Tom Goes to Bolivia

Pictures and words

2010-04-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

Hello,

This will be my last post for a while, at least a month. On Saturday I start my independent study project. My friend Cameron and I will be spending three weeks traveling around Lake Titicaca recording stories and myths. In the end hopefully we will have a sweet video with an original soundtrack. I’ll let you all know how it turns out when I get a spare moment. If it isn’t embarassingly bad we’ll upload it to YouTube.

This week I’ve been very busy wrapping up schoolwork and taking care of a few other things, so I’m not going to write too much. And for one reason or another I haven’t been able to think all week. My brain must be taking a rest before embarking on the next adventure. So instead of my usual long rambling diatribe about whatever is on my mind, here’s a bunch of photos and captions:

Cows.
(a.k.a. the leading cause of deforestation in Latin America)

We visited sand dunes in the department of Santa Cruz. They are a human-made creation: once a forest, the land was exhausted through the production of sugar cane to satiate a sweet tooth. No trees will grow again for decades.

I felt conflicted in finding the dunes beautiful while understanding they are the result of environmental devestation. Perhaps they are beautiful because they are surrounded by forest on all sides. If the whole of the earth was sand dune - which one day it may be at the current rate of deforestation - ’beauty’ would not be the right word. Boring, perhaps. Repetitive. Lifeless.

But definitely a ton of fun. Cameron does a backflip.

Heidi and Ismael - the academic directors - stand in front of a traditional Quechua ceremonial offering. In the last half-century plastic streamers and balloons have become a standard decoration. I wonder at what point a Quechua man or woman felt the need to supplement their tradition with nonbiodegradable commodities from the industrial world. At what point did humankind in general decide this was a good idea?

Ismael offers alcohol to the Pachamama, sprinkling a few drops on all four sides of the embers, one for each direction. Traditional Andean philosophy sees the Universe as a flowing of energy: from the earth to the sky, sky to the earth; from man to woman, woman to man; from day to night, night to day. In this tradition, energy flows from humans to the earth in the form of very hard, disgustingly hard, alcohol. ’Aguardiente’ - it means, ’fire water.’

The Masis. Their founder left me with one especially impressive line that I feel is a perfect summation of Andean cosmovision: ’Accept the goodness of evil so you can learn its songs.’

Music in a circle. Why do humans find truth and beauty in geometry? Why are the circle, the spiral, the triangle prominent in so many different systems of belief' What geomtries do we use in the United States and what can they show us about how we perceive the world? Think of the geometries we have created with our highways, our trains, our telephone lines, our shopping malls, our parking lots.

So many musical instruments; I could barely hide my arousal.

Cerro Rico: perhaps the most infamous mine in the world. Inside over eight million people - Bolivia’s entire current population - have lost their lives, in explosions, heart attacks, boulders to the head. Almost entirely for silver, something completely useless. Pretty, but useless.

A forest turned to sand for sugar; eight million dead for a shiny rock.

One economic theory - dependency theory - asserts that the First World was only able to become rich because of direct exploitation of the Third World. Eduardo Galleano compares it to the relationship between rider and horse. This is evident in the fact that Third World industry in Asia, Africa and the Americas were entirely dictated by the desires of the First World: we wanted novel fruit, we wanted rocks, we wanted servants and slaves. More than anything we wanted land. Not very much has changed. Now we just want open markets.

More and more I am starting to believe that for some people to be rich, others must be poor. Wealth and poverty only exist in relation to each other.

The miners pay daily tribute to a devil named Tio (not like uncle, but like ’dio’ for god, except the Quechua do not have the ’deh’ sound). Above ground, Jesus and God are sensical. But below the surface the Devil must be respected, otherwise he will take your life through rock slides, black lung, dynamite. It is not a matter of worshipping evil over good, as these are not terms that existed before colonization. It is a matter of understanding that the Pachamama has many different faces, some peaceful, some violent, some welcoming, some terrifying.

Me with a mouthful of coca leaves.

Two children, along with hundreds of workers, still try to make money off of the mine, even though it has long been exhausted of silver. These two try to sell sparkly rocks to tourists such as us that come to witness the terrible state of the mine. Poverty sells.

So does danger: Our guide chews live dynamite.

Another example of how industrialization and environmental devestation sometimes make the world beautiful in bizarre, alien ways. A friend told me that sunsets have become more brilliant because of all the pollution on the horizon.

The boys.

Ismael’s 60th birthday party. Theme: Carnaval. I dressed up as the diablada. In this Catholic country people seem to love dressing up as the devil.

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You’ll hear from me again in a month. After three weeks of traveling Cameron and I will be editing our film for probably 15 hours a day for eight straight days. After that I’m off to Peru for a week and a half to visit Macchu Picchu and probably spend way too much money on artisan crafts and CDs.

Hasta luego,

Tom

A story:

2010-03-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

Lake Titicaca is where the Sun and Moon were born. Ages ago before the first light, bizarre ugly animals without eyes roamed the earth in darkness. Then from the deeps of the Lake, a force that had been fermenting for an eternity exploded out of the water in the form of the Sun and Moon. The blinding light killed all of the creatures instantly and Pachamama was made inhabitable for humans. The Sun sent down a son and the Moon a daughter and together they populated the shores of the Lake with the Aymara.

A myth like this has evolved over the course of tens of thousands of years. It is an extension of the land, having sprouted from the soil with the people themselves. It has changed and adapted slowly from generation to generation, passed down orally from father to son, mother to daughter, on rowboats, around bonfires. The Aymara say they have been in the same place pretty much forever – and who am I to tell them otherwise? – but more likely there has been a succession of different civilizations rising and disintegrating and forming anew, and with each transition a myth such as this changes to suit its new people and provide them with a new narrative to live their lives.

When the Incan Empire conquered the region, they did not care what you believed or how you worshipped so long as you paid your taxes and did the jobs the Incans told you to do. The Aymara maintained culture autonomy for the most part, although the Sun – the Supreme God of the Incans – likely began to take a more prominent role in their mythology. The Spanish Empire worked a bit differently. They did care what you thought and how you worshipped, and they invested a lot of effort in gently convincing their new colonies to accept Jesus Christ into their lives. Among their tactics for conversion were torture and rape. The Aymara mythology began to evolve further, adapting to accept certain aspects of Catholicism and reject others.

