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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?
