Time

Your phone has not been backed up to the iCloud in 31 weeks. Security backups occur automatically when your phone is unlocked, plugged in, and connected to wifi. 

I don’t quite understand why, but my phone has been giving me these notifications ever since I got to Bolivia. I’m sure that at some point since September my phone has been unlocked, plugged in, and connected to wifi, but the backups are never realized.

The security backups, of course, are far from the point. The point is that for each of the last 31 weeks, my iPhone has slapped me with a reminder of exactly how long I have been in Bolivia and inevitably draws my thoughts to the unyielding passage of time.

Time has emerged as an unexpected motif of my Bridge Year experience. It pops up each day in the form of the “Bolivian hour,” which allows me to leave the house at 8:01 to catch an 8:00 school bus five blocks away or arrive home at 7:30 with no apologies when I had told my homestay family 6:00. It manifests on the weekly level as I juggle teaching, lesson prep, and group activities in a perpetual obstacle course toward the weekend. And most saliently, it works on a monthly scale, creating nine natural blocks to measure our development and reflect on the concept of time throughout our experience.

I once read that above a certain number (about 12), our brains can no longer truly comprehend discrete integers; we think in terms of “few,” “some,” and “many.” Time shares this frustrating property, which leaves me playing weird, unproductive mind games to try to understand how much longer I’ll be here. I note that as of this writing (April 6th) John’s arrival for his visit is just as far in the past as our departure from Tiquipaya is in the future. And John was just here. I open up my journal, now so thick in my left hand and so thin in my right, and remember when the sides were reversed. For months I have been aware of Julianne’s growing belly, a different sort of 9-month timer, knowing that she’s due for two weeks before we leave Tiquipaya. And then the games bring my inner mathematician out to play. I calculate that our trip’s 3/4 point was about a week ago, and the 4/5 point is about a week away. 5/6, 6/7, 7/8, etc. will only come faster and faster, both mathematically and emotionally. I have just 4 more peanut soups in the family restaurant, 3 more hellish, never-ending staff meetings at Kusikuna, 7 more lessons with my favorite group of sixth graders, 1 more Quechua class.

There is no logical reason to play these mind games. In fact, I don’t even know if I’m rooting for the time to pass faster or slower. I feel immersed in this rich, enlightening, and incredibly fun Bolivian experience, yet every time I look at the calendar, I viscerally root for a higher number. Even at Kusikuna, my favorite aspect of this experience, with my aforementioned favorite group of sixth graders, I hope for the clock to say 12:45 as soon as possible. This feeling is not at all rational; it already seems dumb and will surely seem dumber when I’m back in my bed at home wondering why I was in such a rush to get there. But irrational doesn’t necessarily mean unnatural.

“Seize the day” is easy to say but impossible to do- or at least impossible to do at all times. But that’s not a problem because I don’t remember days. Or weeks, or months, or for that matter any of the other units of time I’ve contrived here. I remember moments. I remember the crispness of the air in El Alto airport, the barks of stray dogs in Coroico breaking night’s heavy silence, the motherly mountains to the north watching over us as we first entered Tiquipaya. I remember Mamita María laughing and yelling at me as she demonstrated how to hand wash clothes, 19-month-old Lupe calling me “uh-KOB” for the first time, John trying to help teach my algebra class by replacing variables with ducks. I remember doing the Cotton Eyed Joe with ten other teachers at Kusikuna’s end-of-year show, getting foam spray in every opening in my face during the street-melee that was Carnaval, nervously tossing the ball to first for the last out of a national baseball championship. This is what defines my time in Bolivia, not an obsession over the concept of a month nor a reminder of how long my iPhone has gone without a backup.

I’ll no longer try to defy human nature by seizing every moment. Instead, I’ll be content to plant my feet in the ground, stay as present as I can, and be ready to relish those moments that engulf me before I can even reach out to seize them.

Bolivian National Baseball Championship

This is a nutty story. In October I asked my on-site instructor Pedro if he knew anyone who played baseball in Cochabamba; it was almost a joke of a question. But what do you know, Pedro knew a guy named Rodrigo, the founder of the Cochabamba Association of Baseball and Softball. (He once dated Rodrigo’s sister.) By November I was playing, and in March I got a text asking if I’d join the Cochabamba team in the Bolivian national championship 12 hours away in Santa Cruz. This is the story of that tournament.
The afternoon before Good Friday I went to get a buzz cut, said goodbye to my group-mates, and headed for the bus terminal in trufi. I got the last spot on a 106 and crammed into the small van with fourteen other people. Good thing I packed lightly. For the 40-minute ride through rush hour, I sat with my head almost out the window, enjoying the cool, afternoon breeze and the bright yet muted, setting sun. Bolivia was playing Colombia in soccer on the radio, and although background noises and radio fuzz made it hard to understand, I didn’t miss the two screams of GOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLL!!! Bolivia brought it from 2-0 to 2-2 on the ride. I later learned that they lost 3-2 on a stoppage time goal. Not a surprise.

I got to the terminal, the very end of the 106 trufi line, just before six o’clock and met up with several of my teammates. When I travel with my program, we always get tickets in advance, but this time we would take advantage of the cheaper tickets sold by people screaming city names on the terminal floor.

“ORURORURORURORURO!!”

“LAPALAPALAPALAPAZZZ!!”

“SANTACRUZ SANTACRUUUZZ!!”

We were going to Santa Cruz Santa Cruuuzz, so Rodrigo flagged down an appropriate yeller and asked how much the tickets cost.

“How much did I tell you a second ago?” the guy quickly asks.

“Eighty bolivianos.” (It was actually ninety.) “But could you lower it to seventy since there are six of us?”

“Absolutely not,” the guy responds, shaking his head. “Look around, no one’s gonna give you under eighty. Everyone’s saying eighty. It doesn’t matter that you’re six people; nobody’s going under eighty.” Every part of his body moved (except his over-gelled spiked hair) throughout the vehement, offended response to Rodrigo’s offer.

“Seventy five?” Rodrigo countered coolly.

“No, can’t do it.” And he walked away quickly.

No more than three minutes later, the guy came back around the corner and eagerly signed us up for six tickets at seventy bolivianos each ($10).

Our double-decker reclining-seat bus parted at 6:45 PM. As we passed by familiar places in the first few minutes, my thoughts and emotions stirred within me. I was going to play the beautiful game in a very beautiful country. And to think that in six months I would be a normal college student back in the U.S. was unbelievable.  

I managed to fall asleep on the bus and didn’t wake up until shortly before our 5:45 AM arrival in Santa Cruz. We walked over to our hotel across the street and crashed for a couple of hours. Santa Cruz is at sea level, way down from Cochabamba at 8500 feet. It’s hot and buggy, rather rich and white, and (at least on Easter weekend) a sorta dead town.

 

Us at the Santa Cruz terminal

 
Now I’ll start explaining the baseball stuff. The tournament was the “national club championship,” meaning that instead of each department selecting its best players, their own league championships would decide who advanced to the national tournament. But each department was allowed two “reinforcements” that didn’t have to come from the department-winning team. It seemed like all of the departments found ways to work (or cheat) the system to get their best guys out there. In other words, it felt like a legitimate national championship. I was one of the reinforcements for DSA (the Cochabamba team), and the other was Kazuya, a short, thin, skilled, 24-year-old Japanese catcher who is in Bolivia with an organization that promotes baseball around the world. Actually, Rodrigo was also a reinforcement since he is on a different club team. Shhhh.

The three-day tournament would have seven teams. Games would be seven innings or two hours, whichever came first. Umpires would be members of the other teams, trusted to remain unbiased- which I think they did. Going into the tournament, the home team (Santa Cruz) was the heavy favorite. Santa Cruz vs. the field was about a 50-50 bet. Other than that, San Juan (a community full of Japanese immigrants) was likely the best of the rest, and our team perhaps would be ranked third. We were split randomly into two groups as follows:

Group A

La Paz, Oruro, San Juan, Sucre

Group B

Cochabamba (us), Santa Cruz, Quillacollo

We somehow didn’t have to play on Friday, so we just watched the games and tossed some balls around. One nice moment from that day was throwing my first sea-level slider after 6 months at altitude. The air density matters way more than I thought. 

