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The moment I moved into my apartment, with its high walls and its cool stone, I found myself very content, and very ready to get to grips with Bolivia. The halfway point of my time was fast approaching; a disturbing fact given how much there still is to be done here.
I had come to Sucre to work with Condortrekkers, a non-profit tourist agency that uses all of its profits to fund other social work programs in the city. It is a simple idea but with brilliant possibilities. The local guides are paid but the bulk of the work is done by volunteers, which keeps costs down and ensures the organisation is self-sustaining.
When I arrived Randall, the director of Condortrekkers, was stuck deep in the convolutions of Bolivian bureaucracy, awaiting the official registration of the organisation. The laziness and recalcitrance of the Sucre officials is infuriating. Randall was told, for instance, that he could operate as a non-profit organisation, but he couldn’t advertise this fact, as it would place him at an unfair advantage over the other tourist agencies that keep the profits for themselves (and most of whom have friends in high and official places).
There are plenty of volunteers eager to work with Condortrekkers, but until the organisation is up and running, it is mostly just Randall and I. My job will be to research and write promotional material and information for the tours. I’ll also be going on exploratory treks as we try to finalise the actual routes of the various treks. It is a great job to have. Be prepared for a barrage of re-hashed snippets of information to appear on this blog…
The only problem is that I only have a tourist visa, which expires and requires renewal every thirty days, and which will require me to leave the country briefly in February to start the process over again. On my paltry tourist visa I am not allowed to work, to study, or to volunteer. To upgrade to a volunteer visa would take medical checks, Interpol background checks, months of waiting, and hundreds upon hundreds of Bolivianos. And even then I wouldn’t be able to function as a tour guide.
So instead of beating my head against a bureaucratic wall, I return to a life of illegality, living beyond the mandate of my tourist visa. Three years ago I worked as a pirate English teacher in Madrid, receiving under-the-table cash for teaching civil servants. Now I find myself a pirate volunteer; a do-gooder pirate but a pirate none-the-less. There is no avoiding destiny (especially when it is an enjoyable destiny).
I woke up in the new year and knew it was time to move on. As much as I was enjoying Cochabamba, I’d managed less than two weeks of volunteer work, and had fallen into the old, dissolute expat lifestyle. I expected more of my time in Bolivia.
Deciding once and for all to leave wasn’t easy. I had made good friends and had a great Spanish teacher. I’d wanted to live in Cochabamba for a long time, and six weeks didn’t seem like nearly long enough to get to know a city.
Exacerbating the difficulty was that I had very little idea what would happen when I moved on to Sucre. I didn’t know anyone there, which meant it was unlikely I’d find an apartment or Spanish lessons quite as good as those I’d been lucky enough to find in Cochabamba. There was the opportunity for interesting volunteer work there, but the only confirmation I had of that was a single line in an email.
And yet it was time to move on, to wring as much from my time in Bolivia as possible.
So, again, the sadness of leaving, of packing up a recently established life, of putting final ticks in final boxes, and of saying goodbye to the people and places and habits that I’ve come to enjoy so much.
And one final dump of photos; an attempt to capture just why I’ll miss Cochabamba…
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?
New Orleans, Louisiana
Friday 18 May 2007
My southward flow ended where many paths seem to end; in New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi delta, the great river reaching its terminus and dissipating into the gulf.
Dissipation is an important idea in this city. It is a city that, one way or the other, has the ability to destroy a person. As well as to revivify. Old and well-worn tales tell that in the early days of the settlement here the high water table meant that interred corpses would from time to time be washed out of their holdings and slither into the streets. Now all tombs are built above ground. The corruption and mortality and absurdity of this city…
I was shocked by the number of tourists soaking up the flavours of the restored French Quarter. I hadn’t seen so many tourists, nor such a tourist industry anywhere else in the USofA. But here they were, seeking their own forms of dissipation. I was left with little choice but to also dissipate into the crowd.
So Phil the tourist, adrift in New Orleans. He walks the French Quarter, up and down. And despite the souvenir shops and tacky, hokey displays of decadence, the beauty of the area is clear to see. The city feels old in a way that no other city in the USofA feels old. Here is an escape from the single, thin layer of history that seems to bother the Americans so much. Here is the natural evolution of architectural style, through the influence of the French and then the Spanish, then America, both confederate and union. Here is escape from the pretense of neo-everything style. New Orleans doesn’t need to pretend to be of another style. It is its own style, mimicked and evoked all over the country and world.
The tourist takes coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, a crumbling old place, the terrace littered with spills of icing sugar from the over-sweet snacks served. Fine old Louis Armstrong covers are bawled and ad libbed to the delighted audience.
He stands on the banks of the muddy Mississippi and shudders at the idea of death by water. The French Quarter is just beyond its banks.
