THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE
" COCHABAMBA, BOLIVIA - THE PLACE WHERE I LIVE "
Volume 38 - June 9, 2001
With a Special Photo Exhibit at:
Dear Readers:
A few weeks ago I returned from a month-long visit to the U.S. In San Francisco I received an award from Project Censored, which named my articles on last year’s Bolivian water revolt as the top story of the year. I was honored by the award but I also came to a realization about my writing from Bolivia that I wasn’t very happy about. I have made thousands of people think that Bolivia is basically a violent place where you would have to be whacko to want to live.
The actual experience of living here is so utterly the opposite of that image, that I have decided to make amends, with this special issue of our newsletter dedicated to the great place my family and I live - Cochabamba. My wife and I first came here ten years ago, to serve as volunteers for a year in a local orphanage. In 1998 we moved back here with our two children and every day we feel blessed to be here. In this issue, a snapshot of life in Cochabamba AND THIS TIME WITH REAL SNAPSHOTS TO GO WITH IT. I spent some time recently taking photographs around town, creating a small exhibition of photos now posted on The Democracy Center Web site:
Please take a moment to click and have a look.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
COCHABAMBA, BOLIVIA - THE PLACE WHERE I LIVE
DOGS AND BREAD
The beginning of my day is about two things - dogs and bread. At precisely 6:45 each morning my cheap green plastic alarm clock alerts our dog Simone that it is time to attack my face with her long pink tongue until I get out of bed. It is our job to walk to the small corner store run by our neighbor Lourdes to buy fresh bread for my children’s school lunches. For Simone, our mission to buy bread is really about making it to the day’s first meeting of the local “dog club”. This isn’t the type of dog club one sees in San Francisco or New York, where urban canine owners gather informally to let their animals run loose and swap dog stories. Our dog club is strictly run by the dogs, more than a dozen, some of whom live with families and most of whom just live on the street and “off the kindness of strangers.” The morning begins with a wild frenzy of sniffing, jumping, chasing, and looking for food - a canine rave.
Bolivian bread comes in two main varieties - we sometimes call them footballs and hockey pucks, referring to their shape. The bread is fresh, better than almost any you’ll find in the wealthy world up north, and an assortment of ten rolls will set you back about 30 cents. Bolivian dogs, on the other hand, come in an unlimited variety. As a result of all that uncontrolled sniffing, jumping and mixing, Bolivian dogs are like snowflakes - no two alike. Waiting at our door when we return are Simone’s best friends - Jumping Dog, Blanquita, Brown Dog. Each one has perfected to fine art the ability to jump and catch in mid-air the pieces of bread I toss to them each day.
THE RACE TO SCHOOL
The only thing in our neighborhood that there might be more of than dogs is children. Each morning our neighborhood becomes a flurry of children racing off to school, wearing the standard school uniform of a long white smock (called “guarda polvo” or dust protector). From pre-schoolers to high-schooler, they run down the hillside, their white smocks flapping in the wind like a flurry of ghosts running about in the morning sun.
My teenage children, Elizabeth and Miguel, run the same race. At 14, Elizabeth still lets me practice the ritual we have enjoyed since kindergarten of walking to the bus together, only now with very strict rules. As soon as we spot the school bus climbing up the long cobblestone street that leads to our neighborhood I have precisely 17 seconds to disappear, with Simone, around the corner before the bus comes and I get sighted. Before we implemented the “disappearing daddy” rule we had a few crises when Simone climbed aboard the bus, jumping and licking and spreading pandemonium before I could climb aboard, grab her, and rescue my children from utter embarrassment.
LIFE IN THE CITY
Cochabamba is a big bowl-like valley. At the bottom is the center of the city, a tangle of narrow streets, green plazas, bursting street markets, and people with mobile carts selling everything from fresh squeezed orange juice to “salteñas”, the thick crusted dumplings of hot stew that are a favorite breakfast here. Up the hillside are the neighborhoods and with each climb in altitude the houses become farther apart and traditional rural life becomes a larger presence. Our neighborhood is smack dab in the middle between city and country, with wandering pigs, sheep, and cows are a daily presence. A few minutes uphill from us the city ends, giving way to Andean foothills filled with small farms, rivers, and long dirt pathways.
Our corner is the end of the line for one of the city’s many mini-bus lines. At about 5am the first drivers arrive, letting us know with the beeping of their horns. By dawn the corner looks like a small parking lot of small buses still plastered with mysterious Korean printing (in Bolivia, most everything comes second hand). A woman named Miriam cooks for the drivers as they take breaks in between their trips to and from the city.
Daily life on our corner is punctuated by specific sounds which alert us to who is coming up the hill. As the garbage truck approaches, the men aboard bang on a cow bell. As they arrive we all race out to the truck with trash bags in a scene that looks like one big happy neighborhood garbage parade. The trucks selling tanks of propane gas (which we use to power our tiny ovens) blow a horn that sounds like whales crying in the distance. Remberto the knife sharpener, who comes round with his cart, blows a shrill whistle. The trucks full of fruit, salt or laundry detergent announce their arrival with blaring speakers which belt out Bolivian music and special price offers.
In the center of the city, a half hour walk below us, people gather in the main plaza, a big square garden bordered (like every city plaza in Latin America) on one side by the Catholic cathedral and on the other by the main government building. Here people sit, talk, politic, drink fresh-squeezed juice, sell, take pictures, and pass the day slowly. A few blocks to the south is Cochabamba’s famous marketplace (“la cancha”), one of South America’s largest. Cochabamba’s answer to Wal-Mart, it is 25 square blocks of mayhem, with people selling everything from Sony radios to llama fetuses.
LIFE IN THE COUNTRY
Over the mountain, in the rural communities that dot the Andes all around us, life is considerably different. We spent last weekend in one of these small villages, where we go as often as we can, Aramasi. Here the tiny houses are adobe with roofs of grass and with pigs and sheep standing guard at the door. The fields of corn and potatoes have been harvested, with a poor crop this year because of the hard summer rains. Our visit coincided with a local celebration, in which the children put on native Quechua clothing and danced traditional dances. The local women competed in a contest to see who could most quickly spin sheep wool into thread using a simple wooden drop-spindle.
The countryside has its rush hour just like the city. Only here, instead of cars trying to cram together onto tiny streets, the morning and afternoon rush hours are about moving the sheep and cows to and from grazing pastures. During our four hour hike into Aramasi last weekend my son Miguel was amazed at how quiet it was. Voices here carry for a mile. In silence like this the people of the countryside pass whole days tending sheep and spinning. For many, it is as if the last hundred years never happened.
BOLIVIA
To be sure, Bolivia has hard problems to address and life here is not always sweet. But to look at it day to day, it is a place where five year olds in the city can still take the public bus on their own to school. It is a place where taxi drivers, storekeepers, and sellers in the marketplace bring their children with them to work. Bolivia is still a place where you can walk a half an hour from the city center and be in the country, walking a soft dirt road. The rest of the world likes to pigeonhole this place - poor, backward, broken. On my trip back to the U.S., the views of San Francisco Bay were breathtaking. Brunch by the sea at Malibu was a luxury. Walking in New York’s Central Park was grand. But I am always glad to come home to the dusty streets, to the pigs and the cows, and to the menagerie of dogs waiting at my door for bread.
See the photo exhibit that goes with this article at:
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