This abandoned mining center is still owned by one of the richest mining bosses in the country and the Aymara are unable to develop the land; as our payment to the community for our stay, we donated $800 towards the cause of buying the land back

It is impossible to tease out which aspects of the Aymara stories are Catholic and which are Incan and which are whatever else. Sometimes Jesus in the son of the Sun, other times he walked out of the Lake. Sometimes the Sun floods Lake Titicaca to punish the people and thirty-six pairs of animals are gathered on a raft. Other times the Sun lights the whole world aflame or turns the people to stone. The stories differ from community to community, island to island, from one side of the lake to the other. In the end it doesn’t matter what is Catholic and what is Incan and what remains from before – it is all Aymara now.

Indigenous women in the Andes were forced to wear boulder hats under colonial Spain; now they wear them both out of imposed tradition and as a proud symbol of their liberation and perseverance

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We spent five days living in a small Aymara village on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest lake in the world. I lived with a family of four about a quarter mile from the beach. I slept on a bed of eucalyptus leaves in a room that used to be the chicken coop. In the morning I ate barley powder mixed with hot celery tea. Lunch and dinner was potatoes, soup, and bread. Occasionally we ate bananas and one night my father caught a fish from the lake. It was more bones than anything else, but it tasted nice.

It rained every night, the loudest I’ve ever heard. There was no space between the drops on my tin roof. I tried to sleep through a deafening static. The lightning split the sky like a hammer to a glass windshield. It was the most apocalyptic five nights of my night; I actually felt closer to the sky.

My father Demetrius was a really solid dude. He had face carved by a lifetime under the sun and had a voice like Kermit the Frog. Once upon a time he built the house the family lived in. He played the flute like a madman. My mother Esmerelda was also a classy lady. She spent several hours a day peeling potatoes and making fire and boiling water and cooking soup. When I first shook her hand her skin felt like hard leather. I later realized why: the Aymaran women handle scalding iron pots and pans without oven mitts. But I never once saw her flinch. She didn’t speak any Spanish, like most of the women in the village, so we didn’t do a whole lot of talking, but she laughed at me as I learned basic Aymara words from Demetrius. Maya means one, Paya means two. Uma means fire, Nina means water. I thought I was saying these words correctly, but my gringo-ness was the source of endless hilarity.

My dad

I also had a brother and a sister. My sister never once looked at me, I’m not sure why, but she let me herd the sheep up the side of a mountain with her one morning. I felt slightly immasculated as this portly teenage girl jogged up effortlessly as I sat heaving between my legs every few minutes. My brother had bleached streaks in his hair and liked to play Rock Band on his PlayStation loudly every morning. When I told him I played music he brought me his out-of-tune bass guitar and I played him Day Tripper by the Beatles. My siblings were both around twenty years old, a rarity in a community where more and more the young people are leaving to find work in the cities.

Everyone in the community had a cell phone. Many of them had electricity and a few families had televisions. They mainly wore jeans and sneakers and wool sweaters, saving their traditional clothing for special occasions and ceremonies. Despite these industrialized luxuries, they still continue the culture of their ancestors.

They have their music, a mix of flutes, panpipes and drums. The music sounds like it came from the earth, having been chiseled slowly by weather and time like the mountains themselves. In the city we have our music that is modeled after sounds we buy on CDs and the blips and bleeps of the industrialized world. But on the shores of the lake music evolved as an imitation and extension of nature. Whoever made that first melody had only heard the lake, the rain, the thunder, the wind, and the songs of other animals.

They have their dance, although for them dance and music and not separate entities: one requires the other. Legs and arms and bodies twisting are just music made visible. Dancing is always done in a circle, perhaps the most sacred symbol of the Andes. The circle represents the Unity of the Diversity. All is different but All is One. In Aymara there is no word for “equality.” It is not a category that existed because, until the arrival of the Spanish, they felt no need to label anything equal or unequal. Everyone existed as a point on a circle, each point different but no point further or closer from the center than any other. To us the circle, as in King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, is a symbol of equality, because King Arthur was reacting against the hierarchy that already existed in society. But to the ancient Aymara the circle was the truth of the world in geometric form and it was never debated. No words needed to exist to describe it.

The Aymara also continue their belief of chachawarmi, a belief somewhat similar to Yin-Yang. Chacha is the female force and warmi is the male force, each permeating every facet of the Universe. It is an example of the Andean concept of the complementarity of opposites. Male and female, left and right, up and down, day and night; all these things only exist in relation to each other. They seem like opposites, but really one needs two opposites to make a whole, like two poles on a magnet. The Aymara do not see the world in black and white but different shades of grey; the terms “good” and “evil” did not exist until the arrival of the Spanish. This concept of 2 = 1 is another aspect of the Unity of the Diversity.

Chachawarmi is not just an abstract, philosophical concept. It is played out in every action the people take although they may not be consciously aware of it. I am only able to understand the most obvious instances, such as when the men and women drink in separate circles or when the men dance in an outside circle and women dance in the inside circle. But more than this the concept informs and reinforces the gender roles in Aymara society: the women cooking and cleaning, dancing and singing, the men fishing and building, playing the instruments. It would be easy to call this an example of inequality because that is the lens through which we are used to viewing relations in the United States. But remember that the category of equality/inequality is not an objective quality, but is socially constructed. For the Aymara men and women exist to complement each other, not to be equal and therefore the same.

Perhaps my favorite way chachawarmi is expressed in the culture is through Aymara music. The Aymara use a seven-note scale for all of their melodies. They use quenas (flutes), zamponyas (panpipes), and drums. I am simplifying this significantly because there are many classes and sizes of flutes, panpipes, and drums. Some of the flutes and panpipes are four feet long. Anyway, when a song includes panpipes, two people are required to play the melody with two separate panpipes, because neither panpipe has all seven notes. One might have four, the other three; one five, the other two. In order to play a fluid melody, the sound alternates between the two players. When one listens to Aymara music on headphones, the sound of the panpipes bounces back and forth between the left and right channels. While it is only men who play instruments, one set of panpipes is the female force, and the other is the male force. It is a beautiful way to look at the world: the interplay between opposites is needed to advance the melody of the Universe.

