The Moveable Feast

This past Thursday, I again hit the road with the FEFEME hermanas, the pastor who is the national director of Life and Mission, and the pastor who is the coordinator of the El Alto district, a satellite city of La Paz and the urban Aymara-speaking center of the country. After five days on the road together, making our way through copious amounts of fruit and hundreds of kilometers of dangerous mountain roads, sleeping in various lumpy and sagging beds of questionable cleanliness, clapping mutely but enthusiastically along with countless indecipherable hymns sung in Quechua, and pushing, dragging and sputtering a broken down jeep through the remote countryside, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I came out with a familial sense of belonging with my hardy travel companions.

The purpose of the trip was to attend an annual national church encuentro (encounter) called Misión Quechua, which unites all the Quechua-speaking members of the Methodist Church for administrative coordination, the inspiration and planning of evangelical efforts, a Christian Quechua music competition, and lots and lots of hymn singing. The meat of the encounter itself was, in the end, of little interest to me,

which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I know approximately 10 words in Quechua, and at least half of them are sexual innuendo. However, the encounters around the periphery and in the incidental margins of the journey there and back were fascinating. I also enjoyed the chance to visit Sucre, the de jure capital of Bolivia (despite the fact that La Paz, as the seat of the government, is certainly the de facto capital in the imagination and daily speech of Bolivian citizens). Sucre sits at a relatively lower altitude for Bolivia, and enjoys a mildly tropical climate. It is a city full of palm trees, shady parks and plazas, fascinating miniature shrines dedicated to rich families in a cemetery so lavish that it is a tourist attraction, and a considerable portion of the country’s young adults, who arrive there to study and leave their impassioned political graffiti on all available walls.

The most important thing you need to know about what it is like to travel with my fellow hermanas and hermanos in the faith in Bolivia is that everything involves the consumption of almost superhuman amounts of food. I admit that I’ve never read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, but I imagine that an exhaustive travelogue of my time in Bolivia would produce a book with a very similar feel. The significance of food in these contexts could be a research topic onto itself. At the least, it is safe to say that the amount of food consumption and the process of consuming it certainly has much more multilayered purposes than simply satisfying hunger or craving. The moment I got in the jeep to set out with my lunch of re-heated lentils in tow, I was offered soup and the segundo (entrée) of a Bolivian version of lasagna, leftover from a hermana’s lunch in a restaurant. Oranges, chicles (gum), and butterscotch candies soon followed. Dinner was soup and seco de pollo (chicken stew in a light pesto-like spinach sauce) at a restaurant in a small town, where the grubby-looking men drinking Coca Cola and beer at red plastic tables stared at me as if I were a unicorn or some other mythological creature they had a similar likelihood of encountering.

The next day began bright and early in the city of Potosí, the old boomtown and primary generator of colonial-era South American wealth, which is elevated even higher than La Paz, at 13,500 feet above sea level. Before setting out, we ate on benches at the stand of a street vendor who made api, a thick, mildly sweet purple and white corn drink that is somewhat reminiscent of tapioca pudding, and is typically served with big, delicious and ridiculously greasy disks of deep-fried bread.

At a highway tollbooth en route to Sucre, we bought baggies of charqui (extremely salty, naturally cured llama meat jerky, which is in fact the “original” jerky, as evidenced by the semantic trail of the word from English to Spanish to the Aymara ch'arqi), which came with cooked corn and aji (hot chili sauce). Then, in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkein’s hobbits with their “second breakfast” and “elevensies,” immediately upon arriving at the church in Sucre at just about 11:00, we were served salteñas (deep-fried pastries filled with meat, vegetables, hard-boiled eggs and gravy, which I think must require years of experience to eat without spilling their “juice” everywhere).

The trip back was, if anything, an even more intensive gastronomical marathon. Setting out after having had both breakfast and a lavish 11:00 lunch in rapid succession, we snacked on an abundant supply of peaches, apples, chirimoyas (custard apple), tunas (cactus fruit), and watermelon bought on our way out of Sucre, along with a couple big bags of panes (little single-serving bread loaves, as they are most often baked in South America) and more candy. The following day this sort of snacking was supplemented with a lunch of chuleta de vaca (beef chops) with a sort of white rice porridge and potatoes in the mining city of Oruro. And this is not even to speak of the endless supply of food that proceeded from the kitchen adjacent to the church in Sucre throughout the weekend.

