I have lived in Bolivia for only 4 months. I have spent most of that time learning to speak and write Spanish at the Maryknoll Language Institute so I can communicate with people here when Lynn and I move to our mission site. In Cochabamba, when I walk on the streets I see a lot of people selling food or small consumer goods on the street. Most of them seem to be people from the countryside around Cochabamba, dressed in traditional Quechua attire. The upscale ones have a kiosk or a cart. Others may simply have a bag of stuff beside them--fruit or vegetables--as they sit on the sidewalk and offer their wares to the passers by. That there are street vendors does not disturb me; it's that so many people seem to be trying to make a living this way.1 Maybe a lot of them don't mind being street vendors, or even want the flexibility of being able to move to a new location at will2, but I think more often than not they choose from within the opportunities available to them and that they haven't had much to choose from.
Maybe they even perpetuate this themselves by making short-sighted choices. It wasn't so long ago that I first saw a woman from the country (camposina) making a cell phone call while she sat on the sidewalk beside the sack of narangas she was selling. My first reaction was to assume that sitting on the sidewalk in her slightly dirty traditional attire was just a way of trying to look impoverished in order to influence people to buy the fruit out of pity3, and that the cell phone meant that she really had chunk of discretionary income that she opted to squander on a material possession that she would always have to keep paying for to actually make it work. Then I remembered the cell phone in my own pocket. Cell phones here are not expensive. They can be used without a contract by buying minutes only when you need them. Maybe the cell phone was part of a more efficient system of supply and demand for this woman: "Hey, I don't think I'll be able to push a second sack of narangas by sundown, so maybe hold off on that and bring me some potatoes instead." Maybe it helps her to relieve boredom there on the sidewalk or to keep someone from worrying about when she might be coming home for the day. Or maybe it was for something about her baby; she had a baby wrapped up on her lap.
Thinking about the camposina vendor with the cell phone reminded me to think about my own reactions to the things I see. I knew that I couldn't suddenly transform her life,4 but I also didn't want to have a reflex reaction that allowed me to just keep walking and eventually not even see her when I passed.5 One day the following week Lynn and I were leaving the Language Institute after classes, and just outside the gates a woman with a small child in her arms approached us. She explained that she needed help because she had no job and she had four children, one of whom had Downs syndrome. She was waiting to see one of the Maryknoll brothers inside the institute but he hadn't been able to come yet. We went back in the Institute to make sure he would come out to see her and told her that he would come when he could. We wished her good luck and walked on. About 50 yards away a woman stopped us and asked us if we would be interested in buying some bread in support of the cause she was working for. She handed us a brochure. She showed us the bread. We didn't need bread, but I checked my pockets for money. The bread cost 8 bolivianos. I had 10. We gave her the 10 bolivianos and asked her to give the loaf of bread to the woman with the child back at the gate. We pointed her out, and the woman with the bread was walking toward her as we left. We think she probably gave the loaf of bread to the woman with the child, and now I felt I knew what to do the next time I saw the woman selling narangas on the sidewalk.
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1I hear that for the purpose of employment statistics, selling something on the streets counts as being gainfully employed. So, is the unemployment rate then a falsified statistic or one based on a realistic use of the criteria for employment in this market economy? And does the fact that I can internalize both sides of an argument make me a better final arbiter, or is that just a gratuitous first step toward believing what I wanted to believe in the first place, employing the appearance of a Hegelian dialectical process?
2 This feels a little like the argument that even if there is such a think as global warming one of the benefits will be to bring more land into cultivation for food. ("Till, baby, till!")
3 Would there be anything wrong with having a sales tactic?
4I wasn't sure what needed to be transformed and how to go about that anyway, and there were too many on the street to help them all even though that shouldn't stop me from helping one.
5Because my own preoccupations and the settling dust made her seem to blend into the road.
