Staying focused

This would be a great night to purge my inbox, but right now I'm concerned about that strange human trait of desiring something more when we know we can't have it. No, I'm not yearning for lent so I can give up something else. It's mid-October. We're in La Paz, which is a beautiful city, but we should be in Carmen Pampa. There's plenty to keep us busy in La Paz--museums, restaurants, artesanias--but our agreed-to responsibilities as missioners are in Carmen Pampa.  We can't reach them because of the blockade on the road into the North Yungas.   The blockade has been in place since early Monday morning.  Some people here think that with further negotiations the blockade might end this weekend, and that way we might return to Carmen Pampa by Monday. That's an attractive thought, but I don't see what negotiations will resolve the protest.


As I understand it, coca growers here are protesting the government's 15-pound limit on how much licensed coca growers can sell.  They also want the resignation of two apparently over-zealous government ministers.  Of course, I don't understand why each side feels as it does. I've only been in this area for a few months, and in my own selfish way I just want to get back to the UAC-Carmen Pampa so I can feel responsible as I try to fulfill the expectations about my being there:

• the children that wait for the library to open
• UAC-CP students that show up for the 6:30 am liturgy of the hours service before plunging into another busy day
• setting up for Mass
• Pastoral,
• English Club
• the volunteer teaching program for English.

Of course, none of those activities cease just because we're not there to help. Maybe our desire to return is stronger because we know we can't get back.


How do we know we can't get back? We tried, and finding that out was an adventure in confronting our own naivete. After returning to La Paz from a retreat with our fellow Franciscan lay missioners in Cochabamba (Catherine, Clare, and Nora, as well as our mentor, Hermano Ignacio) we heard that the blockade was indeed in place, shutting down all traffic on the only road into and out of the north Yungas. Before leaving, we had heard that a blockade probably would be set up before our return, but following the information we liked most to hear, we thought that we might just be allowed to walk across the blockade and be on our way. We hear that does happen sometimes. So, we went on to our retreat. When we returned we took a cab to the site in La Paz where the minibuses depart for the north Yungas. There we discovered that the minibus companies were all closed. However, while we were there we met two students from UAC who were also trying to return.  The four of us agreed to risk crossing the blockade.  As we understood it, the taxi would drive us right up to the blockade. We would get out of the taxi, explain to the nice people holding the threatening signs and marching back and forth around and beside the big piles of rotting papaya and other fruit unable to get to market, that we were all about social justice and higher education, so would they kindly step aside so we wouldn't be late for class. We would then lift our backpacks and other bags and saunter the scant two kilometers over to the other side of the blockade and pick up a ride in the minibus that was sure to be waiting to drive us  to the next stop, Coroico, or probably even right up to our apartment door. For all I knew, maybe some of the nice people would put down their signs so they could help us carry our bags and so we could get back in time for a little class prep. Ah, truly, this was the best of all possible worlds!¹ (Did I mention that rain clouds were rolling in?)


Fortunately, we were turned back by the police before we made it out of La Paz. We were later informed that the people on these blockades sometimes turn violent. We also learned that there were actually two blockades, one at Unduavi and another about 65 kilometers away at the Santa Barbara bridge. Had we been allowed to walk unharmed across the first blockade, our hike to the second would have been a few kilometers longer than expected, and in weather for which we were unequipped. Our guardian angel must've been splitting her sides at how hard we had been working to hurt ourselves. We felt fortunate to be able to reflect on these things from the comfort and security of a room at the Maryknoll House.  Once again in our lives, we were learning that we couldn't just choose to believe what we wanted to hear. And we were learning about the complexity of social change in this country (what about the various reasons why each person on the blockades was there), why some things that are possible, like increasing education in the Yungas, may proceed very slowly.                                    
__________
1Doctor Pangloss, true to his phenomenal longevity in Voltare's Candide, is alive and well in Bolivia.

Thanks

Lynn and I know that life continues to change for our family and friends back home, just as it does for us here in Bolivia. We also know that they continue to make it possible for us to do our work here.  Such was the case when we found out recently that Ken and Janice had decided to move to another state.  They have been providing a home for some of the belongings that we did not give away and they couldn't take these things with them. Craig and his family were kind enough to accept them. And Chris was kind enough to transport them. Thanks guys.