To understand the significance of all this eating, it’s important to indicate that, in the case of the road food, it was almost always bought on one person’s initiative, with their own money, and then shared freely with everyone else. The importance of “inviting” someone to food is also reflected in my daily life in the hospedaje. (The Spanish verb invitar serves the same purposes as its English cognate, but also is often used for offering someone food, and carries the implication of paying for whatever you are “inviting” someone to.) When I go down to the community kitchen to cook my lunch each day, a crew of boys usually assembles around the same time to cook their lunch together. If they can reasonably spare a plate, they will always offer me whatever they are having (which is, with little exception, the all-weather classic of white rice, fried potatoes and fried eggs) along with whatever they have prepared for their mate (water boiled with toasted wheat, corn, or herbs and sweetened with sugar). Similarly, if the caretaker of the hospedaje can spare some of the food she has prepared for her and her children in her little kitchen adjacent to the community kitchen, she will invite me to a plate. This is all regardless of whether I am already cooking myself a veritable feast, and regardless of the fact that I don’t “invite” them to my food as often as they do to me, though I am certainly learning to do so more and more. Food seems to have an extremely important function as a shared substance, expressing acceptance, hospitality, appreciation and above all cariño (love, affection or caring) to the recipient.

On the other hand, I wonder if the endless moveable feasts of road trips are also a response to the rigorous sleep schedule of "late to bed, early to rise" that is certainly common in the Protestant work ethic of the church but seems perhaps to be a typical practice amongst Bolivians in general. Food provides fuel for the body and breaks up the monotony on long journeys and at intensive church encounters where one might be tempted to succumb to sleep deprivation. Furthermore, the fruit in particular might help to provide water content in the body. I’ve noticed that Bolivians, like the Peruvians I lived with last year, have the maddening habit of barely ever getting thirsty, and those in the Methodist Church seem to drink mostly either soda or the mates mentioned earlier, and this usually seems to be more for pleasure than for thirst, and takes the form of a loosely ritualistic exchange similar to that involved in sharing food.

Our moveable feast was made more exhilarating by the way in which it moved. The Life and Mission pastor who was driving, not at all untypically of drivers in Bolivia, has the habit of honking at everything that he might collide with instead of actually take any measures to slow down or steer clear of it. Presumably the idea is that when inevitable collisions with things occur, at least said "things" won't be able to claim they weren't warned. The pastor also doesn't think twice about passing in no-passing zones or when oncoming traffic is present and nearing quite rapidly, and he surely cuts many fractions of kilometers off of our trip by whipping around sharp mountainous curves in the left lane. Furthermore, we are all disencumbered from the seat belts in which we North Americans usually insist on restraining ourselves. Functioning seatbelts seem to be nonexistent in back seats in Bolivia, and go unnoticed in front seats. If you're the intercessory prayer type, I would recommend praying that I don't die in a car crash.

Between feasting and narrowly avoided collisions, we found the time to stop every hundred kilometers or so for Hermana S. to climb up or down some mountain or other to collect various huge and menacing-looking cactuses for her to transplant into her garden when she got home, because "they don’t have these in La Paz." She would then happily station herself on top of our luggage inside the hatchback of the jeep and keep her gradually mounting, prickly collection company. Hermana S. is a retired gardener and the oldest of the FEFEME leaders. She is always quick to laugh, quick to forgive, and highly cordial and gracious. She is the FEFEME leader I work closest with in my volunteer work for them, and I have latched on to her as a comforting but feisty mother figure, whose thick mantas (shawls) keep me warm and whose patient explanations of our surroundings keep me sharp.

When Hermana S. wasn't stopping to collect cactuses and try the patience of the pastor of Life and Mission, she was stopping on the side of the road to "desaguar" beneath her full skirts. Though I was clever enough to wear a skirt for the entire journey this time, the reality of inevitably spilling some portion of my pee on my shoes and the hem of my skirt a few times a day still took some getting used to, and I found comfort in reciting to myself a tidbit of medical trivia I heard somewhere once: Urine is actually sterile, you know.

Hermana S. also proved an enthusiastic Aymara teacher on our long drives. I would go through my flash cards with her and she would tell me if my understanding of the word was correct, and often break out laughing with some double entendre suggested by a word. She even humored me in my rehearsal of the names for genitalia in Aymara, through conspiratorial whispers and giggles as we tried to hide the topic at hand from the El Alto pastor. He had otherwise been joining in to help with my Aymara education, but he had been embarrassed enough when, in response to his ambiguous question, “What is the physical difference between men and women in the United States?” I had been unable to resist offering: “Well, men have penises and women have vaginas.” Best keep a discussion of Bolivian genitalia, then, between just us ladies.

