Entering Bolivia

January 6, 2010

Our mission has begun.  The four new Franciscan lay missioners are nearing the end of their flight from Miami, Florida to La Paz, Bolivia.  We should land in about 40 minutes or less.  The plane has already begun to descend. I woke after sleeping 5 hours and actually feel well enough to keep traveling.  I glance around. The other three missioners (Lynn, Clare, and Nora) are still asleep although probably lightly.  The beverage cart passed down the aisle, and now I have fresh coffee.  This isn't exactly roughing it--despite the pains of passing through Security twice and lugging around more baggage than I prefer.  The luggage is stuffed with the stuff I apparently thought I couldn't do without. Lynn and I did the cull and cast away a number of times, so I'm accepting responsibility for the tonnage in our two (well, okay, three each counting the papers and etc. tucked into ) carry-on pieces and two large neatly crammed checked suitcases each.

Earlier in the flight Lynn befriended the woman sitting beside her, a Bolivian dentist who lives and works in Washington, DC and who is returning to Bolivia for her vacation.  She included me, the husband, in the conversation briefly, and she seemed intelligent and affluent.  Her brother attended Carmen Pampa, the college where Lynn and I may work. The brother became a veterinarian and apparently married a woman named Kirsten from Wyoming who was a volunteer teacher of English there and who (as Kirsten told me herself in a conversation on the Bolivian woman's cell phone) started a goat farm. The Bolivian woman was very friendly to Lynn, and they apparently shared many details about their families with each other.  I was glad to see Lynn still doing what she always does so well--make friends wherever she goes. 

After Lynn's conversation with the woman tapered off, Lynn turned to me and whispered that it felt a little strange to be telling the affluent woman that she was coming to her home country to work as a missioner.  I found my own understanding of that feeling of strangeness. If prosperous citizens are not sympathetic with the plight of the poor in their country, they may think that it is their own fault or that perhaps it isn't really as bad for them as it may first appear. They might regard outsiders who come professing to help the poor as not understanding, or as being over-zealous about their beliefs--secular or religious-- or that perhaps the outsiders may have an ulterior agenda of social revision.  It is true that outsiders may not fully understand the root and complexity of a country's social problems and may by their ignorance even be regarded as part of the social problem themselves.

These thoughts weighed on me as our American Airlines jet touched down on the runway of the La Paz airport.  What peace and tranquility could I hope to bring to a country noted for uneven distribution of wealth, political struggles and a high rate of poverty among its indigenous people? Any idealized thought of this group faded as four indigenous men quickly took charge of our checked luggage and then set what seemed to me an outrageous fee for their services.  I paid without quarreling because I hadn't asked the price beforehand; I was feeling more disoriented by the second as the Altiplano began to grip me.  The four diminutive porters--acclimated and adept at this conquest--vanished.  I chalked one up for the caveat emptor rule.  Hoping to cling to something so I wouldn't have to look for something to fall on, I focused on why I had come and who had helped me to get there.