Thursday, December 10, 2009

Interested in Funding a Community Project?

Hello all!

So now that we are into the month of December, it´s officially acceptable to start talking about Christmas and Christmas related things. Despite the 90 degree plus weather, we have little flashing snowflake lights and fake pine trees in all the shop windows down here, too.

I really hate asking for (more) money from anyone, but I´m going to throw this out there anyhow, cause it´s Christmas time, and I hear that charity is like, really in right now. And our organization is broke. I hate asking for money from corporations more than anything else, though if you know of any foundations that might be interested, please let me know. Otherwise, here goes-

The deal is pretty much this: the community of Santa Barbara, where I work, has no bathrooms, no water, no access to water, no plant growth, poor sanitation and erosion prone hillsides. I am currently running a project that aims to create a sustainable ecological cycle in the community, transforming Pro Habitat´s completed eco bathroom construction project into a resource and tool in order to improve community sanitation and the local environment. The project has two primary focuses: a community wide educational campaign, and the formation of a small women led micro business. The educational campaign features house to house educational visits and monitoring for families who already built their eco bathrooms, and a sanitation, health, and bathroom cirriculum and teacher training program in the local primary school. The micro business ladies will be trained to take care of the waste products of the bathrooms, recycling them to create fertilizer and grow vegetables, and both fertilizer and produce can then be sold to the community.

plant growth! sanitation!

Thus we have the ability to combat many of the community´s issues at the same time: Eco bathrooms don´t require water and therefore save the already very low-income families money on water costs. The house to house education includes assistance in rerouting other household water waste into home gardens, encouraging plant growth. The school curric will increase community knowledge and improve sanitation practices. And the micro enterprise will create fertilizer to support further plant growth in the hillsides as well as provide supplementary income to the women involved. The more people we can get excited about the bathrooms, via the school campaign and increased awareness, the greater the possibility that more families will be willing to construct them in the future, contributing the ecological stability of the region and improving sanitation levels at large.

yup, I´m really posting a picture of little kids in need. I know.

The trick, of course, is that we have virtually no money to do any of this. The bathrooms are thankfully already funded and completed, but without these additional social and economic programs they will not function as a part of a sustainable cycle, and the technology risks going unused or misused. The community of Santa Barbara is providing $3,050 in in-kind support for my project (mostly in the form of donated land), Fundacion Pro Habitat is covering at least $300 of the costs, and the Foundation for Sustainable Development may or may not approve my grant request for additional funds. In order to ensure the completion and the long term functioning of this project, we need at least $1,000 more to create and print educational materials, run capacity building classes for the women, and prepare a site for the waste recycling center.

Most of you lovely family friends have already contributed money to get me here, and I seriously appreciate that, and don´t wish to ask for anything else. However, since it´s Christmas, I thought I would throw out this opportunity to donate somewhere where you know the money will be used well and you can get all the follow up information and documentation that you want. All donations are tax deductible, of course! And you you can make them all official and formal like, here. Friends, even $10 or $20 bucks would be seriously useful. That´s almost 150 bolivianos! Pretty awesome.

You can also donate via paypal by clicking here:




Anyhow, thanks for reading, and if any of you can support this work, thanks again, immensely.


Best, and hope you all have a lovely December and holiday filled season.


P.S. While this project lacks a strong political or organizing element, community to community skills transfers and capacity building are inherent to its success. Yet it is of course this basic disconnect that is key to everything that interests me about development work. However, Pro Habitat is indeed engaged with political operations in other projects, hand in hand with the communities, so you´ll just have to trust me that it´s all a part of the same process. A super interesting community action-sanitation-bathroom program has been invented and piloted in India- read about it here. These folks may actually come to Bolivia to run another pilot in the next few months, which would be amazing. Cheers!

Monday, December 7, 2009

EVO de NuEVO


Yesterday Evo Morales was reelected as Bolivia´s president. His victory was such a given that folks don´t seem too interested in it, though perhaps in the campo feelings are more fiery.