They have their coca as well. Coca is chewed by everyone in the community during rituals and during work. Men chew with men, women chew with women. One takes a handful of coca, makes the sign of the cross, and offers their coca to someone else. It’s all about reciprocity. The sign of the cross would seem to be a Catholic import, but there also exists an Andean cross which predates Jesus. Who knows how these two symbols play out in the minds of the Aymara? Coca leaves and many other herbs are burned as an offering to the Pachamama. When the fire is lit, one takes a bottle of extremely hard alcohol called aguardiente (fire water) and pours a few drops on all four sides of the fire, one for each direction. Nowadays cigarettes and weird plastic confetti are also burned. Culture always changes and adapts; the Aymara have come to accept Jesus, plastic, and cigarettes into the traditions of their ancestors, but in ways no one could have predicted.

And so culture perseveres and transforms. It is always staying the same and always changing, the interplay of opposing forces colliding to create new growth. I learned a ton from the Aymara and their way of living and looking. I am sure that they have changed me through their words and music and faces. But how did we, the tourists, change them? We taught them Frisbee and left one behind the community. Who knows what new games will be invented with this plastic white disc? Nothing we can predict. I played “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” by Bob Dylan on the charango for my family. Will this melody be lodged in the memories of my family in such a way that it effects the creation of future songs, if even only one or two notes? What other ways have we changed them that are completely beyond our ability to comprehend?

The idea of keeping indigenous cultures in a vacuum to never change is ridiculous and impossible. It’s like when ecologists try label every new plant in an ecosystem an invasive species and then eradicate them ferociously in the cause of ecological preservation. Seeds were carried across oceans in the feathers of birds or in lucky breezes long before humans set foot on this planet, and likewise indigenous cultures have always been in the process of change long before the colonists arrived. The idea of a pure, authentic, untouched native is romantic and condescending. The Universe is always changing, never in equilibrium, and anyone that tries to fight against that change is living in a fantasy world.

I even struggle with the idea of “indigenous” as a label. Indians, Native Americans, original peoples, whatever you want to call them... how many generations does it take to be considered “native”? I was born in the United States, am I not a native? Do I need to have a bloodline here 500 years old? 5000? Do my people have to be colonized first? Any attempt at definition is arbitrary. People talk about Europeans like an invasive species that came over and destroyed the beautiful untouched ecosystem that existed here since the beginning of time. And I’m not trying to justify the genocide that took place, but that’s just kind of the way the world goes, isn’t it? Destruction is necessary for creation. In fact they are one in the same, two sides of the same coin, chachawarmi, the complementarity of opposites.

Change is neither good nor bad. It is just the way things are. Now in some Aymara schools girls are being taught to play the panpipes, a break in tradition from the male-only custom. Many Aymara are leaving to work in factories in Brazil or Argentina. They leave their communities behind but they return with money and new ideas. Jesus, cigarettes and plastic confetti have destroyed Aymara culture, but they have also created it anew.

Of course, this does not justify the imposition of change in the form of death, rape, torture, religion, and labor upon the peoples of the Americas by the colonists. Change is inevitable, but that does not mean there is not a difference between internal and external change. If indigenous cultures are going to change, which they are, we should do all we can to ensure that they have the power to choose their own direction.

“He who is not busy being born is busy dying,” – Bob Dylan

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Anyway, my experience was amazing. I’m going back to live with the Aymara for my independent study project for three weeks in April. I’m going to make a movie about Aymara mythology with my friend Cameron. I’m super excited.

Also on the way back to La Paz our bus attempted to ford a river and got stuck in the mud. We had to have a tractor pull us out. Here are some pictures:

Way too many words, Vol. 3

2010-03-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

Hola amigos,

School is cancelled today because there are roadblocks all throughout the city. All throughout the country in fact. This is the second day. The buses aren’t running and the center of the city is almost entirely inaccessible. This happens every once in a while when Bolivians are protesting some new law or the lack of a new law. Today bus companies are protesting a new article that fines the owners of buses if their drivers are caught driving drunk. The owners believe that the drivers themselves should be fined because the owners have little control over what the drivers do once they’re in the bus. Some believe it shouldn’t be illegal to drive drunk at all. It is kind of an absurd argument, but they are certainly passionate about it.

Can you imagine something like this happening in the United States? People getting out of their recliners, turning off the TV and blocking traffic for two straight days? To change a drunk driving law? Here roadblock days are like snow days in the States. Kids cross their fingers the night before hoping the protests last a day longer. They watch the news early the next morning for the announcement.

A mural at El Alto University showing indigenous protesters taking to the streets

In 2000 the multinational corporation Bechtel – currently in charge of the reconstruction of Iraq – was forced out of the country for raising water prices. The battle took place in the city of Cochabamba where I live, as tens of thousands took to the streets. Hundreds were wounded in the riots and a 17 year old boy was killed. In 2003 the capitol city of La Paz was surrounded by indigenous activists from the neighboring city of El Alto, the largest indigenous city in the continent. Dozens were killed, including military officials, and the president was pressured to resign. It is a completely different kind of political participation here. 93% of the population votes in elections, but the elections are only the beginning of the popular political process.

Anyway, so with my day off I slept late and played charango (an Andean guitar-type instrument) for two hours. Thank you protestors. Now I am somewhat vainly trying to muster myself out of this laziness to update my blog. Here we go.

I spent the last nine days in the two extremes of Bolivian society: the first four in its largest city of La Paz, the last five in a small indigenous village of 24 families on the shore of Lake Titicaca. La Paz was neon, flashing, pungent, rambunctious, overwhelming, like having the volume turned up full blast and blowing out the speakers. The indigenous village was ambling, lazy, silent, a steady inhaling and exhaling, like the tide of the lake on the rocky beach, versus the hyperventilating bustle of La Paz’s traffic jams and espresso shots. After a few days of rest my mind is still swirling with exhaustion trying to synthesize all the very different ways there are to live in the world.