  
At 9 AM on Saturday, we played the odds-on favorite in Santa Cruz. I was the the starting pitcher. We went through four innings scoreless; I was throwing very well and pitching around some errors. We had two hits and they had one hit through 4. In the fifth inning two errors and two hits got to us. I got pulled out after three unearned runs, and Kazuya came in to finish the game. We lost 5-0 in six innings.

The loss was very frustrating, but of course I was happy with how I pitched. In fact, that performance got me an invite to be on the Bolivian national team for the South American championship in June, which I unfortunately won’t be doing. The problem was that now we’d have to win four straight games (and three in one day) to get the championship. That meant I’d certainly have to pitch again. Playing (let alone pitching) the day after an 80-ish pitch outing is stupid at best and unsafe at worst, but I told myself that with some Tylenol I’d be fine.

   
   
We got lunch at a rotisserie chicken place and then beat Quillacollo 11-1 in a pretty relaxed game. Kazuya pitched the first two innings, and then all of our best players came out.

So the group stage was over:

San Juan 3-0, La Paz 2-1, Sucre 1-2, Oruro 0-3

Santa Cruz 2-0, Cochabamba 1-1, Quillacollo 0-2

We would have to wake up the next day at 5:30 to play Sucre at 7 (semi-final play-in game), then with a win we’d get San Juan at 11, and then with another win we’d probably get Santa Cruz at 2. And Kazuya and I were the only good pitchers. We were in trouble.

The plan was for Kazuya to pitch the first game, me the second game, and both of us the third game. Absurd. We got past Sucre something like 6-1. Kazuya threw very well while I prayed to never have to make a throw from right field. 

Then, as we ate hot dogs and salteñas during our two short hours of rest, we got the biggest break of the tournament. La Paz beat Santa Cruz in the first semifinal game. Or to put it more honestly, the two Japanese reinforcements on La Paz’s team beat Santa Cruz. One of them (Daisuke) pitched and held Santa Cruz to one run all game, and as batters they were partially or fully responsible for all three La Paz runs. All of the other teams were rooting hard for La Paz, partially for their own championship prospects and partially because almost everyone in Bolivia who’s not from Santa Cruz hates Santa Cruz.

We finally had a path to winning this championship. But that path would require me throwing to 3-0 San Juan with my arm hurting from the very first warmup pitch. I swear I did not throw a single pitch over 50 mph all game. However, San Juan was surprisingly bad. I located well and threw lots of breaking balls, but any decent JV team back home would’ve lit me up. We won 9-3 in the least energetic national semifinal you could imagine. My right arm didn’t fall off, but it wouldn’t have been that surprising if it did.

Now a 45-minute break before the 9-inning final. The bats were finally getting hot, and we were feeling empowered because Santa Cruz had lost. The pitching matchup would be Daisuke vs. Kazuya. Neither of them had any business being back on the mound. (Oh, did I mention that Kazuya caught every single inning that I pitched?) Walks, hits, and a

Kazuya home run put us up 6-0 by the third. Daisuke had nothing left. Was this really happening?

I had to remind myself that 6 runs wasn’t gonna cut it in this final. It was a war of attrition. Katzuya was going to run out of gas soon, and we had no plan for when that happened. I sure wasn’t pitching again. La Paz (mostly the Japanese guys) started putting up runs, but we answered. 8-3 in the fifth inning. Kazuya was obviously tiring but hadn’t yet hit a wall. In the sixth I passed I him on my way out to right field (where I would stand and keep praying for no action) and told him that he was a samurai. Maybe that was good moral support. 13-7 in the eighth. Kazuya was a tank.

In the seventh inning I had moved to second base because the second baseman’s arm hurt. Imagine that. In the bottom of the ninth inning, I got my moment. Still 13-7, two outs, runners on second and third. Routine grounder to my right, backhand, set, let loose my nervous noodle of an arm to make the throw. It came out fast and low, but the first baseman reached down to his ankles and made the grab. Ball game. Championship. Next thing I knew we were all on the pitcher’s mound singing some fight song in I didn’t know in Spanish, and then we ran around the field with our team’s banner.

Kazuya and I accepted the 1st place trophy at the award ceremony. We took a lot of team pictures, which ended up in the biggest newspaper in Santa Cruz and the two biggest newspapers in Cochabamba. And no more than two hours after accepting the trophy, were on the overnight bus ride that would get us home for work on Monday morning.

   
  

Rodrigo and me

  
 One quick aside: we didn’t eat breakfast the day of the triple-header because we left the hotel before their buffet opened. Nor did we have time for lunch (unless you count the mid-morning hot dogs and salteñas). I am reminded of a famous moment in Philadelphia sports history, when Phillies fans mocked Barry Bonds with an enormous sign in left field saying “Ruth did it on hotdogs and beer… how did you do it?” Well we did it on hotdogs and salteñas.

So that’s my story. Hope you enjoyed it. I don’t know if I can wrap it up into any concrete takeaways other than that I had the privilege of playing baseball in Bolivia with a 5’6″ robot samurai.

Jacob

P.S. Here are links to a newspaper article about our win: http://www.opinion.com.bo/opinion/articulos/2016/0328/noticias.php?id=186269

P.P.S. I wrote a baseball-heavier, Bolivia-lighter version of this story to send to my former coaches. If you’d like to read it, you can let me know as a comment on this blog or contact me some other way. I’d love to send it on to anyone who’s interested.

¿Qué Dijo Bolivia?

Two Sundays ago, Bolivians flocked to the polls to give a simple SÍ or NO that would profoundly affect their country’s political future. The question: should the country’s constitution be amended to extend the presidential term limit from two five-year terms to three five-year terms?
This referendum demanded that the people ask questions along two different lines of reasoning:

1) The theoretical- how does an increased term limit change the outlook for Bolivian democracy?

2) The practical- how do we like President Evo Morales? What would the country look like without him? Who might become president in 2020?

If such a referendum occurred in the U.S., you’d imagine point 1 carrying much more weight than point 2. Most of us would be concerned about a threat to democracy, and anyone who liked the president enough to support the change would likely have to campaign on some bogus theoretical argument to mask his purely partisan decision. In Bolivia it’s really not like that. Apart from the intellectual elite, most people vote on “the practical,” and both campaigns revolved entirely around Evo and his policy.

Now might be a good time to tell you all I know about Evo. He is of Aymara indigenous background and worked as a cocalero (coca grower) in the semi-tropical Chapare region east of Cochabamba. He was elected president in 2005 and took office in 2006, succeeding Carlos Mesa, vice president to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (a.k.a. Goni). Goni was a Bolivian-born, U.S.-raised rightist who got fled to Washington in 2003 after a series of neoliberal policies culminated in an uprising over an unpopular gas deal with Chile. Don’t feel bad for him, though; he raided the treasury and stole millions of dollars before fleeing to the U.S., where he has been granted asylum and remains to this day.

So coming off the wave of social uprising against a neoliberal gringo, it wasn’t at all weird for a socialist indigenous man to become the next president. People say that Evo was just a face put on a much larger movement, and people voted as “revolutionaries” without particularly caring about his specific ideas. And just like that, Evo was elected the first indigenous president in Bolivian history with over 70% of the vote.

One of the first things Evo did was change the constitution in perhaps more of a symbolic than practical act, renaming Bolivia a “plurinational state” and recognizing each of of its 37 distinct indigenous nations. I’m not sure how exactly that has affected indigenous rights, but I expect it has helped in many ways. Also, an important side note is that the two-term limit was written up such that a term would not count if the election occurred under the old constitution. In this way Evo sort of snuck himself an extra term; clearly he was thinking about this stuff from day one.

So far I have painted Evo in a pretty bad light, especially from a U.S. value system and concept of democracy. However, it is important to note that over these ten years (and especially at the beginning) Evo has been extremely popular and arguably the best president in Bolivia’s history. He invested heavily in infrastructure and successfully nationalized the oil and telecommunications industries (basically by levying very high taxes on existing private companies and daring them to leave, which they didn’t). He works 18-hour days and is a charismatic speaker, especially to indigenous folks who finally see a leader who represents them.

