by Ursula Pike
“Any questions?” the anthropologist asked as she moved her map of Bolivia out of the way. No one, including me, brought anything up.
The question I wanted to ask was, “What about the ingenuity it took to make a living in this dry country or the resilience required to survive when outsiders stole your wealth?” I thought about chicha, the sour drink that the Cochabambinos were famous for, and how Quechua people chewed the corn kernels to break them down and begin the fermentation process. Masticado. Many people found this custom disgusting, but I thought it was one of the most ingenious uses of human saliva I had heard of. I wanted more stories like that about the Quechuas and Aymaras. What would we do when we realized how inventive and successful Bolivians were? Would we have anything to offer them?
“I will now teach you the most important dance in Bolivia.” The anthropologist told us to move all the folding chairs to one side of the room, and hit the play button on a small boom box.
“This is la cueca.” She unfolded a paper napkin and pinched it on one end as she instructed us to do the same. She motioned for the Spanish instructor standing nearby to be her partner. His nickname was Papa Smurf because of his large nose and guileless grin. He looked alarmed, but didn’t hesitate when she offered him a napkin. I faced my partner, a solid but short man from Wyoming, and following the anthropologist’s lead, raised my napkin high in the air with one hand like a matador preparing to challenge a bull. She placed her left hand on her hip and raised her chin slightly.
“Start the music.” Out of the boom box came the familiar sound of the guitar and charango strumming that began most traditional Bolivian songs. She demonstrated the wide swings of the dance, which was often used as part of courtship rituals. Papa Smurf mirrored her movements, stepping left as she moved right. Pulling the napkin tight between her hands in front of her, she batted her eyes at Papa Smurf. It was modest and alluring at the same time, the way they almost touched but didn’t, the way their bodies moved together then apart. Still, I could not imagine how this dance might be used by a man to get a woman or a woman to tempt a man.
I laughed at myself as I attempted to watch while mimicking her. It had been an intense afternoon, and I was glad to be up on my feet moving. I stepped on my partner’s foot and repeatedly bumped his elbow, but a quick glance around the room confirmed that everyone else was struggling with their dance moves. She played the song again, and by the third time, I was able to mirror my partner’s movements and step in rhythm to the music.
When the song finally ended, the other volunteers walked up to talk with her, but I kept my distance. The afternoon had shown me that I had more in common with Bolivians than I thought. Would that change the way I related to them?
4
Primer Viaje a Kantuta — First Trip to Kantuta
The large map of Bolivia sat on an easel at the front of the training room. Bolivia was a puzzle piece wedged between five countries in the center of the South American continent. For weeks I had wondered where I would spend my two years of service. Finally, the day came when they were telling me where I was going. My stomach gurgled with excitement but also with fear. Training was ending. I would move to a community expecting me to do something beyond learning their language or awkwardly mimicking their traditional dances. The training director called out names, and each time a volunteer’s name and city were announced, an instructor standing near the giant map pushed a red pin into the spot where that person would be working.
My friend Jodi, the charming southern artist, cheered when she found out she was assigned to a project in the heart of Cochabamba, at a center for homeless girls. Laura’s name was announced, and her pin was pushed into the very bottom of the map along the border with Argentina. I wasn’t supposed to care where she was going, but I hoped we would be near each other. Then another girl was assigned to the same town.
“We can be roomies!” she said to Laura. I crossed my arms in front of me. When the training director said my name, I forced myself to breathe. The instructor pushed a pin into a spot near the center of the map. It was nowhere near Laura’s pin.
“Un hogar de niños en Kantuta,” said the instructor.
“What’s an hogar?” I asked.
“Like a home for children without parents,” said the instructor.
“Orphanage,” the training director said. An orphanage? Were they sending me to a Third World orphanage? Images from late-night television ads came to mind, the ones that used guilt and pity to motivate people to give money. Brown and black faces were usually crying or nonresponsive to the flies gathering around their eyes. What could an orphanage in one of the poorest countries in South America hold besides poverty, evil overseers, and vulnerable children? I thought of Indian residential schools, where students were stripped of everything relevant to their culture, including their hair and their traditional clothes, and punished for using Native languages. I had to trust that my government was not sending me to a small town in the heart of this Indigenous country to distance children from their culture under the guise of helping them.
The following week, I boarded a bus for Kantuta to see for myself what this hogar was. I was replacing an outgoing volunteer and hoped to absorb as much information from her as I could in one weekend. I planned to write down every word she said and create a manual for myself. If there were rules to follow, I would survive. That’s how I made it out of poverty, to college, and into Peace Corps.
I found the bus with the words Flota Kantuta on the side in faded gold paint and knew I was in the right place. A chubby young man sitting behind a table in an empty storefront handed me a slip of paper that was my bus ticket. Sitting on the sidewalk, I watched taxis speed by, narrowly missing each other, and the smell of gasoline and rubber from the tire shops lining the road was overwhelming. A woman in a pollera skirt threw a long braid over her shoulder as she yelled “Be careful” at a skinny teenager loading a bulky burlap bag onto the top of the bus.