This sort of joking and tangential, vague references is pretty much all I've gotten so far in terms of ideas about romantic relationships, sexuality and the gender roles encapsulated therein. However, my time in Sucre over the weekend offered me an opportunity to observe some of these themes concretely in action for the first time. Unfortunately, my experiences were perhaps a bit too concrete in that I was the female protagonist in these romantic scenarios: I received no less than two overtures towards marriage proposals over the course of the weekend. The first was from a middle-aged, upper-middle-class mestizo man who cornered me the instant I came downstairs from the nap I took shortly after arriving and eagerly invited me to go out and see all that his beautiful city has to offer. The FEFEME hermanas were nowhere to be found, and the El Alto pastor told me they had gone out to pasear, so I figured I’d go along with this hospitable man to pass the time. However, before we had even finished crossing the street just outside the church, he had already not-so-subtly informed me that he had been praying for a Christian wife ever since switching his career from history teacher to lawyer (the connection between the Christian wife and the law practice eludes me), and that she had yet to arrive. As we walked, I called one of the hermanas on my cell phone and happily agreed to meet them back at the church where a late lunch awaited me, despite my sucreño host’s protestations that he was going to take me to a café instead. As I ate, I told Hermana S. about the impropriety of this supposed “man of the church,” and she agreed that this was gravely inappropriate behavior for such a man. For the rest of the evening, I stayed glued to the hermanas, making a second approach impossible for him. This protection of female sexuality was a surprisingly nice change for me, as someone who as always insisted I could fend for myself, has deftly handled all kinds of attention from shady older men, and sometimes even felt flattered by them. It was somehow refreshing to be able to glare at and pointedly ignore my would-be fiancé from the looming, large presence taken up by my church sisters’ billowing, multilayered pollera skirts and shawls.

My second suitor was considerably more endearing, and thus proves a more difficult nuisance to shake off. A Methodist Evangelical Bolivian folkloric music band was in attendance, and their lead singer was, apparently, fascinated enough by my unicorn-like gringa presence to ask me for a photograph with him, for no apparent reason, after having exchanged nothing more than the customary hand-shake-and-kiss greeting.

After watching me dance to his band with my characteristic unbridled, ear-to-ear-grinning fervor in the semi-structured delightful chaos that seems to characterize all dancing to traditional folk music in the church, he had apparently grown even more enamored, and asked me for another picture.

When I protested that he already had one and began to tease him about it in my more or less fluent Spanish, he was clearly stoked to discover that I could intelligibly speak his language, and he didn’t have to use photo shoots as an excuse to get near me. He proceeded to provide me with a condensed version of his life in an almost resume-like form, being sure to inform me that he had his own farm where he grew wheat and soy as cash crops, that he was the president and lay pastor of his local church, that he was dedicated above all to his music ministry, and that he was most definitely single. After telling him I was a singer/songwriter and exchanging a few songs out on the patio, this sealed the deal on his decision to fall hopelessly in love with me and to do everything he could to gain my trust, friendship and cariño during my five months in Bolivia, with the hopeful end of marrying me. He began this project by showering me in the most stereotypical gifts imaginable: a heart-shaped box of chocolates, a bouquet of red roses, and an earthy, “ethnic”-looking necklace and pair of earrings. In contrast to the middle-aged lawyer, the hermanas were encouraging and cajoling about this potential suitor, recommending I tell him to buy me gold earrings next time, which would be better for my sensitive, easily-infected ears. The Life and Mission pastor, for his part, smiled and told me, "estás con suerte" (you have good luck). I suppose a good, clean-cut, economically established and devoutly Christian young man with musical talent would be a reasonable enough marriage choice for me, but I really can’t deal with any marriage proposals in my inbox right now, as I am already quite happily occupied with research proposals.

Nonetheless, the experience got me thinking about the nature of courtship, falling in love and getting married in the context of Evangelical Protestantism in Bolivia. Despite the fact that my second would-be suitor’s fairly unequivocal suggestions of marriage plans sounded insanely premature and immature to me, the manner in which he attempted to initiate a romantic relationship with me might very well be every young Bolivian evangelical woman’s dream. (The irony, of course, is that he seems to be so very enamored with me because I am different than most Bolivian woman.) I am smelling here the beginnings of more clearly defined and focused research questions. You might call it an investigation into the anthropology of romance, as it raises questions about expectations of sexual conduct, sexual purity, courtship, dating, the decision to get married, and what people do when these ideals aren’t fulfilled (in the cases, for example, of the two young women I’ve met already in the church who have babies with absentee fathers). I like the idea of writing about the anthropology of romance, because it has an initial tone of being an appropriately young-womanish and somewhat dreamy concern, yet I know it will unavoidably tie back in to the messy and often tough realities of the women with whom I live, work, worship and commune here in Bolivia.

I had plenty of time to draw out these ideas from my own brush with romance as we made our way back from Sucre. Indeed, it took us two full days to make the 10-hour trek, because of a mechanical fiasco with the pastor’s jeep. How we ever got that jeep from a stretch of road in the middle of the country, inhabited by little more than cactuses and the ruins of giant earthen ovens called huatias (pictured below), to a tiny and phone-deficient town, to the larger town of Ch’allapata where we slept, to the city of Oruro where we got its carburetor replaced, and finally back to La Paz, is a miracle only God could have pulled off.

