Backland

My Bolivian diary, entry #20

September 23, 2013

Ryan is going to give the kids ceramics lessons, four hours every Saturday morning. He has clay, a kiln, a wheel, glazes, books. This Saturday is a brief introduction. Jacky brings with him the model Kon-Tiki he has built over the last month or two out of dowels (three), popsicle sticks, chopsticks, string, thread, and a handkerchief, based on Thor Heyerdahl’s research into Inca rafts; he names it Supay, the Quechua word for demon. At 11:30 we launch it in a tiny version of Lake Titicaca below the Café Mirador. It’s part of a now closed outdoor children’s museum; Ryan gets the key from the groundskeeper. Down the hill for a block are terraced gardens, each featuring a different Bolivian ecosystem and a native dwelling there. A miniature amphitheater is in the middle and at the bottom is a greenhouse with a jungle in it.The museum, the indoor part of which filled two eighteenth- or nineteenth-century water tanks next to the Plaza de la Recoleta, was shuttered about half-a-dozen years ago, but the grounds are well kept.

In the afternoon, bus number four takes us on a circuitous route through the mercado campesino to visit Cal Orck’o on the very edge of the city. In 1994 the huge Sucre cement factory Fancesa discovered, while blasting a hill, a vertical layer of rock with thousands of dinosaur footprints. The beasts had tracked through clay, which a layer of volcanic ash covered and petrified. The formation of the Andes by shifts in tectonic plates moved this trod-on plain from horizontal to vertical: a flat wall three-quarters of a mile long and 250 feet high with five thousand prints from close to three hundred different species crossing it in straight tracks. The viewing platform is across from it on a tall hill in a park full of cheesy life-size dinosaur sculptures emitting roars that bring the one-year-olds there to tears. The view takes in all of Sucre, floating below the two hills behind La Recoleta and above a steep valley.

Sunday Karen and the kids go to the mercado campesino while Philly and I visit Che, an American radical writer who has been in Bolivia over three years and now rents a house from a family who supplies lettuce to the best supermarket in Sucre. Chaupo Molino is a village of thirty-two families just north of Las Palmas on the Rio Chico; we get off a bus, clamber down a dirt road, cross a swaying pedestrian bridge, and walk through farmland. The family’s two sons, Rodrigo and Sebastian, go to Colegio Pestalozzi with Jacky; I understand the Spanish they and their mother, Ximena, speak better than that of any other Bolivians I’ve met, with the possible exceptions of my Spanish teachers. They greet me warmly, inviting us all to visit their farm in a few weeks, when they’ll fill the swimming pool outside Che’s house; they’ve just built a pond and filled it with 3500 pacu (an Amazonian fish) which they’ll also sell to the supermarket; they’re growing artichokes, celery, arugula (a rarity here), tomatoes, parsley, and basil too. She tells us when we come, besides the expected goats and sheep, we might see frogs and toads, rare parrots, pumas, and owls; if you kiss one type of frog, she says, you’ll hallucinate. All we see, though, are lizards and birds and that peculiarly friendly creature called humans.

My Bolivian diary, entry #19

September 15, 2013

The Entrada (see previous entry) coincides with Yom Kippur this year, which matters to nobody except me (the Messianic Jews here don’t observe Yom Kippur much). Luckily (for me) it begins earlier—at about two o’clock Friday afternoon—and ends later—after midnight Saturday.

One hundred and thirteen dance troupes from all over the region—even as far as Oruro—participate. At about a hundred dancers and musicians per troupe, that’s over ten thousand costumed revellers. They follow a two-mile route, mostly uphill, extremely slowly—it takes them well over three hours to reach the plaza. In front of the cathedral, they kneel and pay homage to the Virgen de Guadalupe, an image painted in 1601 and elaborately decorated with pearls and gemstones. Each troupe is introduced by tiny costumed children, sometimes having mastered the dance steps of their elders; the musicians usually follow two large groups of dancers, with a third group behind them. The huge variety of troupes can be roughly classified into five categories:

• the Tinkuy troupes wear outlandish multicolored costumes based on a Potosí tradition, the men with feathered helmets, cushions over their buttocks, and thick sandals; at times they swing their entire bodies back and forth and around as if in a roller derby; the marching bands play highly rythmic repetitive riffs, the drummers dancing as they play
• the Caporales wear glittery gold-lamé outfits with huge shoulders and bells on their boots; the women wear high-heeled boots with tiny skirts so that when they twirl you can see their panties; the marching bands wear suits and ties
  
  
  

