An Indian among Los Indígenas

by Ursula Pike

  “Un recuerdo,” he said. I opened the little box to find a slim chain necklace. Small and shiny, it looked too delicate for me. He stood behind me and connected the two ends of the necklace. I pressed it into my chest and thanked him. I had expected an argument. But he did not seem interested in rehashing what had happened. And even though I had been thinking about it for the last two weeks, I did not want to spend this moment arguing. It was my birthday, and he was here. I turned and faced him. There was that horrible sweet cologne of his.

  We ended the relationship the way we began it: in my bed. I cried a little, not a lot. We made promises to stay in touch that I knew weren’t true even as I whispered the words. I missed him already, but I was done being the girl who waits. I was ready to move on. Everything was slow and deliberate that night because I wanted to remember it all. He left before the sun came up.

  The next day, as I listened to him read the news on Radio Kantuta, his voice seemed scratched and rough. I felt as tired as he sounded. It was my birthday, my last in Bolivia. I had two weeks left.

  20

  Mi Salida — My Departure

  A knock and then a gangly teenage boy was standing outside my open door. He reached out his long arm and handed me a piece of paper. Una llamada de Daniel was written on it. Daniel had left Kantuta three months earlier, and except for a few letters, I had not heard much from him. I had no idea why he was calling me on this day. It was less than a week before I was to leave Kantuta.

  “From Daniel?” I asked the boy, confirming that the message was correct. He scrunched up his face in an expression that was either boredom or nervousness.

  “Sí, una llamada de Daniel, el gringo de los Estados Unidos, a señorita Ursula,” he motioned for me to follow him. That was me, señorita Ursula.

  Knocks on the door were more frequent now than ever. But now it was friends stopping by to say good-bye. Or people wondering whether I needed anyone to take that stove, blender, or table off my hands. I was the fourth volunteer to leave this town in the last few years, and those who’d seen these departures before knew we couldn’t take much of anything back to the States.

  I wasn’t sure why Daniel was calling me, but after everything we’d been through, if he was calling, I was going to answer. The boy pedaled slowly on his too-small bike and led me to the telephone office by the plaza across the street from where Daniel used to live. Now that Daniel wasn’t there anymore, I rarely came over to this side of town. The church stood guard over the dusty central plaza. The hedges were trimmed, and the trees didn’t look as droopy as I remembered. The leaves of the tall palm trees rustled in the breeze, sounding like rain, but the day was dry. The smell of fresh bread drifted from the other side of the plaza where the best rolls in town were sold.

  I followed the boy inside the dim and cavernous telephone office. The hard wood bench was smooth from years of seated customers waiting for phone calls. I thought impatiently of the clothes I needed to pack or give away that sat unfolded on my table in my little room. I tapped my foot in annoyance that I was forced to sit and wait for a call. From behind a closed door came the low mumble of a man. Just as I started to become anxious, the teenager motioned for me to go into the other empty booth. I picked up the hard plastic receiver.

  “Hello, darlin’,” Daniel said. The lift in his voice made me smile. My breath slowed, and my shoulders relaxed. He told me about surfing again, going to the beach where he used to live. Every wave was different, a new opportunity, a new challenge. Quickly he asked about what was going on in Kantuta. Everything that had happened to me over the last two weeks came pouring out: the drunken kiss with Fernando at the dance; his wife’s confrontation; how I choked up a little with every hug from a child at the Center, knowing it might be the last. He laughed.

  “No me digas!” he said with a little bit too much enthusiasm. What must this fermented drama sound like to him, thousands of miles away, sitting in his parents’ air-conditioned house within view of the Pacific Ocean? At least that’s what I imagined. It was winter here, cold and dusty. In California, it was the warmest part of summer. I was silent for a moment. Is this what awaited me back in the United States? Would this life and my experience here become an amusing story?

  From where I stood, I could see groups of young children crossing through the bright sunshine in the plaza. They wore clean white smocks and backpacks on their backs. The day was starting, and I needed to get going.