But does he really represent them? That has become a hot question in recent years. The problem with a plurinational state like Bolivia is that even an indigenous leader like Evo cannot possibly feel connected to every ethnic group. For instance, Evo is supporting a trans-South American road project that will connect the Pacific to the Atlantic but will cut straight through a national park in northern Bolivia and disrupt the lifestyles of lowland indigenous groups. One demographic that would benefit from the road is the cocaleros who lack efficient transportation of their harvest. In addition, government funds set up to help indigenous communities across the country were lost to corrupt officials within Evo’s party. If nothing else, Evo’s presidency has matured the public’s understanding of politics. It’s not just “bad guy,” corrupt, neocolonial, light-skinned leaders screwing over the Bolivian pueblo; indigenous leaders also have their personal agendas, alliances, and a fair share of corruption. A common critique of Evo is that he has gradually transitioned away from representing the social ideals of the movement that got him elected and now just surrounds himself with party members who love him and support whatever he says or does.

So how did the campaign play out? A month before the election, when official campaigning was allowed to start, the city streets filled with green t-shirts and banners of “¡Claro que sí! and their red counterparts proclaiming “¡Bolivia dice no!” News coverage heated up, and the dialogue was centered entirely around Evo, not some higher tenets of democracy. “Sí” supporters touted Evo’s many infrastructure successes and planted a narrative of progress that must be continued, while “no” supporters denounced government corruption, like that of the indigenous funds. A week or two before the election, a news story came out that Evo had a secret relationship with Gabriela Zapata, an executive of an engineering company contracted by the Bolivian government; the “no” ran hard with that, but it likely didn’t change anything. Evo is not married and is well-known to have several kids out of wedlock, and few people believe that personal matters should enter into politics. Think 1960s U.S. (Kennedy), not present-day U.S. (Clinton, Edwards, etc.).

On Election Day everything in Bolivia shuts down. No transportation, no business, just every single citizen walking to his or her local school to vote. Voting is obligatory here; at the polls they give you a paper without which the bank will not let you make transactions. Also, all campaigning must be suspended two days before the election, a law that was quite weirdly and inconsistently enforced. For instance, Dennis was slowed up for wearing a red shirt (the color of “no”) to the polls, while banners supporting both sides decorated the plaza. Here’s one that Matt’s dedicated homestay father put up that morning.

  
As far as voting demographics, it’s what you would expect. The “no” did well among whites, the rich, and urban communities, while the “sí” did well in the campo (countryside or rural areas). Everyone in my homestay family voted “no,” citing corruption and asking “What has Evo ever done for me?” In Tiquipaya, which is fairly urban but has strong indigenous roots, it feels like the “no” probably won by a decent margin.

So now the moment you’ve been waiting for… what was the result? Maybe already you googled it. Sunday night they reported unofficial results of a 51-49 victory for the “no,” complied by a private company that supposedly sends a representative to every single precinct in the country. The “no” supporters celebrated in the streets while Evo’s party members denied that it had been decided. The votes came in slowly over the next two days, and on Tuesday we got confirmation: 51.3% of Bolivia dijo no!

Fallout: first of all, the main news station (UNITEL) didn’t do 24/7 election coverage on Monday and Tuesday, which I found incredible. To be fair, UNITEL is a pretty silly and bad news station. But it is cool that they didn’t spend hours talking about a subject with nothing really constructive to say, like they do in the U.S. when it’s a waiting game. MAS (Evo’s party) leaders took a while to accept the results, but they have all come around. Evo has said publicly that he accepts the results of the referendum but stops short of conceding that he will not be the president in 2020. This suggests that he may call another referendum later or proceed with the amendment through “constitutional assembly,” although I don’t know exactly what that would entail.

Other interesting developments since Election Day include a picture circulating on Facebook that suggests the miscounting of votes in favor of the “sí,” the arrest of a key “no” leader accused of sedition, and the blockbuster news that Evo has a 9-year-old son with Gabriela Zapata who he apparently thought was dead until now! What the heck?! I was for a long time pretty ambivalent about the referendum results, but I’ve come to the decision that the “no” is probably better or at least safer for the country. It will be very interesting to see what sort of new candidates emerge in 2019 (yes, remember Evo has plenty of time left). Will a socialist win again, or will the presidency move back to the right? (My best guess is the former.) 

And of course, this all assumes that Evo doesn’t find a way to get the constitution changed before his time runs out. No matter what happens, it’s pretty cool that I am in Bolivia in such a profoundly pivotal time in its political history.

Well, that was long and detailed and dense and maybe boring- but I hope you enjoyed it and learned something. One last note- we’re two-thirds of the way done the course now. That’s nuts.

Abrazos,

Jacob

Synagogue

As promised, this post is about my experiences at the only synagogue in Cochabamba. The national referendum stuff will come in another post very soon.
Estimations of the Jewish population in Bolivia center around 1,000. There were once many more Jews here, especially right after WWII, but most have migrated to countries with larger Jewish populations, such as neighboring Argentina. Also, Evo Morales’s election in 2005 sparked a wave of Jewish emigration. This was not due to any anti-Semitism that I can perceive, but rather because the Jews on the whole are whiter, richer, and more conservative than the overall population. This means they are more likely to disapprove of the indigenous, socialist president and to have the means to leave the country. It should be noted that the Morales government recognizes Palestine and not Israel as a sovereign nation; however, I’ll repeat that I see no signs of anti-Semitism here, just a general lack of understanding and awareness of Judaism.

Luckily, I am in one of the two cities in Bolivia with a non-negligible Jewish community. La Paz has a JCC and a Chabad; Cochabamba has a synagogue that does only Friday night services and Bar/Bat Mitzvahs. Rachel and I were connected to this synagogue through a friend of the program who knows a congregation member (if you’re reading this, thanks Jim!)

In fact, that member’s name is Ronny, and describing him would be a good place to start. Ronny is a 50-ish, bald headed, smiley, German-Israeli man who keeps that synagogue afloat. There is no rabbi, so Ronny leads the service every Friday night; I recognize most of his tunes. He leads the service in jeans and doesn’t count women toward the minyan. That’s a weird combination for me. I think of (non-ultraorthodox) Israelis as progressive, but then again I don’t know if it’s Ronny’s decision, nor do I know the strength of his Israeli roots. My only hint is that he carries the classic throaty accent on his R’s.

The synagogue, founded in 1947, is almost in the very center of the city. From the outside there are few indications that the building is a synagogue (maybe a couple Stars of David), but the inside is fantastically beautiful. The sanctuary feels old, grand, and spacious. It’s not wide, but very tall and deep from front to back. Ebony and ivory dominate the color scheme. Black pews extend backward cathedral-style from the bimah. Black, wooden, bleacher-style benches run down the left and right sides. It looks like the old, classy sanctuaries I remember from the children’s books in the Beth El library. I’m debating whether or not to subtly snap a picture.

The congregation is very old and very white. Many trace their roots to Germany and Poland, and several have lived in the U.S. That’s cool, because I can trace my roots to Germany and Poland, and I have lived in the U.S. Many of the congregants look like they could be my family members. Unfortunately, there are very few kids in line to replace the older congregants. Let’s just say that I’m lucky to be in Cochabamba now and not in 20 years.

I have been to two services, and a few moments stick out in my memory. One not-so-great one was when I realized that men and women sat separately. Actually, Rachel realized it; she was by necessity paying close attention and noticed that all the women gravitated to the side-pews as the service got ready to start. I’m not accustomed to that, and my visceral reaction was strongly negative, even though I had known it was a possibility. One guy couldn’t do Mourner’s Kaddish because there were only 9 men.

But the positive memories certainly stick out more strongly in my mind. At a point during that first service- we were singing a very familiar psalm- it just hit me how incredible it was that in this foreign country with essentially no Jews, people meet up every Friday night and sing L’Cha Dodi just like back home. Pretty wild. I also got to eat some challah (not really, but close), and they invited up the one kid at the service to say the motzi and pass around the bread.

The people there are not the most energetic, but they have been kind and welcoming to us. Many take interest in the U.S. and tell of their son or niece or cousin who lives there. One tender man with Alzheimer’s asked me where I was from, how long I was staying, how I learned to speak Spanish, etc. twice in a five-minute span, and then he leaned over to give me a piece of advice: “Never stop smiling.”

All in all, going to synagogue has been an exciting enrichment of my experience here. I plan to keep going on Fridays, and I think Rachel does, too. We’re going to try and find out if any congregants are having a Passover Seder and then (not-so) subtly try to get an invite. Will keep you posted.

