Birthdays, Deathdays, and the Stuff of Life

If you know me even just a little bit, you probably know that I love Getting Things Done. This certainly helps to explain how I found a volunteer position through a crapshoot email contact with a stranger that has enabled me to live in Bolivia for five months with the foolhardy aim of doing Master’s-level research work as an undergraduate student, after having become fluent in written academic Spanish and colloquial Andean Spanish in a crash-course period of three years. I make this all sound very exciting, but on the flip side, my obsession with accomplishing said “things” can lead me to a life that is as tediously abstract as the word “things” itself. I have been known to pass up vibrant parties to finish a writing project a day early (thus, theoretically, freeing me up to do even more Things than I would’ve done otherwise). I also spent at least two of the past three years refusing to watch any movie that wasn’t in Spanish, because I reasoned that I simply didn’t have time if my language skills weren’t also to benefit in the process. At home on breaks from school, I sometimes barely see dearly missed friends because I am too busy studying in between other “side projects,” like recording my second album.

But life is not made up of abstract Things to Get Done. As much as I might try to convince myself otherwise, the important things in life are vibrantly, viscerally concrete. For example, sharing peanut-butter-and-apple-slice sandwiches with my friends on an overcrowded bus from La Paz to Ancoraimes. Or watching the college classrooms across from my window light up in the evening and waiting for one of my research assistants to come to the window and jump up and down as he tries to get my attention. Or offering my eternally chilly hands to get warmed up between Hermana M.’s eternally warm, soft and motherly ones. Or arguing with a refresco vendor about whether or not I’ve paid her yet and realizing I’ve become one of those uppity Americans who doesn’t want to be cheated out of what translates to a few dimes for me. Or finding a sad love note dirtied under feet on the sidewalk. Or missing my mother on the US Mother’s Day. Or feeling complete as I run up to Mirador Montículo where the tall buildings fall away to reveal jaggedly carved stone mountain ranges that look so close I imagine I can stroke their contours. And finally, knowing that all of this could be taken away, indeed all of it will be taken away, in the blink of an eye, by that one task that every person on earth accomplishes completely, if not voluntarily: death.

If I was at risk of forgetting these important concretes of life, last week has provided a heartbreakingly sweet and, at times, just plain heartbreaking reminder. I was flying at the beginning of last week, veritably shining in my specialty of Getting Things Done. On Monday evening I wrote a brief paper on doing anthropological participant-observation, outlining several tools and approaches I saw as particularly useful for doing anthropology as a native of a cultural context. Over a lunch meeting on Tuesday, I presented these ideas to my five native-anthropologists-in-the-making, and tried to get them to generate their own ideas about things they will find noteworthy and challenges they will encounter in doing participant observation. I gave them each a copy of my paper on methodology and a thick notebook with hardcover binding carrying their name and the words “Cuaderno de Investigación (Research Notebook)” markered on to the cover of each. With these tools in hand, I sent them off to try their hand at participant observation in an event or situation in which they found themselves amongst other Methodists during the week.

Three of my research assistants already had the perfect opportunity to carry out this initial assignment and dive headlong into playing anthropologist, as we were planning to travel together to a weekend-long workshop on evangelization and church leadership for youth leaders from around the country. In an impressive group effort, my research assistants and I gathered at 10:30 the night before our departure to generate ideas for the design of a brief interview on gender and youth to administer to young men and women at the weekend training. We managed to generate more than enough questions and decide on a basic organizational approach without me dropping to sleep right there on the couch, and the next morning I woke up early and immediately got to work typing up, prioritizing and categorizing the questions into a user-friendly interview instrument. I dashed around getting some promised road food together for the trip and going to a printing and copying shop to get copies of the interview instrument made. In the midst of our whirlwind to get ready and leave, which included packing up a copious amount of wool blankets to make our beds on straw mats during the chilly nights of the rural altiplano, we heard there had been some sort of auto accident in which some people from the church were involved. We saw the daughter of the national secretary of finances crying with worry and being comforted by another hospedaje student, because the secretary of finances and his wife were, apparently, involved. Clear details were not forthcoming. Just before we headed out the gate of the hospedaje, an hermana arrived and was talking with the guard hermana of the hospedaje, and we heard the woman vaguely mention something about death, but then she waved us on encouragingly, and we set out for the pueblo of Ancoraimes. En route, we practiced giving each other the interview and recording it both with notes and with the digital recorder. Afterwards, as we settled back in our seats and Eddy excitedly pointed out landmarks as we neared and passed his own pueblo, I felt like we had just pulled off the most effective last-minute research designing and training on record. I expected to return home with the fruits of our labor, inspired and stimulated to dive deeper into our research.