Me posing goofily with some of the young radicals being educated at the University

Some brief details on La Paz and then way too much rambling about nothing in particular

I spent much of my time in La Paz wondering around the Witches’ Market absorbing the sights and smells. Many street vendors offered an impressive array of llama fetuses. They looked like dehydrated corpses of Martians found wrinkled and stiff in the desert. Their shriveled bodies hanging in clusters from the store roofs was slightly disconcerting. Some indigenous people around the city use the fetuses for sacrifices to Pachamama. I thought about buying one and bringing it home as a souvenir, but I assumed it would look suspicious in my carry-on. At other stands hallucinogenic peyote cacti were offered to me for about $3 American. Chop the cactus up, steep it in boiling water, strain and drink for a good time, the woman informed me. I declined. I did however buy a large bag of fresh aloe vera juice squeezed from the largest aloe plant I’ve ever seen. It feels sticky and disgusting applied to my sun burnt face, and it has a vague semen kind of smell, but it seems to be doing the job.

A collection of bizarre plants

I visited the Coca Museum in the Witches’ Market to learn about the history of the most sacred plant of the Andes. The Incans used oil extracted from the leaves to remove brain tumors. It’s been found buried with mummies over three thousand years old. It is one of the most nutritious plants in the world, with more calcium than milk and almost as much protein as meat. It helps with indigestion, headaches, and altitude sickness, particularly important up in the Andes Mountains. The leaf is still chewed all across the country and used in a variety of ceremonies. They chew it like we drink coffee and tea in the United States, as a mild stimulant to start the day fresh or as a social lubricant in gatherings of friends. It is also made into tea, cosmetics, lotion, candy, cookies, and, as I later discovered, a delicious chocolate cake. I went back for the cake a second time.

More notoriously, of course, it is used to make cocaine. I saw an exhibit using a series of mannequins to demonstrate its production. Poor campesinos are used in forced labor to stomp on the leaves with a mixture of hydrochloric acid and other noxious chemicals to extract the powder. Afterwards their feet are mutilated from the concoction and many cannot walk for the rest of their lives. For millennia the plant has been used for health, ritualistic and social reasons. Now it is being used to indulge the habits of rich frat boys and rock stars in the United States and Europe.

Bolivia kicked the DEA out of the country for trying to annihilate its fields of coca through excessive and inaccurate use of herbicides that killed more plants than just coca, as well as through other more direct tactics such as burning campesinos’ farms to the ground leaving them with no livelihood whatsoever. Everyone is much happier without the DEA here. Except, of course, the United States. The Bolivian government’s rational is logical: the drug war is a case of supply and demand. As long as there is demand in the United States, there will be supply in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. Fighting the supply side will never work, especially when the supply is a plant that grows natively all throughout the region in all kinds of climates. La oja de coca no es druga, proclaims a popular shirt in Bolivia.

A 16th century church outside of La Paz

The inside of the church, complete with paintings of Jesus in modern times fighting with guns in the revolution

Later we visited the World Bank and were given a presentation by a cheerful PR type. The World Bank has a tainted reputation in the so-called “developing” world for giving loans to elites with bad credit records who are in charge of the government. The people have no say in the matter, but they are the ones affected when the country’s economy is crippled trying to pay the high interest rates attached to the loans. The loans are also given with “conditions,” meaning a country must become a capitalist country open to exploitation by multinational corporations, otherwise they don’t receive any money. Once again, the decisions are made by already rich elites who aren’t affected when the masses can’t afford to buy water and fuel because its been privatized.

Ecuador refused to pay its debt and kicked the World Bank out of the country. So did Venezuela. After the earthquakes in Haiti the World Bank offered $100 million but only under very strict economic conditions that would’ve privatized much of the country. There was such a backlash against the idea that the Bank removed the conditions and gave Haiti the money ideologically free. The Bank exists in a reduced form in Bolivia today. Our PR man told us that “The Bank’s one goal is to stay alive, and it will change its politics for the sake of staying in a more liberal country such as Bolivia.” Sounds like a parasite to me.

A Bank of the South has also been established in South America that one day will likely replace the World Bank altogether, giving the continent agency over its own finances. It’s kind of like growing up and getting your own bank account instead of only getting money from your parents when you say the right things and do all your chores. The United States and the rest of the Western capitalist world still thinks it can treat South America like an infant.

Said a friend at the sight of La Paz sprawling across the mountains: "Urbanity: cooler than anything nature could ever do." My response: "Urbanity is nature, dude."

Later that same day we visited a feminist anarchist group called Mujeres Creando (Women Creating). One of the largest, most powerful capitalist organizations in the world followed by an anti-organization, anti-capitalist art activist collective in the course of a few hours. I would’ve loved to see the two groups debate each other.

The cognitive dissonance caused by the two groups predictably set off a few arguments among the students. The next day at lunch I had a talk with some friends about the best way to change the world. Us young idealistic types do this a lot. Like most of the students on this program, they were International Relations or Political Science majors, interested in using NGOs, politics, and, most importantly, money, to help people. We need to go into struggling, poverty-stricken countries like Bolivia, Guatemala, and Haiti, set them up with clean water systems, modern technology, modern agriculture. We need to build functioning democracies and successful businesses. Business is the most important part. Sweatshops are a good thing, they say, because anything that creates jobs and brings money to a country cannot be bad. We need to help these countries develop. We need to increase GDP, decrease inflation, raise this number, lower that one. It doesn’t matter what’s actually happening on the ground, it matters what’s happening on the graph.

I have a somewhat different perspective. As someone with admittedly very little knowledge of economic systems, I can approach the subject only from an intuitive level. But I don’t think expertise in a field really makes you any more qualified to have opinions than anyone else, because everybody is an expert on something and we all disagree with each other, so expertise really hasn’t done anything except make everybody more sure of why everybody else is wrong. So because of this I had no reservations in voicing my extremely unqualified positions.

I think the only change that has any lasting effect is change that comes from within a system. We humans are obsessed with trying to control things beyond our control, and foreign aid, development projects, the World Bank – all of these things – are instances of this. These are all instances of external change, of foreigners coming into a developing country and telling them how to improve their situation to join the developed world. It is imposed change rather than organic change. Imposed change can only be superficial because society is not restructured from the bottom-up, but from the top-down, and a pyramid balanced on its point rather than on its base will always crumble.

It’s like when the United States imposes democracy on another country (*ahem* Iraq) rather than allowing that country to fight for democracy on its own. In the short term the project will seem a success because there will be the illusion of democracy, but in the long term the project will fail because the people did not invent and build it themselves but unwrapped it fully formed as a gift. Think of how different our country would be if France had won the American Revolution for us rather than merely helping us to do it on our own. When change is external, the society becomes dependent on that external change to solve its problems as opposed to taking ownership over its own internal change. External change comes and leaves, but internal change can perpetuate itself.

