by Ursula Pike
A short truck hauling people and cargo passed us. The trucks were not semis like the ones I was accustomed to seeing in the United States but had smaller, more compact front cabs and beds open to the air. They added passengers or extra cargo for a fee on their route. As this truck passed, I could see the tops of men’s hats swaying in the back, their hands grasping the metal bar running down the center of the bed to steady themselves. One dollar. That was probably the cost to carry all of us to our destination. I considered offering to pay for all of us, but hesitated. Using my money to make my life easier was what I had been doing since arriving. The gruff engine pulled the truck up the switchbacks, and clouds of dust drifted in front of us. I jumped onto the side of the road. Dodging cacti and hopping onto barrel-sized boulders, I tried to get away from the dust.
We reached the top of a small hill, and a wide valley opened up below us. Brown thatched roofs were all I could see of the homes on the edges of fields. Doña Florencia and the children kept walking. They had probably passed this spot hundreds of times.
After two hours of walking, we turned onto a narrow road thick with green bushes on both sides. The older children sped up and disappeared. We came upon four small buildings and an open courtyard. We had arrived. Her mother’s house was empty except for us. I was relieved to slide the backpack off my sweaty back.
It was like every Bolivian house, a compound of rooms around a central open courtyard. The rooms were in various states of completion. Some had no doors; some had no roof. Were these in the process of being built when the family ran out of money? The kitchen had a roof but no door. Little white flecks of straw that had been mixed with mud speckled the adobe walls. Other walls were painted white and led to rooms with beds or stacks of burlap bags. This home had no electricity, no running water. And no bathroom. No latrine or even a hole in the ground covered by a board. Thank God I had brought my own toilet paper. This family, like all Bolivians in rural areas, went for a walk into the countryside when they had to go.
An older woman in a black pollera and shirt walked into the courtyard. Doña Florencia’s mother, doña Manuela, greeted me with a polite handshake and a kiss on the cheek. The musty smell of goats surrounded her. She was probably in her early sixties, but her gaunt face had deep crevices and was dark as leather. Her cloudy eyes showed the first evidence of cataracts. Two long gray braids hung down from her head, and she wore a black felt hat with a few twigs and dry, curled leaves from her day in the countryside.
“Imaynan kashanki?” (How are you?), I greeted her. It was one of the few Quechua phrases I remembered. One corner of doña Manuela’s mouth seemed to rise slightly. She said something back to me in Quechua.
“Mana intindinichu” (I do not understand) was all I could come up with. She said something in Quechua, and everyone laughed. Doña Florencia explained that her mother said I looked like a cat because of my green eyes.
“Misiñawi,” the mother said again. Cat eyes. I repeated it, and this time she smiled. My hazel eyes took on a green tint when I wore green, as I was that afternoon. I liked this word misiñawi. It was sweet. My light eyes gave away my mixed-blood heritage and were the lasting markers of the Spanish and Irish men in my lineage. Most Bolivians had brown eyes, and light eyes were seen as attractive.
Several strips of raw beef hung from a wire stretching the length of the courtyard, drying in the sun. Charki. Dried meat. I was a fan of beef jerky and dried salmon, so maybe I’d like it. As I watched a hundred flies walk all over the meat, I felt squeamish about eating it. I joined the women in the tiny kitchen and tried to help prepare dinner. Soup with noodles and vegetables boiled in a charcoal-black pot that sat above the flames. The smell of smoke filled every corner of the little kitchen, and I had to step out. The mother filled large ceramic bowls with the steaming soup. As the guest, I was given my food first. I was more tired than hungry, but the greasy broth tasted good after the day’s long walk. I discovered a small piece of charki under a potato. The impossibly chewy texture reminded me an old shoe. I tried not to think of the flies I had seen earlier. I was a guest and was not going to refuse food they were serving on my first night.
