The driver starts up the car and lets it run to warm it. He says that we have a couple minutes, that gives me time for another cup of coffee. It will be my third but I can’t really wake up. It’s cold and dark outside and the dim yellow light in the kitchen is anything but exhilarating. It’s 5:30 when the car leaves the university driveway in front of my house. We stop and pick the doctors up at the Health Post a few minutes away and everyone teases me for looking so dumpy and worn out. If I didn’t feel so dumpy and worn out I’d try to think of something silly to say so I seem good natured. I didn’t really have it in me, anyway it’s just that morning REALLY hasn’t been my time of day.




I sort of zone out until we get to Coroico to pick up medical supplies a little after 6:00. I get out of the car to stretch my legs when while we wait outside the hospital. The adobe houses and cobblestone streets are totally alive in the pink sunrise. It feels like the light is emanating from inside them somewhere and the sun might as well not even be coming up. It’s the kind of light that has a texture to it, a density that you can almost touch. Bodies moving through it should leave churning wakes behind them and light objects could be suspended in it. The hopefulness from every new beginning in history has been collected and the soupy mass and poured into the valley where it’s so powerful that it might make you excited for a day of picking Coca.
My eyes open up a little bit.




Back on the road toward Santo Domingo I chat with the nurse next to me. She is a recent graduate of the UAC and now a full time employee. Behind us sit a nursing student and the campus doctor who was trained in La Paz. The visit we are going on is part of the campus health extension program, a couple times a week the health professionals and a student or two pack up some basic equipment and go visit one of the many small communities in the area. Santo Domingo has about 60 people and is 30 min from Coroico in the opposite direction as Carmen Pampa. Which means it’s poor and isolated but not at all unreachable. They have electricity, and I think some running water. When one thinks of rural life in a developing country this is what comes to mind, not desolate but anything from comfortable.





We pulled into town and parked on the soccer field. There are about 10 visible houses and a few more back in the woods. The doctors told me we are mostly here for the children and the elderly. They come here once a month and know exactly which houses to go to. The first one has a baby, I think three months old. We weigh it, give it a few vaccines and talk to the mother about basic health stuff. Has your child been sick? been eating regularly? sleeping? The baby is really normal, its weight is right, it’s clean, and it already has the big dark eyes that characterize the kids here. There are two older siblings who peek out from the door of the house. They look good, and only a little surprised to see a blond white person fumbling with their little brother in a baby scale.










In addition to drugs the doctors are here to provide information. To the mothers of young children they explain a new government benefit, all mothers are eligible to receive 120 B’s every other month until their child turns three. This comes in addition to all the other government benefits like the free medical care we are providing and food programs. There is a catch of course; the mother cannot get pregnant again until the child is three years old. In a country where condom use is low and sex ed is less popular than Ice Hockey many of these women could struggle not to get pregnant again. But that’s probably the reason for the incentive in the first place.






Later we visited an old couple, they looked like they should have been retired for 20 years and spend their time eating hard candy or falling asleep to daytime TV. In reality they probably weren’t much over 60 and they were working with their son when we arrived, drying and husking coffee beans. The woman was having trouble walking and said she was always dizzy in the morning. Her blood pressure was okay and the Doctor said she might need more vitamins, which we left for here. She won’t see another health specialist until the ones from the UAC come back in a month. She will be fine but I hope to be coddled a little more than that in my old age.


Some people gave us Avocados or Oranges for coming, they were pretty happy to have had the chance to talk to a DR. even though for the average person the conversation was like five min consumed mostly by pleasantries.






Every time I leave Carmen Pampa I am reminded of how much better things are in this community and in the university than in other parts of rural Bolivia. It’s amazing that a place which seemed so backwards to me for so long could actually be a big step up from other places so close but it’s really true.






Okay, well I miss the US and my friends and family. Don’t be afraid to drop a line and if you don’t hear back it’s just because I’m bien flojo.



LOVE



andy

It’s been nearly 10 months in the making, after hundreds of dollars and what seems like hundreds of trips to La Paz I’m finally a fully documented resident of Bolivia. At least the pic turned out right? I like it, a lot. I don’t care that my hair is unkempt or that my smile is a little crooked, during the picture the thing I was most concerned about was the cop next to me, the one holding my national ID#. I was really hoping he wouldn’t be cropped out. At least not entirely.

I could use the ID and the pic to generalize a ton of stuff about Bolivia. The time I waited to get the dumb thing says something, the fact that the pins on the number were broken and it had to be held could mean a lot, the glare on the numbers or the care that wasn’t taken to remove it might mean something too. RIGHT? Probably a lot of the generalizations would be accurate too.

I’ve made many assumptions and split second decisions in my time here. In most ways it’s just something you have to do in a culture that’s so different. The Bolivians I’ve met make them too. More than once someone has asked me if ALL the food we eat comes from a can. They mean it too, and when I say “no” they cite some friend of a friend who went to the US, or some movie. It’s okay to generalize and it’s normal, and it defines how we see and comprehend things. Getting a Bolivian to understand what’s a convenience store is a lot easier than you might think, sadly it doesn’t shatter the idea of how the people here see us.

My time away from home has made me think a lot about life in the US and how I see it from here. Going abroad to a poor country to volunteer makes it really easy to judge everything back home, and to be really harsh about it. Look I come here, my house is made out of MUD, I don’t have a microwave, my socks are so stretched and stained it looks like I’ve got burlap sacks jammed into my shoes, and I’m just fine. All this while you’re driving to work every day in your OWN PERSOSNAL CAR, eating Hot Pockets, and not even appreciating that the only parasites living off your sweat and blood are your own children.

I wouldn’t ever say anything so blunt outside of such an intimate context, so let’s keep the above to ourselves or someone might get upset.

Seriously though, it’s just not fair to take shots like that. That’s not what I want to do.

It’s not true anyhow - I mean my house is made out of adobe bricks covered with plaster and stones, so it’s only part mud.

I brought it up to say of course that I had a lot of misconceptions about life here when I first came, and I had a lot of unfair opinions about the US as well. I’m not promising to stop doing either one, I’m just saying that now I’m more conscious of it.

Let me reiterate some things. I live in a big, simple, partly mud house. I don’t have a microwave. I’m just fine, I’m happy. That’s the important part, that I’m happy. I don’t think it’s a surprise, and I don’t want it to be.

There is a surprise though, or for me anyway it was.

I’m not happy because I’ve left behind consumerism, because I haven’t. I not happy because I’ve changed so many lives, because I haven’t done that either - I hope I’ve touched a few though. I’m not happy because I’m a strong, incredible person doing something impossibly hard, because I’m really not that.

I’m happy even though most of the expectations I had about coming here turned out not to be true, and even though due to personal weakness I haven’t achieved the growth I hoped to. I’ve never been as peaceful as I am today and I can’t imagine I will be after I leave.

I don’t know why it is, I just AM happy.

Is that enough?

That’s the surprise…

The semester ends in two months. In two months I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’ll be. For the first time since I was in High School I’m okay with that.

LOVE

andy