God, however, had other plans than for us to Get Things Done last weekend. We arrived in Ancoraimes past dark, and a bitter wind was whipping through my thin hoodie as we stood in the deserted town plaza, unsure of the exact location of the district church’s headquarters. After a bit of wandering and worry, we stumbled upon a big garage-type gate with “Iglesia Evangélica Metodista” stenciled on to it, and I peeked in through the hole to see a large yard covered in grass like windblown hair, and in the distance, a big farmhouse glowing with warmth. We banged on the gate and called out for a few minutes before someone came to show us the way in. Rather than a whole crew of young church leaders, pastors and coordinators, however, a lone, middle-aged hermana dressed de pollera greeted us at the door. We stepped into a mostly barren living room with wide, clean old floorboards, an empty fireplace and a set of loveseats and a couch in the center. Seeing the blank confusion on our faces as we looked around the room, the hermana told us that everyone else had returned to La Paz already. When we informed her that’s where we had just come from, she asked us why we hadn’t heard about the accident. We had, of course, but we hadn’t heard what she was about to tell us: that two beloved members of the church had died in it. One, Pastor G., was the national coordinator of Liturgy and Communications, and pastor of four churches (on a rotating basis) in El Alto. Another, who I hadn’t met, was a young man from Oruro who led a Christian praise band and, as I found out that evening, had left behind a wife and a three-year-old son. Aside from that, the national secretary of finances’ wife and the younger sister of the deceased orureño were seriously injured, and the national secretary of finances himself, who was driving, sustained minor injuries. A sixth passenger, another young man from Oruro, came out with only a few scrapes and scratches.

My three research assistants and I were all a little paralyzed as we stood on those clean-scrubbed wooden floorboards with our backpacks and the suitcase full of blankets that now seemed somehow useless to me. I was automatically placed in the position of leader, decision-maker and spokesperson for the four of us. All I could offer in response to their queries about our decision to depart for Ancoraimes was, “We had heard about it when we left, but we hadn’t understood well the details. It was very confusing. We though the best thing to do was just to leave.” Rosmery offered, “No sabíamos que era tan grave” (“We didn’t know it was so bad”), which henceforth became something of a mantra for her as the night wore on.

A local pastor and another church hermano came in to greet us as well, and they and the hermana helpfully directed us, in our state of mild shock, to sit down on the couch and loveseats. We mulled briefly over whether we should just run back to the town square and try to catch the last movilidad (vehicle) back to La Paz, which they said usually left at 8:00. We determined that it was too dangerous to be traveling at night, however, and after consulting with me, the pastor and hermano decided we could stay in a guestroom with several bunk beds in the local hospital, rather than the traditional straw-mats-on-the-floor arrangement of big church encounters. We planned to wake up before dawn and take the 6:00 movilidad back home.

We sat mostly in silence as we waited for our cedar mate to be boiled and brought to us sweetened and accompanied with a piece of bread each. Eddy was the quietest of all. He pulled his baseball cap over his eyes as if he might be trying to hide tears. Amalia, seated at his side, grew uncomfortable with this gesture after awhile and jiggled his knee, saying, “Come on, don’t be sad, Eddy!” Rosmery, along with repeating her “No sabíamos que era tan grave” line, as if it were some kind of repentance for our heedlessness, asked questions about the accident, trying to get details that they mostly didn’t have. She also commented on the tragedy of the young orureño’s death, as she is from the department of Oruro and knows him, and his wife and child. I sat looking down at the worn, well-swept wood floor and thinking about how ridiculously fragile our human lives are, with tears welling up in my eyes every few minutes.

