You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Juvian' tag.
After having immersed myself in the gringo volunteer community in Cochabamba, I’ve been able to observe the ways in which the average gringo interacts. In the interests of promoting cross-cultural exchange, I’ve compiled a list of safe conversation topics for anyone interested in engaging with a gringo.
1. How dull Bolivian food is. To create a point of common ground with a gringo, mention how tired you have become of your Bolivian diet of chicken, potatoes and rice. Generate sympathy for yourself while demonstrating your health-consciousness by mentioning that you wish less salt and oil were added to these staples. This works particularly well if the gringo you are engaging is a vegetarian. These are identifiable by their thin, pale, ungainly appearance.
2. How much of a cholita is clothing, and how much is human. Cholitas, the braided, hatted, traditionally-garbed indigenous women are a subject of fascination to gringos. The fascination stems from the fact that cholitas are simultaneously exotic and (generally) unattractive. Mentioning the disproportionately large butts of cholitas, and questioning how much of this bulk is layers of skirt, and how much is actual flesh, is guaranteed to generate much discussion among gringos. Raising the idea of dressing like or dating a cholita is a safe way to add humour to the discussion.
3. Your declining currency. If a gringo conversation is becoming lost in economic jargon, you can bring it back to a more manageable, understandable level by mentioning that the current economic climate has caused your currency’s exchange rate to plummet, and that this is destroying your savings, and forcing you to tighten your belt. You can demonstrate your helpfulness by quoting actual, current exchange rates. This is a particular useful for topic for engaging Australian gringos.
4. How slow Bolivian internet connections are. If you encounter a flustered gringo, it is probable that they have just come from an internet café, or have been stealing wi-fi. Sympathise with them by quoting how many minutes it took you to send a single email, or to open facebook. Lament with them how long it takes to download music and sitcoms. To demonstrate that you have not lost perspective, follow this with an ironic comment about how little most Bolivians have, and that all you can complain about is the internet speed. Follow this with an embarrassed laugh.
5. Which graduate program or career path your volunteer work is qualifying you for. To show your sensitivity, this topic should be prefaced by ‘I really just want to help, but…’. Having done so you will be free to comment on how inefficient many Bolivian NGOs are, but how your perserverance and hard-earned successes will help you qualify for the graduate program or career in international relations that you intend to commence once you return to your home country.
After mooching off the Sustainable Bolivia crowd for as long as possible i moved into an apartment in the west of the city. Cochabamba is divided by a river into the older south and the newer and more affluent north. The west is where the new apartment blocks and big super markets are going up. It is a quiet area without the glamour of the north or the ambience of the south.
My apartment looks up and out to the high hills that surround the city. Every day storm clouds come tumbling down over the hills, flinging hail at the city or scattering the heights with snow. Cochabamba is known as the city of eternal spring, but the wet season has arrived and that means daily showers and sublime cloud formations.
My career as a volunteer has been postponed until January, leaving me more time to explore the city and to steal its internet. December saw a mass exodus of volunteers as Christmas approached. After a few weeks on the couch with Jules and Viv we had three consecutive days of painful goodbyes as they tried and failed and tried and failed and tried to master Bolivia’s hectic holiday season public transport.
Suddenly in posession of so many free hours I’ve taken to wandering the streets and trying to take photos without being robbed. So far i have been successful, but it seems like everyone in Bolivia gets robbed at least once, and my time is surely approaching.
When i first arrived every student in the city was preparing for a huge street festival in which each faculty tries to out-dance the others. Bolivian dancing is all about costume and endurance, the same performers cycling through the same steps as their troupe marches through the city.
With the festival over the students went back to making out in the parks and plazas, and i took to gravitating between various street food stalls. Cochabamba is probably more famous within Bolivia for its food than for anything. It is not really a big tourist destination, but it is a great place to live. Besides the food, the city’s universities keep the city young and dynamic. The streets south of the river are narrow and grubby and full of life. North of the river the pace is more sedate, the prices higher and the night life frenetic.
The city’s most famous site is the enormous Cristo de Concordia watching over the city from a hill to the east. Cochabambinos proudly promote their Cristo as larger than the more famous one in Rio de Janeiro (which is now one of the seven wonders of the world).