• the Morenadas do the least dancing, just swaying from step to step, gracefully waving their hands or twirling noisemakers; the older women wear layers of ruffled skirts, lace shawls, and bowler hats, the younger women wear sequined corsets, tutu skirts, and thigh-high four-inch-heel platform boots, and the men wear suits, ties, and hats
• the Chaqueño women wear floor-length full skirts that allow them to raise the hems over their heads as they twirl so that they look like spinning flowers; the men wear bandanas, cowboy hats, leather chaps, balloon-like pants tucked into black-leather pleated knee boots, and have lassoes dangling from their waists; they dance a wide variety of formal but intricate and energetic Flamenco-like dances, mostly to music pumped at high volume from massive speakers mounted on trucks, but sometimes to a four-to-seven-piece acoustic band amplified and sitting in a truck, including at least one fiddler, one guitarist, and one drummer

• the other category, which isn’t much of one, is “Variado,” which can include Afro-Bolivianos—their hair in cornrows, the drummers running through the dancers, some wearing intense bearded blackface masks with bulging eyes and teeth and lower lips (shades of black minstrelsy!), and the male dancers carrying whips to signify that they’ve overcome slavery; Diabolos—dressed as various kinds of devils, including wild men with long white beards and tiny skulls embedded in their fur, hunched-over witch doctors, yetis, bats, wolves, and other insanely masked creatures; and a wide variety of folkloric troupes from around the country, with bands playing panpipes or long wooden flutes and drums.

We watch the first troupes Friday afternoon, Jacky and I going all the way down to the Parque, then back up to the Plaza to meet Karen and Thalia (who takes videos and a few photographs). The streets are packed with spectators and vendors; bleachers have been erected all along the parade route, and squares on the sidewalks are numbered in chalk; people pay to put their chairs there. Many of the early troupes are made up of youth or campesinos in their folk costumes with their homemade instruments. I go indoors and make a hearty pre-fast dinner; after dinner, I play some ancient recordings of the Kol Nidre on my computer, and then pray for over an hour, using an old public domain mahzor on my e-reader, before going back outside to watch the parades until close to midnight.

Saturday morning I pray for three or four hours, then after noon we go see the parades with Zannah and Carlos. Carlos’s older brother Edgar is in one of the Charqueño troupes, and dances beautifully; we hang out with him and the oldest brother, Daniel, afterwards. These three young men are some of the handsomest in Sucre. Carlos has an infectious smile and loves to play with Jacky; he always wears a hood to keep his long hair out of his face. Edgar has sharply chiseled features, a soft voice, a strong Quechua accent, and, out of shyness, often keeps his hands near his mouth when speaking; it’s hard to understand him. He teaches music to children about four hours away but spends his weekends in Sucre. Daniel just returned from a few months in Argentina, and he’s clearly the most intellectual of the three. We stayed with their parents in Candelaria a few weeks ago, so this is one Bolivian family we are getting to know very well. We go to the Joy Ride Café, the main tourist hangout, because they have a two-for-one postre special, but this was our first time: we know from ex-workers how badly they treat their staff, and the desserts were mediocre. The sun had gone down so Thalia and I broke our fasts there; I then had a tucumana (a deep-fried empanada with chicken, veggies, and beef inside) and a papa relleno (a deep-fried mashed-potato empanada with a hard-boiled egg inside) on the street.

The contrast between the fasting, praying, and penitential aspect of Yom Kippur and the festivities on the streets was a bit much. It is so much easier to be joyous than sorry, so much easier to be with people than alone. I was tempted and gave in. Perhaps the Lord will understand.

My Bolivian diary, entry #18

September 8, 2013

I’m editing a manuscript while the rest of the family watches a movie, but the sound of the fireworks indicates that something is going on. So I pull on a sweater and go out to the plaza at about 9:15 p.m. They’re setting fireworks from the cathedral courtyard, dozens of people going in and out, including some in costume with instruments. But the street is where the action is. Beginning about a mile away and ending at the plaza come thousands of dancers. Each troupe is composed of about fifty to a hundred along with funky marching bands. The uniforms vary from troupe to troupe: tight jeans and polo shirts; skirts made of multicolored cloth strips; helmets with tall plumes; miner’s outfits complete with lit helmets, hammers, and spikes; boots with bells; boots with loud heels for stomping. Most of the troupes are from Sucre, but some are from Potosí or smaller villages. The dances are of two types. In the main dance, always to the accompaniment of a marching band, with the drummers usually doing their own dance as they play, the dancers take lots of short steps backward and forward and then hunch over and swing their whole bodies wildly, lunging from side to side (the miners hitting their spikes). The energy they expend and generate is tremendous; the dance is complex and entrancing. The Chaqueños (the Gran Chaco is a huge plain that stretches through parts of Bolivia and Argentina and most of Paraguay) use amplifier trucks instead of marching bands; the music is triple-meter, a bit Mexican sounding; the dancers wear mostly white; and the dance features a lively quick-step interval of boot stomps and taps. Between troupes, people run into the street to set more fireworks that fill the sky with chrysanthemum explosions; I’ve never been only ten feet away from massive fireworks before. The Entrada de la Virgen de Guadalupe, which is to Sucre what Mardi Gras is to New Orleans, takes place next Saturday, September 14; this is the beginning of the fiesta. I stay out until 11:45, when the first band takes the stage at the plaza; the fireworks and dancing continue until past dawn, but I’m in bed, sleeping, listening, wondering.