The doors opened, and I followed men in battered black fedoras up the steep stairs onto the stuffy but clean bus. The seats were covered in faded blue fabric fraying at the edges. Men and women boarded the bus; some eyed me as they passed, but most did not. They looked like any of the Bolivians I’d met during my time in the country, but because they were from Kantuta, I knew they might become more than random strangers. I looked forward to the day when I could catch this bus and know most of the people.
The bus grunted as it pulled away from the curb, and the tall apartment buildings of Cochabamba gave way to fields and tiny adobe houses. A patchwork of brown and green plots stretched across each valley and up into the hills. The noisy engine pulled us up endless switchbacks and then down, across bridges over chocolate milk rivers that ran through valleys. Steep ledges dropped straight down away from the narrow dirt road. Sometimes the blackened hulk of a long-burned-out bus sat crumpled at the bottom of a drop-off. I smelled the brakes and was grateful they were still working.
A truck heading the other direction came toward us, and my stomach tingled when we moved to the extreme outer edge of the road to pass. The road looked too narrow for one giant vehicle, let alone two side by side. The other passengers chatted while I covered my eyes. How sad it would be if I died on the way to Kantuta, how my mother would cry over an empty coffin while my body remained in the twisted wreckage at the bottom of the mountain. But we squeezed by. Twice more we passed trucks heading the opposite direction, and I stopped looking out the window.
The bus passed over a small bridge, and as everyone pulled down their bags from the overhead rack, I realized we had reached Kantuta. Being taller than most of the people on the bus, I could look over the heads of the waiting crowd. Employees handed down the lumpy packages tied to the top, and little kids tugged on adults amid the sounds of Spanish and Quechua. I wanted to ask someone where I could find Nina, but thought it best to wait until the chaos subsided.
“Hi, are you from Peeze Corp?” asked a skinny young Bolivian man in E
nglish as he reached out his hand. He did not launch into the traditional handshake–hug–cheek kiss greeting.
“I’m a friend of Nina’s,” he said. Nina was the volunteer I was supposed to be visiting, and I was relieved that someone was there to greet me, but unsure of who he was. It was evening in a strange town, and I had nothing to go on but my instincts. Should I trust this man? We both reached for my backpack, but I grabbed it first. In the light of the street lamp, I saw a crooked smile spread across his face, and in that instant, I made the decision to accept his assistance. I had few other choices.
His name was Emilio, and he led me to the small hotel and restaurant his parents ran. Inside the empty restaurant, Los Simpsons was playing on a tiny TV in the corner. Once I was alone in my small but clean room, I collapsed on the bed. Then it occurred to me that I was in Kantuta. This was the place where my Peace Corps adventure would happen. I wanted to spring out of my room and bounce down the center of the street like an exuberant Tigger. Maybe here I would find that connection I had hoped for when I arrived, and the Bolivians would recognize I was different from the other volunteers they had seen before.
The next morning while I sipped barely warm coffee and ate a hunk of bread, Emilio walked in with a petite woman with dark eyes and straight black hair.
“La Nina,” Emilio announced. Later I found out that she was Salvadoran American. She was weeks away from finishing her service. I jumped up to shake her hand. A former financial manager from Southern California, she had written a grant to fund a workshop where the kids at the hogar would learn to make musical instruments. She didn’t smile or ask me how my trip was. Maybe I didn’t impress her.
As we walked up the street toward the hogar, every person who passed us on the street greeted Nina. She nodded at each, but didn’t stop to talk. I looked forward to the day when everyone would know me, and I would be a part of the town. Emilio pointed out buildings as we walked. The market, the post office, the most reliable foosball tables; he knew where everything was. He leaned in close and whispered in Nina’s ear as she pushed him away softly. I wondered if they were a couple.
Three blocks later, she stopped in front of an open metal gate through which black-haired kids wearing white smocks streamed out. A small white church sat just inside, its large wood doors closed. We walked under a sign that read Centro Infantil (Children’s Center). The kids watched us pass as Nina led me to a small kitchen near the cafeteria. She introduced me to the cook, doña Florencia, a smiling, rotund woman; Ximena, the cook’s helper, who was a beautiful teenage girl wearing the pollera skirt; and a teacher named Teresa with round cheeks and curly hair. I repeated their names in my head, but with no point of reference, I forgot them almost immediately. This was my first opportunity to demonstrate that I knew to shake their hand with my right hand, hug them with my left arm, and kiss their cheek. I had practiced this maneuver in training and managed to get through it without elbowing anyone.
“De dónde vienes?” asked doña Florencia. Her thick biceps and shoulders looked capable of lifting boiling pots of soup and moving them across the room. “Where do you come from?” she was asking me. Not what did I do or whom did I work for, but where was I from.
“Oregon,” I said.
“Orejón?” a teenage girl putting away dishes nearby asked. Everyone chuckled. I was confused but wanted to be in on the joke, so I laughed too. The teenager placed her hands by her ears and asked, “Orejona?” Had I said the wrong thing? Or maybe I said the right thing the wrong way. I searched my brain for that word. La oreja meant ear, so orejona must have meant someone with big ears. Here I was coming in trying to look like an expert, and they found something to tease me about. I signed and laughed. I raised my hands to my ears and danced around like a drunk elephant. They laughed. At least they had a sense of humor.