Despite the high altitude and its attendant problems, despite the dullness of vegetarian options in Bolivia, despite the decreasing number of people who haven’t been robbed, life here is easy. I slept blissfully through a mild earthquake last week. The same day an eerie full moon rose of the city. Strange portents, but for now Cochabamba is peaceful.
I came to Bolivia intending to volunteer, and i heard that the place to do this was in Cochabamba.
Cochabamba lies halfway down the east side of the Bolivian Andes, in a fertile valley that has long been Bolivia’s breadbasket, or more specifically its rice and potatoes basket. The drive into Cochabamba is beautiful, and agonisingly slow.
Before i chased Jules and Viv here to volunteer i had already decided that it would be a good place to spend some time. I had included the town in my novel, Lord of Miracles, and in the course of researching it had decided its springtime climate, enormous and progessive universities and general ambience sounded like my kind of place.
The Cochabamba i arrived in wasn’t quite the city i had imagined or evoked. it was smaller than i had thought, its main street little more than two lanes each way clogged with colourful traffic. Although this is the country’s third or fourth largest city, it is not an industrial or economic centre. There are no gleaming edifices, just narrow crowded streets. More than anything this is a market town, home to allegedly the largest market in South America. And that’s only one of the city’s markets.
Having friends on the inside, it wasn’t hard to find circles to move in. I attached myself to the volunteer milieu, made up mostly of short term visitors, along with a few longer-term residents and the odd Anglophile Bolivian all assembling under the misleading banner of Sustainable Bolivia.
Sustainable Bolivia is an NGO, one of the few in town that seem truly successful, and that is growing in leaps and bounds. Most of the volunteers i know have found accommodation and work through S.B. Its growth has attracted the jealousy of other more sedately-paced NGOs.
I had expected to find the volunteers of Cochabamba a bunch of bleeding hearts, expunging their own bourgeois guilt along with the problems of the developing world through the sweat of their brows and their expenditure of their savings. Instead i found normal people who give a damn, both about the world around them, and about their resumes and future career prospects. These were my people; i had been inspired to volunteer by the same muddy mix of motivations.
How much good do we do down here? We are not saints, and many of us are not even really professionals. Mostly we are arts majors. The volunteers with the most job satisfaction seem to be those least concerned about CV building, who stay a short time, work with kids, have fun, learn some Spanish, and then keep backpacking. Those of us staying longer and wanting more involved projects seem to drift between NGOs or end up stuck at a computer, questioning our own usefulness. It took me less than two weeks at my organisation – one of the most promising NGOs in terms of the projects it coordinates - to decide i was acheiving nothing, and to leave.
Outside of the shortened working hours (if we have bothered to turn up) the volunteers lead carefree lives. Elaborate meals are prepared in enormous, communal kitchens, and the worst of the mess is attended to by cleaners. Those not suffering from bouts of diarrhoea or other mystery malaises eat very well and more often than not find themselves drinking in the kitchen, in the hammock, in the garden, in the bars, or in a street. It is a very easy life.
But is it worthy of the banner ‘Sustainable’? Are we doing more good than harm by being here? Given the amount of food, drink and drugs consumed, maybe not. If our deteriorating bank balances are any indication, than there is definitely nothing sustainable about our existence here. I’ve spent more on cabs in a few weeks – and taxis cost maybe one tenth the price of those in Sydney – than i have in my entire Australian-based life. I’m told this is the only safe way too get home at night.
Our prodigious patterns of consumption really worry me: is our total impact here positive or negative? And aren’t we all a bit naive for thinking we can do any real good in a few short months here, with such limited investment? This community looks awfully like every other dissolute expat group i have ever been a part of. I wonder who is really benefitting: the volunteers or Bolivia?
The border between Chile and Bolivia was remote, frequented only by freight trains, and watched over by a volcano dribbling smoke. Each side consisted of a single guard post surrounded by derelict buildings and garbage. On one side stood the barren, stark desert of Chile, full of mines. On the other side stood the colourful, sublime desert of Bolivia, teaming with animal and plant life and scattered with adobe villages.
