Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day to all our Mom's in Bolivia. Today, May 27, is Mothers Day in Bolivia.

Grade schools across Cochabamba held special events today in honor of Moms and children have been at work all week on all manner of cards and trinkets – Hallmark, stand aside.

This morning at the Tiquipaya market the women were wandering from one vegetable and fruit stall to another sprinkling mixtura (confetti) on one another's heads, and passing around saltenas and I assume a tutumba of chicha or two as the day wore on. When I called the electric company this evening to share the happy news that our entire neighborhood had no lights (it's back on now, thank you) the operator and I had a very nice chat about the event in her twins' kindergarten earlier in the day. Even the airlines have joined in, letting all women in the country, mothers or not, fly around half price this month.

In Bolivia, Mothers Day is a big deal.

In our family the choice trinket made with a child's hands was a bookmark decorated with colored pencils, and carefully "plastificado" by Daddy at a local libreria. The outing involved two dogs, mothers both, and a climb to a river in the hills.

Below is an additional report on Mothers Day in Bolivia from the newest member of the Democracy Center team in Bolivia, Kris Hannigan-Luther, a transplanted Mom of three from Idaho. You can expect to see more writing from Kris in the coming months.

So, to all Moms, Happy Mothers Day. And to all our Bolivian readers abroad – don't forget that today is the day. Call your Mom.

A Cochabamba Mother’s Day

Wriiten by Kris Hannigan-Luther

On Mother’s Day in the United States we barely made a respectable nod to the day this year, with my husband and I phoning our mothers to wish them a happy day. We took advantage of Skype, not of the international postal system. We weren’t in tune with the U.S. calendar holidays- we planned to celebrate Mother’s Day on May 27th, with the rest of Bolivia.

As we moved our family to Cochabamba in January, this was my first Bolivian Mother’s Day. I feel the weight of motherhood more intensely this year. Making a decision to transplant my children into a foreign culture and language is not something I take lightly. I watch them closely. I hold my breath, waiting to see whether this experience will be the life-enriching gift that I hope it to be, or a form of slow torture. In the short term, it appears to be a mixture of the two.

On my morning commute into the city center, I didn’t notice much out of the ordinary on May 27th. Arranged flowers were for sale on a small table in front of a hardware store, there was a stand of flowers and unidentifiable pink and purple items in front of the stadium. Women on my bus seemed to be smiling at and acknowledging each other in a different manner- almost a secret code in the language of motherhood.

My kids have been rehearsing for their school’s Mother’s Day program for weeks. They haven’t filled me in on the details (yes- they’re at that age), but I gather there is to be a time-machine and dancing. My children’s teachers have also been discussing the history of Mother’s Day in Bolivia. Through my kids, I learned about the significance of May 27th as a day Bolivian women fought for independence. The school program is scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m., so I play it safe and arrive at the school around 10:20. I am among the first to arrive- obviously still learning to navigate the cultural norms.

My son is at home, slightly sick with what I hope is not a case of swine flu. My daughter is not dressed in the poodle skirts the rest of the girls in her class have donned. “I guess we were supposed to wear something special after all,” she comments to me when I arrive. I’m not sure if this attire mandate was something she missed in the context of foreign language difficulty or something she chose to ignore purposefully. She dances with her class of third graders and sings songs with the school in English and Spanish. Afterwards she joins some classmates eating Salchipapas with lots of ketchup and mayonnaise.

I snap pictures, like the other mothers and grandmothers around me. We smile at each other and share knowing looks in the language of motherhood.