A note between classes

September 24, 2010

It's 11:30 am. I have a break between the English classes I'm teaching, enough time to think about what I've been doing since moving to Carmen Pampa from Cochabamba in June. Lynn and I are working at our assigned duties¹ here at UAC-Carmen Pampa:

• teaching English classes for the Departments of Ecotourism (lower campus²) and Education (upper campus),
• assisting with Mass preparations on Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon,
• assisting with the students' Thursday night Pastoral meeting on the upper campus,
• conducting an early morning Liturgy of the Hours service in the chapel on the upper campus (Tuesday through Friday),
• staffing the children's library on the edge of the lower campus.

These are some of the proposed assignments we received shortly after we arrived. There were others, such as coordinating the painting of the chapel interior on the upper campus³, but these were the ones that became routine duties.

The environment of the two campuses was very different in late June from what it is like now.  We were between semesters. Few students were on campus and we were not taking classes ourselves so we relaxed. Except for noticing different and more dense vegetation,⁴ maybe the occasional clouds outside the door of the apartment where we moved our belongings, it felt like being on any college campus between sessions in the United States.  We worked at meeting and remembering the faculty and staff still around the school--making lists to associate names and faces and functions.  They all were very patient as we slowly fitted ourselves into their midst.

In the empty apartment we moved into we found a big echo and some memories of the previous Franciscan missioners (Jean and Leo Lechtenburg) and volunteer David Flannery who lived there. Yellow curtains decorated the two windows in the front room.⁵ A giant Asian fan spread wide over the main wall in the kitchen area. A large set of shelves covered one wall, waiting to become our bookcase. Two maps of this north Yungas region and a poster of Saint Francis filled the area by the front door. A San Damiano cross hung at door-top level on the sliver of wall between the doorways to the two rooms directly off of the front room. Two UAC uniform shirts for teachers hung on the rack in the bedroom.  The two cooking pots and lid beneath the kitchen sink lay waiting to be discovered as, in fact, a double boiler so that just maybe with a little free time and enough fresh eggs we might have a batch of hollandaise sauce for eggs benedict. A small cylinder of fabric on one of the tables unfurled to reveal a Tibetan prayer flag. Once we found places for our own things among these things the echo vanished.

A supporting part of our mission during this quiet time between semesters was spent setting up various daily life systems for eating, hygiene, laundry, and getting to and from work. Every environment presents its challenges and surprises.  Setting up some of these routines in Carmen Pampa took more time than I expected.  I also learned new methods for things we have taken for granted in our lives in the United States.

I'll write about some of this with my next post, but right now Janina, one of the children from Carmen Pampa and a frequent library visitor, has discovered that the library door is open. That technically means that the library is open despite the regular hours, and she has headed immediately for my laptop.  She wants to play a game of ajedrez (chess) against the computer.  I'll close out this post so Janina and I can walk over to the dining room of the food cooperative where there's more space for the game and where her mother works. Not knowing the regular hours of her school, I want to be sure this middle of the day ajedrez habit has parental approval. . . . "It does?" Yes. Okay, caballo b1 to c3, and she's off to the races!


The photo above shows some of the regulars at the children's library while they're playing Scrabble. 

__________

¹ We are doing these things without salary from UAC, but our housing is paid for, and we receive a stipend for living expenses from Franciscan Mission Service. This helps UAC provide education at a lower cost for students in the Yungas.  Thanks to all of our friends for supporting our mission here.

² The lower campus, Manning, was built first and is further down the mountain (Uchumachi), beside the community of Carmen Pampa. Further up the mountain and close to the main road to Coroico is the upper campus, Leahy, built as more career areas were added to the curriculum.

³ This would exclude the mural decorating the wall behind the altar. This was painted by missioner Leo Lechtenburg. It unites the chapel with the natural beauty of the Yungas and the people who live there.

⁴ Well, okay some of these plants I have seen frequently in the US, such as impatiens, fern, wandering jew, caladiums, and ajuga, but they were growing anywhere there was space to spread leaves and throughout winter here.

