La Paz, Bolivia: Why I’m Not Disappointed That We Didn’t Go to Prison

Action
While in La Paz, Josh and I did not visit San Pedro Prison.

Reflection
To help plan our trip, I’ve been making lists ahead of time of what I want to do in each city we visit. It helps us prioritize and figure out how long we want to spend in each city. Since I first began reading South American guidebooks last summer, I’ve been excited about touring the San Pedro prison in La Paz. According to the guidebook, tourists can go to the prison and request tours from inmates, who need the money to pay for food. This seemed to be a strange arrangement, given how difficult it is to get permission to visit US prisons. Having visited prisons in the US, I was curious to see the conditions in Bolivia.

We spent our time in La Paz walking around the city, visiting its numerous markets, and checking out the coca museum. We were planning to visit the prison before taking an afternoon bus out of town on our third day. By late morning of our final day, we realized we wouldn’t have time to visit the prison. We slept in a little and still had emails to write that would lay the groundwork for our time in Argentina and at the World Social Forum.

Surprisingly, I’m not (that) disappointed that we didn’t tour the prison. When reading guidebooks, I distill cities into lists of Things to Do, and I can’t imagine visiting a place and not checking off things on that list. Once I reach a city, however, life intervenes. Wandering the streets, buying postcards and sampling different foods, hearing the music blaring from CD shops, I experience the city and the once-important list seems disconnected from the full experience of a place. Moreover, traveling isn’t just sight-seeing. It’s also taking the time to write postcards, sleep, and coordinate the next steps of the journey. So, even though 2 months ago I would have been disappointed if I had been told that I would be unable to visit San Pedro prison, now I’m content with our time spent in the capital of Bolivia.

Question
How do you plan what you’ll do and see on a trip? How do you feel when what happens doesn’t match up with your plans?

El Alto, Bolivia: General Strike!

Action
On January 8th we arrived in Puno, Peru, with the intention of moving on to La Paz, Bolivia in the next couple days. We soon discovered, however, that buses weren’t running to La Paz anytime soon, because of a general strike around La Paz. No one seemed to know much about the strike, except that the highways were blockaded, transportation wasn’t running, and water rights were involved. We managed to get to Copacabana, across the Bolivian border, on the 10th, and although the buses still weren’t running to La Paz, word on the street was that a round of buses would depart early the next morning. Very early.

On Tuesday, January 11th, we awoke at 3:45 am, crawled out of our hotel beds, and stumbled onto the lone bus waiting at the town square. The bus was full of tourists and locals, so full that only a few standing room spots remained for Renate and I. For the next hour we clung to the handrails as the bus swerved along highland roads. We tried to sleep and avoid getting queasy, but weren’t particularly successful.

At 5:00 we arrived at the river. Normally, vehicles are ferried across the river to continue the journey. The ferry owner didn’t seem to have awakened yet. It started to rain, and for the next hour we huddled next to a building outside the bus, grateful to be on solid land.


At 6:00 the sun started to rise and ferries started to transport the waiting buses and vans across. Our bus seemed to be weighing the ferry down, but gradually it reached the other shore.


The next two hours of our trip were sunlit, and slightly easier. At 9:00, however, our bus stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and the driver said that we all had to get out and walk the rest of the way. He explained that the road ahead was blockaded, and the bus couldn’t pass. We were apparently at the edge of El Alto, the booming poor people’s city that had grown up next to La Paz. The driver said that La Paz was an hour’s walk away and that there were bicycle carts up ahead to help us. Other Bolivians said that it was 2 hours, or 3 hours, or just far.

After 15 minutes of haggling, most of the passengers began to retrieve their bags and march off down the blockaded road. With two oversized hiking backpacks, two handbags, and only a few hours of sleep, we were somewhat reluctant to embark on a trek of unknown distance, especially since El Alto was over 4,000 meters high, perched above the crater that housed La Paz (itself at an altitude of “only” 3,500 meters). There didn’t appear to be much of a choice, however.

Walking down the main highway road, we soon began to encounter the roadblocks. Every hundred meters or so, the local residents had placed a row of rocks, bikes, debris, and/or people across the road. Next to the low-tech barriers, clusters of people were talking, eating, knitting, playing, and/or heckling passing pedestrians. As we stepped over each barrier, the people generally smiled, laughed, and made some light-hearted jokes at our expense. The mood was very relaxed, and generally friendly.