The pastor, for his part, kept trying to call his wife on her cell phone, because, as he explained, she was supposed to be home by now, and “when these sorts of things happen, you get to worrying.” But she arrived safe and sound, with their two-year-old daughter in tow. Shortly after arriving, the little girl walked over to her father, clasped his knees, and looked up into his face if she did know that it was “tan grave.” He picked her up and kissed her forehead and stroked her hair for quite awhile, because he, too, knew the graveness of this situation called life, which is so quickly and so easily followed by one called death.

This pastor was joined by another, somewhat older local pastor, and the two sat with us in the living room and tried to lighten the mood. They talked about other things, and attempted jokes. These efforts only started succeeding when they asked me about where I was from and what I was doing here. My foreignness, juxtaposed with my comfort with the language and sense of humor of Bolivian culture, is a constant source of amusement and fascination for my Bolivian brothers and sisters. By the time we finished our tea and bread and I announced that it was time for us to be getting to bed, we had more or less absorbed the fact of the accident, and we conversed light-heartedly with the pastors, who lead us through town to our appointed sleeping quarters, trying to learn how to pronounce and spell my name most of the way there. Meanwhile, Eddy bravely continued to drag the gigantic and half-broken roller suitcase full of blankets behind him across the bumpy streets, in the freezing cold, without gloves, despite various offers to relieve him of the duty he had designated for himself that day.

We awoke the next morning to more bitter cold and rode home with barely anything to eat or drink until we got back to La Paz, but we somehow managed to enjoy each other’s company anyway. We evenly distributed a meager leftover supply of drinking water, bananas and havas tostadas (fava beans I had fried in oil and salt the day before). We also held a surprisingly eventful tic-tac-toe match, and we enjoyed Eddy’s less than scientific—or psychic, for that matter—palm reading. As is commonly the case, experiencing a tragedy together seemed to have bound us to each other in a unique way.

I spent almost the entirety of the next two days processing Pastor G.’s death, too distracted or sad to even keep up with my field notes. I have been pondering how to describe Pastor G. here, because I don’t want to fall into the temptation of painting a grandiose picture of a man of monumentally loving, brave, and wise proportions, just because he’s gone and everybody misses him. I honestly didn’t know Pastor G. all that well, and he may have disappointed me had I known him better. As everyone does. Perhaps he thoughtlessly threw litter out the car window, or only gave money to beggars to boost his public image, or had a double sexual standard for his teenage daughters as opposed to his teenage son. I don’t know. But the man I did know was humble, soft-spoken, and always seemed genuinely concerned for the welfare of those around him. He would accompany the FEFEME hermanas at the last minute when they were delegated to attend church encounters, if they wanted him along for the extra support and perspective. He came across as timid and somewhat serious, but he was actually pretty keen on playful banter, and even forgave me—after he finished blushing—for once jokingly suggesting that he had multiple wives in different houses. Pastor G. was also one of the first people whose hands I shook in Bolivia. He was waiting at the airport with the FEFEME hermanas when I arrived, and on our winding drive down to the Methodist Hospedaje Center that morning, he offered me little insights on the church, La Paz, and Bolivia’s current government. The last time I saw Pastor G., I had stopped into his office to ask him about getting a copy of the book on the history of the Bolivian Methodist church that his colleague, Pastor D., wrote and to which Pastor G. contributed as a researcher. “That is the official story,” Pastor G. told me. “The documents, the records, the decisions that were made. But what it doesn’t say is how those decisions affected the people. It doesn’t have testimonies of peoples’ faith. That is what we need more of,” he affirmed. I thought, “This guy knows his stuff. I should come back and talk to him more about the church.” But now, of course, that’s a conversation I’ll never have.

