Yaguapüa, 13 April 2011

Greetings from the Cañón del Ingre, Bolivia.

At 4:30 Christmas morning my neighbor, Don Julio, woke me up to borrow a saw, a hammer, and some nails. I’m sick of existing in this community only to lend people tools they abuse or never return, but the hour and the set of Julio’s jaw told me it was serious; told me, somehow, this was the exact obverse of A child is born. I spent the day glazing the windows of our new classroom building, but now and again the sounds of carpentry drifted over from Julio’s house. Julio’s two young sons also drifted over a couple times to steal lumber when they thought I wasn’t looking.

They didn’t start digging until nearly sunset, but it didn’t take long. Just as darkness set in, the shovels went quiet, and were suddenly replaced by an amazing keening. I couldn’t say if it was a man or a woman. I couldn’t tell if it was singing or crying. It was the most beautiful, most desolate sound I have ever heard. It went on forever, and ended too soon. Abruptly there was a little more scraping. Then Don Julio and his wife put their sweet, precocious, two-year-old granddaughter Ireña to rest, for the very last time.

Sometimes I worry these occasional general letters overemphasize the positive. On the other hand, this particular story does have a (not quite redeeming) positive side. When I lived in the jungle on the other side of the country twenty years ago, there were no families in the village that hadn’t lost at least half their children – mostly to diarrhea. This is not something you ever get used to, but you adjust. You brace up. For example, you don’t name your kid until he or she is five or six and likely to live: it’s easier to lose the guaguita than a little María or Josico.

Here in Yaguapüa the community is still reeling from Ireña’s death, because we were defenseless, braceless. Not only have the Guaraní always understood nutrition (my Aymará neighbors in La Paz refused to eat beans because it’s “poor people’s food”), but in the past couple decades Bolivia has made a priority of mothers and babies. Infant mortality is still a problem, but something’s working: the national population has increased by 40%. Ireña is one of only three children I’ve known since moving here eleven years ago that has died. It hurts, but it’s supposed to hurt.

The community is also angry. Ireña died of what may be the second most common cause of infant death in the country. Her mom had gotten bored with rural life and sought excitement in the city. As seems to be the invariable rule, she got Ireña instead. She was fourteen, and alone. By the time she handed Ireña over to her own mother (and fled again) it was too late. Doña Ruth, a neighbor who came by this-morning to borrow laundry soap, spent ten minutes on my porch fuming: “That poor baby just faded away. Her mother threw her out like garbage.” We might prefer to be more forgiving, but women like Ruth are entitled to their anger: they believe in struggling back, not bracing up.

Lining up to get lunch outside the kitchen at the Internado San Jorge de Ipäti; May 2004

Yaguapüa, 29 May 2011

The Bolivian government set up elementary schools in every one of the free indigenous communities in the Cañón del Ingre, but the only highschool is in Yaguapüa. Ten years ago the Guaraní Regional Assembly established an internado (boarding house) here, so their kids could all attend school beyond fourth grade. The director, Cecilio Tardío, asked me to drill them a well back in 2003. At that point the accommodations were pretty basic: thatched wattle and daub buildings, and the woods if you felt the need – just like everywhere else in the cañón. I did a few other projects with them in the following years. When my agricultural work in Imi ended in 2006 and MCC let me go, the Regional Assembly asked me to stay on in Yaguapüa and develop permanent facilities.

Progress, for many aid organizations in Bolivia, means introducing outside expertise, technology, and (most of all) money. The Assembly may have been disappointed when we stressed local initiative, labor, materials, and locally appropriate construction design. We certainly used outside resources, but mostly to catalyze what the communities could do for themselves. Of course, producing an environment that would be attractive to kids and their parents was the main object: it was in everyone’s interest to keep young people near home, where they’re safe, where –for example, and not to be too parabolic– boys at least take responsibility for what they do with girls.