My Bolivian diary, entry #17

September 6, 2013

On Tuesday, Maya, an Israeli officer here for a week on her South American travels, finds out about us, the rare Jews in town, and invites us to have a Rosh ha-Shanah dinner with her at Café Condor Wednesday night along with a dozen or so “homeless” campesinos and a couple of guides to translate into Quechua. Thalia gets sick again (briefly) so only Jacky and I go. The campesinos aren’t really homeless—they come into Sucre from the campo to beg—but they’re poor and hungry and we all relish the food and Maya’s sweetness. It’s not traditional but it’s a good way to begin the new year.

The actual Jews who live in Sucre probably number about five, and they have formed a congregation, along with a number of non-Jews, as Messianic Jews, a term new to me (though, as I later read in Wikipedia, they are a widespread and established group). Carla, one of my Spanish teachers, invites us to her parents’ for the second night of Rosh ha-Shanah. Her father, whom I’ll call Mr. Z., leads the congregation; he takes us to the temple/chapel he has built on his property. The walls are painted to look as though they’re made of black rock with white mortar; on the back wall are menorahs, stars of David, hangings with the name of God in Hebrew letters, instruments, and amplifiers, while on the right wall are giant letters spelling Jesus Christo. As about thirty or forty people show up little by little, Mrs. Z. invites women to come up and light candles, nine in all, while she recites the blessing in garbled Hebrew. But Mr. Z., who was born a Jew, is the real star of the show, praying in a “charismatic” manner (in Spanish) for the Lord to rise again while his wife whispers into her mike, “Ah, Señor, levántate, Señor.” Mr. Z.’s wildly eschatological sermon centers around the importance and connections of the Jewish holidays to the messianic ideal, and in addition to readings from both the Old and New Testaments, he uses a laser pointer to highlight the significant passages on charts pinned to the wall. The songs they sing along to are cheesy synth-laden numbers mixing Spanish and Hebrew; as she sings, Mrs. Z. plays slightly off-beat on a tom-tom (Mr. Z. used to play guitar, but has arthritis now). The service lasts well over an hour; by the time it’s over it’s after nine. The chairs are rearranged in a circle and a table is brought in with bread, wine, apples, honey, two kinds of rice, two kinds of chicken, and another dish or two; I say the Hebrew blessings, we dip apples and bread into honey, we drink port, and we finally eat. After dinner, Israeli dances are blasted from the speakers and we clumsily (or, in Mr. Z.’s case, skillfully) dance around the room, happy that the service is over and the food was good and the people are so warm and kind and it’s a Shana Tova (good new year) and we’ll be going back to our house soon.

My Bolivian diary, entry #16

September 1, 2013

This weekday routine we’ve set will, I assume, take us through mid-November, when summer vacation begins. From 8:30 to 12:50 (though soon they’ll start at 8:00) the kids are at the Colegio Pestalozzi. Meanwhile I work, via Internet, from 10:00 to 6:00. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings I take a Spanish class from 6:30 to 8:30. In my (little) spare time with the kids, I teach Thalia pre-calculus and chemistry and Jacky algebra and Hebrew; Karen takes care of the other subjects. Almost every morning I visit the mercado central for groceries. On Thursday afternoons we’ll go to Yamparáez, a village about forty minutes from here, to help in the library, where about fifty local kids hang out. I also have Spanish homework, an hour or two’s worth a week, and prep work for the homeschooling. I do like to read the paper (the Correo del sur, a Sucre paper whose editorials, in Randall’s words, “would make Goebbels proud,” or the Guardian or the New York Times, online) and take a walk every day, though I can’t always. Occasionally we're invited somewhere for tea or I'll go to the Mercado San Antonio for a lunch of grilled fish eaten with my fingers, making up the hours spent off the job in the evening or early morning. All this leaves me with no time to read books, exercise, and the other things I would fill my spare time with in Chicago. I have some time on the weekends; but that’s partly taken with travel and socializing. (This weekend and last we stayed in Sucre.) The differences between my life here and in Chicago are innumerable.