We ate as the sky turned from light to pink to dark. This was the countryside I had been hoping to see, the remote retreat without clocks or honking horns. Staring at the flames, we communicated in a telephone game of Spanish to Quechua to Spanish. I understood about half of what was said. Occasionally, I heard the fluttering of wings and wondered whether there were owls or maybe other birds looking for a place to rest. What must it have been like for Florencia to grow up here? How much work awaited her once she completed the almost two-hour hike from Kantuta after her half day of classes? Girls were expected to work. This I understood. Every girl in my family cooked and cleaned to support mothers who worked. My chores were easy compared to those of the Bolivian women, and even though dishwashers and microwaves sped some things up, we were still folding clothes, making beds, and chopping onions no matter where we lived.
Once the sky was completely dark and the fire was dying down, I pulled out my bright one-person tent covered in netting. Holding a tiny flashlight in my mouth, I unrolled the tent, opened up the poles, and was pleased to find that I had an instant bug-proof room. I was too tired to brush my teeth. There was a specific type of exhaustion that came when I spent the day speaking Spanish. The work it took to understand what everyone was saying and then to communicate a coherent response in Spanish—for hours—drained me. Underneath my sleeping pad the courtyard was hard, but I was happy to be hidden in my little white net. I turned to say goodnight to Florencia and her children. They were sitting on the bed in a nearby room, staring at me, smiling as if they were watching a fascinating nature documentary. When they saw me looking at them, they laughed and did not stop for several minutes.
Even before the rooster announced the new day, doña Manuela was starting the fire in the kitchen. On my cheeks, I felt the cool morning air. Florencia and her mother spoke to each other in Quechua in the kitchen. There were no clouds overhead, and as I watched the moon fade away into the brightening sky, I wondered what the day held. The children walked out of the kitchen carrying steaming cups of something, and I knew it was time to get up. The chipped porcelain mug I was handed was full of purple api, a hot corn and sugar drink. I missed my morning cup of instant coffee. Now I wished I had brought some. I sat on a plastic chair on the patio sipping the sweet, thick liquid and realized I had not brought food or any gift to my hosts. This family was sharing their food and home with me. Before I left Kantuta, my primary concern had been with making sure I had whatever I needed to be as comfortable as possible. I knew better. I searched my groggy brain for the Quechua phrase for thank you, but came up with nothing.
After breakfast, the kids, both human and goat, guided me on a tour of the hills surrounding the house. I was glad to have my boots as we hiked up steep, dry hills and snaked between thorny bushes that grabbed my pants. The kids found a nest of ants that produce a type of honey and asked me if I wanted to try it. I was here to experience new things, but the thought of sticking a dirty twig into a live ant nest for a slightly sweet goop was more than I wanted on that uncaffeinated morning. I distracted the kids by asking about the rubbery pink and orange bulbs growing out of the top of a nearby cactus. Prickly pear fruit. I had never seen them. Carefully, the kids picked a few and wrapped them in their shirt to ask their mother to prepare later. We came upon rows of brush that were used to herd, then capture wild guinea pigs. I had only been served qui—guinea pig—on festival days because it was considered a delicacy. How many times had I looked out of a bus window at this Bolivian landscape and thought it held only clingy thorns, rocks, and insects? But, like the huckleberries on the slopes of Mt. Hood that my mom and I picked, there was abundance in a landscape that looked dry and dead.
When we returned to the house for lunch, I was exhausted and ready to rest. The big bowl of soup I was given had an extra-large piece of charki in it. I tha
nked them in Spanish for the meal. Doña Florencia smiled a tiny smile, and her mother nodded her head in my direction.
“We’re going to make humintas this afternoon,” Florencia told me. Humintas were sweet little tamales without any filling. I bought them in the market whenever I found them. Doña Manuela pointed to an area behind the house and said something in Quechua. I followed the oldest daughter, who picked up a basket, and we walked into the cornfield. She picked quickly and outpaced me three to one. I wrapped my tender hands around the thick corn, pulling down and out until the tall stalk released the ear to me. In less than an hour we had a basket full of fresh corn.