Fragmented and mildly fond memories are all I am left with from my brief acquaintance with Pastor G. But in this sense, I am lucky. For many others, the memories are complete, continuous, and painfully dear to them. I snapped this photo of him as we were getting ready for the Easter march of the Methodist Churches of El Alto, and I had sent it to Hermana J., one of the FEFEME leaders, along with several others after the march. When I went to visit the FEFEME hermanas in their office earlier this week, Hermana J. was sitting glued to the computer screen as other business went on around her, meticulously examining this same photo. She zoomed in on Pastor G.’s face, his scarf, his notebook, his pant leg, as if by getting close enough to each part of his person, she could move through the pixels on the screen and move through time and space itself to touch him, to feel his real presence there. It was one of the most heartbreaking expressions of longing that I have ever witnessed.

Outside the FEFEME office, the receptionist of the building, who I have become somewhat close friends with, told me that things were sad around there, because they are all so used to having Pastor G. around. She explained how he would always come through smiling and asking how she was, and sometimes he would have so much on his mind that he would run into the door she was in charge of buzzing open, then he would have to turn back sheepishly and ask her to open it. Hermana G. was not only familiar with him at the office, but he was also the pastor of her church in El Alto. As her eyes welled up with tears remembering her daily interactions with Pastor G., I remembered seeing her at his burial service last Sunday. After they finally lowered the coffin into the grave, after many speeches, many songs, and much chewing of coca leaves and consumption of puffed corn and lemon sodas, we all began ripping flowers from the abundant wreaths and bouquets to fill his grave with them. I watched Hermana G. and several other women from his churches sobbing with belly-aching intensity as they threw fistfuls of red, pink and yellow petals into Pastor G.’s grave, and I couldn’t help but start weeping, too. The same was true when I had been standing outside the cemetery walls earlier, and saw Pastor G.’s wife and three daughters ushered outside as they wailed with sorrow and held black shawls around their heads. They were lead to a wall to lean against as they sobbed, and then they sat down outside the cemetery amongst other women and remained there for the rest of the ceremony, as if it were too much for them to be so near his ceremonial parting.

How on earth do we humans move on after losing someone as important to us as a husband, a father, a brother? I suppose most of us are able to and do perform such a feat, since most of us lose someone dear—or many dear ones—in the course of our lives. Still, I’ve yet to experience such a devastating loss, and it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around it. Perhaps this is why I came home from the burial on Sunday night with a splitting headache and stomachache to match my heartache. I went down to the kitchen to heat myself up my first decent meal of the day (which I suppose probably also had something to do with my physical state), and every time I dropped something or the match went out before I could light the burner, I swore profusely in English, and then told the two boys that were also cooking down there never to repeat what I was saying. I lamented aloud that no one was going to remember my birthday tomorrow; I was even having a hard time remembering it was my birthday tomorrow. I didn’t feel up to celebrating my 23^rd year of life with the sort of joy and zest that it probably deserved.

But somehow, joy found its way to me, to remind me that the reason I’m still alive is precisely to enjoy the fact that I, and countless of my beloveds, are still alive. I was awoken at 7:00 in the morning with a hearty, enthusiastic and out-of-tune serenade outside my door. I opened it to find perhaps half the students from the hospedaje, and the hospedaje caretaker, clapping and singing away in the hall, accompanied by the one boy who plays decent guitar. In the pants I’d put on backwards and my groggy morning breath, I danced a cueca with one of my male friends, replacing the customary white handkerchiefs with white napkins (napkins and toilet paper, in my experience, are in fact the de facto custom for this dance, since white handkerchiefs don’t seem to be on hand as often). Then we danced a huayño, adding into the dance the sassy and sweet single mother who lives in the hospedaje under the auspices of her American missionary godfather. I didn’t even care that they had woken me up early, because it felt good to be awake, and alive.