Abrazos,

Jacob

Carnaval

In November I posted about the celebration of “All Saints’ Day” in Tiquipaya. That was a pretty absurd thing to translate into English. Todos Santos was special because the Catholic holiday got all wrapped up in the traditional Andean worldview and the Bolivian (and human) spirit. We didn’t really experience “All Saints’ Day,” but a special cultural event with no real equivalent in the United States.
So I won’t make that mistake again. This post is about the festivities surrounding Carnaval, which started the first weekend of February and is just wrapping up now. Carnaval has its Catholic roots in Ash Wednesday, but much more memorable and meaningful are the elements of human expression and playfulness that have become part of the tradition.

For the entire duration of Carnaval, it would be ill-advised to leave your house without a water balloon. You have to protect yourself, of course. Tiquipaya becomes one big, never-ending, hardcore water war on the streets. Water balloons, guns, buckets; melees between moving cars; ambushes of innocent pedestrians (white people make especially fun targets). All of this after weeks of news saying that water fights would be illegal and that the police were cracking down. Haha, not a chance. One time a man standing just feet away from two police officers hit me with a powerful jet from a massive, orange and green water gun. I looked over at the police officers, and they were laughing. So I reached into my pocket, pivoted, and quickly threw a balloon. No, I didn’t hit an officer. (But if I did, there’s no way I would have been arrested.) The whole experience was incredibly fun; I wish I could get it going back home. You’ll have to forgive the lack of pictures for good reason.

Apart from the water fights, Carnaval is defined by two main features: blowout parades and the ch’alla (Quechua for “offering”). The entrada (entrance parade) into Tiquipaya kicked off Carnaval on Sunday. Manny played some sort of woodwind instrument and Asia danced in one of the groups. Matt and I went to spectate and ended up getting roped into dancing too. We ended up on a microphone in front of a few hundred people (including my homestay family) being asked questions about where we were from and how we liked Cochabamba. My Spanish suddenly got pretty bad when I was put on the spot. Anyway, here’s a cute picture of Manny and Asia.

  
The next Sunday was the Corso de Corsos, the big parade in Cochabamba. Full of extravagant costumes, folklore dances and marching band music. Alcohol was prohibited there, but that got enforced about as well as the “no water fighting” rule. Speaking of the water fights, they were at their peak that day, and we got a lot of “¡dale al choco!” (throw it at the light-skin!) followed by a stream of water or a spray of white foam (espuma) to the face. Here’s a short clip of one of the performances followed by a classic picture of an espuma-ed Peter.

  
  
Now onto the ch’alla, the distinctly Andean feature of Carnaval. Much like the idea of “Fat Tuesday,” the tradition here is to appreciate the abundance of nutrients that Mother Earth grants us. The antiquity of the ritual (and the fact that it’s not called “Fat Tuesday”) makes it feel much more profound, and probably rightfully so. The ch’alla looks like this:

  
Composed of radiant flowers and aromatic herbs, the ch’alla is burned over hot coals as an offering to the Mother Earth. Then come the requisite ear-shattering fireworks that seem to make the ch’alla official. Every house, business, and school carries out the ritual. In the program house, we carried the burning ch’alla to all four corners of the house as a blessing, and in the homestay, Dennis sprayed the whole house with champagne- a much more fun and messy means to the same end. Afterwards we decorated the car (picture below) and drove around getting water thrown at us and spraying foam out the windows at our attackers. 

  
Carnaval was a wonderful experience of a Catholic holiday overlaid with ancient Andean tradition and a general jubilance of human spirit. Words can’t do it justice- or at least mine can’t.

The next post will come sooner, as there is a major election (actually a referendum) this Sunday. If you google “Bolivia referendum New York Times” you’ll get an article with a decent summary of the facts, but I don’t agree with the main premise, or even the article’s title.

Anyway, now I’m off to synagogue. I guess that’ll go in the next post, too.

Abrazos,

Jacob

We Travelled a Little

Well it’s hard to believe, but the first half of our course is over. It doesn’t feel in any way like I have been here for four and a half months already. And the next four and a half will surely fly by even faster. I am excited for the second half the course, during which my growing cultural literacy, language skills, engagement in the community, and comfort at work will hopefully gel into the best part of the program for me.
For the past two weeks, as a sort of mid-year retreat we took a vacation around some of the most beautiful and/or historically important sites in the country. This post will be dedicated entirely to our travels.

On January 3rd at 7:00 PM, we left from the Cochabamba bus terminal destined for the capital city of Sucre ten hours away. The bus was very comfortable with reclining seats that allowed us to sleep during the ride.

   
 

We arrived in Sucre just before 5:00 AM and checked into Mama Vicky’s, a homey hostel right by the terminal with no signage and just a large, black, metal door that backed up to the road. After relaxing a little bit, we split into groups and went to buy food for our upcoming trek, which would be for four days in the nearby mountain valleys. We were pretty successful in the market, except Peter and I accidentally bought five cans of tomato sauce with some cheap, small fish like anchovies in them. Gina and Pedro knew the reputation of this brand so well that they went out themselves to buy new sauce. That’s a classic Jacob thing to do, not sure if it’s classic Peter as well. The central market in Sucre is beautiful and abundant; not only could we buy everything we needed, but we were able to find lunch and delicious tojorí (a sweet, hot corn drink) upstairs.

   
 Old-fashioned Sucre, sitting at around 8,000-9,000 feet with it’s narrow, hilly roads and classy, white buildings, feels sort of like Europe or San Francisco. Sucre is the constitutional capital of Bolivia, but the entire national government except the Supreme Court is situated in La Paz. In fact, in tenth grade when I had to learn all the Latin American capitals, I remember having to memorize both Sucre and La Paz. Sucre has the history, but time, change of leadership, and results of wars have gradually moved power over to La Paz. I think by now they may as well call it the capital. The international airport is there, all the embassies are there, and President Evo Morales is there.

Anyway, capital controversy aside (honestly I basically just made up that “controversy”), in Sucre I really enjoyed walking around, exploring the central market, visiting an indigenous fabric museum with intricate, red and black weavings that took years to finish (sorry, no pictures allowed), and hanging out cooking our own dinners at Mama Vicky’s.

  
The trek, guided by the fantastic Johnny and Edwar of Condor Trekkers, started about two hours outside of Sucre at 11,000 feet and was a mix of descents and ascents through mountain valleys that brought us down to 8,500 feet after about 35 miles of walking over three and a half days. We had the support of a pickup truck to carry food and cooking supplies and meet us at our campsites each night. We camped out in three small, rural communities, but since it was peak agricultural season we had less interaction with the communities than I would have liked. Nevertheless, on the last night, a little girl named Yolanda brought us potatoes and sat with us while we cooked dinner. We shared the food with her and her grandparents. I’m almost positive we also left the anchovy sauce with them.

Apart from that, I think pictures (especially selfies) will tell a better story of the trek than words.

   
    
    
    
    
 After the trek, we spent a day relaxing back in Sucre and then took a bus to Potosí. Potosí is up near 14,000 feet and is known as the highest city in the world. (I guess it depends on your standards.) Potosí is where the Spanish first found silver in Bolivia, and the city once funded the entire Spanish empire. It was richer than Paris and London. But at what cost? An estimated 8 million miners (many of them slaves) have died in the cerro rico (rich hill) since the 1500s, and parts of the mine are still active. We learned about the history and had the option to go into one of the mines, which I didn’t do because there were people working inside. Making eye contact with a worker and tacitly acknowledging that their suffering was my object of study would have given me the shivers. That said, those in our group who went in did so quietly, quickly, and humbly. We didn’t go with a large tourist agency, but rather a single former miner. It was just about the best possible way to go about what was guaranteed to be an imperfect experience. Here is a picture of the ugly, fleshless cerro rico that overlooks the city.  

In Potosí we all got to work alongside child laborers for a morning through a child union called CONNETSOP. Child labor (selling newspapers, shining shoes, etc.) is a controversial topic in Bolivia and especially Potosí, and while few people will defend child labor as “good” or “just,” they also realize that raising the legal working age is not nearly as productive as fighting the causes of family poverty that force kids to work to chip in. Children as young as ten years old can go work on the streets. Those who work with CONNETSOP attend school half-days.

We also visited the “house of coins,” a museum about the history of Spanish and then Bolivian mints. All I’ll remember from that tour is the poor guide’s incomprehensible English (we should have taken the Spanish tour) and that the $ sign is the S and the I from Potosí (modified from a more complicated symbol that had superimposed the P T S and I). Maybe one of you will get that question on Jeopardy one day.

