An Indian among Los Indígenas

by Ursula Pike

  Four days after handing her my laundry, Teresa and her five-year-old son dropped off my neatly folded clothes. I added three Bolivianos to the total to help me cover up the weirdness I felt. This was privilege in action, but I needed clean socks.

  Teresa invited me into her classroom a few days later and asked me to help with the kids struggling to learn English. In between classes, we talked about our lives. In addition to being a single mother raising her own son, Teresa also helped her widowed mother raise Teresa’s five brothers. Her dream was to be a beautician, and although she had attended beauty school, the reality of raising her son and brothers did not allow her to do what she wanted. Teresa was the same age as I. She never said this, but I knew Teresa’s earnings did not go into her own pocket. Whatever she earned, as well as what her brothers earned, went to the family. I complained about making only $200 per month as a volunteer, but not only was I making more than she or any other person on the staff of the Center, my money was completely my own. I could blow it on a new stereo or a trip or a typewriter.

  “Would you help me make bread next week?” she asked me one day as she dropped off my clean laundry. Everyone made bread at the Center; the other counselors had their wives or husbands to help, but Teresa always made hers alone. The possibility of being able to contribute something and support Teresa thrilled me. I said yes instantly because I actually knew how to make bread. The years making sourdough rolls with my grandfather in his cluttered San Francisco kitchen while he patiently explained yeast and the proper way to knead dough were finally going to be useful.

  Simon, the director of the Children’s Center, was supposed to be helping me, but it was Teresa and Ximenita who became my real guides. I turned to them when I didn’t understand something about Kantuta or the Center. They were always patient when explaining things to me. There was a boy in town that Ximenita liked, and she spent hours telling me how smart and sweet he was. She always asked me whether Daniel was my boyfriend because, like most people in town, she thought we were together. She never believed me when I told her we were just friends. But it felt familiar and comforting to sit with a girl and talk about love and boys.

  Walking past the one restaurant in town I frequented, I was shocked to find a Dutch woman I had met the previous week in Cochabamba.

  “Hello, Blanca, do you remember me?” I reintroduced myself. Maybe her Dutch name wasn’t Blanca, but that’s what everyone called her because of her white spiky hair. She volunteered at the Children’s Center in Cochabamba. She was on her way to Potosí to see the Salar De Uyuni, the world’s biggest salt flat and one of Bolivia’s major tourist destinations.

  “You probably already know Lucas,” she said, and motioned toward a thin man with short brown hair sitting across from her. I had seen him walking around, but had assumed he was a tourist.

  “No, I do not know you,” he said. He laughed. I laughed. He was an agronomist working for an organization a few blocks from the Children’s Center. He had been in town for a month. I told him all about what I was doing at the Center, and he said he wanted to buy a charango. I was about to respond when Blanca cleared her throat. I had forgotten she was sitting there. Soon after, he stood up to leave and gave me a traditional but forceful Bolivian hug-handshake-kiss. I wondered if he practiced doing it as I had.

  “We should hang out some time,” I said, hoping it didn’t sound too flirty.

  “Mucho gusto conocerte,” he said. I watched him walk away.

  “You can chase him down the street if you want. I won’t mind,” Blanca said when he was a few blocks away. I wanted to say, “Damn right I’ll chase him down,” but instead laughed with a pained smile that I hoped expressed my annoyance. Daniel was out in the countryside most of the time, and, as much as I loved my friends from the Center, it would be nice to have someone else to speak English with every once in a while. I left Blanca soon after and headed home, wondering how long I should wait to visit Lucas.

  The following Thursday, Teresa and the girls in her group laughed and gossiped with me as we mixed the flour, lard, and water together in giant bowls. While the yeast worked in the dough, we sat on old chairs in the shade, and the girls asked me questions.

  How many brother and sisters did I have? One sister.

  Was my mother sad that I was not at home to help her? Probably a little.