The hospedaje caretaker warned me at the end of the serenade that this was only the beginning of the fun, and even then I underestimated what exactly they had in store for me for later. I was, typically, nervous that if I didn’t do things to make my birthday special, nobody else would either. Furthermore, the FEFEME hermanas had called me to wish me a happy birthday but also to apologize that the promised cake they had planned to push my face into (a charmingly messy Bolivian custom) would have to be delayed since they were so busy with taking care of the practical follow-up from Pastor G.’s death. But my friends at the hospedaje, less directly impacted by the tragedies of the weekend, did not fail to deliver. After all the students had gotten back from their classes at 10:15 that night, I heard all kinds of commotion in the downstairs sala, and eventually wandered in to find balloons, ribbons, a table full of cake, candy, popcorn and other delights, and a poster they were still fervently finishing up that included the rather impressive artistic attempts and personal messages of almost all the students in the hospedaje.

An inordinate amount (for me) of sugar consumption ensued, and this was followed by an attempt to “teach” my Bolivian contemporaries to dance to soul music. Despite what I take to be the universal infectiousness of the Jackson 5 and the Temptations, and despite my continued attempts to convince them that there was really nothing to teach them—no specific steps or moves, that they just had to “feel it” and dance “a su manera” (in their own way)—they were understandably trepidatious about joining me in my wild arm-flailing and hip-gyrating. Later, we put on Bolivian folkloric music and they had their chance to embarrass me as they tried to teach me the morenada and the tinku. Finally, as if drawing up a sort of compromise, the DJs motioned me over to the stereo and said, “Why don’t we play cumbia? Everyone loves cumbia!” It’s true. Cumbia, even more so, I would argue, than salsa and merengue, is a sort of universal dance language, at least for anyone at all familiar with Latin American cultures.

My favorite part of the evening, however, was when I was dead tired (at the inappropriately early hour of 12:00, my friends all complained) and went into the kitchen to wipe some cake frosting off my sweater before, hopefully, escaping up to my room. There I found Eddy and M., who was the one playing the guitar this morning, and they were singing huayños. Eddy grabbed me and spun me around to the slow foot-stomping huayño rhythm, singing along to the perfectly appropriate words: “¿Qué la voy a hacer a esa mujer? La voy a matar, ¡la voy a matar!” (“What am I going to do with that woman? I’m going to kill her, I’m going to kill her!”) This somehow created enough energy in me to dance to a couple more of our private huayños intoning death on my birthday.

Afterwards, I went up to my room with my hands full of poster, a couple odd gifts and cards, and cake and other leftover snacks. I felt very happy to be alive, and very accomplished for having been in this world for 23 years now. Just Being Here, I thought, is more important than Getting Things Done. And despite my usually morbid sense of humor and my habit of casually reminding everyone that I could, possibly, die any day now (I even updated my will, which I originally wrote when I was 16, before leaving for Bolivia), I do have to agree with the wish constantly repeated to me throughout the day of my birthday here in Bolivia: that I complete many, many more years of life here on this earth.

Stones Speak Louder Than Words

I found a petoskey stone in the pocket of my orange hoodie the other day. I had been rubbing it absentmindedly between my fingers for the past couple months, without remembering where it came from or taking it out to look at it. When I finally did, I felt my heart break a little bit for those perfect starburst lines radiating from dark centers and ending at the outlines of imperfectly round white flowers, and I remembered that the seamstress who lives across the backyard of my mother's house had given me a petoskey stone the day before I left for Bolivia. She had just gotten through shortening the strap on the shoulder bag that was to become my constant companion here in La Paz, and she pressed the stone into my palm and said: "So that you don't forget where you come from."

