I have an early morning flight tomorrow to La Paz, another large city here in the mountains. They say it is much colder there so I purchased some llama socks and a scarf made of alpaca wool today at the big market downtown. It must sound crazy to you all to want to wrap up in wool and sit in front of a fire, but my goodness the nights here are so cold and the mornings seem even colder. I hear it is quite hot and humid up there.
Our adventures this coming week take us into lots of interesting settlements outside of La paz where many campesinos have migrated in order to make more money or because they have been forced off of their land by corrupt politicos. The migration situation in Bolivia is countrywide and rather shocking. Many families are torn apart by this phenomenon that began only about 15 years ago. More on that at a later date...
We all also intend to visit Copacabana, Tiawanaku (ancient Incan ruins) and Lago de Titicaca, the highest lake in the world! More stories and updates to come...off to pack. Hope you are well. Much love from the heart of the heart!
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Heart of The Heart: A Solstice Celebration in the Andes
I woke up before 3am yesterday morning and hopped in a small micro bus with the other students to drive to the mountains. It was the Andean Solstice, celebrated for thousands and thousands of years by the Inca more or less as I observed it celebrated yeasterday. We drove in the dark up a frightening steep mountside, hugging the corners of the mountain, praying that the tires wouldn´t snag the edge and send us tumbling. The altitude played with our heads and the eeriness of the the night sky made this adventure one I can´t imagine will ever escape my mind. We wound our way in the dark in between bonfires, musicians, animals, policmen, bags of coca and circles of men smoking tobacco. It smelled of burning peet and chicha, the local alcohol. I climbed up a rock face and sat watching the night sky turn into day. As the sun began to rise, the crowds and crowds of people, many of whom had walked up the mountain 8 hours the night before to participate in this celebration, held their palms to the east to welcome the energy of the new year. Men and women cried out prayers and the crowds would reply with a Qechuan phrase equivalent to Amen. After the sun was all the way above the peaks of the Andes in the East, there was a sacrifice of three llamas, and incredible music-both ancient pipe songs and spanish guitar music that was brought here during colonial times. I passed through the crowds somewhat in disbelief of how ancient this country really is. They call Cochabamba ¨The Heart of The Heart¨because we are in the center of Bolivia which is smack dab in the middle of South America. The longer I m here and the more Spanish I understand the more I am beginning to realize what that phrase really means and how much of the world really began down here.
When I arrived home my family was still sleeping but I found Ligia, mi madre, in the kitchen in her usual state, high-heels and sweatpants, one large pink curler in her bangs and a long orange sweater. She greeted me in a panic trying to cook a cake, pancakes and breakfast and lunch all at once. We chatted about her family while I mixed batters and she heated the oven. I am not quite sure what to say about this woman other than that she is just as easy to love as she is to despise. Somehow I find myself adoring her most of the time. We cooked all morning until her relatives appeared and so we ate and talked and laughed all night.
The studies we are doing down here are rather rigorous and I am not only fully immersed in this culture and language but also discovering this new interest in documentary work. It is a pretty wild place to try to make a first film. The group of us, only four women from all over the states, have decided to work together on a piece about the concept of circles in Andean culture and how that is effecting the reclaiming of Bolivian indigenous identity through music. We´ll see where that leads.
I´ll try to put up some pictures this week if I can. I hope this update finds you all well!
Amor y besitos, Norita
When I arrived home my family was still sleeping but I found Ligia, mi madre, in the kitchen in her usual state, high-heels and sweatpants, one large pink curler in her bangs and a long orange sweater. She greeted me in a panic trying to cook a cake, pancakes and breakfast and lunch all at once. We chatted about her family while I mixed batters and she heated the oven. I am not quite sure what to say about this woman other than that she is just as easy to love as she is to despise. Somehow I find myself adoring her most of the time. We cooked all morning until her relatives appeared and so we ate and talked and laughed all night.
The studies we are doing down here are rather rigorous and I am not only fully immersed in this culture and language but also discovering this new interest in documentary work. It is a pretty wild place to try to make a first film. The group of us, only four women from all over the states, have decided to work together on a piece about the concept of circles in Andean culture and how that is effecting the reclaiming of Bolivian indigenous identity through music. We´ll see where that leads.
I´ll try to put up some pictures this week if I can. I hope this update finds you all well!