5 Through these windows each morning we could see that the sun ascended over the top of Uchumachi at about 9:20 am. This was in late June, and by the longer days of mid-September, the sun was topping the mountain at about 8:15 am.

Kids Having Fun

It was nice to see kids enjoying themselves at a recent birthday party in Carmen Pampa.

Reflections on Language School

Six weeks ago Lynn and I completed the 5-month Basic Spanish immersion course at the Maryknoll Language Institute in Cochabamba. I thought the living/learning situation there was close to ideal.

Cochabamba is an easy city to get around in, even if you don't know much Spanish. Taxis and buses run frequently, and for someone from the United States, the fares are cheap . Our section of the city--Cala Cala, on the north end--was served by plenty of shops and a Catholic church (we're Catholic) within a 15-minute walk. Also we could satisfy most basic needs without traveling far from our host's home on Calle Rafael Canedo. Even so, I remember the curious exhilaration and independence I felt when for the first time in Spanish I communicated my need to purchase toothpaste and bread, or attended Mass and discovered that I was beginning to understand parts of it, homily included.

Life with our host family was both simple and good because of their 25 years of experience hosting students from the Maryknoll Language Institute, their care for the welfare of the people they hosted, and their amazing willingness to be an active part of our effort to learn their language. That willingness extended not only to Dr. Henry Rojas and his wife, Lily Arze, but also to their three adult children (Lupita, Diego, and Cathy), their friends, and even aunts, uncles, and parents. We broke bread together, stoked the koa together, attended soccer games, shared music and photos, and talked and talked and talked. We were welcome on a daily basis to include or absent ourselves depending on our own schedules and/or those stages of fluctuating confidence in our ability to join in. We didn't realize it at the time, but because they slowed the pace of their own lives enough to include us they cushioned us from culture shock.

The Maryknoll Language Institute also helped us overcome culture shock. During classes I found it hard to do more than work at the vocabulary and grammar. The hypothetical daily situations we practiced gradually became real as we began exploring Cochabamba and needed to communicate. We also practiced vocabulary during class for events that we were encouraged to participate in like Carnaval, and the trip to the Jesuit missions.

The professors at Maryknoll Language Institute were patient, optimistic, and often inspiring. They were obviously accustomed to adjusting the pace of the program to the needs of individual students and even to adjusting that further as students had their periods of two steps forward and one step back. This was effective teaching-- sometimes tolerating error for the sake of continuing conversation. This brought more questions, answers and corrections. It also felt good to be a student in this group of like-minded people from different language traditions. People from Brazil, North America, New Guinea, England, Korea, Ireland, and Togo were speaking together in Spanish and communicating.

At the Institute conversations with faculty and staff were in Spanish, from the librarian to the grounds crew and gatekeepers. The grounds of the institute were carefully tended and formed an orderly garden. the prevailing there is no accident. The work of Padre Ramond Finch, Hermana Cathy DeVito, Alejandro Acázar and others helped to preserve the harmonious atmosphere. Our experiences with Padres Pancho and Juancho at Masses in the Institute and during visits in the South Zone taught us the high level of personal commitment to improving life for the people. Our brief meetings with the three older hermanas (they referred to themselves as the dinosaurs) and Padre John Gorsky, reminded us of the long history of those traditions. They knew the talented missionary linguist Padre Jack Higgins ( they called him "the Colonel") from Nashville, TN who served in Bolivia during the '50s until his early death in the '60s. His sister Bitsy would be pleased to know that the good work he was doing there has carried on. That includes Padre Ignatius Harding (also has a sister in Nashville) for his 39 years of service in Bolivia, and good work by people from our own organization, the Franciscan Lay Missioners, for I recall a boat ride back from the Isla del Sol to Copa Cabana and a casual conversation with two young volunteers from Cochabamba (started when one of them remarked on my Middlebury cap) revealed that they had worked with Richard Nalen in after-school programs and had great respect for his willingness to go out and visit with the families of children having problems, addressing them both in Spanish and Quechua.