From Potosí, we went to the Salar de Uyuni, an enormous salt flat that probably takes the first ten pictures if you Google Image “Bolivia.” It is an expanse of pure whiteness and blue sky that you wouldn’t believe was real if you didn’t know it existed. Again, I’ll let the pictures do the work.

   
    
    
    
 The salar is arguably the largest lithium deposit in the world, and the policies surrounding its extraction will be telling of Bolivia’s progress on the idea of “good change.” (Silver = horrible, oil = pretty ugly but improving, lithium = ?)

After three days in the salar, we took a train and then a bus home for about 13 total hours of transportation. I’m almost back to life as usual. My pre-schoolyear meetings started yesterday, and the new baseball season starts in a couple of weeks.

Abrazos,

Jacob 

Part of the Family

This post comes from a week or two ago. I apologize in advance; I don’t have any pictures. But it’s a nice story. January 3rd we start a group vacation, so more pics will come then.
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Crumpled up on the floor in the back corner of my bedroom sat my soiled baseball uniform. It had been there for the ten days since my previous game, and I wouldn’t wash it until another game was approaching and the time constraints of clothesline drying made it absolutely necessary. And now, two days away from a doubleheader, that time had come. Nine months in Bolivia may rip apart and reconstruct my values and entire worldview, but it can’t touch my shameless laziness when it comes to washing baseball clothes.

Luckily for me, my homestay family has a washing machine (most wash by hand), but they advised me that heavily soiled clothes could cause the pipes to clog up with dirt. So I balled up the unwieldy, whitish mass in the corner of my room, picked it up in an awkward bear hug that sent puffs of dust emanating into the air, and walked determinedly downstairs to the large sink made out of cement washboard material- the “lavadero.”

I plugged up the drain, threw in my clothes, and turned the faucet hard counterclockwise. Nothing. Uh oh. I had procrastinated, and now I might have to play in dirty or wet clothes. It wasn’t too weird that the faucet was dry; it had happened plenty of times before and was becoming a more common occurrence as the rainy season came on the calendar but not in the clouds. When there is no water, you can sense it the second you touch the faucet. The Your twisting hand feels not the release of a pent-up stream of water, but an empty, quiet action of moving metal.

For about two seconds I wallowed in the miserable thought of batting with two damp pant legs, but then my eyes were caught by a massive, brown urn a few feet away that seemed to serve as a rainwater collector. I peeked inside and was relieved to find enough water to do a good-but-not-great washing job, which is all I cared for anyway. I filled up a bucket, poured in some powdered detergent, and started to squeeze and move around my pants in the soapy water. The water quickly turned brown, and I realized that my pants would never get completely clean this way, but they would be good enough for me. I thought, “As long as no one in the family comes in and sees how incompetent I am, this will be fine.”

And then the metal door to the outside creaked and opened, revealing María, then Ana, then Fabi, then Dennis with Lupe on his shoulders, and then the four neighbor women who work in the restaurant. It had to have been fate or Candid Camera or something. At that point, all I could do was laugh to myself and get ready to take my licks.

María was the first to see me. “Buenas tardes, Jacob.” Then a gasp. “¿Qué estás haciendo?” (What are you doing?) She came over to observe my technique and quickly pushed me aside to show me how it’s done. She turned the faucet to no avail and then asked me why the heck I was doing this when there was no water. The honest answer was a little embarrassing, so I just laughed and half pretended not to understand. At this point, the whole family and the neighbors had gathered around to see what was causing the fuss. We all watched as María emptied out the bucket of dirty water and refilled it from the urn.

“¡Hay que frotar, pues!” (You really have to rub hard!) Her technique was far superior to mine- dip the pants in the water and then rub the fabric against itself and the washboard with intense motherly elbow grease to get the dirt to come out.

“I’m going to return these to you completely white!” María repeatedly exclaimed as she squeezed pure infield juice into the sink.

All this time, Ana held back laughter while assuring me that Gottfried (another student they hosted) was worse, while the neighbors overtly laughed and talked about me in Quechua. I may not understand Quechua, but eye contact and the occasional use of the untranslatable word “gringo” were pretty useful clues into their topic of conversation. I piped up coolly with a “mana qhichwataj parlanichu” (Quechua for “I don’t speak Quechua”), which triggered another fit of laughter from the group.

María did return the pants to me white, and then she had me wash the vest and socks on my own, which were easier tasks because I now knew the technique. I did a decent job, but I got myself soaking wet in the process. I rinsed, hung, chatted a little more with the family and the neighbors, and was ready to go upstairs when Fabi approached me for a hug. She was about ready to grab me by the legs when she saw my wet shorts and recoiled. She looked up at me, then at her mom, then at my shorts again, then back at her mom. She tiptoed over to her mother trying to be inconspicuous and whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear:

“Mami, el Jacob se ha hecho pis.”

(Mommy, Jacob peed himself.)

Amidst the side-splitting laughter, I realized I was now really like a part of the family. And that felt really good. By the way, the doubleheader got rained out.

Abrazos,

Jacob

School’s Out for Summer

Here on the south side of the equator, we’re heading into summer as you start to bear down for the winter. (On a nerdy side note, since we’re relatively close to the equator, the sun is stronger today than it will be on the summer solstice.)
Summer vacation means a much different schedule for me, especially because I work in a school. Classes ended on November 27th, and then the next day there was a nice end-of-year ceremony called the kacharpaya (Quechua for “final goodbye”), in which all the groups put on dance, theater, and circus performances that they had rehearsed for weeks. We instructors also had to perform a number, and they thought it would be cool if we did a “traditional dance” from the United States that I could teach them. Haha. I was embarrassed because traditional dance is much more meaningful here than back home. I thought of square dance but didn’t really know enough, so we ended up doing the Cotton-Eyed Joe. We all dressed up as cowboys and cowgirls, and the performance went surprisingly well with little time to prepare. That will be a great memory for all of us, and I’m sure that despite my explanations, the other teachers will forever hold the Cotton-Eyed Joe in a much higher place than it deserves in the pantheon of United States musical tradition.

We had a week of staff meetings to kick off December (self-evaluation, clean up, etc.), and now I am free until January 18th, when the two weeks of prep meetings for next year will begin. So how am I filling that time? Baseball. Yes, they play baseball in Cochabamba. Or at least one family with roots in the U.S. does, and they managed to drum up enough interest among friends and neighbors to start up the Cochabamba Baseball and Softball Association and build two fields. The baseball league has three teams of adults and one team of middle/high school students. I play on the kids’ team, as do the president of the association Rodrigo and a 23-year-old Japanese guy Katsuya who moved to Bolivia for two years basically to help coach this team. So with mostly kids but possibly the three best players in the league as well, our team is decently competitive.

The overall quality of play is pretty low, but I still have a lot of fun. Katsuya (not even a pitcher in Japan) and I (a rather slow pitcher in the U.S.) throw harder than anyone we’ve faced by a lot. Never did I truly appreciate all of Dad’s rainbow-arc batting practice pitches in the backyard until that’s what I started seeing in games. I’m also getting to play some infield, which is new for me, and I’m still very bad at it. (I need to buy one crucial piece of equipment before I can play shortstop with the confidence necessary to attack ground balls.) Rodrigo, the player-coach, brings so much energy to each game, and I am thrilled to see it rubbing off on the kids. For three practices and one game a week, Rodrigo picks me up in downtown Cochabamba and drives me 15 minutes south to the field, which doesn’t boast nice outfield grass but does have a beautiful view of the mountains out in right-center. Speaking of the mountains, hardcore baseball fans will have heard about the supposed effects of playing at altitude, a redundant, time-filling topic for every single Colorado Rockies’ commentator. Well, Cochabamba is 3,000 feet higher than Denver, and I can tell you for sure that the effects are no joke. My breaking balls move much less, fly balls carry over outfielders’ heads when they shouldn’t, and I get winded scoring from second on a single. Maybe that last one is just me, though.