I’ve had a few personal successes heading up the construction work. Food is still all cooked on wood. While fireplaces aren’t new in the region, ones that actually work were a revelation; I had good luck and my chimneys, as the vacuum cleaner salesmen like to say, really suck. More recently we’ve finally gotten composting latrines to work. The glitches were social, so I’m a little sorry the solutions were technical. But bootstrapping new concepts is always sloppy: as the kids learn that latrines don’t have to be smelly and disgusting – as their expectations improve – their care and commitment will improve. Little by little we built the internado into a fairly commodious environment.

The internado at present, left to right: classroom building, girls’ dorm, and kitchen/dinning hall (boys’ dorm, volunteer house, and grist mill not shown); June 2010

I was lying awake late one night, way back when I still lived in that wattle and daub dorm with the boys, when I heard a whisper:
    “Santiago, ndekuaru neï?” (Santiago, are you peeing?)
There was no answer, but the question was repeated a few minutes later, with new emphasis:
    “Santiago, ndekuaru neï!” (Santiago, you are peeing!)
Most families among my neighbors share one or two beds, but in this case Santiago occupied a top bunk, and the voice I heard was no doubt his downstairs neighbor.

Somebody lit a candle. Two boys helped Santiago down and led him outside to finish his business. Three or four others got up and changed the wet sheets, above and below. Santiago went back to bed, perhaps without ever really waking up. They blew out the light, and in a few minutes everyone was snoring once more. But after that second “ndekuaru neï” nobody had said a single word. In fact, nobody there ever mentioned the incident again. The sheets and blankets were washed and drying in the sun before breakfast the next day; otherwise, it might have been a dream.

Elena Cerezo (from Imi) and Mariela Jarillo (Ñaurenda) laying the cornerstone of their Girls’ Dorm; February 2008

Of course there have also been many frustrations. Frankly, even the most pleasurable aspects of this work –designing complicated buildings and putting them up brick by brick– aren’t as personally satisfying as producing food in a community of fellow farmers. Budgeting, fund raising, and contracting aren’t any fun at all. Furthermore, these wonderful kids are usually loud, disrespectful, hormone-driven weapons of mass destruction (like any young teenagers), and I’m an old grump. A guy can’t hear himself work! Still, the community values the construction much more than my farming efforts; buildings do grow and bloom like plants; and if I happen to remember “Santiago, ndekuaru neï”, it all makes sense.

As for the girls, they are, as I write, practicing their chacarera dancing in the courtyard. The Guaraní have adopted this tradition from the culture that kept them under subjection for most of the last century, and I wish they did not love it so. On the other hand these girls are awfully pretty, collectively, spinning and soft-shoeing, giggling when they screw up and making fun of the teacher behind her back. It fills me with a kind of preemptive yearning nostalgia. My work here is done; my plane ticket is purchased. I leave Yaguapüa in a few days and Bolivia on Friday. I may never come back.

Cecilio’s eldest daughter, Talía, is the light of my life (here washing her little sister, Cielo). Unfortunately it’ll never work between us: she is in love with Antonio Banderas.

The Adirondacks, 09 July 2011

I have now been in the Land of Total Availability a month, lazing around and trying to figure out what’s next. The transition has been easy enough, though I’m reminded everywhere I go of why I left for Bolivia in the first place: we enjoy a pretty high standard of living in this country because most people in most other countries do not. My neighbors in Imi and Yaguapüa were competent men and women. They didn’t need me to teach them anything: what we learned, we learned together. On the other hand, they could probably teach us. For example, during the June heat wave in Pennsylvania Dad took me to an enormous shopping mall that was so over-air-conditioned the shopkeepers were all wearing sweaters. It would never occur to my Ingre neighbors to go to war just to defend their right to indulge in such criminal waste.

Sorry: in the next few days I plan to walk the Long Trail in Vermont, and shake some of this reverse culture shock from my sandals. But in the meanwhile I am very grateful for and proud of the bit part I got to play in the Cañón del Ingre: grateful for the respect that developed between me and my neighbors (a little respect is all they really need), proud of contributing a little to the justice they are just beginning to live. In the meanwhile I can’t help feeling it’s that kind of respect, that kind of justice, the United States desperately needs to learn.

Which does not mean I wish you anything but the most pleasant of summers.

./James (Phineas) Gosselink