Back With a Vengeance

Ok readers – I am back.

After five weeks of bouncing across the USA I am back in Cochabamba – back from visits with everyone I am related to by blood or marriage, back to a diet without bagels or the bags of junk food consumed on long road trips, back to the land of road blockades and afternoon coffees that don't cost $4.

And after a long absence I am back to writing here on the Blog. That’s fine, you needed a vacation from me and I needed one from you.

But get ready to go at it again. The months ahead in Bolivia promise an ample supply of drama and comedy as we head into yet another round of national elections. But first a look at my eight-city "Schlep Across the USA".

Jim Shultz


Things I Saw in the USA

Washington, DC

Obama-mania. I used to think there were a lot of pictures of Evo Morales on walls and billboards in Bolivia, until I got a good look at the explosion of Obama paraphernalia on sale in our nation’s capital and across the U.S. Obama comic books (as a super hero), kits letting you paint and decorate your own Obama statuette, bobbing head Obamas for your car dashboard. The key difference of course is that while the Morales imagery is largely financed out of the public treasury, the Obama paraphernalia is free market economics in full throttle. I am looking the possible market for a bobbing head Evo statuette.

Washington is a divided city. On the one hand there are all those people clustered together in a beehive dedicated to power and the pursuit of it – from both left and right. Then there are the people who serve those people bagels. Here is where there is some insight to be gleaned.

Most of the folks slapping cream cheese on round boiled bread with a hole in the middle are immigrants. I make a point always to ask them where they are from and get some morsel of their story. Usually they seem genuinely pleased to have someone ask about them. The morning I was headed to the Obama State Department to debate the merits of international trade tribunals I was served by a young woman from Guatemala, in the U.S. for eighteen months.

“And how do you like it here?”

Pause, “Not so much.”

“Why?”

“All day people just look behind me at the wall. No one looks me in the eye.”

I know there are many good people in Washington (before last January 20 and after) but sometimes all those people so busy "saving the world" forget to pay attention to some of the people living in that world who cross their paths. So a simple Spanish lesson for those buying bagels and other food products from Guatemalans, Salvadorians, Mexicans, Bolivians and others:

“Hola, como esta usted?”

New York, New York

I sat for dinner with one of my true heroes, Cathy Breen. A woman in her late 50s with graying hair and large plastic glasses, Cathy is not the sort of person you would necessarily notice just passing her on the street. But she is a hero. For half the year she lives in a Catholic Worker house in the East Village, making her life with people who live on the margin, including some who carry the burden of mental illness. Her home is a community where most others could not comfortably spend even a few hours.

The other half of the year this former Maryknoll missionary in Bolivia lives among the refugees of the U.S. War in Iraq. She began going to the Middle East in the run-up to that U.S. invasion. Back when the U.S. government was pedaling false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and raining mass destruction on Baghdad, Cathy was there. She was on the ground during “Shock and Awe”, to bear witness and send reports back home to the rest of us. She was embedded with the people instead of the troops.

Now, more often than not, you can find her in either Damascus or Amman living among some of the 1.5 million Iraqi people who have fled the war and its violent aftermath. She accompanies them through their process of applying for asylum to the U.S. for a new life and comforts them when they are turned down. One family she told me about was denied entry by U.S. officials because the wife had paid ransom to win release of her kidnapped husband. U.S. officials labeled this as “cooperation with terrorists.”

In her stories I hear echoes of another U.S. war two decades ago. Washington spent billions backing a right wing regime in El Salvador and then when Salvadoran refugees fled to the U.S. border to escape the violence we did all we could to send them back home. The U.S. is much better at starting and financing wars than it is dealing with the human damage our wars create.

Upstate New York

To my California friends, call it treason if you like but after many visits here I have to say that one of the most pleasant places that the U.S. has to offer is upstate New York in the summertime. I am not just writing that to kiss-up to my hoard of Buffalo in-laws (with whom I just spent a week in the Adirondacks). Upstate in summer is green, it is relaxed, and it is full of people who really, really appreciate summer since it is a respite from the punishment that is upstate in winter.

