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.