The Most Beautiful and Chaotic Place I've Ever Been

A close friend of the pioneering cultural anthropologist Franz Boas once commented that Boas was a man who was never comfortable in the presence of a generalization. I seem to follow in Boas' footsteps by nature; you give me a generalization, particularly one about human behavior, and my brain will immediately and automatically go to work searching for counterexamples. With that said, I admit that generalizations can sometimes be useful, or at the very least, amusing. And I am here on this blog, in part, to amuse you. Thus, I have decided to make two extremely broad and brash conclusions about the country of Bolivia after my weighty 11 days of firsthand experience here:

Bolivia is the most beautiful place I have ever been.

Bolivia is also the most chaotic place I have ever been.

My trip today to a remote pueblo (town) in the mountains to the north of La Paz—not far from the famous Lake Titicaca—has sealed the deal on the first conclusion. I offer you a few pieces of evidence here, but I must disclaim that I am not always in agreement with the adage "a picture is worth 1,000 words," because 1,000 pictures ain't worth nothing in comparison to experiencing firsthand the ridiculous green, the fresh dewy coolness, and the black dirt and mountain-herb aroma of this landscape:

(The keen and agriculturally-minded reader will note, as I did, the brilliant terracing cultivation techniques in the latter two photos. It turns out my high school obsession with sustainable farming and my schoolgirl crush on Wendell Berry weren't for naught, after all!)

Now how, you may ask, could such a graceful, tranquil and positively artful landscape produce such a chaotic society? I will venture to suggest that the two phenomena are not opposed to each other, and indeed might be interrelated. You see, Bolivians don't seem to be chaotic because they are trying to do too much at once, or trying to integrate their organic, unreliable bodies into unforgiving mechanistic systems of production, transportation, communication and socialization. On the contrary, it seems, most Bolivians are so laid back and so loosely bound to established mechanistic systems that the result could only be a general, almost friendly chaos. The average citizen seems to handle this chaos with remarkable patience and perseverance.

Some examples:

Do you usually think about the rules of pedestrian traffic when you are walking down the sidewalk? I don't mean rules about pedestrians and cars. I mean rules about pedestrians and pedestrians. I had never given much thought to this myself, but here in Bolivia I contemplate it almost every time I walk down the street. It seems that every other oncoming pedestrian wants to play a game of chicken with me, to see who will veer off first or if we will perhaps just go for the crash. I've tried going right. I've tried going left. I've tried heading straight at them. I've tried giving them exaggerated amounts of space. It seems no matter what approach I adopt, confusion ensues.

Motor vehicle traffic is equally as lacking in all mores and structure. Enough said. It's a good thing children in zebra costumes have made crossing guard duty into street performance art here in La Paz, or else its death rate would probably be much higher.

I might not have synthesized such relatively impersonal interactions into a generally chaotic portrait of Bolivian society if it hadn't been for my observations during my time in the pueblo of Inca Katurapi today. I should preface this by reminding you all that I am not a big fan of etiquette. I will be the first to support you in breaking all kinds of social mores if it makes you happier or more comfortable in a given situation. However, even I was vaguely embarrassed by the extent to which rules of etiquette during this church assembly in Inca Katurapi differed from my own culture's rules, or perhaps lacked certain kinds of rules altogether.

I was in the company of the bishop, the national secretary of Life and Mission, the national secretary of finances, and two of the Federación Femenina Metodista hermanas for the consecration of a new "sub-district" of the Methodist Evangelical Church, in which local leaders were elected and copious amounts of edifying or inspirational speeches and prayers were recited.

During the first part of the ceremony, I was dragged up on stage with the other church representatives to have lavish, indescribably colorful and cumbersome wreaths of fresh flowers placed around our necks. After the customary welcome song, a series of church elders or leaders came up to shake our hands. This seemed appropriate enough to me. But then, as the assembly went on and announcements and speeches were being made, certain people continued to trickle in who would come up on the stage, without any regard for whatever was supposed to be the center of attention at the moment, to shake all of our hands. Though this was surprising to me, in a way it was also relieving, because it made me feel comfortable sitting back down in the audience so I could take pictures, and later escaping to find a bush to pee behind.

(On this latter matter, I must commend Bolivian women for their sensible and well-planned wardrobe choices: those giant, pleated, multilayered pollera skirts make it so you could probably squat and have a pee while standing around in a circle with a bunch of men and no one's propriety would be lost nor voyeurism gained.)

