Tenderness

Back home in the USA, poring over pictures of Bolivia, talking about it every time I am given the opportunity like a lovesick teenage girl talks incessantly about her boyfriend, writing up final reports and finishing up rudimentary organization of what seems like an endless river of data to analyze, I have no idea what to write here to tie together my experiences there. The idea of attempting a crude synthesis of my research findings is overwhelming, not to mention unwise. But nor do I feel prepared to synthesize how my past 5 ½ months in Bolivia has impacted my personal life. So I think the only thing I am left with is to choose just one aspect from amongst the complicated threads of my experience, which glitter, dangle and tangle like the foot-long fringe on my cholita paceña shawls. If I have to pick a color that captures something from all my shades of experience in these months, I will pick “tenderness.”

“Tender” (or “tierno”) is a word I heard a lot near the end of my time in Bolivia. People often used it to describe what they liked about me. For most purposes, I would translate it to “sweet” in English, in terms of the associations it conjures when used to describe a person. But in this case, I want to translate it literally, because the word “tender” doesn’t just connote someone who is kind, loving, and pleasant, as "sweet" does; it also connotes vulnerability, softness, and openness. When we are tender, we expose the true sweetness inside our hearts, sometimes at great risk of being hurt. With tenderness I think also of permeability, and I indeed felt like the membrane separating me from the outer world was thinner in Bolivia. I felt gushing pleasure to see friends enjoying the food I’d cooked; I would cry readily when I knew someone was hurting, even if I didn’t know them well; I would cry sometimes just watching the sunset reflecting off Mount Illimani and thinking about how I will leave here and loose all of this someday soon.

I am tempted to say that Bolivia has more tenderness than other places I’ve been, but I really don’t know if that’s true. I am not trying to make any sort of anthropologist’s cultural comparison here, nor even a travel writer’s questionable but entertaining generalization. I don’t even know if the unique, intense tenderness I felt in Bolivia has more to do with the attitude of the people receiving me or with my attitude arriving to Bolivia. Maybe it was just for the refreshing levity of high altitudes or for the peaceful lifestyle of a culture averse to punctuality, but for whatever reason, I felt more tenderness in Bolivia than I have at perhaps any other point in my life.

Even if this tenderness was my very own fabrication and transposition onto my experience in Bolivia, I don’t want to lose what it’s taught me. So I am attempting to immortalize it here, and hopefully to share it with a few of you whose hearts will feel more opened by it, too.

Yet in some ways I feel that all my words have been used up, from fervent, constant field note-taking and epic blog entries and, of course, my dialogues, discourses, and debates with Bolivian friends. To truly explain to you what tenderness in Bolivia means to me, I’d like to just sit down with you on stools and start cutting pumpkins and carrots into a big bowl on the floor, or grab your hand as we struggle up a steep sidewalk-stairway in La Paz, or sit silently and wait on a stoop for the sun go down, for the kids to come back from school, for the uka roots to dry out, for the seasons to change, maybe just for something we can’t even explain.

The next best thing, of course, is a picture or two. In this blog so far I haven’t done much of just letting the pictures talk, and I’ve been rather heavy-handed with the 1,000 words, so I will try, in this closing, to let the ineffable quality of the images speak as much as my words do, and hopefully leave you with a definition of some of the variegated meanings of tenderness that I have discovered in Bolivia.

To begin where proper homage is due, I can tell you of the tenderness of my research assistants as they learned, alongside me, to play anthropologist. In some moments they stumbled nervously through painfully stilted rehearsals of our interview questions, seeming to be pretending one of their closest friends was a talk show guest, but then in other moments they improvised follow-up questions with a sensitivity to analysis that rivals my own.

There is the tenderness of excitement over getting one's picture taken, as some of the participants in my Gender Equality and Leadership workshop during the National Methodist Youth Encounter demonstrate here. These pictures also reflect their excitement to learn, which I noted in the sincerely receptive, if disoriented, looks on the faces of certain young male participants most of all. But of course, mostly it's just about the excitement of getting one's picture taken.