  Then it was my turn. I asked each of the girls how far they lived from Kantuta. Most were from communities an hour or more away by foot. What did they want to do when they finished school? Work. College and a career were far in the future, and most did not know what their options were beyond being a mother, working on a farm, or being a teacher. These girls were already more educated than both their parents, but that education came at a cost, and they were expected to help their families financially once school was completed.

  I had heard so many depressing statistics about the situation of Bolivian women: high poverty rates, low education levels, and limited access to basic health care. And for girls like these, Indigenous girls from the countryside, the numbers were worse. Yet it was impossible to pity them. They were curious, smart, and funny. Part of me wanted to encourage them to go to college and remake their world. But that was a version of empowerment I learned from a white woman in college, and I found it to be a flawed vision. It was as if everything about Native women’s lives was wrong, as if there was one version of liberation—the one preferred by white Western women. Education often came at a cost that was cultural as well as financial. It required sacrifices. In college I never invited the women from my women’s studies classes to our student powwow because I worried about what they would think of the clearly differentiated roles of women and men at the drums or on the dance floor. The gender roles in my own culture might look backward and unfair to outsiders. And even though I knew there was inequality between men and women in Native culture—I had seen it and lived it—I couldn’t walk away because it was imperfect. I had survived by cutting my life up into segments, but that was not the advice I wanted to give these girls.

  The dough rose. Each roll was now a perfect little bulging circle. Finally, we were ready for the boys to lift the large sheets covered with risen rolls and slide them into the oven. Teresa had a firm but calm voice with the kids, never yelling. She was able to get them to behave with a tilt of her head and sideways glance. I hoped she would ask me to help her again next week.

  Sooner than I expected, Teresa said my laundry was done. I asked her whether I could come to her house and pick it up after work. I often walked around the streets of Kantuta in the evenings with nowhere to go. I didn’t know where Lucas lived, so I couldn’t drop by his house. Visiting Teresa would be like having a real friend.

  “If it’s OK, I’ll bring it to you,” she said.

  “But I want to meet your family.”

  She pursed her lips together. “Ursula, my house isn’t like yours,” she said.

  “What do you mean? That it isn’t a mess and dust everywhere?” Never a good housekeeper, my cleaning skills completely failed me in Bolivia.

  “My house is simple. We don’t even have a bathroom,” she said.

  “I don’t care,” I told her. “I am not rich. I lived in a house with an outhouse.” As soon as I said this I realized how meaningless it sounded. She was worried about what I might think of where she lived. A home can give away secrets about you that could otherwise be hidden through wit and style. It is why I never had birthday parties at my house when I was growing up. I dropped the subject. That’s what I would have wanted if the situation was reversed. I accepted my clothes and paid her. If she let me come over, I knew I would be the first person from the United States ever to enter her house.

  Lucas found me at the Children’s Center and invited me over to his house for dinner. Ximenita gave me a look that told me she was dying to know who he was. I didn’t tell her anything, hoping to keep one thing about my life private. That night I discovered that he lived in one of the oldest buildings i
n town, on the main road, and that I had walked by it almost daily. He had transformed an old Bolivian home into a modern living space using abstract paintings and rustic furniture. In English and Spanish, we discussed economic development theory and ate Dutch chocolate while Brazilian bossa nova played in the background. I felt sophisticated and international sitting in his apartment—as though I were part of some multiethnic, multilingual world. His work with the Kantuta Agricultural Cooperative was completely different from my work at the Children’s Center. We were both there to help, but his work was measured and effective. He consulted with a team of Bolivian agronomists about crop yields and water collection.

  Of course, I developed a crush on Lucas. Not just a little crush, but a whole imagined idyllic future roaming the globe, doing meaningful economic development work, and raising slightly brown children who would speak three or more languages. It seemed perfect and civilized. Under my breath, I practiced the German I learned in high school because I thought that in this imagined future I’d have opportunities to use it. Bitte und danke.