  “They will become ghosts to you,” Daniel said. His voice was deep and serious. Was this a warning or a lament? I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to rebel against him, to tell him that for me it would be different. Whatever he was saying, I would not hear it right then. The people of Kantuta were not ghosts to me, and the idea that I would ever think of them as ghosts scared me. But with everything that was going on, I hadn’t had time to think much about what life would be like once I returned to the US. I saw myself on my grandmother’s couch in San Francisco, joking with her while we drank tea and watched the local news. I wanted to cry, but stopped myself.

  “Call me when you get back to the States, OK?” he said. “You’ll feel kind of messed up at first, so be prepared.” He was showing me the way as he had when he was here, but I resented his assumption that we had had the same experience in Kantuta.

  When I finally arrived at the Children’s Center, two of the younger girls led me to the cafeteria and sat me down at the head of one of the tables. The shiest girl at the Center, who always kept her eyes lowered even as her dimples popped, put a chipped porcelain bowl full of soup in front of me.

  “Gracias,” I said. She smiled tightly and met my eyes for only a second. Sopa de mani, peanut soup. Florencia and Ximenita knew what my favorite foods were and had cooked them for me. The thick white soup was salty, and I slurped it down quickly. Around me sat a row of young girls in white smocks, looking like a table of scientists about to go into the lab to perform important experiments. Marisol, the very tough little girl who spoke to me on my first day at the Center, asked me whether my family was glad that I was returning home. I told her that I thought they were and that I knew I was excited to see them. All of these girls, with their smart faces and dark hair pulled tight into bouncy ponytails, knew what it was to live apart from their family. Each of them spent the majority of the year living at this Children’s Center to attend school. In a few years, these girls might be encouraged to leave school and start working to earn money to support the brothers and sisters still at home.

  “Attention, attention, please,” the director of the school said as he stood at the far end of the cafeteria. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get everyone to quiet down.

  “Today we are honoring a special friend who has been with us for two years.” I put down my soup spoon and exhaled. Keep it together, Ursula. I did not want to start crying, to have their last memory of me as a blubbering gringa.

  “Over the last two years, señorita Ursula has helped us with many things, like the charango workshop and the bakery. Now we want to thank her for everything she did.” He looked at me and led the cafeteria in a round of applause. The girls at my table put down their spoons and clapped for me, keeping their eyes on the director. “Does anyone want to say anything to the señorita?”

  Joel, the boy who had always been helpful, the first one to make a charango in the workshop, stepped up and, ducking his head respectfully, thanked me for helping with the workshop. Tears and sobs waited anxiously behind my scrunched-up face. Rita, with her long hair pulled behind her in a braid, stood up and said thank you for teaching them about bakery businesses.

  “Is there anything that you’d like to say, señorita?” the director asked. I stood and pushed the hard plastic chair behind me. Tomas, sitting at the next table, grinned his gap-toothed smile. I could not look at his face or I’d start crying.

  “I…” was all I could get out before crying. In between sobs and wiping my nose, I uttered a string of words that began with “Thank you�
�� and “Love you” and “I will miss you all.” I don’t know whether it made any sense or whether they could hear me above the crying, but I said it.

  “Bueno.” The director cleared his throat. My choking, crying good-bye must have surprised him as much as it surprised me. “Children, this is what happens when we feel strong emotions.” I suddenly felt embarrassed for my outburst. I was exposed. My love for these children and the adults who cared for them was controlling me.

  Ximenita and doña Florencia hugged me tightly. Florencia hugged me with her strong arms, and I forgot to cry. The boys shook my hand, respectfully thanking me. The girls hugged me and asked why I had to leave. Despite whatever I did or didn’t do, they loved me and wanted me to stay. I had never imagined it would be this difficult to leave.