  
So much has happened since my last post- we kidnapped Manny for his birthday, went to an Enrique Iglesias concert, and saw a weird Sandra Bullock movie about Bolivia. (If you’re going to the theaters you should probably pass it up for James Bond or Mockingjay or Star Wars). But I’ve also had some special, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime experiences that I would like to describe to you in more detail.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon, María asked me if I wanted to go somewhere with the family. Where? “Really far away!” That’s all I got. I consented and ended up in the (large) trunk of the pale, blue van with Fabiola as we drove southward into Cochabamba. I kinda figured “really far” would mean 45 minutes to the south side of the city, but then we continued well into unfamiliar territory for me. We stopped in a smelly, barren region of the poor south zone to buy cookies and Coca-Cola, which I tried and failed to get in my mouth during the bumpy ride. Then we started to ascend up a large hill that got drier, browner, and emptier as we went. Many more cows and goats on the side of the dirt road than houses. Finally, we stopped for no obvious reason in the middle of the path. Time to get out. We had probably driven for two hours, and I wasn’t sure why. But here is the view that greeted me (featuring Fabiola).

  
Turns out we had taken this trip because Ana and Dennis were looking for a property to buy for their daughters for when they grow up and move out. They had learned of a promotion for cheap land in the campo (countryside) and wanted to check it out. That’s the reason for the divisions you can see in the background of the picture. When I found this out, I thought Ana and Dennis must really want to get away from their kids! But actually they didn’t know the land was so distant, isolated, and arid. They are going to look elsewhere.  

After a 15 minute stay, we piled back into the car, and drove two hours back home. I got to see even more new parts of Cochabamba, made even more special by nightfall and the vibrant lights and energy of the city. We ate out (fried chicken) and got home around 9:30. A truly special afternoon that started out as just tagging along on an unclear adventure.

Another special day was two Sundays ago- día de peatones (Pedestrians’ Day)- during which all fuel-consuming transportation was prohibited from 9:00 to 5:00. The idea almost certainly came from environmentalists, but by now the holiday has its own energy and spirit well beyond the political message. Several of my group members and I walked the 8-9 miles from Tiquipaya to Cochabamba, starting at 9:00 and arriving before noon. As we got closer to downtown Cochabamba, the streets got more and more packed with market-style vendors selling treats, lunch, jewelry, toys, pet cats and dogs, the whole lot. We walked down the main drag (which was one big market/party), ate lunch, got frozen yogurt, hung out in the city for a couple hours, and left on foot for home at 4:30ish. At 6:00 we were lucky to catch a trufi to take us the rest of the way; our 5 miles of progress lowering the cost by a cool six cents per person. The wild thing is that día de peatones was going on all around Bolivia at the same time. It’s a very cool national commitment. There will also be three Cochabamba-wide días de peatones, and I think we’ll be here for one of them.

  

 Last Saturday night I had the privilege of attending my first quinceañera, a traditional coming-of-age ceremony for a girl turning 15. (Quinceañera literally means 15-year-old girl.) This tradition is present in all of Latin America and I think Spain as well. In my case, the quinceañera was Masel, a student at Kusikuna and Asia’s homestay cousin. The reception was a ten-minute walk from my house on this beautiful, isolated, green, country-club-style property that I didn’t even know existed. Masel entered in a beautiful, enormous, red dress and went around the room hugging all of the guests. There were some toasts, a speech about the passage from childhood to adulthood, and then lots of dancing and food. The dancing was Bar Mitzvah level awkward, which was funny because I knew all the kids from Kusikuna. The food was plentiful and delicious, and I ate ev-er-y-thing. My stomach is better now, on Wednesday. Worth it? Probably not.

  
Anyway, those are all my stories for now. To those who celebrated, hope you had a happy Hanukkah!

Abrazos,

Jacob

P.S. I just remembered that about half of my future class at Princeton, current high school seniors, will hear back from admissions today. That’s kinda cool. Doesn’t feel so important in Bolivia right now, but it’s definitely important to a lot of future friends of mine.

Hey, what’s life like in Bolivia?

Hi, Happy Thanksgiving! We’re celebrating down here, but that story (among other things) will come another day.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. My blog naturally tends toward highlights and special events, so you’ll get an incomplete picture of Bolivia and my life here if I don’t stop to fill in the gaps from time to time.

First of all, I have a couple errors to correct. Somewhere I remember writing that Cochabamba has a population of 2 million. Turns out it’s more like 700,000. I confused the department of Cochabamba with the city of Cochabamba. A more important error has to do with my homestay “parents,” Ana and Dennis. I had them pegged at about 30 years old, and that’s what I wrote, but it turns out that they are 23 and 25, respectively. Also I’m almost positive that they aren’t married yet, and the wedding may be while I am here! 

Now I invite you to join me as we go together through my typical day in Tiquipaya. I won’t catalog the events of an actual, specific day, but what I’ll write will be a very realistic account of an “average” day in my life here.

I wake up at 6:15 to the sun and then at 7:00 to my alarm. Breakfast is as usual- bread and butter, bananas, and coca tea. Today we also have cheese and avocado, which is a treat. During breakfast we always turn on our small, 25-year-old, rabbit-ears, requires-pliers-to-change-the-channel TV to watch the morning news (station: Unitel, program: La Revista). We get a good dose of national and local news, and later a local teen dance troupe comes on the show to give a performance.

Dennis finishes his food first and says quickly, “muchas gracias Ana muchas gracias Fabi muchas gracias Ha-cob.” We all respond, “provecho.” This is the custom here; to excuse yourself from the table you thank everyone who shared the meal with you. Then everyone responds by wishing that the meal serves you well.  

Next Fabiola finishes her food. “Gracias Mamita Anita. Gracias Mami. Gracias Mami. Gracias Mami. Gracias Mami. ¡Grac-”

“¡Provecho, Fabi!” Ana barely manages to get out in the midst of a hurried swallow. Fabi definitely knew that her mother had food in her mouth, but she would not stop saying “gracias” until she got that “provecho” out of her mother. Really cute, a little annoying, and absolutely an everyday occurrence.

I finish my breakfast, give my gracias, and check the time. 7:48. Just enough time to wash my plate, knife, and mug and get out of here. If it were two minutes earlier I would have washed all the dirty dishes; two minutes later and I would have just put my stuff in the sink and run.

I grab my backpack, put on my hat, fill up my water bottles, and I’m out. It’s about a ten minute walk to the bus stop each morning (teachers, students, and even the principal take the bus to school), and I always aim to be there by 8:05 at the very latest. My daily walk takes me right past the main plaza of Tiquipaya, which at this hour is abuzz with public school students in way-too-hot uniforms rushing about in every direction.

I get to the bus stop and greet the students and teachers who are already there.  

“¿Qué tal, Sebas?” We slap hands and then fist bump. That is the common handshake among young people here. “¿Cómo estás, Nico?” Slap, bump. “Buen día, Marcel.” Slap, bump. “Hola, Manuel.” That’s Matt’s 16-year-old homestay brother. We don’t do “slap, bump.” He always goes in for the handshake and then pulls his hand back at the last second and runs it through his hair. There’s one in every crowd. It’s OK, I’ve caught on by now. Manuel also intentionally uses fake Spanish words like “rompido,” “morido,” and “escribido” when he talks to me. Anyone who speaks or is learning Spanish will understand how annoying and (admittedly) clever that is. He’d better watch out, though; I’m his English teacher.

Anyway, at 8:08 the big, red and white, Kusikuna bus #2 arrives, with nothing to distinguish it from a public transportation bus other than a sign on the inside of the windshield. We pack into the bus, little ones first, and then continue on our way. We drive away from the city and into more and more rural terrain. By the last stop, people are standing up, packed into the aisles, and grasping the metal bars above them. It feels like a bus in a major U.S. city, except when you look outside you see mountains instead of steel.  

We clunk up the final cobblestone/dirt road and arrive at la Comunidad Eco-Activa Kusikuna at 8:30, right on time. Someone rings a cowbell loudly enough for all to hear, and we’re off to our ambientes (“environments,” which is what they call their classrooms).

  
Today I’m starting with the secondary students, who range from age 13 to 18. It’s our one day a week for curriculum-based math. (With them I also have a day for math activities/games and a day for English.) I’m working with a group of 8-10 students, but they are at so many different levels that I mostly do 1-on-1 help instead of typical teaching. Today I taught combining like terms (Algebra I) and trigonometric identities (Pre-Calc) to two students in the same classroom. After about an hour many of the students get bored (maybe two are still focused, and two were never focused), so I play chess with a couple of the kids and pause when I’m needed for a math question. They’re not so good at chess. Too bad I’m not so good either, so I can’t really teach them.