On the other hand, perhaps the eager church elders who came up and shook our hands in the middle of speeches were complying quite well with their own rules of etiquette. And as I mentioned, their laidback behavior that broke the sacredness of lengthy orations spoken through a microphone was somewhat of a relief for me. I found a bit more manifestly rude, however, the constant coming and going and chattering at the back of the church. I was able to duly take this aspect in while lingering at the threshold after returning from my visit to the bush (during which I was genuinely concerned that I might encounter some of the same sort of adolescent boys who had just called out "buenas tardes" as I passed and had responded with peals of gleeful laughter when I—rather uninterestingly, in my opinion—returned the exact same greeting). At the same time, this commotion in back might not have been all that different than what happens at interminable, community-wide meetings all over the world. Furthermore, it offered me an endearing glimpse into some of the children's and adolescents' interactions:

I was more unsettled, however, by the complete lack of reserve and considerateness during the wedding-line style greeting of the newly elected leaders. I fell into a place in the line to shake their hands, and was surprised to discover that every single person I thought was in line behind me pushed ahead of me heedlessly to greet the elects. I eventually had to get a little pushy myself so as not to be left standing there dumbly, with a sea of people pushing past me to shake the elects' hands. Perhaps it is significant that all of the people who pushed ahead of me in this way were also older adults, as were the ones who came up on the stage to shake our hands. Maybe there was some sort of elders' privilege at play that I was just not picking up on. Nonetheless, the shorthand reaction to this experience that I jotted down in my pocket notebook reads: "Rude people pushing in front of me in line."

With all this said, I don't mean to assign a necessarily negative value to Bolivia's chaotic nature, or even to suggest that I personally dislike it. In fact, some of the finest examples of chaos I encountered today were also the finest moments I spent in Inca Katurapi. For example, congregational prayer in this community is truly a group effort, if not a coordinated one. I had noticed already in various events of the church administrators in La Paz that when someone was designated to pray out loud, many others simultaneously prayed their own prayers in whispered tones. The churchgoers of the newly christened "Valle Verde" sub-district, however, are not so reserved. As the local pastors, the bishop or the pastor in charge of Mission and Life prayed during the service, a great wailing cacophony arose amongst the congregation as everyone offered their own words up to God, many raising their hands towards heaven with expressions of the deepest untold longing on their faces, and some weeping freely as they prayed. The palpable earnestness of these devotions sent shivers down my spine, even though the confusion of voices, and the predominance of Aymara over Spanish, made it impossible for me to understand any of the words themselves. Meanwhile, I derived some secret satisfaction from the fact that the paternal, pastorly voice of the bishop, who prayed in Spanish rather than the group's preferred Aymara, was mostly drowned out and certainly ignored by the congregation.

Finally, there was the dancing. In preparation for this finale, I was served what I believe was the hip or knee joint of an alpaca, along with numerous potatoes, yams, ukas (similar to yucca but much smaller and slightly more flavorful), and plantains. The bishop is pictured here partaking in his portion, which was ridiculously larger than my ridicously large portion, and after which he was given a whole other serving of a similar size. After this, we were sent outside straight away to join the congregants in their musical revelry. A delightfully noisy rhythm and woodwind section provided the backdrop for what I can only describe as a combination between a drunken dance train started at a wedding reception and a wild rumpus straight out of the book Where The Wild Things Are. Better yet, no one was actually drunk, because they're evangelicals. We skipped around in concentric circles and then in an elaborate

spiraling pattern; we changed directions abruptly without much rhyme or reason, and in fact at one point the person on my left decided to go in one direction at the same time that the person on my right chose the opposite direction; we broke out of the circle of onlookers into an open grassy field and ended, in a nicely misshapen conglomeration, with the bishop's insistent clapping. When all was said and done, as we drove away from Inca Katurapi, along a terrifyingly narrow and bladder-bursting bumpy mountain road that gave new meaning for me to the word "remote," I was happily resting in and ruminating on Bolivian chaos. I was also pleasantly surprised with the way our time there unfolded in comparison with the vague and less-than-exciting idea I'd been given of the purpose of the trip before we got there. Another possibly chaos-producing trait of some of the Bolivians I've met is their aversion to answering any questions too directly or clearly. A sample conversation from about 5:45 AM today, recreated from memory and translated from Spanish:

Sari: So, what are we going here for?

Hermana M.: For a visit.

S.: What kind of visit? What are we going do there?

H.M.: It's an assembly.

S.: Oh. What kind of assembly?

H.M.: A general assembly.

S.: So, is it like, a special assembly, or a regular assembly that happens every month or something?

H.M.: A special assembly.

S.: So then what's it for?

H.M.: It's for the sub-district.

S.: But what are we going to be doing there?

(Pastor D. intervenes)

P.D.: It's for the consecration of a new sub-district that is being formed.

S.: Ohhhh.