Ximena, the cholita who was the cook’s helper, handed me a fresh piece of soft bread as we left the kitchen. I tucked it under my arm as I shook her hand.
“Very nice to meet you,” I said with such enthusiasm that I almost spit on her. Although her name was Ximena, from that moment forward she became Ximenita, the diminutive flourish ita added to demonstrate extra care and affection. I practiced her name to remember how to pronounce it.
The director of the Center introduced himself, then walked me around the buildings. In addition to the kitchen, there was a large open-air dining hall with long rows of tables and chairs. Unlike at the day-care center where I worked during college, there was no sign of any toys, puzzles, or art supplies, but it wasn’t the dark little boarding school I feared when I first found out I was coming here. A little girl missing her two front teeth grinned as she walked by, pulling her long, straight hair up into a ponytail. She looked healthy and not wanting for anything except maybe a new pair of shoes. I wondered what I could possibly contribute to this place.
At lunch, Nina disappeared into the kitchen, and I sat down next to Teresa, the curly-haired teacher, and her table of kids. The girls had long black braided hair, with dark polyester skirts and cotton T-shirts peeking out from under their clean white school smocks. The boys had short, neat hair; collared shirts; and pressed pants. Teresa told me that half the kids attended classes in the morning and the other half attended in the afternoon. They looked at me with timid smiles as we ate noodle soup. The broth was good and salty. A hunk of meat floated at the top of my soup, and I tried to take a bite, carefully avoiding the fat. The kids around me ate everything in their bowl, even cracking open the bones and sucking out the marrow. I wanted to show them I wasn’t a squeamish gringa and ate as much as I could. They smiled and looked at each other, but said nothing.
A girl introduced herself as Marisol. She was petite and serious. While most of the other kids only eyed me silently, Marisol told me she was in the third grade and wanted me to teach her English. Of course, I agreed. She took my plate and Teresa’s, scrambling off to the sink to wash them before going to class.
All of these shy, averted eyes reminded me of what I was like as a little girl. Sitting across from them at the clean but scratched table, I had to admit that this Center was a good spot for me. I hadn’t wanted to come here because I thought I’d be babysitting while my friends would be developing export businesses for farmers or building sanitation projects. But the years I had worked at my college day-care center taught me how to respect and care for children. I could do this.
“Is there another volunteer here? Do you ever see him?” I asked Nina as we left the Children’s Center and walked back toward my hotel.
“Daniel? He’s gone right now.” She continued, “And he had a message for you.” She turned to face me as we reached my hotel. “He said that it’s a bad idea for volunteers in the same town to hook up.” I took a step back. Was this her message to me, or his message? I didn’t understand what was going on. Nina barely spoke to me, treating me as an inconvenience, while this dude I had never met was already pushing me away as though he were some one-night stand who thought I was too clingy. I wondered how Laura was doing on the other side of the country and couldn’t wait to commiserate with her when we returned.
“Well, I prefer Bolivian men anyway, so I don’t think that will be a problem,” I said with more fake bravado than I knew I had in me. Bolivian men did interest me, and I had spent a few hours with my lips locked to a handsome engineer at a dance club a few nights earlier, but I was trying to sound like the type of woman who knew what she wanted and went after it. In reality, I was just a pudgy lady trying to keep from being the worst volunteer that ever existed.
“Not me; I don’t date Bolivians,” she said with a blank expression. Right then Emilio rode up on a bicycle and stopped at the curb in front of us. His wide-eyed expression reminded me of a puppy waiting for a treat. Nina sat down on the handlebars, balancing her petite frame in what looked like a practiced move. For the first time all day, a smile crossed her face.
“Ciao,” Emilio yelled as he pedaled away down the bumpy street. It sure
looked like they were more than friends. I hoped she’d return a little bit nicer after a few hours spent with Emilio, because I was not enjoying my time in Kantuta with Nina so far.
The next day, Nina decided we were going to visit some people from the States she knew outside of town. I really wanted to learn more about what she did at the Center, but she was the guide for this tour, so I followed her. She, Emilio, and I squeezed into two seats of a truck. During the ride, I asked Nina questions about her work at the Children’s Center and whether she had any suggestions.
“I helped them with the books, you know, the accounting. I’m an accountant.” She spoke in the past tense as if she had already distanced herself from the Center and Kantuta.
“What about the workshop, the one you got the grant for where they make musical instruments? What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I don’t know, sell them. How hard can that be?” she said. Her responses were shattering the little bit of confidence I had, so I stopped asking questions.
The truck left us outside the tall, thick gates of a Catholic mission school. Nina explained that the mission had volunteers from the United States. I wondered whether they were missionaries converting “Indians” to Catholicism. A short, dark-skinned nun in a habit let us in. The outside of the building had recently been painted with fresh white paint and looked newer than the buildings at the children’s home. A tall guy with long hair gave Nina a hug.
“Where are you from?” asked a woman wearing a faded Ramones T-shirt. Her dark brown hair and athletic frame made me see her as a prettier, skinnier, Catholic version of me.
