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.