In other news, another empirical generalization I have arrived at is that I have a unique talent for saying things that make Bolivians crack up. Whether they are laughing at me or laughing with me isn't really important, because it clearly works in my favor, as this picture demonstrates without further explanation:

The crowning moment of my jocular antics so far was last night, when I was somehow able to draw upon my miniscule vocabulary in Aymara to get an entire room of 17- to 20-year-old boys and girls and two matronly Aymara women cracking up over the impossible conversation I was having with a boy while I spoke English and he spoke Aymara. We switched to Spanish in between so I could reveal the merciless pit of sexual innuendo I was providing for my conversation partner to bury himself in deeper and deeper with each unintelligible exchange.

I wish I could put up pictures from moments like those, but unfortunately I have yet to capture on film and perhaps even in writing my daily life around the hospedaje, with the FEFEME hermanas in the church offices, going to the market or going jogging in the beautiful and impossibly hilly cobbled streets of La Paz. I suppose these are the hardest moments to capture. I would like to represent them here, though, because I don't want to give the impression that my life in Bolivia is nothing but visits to exotic, remote mountains and quaint Bolivian farming villages. I would hate to do nothing more than fulfill expectations of properly "exotic," "traditional," "indigenous" and thoroughly "othered" Bolivians. So, forget all the generalizations I just made, and all the fascinating points of difference I just cited. When the congregants were praying, I felt a surge of emotions and devotion probably not so different from theirs. When I consumed that alpaca limb, the delight in smoked animal protein and fat was probably manifesting itself within me much as it does in my hosts. When Hermana S. "covered me" with her shawl so I could "desaguar," I was peeing basically the same stuff she peed a minute later, only I didn't have the skirt to make it easier.

The most important thing for you to know is that I am very happy here, and I am building up friendships, sacred spots, slang words, cookware, and nostalgic memories that I will be very sad to part with when I leave.

Homesickness, Kari Kari Sickness, and the Unique Anthropologist Syndrome

On Thursday evening, after having gotten lost approximately seven times earlier that day—even with a map to consult!—while trying to find the house of the American missionary where my groceries were held hostage, then going through somewhat of an ordeal to find even a distant refrigerator in which to keep said groceries, and finally being dragged endless blocks to buy a wireless internet antennae for my computer that it turned out I couldn’t afford and a prepay cell phone they couldn’t actually sell me, perhaps it was inevitable that I would start to feel that deep, irremediable loneliness unique to strangers in a strange land. When I came home phoneless, internetless, worried about my higher-than-expected living costs, and exhausted from altitude sickness and/or dehydration (which seem to be one in the same problem for me), it suddenly dawned on me that there was absolutely no way I could possibly communicate with anyone who had known me for more than 36 hours. I wanted my mommy. Crying ensued.

But I pulled myself together and went down to the kitchen to cook a meal with the hermana who oversees the hospedaje and her 10-year-old daughter. After all, I had two beef chuletas to cook that would otherwise go to waste, nor am I one to waste an opportunity to invite my new Bolivian hosts to dinner. As we waited for the brown rice to cook (which didn’t, by the way, really cook—but at least my first attempt at brown rice 12,500 feet above sea level proved highly education!), I asked the hermana about how she came to live in the hospedaje and work for the Methodist church. In the story she elaborated for me, I learned that her husband had died of an illness called kari kari, which, if I understood her correctly, results from a malicious individual performing a procedure on you when you are unaware and vulnerable, perhaps sleeping on a bus, for example. This procedure creates an abscess in your stomach or your lung (via the back) or sometimes your thigh. At first, you don’t feel anything and go about your life as normal. But within a week or a month, perhaps, you are bound to eat something fresh such as fish, eggs, or cheese, and this activates the dormant abscess, at which point you begin to feel a screaming, constant pain, as unbearable as being in labor. Finally, you bleed to death out of your nose, mouth and anus. The evil stranger is then able to collect this blood somehow and sell it. The doctors don’t believe in this illness, she explained, thus it is no use going to the hospital, where they will inject you with poison in any case. The only cure is an herbal remedy that her husband did take, but as she found out later, he did not take enough of it, which is why he died. She told me that another hermana, the gatekeeper of the hospedaje, cured herself from the same illness using this remedy.

It would, of course, be natural for most anyone from my cultural context to side with the Bolivian doctors in their disbelief. However, as I listened to her story, I was reminded of a book I just finished reading before I left for Bolivia that gave me some reserve in denouncing the hermana’s understanding of bodies, illnesses and medicine as categorically less enlightened than my own understanding. In this book, The Woman Beneath the Skin, Barbara Dudden examines the case files of a 17th-century German doctor who attended primarily to women. In the world of this doctor and his female patients, not only the medical explanations of illness and the cures prescribed were strange to my medical understanding, but even the physical symptoms themselves were almost completely alien to any types of diseases and conditions of the human body that I am familiar with. In this small town in 17th-century Germany, women would urinate pins and other household objects; bizarre swellings and abscesses on the skin would be encouraged and nurtured as semi-permanent cleansing outlets for the body as they emitted varied substances that I don’t associate with bodily fluids; and men frequently menstruated as well as women, sometimes from the penis but more often from other body parts, such as the fingertips. It was seen as a grave sign when men’s flows stopped, just as such stoppage was grave for women. Unless I am to believe this ordinary but meticulous doctor was inventing every single thing he wrote down, I am forced to allow my own solid notions about what the body is and how it works to be challenged, and to recognize that our understanding of the body shapes our experience of the body, and, perhaps more importantly, our experience shapes our understanding.

