, one ten-year-old boy walked into our home, looked around with huge eyes, and hollered:

"Dad!  This white dude is RICH!"

We are.

For years I didn't realize this because so many others had more.  We were surrounded by extreme affluence, which tricks you into thinking you're in the middle of the pack.  I mean, sure, we have twenty-four hundred square feet for only five humans to live in, but our kids have never been on an airplane, so how rich could we be?  We haven't traveled to Italy, my kids are in public schools, and we don't even own a time-share.  (Roll eyes here.)

But it gets fuzzy once you spend time with people below your rung.  I started seeing my stuff with fresh eyes, realizing we had everything.  I mean everything.

I dig this passage because Hatmaker (I just wanted to use her last name again) ends with a reflection about relationship with others.  How does our wealth enable or inhibit our ability to relate with our fellow humans on "another rung?"  In Hatmaker's case wealth was both an obstacle and a opportunity.  Their 2400 square feet became community property for one important week.  But without the open door -- including the open door of allowing her way of life to be questioned those 2400ft would have remained an obstacle.  Instead the week set in motion a lifelong change.

Colectivo Katari doesn't have quite as much choice in the matter.  These Bolivian Artists don't earn an American salary; most live on $150-300 a month, some less.  They are middle class.  However an intentionality permeates the life choices, their spending, and perhaps more than any other artists I've met, there is a conviction that their artistic presentations must be matched--even proceeded--by a change in their personal lives.

Overlooking Cochabamba from the high surrounding hills

In racial matters, Katari has chosen to show solidarity with the "lowest rung" of the racial class.  (Indigenous Bolvians are the majority here, yet racial violence and passive-agressive oppression continues as it did 500 years ago.)  Though nearly all have indigenous blood, none claim a pure indigenous heritage.  They are urban mestizos.  Aliya is a white North American.  But they know this.  They're frank about the privilege these identities entail (or don't).  

My friends at Church of All Nations in Minnesota (a church that astoundingly has no ethnic majority) talk frequently and with shocking forthrightness about the privileges of race.  Because they have to if they've any hope of their Latino parishioners relating to their white parishioners.  Church of All Nations ("CAN") Pastor Jin Kim confesses his racism as a Korean American--"at least we're not black"--and Korean Americans' contribution to the violence against Rodney King in an article in the MN Christian Examiner here.   Or, read a CAN parishioner's confession to the immigrants of their congregation published in the February edition here. 

A large plant at the park next to my house.
I don't think you can eat it.

What I'm getting at is the liberty that seeps in when we become aware of all that our color and class entails.   It begins a conversation on another plane.  I know I'm white,  which entitles me to privilege all across the globe.  I know I come from the educated middle class, which meant it was near impossible that I not attend college--a privilege that aligns me with the 7% of the world population.  I know I'm a woman, which means in many parts of the world my testimony in court is invalid.

This is not the vice of Conservatives or Liberals, Buddhists, Christians, Jews or Secularists  -- but all.  Indeed, often those of us who consider ourselves "progressive" are the most blind to our racism, classism and sexism.   I noted this in my time in San Francisco.  Tim Wise outdoes me in his article With Friends Like These Who Needs Glenn Beck.  

The Post-Performance High

Talking till 2am about the idea of ideologies

when I could've gone to bed at 7

Whether it was the wine at 9,000ft

or my delight at having this conversation in another hemisphere, another language

I told my exhausted mind to stay with it -- understanding the 75% - 55% - 80%? 

I could

Oh the day when I hear in compete clarity

(Will it come?)                  

"You're worth more than I am"

because you're estadounidense

That's the structure--the ideology--of our world

I'll give you that:   Compare dark-skinned Boliviano and middle-class american 

(even as a woman).

But we both know.

We know.  Somehow.

That it's a lie.  That we are equal.