Amor y besitos, Norita
Sunday, June 15, 2008
An entirely different world: Shopping for toilets and thoughts on Evo
This first week has flown by and yet I feel so far away it is as though I have been here forever. It is incredible how time passes differently while traveling, each moment is full of something - amazing Andean vistas, beautiful festive music, angry taxi drivers, confusing and sometimes frightening miscommunications at the mercados, shops, in class and even at the dinner table. No matter how strong my Spanish may have been before I got here it is rar that one feels as humbled on a minute to minute basis as when immersed in a new language, an entirely different world.Needless to say my heads hits the pillow hard every night (please excuse any misused sayings...í´m in the middle of this language learning process where I can´t quite speak Spanish with fluency and I already have forgotten my English).
Yesterday morning mi madre boliviana, Ligia, woke me up quite early for a quick breakfast of tea and coconut yogurt (heaven on earth...really!). Afterwards we walked a ways down the hill from our casita to a catch a micro (public bus) to ¨La Concha¨, the biggest outdoor market in Cochabamba and most certainly the biggest, most colorful, beautiful and craziest market (and quite the contender for the biggest, most colorful, beautiful and craziezt place) I have ever been to! My family here has a small building behind their house that they want to rebuild so our first mission was to find a toilet for their new bathroom. For this reason we entered La Concha by way of the contraband venders. We walked quickly by piles and piles of scrap metal where men dug for car parts, door hinges, and tools, by stands of plastic toys until we found the perfect toilet sitting by the side of the road. We each took a turn surveying this toilet for any chips or broken edges because as Marcelo (my Bolivian padre) told me, ¨We don´t know exactly where this toilet has come from¨. It seemed to be in good shape so we sent Marcelo home in a taxi, with the toilet to beign installing. Carmen, Ligia nd I continued on.
At the bottom of the street began the vegetable stands that muist have been blocks and blocks long.Each campesino stood behind bags and bags packed full of spoices, corn,potatoes. In the streets lay piles and piles of garlic, oranges, carrots, pineapples, avocadoes, twers of bread and so much more. Somewhere I read that the population here in Cochabamba is 850,000 but including the barrios outisde the city people here say it is more like 2 million. I´m pretty sure that all 2 million inhabitants of this part of Bolivia were at the narket yesterday. We walked for hours essentially moving in one big mass with thousands and thousands of otheres. Whenever the movement stopped the venders would offer a taste of whatever they were selling - guava,grapes, peanuts, pig liver, quinoa and so on. Young children wrapped in textiles slept, their heads buried in their mother´s laps if not right in the dirt, the floor of the market. What a different life it must be for these little ones growing up just outside the ciyt, just outsied the education system and healthcare, just outside of people´s awareness, frighteningly underfoot. Apparently this i all chagning though with Evo Morales in power. Morales (or Evo as he is popularly referred to here), being from the coutnry and full indigneous blood is beginning to reclaim the land, culture etc. for the Qechuan, Aymaran and 40 plus other indigenous cultures that call Bolivia home. Some people aren´t as happy with this as you might think (or as I thought before coming here) because they he has just turned the tables, gone from one extreme to the other - instead of finding a solution fot the profoundly potent racism, classism and corruption - he has just given power to the opressed and in turn is taking away rights from the more comfortable elite classes who feel very strongly about having earned thier places in soceity.All that I have been able to offer so far to these extrememly passionate and challenging conversations is that perhaps it is more important for the pendulum to swing fromt he historically conservative and money hungry side to the other extreme to eventually land somehwere in between corruption and radical reaction. Like they say quite often here, vamos a ver. We´ll see.
today I fulfilled a long desired goal of mine - that is I wnet hiking in the Andes. Surprisingly, or maybe not so, a few hours of hiking doesn´t quite get you very far or to hardly any of the summits. Even though Cochabamba is at about 8-9,000 ft, the Andes are just enormous beasts! Beeen the natural enorphines one experiences and the added feeling of 10-12,000 ft, it really is quite magnificent and surreal up here! I scaled the side of on summit and came upon a small waterfall-cascading icey cold water. It tunrs ou that the winter here is in fact quite cold, even though we are closer to the equator than I´ve ever been, no snow but dry chilly winds that are hard to combat. Unfortunately I brought extra sandals and not enough wool socks. Tomorrow I´ll go looking for some extra layers. I hope you all are enjoying the hot summer sun. I suppose I´ll just skip summer this year. It is vertainly worth it to be here in this mysterious place. One week down, many more stories to come.
Besitos y amor!
ps-also excuse the distracting spelling errors...the key sare in very funny places on these computers.