Every village we ground through on the way to Uyuni bore signs announcing the work of Evo Morales and his re-allocated funds, his work done to help the local Aymara people that scrape out a living in this remote and difficult land.
In Uyuni, the human hub of the desert, two very different cultures were merging and striking deals. Locals in their traditional garb – the ladies in bowler hats and many layers of skirt and petticoat – were selling handicrafts, fruit and snacks to the dreadlocked, gore-texed backpacker crowds. Most backpackers stayed only long enough to book a tour out into the desert or to return, take a lukewarm shower, and catch the night train on to the rest of Bolivia. Such a frenetic pace must seem ridiculous to the locals, who have lived for centuries according to the slower rhythms of the desert, of high altitude, of Thursday markets.
In Uyuni i met up with Jules and Viv, comrades from my time in Korea, which already felt like forever ago. They had brought four others with them; together we formed a jeepload of eager gringos, and set off on a four day tour of the sublime south west.
Lake Minchin, a prehistoric, inland body of water remembered in Andean mythology once covered the altiplano of Bolivia. As the waters of the lake gradually receded away they left behind the world’s largest salt flats, containing some ten billion tonnes of salt. Today the Salar de Uyuni is one of the biggest tourist attractions of the country; an endless plain of perfect white, punctuated by rugged islands, bubbling springs, small-scale salt mines, and jeeploads of awestruck visitors.
Surrounded by salt and with a near-cloudless sky overhead, perspective warps and distorts. It is impossible to distinguish the distant volcanos from the much nearer islands of ancient cactus and coral. A speck on the horizon could be a person or a jeep or a mountain. Tourists compete to take the most original trick photographs, bringing props out into the desert and spending hours composing their witty scenes.
The only organisms that survive out here have adapted specifically to life on the salt. The small communities of people mine the salt and its minerals, albeit on a miniscule scale. Marooned colonnies of cacti and vizcachas cluster on the rocky islands in the salt sea.
In comparison to the Salar the surrounding desert seems to be full of overwhelming colours and a superabundance of life. Wherever there is water there are llamas. Wherever there is no water and seemingly no way to survive there are families of dainty vicuñas. The bigger lakes – stained by the tiny pink organisms thriving within them – attract thousands of flamingos that strut through the waters, honking and chattering.
There were long distances to cover in the jeep – every day we had more ground to cover as we sped between the main drawcards of the desert – but one of the great wonders of the desert was it constantly changing landscape. The desert was in places red with stone and in other green with coarse grasses. In places rivers had gouged deep canyons out of the stone, and in other that gurgled happily through llama-filled meadows. Bizarre rock formations grew out of sand dunes, and bizarre plants grew out of rock formations.
On the beginning of our third day we entered a volcanic region, where geysers sprayed the stinking steam into the morning air, and where the jeeploads congregated to bathe in thermal pools while ducks and gulls circled and picked off the breakfast buffets.
As our tour progressed the food grew less creative, and fell back on the staple potatoes and eggs more and more often. On the third day in the least-ominous looking valley we got a flat tire, and soon afterwards discovered that our spare was also flat. A long wait in the sun, an abortive attempt to scale a deceptively tall peak, and we continued on our way; dusty, dried-out and dehydrated.
The sublimitiy of these deserts is guarded over by their harshness; by the burning sun and the chill winds, by the freezing night air, by the razor-edged stone and the spined plants. It is a place that, after four days, leaves you stuck between a desire to see more and a need never to cram yourself into a jeep again. At night we shivered and squatted in the dust, looking up at a million stars each pulsing with their own distance rhythm. Alien constellations invisible to most of the world burned brightly and shooting stars fell into the darkness. The magnitude and clarity of it all was breath-taking, but so too was the cold of the air and the ache of our bones.
When eventually we trundled back into Uyuni I was hungry for real food and for the freedom to steer my own course, but i was also elated by all i had seen. The desert is one of the most spectacular places i have ever seen. And between the many flat tires and dull food, between the many reports of shoddy tour companies and drunken drivers, between the heat and the altitude, the dry skin and the cold nights, between the rarely-running trains and the partially derailed train that kept us detained for hours awaiting a way out of Uyuni, it seems safe to say the surreal beauty of the place will be preserved against outside invasion for a long time to come..