A wise move. Sometimes, I almost forget. I am surprisingly comfortable with many of the details of everyday life here: I skip down the long, smooth stone steps of Landaeta or Aspiazu and forget that sidewalks—and streets!—don't eventually become stairs everywhere. I duck into the cool underground market on Sanchez Lima and stop by each of my preferred vendors, getting their attention by calling out "¡Caserita!" ("My dear vendor!") and asking for havas (fava beans), camote (sweet potato, which hides a beautiful magenta color just beneath its skin), mangas (a hybrid mango, which is larger and has a meatier texture), plátanos de postre ("dessert bananas," which is to say, plantains), ají panka (a spicy red chili paste used in small amounts in entrees), and, if I am feeling extravegant, perhaps some lomo (literally, "back"—in this case, of a cow) or cold cut slices of jamón. I run out in front of oncoming traffic and avoid being plowed over by just a few moments, or else I would never be able to cross the street. I set aside entire afternoons to wash my clothes, donning a wide-brimmed hat and carrying my socks and underwear and sheets down to the sinks in the yard to soak them in powdered detergent and scrub the dirt out of them with a bristly brush, then rinse and ring everything three times. If I'm lucky, the scorching sun will still be out when I hang my sheets up, in which case they dry in ten or fifteen minutes. I braid my hair almost every day because it is more practical, and more modest, than wearing it loose. I have gotten used to coming over to someone when they blink their eyes at me from across a room, in a tasteful gesture that replaces our brutish American use of hands or entire arms to motion someone towards us. I have also gotten used to kissing almost all Aymara women over 40 on the lips when I encounter them. I wake up and fill my electric water heater to boil drinking water for the day. I never throw toilet paper in the toilet itself.

Yet in spite of how familiar the strange has become for me, I am still, essentially, a stranger here. There are so many little gestures, implied consequences beneath circuitous speech, motivations and logical connections that I know I don't understand. So just imagine all the things I don't know I don't understand! This is one of the reasons I have decided to involve "natives" in my research as much as possible at every step of the process, not only as well-respected informants, but as workshop designers, dialogue facilitators, interview question writers, interviewers, and participant-observers. Over the past week, I have gone through the process of soliciting and hiring five research assistants from amongst the students in the Methodist hospedaje I live in, and in my hiring interviews with each of them, I made it clear that in this project, I wanted their own ideas to shape the questions we ask, and for us to ultimately arrive at their own conclusions about the problems, solutions, and complexities of gender in the Methodist Evangelical Church, above all amongst young people like themselves. My job, I told them, is to facilitate this process and get out of the way as much as possible, then represent your perspectives as faithfully as possible in my thesis. Furthermore, I promised them that I would not simply take their ideas with me to the United States for the benefit of my own academic accolades, never to be heard from again. Rather, I promised them that I would return, sooner or later, with my thesis in hand, translated into Spanish, and I would present it to the church for its own use. And who knows, I might come back as missionary and stay awhile, continuing to collaborate in the facilitation of dialogue and auto-analysis in the church.

I'm a woman who keeps her word, so I guess there's no backing out now. Before I left for Bolivia, I was reading the autobiography of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian miner's wife who was a leader in the Syndical Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB) and the associated Housewives' Committee (Comité de Amas de Casa). In a conversation she had after the sociologist she dictated the book to, after it had been published—which formed an introduction to the edition I read—she was clear about what she thought should be done with academic representations of the people of her country; that is, what exactly such research is for in the first place. She explained:

I've been interviewed by hundreds of reporters, historians, lots of people... [and] anthropologists, sociologists and economists come to visit the rest of the country, to study. But of all those materials that they take away with them, very few have returned to the heart of my [economic] class, of my people... I think that the movies, documents and studies that they make about the reality of the Bolivian people should return to [us]...so that we can analyze them, criticize them. Otherwise, we'll stay the same, without any contribution that helps us to understand our reality better and solve our problems (p. 9, my translation from the Spanish).