On Friday I narrowly avoided spending some time in a Bolivian jail. For the 48 hours preceding an election of any kind in Bolivia it is prohibited to drink alcohol or have social gatherings. This year the 48 hours fell across Primer Viernes, or the first Friday of the month, during which it is traditional to hold a Koa ceremony, and, in the case of Red Tinku, follow it with a huge drunken traditional dance party. Story short- Tinku persisted in holding their party despite the law, I opted to leave relatively early when things began to get loud and rowdy, and at 2am the police showed up in riot gear, throwing cans of teargas and bashing in people´s stomachs with their clubs and rifles. A bunch of my friends spent the night in jail and a short TV spot has been running all weekend about how the Tinku folks are collecting and corrupting visiting foreigners. Anyhow, though breaking a dry law is not a good enough reason for me to justify a night in jail, the police violence is yet another echo of everything we´re fighting against. Onwards.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Coca War

A super brilliant lady from the Andean Information Network recently came in to talk to us about Bolivian-International relations and drug policy. The presentation was based so firmly in common sense and objective data that it was both shocking and fascinating and just... kind of exciting to listen to. It also made me want a job like hers.

The bottom line of her shpeal was basically that drug eradication policies have failed horribly across the board, and while they are being continued in Colombia and Peru, Bolivia is actually making headway in finding new, though imperfect, means of combating the issue. She pointed out that Bolivia is a relatively pure case study, meaning that you don´t have the FARC, the Shining Path, paramilitaries, and kingpins running around confusing the situation. You have coca growers in Las Yungas and in Chapare, where they have been growing some amount of coca since before the Incas came. You have Colombians and other international drug producers coming in to buy leaves or paste. And that´s pretty much it. To say that there is no confusion or chaos would be impossible, but at least the situation is relatively easy to understand.

Past policies were eradication based. Oh, and US demanded and directed, as they still are in most of the region. The US demands results and militarized fumigation and violent practices, withholding trade benefits and aid if you fail to comply. In the 1990s Alternative Development was the big policy- namely the encouragement of the production of other products, like pineapples and mangoes, instead of coca. The major problem with this is that coca is about 1000 times easier to grow and brings in more than 10 times the money. Aid programs refused to offer aid to non-coca growers, indirectly contributing to a rise in coca production as farmers made an effort to gain access to the money. Additionally, growers often eradicated fields and took the aid money, only to set up new ones in other areas. So that didn´t particularly work at all. Even ex militaries have come out against these old policies.


Though Evo is toted as the leader of the coca growers and their best political ally, coca production areas are still heavily militarized. A mini School of the Americas is still functioning right in the heart of the Chapare, despite the eviction of the DEA and USAID alternative development projects. Why? Well, it´s rough to maintain stability in the south if you go around upsetting the military... So the occasional violent attack persists in the jungle, prisons are still full of middle men, and the growing continues. Evo´s policy has been to legalize coca growing to the extent that country chews nationally, and each family is allotted land on that basis. But Bolivia has no idea how much coca its citizens consume traditionally on a yearly basis. Europeans have been in the process of conducting a study for years now that would give a concrete figure of how much coca is consumed traditionally-setting a bar for legal coca production. But the study has never been finished- no one wants to know the answer. The government is much happier with a grey area, and ultimately it doesn´t seem that the figure will ever materialize.

So what´s the current strategy? It´s not, as some hard core conservatives might scream, to encourage coca growth or cocaine production. It is to cap growth, forcing prices up, and allowing farmers to subsist growing less. This program has met with some success in areas where everyone participates. But illegal growth continues, spilling into national parks and steep slopes hidden in the mountains. If this continues, the system will fall apart. Of course the US likes to ignore the fact that studies demonstrate that demand side policies- ie, drug treatment in the United States- are many times more effective and much cheaper. While the demand exists, production will continue. Additionally, almost all the money from coca production ends up in the countries where its sold. Growers make a mere % of the total drug profits, compared to % of their first world counterparts.

