Early Morning, Beyond the City Limits

Readers:

There is plenty of time between now and December to obsess about Bolivian electoral politics, to let people trade barbs over Evo and his coterie of adversaries, to examine the ramifications of the US’ latest criticism of Bolivian anti-drug efforts, etc. We also have a new video coming up from Cochabamba, a major offering that is in the final editing stages (the theme remains secret).

But in this post I prefer to offer something different.

Jim Shultz

Early Morning, Beyond the City Limits

My alarm goes off reliably at 6am every morning. My alarm is not a clock. It is cat. Her name is Emma. She is brown and white and just as the first light of dawn peaks in through the tall eucalyptus trees she decides that her night of tormenting small mice and baby possums is over and she comes to the door that is two feet from my sleeping head and meows in high volume. If that fails to roust me she has some manner of banging her body against the thin wooden door. That works.

The cat’s entrance into the bedroom sets of a chain reaction involving the dogs. They awake and with tails that wag so frenetically they can knock over a small child (and have) they wait for possible signals that I might take them for an early morning walk through the countryside. When I pull on an old pair of boots that is usually the sign they are looking for.

As I shut the wooden gate that separates our yard from the rough street of rocks and dirt where we live I can see my nearest neighbors, two fields up, tending to their cows. Don Fructoso (yes, that really is his name) and his family are up well before their strange gringo neighbor up the road. They have almost twenty cows, not including five little ones born just these past few months. Each of these cows, he explained to me, produces 20 liters of milk per day, ten in the morning and ten in the evening. By 6:30, with the sun barely up, his family is headed off in an old beat-up blue station wagon with a collection of steel milk canisters in the back. They take these canisters to the meeting point in our neighborhood where the giant truck for the PIL dairy company will buy their milk to process into small plastic bags. No milk carton has ever been seen here in Bolivia, to my limited knowledge.

My family has recently given Don Fructoso and his family a small puppy that was part of a litter that ended up living with us for a time. These puppies produced great glee in my six-year-old daughter and great quantities of tiny black piles of puppy poop in our yard. Now when I pass by his house the puppy wants to follow me. So this morning the two excited black dogs and I headed uphill in the opposite direction.

Just past the corner I run into another neighbor of ours, an elderly woman who grows corn and walks with a waddle. She is carrying a broken plastic trashcan in which there appears to be an assortment of plastic and paper refuge. I wince because I know where she is going. More than likely it is to the dry riverbed to add her garbage to the pile that has been growing there since the rains stopped falling last April.

Tiquipaya is beautiful as long as you keep your sights six inches above the ground. Because the ground is often covered with garbage. Empty lots become carpeted with discarded plastic bags. Dry rivers become dumps. It is hard to find a stretch of 100 meters anywhere that hasn’t already been strewn with bits or piles of plastic and paper that someone tossed out of a car window, or onto the ground as they walked, or dumped just before dawn while the cows were still being milked. This is what happens when there is no garbage collection and nowhere else to put it.

Last April President Morales sponsored a resolution at the UN declaring it Dia de la Pachamama, Mother Earth Day. It was nice gesture. But I think La Pachamama would appreciate it even more if the government would buy some public trash containers, set them up around these rural neighborhoods, and arrange for the garbage to be collected. People would use them. La Pachamama might like it even better still if the government had a plan to actually reduce the amount of garbage produced. We can dream.

The dogs and I walk past the fields where my neighbors have only recently planted corn and potatoes. The earth is clean now, plowed up into long straight lines of trench and mound. One thing that people who live in these parts know how to do well is squeeze food out of soil. Some friends here have tried to teach me the basics in the small garden plot we have just planted in our yard, a miniature imitation of the real fields that surround us. Corn and potatoes, as it turns out, prefer to sprout in dry soil. Who knew? They are only to be watered after the first green leaf pops its small head out into the Bolivian sun. I would have probably drowned them.

When summertime comes some months from now these fields will be harvested. Tall corn plants will produce a few cobs each of the giant white corn known here as “choclo” and we will eat it with chunks of the soft white quesillo cheese that people like Don Fructoso produce fresh. We will be reminded in that wonderful combination of tastes and textures why we live here.

Farther up the road a small creek runs along the property of another neighbor. The children in this house here often bathe in the creek in the morning. But most of the creek is filled with a long parade of the deep green leaves that belong to the calolillies growing in its waters. They have long white pedals shaped like upside down bells and thin yellow fingers reaching out from the center.

It is just after here that we hit the crossroads of two main paths. My dogs look up at me for direction. In another hour or so there will be cars making their way along these roads. Old white Toyota Corolla wagons, manufactured in the era of disco, will encounter one another and take turns pulling over to the few wide spots to the side so that the other can pass. Speeds here rarely reach what a bicycle can’t pass.

But for now, with the morning sky still only a faded blue, the only movement on the streets is of people and cows. Most of my neighbors have gotten acquainted with the two walking beasts at my side. We joke that I am out walking with my “guardas espaldas”, my bodyguards. Simone, eleven-years-old and social insists on sniffing the feet of those we meet.

Just before we turn right back to the house there is a creek to cross, this one full of water. It irrigates fields for miles onward. I leap across it at its narrow point. The dogs wade in, not missing a chance to muddy their feet before they make a run for my poor wife and daughter whom they will pounce on as soon as they find an open door.

I lag behind to take one last look at the sky. Dawn has had its moment here in the countryside. The sun’s fires already shine on the top of the mountains to the west. In an hour I will have completed the rituals of taking a child to school and will be smooshed once more into the back seat of a tiny car converted into public transit, the city inhaling people from all directions to begin their workday.

And I will look forward to the next dawn and the next walk and the next alarm that comes with small white whiskers.