As the saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination, because the journey is where principles are built gradually for the support of strong actions. By jumping straight to the destination – as is the result of external change in the form of imposed democracies, imposed capitalism in Latin America, imposed charity from many NGOs – the journey of internal change is lost and any outcome is an apparition floating precariously in the air, seemingly in flight but really just nose diving to the ground.

The whole idea of “development” is an imperialist, ego-driven masturbation. Third world and first world, developing and developed, savage and civilized – these are all colonialist terms that imply only one possible course of evolution, with our own society obviously being the standard with which to compare all others. Development projects seek to force other countries into our own evolutionary path rather than allowing them to become uniquely successful on their own merits. We are striving towards the creation of a globalized, monocultured, capitalist world, and everything I have learned about biology seems to suggest that diversity always wins over uniformity.

It’s like in the 70s when ecologists decided there weren’t enough deer in the wild. Wolves were killed and more deer were introduced. Now, in the 2000s, ecologists have decided we have way too many deer and not enough wolves. Rather than allowing a system to regulate itself internally, humans pretended to understand and took action. In every system an extremely complex tangle of variables exists. When outsiders come in with chainsaws and strike dumbly and bluntly at everything between them and their goal, it is no surprise to me that things fall apart.

So what do we do then to change the world? Surrender control? Not try to help people? Of course not. But I think there needs to be more focus on solving problems in our own countries rather than solving everybody else’s. So many problems in the world exist as the result of Western capitalism, of which the United States is home base, that if we really want to help peasants in Africa and South America, we will focus on reforming the politics and economics of our own country. The United States affects so much of the world both directly through its economic policies and indirectly through the model it sets. If we change our country, the world may follow.

And I personally think the best way to do that is through art rather than politics. The tool of politics is money, and because money is the cause of so many problems, more money is not going to solve anything. Money creates so-called “band-aid solutions,” like an anemic person putting bandages on their cuts rather than changing to a diet with more iron. I think art is what fuels the hopes and dreams of a people, and as I discussed in a former post, dreams are what determine the future of a country.

When Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, racism did not vanish. When blacks were given the right to vote, racism did not vanish. When Barack Obama became president, racism did not vanish. Racism will not vanish on any account of government. Neither will any other prejudice. Something else is required. All of progresses in the fight against racism were not the triumph of government – they were the triumph of culture. Government is always a reaction to culture, and government is always many steps behind, especially when that government is full of old white men whose only interaction with the world is in a mansion or private jet. Because democracy is a slow and bureaucratic process where officials must be elected and must draft and vote for and redraft laws, it cannot keep pace with a rapidly changing culture.

Government often exists as an inconvenience, a barrier to social change. It is only helpful when it is decreasing its power in regard to social freedom – giving blacks and women the right to vote, legalizing gay marriage, legalizing alcohol or marijuana... these are all the result of government decreasing its role as it finally succumbs to pressure from a culture that has outpaced it.

I think government can be useful in battling the damage of capitalism such as through universal healthcare, social security, and other kinds of economic regulation, but I also think these problems could be solved without the use of government, by people abandoning these economic systems altogether and creating something new based on human-to-human interaction rather than bank account to bank account. We make a distinction between sex for love and sex for money, scornfully labeling the latter “prostitution.” If this is true then is not every exchange done for money rather than love a kind of prostitution? If prostitution is to be scorned, so should selling food, selling books, selling anything. I think we can strive towards something new and I think art can create dreams for this new something.

I define art loosely – any work created by people with the intention of connecting with people: a website, a piece of music, a poem, a thoughtful conversation. These are interactions that take place from one human being to another, and their effects cannot be quantified. You can sell a piece of art, sure, but I think there is also something inherently anti-capitalist about art, even that which is sold. Anything that comes from a place of truth and love is priceless, and what is priceless is subversive to a system that worships capital.

Here’s a Charles Bukowski quote I like: “The only way to save the world is one life at a time. Anything else is romance or politics.”

Anyway, if you read all that, good for you. I could ramble on for pages more but I lost track of what I was talking about a long time ago. I don’t think my friends are wrong in wanting to help the world by bringing clean water and food to those that don’t have it. These are admirable goals. I just don’t know how effective they are at systemic change which would save more lives in the long run. Maybe you need both approaches. An anemic person still needs to put bandages on their cuts so they don’t get infected. But all the good intentions in the world will not keep bad things from happening in a society that is spiritually anemic.

And please, feel free to disagree with anything or everything that I write. I’m mainly writing to see what I think, because I don’t exactly know, as I tend to think many contradictory things at once. I disagree with myself from one moment to the next. I've also always wanted to be a musician or writer. Perhaps I am just finding ways to justify my dreams over those of others. In the end I don't think any of us can claim to know the only right path because there are an infinite amount of options.

I’ll tell you all about my indigenous village stay in the next post. It’s raining now and it sounds great on my tin roof and I want to listen to my new CD and go to sleep.

Love,

Tom

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P.S. Here are a whole bunch of pictures of Tiwanaku, a massive site of ancient ruins in northern Bolivia. The city supposedly hosted anywhere between 60,000 to 100,000 people, with its peak around 1100 AD. The site shows evidence of extensive agricultural terracing, irrigation systems, massive ceramics production, a sewer system and intricate stonework. A few different societies lived there over the ages. It was suddenly abandoned sometime around 1200 AD, no one is sure why. The Incans believed the inhabitants were all turned to stone because they offended the gods, thus explaining all of the statues.

Spooky.

The Gateway of the Sun; on the Solstice the sun rises in the arch

Our guide Oswaldo, the leading archaeologist at the site

Priests-in-training would live in this underground room for a few days to be reborn... How archaeologists know this about a site a thousand years old from a society with no written records, I have no idea. The tour led me to believe that 80% of archaeology is just saying things that sound cool with no real evidence.

The ancestor of the domestic potato: this variety is completely inedible and even a little poisonous. Why and how did early humans decide to grow it for food?

Carnaval

2010-02-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

The party...

