Escaping the daily slaughter for photo fees and souvenirs 3/19/2007 10:08:40 AM Link | | Add comment 
“ We´ll be building a, um school in a little village near Cochabamba” I had told our bemused Austrian and Swiss travelling companions in La Paz, trying not to sound like a missionary on the way to martydom but rather the ambling Atheist that I am.
This conversation came back to me as our bus from Cochabamba stopped, spewed me, my friend and our unnecessarily large amount of baggage out into a rainforest panorama; complete with palms, banana trees, birds chortling from tree tops, and bumbled on, farting large amounts of carbon monoxide before being swallowed up by a bend in the road. Silence. Before us stretched countless hectares of Amazonian lowlands, a brown surging river...opposite us a few stray dogs, in the distance cholita-clad women swaying their skirts as they waddled along the roadside. Then the rain started.
Two days later the downpour allowed itself a brief intermission before the monsoon continued. Fork lightening split the sky, thunder shook the very foundations of the Castillo, our residence for the next three weeks. The daughter of the all-round-resident-handyman Mario committed obscene acts against a poor and now headless grasshopper. Identical-looking women fried and sold identical-looking chicken carcasses in a row of neighboring stalls. Taxis blared horns impatiently. The police “controlled” the drug check-point... and life continued as usual.
In the mornings, Kieran and I memorised large amounts of useful Spanish vocab for three hours, guided by the enthusiastic and gossip-provoking Adib (never knew that the word for “g-string” (thongs to non australians) in Spanish was “dentalfloss”, did you?!), and in the afternoon helped at first to paint the school in preparation for the new school year, then later contributed sweat to the concrete mix for the latrines (toilets) in a small jungle village not far from the Los Angeles foundation.
One of the most valuable experiences here, unfortunately not often available to travelers, is the opportunity to see communities that are, as of yet, not participants in what my travel guide describes as ´the daily slaughter for photo fees and souvenirs´. Here, in the village of San Lorenzo we were mixing concrete with a local, picking up some Quechua and cooing over his
first grandchild born the week before to his 18 year old daughter. This is where reality departs from the travel guide in a labrynth of clucking chickens, mossie bites, guardia and local gossip, and I feel now that I can return home and be justified in saying “I´ve seen south America”.
We lent our hand to a diverse range of things: brick laying, concrete mixing, riding the bus with 150 excited children, all wide eyes and cute smiles, drawing pictures of canines plucking flying excrement from the sky for a health pamphlet (yes, my artistic qualities have yet to be worked
upon), painting, cooking, hammering windows, inventing the ultimate tippy tap, inventing the ultiumate tippy tap 2... and the even more ultimate ultimate tippy tap 3 (which turned out a complete disaster- it obstinately disobeys the fundamental laws of physics), learning how to dance Bolivian style at Jasmins on a Saturday night. Jungle tours with Mario, on the track of the puma. (Although no puma presented itself for us gringos, we did see an armadillo road kill. Armadillos, as my best friend later informed me, are known to be carriers of leprosy, are considered a delicacy in Argentina, and have an unfortunate habit of springing up when in danger, and thus kamikazying into the undercarriage of an oncomming banana-bearing truck. woops.)
All the volunteers I´ve met here have the same enthusiasm about Villa Tunari and the work of the foundation that we quickly came to share. Although with so much ahead of us to look forward to; with the Uyuni salt planes calling and the roar of Iguazu beckoning, with the flare of Buenos Aires awaiting us, it will be sad tomorrow to step onto a bus, to be jostled along the road, and to watch the jungle reclaim with green vines the sight of the Castillo. The same view as when we arrived, but more beautiful, because of the memories of our wonderful month spent here.
Katie Hall, Australia |
Independent Catholic Lay Missionaries:Serving Bolivia's impovereshed people