In the kitchen, Florencia demonstrated peeling the corn husk and scraping the raw kernels off the cob into the waiting bowl. My slow progress was easily outdone by the children and Florencia. When I threw a corn husk onto the kitchen floor, Florencia told me to save the husks and showed me the pile she had quickly accumulated. When the last cob was stripped clean of kernels, Florencia poured the corn onto a flat, two-foot-square stone in the corner of the kitchen. She rolled out a large crescent-shaped rock. This was a batán—their food processor. Rocking the stone back and forth quickly with practiced ease, Florencia ground the corn into a thick, lumpy mush. I asked to give it a try, and all three women watched as I awkwardly moved the stone over the corn. Now I understood why every Bolivian woman had arms like a bodybuilder. I could barely move the ten-pound rock.
The humintas were cooked inside the corn husks that I thought were garbage. Florencia’s daughter Lena had the hardest job of all, wrapping the slippery green husks into perfect little knots and dropping them into the blackened pot of boiling water. As we sat in this kitchen, mixing the ground corn with spices and lard, Florencia spoke to her mother in Quechua and to Lena in Spanish. Lena understood the Quechua her grandmother spoke, but beyond a few words, preferred to speak Spanish. It reminded me of the times my grandmother went between Karuk and English when we visited older relatives.
In these three generations, I saw cultural assimilation. Manuela was a traditional woman who wore traditional clothes. Her daughter, Florencia, had been a cholita when she was a child. By the time she was in high school, she was wearing the straight polyester skirt and T-shirt that was now her regular outfit. Lena never wore a pollera. Manuela’s granddaughter Lena had access to opportunities that her grandmother and even her mother never had. She was already planning on following her older sister to attend the university in the city. This reminded me of the women in my family. My great-grandmother never went to school and spoke almost no English. My grandmother learned English in school, and as a teenager went to Arizona to attend the Phoenix Indian School, but had to drop out before graduating to help her mother. To find work, she moved south to Oakland, California, and spent the rest of her life in the Bay Area. Her sister and brothers remained in the mountains of northern California. The further away my grandmother moved from her family and her culture, the more she assimilated. She had a good job as a cashier at a five-and-dime, but she almost never spoke Karuk and forgot many of the words. Her decision also changed my life; I spoke less Karuk and had less of a connection to the land and the culture than my relatives who never left. It seemed as though that was the price. Education and economic empowerment were available to Lena as they had been to my grandmother, but the only way to achieve them was to leave behind her culture.
Was I part of this family’s assimilation? That was not why I joined Peace Corps. I joined because I wanted to help people get out of poverty through economic development. But having to choose between development or culture was a choice someone outside the culture had thought up. A choice that someone who didn’t have to leave her culture to thrive would present. Stick ’em up—your culture or your future.
What gave me a shred of hope was the ways that Indigenous cultures, both Manuela’s and mine, were not erased. Lena spoke Spanish, understood Quechua, and was as genuinely Indigenous as her pollera-wearing grandmother; just as my city-dwelling grandmother was as Karuk as her sister who remained near their birthplace. The only options for survival forced a person to shed her culture like a restrictive skin that was keeping her from growing. That was the nature of the development forced on Natives in the United States in boarding schools and reservations. As Ximenita’s decision to stop wearing traditional clothes demonstrated, Indigenous people faced these choices every day. But could there be another way? Could a country, a community, a person thrive both economically and culturally? As a Native person, I hoped so.
The sweet steam rose from the pot and spread across the kitchen. The humintas had to boil for an hour. Lena and her brothers spent the time talking about their favorite things to eat. I tried to describe a taco and a tortilla, but after an entire day of speaking mostly Spanish and some Quechua, my brain was not firing on all cylinders. Mangoes were the one food we all agreed on.