It was barely 2 p.m. and most of the crowd was already wasted. Bodies crammed into the bleachers, some on top of other bodies, always with room for one more. Drink a Taquina, smash the can, toss it over the side, crack open another. The crowd sways deliriously to queasy, flat blasts of trumpet and tuba. Most definitely a fire hazard.

The smell of thirty thousand armpits, maybe more. All baking in the sun, which I’m closer to than I’ve ever been. My skin is burnt within fifteen minutes. The parade marches on into its fifth hour. All kinds of intricate costumes, each more terrifying and bizarre than the next, with misshapen noses and exploding eyes, Picasso characters escaped from their portraits. They dance on for hours under the dry heat of the Andean sun, so close it barely weaves its way through the mountaintops. On the top row I’m a fountain of sweat. Inside the costumes after hours of dancing and hours more to go, somehow, a living human persists.

The women have it easier. They have the highest concentration of sparkles packed into the tiniest amount of clothing I’ve ever seen. Grizzled men slouch out on the pavement for the good view.

I’m sitting with all the other gringos. Every one of us has our cameras aimed at the parade, but the real spectacle is behind us. I look down over the side of the bleachers. A man urinates shamelessly on the sidewalk. An old woman collects smashed beer cans. Green mohawks and Spider Man masks. Argentinians with dreadlocks selling grass and coke. Children offering bags of water balloon for a peso, about 14 cents US$. For the first time in Bolivia I can’t spot a street dog anywhere. There’s no space.

Something hard smacks me in the back of the head and I notice I’m covered in water. The war has begun. During lulls in the parade, after the devils and angels and warriors and showgirls and brass bands have passed, water balloons and shaving cream fill the sky. I head out front with a friend to get a good position and buy a bag of balloons from a cute little girl. I spot my target across the street, a blonde-haired white woman in a blue parka with an oversized pair of sunglasses. She looks jaded. I hurl a lopsided, pair-shaped balloon in her general direction but hit some bro with a popped collar and seashell necklace instead. He lets out a yelp. Excellent. Him and his bro brigade spot me and we wage war for the next five minutes. My friend Cameron spots an elegant-looking bourgeois type in the third row. He lobs out a bulky, phallic balloon. The woman sees it coming. She uses her infant as a shield. This goes on all day and most of the night.

Out in the market the war is more brutal. Rag-tag children pop out from corners equipped with super-soakers. Balloons fly out of car windows in drive-bys. Every block is full of vendors selling water balloons, water guns, water assault rifles, and what appears to be shaving cream. I’ve equipped myself with two cans of the shaving cream. The rest of my team has balloons. We don’t have to look hard for a good fight. Gringos are prime targets, right up there with the elderly. We chase children all around the block. One boy tries to hide in his mother’s meat-on-a-stick stand. “No cerca la comida, por favor,” she says. “Yeah, no problem.” I pull the kid out into the street and spray an X across his face.

Walking back towards the hotel, I squeeze my way through the pulsating crowd. Suddenly my face is covered in shaving cream. I can’t see anything. “Viva Carneval!” someone shouts. I respond with a laugh. Then comes another spray. “No mas, por favor!” I say, waving my arms. I wipe the cream out my eyes. It stings a bit. Who knows what’s in this stuff. Later, too late, I check my pockets and realize my cell phone is gone. Awesome. Those guys are slick.

Says some dude in my textbook: “The function of Carnaval is to reaffirm, at regular intervals, the truth and presence of myths in everyday life.” That’s bullshit. The function of Carneval, at least what I saw of it, was to get drunk and make a loud mess surrounded by the rest of your country. That’s not to say the costumes and music weren’t stunning, because they were, but the “refined cultural tradition” is only one aspect of the mayhem that is Carneval in Oruro.

Oruro is the second craziest Carneval city in Latin America, next to Rio de Janeiro. Its population triples for the weekend. Carneval literally translates to carne (meat) vaal (good-bye). It comes just before the month of Lent when good Catholics are supposed to give up meat for a month. Basically it is a God-sanctioned excuse to party hard before being forced to behave. Not that Bolivians give up meat anyway.

...And the hung-over clean-up

Like all parties, there is a downside to Carneval. When this many humans get together and drink beer, a mess is inevitably made. I saw absolutely no trashcans whatsoever on the streets of Oruro, and afterward the results were evident. While I take no credit for more than my two beer cans, a fair share of water balloon shreds were definitely my doing.

Cochabamba, where I live, is not too different. The norm in Bolivia when finishing beer or candy bar is to toss the can or wrapper on the street. At Carneval, a team is paid to clean up over night. They don’t get everything, but they do an impressive job. In most cities though at most times of the year, trash builds up and up and up. Bolivia is a place of extreme beauty and extreme filth, often in the same scene.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick describes his concept of kibble. In his dystopian vision of the future, after most humans have left earth, only abandoned buildings and rubble remain. Kibble is a lifelike entity that seeks to reproduce itself. Dick uses the example of an empty box of matches. Its purpose served, the box exists only as a remnant of its former calling. And the Law of Kibble states that one box of empty matches inevitably leads to two, then three, and so on.

The same is true of the water balloons we were all hurling with such glee. The plastic was a container for water, nothing more. Once the balloon popped, the water absorbed easily into the earth or evaporated into the air. But the plastic remains and will remain for millions of years or until burned and transformed into toxic gas.

In places like Bolivia, so-called “Third World” or “developing” countries, not much emphasis is placed on cleaning up garbage. As the poorest nation in Latin America next to Haiti, Bolivia is busy trying to pull its populace out of poverty. Trash is not a priority. Under every bridge is an ever-growing pile of junk, and floating down every stream is a collection of evidence for the downside of consumption.

“What a dirty place,” we from the First World say when we see places like this. But just because Bolivia’s filth is out in the open does not make it any more polluted than the rest of us. In the United States we produce much more waste per capita, but it is shipped away, out of sight. It’s like when my mom used to ask me to clean my room, and I just shoved everything under my bed or in an empty drawer. Just because our waste is in a landfill somewhere and not in our streets does not make us any cleaner, it just makes us in denial. I wonder how our mentality would change if we were more like Bolivia, if instead of throwing things in the trash we threw them in our front yard or on the floors of our kitchen, if we were forced to confront our trash every day and it didn’t just magically disappear at the curbside. Maybe someone should do a Supersize Me-style documentary where they keep all their trash in their house for a year to see just how much builds up.