The moment that I read these words, I knew that I had to make it a constant and central aim in my research in Bolivia to emerge with a study that would not only please my professors, my outside examiner and perhaps other members of the academic community, but rather one that could, indeed, be presented to my very research subjects themselves. I realized that it had to represent them in a way that they themselves would want to be represented, and that if this wasn't the case, I would be nothing more than the "literary wetback" that anthropologist Ruth Behar feared she was being by taking a Mexican woman's story across the border and turning it into a book that won her respect and popularity as an academic and writer in the US. In my opinion, the resulting book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border With Esperanza's Story, proves Behar's fears to be well-founded: while it resulted in all kinds of benefits for Behar and the rest of the North American academic community, the originator of this rich material did not see such benefits in her own life from having shared it. However, the same could be said for probably the vast majority of anthropologists in the US, and I'm not so sure I'll manage to exclude myself from this group.

My ideal of remaining faithful to how my research subjects would represent themselves is also a product of several studies I read that insisted on coming up with all kinds of reasons Bolivians (or, in some cases, other Latin Americans) have converted to Protestant Christianity besides the simple fact of their belief in the goodness and truth of the religion. Not to say that analyses of socio-economic factors and emotional needs and so forth aren't useful in studies of religious commitment, but I couldn't help but wonder how the people who participated in these studies would feel if the works were translated to Spanish and handed over to them. They would read their religious lives shrunk down into a few sentences about how Catholic fiesta sponsorship became too expensive for them in a time of economic crisis, or about them being women trapped in a patriarchal system that makes paternalism attractive, even though they are ultimately repressed by male dominance and the precariousness of relying on male benevolence. I, for one, would be indignant.

Perhaps this means I'm not cut-throat enough to be a truly critical, analytical anthropologist, but in this case, at least, I just don't feel capable of doing on to others as I would not want them to do on to me. Hence, my plans to become a minister, rather than a professional anthropologist. However, there is certainly a place for the kind of anthropology I am trying to do, and I don't plan to turn in my critical academic tools the day I get ordained in the church. (I did, after all, announce to my mother when I was four years old: "I am very good at academics!", and have ever since set out to prove myself right.) I have been particularly inspired recently by Julia Paley's ethnography on a Chilean shantytown and their political organizing in the rhetorically democratic, but effectively disempowering, atmosphere of post-dictatorship Chile (Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile). At one point, in a transcript of Paley's conversation with a Chilean sociologist friend, her friend asserts that the difference between anthropology and sociology is that in sociology they "don't believe what people say," and Paley concurs, adding that in anthropology, on the other hand, "it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. What's important is what it means to them" (p. 182). Indeed, Paley's analysis is not hers alone, nor is it a collaboration simply with other academics; rather, she worked with health promoters, teenagers and other locals to jointly construct analyses of their history and their present situation. To underline this point, her book-length ethnography is followed by an article-length one written by health promoters from the neighborhood in which she carried out her research. Likewise, all the people she worked with in the health organization wanted her to use their full, real names in her book, as contributors to an intellectual work. Similarly, Rober Galo Condori Machicado dictated his full name to me during our hiring interview the other day, to make sure it would appear correctly in my thesis about his religious community.