At 10:20 (yep, that’s a 110 minute period), the cowbell rings again. Time for recreo (recess). I spend my recreo as I do every day, playing fooseball in one of the classrooms. We play in teams of two, first goal wins, losers go to the back of the line. I stink at fooseball. But it’s really fun. Who would have thought that because I’m living in a foreign country instead of a college dorm I get to play more fooseball?

Anyway, after the recreo I’m with the 11-12 year old group, Jatun (that’s Quechua for something, I think “big”). Today is our day for math activities. We start as always with a warmup that lets them choose between three games: Knockout, 21, and 24. The first two I mentioned in an earlier post, and the last one is an elementary and middle school staple that you may have seen in the form of blue cards with a big yellow circle in the middle. The goal of the game is to use the four integers on a given card and add/subtract/multiply/divide to reach 24. I made up most of the cards, and each student made a card also to add to the stack.

The warmup takes about half an hour, after which I would normally present the students with a challenge or discovery activity, but today I just have them go outside for a review game. This game emerged spontaneously a couple of weeks ago, and it goes something like this: everyone stands in a circle tossing a basketball around to whomever they want. If someone drops the ball, the group has to answer a math question before they can continue. If I drop the ball, they get to play one round of “el diablo se divierte,” which is like sharks-and-minnows.

We play this game for a surprisingly long time; about a half hour goes by without them getting bored because victory is always in sight. They chuck the ball almost exclusively at me with a complete repertoire of fastballs, lobs, look-aways, behind-the-backers, etc., but I don’t give in. Plus, they drop the ball frequently enough that I get to drill them in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions. After I’m satisfied with their work, I drop a tough one from Nico on purpose, enjoy the look of shock and pure bliss on his face, and then they’re off to play “el diablo se divierte.”

Once their round is over, there is only enough time left for me to pull out the 24 cards again and play with those who are interested. I let the others stay outside if they want. We didn’t do anything new or exciting today, but they got a good fractions review and definitely had a good time.

At 12:30 we stop what we’re doing, and the students pack up and do their chores (cleaning the classroom, watering the plants outside, etc.). At 12:45 Kusikuna buses #1 and #2 pull up, we pack ourselves in tightly, and before 1:00 we’re out of there. Good thing it’s not Thursday; those days there is only one bus because several (but less than half) of the students stay after school for workshops.

At around 1:15 I get home. The family restaurant is still open, but traffic is winding down. Dennis, who acts as the host and the waiter and the busboy and the cashier, looks tired as always. I feel bad because I always arrive just too late to be able to help. I peek my head into the kitchen to say hi to Ana and María. María gasps, her eyes widen, and she exclaims, “Oooh, ¡ya llegaste!” (You already got back!) Then I sit down at the table, and she serves me sopa and segundo (soup + second). Sopa is quinoa, and segundo is milanesa de pollo (pounded, pan-fried chicken) with rice and a potato. Yummy. But not colorful.

I go upstairs to my room and have about an hour to relax. I listen to a short podcast (Democracy Now! en español) for news updates and Spanish practice, I work a little bit on my next blog post, and then it’s time to go to the program house. 

I get to the house at 2:45 after a seven minute walk, help myself to some yogurt in the fridge, and pull out my phone to check my email and fantasy football. Rachel, Peter, and Gina are already there, and the others trickle in by 3:00. We start with our group check-in, in which we all share how much water we’ve drunk today, the consistency of our poop on a scale from 1 to 10 (not a joke), our energy levels, and highs and lows of the day.

The Spanish teachers won’t arrive until 4:30, but before that we have to do “metacognitive Monday.” That’s a misnomer for the sake of alliteration- all it means is that we go to the backyard, watch and discuss a TED talk about development, close our eyes while Gina proposes some deep reflection topics, and have some free journal time.

The three Spanish teachers arrive promptly at 4:30. They are the extreme exception when it comes to punctuality in Bolivia. Manny, Peter, and I go into the back room to work with María. For the first time in weeks we are all there at the same time; all of our jobs require occasional full days, so almost always one or more of us is missing. We start with grammar- today is involuntary actions using the impersonal “se”- and then move on to talking about the books we’re reading. I’m reading El Alquimista (The Alchemist) by Paulo Coehlo. While we are speaking, María corrects every single mistake we make and sometimes jumps in to provide better ways of expressing ideas even when we hadn’t messed up. I like that a lot, especially since no one at school or at home will do that for me. María is pretty serious but also fun, and any time a random question about Spanish or Bolivia comes up, she is willing to digress to clarify any doubts. She also speaks English pretty well, but in class we pretend she doesn’t.

Spanish ends at 6:30, we stay after a little bit to clean up and chat about upcoming events (i.e. Thanksgiving), and at 7:00 I’m on my way home. I let myself in the side door, go upstairs, and am greeted by another set of surprised eyes and a “¡ya llegaste!” from María. She’s funny; I get back at this time every day.  

María offers me dinner and I say that I’d be fine with the bread and tea that the rest of the family eats, but she insists on cooking for me anyway. (Lunch is the biggest meal of the day here, especially because dinner is kind of late and close to bedtime.) A half hour later, she comes out with some sort of beef over rice with sautéed onions and tomatoes on top, and of course, the omnipresent potato is right there on the side. She also brings full plates for Ana and Dennis. Ana tells me that she’s getting fat because of me since they didn’t eat big dinners before I came.

As we eat, the old TV goes on again for our nightly viewing of “Calle 7,” a corny American Gladiators-type show with super muscular athletes sent through a gauntlet of taxing physical challenges in support of either the red team or the yellow team. My family is full of die-hard red team fans. The winners of the day celebrate jumping up and down with Coca-Cola in a hilariously contrived ad ploy; they remind me of Wii Sports characters celebrating their victory. Then everyone dances together and they’re all friends again.

After dinner I shower, read, journal, maybe work more on my blog, and go to bed around 10:00, ready to do it all again tomorrow morning.

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Intermission time! Here’s a Spanish tongue twister I learned: “tres tristes tigres tragan trigo en el trigal.” Three sad tigers swallow wheat in the field.

* * * 

Now I have several nuggets about Bolivia that I’d like to share with you. I’ll throw them at you bullet-point style.

– Stray dogs everywhere. They chase bikes and bark really loudly at night. Some people have pet dogs, but they’re just for protection and aren’t really domesticated. If a stray dog bothers or threatens you, you throw a stone at it. Faking a throw works just as well. The relationship between dogs and humans is way different here, and it’s a little shocking and unsettling to someone who comes from a culture in which the dog is “man’s best friend.”

– I already alluded to a general aversion to punctuality in Bolivia. In fact, Bolivians themselves admit to working on “la hora boliviana” (Bolivian time). You know how you have to show up “fashionably late” to parties? In Bolivia that rule extends to almost every possible meeting, maybe 15-30 minutes. Along a similar vein, if I ask for directions from a stranger in the city and am told to walk straight ahead two blocks no más, you’d better bet it’s at least four blocks away.

– In Tiquipaya and more widely in Cochabamba, you can buy a nice little bag of popcorn from street vendors for 1 B ($1 = 7 B). In Cochabamba cholita women on street corners will make you up a cup of freshly-squeezed orange juice for 3 B.

– To travel into the city, we use cheap, ubiquitous, fixed-route taxis called “trufis.” Two trufi lines that go into Cochabamba pass right by my house. It’s about a 30 minute ride with up to 9 people in a minivan that costs 2,40 B each way.

– Driving in general: trufis and individual drivers alike drive very aggressively here. Red lights often function like stop signs or even yield signs. At a minor intersection with no signage, cars won’t even stop; they’ll just slow down a bit and honk twice to warn any cars that may approaching from the other way. Luckily, speeding isn’t an issue because of frequent speed bumps on every road that drivers have learned to take seriously.

– In stark contrast to the United States, similar stores don’t separate in order to avoid competition, but congregate in order to stand out. I once asked the woman cutting my hair why she set up shop literally with six other hair cutters on the street. She said that no one would find an isolated hair cutter; everyone in Tiquipaya knows to go to the Calle (street) Loa for a haircut. Plus, when they are in a bind, the hair cutters lend each other equipment and break large bills for each other.

– Cochabamba is home to the largest open-air market in the Americas and arguably the world. It’s called the cancha. You can buy absolutely everything you’d ever need in the cancha, from clothing to ice cream to bicycles to refrigerators to live turkeys. True to Bolivian form, all of the similar vendors congregate, which makes sense because the overwhelming size of the market. In fact, the cancha is so big that it doesn’t even feel like a market, but instead a never-ending set of city blocks packed full with street vendors. The cancha is an amazing place to go shopping and also an amazing place to get robbed. I’ve only been there once.