Needless to say, my conversation about the kari kari illness, as preliminary and poorly understood as it may have been, made me feel like quite the anthropologist. Here I was learning about folkloric medical notions, without even prompting! I felt the same way on Saturday at the house of a woman who works for the three FEFEME leaders. She told me about her struggle to pursue a college-level degree with three children and an unsupportive husband, whom she had only married to escape the abuse of her older brother. She indicated that her relationship with her husband had improved considerably since he stopped drinking after getting a testicle cut off by muggers while drunk, but she was still saddened by the fact that he was unable to show much tenderness and love to his children. Perhaps even worse, from my perspective, was that he only gave her Bs. 200 (US $28.50) per week to contribute to her own income as the primary breadwinner for the family. On top of providing the lion’s share of the income for household expenses, she also did all the household work, with help from a cleaning lady one day a week. Despite all these classic conditions of “gendered oppression,” however, she positively glowed with pride at having loved herself enough to pursue her own education, and she also explained that working as a leader of women’s causes in the church has given her confidence and a sense of meaning in her life. Later in the afternoon she agreed to let me record her while I asked her to elaborate on various themes she’d brought up while we went to the market and cooked. Our conversation was cut short because her son was ready to drive me back home, but I walked away with fifteen minutes of conversation on my digital voice recorder—to be continued soon—like they were gold star stickers affirming my anthropologist-ness.

With that said, however, I have to admit that at this point in my stay, I feel as if most of the people I talk to had read all the same ethnographies I did, and were dutifully representing their stereotypical cultural customs along with a haphazard unification of the sundry ethnic groups contained in their national boundaries. I am wondering what it is that I’ll have to add as a scholar, and my ego doesn't like the idea of letting go of doing something radically groundbreaking and unique with my research. I am assuming, however, that this is a common sensation for anthropologists of my generation in these beginning moments of research. Besides, there seems to be infinite layers of gleanings we can uncover with finer and finer-toothed combs as we seek the messy truths in the margins between previous social scientists' generalizations. I like the idea of being a gleaner, because it conjures the image of discovering sweet fruits left behind by chance, carelessness or callousness.

Because of course, not every interaction I've had has been a replay of my expectations. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, for example, that so far the stereotype of the guarded, impassive Andean Bolivian does not hold up all the time, as a couple of women have already shared relatively freely with me about their personal lives. And perhaps more importantly than the “uniqueness” of my findings, I genuinely like many of the people I have met, and am looking forward to getting to know them better. In that sense, my findings are bound to be unique, because truly knowing, understanding and sharing with individuals is always a lesson in the cliché snowflake metaphor: No two of us are ever made alike. The uniqueness of each human being has, in fact, always been an axial research interest for me. After all, what most effectively challenges those oppressive, monolithic cultural structures that I so earnestly seek to topple, as every good liberal-liberal arts student should? Particularity. All oppressive structures rely on the illusion of homogeneity in order to survive.

Views from Windows

I arrived at the tiny, grimy La Paz airport at about 7:00 this morning, barely tired after 4 hours of restless, uncomfortable sleep on the 7-hour plane ride from Miami, apparently high on just being here. And high, literally. The airport is actually in the satellite city of El Alto, which is about 13,500 feet above sea level. It's sprung up really just in the past 25 years, as Aymara immigrants flooded into the city in the 80s, looking for work after huge factory and mining businesses became privatized and dumped their workers to fend for themselves, largely in the informal sector.

I was greeted with much decorum and fanfare by "la gente de la iglesia" (the people from the church), as I identified my hosts when I approached them, hoping I had guessed right. I felt like a visiting movie star, though perhaps one who had played Joseph in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, or something else of a properly religious ilk. The three leaders of the Federación Femenina Metodista (FEFEME) smiled glowingly at me every time our eyes met and gave me numerous hugs and kisses, each time overwhelming me amidst their proudly gilded teeth, beautiful, polychromatic shawls and billowing pleated pollera skirts (the traditional—and actually quite costly—"chola" dress of Aymara indigenous women, actually modeled off of 17th-century European fashions, complete with tiny bowler hats pinned at a fashionable angle atop the two customary long black braids).