Our march continued like this for 4 hours. The sun came out and it got hotter. We got thirsty and hungry, and picked up roadside snacks. Our lungs struggled to acclimate to the altitude. We began to despise each souvenir and extra shirt we were carrying in our bulging backpacks. More people swelled the streets, Our hopes of reaching La Paz rose and fell with each hill crest.

Eventually, we arrived at the border of La Paz. The streets and sidewalks were even more full of people, and the highway had been turned into a pedestrian route for protesters and other residents.


We then reached the main protest rally. Hundreds of campesinos were milling about, making and listening to speeches. A line of cops bordered the rally, calmly and without aggression.


Right after we arrived, a TV news crew approached and asked to interview us. The report asked us several questions in Spanish, and then another reporter interviewed us in English. Mentally and physically exhausted, we tried to explain that, despite the inconveniences, we were in solidarity with and support of the strike.

A couple days later, we learned about the context of the strike. In 1997, under pressure from the World Bank, the Bolivian government privatized the water and sewage systems of La Paz and El Alto. Under the new management consortium, owned jointly by the French corporation Suez, water and sewage user rates increased drastically, and many areas were left without access. By the time of the strike, water and sewer hookup for a household cost over $445 (typical El Alto residents earn as little as $2.50 a day). 52% of El Alto residents lacked basic water and sewer services.

On January 12th, under pressure from the strike, the Bolivian president agreed to cancel the privatized water contract immediately and to guarantee water and sewer service for El Alto and La Paz.

Reflection
We were deeply impressed by the strike and its results. With very few resources, the El Alto residents had managed to entirely block transportation into La Paz, and force the government to change policies. Unlike mass protests in the North, there were no wide-reaching email campaigns, no non-violence or civil disobedience training, and no permits to march. The people simply reached the point of intolerance, and collectively reclaimed their right to water.

Question
What would you have told the TV interviewers? Could a general strike like this happen in your city?

Lima, Peru: Foods Without Borders

Action
Lima offered us little of what we expected, and much of what we didn’t. We visited Peru’s megalopolis capital for four days, staying with electronic privacy and human rights superstar Katitza. We didn’t enter a single museum or church, but instead toured the homes of strangers.

When not making friends, we made food. I offered to cook an “exotic vegan meal” for our hostess, and Katitza invited vegetarian friend Rudy and his girlfriend to join us. The resulting Peruvian version of African peanut stew seemed to be a hit. Katitza added the specially blended Inca Kola for a beverage, and Rudy whipped up a Peruvian quinoa dessert to top off the meal.


The next day, new friend César escorted us to an unassuming downtown row of food stands, to sample some local desserts. We had seen other stands selling mazamorra morada and arroz zambito earlier, but had been too intimidated by their mysterious and globulous appearance. Fortunately, César helped us decipher, and subsequently devour, the offerings.


Reflection
During these and other Lima encounters, food often seemed like a proxy for language. We’d improved our Spanish quite a bit by the time we were in Lima, but we still had trouble understanding much of the rapid-fire Peruvian colloquial language. Regardless of our Spanish skills, we were able to communicate clearly with food exchanges.

For me at least, food was one of the most rewarding ways of cultural learning. I felt that I was able to learn and express more by cooking and eating together than by non-culinary discussion. I’ve always enjoyed sharing food with others, and of course vice versa as well. In this case, I felt that sharing food helped us compensate for our language deficiencies a bit.

Question
How else have you communicated with other people across language barriers?

Lima, Peru: The People will invite you into their homes…

Action
Late one afternoon in Lima, Josh and I took a public mini-bus to a new neighborhood. We weren’t sure where the mini-bus was going to stop, so Josh tried to ask the attendant for directions. As often happens when it becomes clear that we’re not sure about bus stops, a local guy offered us some advice. When we got off the bus, the local guy began walking with us and we made small talk. Soon after he and Josh discovered that they both enjoyed independent music, Cesar invited us back to his place to listen to some Peruvian metal and hardcore and meet his family. We stayed at their place for a couple hours listening to music, eating dinner, and playing with his son Diego. The next night, Cesar and Andrea gave us a tour of Lima by night.


The day after we met Cesar, I had some interviews in another neighborhood. Between interviews, while I was taking pictures of a park, a woman who was walking her dog offered (in perfect English) to take a picture of me.