But like I said, I was throwing just as many water balloons as everyone else. Probably more in fact. And what became of the pieces of plastic that used to be balloons but are now just kibble? Did I really need to condemn the Earth to eons of extra trash just so I could nail some booger-faced kid in one glorious, fleeting moment?

More and more I feel there is a disconnect between my theory and practice. I’m vegan and I don’t buy clothes from sweatshops any more. I voted for Barack. Great. But isn’t there always another step to take? Should I stop driving a car? Should I stop using electricity? Should I cancel my flight back to the United States? Really, how can one person justify using all that fossil fuel? Just for the sake of adventure, self-discovery, character building, yada yada yada. All of these phrases become ironic when juxtaposed with the amount of pollution emitted into the air on my account.

When is it enough?

I’m told there is a whirlpool of plastic twice the size of Texas in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s only a matter of time before we’re all sucked in.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes that we have no obligation to help anybody else. If one wants to be a hermit and never speak to another human being, they are entitled to do so. But, Thoreau writes, we do have an obligation to make sure we are not actively hurting anyone, and that is much more difficult than helping. For this reason Thoreau stopped paying taxes, because he realized that just by being a citizen of the United States, he was contributing to the Mexican-American War.

Thoreau obviously went to jail for his actions. Isn’t that ridiculous? That society is set up so that to be what one considers to be a truly good person, one ends up in jail? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? I think people like Jesus, perhaps Gandhi too, were people who lived their lives according to their theories, their consciences, and it was because they had no fear of what the repercussions would be. They realized that nothing was as important as purifying themselves, for only then could they help others.

In The World is as You Dream It, John Perkins paints a more optimistic picture than I have so far. He writes about the importance placed on dreaming in small-scale societies in the Amazon and Andes. In the industrialized world, we use doctors to solve our health problems. In many non-industrialized societies shaman are used to intervene in a spiritual rather than biological realm. Shaman have healed tumors, phobias, migraines, all kinds of ailments that are usually left for specialized doctors because shaman recognize that so much relies on how we think. Call it the placebo effect if you want, but does it not take great skill to harness the power of that effect? Everything we do and feel in our lives is a result of the vision we have for ourselves and the dream we have for our people. If we change that dream, we change the outcome. It is true for our bodies and it is true for entire societies.

As Perkins points out, at the basis of our current dream is the ego. We each see ourselves as separate entities rather than a unity. We think we can hurt plants, animals, and other humans without hurting ourselves. That’s like a mitochondria attacking the nucleus, or an arm tearing off a leg without realizing they are the same body.

A result of this loss of unity and the creation of the ego is a fear of death. Because we see ourselves as separate and because we prize our individual lives over all else, we fear what will happen when we “die.” We build massive skyscrapers and film ourselves and record our music on plastic discs. We measure progress on how long a material lasts, how many years can be added to our lives even if most of those years are spent in a hospital, how many pixels we can churn out on a computer screen that will take eons to biodegrade. Somehow, we think, if our stuff lives on, we will too. But is there not a limit for the amount of stuff one planet can hold? I mean think about it, all of these CDs and DVDs and knick-knacks and what-nots and computer monitors and clothes hangers and microwaves and shampoo bottles and desk lamps and everything else... it’s not going to go anywhere when we die, but a new generation of CDs and DVDs and knick-knacks and what-nots and computer monitors, etc. etc. will keep coming out. The amount of kibble will only increase. Where is there space left for humans? Are we becoming subservient to our stuff?

When a thing is processed, it is by definition separate from its origin. High fructose corn syrup, double-quarter-pounder with cheese, MTV, antibiotics, SlimFast, four-wheel drive, $3.15 a gallon, Nike sneakers, four bathroom house, Labor Day sales, buy one get one free, paper or plastic, HDTV, Blu-ray, gigabytes, bobble head Jesus, Marlboro, 30 day warranty, Red Delicious, SAT, ACT, IQ, megachurch, Fox News, CNN, talking heads, shopping lines, supermarkets, high fructose fucking corn syrup!

We are processed human beings living packaged, plastic-wrapped lives.

It doesn’t have to be this way. While we prize concepts such as durability and longevity in our products, in some cultures in the Andes and Amazon, houses are built specifically to crumble back into the earth in just a few years. Then a new one is built and it survives for a while before crumbling itself. Durability is not the ideal, because these cultures do not see anything wrong with dying. These people do not see themselves as technologies destined to become obsolete. They are not fighting to stay in existence in any form whatsoever, constantly seeking to add more years and megahertz and horsepower and efficiency and all those other worthless numbers, because there are worse things than crumbling back into the earth.

The good news is that these people, are, well, people. These kinds of beliefs are possible within human nature. It is just a matter of a change of vision, of dreaming a new world.

For the record, here is my dream: a world where a thing can be used but not useless, where life is not a race, where a group of people can get together to have a good time and not make a mess.

Two things:

A passage from The World is as You Dream it:

I remembered a story I had heard about an Apache warrior who was captured by Comanches. He was stripped and his limbs were stretched out and tied to stakes in the ground. His entire body was painted with honey. The Comanches then left him to the mercy of the ants.

At first their bites infuriated him. He struggled desperately to free himself. But once he understood that there was no way for him to break loose, he decided to look at the world from the ants’ perspective. He projected himself into them. As they ate away at him, he visualized himself turning into an ant. Things he had taken for granted – pebbles, dewdrops, his own skin – took on new meaning. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with a feeling of ecstasy, for he felt himself becoming reunited, through the ants, with his mother, the Earth.

And lyric from Radiohead’s “Optimistic”: You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough

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On Sunday I head to La Paz and then I'm off to a rural indigenous village for five days. If I have a chance to update my blog in La Paz I will, but if not, you'll hear from me in two weeks.

More pictures:

Hello friends,

2010-02-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

Here is your chance to follow the adventures of a godless vegan in Catholic, meat-obsessed Bolivia. I’m here for the next three and a half months on a study abroad program for school, and then in June I’m off to Belize, for chocolate farming and Mayan archaeology. I’ll write whenever I feel inclined, which could be anywhere from very often to hardly ever. Read it or don’t, no me importa. Anyway.

