A Rastafarian, A Small Boy and Two Giants
It´s not often that I explain the quotes I use to head posts on this blog which usually have little or anything to do with the content. I choose to explain this one because it has everything to do with the content, whether we like it or not. Lauren and I arrived in Cochabamba three weeks ago and had been staying in my dear friend Carwil´s apartment until he arrived on the 12th of this month with his lovely fiance Sophie. We took off travelling and touring together and in this time a nickname for our clan emerged. A Rasta, A Small Boy and Two Giants: our inexcapable percieved international identities, the way people see each of us who aren´t used to seeing people like us. Carwil has a giant puffy fluff of afro hair and despite having absolutley no other qualities that lend themselves to rastafarian behavior he will be identified and labeled as that anyway. Lauren has been called by masculine pronouns by virtually everyone we´ve met so far, and when you look at her and see a boy, you certainly don`t see a 28 year old one. Of course, myself, at 5´8″ and Sophie at a remarkable 6 feet tower over everyone in the mostly indigenous population of Bolivia. This is what strikes people about us when we are not at home.
At clinica Wiñay I was the Gran Khali again, the biggest wrestler in the WWE, and one of the largest people in the world, or so it felt. I volunteered at a women´s health and dental clinic in Quillacollo catering to largely Quechua speaking indigenous families for the two weeks we were in Cocha, and on more than one occasion walked up on the doctors or nurses who worked there making jokes about how big I am. I would try to fall in step and compare myself to the 33 meter tall statue of Christ that looms over the town, and boy did they love that. I would walk down the hall in the clinic and spot a baby spotting me and they would systematically freeze in their tracks like they saw the worlds largest ghost. “What the heck are you?” they must have been asking. “I´ve seen people before and YOU are not it.” It was like being sized up by the kids in at Odilia´s house in Guatemala all over again. Its amazing how much 5 to 7 inches can make you feel so out of place, so excessively present. The one thing I did think I had on my side at this clinic, unlike at Odilia´s was a much more polished command of the Spanish language, which I wont say proved to be useless but good lord did it feel like it sometime. I was doing patient intake at the clinic so women would come in and tell me their names and I either had to find them in the computer or make them a new chart if they were a new patient. Patient after patient they would tell me their four names and I couldn´t understand a word or even a letter of them. I would ask them to repeat them so many times it was humiliating. They spoke in such hushed voices and when I would ask them to spell their names they would just sound them out. I would then write the name and they would confirm it was correct with or without looking at it and then I would look it up in the computer and find something totally different. I would then get their charts which would say something different all together. Getting their address was even worse. Proper nounds I´ve DEFINTELY never heard of versus the occcasional familiar, Maria or Flores or Rosa or Guittierez, each of which there are more spellings for than I thought possible. Later they would be uncertain of their birthdates, and would approximate their street addresses by saying I live “at the middle” or “at the end” of a particular street. I can´t remember the last time I felt this inept. After awhile some of the Colque´s and Mamani´s and Quispe´s and Quiroga´s started to repeat themselves and I got more comfortable. I tried to apply my western lens to the practices I saw in some cases and deconstruct it in others. I poked around for the staff´s various opinions about abortion and what they would do when women came seeking it to no success.
They invited Lauren and I to come to the clinic on the first friday of the month in which they do an offering to Pachamama, the mother earth, to bless the clinic. This involves building a fire indoors, burning coca leaves and little idols made of sugar over top of it and spilling large amounts of booze on the floor. It also involvs sitting around it until your eyes tear up from the smoke and yelling “salud!” everytime you drink, or even worse “vacio!” which means someone wants to go head to head with you on chugging whats left of the beer in your hand. Lauren and I have hardly drank on this trip but I have to say that girl does not back down from a challenge. They inquired about our lives, compared our worlds to theirs, offered us more and more beer and coca leaves on our empty stomachs until it was time to go. We left drunk, and happy, and smokey smelling. The day I left they had all forgotten it was my last day so they told me to come back in the night. I came back and they gave me a foil wrapped box containing a porcelain statue of a women in a Nurses uniform holding a baby upside down that says “gynocologist” in Spanish underneath. It was maybe the nicest, and most thoughtful gift I have been given by people who knew so little about me. They then sent Lauren and I on a wild goose chase for a traditional fermented grain licour called Chicha in which corn is first chewed up to initiate the fermentation process. After being yelled at by old men, chased away by dogs, nearly fondled by a drunk guy and straining out a couple dozen flys we finally aquired about 2 liters of the stuff for approximately a dollar and 14 cents.
We´ve spent the last few days touring the salt flats near the Chilean border and looking at some of the nicest scenery I´ve ever seen with some of the nicest people in my life. I went from standing out like a sore thumb to bouncing around in a Land Rover full of sore thumbs. We go home tomorrow back to our own worlds where we are normal and don´t have much to explain.
Happy and weary,
Andie