We began talking and I learned that she was a teacher at the American School in Lima and her son lived in the U.S. Before long, I was invited back to her place for a glass of water before I continued my walk to my next meeting.

Reflection
Guidebooks often tout the friendliness of locals by saying, “they’ll even invite you into their homes.” With the exception of one instance in Thailand, I’ve never been invited into people’s homes. I don’t take it personally, since I’m not sure I’d invite some traveler that I had just met on a NYC subway back to my apartment for refreshments. Yet, in Peru I was invited into two homes in 24 hours. I’m not sure why these people decided after ten minutes of conversation that they trusted me enough to enter their domiciles. I wonder if Cesar and Consuela were even more generous, because I was a foreigner. Surprised as I was by these interactions in Peru, they felt friendly and natural.

Question
When do you or would you invite people into your home? Have you ever invited a stranger into your home?

Cuenca, Ecuador: Celebrating the Old Year by Burning it Down

Action
On New Years Eve 2004, Renate and I took a bus from Alausi to Cuenca, in the highlands of Ecuador. Driving along the mountain roads, we were repeatedly stopped by blockades of hyperactive costumed youth, who would let us pass only after some friendly harassment and solicitation of monetary donations. Some of the costumes were genuinely frightening.


Upon arriving in Cuenca, we found the streets full of huge figurines, often in strange and surprising poses:




As we passed by the street scenes, people tending to them would often grab us and lead us around the dioramas and figures, explaining their significance. Apparently, many individual neighborhoods, families, and organizations had created their own displays for what was called Año Viejo (Old Year). Each scene was intended to mock, celebrate, or recreate some memorable happening from the year that was ending.

Later in the afternoon and evening, people began to burn many of the figurines in the streets. Someone explained to us that this served to expel the presence of the year’s more unpopular people (e.g. politicians, celebrities, sports stars).


As midnight approached, we could see at least 5 fires burning around our building, amidst the firecrackers being exploded by kids in the streets.


Reflection
Growing up in the US, my parents rarely let me participate in street blockades or burn effigies on the sidewalks, not even when celebrating New Years. Renate keeps telling me that I turned out ok, but I still wonder how differently things might have been if my parents had spent more time fanning the flames of celebratory street fires with me. Or if I’d been able to nourish my creative instincts more by building giant derogatory representations of civic leaders. Or if I’d learned to block traffic at an earlier age.

Sure, fireworks at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor were nice, but did they really further my understanding of socio-political developments of the past year? Did I personally learn any new creative or destructive skills? Did they allow me to work together with my neighbors to beautify our streets and molest passing cars? Watching the fires burn as the clock struck midnight, I couldn’t help but feel a biting sense of deprivation. Or maybe I had just inhaled too many smoke fumes…

Question
Who or what would you have burned in effigy for 2004? What street dioramas would you have constructed? How would you have harassed motorists?

Quito, Ecuador: Three Ways of Getting to Know a City

Action
We spent four days and three nights in Quito, Ecuador. Our first full day there, Wilson, a professor of architecture and planning, gave us a tour of the city from an urban planner’s perspective. First, he took us to the rim of a mountain valley where we had an overview of the city:


From there, Wilson pointed out different neighborhoods and their attributes. Next, we drove down to one of those neighborhoods and Wilson told us about his involvement in building the community. Finally, we joined Wilson, his wife and son for lunch at a local restaurant. They helped us pick out veggie-friendly traditional Ecuadorian foods.

We spent our second full day in Quito running errands. Josh had to get a vaccination, I had to buy a pen and we both had to get plane tickets from Bolivia to Brazil. Both the injection and the airline-ticket-purchasing required us to go to Quito’s equivalent of Mid-town Manhattan, i.e. lots of office buildings. Between errands, we lounged in a spacious park that we couldn’t help but compare to Central Park. To top the day off, we walked around a picturesque neighborhood, built into a hill-side, that Wilson recommended to us:


Finally, on our third full day in Quito, after a brief tour of the Old Town with Wilson, Josh and I wandered a bit on our own stopping to take pictures of the cathedrals and other buildings the guidebook told us were important, like the monastery of San Francisco:


Reflection
We left Quito, feeling like we knew the city pretty well. I think it’s because we experienced the city in three different ways.