  9

  La Repostería — The Bakery

  My Peace Corps supervisor was coming to visit, and I needed to have something to show her what I was doing. Carmen was her name, and I heard she was waging a personal crusade against useless volunteers. I worried that I hadn’t done enough to help the Children’s Center, enough to help the community, enough to help the entire country, which I believed was my responsibility to single-handedly develop into a thriving economy. The combination of White Man’s Burden and Native Woman’s Self-Doubt made it difficult to get much done.

  When I had arrived at the Children’s Center, I was expected to develop a project, to proactively identify a need the Center had and meet that need. I was never good at being proactive, and, to be honest, proactive people annoyed me. They rolled up their sleeves, tucked their hair behind their ears, and charged forward with grand ideas meant to make everything better. I worried about intervening too much in the Center. The other volunteers seemed as though they’d been born to intervene, unafraid to tell Bolivians what to do and how to do it. Maybe they were bluffing, but I didn’t even know how to bluff like that. I needed to figure out something soon, because there were expectations to meet and work plans to turn in.

  The day my boss arrived, I was in the Center’s kitchen, where I began each day. It was the heart of the whole place. Despite two open windows, the room was often dim. The roar of the propane flames and the clanging of pots kept conversations limited. The kitchen workers fed a hundred kids three meals a day. It was the one place where I knew how to help in a direct, concrete way.

  “Chop those carrots,” Ximenita ordered as she handed me a knife.

  “Help me lift the pot of soup onto the table.” The cook motioned for me to step over to the bubbling-hot ten-gallon pot.

  “Dry these plates and then stack them over there.” Clang, plop, knock. These tasks were satisfying and met my need to be useful.

  “Is your boss coming today?” asked Ximenita. She smiled slyly while saying this, and I knew I was being set up for some serious teasing. She knew I was nervous about this visit.

  “She’s going to fire you, right?” she teased. “What do you do around here, anyway?” she asked. A flirtatious smile spread across her face. Ximenita did this every day. She had a knack for finding my biggest fear and teasing me about it until I wanted to walk away. The women in the kitchen laughed, and I had to smile a little bit to myself even as I tried to pretend I wasn’t mad.

  When the gleaming white Toyota truck pulled up in front of the building, I knew Carmen had arrived. I greeted her with my now almost-perfect Bolivian handshake and hug. Her olive skin and dark hair told me she had some Indigenous blood, but she was no cholita. Educated in the US, she wore a crisp white shirt and spoke in English with no trace of an accent. Director Simon came out of his office and greeted Carmen with a formal handshake. Her Spanish was flawless and fast.

  “Good morning, doña Carmen, what a fine morning,” he said and then laughed at something he alone found amusing. I quickly led Carmen away from the director, hoping he wouldn’t ask her to fund another workshop or build a dormitory or install a soccer field for the kids. These were all things that he had asked for and that they probably needed, but I had no idea what would be the first step in a big project. From the cluttered, bright classrooms where the students did homework, to the latrines and unfinished shower facilities, to the open expanse of packed dirt and brush that was the backyard, I showed her everything I thought was important. The Center had potential, but I did not know what to do with it.

  “What is happening here?” she asked when we walked by the screened-in room with the ovens where Don Lucas and his students were elbow-deep in the bread-making process. Twice a week, students and teachers made bread because it was less expensive than buying bread for one hundred kids. Two skinny teenage boys lugged a full tank of propane gas across the dusty courtyard toward the ovens. Both the boys and the girls helped mix the dough, often competing to see who could make it the fastest. Once the dough had risen, they rolled it out and shaped it into fist-sized balls.