  “Aye mamita, don’t leave,” said Ximenita as she held both my hands and wouldn’t let me go. Finally, after more hugs and promises to write, I was released, and walked toward the gate. Stepping into the street, I felt empty, exhausted, and lighter. I remembered Rowena’s question: Had it been worth it for the US government to send me here? Certainly in terms of the actual cost of my training and support versus the income generated by the Children’s Center, this was not a good return on investment. When I came to Bolivia, I thought Bolivians needed saving, or at least someone to help them. The question for me then was, did I have what it took to help them? I learned that they didn’t need saving. The best help we could give them was the same we could give to a community in the US, which was to ask what they needed and really listen to their answer. Then work with them to see how they wanted us to help and, we would hope, build relationships along the way. I knew that when I returned to the US, I would be encouraged to describe what I had done to help Bolivians, to put my accomplishments on a resume or in a graduate school application. Yet anything that I achieved while I was at the Children’s Center was due to Teresa’s help, Ximenita’s support, Daniel’s encouragement, and the girls in the bakery deciding to spend a few Saturday mornings kneading dough. I thought I should be ashamed that I needed their help. But really the success or failure of my two years of service was less about the projects I started or completed and more about being a part of something.

  The funny thing is, I already knew that any meaningful project didn’t rest on one person’s shoulders. When our group of Native students from tribes across North America planned our student powwows, we were all doing it for each other. And at the end of the night, we gathered together, ate the leftover frybread, and started planning for the next year. Who am I kidding? There was never any leftover frybread, just the lettuce and tomatoes for the Indian taco toppings, and that one guy always left early. But the rest of us shared whatever we had.

  I also thought differently about Nina’s work at the Center. She wrote a grant that funded a workshop. Did she save anyone? No, but she did what any good employee does—her job. Her work gave me something to build off of. When I met her, I thought she was cold and aloof. But my respect for her work had increased as I learned for myself the challenges of launching a project. I also now understood how she might have felt on those last days, how difficult it was to leave Kantuta and people she loved forever.

  My room was stacked with boxes ready to be loaded on the bus. I gave away everything from my kitchen including the pressure cooker that I used to make popcorn and the oven that mostly existed to make toast. Honestly, I was relieved to know that Fernando wouldn’t be coming over to see me again. I was sad and tired when I thought about him, and knew I should have ended it earlier, but I had been afraid of being alone. I felt empty when I met him, and let the excitement and drama of the affair fill me up. I made him the sun at the center of my universe and altered my orbit to capture every wave of heat and light that he offered. It was time to spend time with myself for a while and bask in my own sunshine.

  Lucas invited me for dinner at his house that last night. Seeing him pop through my front door to ask me over was a surprise I hadn’t expected. We hadn’t seen each other much in the last few months. He already knew about Fernando; I had told him months earlier. Lucas knew Fernando from a project he did at Radio Kantuta, which was a reminder of how small a town Kantuta was. Lucas and I sat in his dining room one last time, and he asked what I was going to do next. I repeated the line I had said for months. The one about graduate school, Portland, the US, and community development. It sounded good. I gave answers that sounded good. The truth was I didn’t know. But in that moment, I did not want to think about it. I knew I would be OK. Lucas gave me a warm hug, a good-bye-old-friend hug, and I walked outside.

  And then it was my last day. After one cup of instant coffee, I pulled the mattress and blankets out of my mosquito net. I untied the ropes holding it up. The green mass of netting collapsed into a lump of the floor. How had that pile of canvas, netting, and zippers contained so much of what had happened over the last two years? The nights I passed out or cried myself to sleep or pulled the covers up to my grinning face or invited Fernando in and kicked him out or every once in a while fell into a sound sleep after a hard day’s work.

  The rest of the day was a swirl of good-byes and giveaways. Two hours before I was to leave, the bus to Cochabamba squealed to a stop on the side road in front of my apartment. A few teenagers from the Center showed up. Then the director; his wife, doña Florencia; and four of their children also arrived. Twenty adults and children lined the walls of my tiny pink bedroom. Teresa walked in with her son, and I wondered where I had packed my toilet paper, because I knew I would be crying soon. It was difficult to move, difficult to hear everyone, but I knew I was loved. I tried to give everyone something, even if it was only a used pot for boiling water. I wondered whether they had done this for Nina, but then decided I didn’t care; they were here for me, and that’s what mattered.