1. We had a local show us the city. In Quito, the insider-urban-planner’s perspective was especially relevant to Josh, but I also enjoyed hearing about the different ways neighborhoods had changed and were changing and the projects Wilson and his students were working on. It was also the first time we visited a Latin American city where we had an overview that explained what types of people live in what types of areas. Often when we visit cities, we try to figure that out on our own, but we often end up seeing only the parts of the city charted by the guidebook’s maps.

2. We used the city as if we were living there. While I was experiencing it, I was disappointed with our day of errands in Quito. I kept wishing our errands would end soon, so that we could explore the touristy historical center of Quito. By the end of our stay in Quito, though, I appreciated the day of errands. We engaged with people doing their everyday activities, while we too, were doing our (relatively) everyday, non-tourist activities. I think we kept comparing Quito to NYC that day because we were experiencing Quito as we experience NYC.

3. We visited the traditional tourist sites, while reading our guidebook. The buildings were beautiful and the plazas grand and we enjoyed trying to capture those qualities in photos.

Question
What ways have you used to get to know a city?

Guatemala and Ecuador: Not So Native Dress

Action
In Guatemala and Ecuador, both home to large indigenous populations, we often admired the elaborate and regionally distinctive dress of native women.

Guatemala:


Ecuador:


At the same time, we’ve been reading Eduardo Galeano’s epic “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent”, a sort of people’s history of Latin America. Galeano also takes note of indigenous dress: “Tourists love to photograph altiplano natives in their native costumes, unaware that these were imposed by Charles III at the end of the eighteenth century. The dresses that the Spaniards made Indian females wear were copied from the regional costumes of Estremaduran, Andalusian, and Basque peasant women, and the center-part hair style was imposed by Viceroy Toledo.”

Reflection
For better or worse, we haven’t taken many pictures of altiplano (highland) natives in their native costumes, even though indigenous people are all around us. But we love the handmade fabrics and different styles (especially the hip Ecuadorian hats). We’ve also been told repeatedly that indigenous women, especially those who wear traditional dress, are marginalized and denigrated by latinos (people of European or mixed ancestry who don’t identify as indigenous). Perhaps as a result, many younger indigenous women are adopting more Western dress, such as jeans and t-shirts.

It seems that the Spaniards’ approach was at least somewhat effective. Because indigenous women were dressed in exotic peasant outfits, they were and are visually marked as different - and in the eyes of many, as inferior.

Question
If one of the main purposes of ‘traditional’ dress has been to maintain ethnic segregation and inequality, should it be maintained, let alone celebrated? Are blue jeans and t-shirts a step towards equality… or a new form of externally dictated dress… or integration into Western forms of consumption… or…? What do you consider the purpose of your dress?

Latin America: You (Don’t) Have Mail!

Action
Since Renate and I will be away from North America for a full year, we’ve been trying to keep in touch with you all as much as possible. Besides this blog, we’ve been known to send rambling emails, cryptic postcards, and even some care packages with special treats collected on our journeys.

Alas, our attempts at multi-modal communication are becoming more difficult. Starting in Mexico, the price of mail has been soaring higher and higher. In Oaxaca, we sent our last round of gift packages, at a cost of $40. Since then, we’ve only sent a few mixed packages back to ourselves, with the intent of distributing the loot when we return. As we make our way further south, however, even these packages are migrating out of our price range. In Ecuador, to send only a small package with half of our extra stuff would have cost $20. In Peru, it cost $5 just to send a couple postcards.

Reflection
Growing up in the land of 20 cent postcards and $3 media mail packages, postal mail has always seemed rather accessible. If a friend or family member is in a different city and I want to send them something, no problem.

Not so down here. To start, it’s rather difficult and inconvenient to send mail. Only the biggest cities have more than one post office, and mailboxes are almost as rare. Many post offices aren’t equipped for sending packages. In Guatemala, you could only send packages over 2 kg (a small box) from the central post office in the capital.

Even when postal services are accessible, they’re out of the price range of most people. A $1.30 postcard might seem pricey by US standards, but in Peru it’s the price of a basic meal. Sending a package can cost as much as food for a week.

Question
Have you received any mail from us? If so, did it bring tears to your eyes? Or would you have preferred a week’s supply of Peruvian food?

Digression
We still have some extra postcards looking for recipients… anyone who posts a comment may just get one.