Then there's this indefatigable joker of a young man who insisted that we appear together in a photo to document our collaborative whiteboard work during my workshop in Sucre. (Pictured here are lists of stereotypical traits of women and men in Bolivian culture that we generated.) He was undoubtedly one of those eager to participate in my workshop more for the photo ops with the gringa than for the wisdom to be acquired, but he was so comically straightforward about this fact that I had to love him.

There is the tenderness of building something together, even if it is just made out of tubes of paper and even if it is only the product of a cute object lesson about teamwork that will only stay standing until the end of the workshop.

There is the tenderness of being able to express some new and secret invented self with each other, which happened spontaneously when they gave away presents at a women's retreat of FEFEME coordinators and pastors' wives, and every time one of us went up to receive our gift-wrapped aguayo, we all chanted "She must model, she must model!" The idea wasn't to model any clothing, but rather to act like a model, to act like someone famous or glamorous for a delicious moment of abandon via caricature.

There is also the tenderness of wanting to indeed model what we wear, even if it is a devil costume and possibly contrary to all things Christian—a question Rober is still trying to settle for himself—because "it's an expression of our culture." One learns to just nod enthusiastically to this phrase, despite the diabolically critical post-modernist anthropologist on one's left shoulder muttering about how "culture" doesn't actually exist, and other vague and indecipherable sentences with words like "essentialism" and "reification" in them.

Then there is the tenderness one can find in the more acceptably Christian forms of cultural expression, but the tenderest part, of course, does not emerge when it is done as a show of Bolivianness or Christianness, but rather when the far-away look in her eyes or the perfect arcing trajectory of her hand as she sings convinces you that a deep love for something bigger than all of us truly is moving through her.

There is a certain kind of tenderness that comes out of sheer exhaustion, when that separating membrane you are encased in is worn thin by sleeplessness, fasting, and hard, hard climbing. You almost don't feel the weight digging into your shoulder when you take your turn carrying the cross, and you find at the top of the world that you have no choice but to open your heart to everyone around you, and when you start to pray you have to just let the tears sting your face and clog up your nose until you are dizzy from crying.

















There is the tenderness of a certain friend I felt comfortable crying beside even in the absence of mountains to climb and even in the midst of the normalizing effects of regular nourishment. Sometimes I cried for her, or for her daughter that she struggles so much to take care of on her own, and sometimes I cried for me, and the roots of my own day-to-day pain. But more often than not we just giggled conspiratorially together behind her reception desk, because life is so funny.

I think I read something once evidencing to the idea that being around the same people all the time for five and a half months is bound to set off some sort of psychological coping mechanism that brings out their endearing traits for you, even if you have a love-hate relationship with some of them. Thus, I admit all bias on my part, but I must say, there was something about the tenderness of those kids in the hospedaje that just killed me sometimes. Even when they drove me crazy with their irresponsibility I forgave them immediately, because they all seemed to be trying so hard, and my heart softens around each memory I have of them.

The last night I spent with my research assistants, I felt like there was nothing to do or say that could put a satisfying, climactic cap on our time together, because so much of what it meant to be with them was just living out our daily lives together in the hospedaje, bumping into one another, joking with one another when we were feeling lively, sharing with one another when we had enough food, commiserating with and worrying about and complaining to and rejoicing with one another other. Going out for a paseo to a mirador (lookout point) and eating cake and api con buñuelo just wasn't the same as living together day after day, and it never will be. So in essence I was leaving behind those relationships forever, at least in the form they took while I was there. As we took photos up at the mirador that night with them, I remember distinctly this moment when I tilted my head and wanted to just stay frozen there forever, breathing in the smell of Rosmery's hair.

Finally, there is the tenderness of saying goodbye to an entire community you have come to love, who are even willing to make fools of themselves dancing with you, because it's your last night there.

In the end, of course, I simply have to face the limits of my verbal capacities: There are certain people I found in Bolivia that I will miss beyond what words can say. There is a tenderness they opened up in my heart that perhaps has always been there, but it took traveling thousands of miles to a place I'd never been and, up until about a year ago, never imagined going to bring this out in me.