  “Come in and help us make the bread,” a teacher yelled out as he rolled two white balls of dough with the palms of his hands. The veins on his arms stood out as he quickly threw the balls onto the baking sheet and grabbed two more. He bragged that he could make five hundred pieces of bread in a week. Carmen crossed her arms and surveyed all the activity. I wondered if it would have looked better if I had been making bread when she arrived. Carmen liked to catch volunteers in the act and a friend told me he had heard that Carmen couldn’t contain her excitement when she came upon a volunteer in a remote village who was knee-deep in mud, holding down a pig while trying to vaccinate it.

  “What about the charango workshop?” Carmen turned and asked me. I knew she’d want to see the Peace Corps–funded workshop. Earlier I convinced a few kids to be working on their charangos when she arrived. As we entered the building, I heard the sounds of children pounding metal and scraping wood. The workshop was in an open room and had three large wood tables covered with vise grips, sandpaper, and tools I couldn’t name. Wood, glue, and sweat were in the air, and lining one wall was a large stack of roughly formed charango bodies that I thought of as guitar fetuses.

  By now I knew that charangos were small ten-stringed musical instruments perfect for tucking under an arm and strumming while walking down a dirt road. Nina’s grant had paid for all of this as well as for a teacher, Miguel, to mentor the kids and teach them the traditional art of putting the instruments together. Miguel stood over the table, demonstrating how to scrape out the inside of the charango body. He was a stout but strong man with black curly hair and a thick brush of a mustache. Before she asked, he began explaining how to make a charango.

  “Como un siki de wawa” (Like a baby’s bottom), he said as he rubbed his palm over the back of the instrument, speaking in the mix of Quechua and Spanish that I was only now starting to understand.

  “Where are the girls?” Carmen looked around the workshop. “Aren’t they learning how to make the charangos too?” “How are you going to market the instruments outside of Kantuta?” Carmen drilled me with questions, and I stumbled for answers. The truth was, I didn’t know how to market musical instruments. My degree was in economics. I could make a pretty graph showing the rising value of the dollar against the Mexican peso, but knew nothing about actual business transactions. I didn’t consider asking for help. Asking for help would have revealed that I didn’t know what I was doing. If they knew how lost I was, they might send me back home.

  “The girls are probably not going to make charangos,” Carmen told me when we returned to the Center. “You have to find something else for them.” We sat in the large open cafeteria next to the kitchen, and I wondered if this was the moment when she was going to tell me I was not doing enough.

  “The bread is ready,” said Ximenita, in her soft, breathy
voice and set down a tray of freshly baked rolls. Her delivery was probably an attempt to help me, and I mouthed “Gracias” as she stepped away. Carmen crunched into the large flat bread roll. The spongy white interior and dark crust were tangy and warm. “Is this from…?” Carmen motioned toward the room with the oven, her mouth too full of bread to finish her question.

  “Yeah, it’s cool. Every week they make bread,” I said. I tried to appear alert, but was exhausted from trying to impersonate what I thought a proactive person looks like. I wondered whether she would leave soon.

  “What about a bakery project with the girls?” she said. “Involve the kids, not just in the bakery but in the planning. You need them to take part in every step of the process.”

  “But every store in town sells bread,” I said.

  “Then figure out what isn’t being sold and make that. Have the kids do the feasibility study.” I was not an entrepreneur, but the wheels in my head started turning.

  “This isn’t about money.” She turned and looked me straight in the eyes. “This is about giving kids skills that will make them successful. Anything you do to help them understand that they have options in life will be worthwhile.” Carmen fell silent for a long moment, and I attempted to start a conversation about microlending and the Grameen Bank. I wanted her to have some confidence in me, and I wanted to show her I understood the concepts of development even if I did not personally know how to start a development project. I exhaled with relief as the shiny Toyota finally disappeared down the cobblestone street. I wasn’t sure where to start, but knew that I had to show Carmen that I had at least tried.

  Simon, the Children’s Center director, didn’t like the idea of the repostería (bakery) and told me there was no disposable income to spend on the supplies. I showed up the next day with a bag of flour. He wasn’t convinced. I promised to buy all the supplies.