I remember pausing one day at the bulletin board in the Institute, and there was an aerial photo of the Maryknoll headquarters and grounds at Ossining, New York. The building was designed in the style of a Japanese pagoda. I remembered our week of study there with prospective missioners from four other lay missionary groups, including the Maryknollers like Minh (Lynn's language partner at the Institute), and how even that had seemed difficult at first, interacting with all of them despite our basically shared goals. I remembered that not all us ended up going on mission. And I remembered an early morning jog I had taken on the Maryknoll grounds there, past the tennis courts overgrown with patches of grass, and past the graves of Jean Donovan and the missionaries martyred in El Salvador--God bless them for their intent. It reminded me that these were complex steps we all were taking.

While in Cochabamba we explored possible service sites. On retreat at Angostura we shared reflections with our three fellow Franciscan lay missioners there, Clare, Nora, and Catherine. All of these activities challenged my decision to undertake an out-of-country, out-of-culture experience, to examine my perceptions of myself and other people, to think about my relationship to the Franciscan vows of conversion, poverty, contemplation, and minority, and our motives for wanting to help other people.

Enduring Overwhelming Questions

Lynn and I have completed the five-month Basic Spanish course at the Maryknoll Language Institute here in Cochabamba.  Soon we will leave for our active mission site at Carmen Pampa in the Yungas region northeast of La Paz.  In the lull before packing I've been thinking about some of our experiences here. One in particular, K'ara K'ara, the dumpsite for domestic garbage for the city of Cochabamba, is particularly disturbing. In writing about K'ara K'ara, I remind myself that the dump will close and that a new dump will open with--I hear--appropriate environmental safeguards.  That will be good if those safeguards are in place when the new dump opens, but that still leaves the K'ara K'ara dump to mature as a social and environmental problem.

On Sunday, March 14¹, Lynn and I, along with fellow lay missioners Nora Pfeiffer and Minh Nguyen, visited K'ara K'ara at the invitation of Padre Ken to visit his parish there. Padre Ken was a missionary in Venezuela for 18 years, has been here in Bolivia for 4 years, and has lived at K'ara K'ara for about a year. In Quechua K'ara K'ara means something like peeled or barren. It refers to the natural condition of the land there, which is perhaps a perfect dumpsite for garbage. Problems arise when the garbage dumping process proceeds without environmental safety regulation and when the site around the dump populates with low income housing and inhabitants at risk of compromising their health because of toxic wastes accruing there.  Despite noted health risks the dump continues to operate because it provides an income to some in the region and because claims over who has the right to decide its closure are disputed. And despite this people continue to move into the region because they need a place to live and they can afford to live there.

As such, K'ara K'ara has become a complex part of the social fabric of Cochabamba and a social problem. Social problems are dynamic.  When they first strike our attention, they look like fixed realities, but they spread, intensify, and worsen for the people who inherit them. Institutionalized social problems become more difficult to stop as they perpetuate. K'ara K'ara is an institutionalized social problem:

• Opened in 1987 approximately 7 kilometers from the center of Cochabamba as a garbage dump site for the people of that city;
• Covers an area of approximately 98 acres;
• Established and operated without the benefit of a protective liner to contain the spread of toxic liquids leaching from the garbage deposited there;
• Surrounded by small homes of the many people living nearby, and some directly beside the dump;
• The site of unrestricted dumping, including unguarded hospital wastes and open pools for the deposit of chemical sludge;
• An income for 7 of 33 neighborhood groups by collection of permission-to-dump fines amounting to approximately $87,640.00 per year;
• An income for trash resellers who sort competitively through newly dumped garbage for items to salvage;
• An income for small contractors who buy lots near or adjacent to the dump, build homes on them, and sell them to buyers unaware of the long-term dangers of living next to a dump site.