First, some boring background information: Cochabamba, the city where I’m living, is in the center of Bolivia. It’s about 8500 meters high up in the Andes Mountains and has a population of 580,000. It is home to La Cancha, the largest market in all of South America, a dizzying sweaty mess of tiendas selling everything from llama fetuses to fireworks to alpaca wool sweaters. Like most sizeable cities, some people live in mansions and some people beg on the streets. The people like people everywhere around the world value family, friends, religion, good food, and Hollywood action movies. Especially anything with Brad Pitt (“Brawd Peet”)

They have over 200 kinds of potatoes here. They’re just now getting into Alvin and the Chipmunks and Sugar Ray. They put ketchup on their pizza. They keep tortoises as pets. They drink juice and milk out of plastic bags.

Here’s a photo of my host family. I have a mother, Maritza, a father, Luis, a 16 year-old brother, Andres, and 19 and 24 year-old sisters, Maritza (“Estrella”) and Carola. They’re a blast. Maritza Sr., like most Bolivian mothers, feels it is her duty to please. She cooks vegan for me, despite my insistence that I can be completely flexible. She finds my diet exotic and intriguing, and mastering the vast array of meat substitutes is quickly becoming her new passion. I make my bed every morning, but she comes in my room when I’m at school and remakes it.

Luis is gone most of the time, flooring it down narrow streets in his taxi, blasting USA rock kan roll (that’s how they spell it here). When he’s around, he’s hilarious. Even when I don’t understand what he’s saying – which is most of the time – his facial expressions and sound effects cue that he’s being chistoso. I laugh like I know what’s going on. Carola, Estrella., and Andres bicker constantly, pinching and slapping each other, calling each other pet names like gordito (little fatty) and waa waa (baby).

Carola and Estrella like watching me flail my limbs awkwardly when I dance with them. Andres’s favorite game is chess, which is my favorite game too, so we are becoming fast friends/enemies. I also have a cute old abuelita whose back is entirely horizontal.

Here’s my dog, named Chilabear after a soccer star. He doesn’t have any teeth and all the street dogs hate him and are always trying to kill him. Luis claims he’s 140 years old. There's also a cat, but he's an asshole.

Anyway I want this blog to be a combination of details from my life and a record of my thoughts to see how they evolve over the course of the semester. So here are some thoughts.

“Catholicism”

You might recognize this guy. His name’s Jesus, and in Cochabamba he’s over 33 meters tall – one meter for every year of his life and a bit extra so he can be taller than the Jesus in Rio de Janeiro. He’s visible from every part of the city and at nighttime he’s lit up like a casino. Play your cards right and you might get into Heaven.

Bolivia is 78% Catholic, 20% Protestant, and 2% something else. There’s also a growing evangelical movement. When my family asked what religion I was, I thought it would be easier to say I was Catholic than to explain the nuances of my worldview in semi-coherent Spanish. While I’m not sure if I believe in God, I’m kind of a Unitarian Universalist, which is the rebellious offspring of progressive Christianity, which came from Catholicism, so it was pretty much the truth. I at least told them I didn’t practice very much. But now that they know I’m Catholic, I have no excuse not to go to Church with them every Sunday. I sit twitchily in the pew, making vague cross gestures across my chest and trying to look devout.

33 meter Jesus on the mountaintop

Normally when a priest is preaching, it’s easy to zone out. But when a priest is preaching in a foreign language, it’s doubly easy. It is interesting though not being able to understand what he’s saying because I experience the service on a sensory rather than linguistic level. The timbre and resonance of his voice, full of reverb and echo to invoke maximal righteousness, is powerful and frightening. This balding white man stands high on a platform, his words soaring ferociously over a sea of brown people, a lingering artifact from colonial days. Only he partakes in the communion of the blood of Christ. The rest of us just get stale bread.

Bolivia is Catholic all right, but the kind of Catholic where many people in the countryside sacrifice llama fetuses and coca leaves to Pachamama (Mother Earth). In the city photos of naked women are pervasive, on store walls in La Cancha and the ceilings of buses. Cartoons of shapely mermaids are particularly popular, as the European mermaid was easily merged (syncretized, in anthropology jargon) during colonization with the pre-Colombian water spirits, and modern aesthetic tastes have given the mermaid large breasts and a visible buttcrack. Magazine stands are a collage of butts and breasts, and if you can find me a street in Cochabamba without a manikin with side-boob, I’ll pay you generously. The walls in my host parents’ room are covered in a bizarre mix of Jesus portraits and posters of slutty pop stars and violent Hollywood movies.

In Bolivia, as with everywhere else, religion in scripture is a very different thing from religion in practice. My church experience felt Catholic enough, but once you leave the doors a very different world is unfolding. Catholicism was literally inflicted on the native people through the barrel of a gun, but it was not adopted without concessions.

Ideas are almost impossible to fully eradicate because they are so adept at morphing and adapting into new forms. Here the religions of the Inka and the Aymara and the other pre-Colombian societies have survived in a reduced but recognizable state. This combined with globalized media, Spanish machismo, and an infinite amount of other factors too complicated to ever uncover have created Catholicism in its current manifestation.

In Cat’s Cradle, which I am about halfway through, Kurt Vonnegut writes that a useful religion can be founded on lies. Two characters invent a new religion on the fictional island of San Lorenzo where the people live in miserable poverty. One character takes the role of savior and the other takes the role of dictator of country. The characters outlaw the religion because they realize that will make it even more popular. The tyrant and the saint exist in opposition to one another, but each requires the other to survive. Vonnegut writes:

“The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever. But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant of the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

“So life became a work of art,” I marveled.

How this relates to my point I’m not exactly sure. I mainly just wanted to share a sweet Vonnegut passage. But the idea that life becomes art through religion is a profound one. Like a work of art, Catholicism in Bolivia is a mish-mash of so many different styles from so many different authors. It is not a cohesive whole but a contradictory mess that every individual internalizes differently to apply meaning to their lives. Like the walls of my parents’ room, Catholicism in Bolivia is random, tacky, bloody, slutty, hopeful, terrifying, ugly and beautiful all at once. Whether it’s true or not is beside the point.

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Okay that’s all for now. More to come sometime. Here’s some more photos.

The views from my house (above and below)

Street dogs come in all sizes