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.
* * *

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.