Court orders have been issued about the dump since 2000. In September 2009 the Superior Court of Cochabamba ordered the dump to close and listed many problems with the dump in its present state:

• Nonexistent drains and insufficient works to capture the liquids leaching from solid domestic residues;
• Lack of monitoring of the volumes of production and recovery of leachate from solid domestic residues;
• Insufficient compacting of solid domestic residues, resulting in the formation of air pockets between residue deposits;
• Nonexistent monitoring of biogas formed during decomposition of solid domestic residues;
• Insufficient coverage of solid residues from hospitals (originally, this area of the dump site was surrounded by a security fence, but no longer);
• Lack of reforestation effort for those areas where material has been gathered to cover over areas of deposited waste;
•  Flow of leachate into air pockets among solid domestic residue deposits as that decomposes;
• Transport of deposited solid wastes is facilitated by inadequate cover of the domestic residue as it is deposited;
• Inadequate plan for pick up and disposal of collected leachate;
• Nonexistent plan for adequate disposition of residues;
• Nonexistent plan for recovery and recycling of usable materials in the interior of the dump;
• Insufficient traffic signs warning about the dangers of the dump site, resulting in ready access of unauthorized persons and animas in the area of the dump site;
• Insufficient barriers between the dump and neighborhoods surrounding the dump site;
• Nonexistence of an adequate plan for industrial hygiene.

During our visit to K'ara K'ara, Padre Ken reflected on some of his experiences while living there:

• Some of the older garbage piles are now covered with dirt. Gas pipes have been installed in some areas to channel off the gases created by the decomposing garbage. These gases catch fire and can be seen at night.
• The official collectors of the garbage (EMSA) dumped in K'ara K'ara had a meeting.  After their meeting Padre Ken was informed that he should be careful about going up on the dump site because of the escaping gases. (During our visit to K'ara K'ara trucks arrived, dumped garbage, and departed.)
• Numerous people were sorting through this garbage, apparently for possible reusable items. It is doubtful that they were informed of any danger regarding escaping gases.)
• The priest of the parish at K'ara K'ara before Padre Ken was asked to leave because he asked questions about the income derived from the dump and who controlled that. Padre Ken has been encouraged to not ask questions. As a priest, he visits all of the various neighborhoods around the dump, but many of the people are unwilling to associate with him, possibly because it is rumored that he is a representative of Vicente Cañas, an organization working to close the dump.
• The dump continues to operate by the payment of fines from the mayor's office.  For any of the money from these fines to be spent, a project proposal must be submitted to and approved by the mayor's office.
•  For the dump to close there must be a common agreement of the 33 communities surrounding the area. However, 7 of the 33 claim to have the greatest right to determine the fate of the dump because their inhabitants live in the closest proximity to it.  They oppose the closure.  In this limbo K'ara K'ara continues to operate.
• People are ignorant about the poisons in the dump and their potential effect on people. Urbanization continues on the slope west of the dump site.  People are building houses directly beside the base of the dump, close to all of the toxins. Speculators buy lots there, build homes, then sell them to people who are unaware of the danger. This is not large tract development. Typically, a developer will buy one or two lots then build houses and sell them.

I am very impressed by Padre Ken's persistence in enduring this tough assignment. I recall something he said as we rode in a taxi trufi to visit the dump. "Sometimes you just have to sit with problems, be with them."  True, we sometimes make problems worse by attempting to impose the wrong solutions on them.  And some problems by their complexity seem to mock our desire to solve them. During our brief visit it was very easy to see the potential for ill effects as I watched cows grazing on grass growing atop some of the older garbage and then saw elsewhere closeby children playing who might drink the milk from those cows. To think about K'ara K'ara is to want to fix it or just walk away and try to stop thinking about it.  I cannot stop the garbage flow from the growing city of Cochabamba or the ill effects of the past 25 years of garbage flow, but I propose the following:

• Differentiated future collections to divert most discarded matter into recyclable, compostable, toxic, or safe garbage;
• Incentives for local universities to develop and implement effective strategies for neutralizing the negative effects of the current deposit of undifferentiated waste;
• Broad-based public involvement to provide greater transparency regarding the profit incentives for operating the dump and to challenge the continued operation of the dump site as a cash benefit to a few and a health risk to many;
• Monitoring of residents in the area for possible contamination-related health problems;
• Your constructive suggestions.

______________

¹A little over a month before the Deep Water Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

On the street

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.

_________

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.