He sits down with a Tarot reader with hopes of another insight into a curious old belief. The first card, the centre card, is the world, and that seems fitting, but after that comes a jumble of cups and pentacles, the tower, the devil, the joker, the sun. The reader is poetic, but has drawn no great conclusion when she talks of journeying and change. Nor when she explains that the cards can be read infinite numbers of ways, that she hates the tower but that it can be associated with new beginnings. The tourist gives up trying to have a real conversation about tarot, forgets completely the configuration of his cards, and walks away with the world at his centre.
He walks from his lodging, a little out of the French Quarter and downtown, past gorgeous homes. Some have arcane symbols sprayed on them, the work of rescue teams. Most are beautiful, with porches supported by elegant pillars, small balconies of intricate wood or metal, and yards full of fountains or statues or flags or cats. There are houses painted in all colours. Fluorescent, eye-hurting yellow. But always the cracks in the paint are fast to emerge, and vines creep up walls and into these cracks. There is decay, even amidst the bright colours, tropical gardens and sunshine.
And eventually he comes to Bourbon St, one of the most infamous streets in the world. Though the original French name has somewhat more grand connotations, the present-day meaning is a perfect fit. Bars sell straight onto the street, and at all hours there are revellers seeking dissipation in the depths of those long plastic cocktail glasses.
Most won’t realise this, but you don’t even need to be drunk to feel the effects of Bourbon St. The street itself is drunk, soaked with thousands of spilled liquors. The crowds wheel and spin and the odd motorcycle plows through. The street itself seems to lilt and lean against the fine old wooden walls around it. From terraces people cheers and gibber. On the streets there are tap dancers and musicians and people falling over and people shouting drink offers. Music blasts from every bar at every hour. It is madness and dissipation. The bars seem to twist and turn forever, humble old fronts concealing vast dungeons full of partygoers. There is garbage everywhere.
And when the tourist is done with these sights, he rents a scooter and buzzes out of the downtown area. Flying along narrow streets and over bridges above treacherous canals. There is another face to New Orleans, and it reveals itself most confrontingly in the old Ninth Ward.
The city is doomed, really. It must have seemed that way from the start, when the strategic importance of having a city at the mouth of the Mississippi was sufficiently worthwhile for its forlorn occupants to weather hurricanes and floods, yellow fever epidemics and the odd half-hearted invasion. It still seems so today, with huge resources being poured into the construction of levees and canals to keep the capricious waters at bay.
The Ninth Ward is or was a working class neighbourhood built behind such a levy, in a plain that sat several feet below sea level. When hurricane Katrina hit it wasn’t the fury of the winds that levelled the entire precinct, but the inexorable, encroaching tide of waters, that spilled their confines and rushed the houses waiting below.
Now the tourist can zip through the abandoned streets, nodding to the few other tourists tiptoeing through the neighbourhood. There isn’t much left here anymore. Many of the destroyed buildings have been bulldozed, so that the few that remains suddenly have entire blocks to themselves. But some houses remain, leaning at sickening angles, or collapsed beneath the weight of their own roof. Others have been swept up and deposited on top of cars or other houses. A couple have been rebuilt, but more remain as the waters left them, their insides dragged out and displayed indecently. A caravan lies twisted and crumpled on its side. Rusted, windowless cars are buried under mounds of debris and wreckage. Stricken boats now sit on the sides of dry and eroded streets, where they were tossed by the receding tide.
The tourist is staying with volunteers, a few of the huge army of outsiders that have descended on the town intent not on dissipation but on reconstruction. Most of those he is staying with are moving on now though. There is a feeling of disappointment in the air. While these people labour and sweat over the forgotten neighbourhoods, the city itself, particularly those in power, are watching the French Quarter and counting the tourist dollars. There are no monuments or memorials or museums to Katrina or her victims in that Quarter.
So it is left to the outsider, but not the tourists, to reconstruct lives, to disentangle the long threads of corruption and bureaucracy that encumber every process. And they must face the people of New Orleans, too, who are consumed by another kind of disconsolation. Living in a doomed city, a city of dissipation, what incentive can there be to rebuild when all eyes are on the French Quarter and when the hurricanes and the waters will inevitably come again?
The tourist zips back down town and returns his bike. He passes some streets of freshly painted and newly rebuilt houses, splendid in blues and reds and greens and purples. They are success stories, surrounded by ghettoes, surrounded by empty, obliterated space.
Back on foot he wanders the picturesque streets, that have apotheosed completely since the hurricane. His camera is always out. The city is doomed to die a hundred ways, its culture is rich with fatalism, in its witchcraft and voodoo and baroque Catholicism and hedonism. But it is fated also to be reborn and to rise again from the mud and rubble, thrusting through the grime and filth and corruption and apathy to become again and again the seductive, exotic queen that it is.
The tourist wishes to come back, to see how this city has changed, how it rises and falls and rises and falls. But he is glad to be away from it now. He has his own fate, the world is at the centre, and he would not dissipate completely, yet.