Doña Manuela finally emerged from the kitchen with a large plate filled with humintas. How satisfying it was to unwrap the hot corn husks to reveal the steaming sweet moistness. It had taken us over three hours to pick, grind, and cook the humintas, but in twenty minutes they were all gone. This was my favorite moment of the weekend. I was thousands of miles from home, but in a dusty courtyard, after an exhausting day, I was connecting with Bolivians over a meal we had created together. Well, sort of together, because, really, they had done most of the work. Once we finished eating, I crawled stiffly into my tiny mosquito net. Even the kids were too tired to tease me.
I knew it was time for me to leave even before opening my eyes the next morning. My scalp was itchy, and my hair was stuck in the shape of the ponytail I had left in overnight. I was ready to go back to my little rented room and stare at the wall for a few hours. Staring at the wall had become one of my favorite ways to relax; it was like watching TV except without the visual stimulation or the constant reminders that my breath stank and that everyone could see my dandruff. After another breakfast of sweet, thick api and bread, I was ready to break the news.
“Are you scared we’re going to put you to work again?” asked doña Manuela in Quechua that Lena translated. I laughed lightly, but she had nailed it. I considered myself tough, but I knew that this sixty-year-old woman and her fifteen-year-old granddaughter were infinitely tougher than I was. Doña Florencia told me I should head out to the main road and start looking for a truck if I didn’t want to walk all the way back to Kantuta. I had already packed my mosquito net and sleeping bag into my bulging backpack. Doña Manuela stood with her hands on her hips and looked into my eyes. She said something in Quechua I didn’t understand.
“Why are you so sad?” Lena translated. Sad? I held my breath so I wouldn’t cry. I had been walking around sad and frustrated for months. Being in this country was tough. Trying to start a project at the Center was tough. But I was a strong woman doing my best not to let the sadness and frustration rise to the surface. Why she said this to me at that moment I did not know. I felt exposed. All I knew to do was reach around to hug her.
“Gracias por todo.” (Thanks for everything.) And I meant it. But I had to leave at that moment or I’d start sobbing.
The morning birds were still singing as I walked down the dirt road toward Kantuta. I heard voices and quickened my pace until I emerged on the highway. Several women were loading burlap bags onto the back of a truck. The man sitting in the cab was staring off into the distance. I asked if he was headed to Kantuta.
“Seis” was his answer. I handed him crumpled bills, jumped into the back, and waited for the women to finish loading their cargo. We bumped along quickly, and I watched the landscape speed by. Even though the truck was going less than thirty miles an hour, it seemed swift compared to the speed at which we took the road before. The back of the truck was full of dusty farmers heading to the market in Kantuta to sell their crops. It was Saturday, and tomorrow was the big market day. The men stared off absently as they dug into little green bags of coca, popping single leaves into their mouth an
d pressing them against the inside of their cheek. Dust clouds billowed behind the truck. I held on tightly to the metal bar in the middle, swaying with each turn and hoping to keep my balance. Within thirty minutes, we were crossing the main bridge into town. I slid in front of an old man who smelled like coca leaves, eager to get out of the truck and into my room.
Unlocking the front gate of my house, I wondered what exactly it was that I was doing here, being part of the engine of development changing this country. Development meant a college education for Lena, but it also meant that doña Manuela’s granddaughter would lead a different life than Manuela had. As different as my life was from my grandmother’s. I filled my teakettle with water and sat staring at the wall, waiting for the whistle that would tell me it was ready for my Nescafé.
11
La Noche Más Fría del Año — The Coldest Night of the Year
“Are you comfortable?” Rowena asked.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I answered. We sat facing each other on hard plastic chairs in the empty Children’s Center office. A window was open, and a breeze lightly rustled the papers on Rowena’s lap. All the dark corners and the bare cement floor made the room dank and not unlike a dungeon. A sagging bookshelf on the wall looked ready to collapse at any time. Rowena’s wavy red hair reflected bits of light, and her pale freckled skin reminded me of a breath mint. Rowena was a British college student who had arrived in Kantuta a few days earlier. For her dissertation, she was researching the impacts of economic development on migration patterns.