Central America: Men and Women with Guns

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When Josh took this picture of me at a gas station convenience store, his goal wasn’t to capture my joy at hanging out in front of a convenience store. Rather, he wanted to take a picture of the armed guard in the blue uniform by the door. Private security forces were ubiquitous throughout Central America. They guarded banks, stores and delivery trucks. They usually held their rifles ready to use in front of their chests.

Besides seeing guns on the streets, we saw plenty gun-related imagery throughout the region. At the Museum of the Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador, there’s a photo of a group of rebels who were fighting the right-wing government. The caption reads, “Our arms will guarantee a future of peace, liberty and democracy.” In Chiapas, Mexico, Zapatista dolls were sold on the streets complete with a little stick representing a gun. Several of the murals we saw in Oventic (a Zapatista community in Chiapas) featured guns and bullets:




In Leon, Nicaragua, we saw this image of a mother, her baby and her gun:



Reflection
The abundance of guns is another facet of the cycle of violence that the civil war left behind. Josh has already commented on the violence in Central America produced by post-war society. Ostensibly, the private security guards we saw were armed to protect against that violence. Instead they had the effect of making us more edgy as we explored Central American cities. When the Guatemalan civil war was resolved by peace talks in the mid-1990s, the UN organized a disarmament plan. One of our teachers estimated that about half of the guns were destroyed, one quarter are in the hands of these private security forces and another quarter are on the black market.

I have trouble resolving the practical effects of all the guns on the streets with the joyous imagery of revolutionaries with guns depicted in murals.

Practically, I don’t believe that arming private security guards with machine guns actually makes people safer. I know that in the US, if there is a gun in a home, it is more likely to injure someone who lives in the home than an intruder. I imagine, therefore, that guns used to “protect” stores would actually lead to more violence, for example, accidental shootings and the unintentional injury of innocent by-standers. Josh and I certainly felt uneasy seeing guns slung so casually on the backs of the young guards.

On the other hand, I was surprised at all the joyful gun imagery in Mexico and Nicaragua and El Salvador. I associate obsession with guns in the United States with creepy, kooky hunters (see Bela’s blog from Montana) gangster rap videos, or dangerous paranoia with tragic consequences (for example, suburban high school shootings). While the writers of the U.S. Constitution declared the right to bear arms in order to grant the people a means to combat an oppressive central government, actually taking up arms against the government seemed like a distant, if not archaic, idea to me. To rebels in El Salvador, Chiapas, and Nicaragua, though, taking up arms was a necessary step to asserting their dignity as human beings. The quote at the museum in El Salvador (“Our arms will guarantee a future of peace, liberty and democracy.”) sounded like a contradiction to me. How can one ensure peace through the threat of violence? On the one hand, I doubted that the private security guards were effectively ensuring peace. On the other hand, the images of revolutionaries smiling jubilantly with their guns stirred me.

Question
What do you think when you see an image of someone joyfully waving around a gun? Does it matter if that person is a Latin American revolutionary or appears in a gangster rap video or is a US soldier?

Estelí, Nicaragua: Street Murals and Educative Cities

Action
For two weeks in December, we lived in Estelí, a progressive FSLN city in Northwest Nicaragua. For half of the day we studied Spanish at CENAC language school. The other half of the day we explored the city and continued learning, often from public murals on the streets:


Conquest of the Americas.


A quote from Gandhi: “We must be the change that we want to see.”


HIV/AIDS education


Poetry and Japanese-style drawings


Memorial to a martyr: “lecturer, teacher, poet, guerrilla, revolutionary”

Reflection
When walking around cities in North America, I’m used to passing by lots of blank walls, amongst the shopfronts and homes. When walking around Estelí, I also passed quite a few blank walls, but a surprising number of potentially blank walls had somehow covered themselves in educational and artistic murals. This seemed like a rather sensible decision on their part. After all, why shouldn’t streetfronts try to educate passersby?

While traveling around the US in September and October, we (re)read A People’s History of the United States. We were repeatedly struck by how little we’d learned, inside or outside of school, about the historical oppression and injustice described in the book. The “official story” seemed to be the only one we were taught, but perhaps this might have been different if the streets of Baltimore had as many popular education murals as Estelí. What if our city streets were designed not just to transport us around, but also explicitly to educate?

Question
What do you see in these murals? What would you like to have on the building walls of your neighborhood or city? What do you like or dislike about what is on these walls now?