When my eldest daughter was trying to figure out where to apply for college my Buffalo-born wife tried hard to convince her to head upstate. I would secretly take her aside and tell her, “You want to know what winter is like in upstate NY?” Then I would thrust her hand into our badly-in-need-of-defrosting freezer. “This is what they call a warm day.” I was very convincing. She now goes to college in Florida.

But summertime – that is a whole other deal.

Maybe it was the farmers market in Keene Valley, where locals and visitors in assorted kaki shorts chomp on samples of organic apples and blueberry bread. Maybe it was the vista of Adirondack peaks and square miles without a trace of Cochabamba litter. But actually I credit my seduction to the taxidermy shop in Keene. I recognize that getting shot and stuffed is not great news for the black bears, spotted deer, assorted birds or the black and white skunk that lined the shelves and floor. But my six-year-old and I sure thought it was cool. So now I am thinking that when my own time comes I could get stuffed and become a sort of lasting ornament here at the Democracy Center, perhaps holding a bagel. I’m looking into shipping and stuffing costs and will keep you posted.

Phoenix, Arizona

My family here explained that we were fortunate to hit cool weather, 106 degrees Fahrenheit, down from 115 the week before. Now good cheap Mexican food is certainly an asset in any city but it doesn't make up for living in a frying pan, from my point of view. My biggest regret was when I suddenly remembered on Highway 10 near the California border that I had forgotten to try actually frying an egg on the sidewalk. So I guess I'll have to go back next summer.

Southern California

Home to the land of my birth. So many tourist attractions, so little time. My family lives very near the Reagan Library. I have been there before and was tempted to return once again (I hear it now has a wicked-cool replica of Air Force One) but I opted instead for visits with my mother. If you ask my six-year-old what the highlights were for her she might put them in this order: seeing my brother's new puppy pee on Daddy's shoe; swimming with her cousins, and riding a bike with all her family to the Santa Monica pier and going on all the rides without throwing up. I don't think she would have liked the Reagan library, unless they have a puppy there that pees on shoes.

San Francisco

I believe that it was Jerry Garcia who once described San Francisco as "49 square miles surrounded on all sides by reality." It was good to be home.

Now to be clear, San Francisco doesn't really have summer. In August San Franciscans just read reports about summer elsewhere, while shrouded in teeth-rattling fog. Okay, it isn't that bad. Even in August the afternoon sun is often strong enough to draw Speedo-clad gay sunbathers and Latino families together into Dolores Park. Here is where the Castro and the Mission come together in one of the oddest cultural soups anywhere. But to get real summer you have to cross a bridge.

I spent a good part of my week there in Marin, where redwoods mingle with granola bins and road bikes that sell for the price that people buy cars for in Cochabamba. It is also very sunny. On one of those August mornings I ventured with my youngest and two of her cousins into Muir Woods, where tall straight redwoods dating back to the time of Christ's birth put to shame every grand church built in his name since.

There is a memorial there in Cathedral Grove to Franklin Roosevelt. In May of 1945 leaders from throughout the world were gathered in San Francisco to make history with the signing of the charter that founded the United Nations. FDR was to have been at that conference but died just a month earlier. One of the wiser leaders among the assembled delegates convinced the entire conference to travel across the Golden Gate to the redwoods and to honor the dead President's memory.

It made me think. How different would it be if our leaders today, in any country, traveled to natural settings like this for their debates over environmental policy? Would we demolish our planet so cavalierly if we debated its future in nature instead of within sterile granite walls?

Back to Bolivia

So that is my report. For those of you who come here only or a quick fix of Bolivian political matters, stay tuned. There is plenty to write about here in the days and weeks ahead – Evo vs. Manfred, machinations over lithium and foreign arms purchases, and verbal jousts between Bolivia and Peru. We'll try to do justice to them all.

But today is quiet in Cochabamba, as transportation unions have shut down the city with a one-day strike. It is tradition here that, when mad, various interest groups give everyone a day off (and make working people lose a day of wages) with a set of road blockades. This is the Bolivian version of am upstate "snow day", but with really good weather.

So here I sit contentedly stranded in the fields of Tiquipya, where my daughter plays happily with the five baby puppies that now occupy our yard and where I have just eaten the last sesame bagel that I stashed in my suitcase on my return.

As the saying goes: When the bagels are gone it is time to get back to work.

Stay tuned.