Although the vow I originally made when I read Domitila Barrios' exhortation to social scientists was simply to write something that could be read by my research subjects, now I am committed to writing something that will be read by my research subjects. Thus, Barrios' insistence that studies serve the people rather than simply represent them or debate them has become all the more relevant. The good news is that I am not going to take on such a monumental task alone. Indeed, I couldn't. I will need lots, and lots of help from all my hermanos and hermanas in the faith here. Fortunately, my new research assistants are as excited as I am about delving into the craft of field work, even though none of them could exactly pinpoint what "anthropology" is when I asked them, although a couple offered alliteration-inspired guesses that it had to do with "bones and ancient civilizations." Beginning with a lunch meeting I am planning for my assistants this coming week—for which I will cook them a soup out of the chicharrón (pork), choclo (boiled corn) and chuño (freeze-dried potatoes) I bought from a group of students who were selling it this weekend to raise money for the hospedaje—I will teach them a little bit about participant-observation and making the extremely familiar a little bit stranger to their own eyes. I will assign them to record and analyze an event or even a personal encounter in the context of the church, with all their five senses plastered against the world like a kid's nose against a fish tank. As we move forward, I will try to give them the sort of tasks they feel they were made for. Rosmery, who loves to "listen to people's problems" and try to understand them and help them, will be my primary interviewer of young women. Rober, who wants to be a politician of the common people, "like Evo," but does not want to seek a high-ranking position in the politics of the church—as he sees it, pastors shouldn't be serving God for their own benefit—will investigate the church political structure and the dynamics that prevent women from being represented in almost all areas of its decision-making processes. Amalia, who seems to have a special attraction to formulaic academic work, will be in charge of carrying out the surveys she has envisioned herself administering, even though I hadn't originally planned to include surveys in my research design. Eddy, who wants to "understand other cultures," and how people think in "the pueblos"—despite the fact that he himself is from one such rural pueblo—will be my representative and investigator amongst the young men at a national multicultural assembly of Methodist youth. Rossío is a firecracker: she is at once incisively critical of the divide between egalitarian rhetoric and actual discrimination in the gender politics of the church, yet at the same time fulfills traditional overworked and underappreciated womanly roles in her living situation with her brothers, and takes it all on like a dimpled, smiley and sugary-sweet warrior princess. I'm not sure yet what her specialty will be in my research, but I have a feeling she will have much more say in the matter than I will.

My own research plan includes the facilitation of three dialogues that will take place in the hospedaje on gender, romantic relationships, and religiosity and spirituality in the Methodist church—one with women, one with men, and, finally, one with both genders—which we will draw on in order to write our interview instruments. Then, with our lists of interview questions in hand, we will each carry out a couple of interviews with young men or young women in the church, to explore these themes more deeply, in individual lives and experiences. I think that what my researchers don't understand yet—but which I am hoping to help them grasp clearly through the methodology we use—is that they themselves are the primary subjects of their own research, and that rather than looking for "the other" in the people we interact with throughout our research—the "people with problems" or "the people from different pueblos"—we will be looking for ourselves, and trying to understand ourselves better, even as sometimes the radical difference of our fellow Christians will be exactly what pushes us to these new understandings.

But then, these are simply my plans, and as I've learned from the three national Federación Femenina Metodista leaders I work with—none of whom I have ever seen make a decision without first deliberating the matter with the other two—my work in the church is not just up to me. If I tried to make it that way, I would soon be alone and discounted as a leader. Perhaps this is why the people in peak positions of the church hierarchy at various levels and in various areas are called "coordinators." For example, in a meeting with the 14 district coordinators of FEFEME the other day, Hermana M., the national coordinator of FEFEME, explained that there was a lack of female scholarship recipients to use up the funds provided for this purpose—conditional on their complete use—by the Methodist Church in Sweden, and after she finished she said: "What do you all think we should do? What suggestions do you have?" In turn, I am asking my hermanos and hermanas in the hospedaje, "What do you think we should research? What does this mean to you?" If I can successfully coordinate their efforts to seek out their own meaning, maybe I'm worth my salt as a leader in the church. And maybe my thesis won't meet its end gathering dust in the Literary Wetback Archives, or worst yet, accolades in the Literary Wetback Showroom.

Meanwhile, my petoskey stone's flowery eyes are blinking up at me from my desk as I write, and I am remembering how my friend M., who has been known for a strikingly accurate psychic reading or two of my life, once told me: "You know what you need to do, Sari? This is all you need to do. Take a couple of stones and carry them around with you in your pocket. Then, when someone asks you, 'How did you get this way?' or, 'Why are you so happy?', just take one of the stones out of your pocket and give it to them. Without saying anything." Serendipitously enough, this friend happens to live in the town of Petoskey, Michigan. I am remembering his words right now and agreeing that probably the best thing I can do is not to explain, analyze and shape the reality I am living here, but simply to take the stones out of my pocket and, inexplicably, give them away. Maybe they will inspire someone else to do the same.