It’s sunny and cool almost every day here, and walking up and down the steep hills is pleasant when and where there’s not too much traffic. The streets and sidewalks are narrow; the stores are all closed between 12:30 and 3:00; the micros (small buses) make the air hard to breathe when they pass.

I have now found most of my favorite vendors at the market, all women: the woman who smiles sweetly as she sells me hearty and crisp rolls with the consistency of good French bread and fresh honey in tall bottles corked with beeswax; the old woman with few teeth who sells me dirty farm-fresh eggs (some of them blue, all with huge dark yolks) and quite perishable fresh goat cheese; the stern and tough lady who cuts me slabs or chops of beef or grinds it for me; the vegetable seller who always gives me a few extra things for nothing; the fish vendor who often doesn’t get her fish early enough in the morning for me. I haven’t yet found a fruit vendor I totally trust—most tend to overcharge gringos—but the fruit is always good; I haven’t visited the avocado girls enough because I just discovered their haunt in an upstairs corner I hadn’t seen, next to tables and tables of stews; and I alternate between several of the banana vendors, nuts-and-dried-fruit vendors, potato vendors, and grain-and-bean vendors. As for the food, we’ve tried all sorts of new fruits and vegetables, but I do miss things one just can’t get here: brown rice, lamb, raw sugar, non-pork lunch meats, craft beer, sherry, pasteurized but not sterilized milk. I’ve learned how to pasteurize now, with the help of a borrowed thermometer (we searched in every store in town for one in vain): I heat raw milk in a double-boiler to 161 degrees while stirring it constantly, wait 15 seconds, pour it quickly into a steel container that has been in the freezer, cool it, still stirring, in a sink full of cold water, and put it in the refrigerator. That way the milk doesn’t taste cooked, a taste we all find unpleasant.

I’m sleeping better here: the house is quiet, the bed big, the air cold, the blankets warm and heavy. I’m used to not putting toilet paper in the toilet, brushing my teeth with bottled water, adjusting the water heater before I shower, washing my fruit with boiled water, peeling my cucumbers and carrots, and disinfecting raw foods that grow on the ground (lettuce, radishes, strawberries). My digestive system is, however, not up to snuff: because of the altitude, I assume, it’s harder for me to digest almost everything here, so I end up with stomach aches. If I just stuck with bread and water I’d be OK, but how nutritious is that?

My Spanish is slowly improving. I can’t jump into conversations between Bolivians as I’d like to, but I can have a decent conversation with one person. Almost all the Bolivians I’ve talked with are women, with the exception of Carlos and Moi (one of my Spanish teachers), both of them in their twenties—that’s due to the social circles Philly and Zannah move in. None of these women are married—Philly says that married women aren’t allowed to be independent enough to do office or social work. Karen has some married female colleagues at the University whom I hope she’ll get to know well enough so that we can socialize with Bolivian families. And then there are the Jewish families here, whom we haven’t yet met, but will this week.

I’m glad that I no longer drive, though I miss bicycling—it’s too dangerous to bicycle here except on Sundays. (Today I borrow Randall’s bike and go cycling with Philly, which is glorious because it’s the annual day without cars.) The buses and taxis are cheap, plentiful, and convenient, if on the verge of breaking down; but I walk almost everywhere.

Our first visit to Yamparáez was on Friday—not the best day to go since many of the kids go off to their parents for the weekend. With Zannah and Carlos, we take a micro to the outskirts of the village and walk down the main street which, at two o’clock, is characteristically empty. About twenty kids come, spinning tops on the street, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Martha, the librarian, who unlocks the doors. Their assignment is to make thank-you cards for Biblioworks’ donors using colored pencils, pens, paper, and scissors. We write “thank you” in five different languages on the white board—it’s funny how many of them choose to write it in Hebrew and how few in Quechua. Most of them draw landscapes or computers, but one little boy only wants to cut out butterflies and stars. I’m very taken with one little girl, Anaí, who can read faster than I can, and by another, older than the rest, who is so shy and timid it’s painful to watch. Most of the kids appear to be between seven and eleven; an older group reads comic books, watches TV, and plays video games. They’re all clearly very poor, with dirty clothes and faces, and starved for creative activity—the schools here don’t encourage that. Karen reads Huevos verdes con jamón with gusto and the kids are spellbound; Thalia and I are a bit shyer, and Jacky mostly just plays with Carlos. On the way back he sits next to two fighting cocks, one on Carlos’s lap, with ten more under the seat.