– Cola-Cola has won the game down here. They are publicity geniuses. Many of the family-owned restaurants have Coca-Cola branded tables and chairs and refrigerators and silverware because if they buy enough Coca-Cola they receive these gifts. Works well on both ends. Not to mention that Coca-Cola is all over Calle 7, the most popular TV show in Bolivia. I wouldn’t be surprised if Coke outsells Pepsi 20 to 1 here.

– I have 5 hour staff meetings at Kusikuna every Tuesday after school. It’s about as boring as it sounds. The topics get repetitive and I often zone out. But it’s always a potluck lunch and everyone brings great dishes, so I thoroughly enjoy the vegetables each week. Plus, I’m getting to know the teachers and the inner workings of Kusikuna, so the meetings get better each time. I’m sure I’ll look back on them fondly years from now.

– The principal of Kusikuna is Rafael Puente. That’s a rather famous name around here. Rafo is a well-known historian and was briefly the mayor of Cochabamba. I’d put him in his 70’s; he’s totally bald on the top but has a short, white ponytail in the back; and he’s married to a much younger woman with whom he has a 4-year-old daughter, Rafaela. Just thought I should paint you that picture. Rafo is the heart and soul of the school and it’s philosophy; the teachers and students respect him, even if behind his back they make fun of his eccentricities and “senior moments.”

– Spanish: I’m getting better more slowly than I had hoped. My expectations seem to rise at the same rate as my level of fluency, so I’m always a left a little frustrated. However, when I take a step back and think about it, I realize that I’ve absolutely come a long way. I understand most of what I hear and am confident enough to try to express any idea that comes to my mind, albeit sometimes at what feels like a 1st-grade level. I haven’t dreamed in Spanish yet, but the words come of out my mouth much more naturally now. No longer do I think in English and translate into Spanish in real time. That’s a big step forward from August, and I can’t put my finger on when it happened.

– Quechua: I haven’t picked up much at all, but at least I can tell when people are speaking it. We may start classes in the coming months. Nuqa jumuni estadosunidosmanta. I come from the United States. Interesting that the alphabet is the same- must mean that Quechua was only an oral language before the Spanish colonists arrived.

– Politics: there are two hot issues in Bolivia right now. First, they want a strip of coastland from Chile. The case is working its way through the international court system right now, and Bolivia has had some success invoking an old treaty, but I’m not too optimistic. In the words of my instructor Pedro, “Chile would take La Paz by force before giving us coastland.”  The other issue is much more heavily covered and hotly debated, and that is the question of whether to change the constitution to re-elect Evo Morales to another term. He has been in office since 2006, and his current term goes from 2015 to 2020. The current constitution would not allow him to run again. The public is basically divided into three groups: “we love Evo let’s keep him forever,” “we don’t like Evo let’s vote no,” and “we like Evo but this is a slippery slope and we should just elect someone else like him.” I suspect that the last viewpoint is the most popular, but we’ll see what happens on Election Day in February. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pulls it out.

– What do Bolivians know of the USA? In some coca growing regions they hate us because laws that we coerced the Bolivian government into passing at the height of our War on Drugs led to bloodshed. But here in Tiquipaya, the USA is seen mostly as a reflection of its pop-culture influence. People ask me if I’ve ever been to Springfield (because of the Simpsons), some enjoy WWE, the movies have them mesmerized by Las Vegas, the most popular actors include Adam Sandler and The Rock, when I say I’m from Pennsylvania they ask me if I’m a vampire (Transylvania), then when I pronounce my name as it’s said in English they recall Jacob from Twilight. That reminds me, I have several names here. I’ll write them phonetically from most to least frequent: Hakob, Yakob, Hakobo, Jacob, Gringo, Frederick (the name of the German volunteer at Kusikuna- they confuse us), Hakobito. I respond to them all.

– I make French toast. I’ve done it at least three times for my family and twice for my group. Ana really likes it. Thanks, Dad, for granting me that invaluable skill.

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Hope you’re all enjoying Thanksgiving back home. Thinking of all of you, especially my family and my friends who are reuniting for the first time since going to college. We’re cooking up a storm down here, too, and there’s a lot to be thankful for.

Abrazos,

Jacob

All Saints’ Day + Cutting Circles

Maybe you’ve heard of All Saints’ Day. I’d be impressed if you know it’s purpose. And if you’re not a practicing Catholic, you’ve likely never celebrated it.

Here in Bolivia almost everybody is a practicing Catholic, and All Saints’ Day (they call it “Todos Santos”) is a national holiday. Todos Santos is sort of like Mexico’s “Day of the Dead” in that it serves to remember and celebrate the lives of deceased relatives. On November 1st, everyone sets up a “mast’aku,” filling their tables with sweet bread, cookies, fruit, flowers, flags, and favorite dishes of family members who have passed. We had to wake up before sunrise to go to the market and get all this stuff (I had stupidly stayed up late the night before to watch the Mets blow Game 4 of the World Series.) At noon the souls of lost loved ones are supposed to descend from heaven and enjoy the food you’ve set up for them. Afterwards you can take and eat anything on the table after reciting three Ave Marias and three Padre Nuestros. With both a language and religion barrier, I kinda just stood at the table quietly for a while before taking something. Maybe the Mourner’s Kaddish would have been the Jewish equivalent.

  

The next day, everyone in the town piles into the cemetery and sets up the mast’aku again at the grave of a recently passed relative. It’s a cemetery scene unlike I have ever seen or could ever have imagined. Music playing, street vendors lined up outside the cemetery gate, people carrying chairs to grave sites like we would do at Little League games, and of course, lots and lots of drinking. 

 
Again people can pray and take some food, and this time is it customary to go around the cemetery and pray at the tombs of friends, neighbors, and strangers. We didn’t leave the cemetery until enough people had come and prayed that our entire mast’aku was gone. Some of the kids make a real sport out of praying and gathering as many treats as they can.

That reminds me of Halloween. Even though it basically falls right over Todos Santos, some people do celebrate Halloween here. The super-activists call it neocolonialism from the U.S., and the super-evangelicals call it a devilish tradition, but nonetheless the little kids get really excited to collect their candy. Beyond being way less commercial, Halloween is different here because instead of going door to door, all of the festivities are concentrated on the main drag (the Prado) in Cochabamba. Everyone buys candy from stands on the side of the road, and then the kids go around saying “dulce o truco” and exchanging pieces of candy. I think I prefer our version back home because it’s a nice neighborhood event, but that wouldn’t be feasible here with a much lower level of participation. Here’s a picture of my homestay mom María holding Lupe (dressed up as a witch).

  

Now onto the very exciting topic of cutting circles. The school I work at is so serious about what they call “alternative pedagogy” (tearing down teacher/student power dynamics, teaching through projects and games, empowering students to create their own assignments, etc.) that they held a weekend-long “alternative pedagogy fair” accompanied by a series of workshops at a local university. I was put in charge of creating a fractions game that was to be sold at the fair. Sounds benign enough. Well, this wonderful fractions game entailed cutting out 76 plastic circles, carefully measuring out angles, and cutting out hundreds of “pie slices” varying in size from 1/2 to 1/10. And in the words of the teacher who assigned me this project, “es imprescindible que sean exactos” (it is absolutely crucial that they are exact). I should add that she said this very stoically while holding up my first two circles in search of minute differences. Needless to say, I spent about 15 hours over three days on this project and stayed up until midnight the night before to finish. I remember thinking to myself that this was more work than I would have some nights at Princeton. Haha. I’ll review that statement in a year.

  

We weren’t able to sell a single math game. Just a lot of baked goods. It’s OK. It will go to the students at the school. This is the type of experience that was not fun at all in the moment, but I will certainly look back on it fondly in June. In fact, it already doesn’t seem so bad. Plus, now if any of you need some perfect circles cut out in the future, you’ve got your guy.

My next blog post is going to be different from all the rest and will either be your favorite or least favorite so far. I have been scribbling down all sorts of nuggets that somehow haven’t made their way into any of my posts but are important to Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, Bolivia, or my experience here. Also I have a couple of errors to correct. If you are curious about something specific, please feel free to ask me a question in the comments section, and I’ll answer it in my next post.

Abrazos,

Jacob