Yesterday morning mi madre boliviana, Ligia, woke me up quite early for a quick breakfast of tea and coconut yogurt (heaven on earth...really!). Afterwards we walked a ways down the hill from our casita to a catch a micro (public bus) to ¨La Concha¨, the biggest outdoor market in Cochabamba and most certainly the biggest, most colorful, beautiful and craziest market (and quite the contender for the biggest, most colorful, beautiful and craziezt place) I have ever been to! My family here has a small building behind their house that they want to rebuild so our first mission was to find a toilet for their new bathroom. For this reason we entered La Concha by way of the contraband venders. We walked quickly by piles and piles of scrap metal where men dug for car parts, door hinges, and tools, by stands of plastic toys until we found the perfect toilet sitting by the side of the road. We each took a turn surveying this toilet for any chips or broken edges because as Marcelo (my Bolivian padre) told me, ¨We don´t know exactly where this toilet has come from¨. It seemed to be in good shape so we sent Marcelo home in a taxi, with the toilet to beign installing. Carmen, Ligia nd I continued on.
At the bottom of the street began the vegetable stands that muist have been blocks and blocks long.Each campesino stood behind bags and bags packed full of spoices, corn,potatoes. In the streets lay piles and piles of garlic, oranges, carrots, pineapples, avocadoes, twers of bread and so much more. Somewhere I read that the population here in Cochabamba is 850,000 but including the barrios outisde the city people here say it is more like 2 million. I´m pretty sure that all 2 million inhabitants of this part of Bolivia were at the narket yesterday. We walked for hours essentially moving in one big mass with thousands and thousands of otheres. Whenever the movement stopped the venders would offer a taste of whatever they were selling - guava,grapes, peanuts, pig liver, quinoa and so on. Young children wrapped in textiles slept, their heads buried in their mother´s laps if not right in the dirt, the floor of the market. What a different life it must be for these little ones growing up just outside the ciyt, just outsied the education system and healthcare, just outside of people´s awareness, frighteningly underfoot. Apparently this i all chagning though with Evo Morales in power. Morales (or Evo as he is popularly referred to here), being from the coutnry and full indigneous blood is beginning to reclaim the land, culture etc. for the Qechuan, Aymaran and 40 plus other indigenous cultures that call Bolivia home. Some people aren´t as happy with this as you might think (or as I thought before coming here) because they he has just turned the tables, gone from one extreme to the other - instead of finding a solution fot the profoundly potent racism, classism and corruption - he has just given power to the opressed and in turn is taking away rights from the more comfortable elite classes who feel very strongly about having earned thier places in soceity.All that I have been able to offer so far to these extrememly passionate and challenging conversations is that perhaps it is more important for the pendulum to swing fromt he historically conservative and money hungry side to the other extreme to eventually land somehwere in between corruption and radical reaction. Like they say quite often here, vamos a ver. We´ll see.
today I fulfilled a long desired goal of mine - that is I wnet hiking in the Andes. Surprisingly, or maybe not so, a few hours of hiking doesn´t quite get you very far or to hardly any of the summits. Even though Cochabamba is at about 8-9,000 ft, the Andes are just enormous beasts! Beeen the natural enorphines one experiences and the added feeling of 10-12,000 ft, it really is quite magnificent and surreal up here! I scaled the side of on summit and came upon a small waterfall-cascading icey cold water. It tunrs ou that the winter here is in fact quite cold, even though we are closer to the equator than I´ve ever been, no snow but dry chilly winds that are hard to combat. Unfortunately I brought extra sandals and not enough wool socks. Tomorrow I´ll go looking for some extra layers. I hope you all are enjoying the hot summer sun. I suppose I´ll just skip summer this year. It is vertainly worth it to be here in this mysterious place. One week down, many more stories to come.
Besitos y amor!
ps-also excuse the distracting spelling errors...the key sare in very funny places on these computers.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Hola de Cochabamba
The flight into Cochabamba was like a dream. We cruised low
close to the Andean peaks over shanty towns until we reached the
city tucked in between mammoth summits. These first few days are
overwhelming and mysterious. The city of Cochabamba is a lively place
both historically and currently. I am grateful to have arrived safely and
to begin this time with a lot of joy and curiosity. I will write more when time permits. Much Love.
close to the Andean peaks over shanty towns until we reached the
city tucked in between mammoth summits. These first few days are
overwhelming and mysterious. The city of Cochabamba is a lively place
both historically and currently. I am grateful to have arrived safely and
to begin this time with a lot of joy and curiosity. I will write more when time permits. Much Love.
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