Tom Goes to Bolivia: Hello friends,

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.