After winding down switchback roads into the valley—if one can call it that at 12,500 feet above sea level—in which La Paz lies, we arrived at the Methodist Evangelical Church's colorful, sprawling compound. It contains K-12 schools, a gymnasium, basketball courts and a soccer field, an hospedaje (dormitory) for students from the country (where I am living), the national church offices, and other buildings I have yet to be able to name. In a common room on the first floor of the hospedaje, a big banner awaited me with the words "DEAR SISTER SERY, WELCOME TO BOLIVIAN UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, METHODIST’S WEMEN" and a heart to top it off. I was serenaded with a customary welcome song by the FEFEME women, two pastors, the American missionary in charge of volunteers, a Quechua lay-leader from the countryside and a young man who lives at the hospedaje, accompanied by guitar and charango, whose lack of tuning with each other ceased to sound problematic after everyone started singing and clapping. A FEFEME woman placed a beautiful garland of fresh-woven flowers and greenery around my neck. If it is true what one of the only other American missionaries here later told me about Aymaras' remarkable ability to follow all rules of courtesy without letting on a single iota of their personal feelings, these people are exceptionally skilled at simulating all the warmth in the world with their smiles. I was practically floating in a blissful cloud of welcomeness. This was helped by the fact that they all stood up one at a time to offer formal speeches about how glad they were to receive me here, how much I could count on them as friends and hermanos and hermanas (brothers and sisters) in the Faith, and how much they would pray for God to be with me in everything I do here and to use me to carry out marvelous works.

I can only hope I have the presence of mind to stay that connected to my faith. I am trying to balance this, of course, with consistency in my rigorous attention to details and the use of my critical scholar's tools. I don't mean to suggest that the integrity of the latter are antithetical to the integrity of my faith, but rather they are absolutely essential to it. Regardless, this degree of accountability that I expect of myself on a daily basis here is a lot to contend with. Perhaps too much.

My room in the hospedaje is lovely, if sparsely furnished. Here is a view from its large picture window. It's views like these that makes La Paz seem somewhat enchanted to me, even if it's that messy, clanging, solicitous South American brand of enchantment. I've barely been able to take in the feel of the place, though, because the rest of the day was marked by some mean altitude sickness. 10:30-4:30 was a blur of restless sleep, followed by my first food since 8:00 AM, during which my waning appetite, my nausea, and my throbbing headache only worsened. Over our late lunch at what she described to me as a "Bolivian Starbuck's," the American missionary I had originally contacted about doing my research here filled me in on all her own intricate gripes and struggles with the church, its leaders, and its laity during her seven years here. Of course, not all of this has to be my experience, but it was certainly a sobering reality check for the idealistic visions I had been nurturing after my blissful and surreal morning, imagining that I would be sharing my Great Love of God in an egalitarian state of communitas with everyone the whole time I'm here. Clearly, a reality check was inevitable.

I am now holed up at the aforementioned missionary's house, which she shares with her considerably well-off Bolivian husband. I am recovering well from altitude sickness after taking some pills and resting in a semi-comatose state while listening to the well-off Bolivian justify his conservative capitalistic Christian ethics in a very convoluted manner (notably, he supports the current socialist, indigenous president, Evo Morales, because Evo and my host, apparently, are both "socialists," not "communists.") I interjected what I thought were excellent and concise 10- to 15-word arguments in Spanish every five minutes or so, but of course this rosy self-perception could have something to do with my aforementioned comatose state, and I also think my arguments were too radical to even fully register on his radar, whether they were theoretically sound or not.

One thing is clear from my long, eventful, uncomfortable, yet somehow strangely peaceful first day. There is no way I will ever be able to write enough to feel that I am capturing everything here, neither in my field notes nor on my blog nor in my journal. I will try to spare my blog readers, then, from the sort of detail I am faithful to in my field notes, and will instead write more at random and in-depth on interesting moments of breakthrough and/or absolute failure in my research, perhaps a few personal revelations, and some of my reflections on striking differences as well as surprising similarities I observe between my Bolivian informants and myself/my culture.

This picture is a view from an upstairs window of this upper-middle-class home I am sleeping in tonight. It seems the only things I have had the where with all to take pictures of today have been views from windows. This makes sense to me on some symbolic level. I have yet to truly dive into the world of La Paz, of the leaders and members of the church, of Christian women's lives. Right now I am just looking out of framed windows of courteous introductions and brief, oversimplified cultural run-downs. Appropriately enough, in my second picture of my Bolivian adventure, you can see from a distance the studded lights of the poorer communities that get poorer and poorer the higher you get up the mountains, giving way to golden sunlight slipping away from the tips of the most distant peaks, and the snow of the great Mount Illimani where I assume no one lives, but I could be quite wrong.