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.