  “It isn’t much, but I wanted you to have this,” Teresa said as she handed me a woven wall hanging of a cholita with an aguayo walking toward a snow-covered mountain. It was the perfect representation of everything I thought I would find when I arrived in Bolivia—one-dimensional, simple stereotypes in front of idyllic landscapes. Teresa sniffled, and I hugged her. This woman had not only welcomed me into her home and her life but also patiently explained Bolivian culture to me when I didn’t understand what was going on. Her mother, her brothers and their wives, and even her grandmother, who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, all treated me like a member of the family. The bakery project would never have existed without her help. What I appreciated most was her honesty. She was like Laura in that way, not afraid to tell me when she disagreed with me, but remaining my friend. Teresa had done more for me than I ever did for her.

  “Tell your mother and your brothers good-bye for me,” I said. I didn’t know whether I would ever see her again. I promised myself that I would stay in touch with her, but remembered what Daniel had said about these people becoming ghosts.

  Simon handed me a leather picture frame he had engraved. His wife, doña Florencia, gave me a weaving, and I stuck both into the top of my backpack. I hadn’t expected this generosity, and although I was tired and distracted, I wanted them all to know I appreciated their gifts. Everyone followed me into the street and helped carry my backpack, duffle bag, and boxes to the boys loading suitcases onto the top of the bus. The driver honked the horn, and I stepped onto the bus.

  After crying for a week straight, I had no more tears left. My friends and the children from the Center stood on the street waving good-bye and blowing kisses. I placed my open palm on the window. I leaned back in my seat as the bus crossed the tiny bridge on the northern edge of town and tottered up the hill by the Candelaria bull ring. I was tempted to look for Fernando. Part of me hoped he would be hiding on a side street, waiting to wave to me as the bus passed. But I didn’t look because I didn’t want to see that he wasn’t there.

  From the day I arrived in Bolivia, I wanted Bolivians to see me and to understand that I was an Indigenous person like them. But I was th
e one who needed to see them. I was the one coming to their country, to their community, with wealth and privilege. I was the one who needed to prove myself to them. I should have already known this, considering all the times I saw outsiders come into a Native community and assume that because they professed respect and love for Native people, they would be immediately accepted. “I’m one of the good ones,” they said. I thought I was one of the “good” North Americans, but I needed to prove it.

  The next morning was Thursday. It would dawn exactly as every other Thursday had during my two years in Kantuta. The garbage truck would rumble through the streets near my room. The grumpy mailman would slowly sort through his recently arrived mail. And at the Children’s Center, they would roll out the dough to make enough bread to last the week.

  Afterword

  Kantuta isn’t the real name of the Bolivian town where I lived for two years. I changed the name of the town, as well as the names of the people, for this book because I’m the only one who should be identified in this story. That town is not the same place today as it was when I left in 1996. The streets are wider and mostly paved. Hills that had nothing but brush and narrow foot trails now have homes built on them. A new highway into town turned the seven-hour trip from Cochabamba into a quick four-hour ride.

  Ironically, much of the change occurred because of a massive earthquake that hit Kantuta in the middle of the night in 1998. I found out about the earthquake when Daniel called me early the morning after. He was flying to Bolivia to see what he could do. I wished I could go with him, but was about to start graduate school and couldn’t afford it. That familiar feeling of being tempted to follow Daniel on an adventure sprung up even though we hadn’t spoken in months. When he returned from his trip, he described Kantuta to me. The church spire fell into the main plaza, and homes made of adobe and rock crumbled into dust. Nearly a hundred people died, and everyone moved into the streets to live under blue tarps as aftershocks rocked the ground. None of the Bolivians named in this book died in the earthquake, but all of them were impacted by the destruction it brought. Many people I knew had a mother, sister, husband, or child die that night.