The long history of drug policies and policy changes in Bolivia are filled will 100s of circles and ironies and mistakes. For instance, coca wasn´t even grown in Chapare until the government forcefully resettled fired miners there after the large scale mine closings of the 1950s. These miners had a long history of union activism, and rather than be dispersed, they set up an even stronger and more self sufficient union system in the jungle, neglected and rejected by central state authorities. These are the unions that continue to run production in Chapare today, the unions through which Evo Morales came to power. Other great policies? If you want a better idea of what the drug war has looked like in Bolivia, or, uh, just want to learn how to make your own cocaine, you can hop down here and visit the Cocaine Museum in Chapare any time.

The solution? Well... international and equitable partnerships (this is already beginning to happen as the US looses its influence in the region and European countries step in with less demanding funding), demand side policies, accurate information and honest statistics, intelligence sharing, and constantly assessing and improving policies. The US could actually play a beneficial role in Bolivia acting as a partner. Our speaker was quick to point out that Anti-Americanism is actually more often just the recasting of the rejection of failed programs. USAID´s alternative development projects may have been kicked out along with the DEA, but USAID´s more successful and considerate programs are all still running.

Though the talk was thoroughly engrossing as a topic on its own, it also made me realize something important about what I want to do with my own life: though health work has long seemed like the most practical and depoliticized sector of non-profit work, I will never be able to have the kind of on the ground active expertise in health that I could have in any other development area, by dint of my squeamishness and refusal to consider medical school. The idea of having a job where you get to deal with issues as entire complex processes and also act locally seems pretty brilliant to me. Losing that first component seems like a big loss in all ways. So perhaps policy regarding some specific but linked-to-the-whole-world-as-it-is job would be better for me... something to think about. Revolutions in Health might be more Revolutions in Thinking About Development and Change... which I suppose it always has been. Onwards!

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Two months in and....

I have learned a few Bolivian tricks. I have learned to talk like them, which is one of my favorite parts about staying put for more than a month in any given country. I can throw out Pues and Que Macana and Colla/Camba as much as I´d like. I´ve learned to hold tiny plastic cups in my teeth while I engage in multiple activities. I´ve learned to smile a lot at folks, and wait very, very patiently all the time.

My job has been really wonderful. It´s strange to work in such a general capacity for such a small non-profit. I feel like I´m doing absolutely everything at once, all the time, which is a little overwhelming. Back in NYC we had division of labor and such, and I only had to have a peripheral grip on other people´s projects. I like it this way though, it´s enlivening. Currently we are working on a Right to the City campaign in Cochabamba, holding forums and workshops and festivals to get people to rally around the idea that access to, use, and enjoyment of the city are rights. That includes the right to housing, to water, to transportation, and also to citizen control over key features of city governance and structure. Pretty awesome. In the Southern Zone we are finishing up a bathroom construction project in three communities: Santa Barbara, Barrios Unidos, and Maria Auxiliadora. In Santa Barbara we are also working on getting a youth led recycling center up and running (lots of time hanging out with 12 year old boys), working out the glitches in a women´s cooperative running a local market, and restarting a community garden-seed center. Maria Auxiliadora is petitioning for a kitchen building program. I have been working on a grant proposal for a project that will make Santa Barbara´s ecological bathroom project an ecological and sustainable resource for community members by running an educational campaign in the community and the local primary school, and starting a small scale women´s cooperative to recycle waste products. My boss is in DC right now promoting a World Bank grant proposal, which I will probably end up rewriting and submitting to a host of other agents.

Besides all that... I´ve been lucky enough to make something like a community for myself out here. My host family is lovely as ever, and I have been spending a lot of time with folks from Red Tinku, the local social activist group which gives public classes and sells leftist lit in the plaza, attends local political events (it´s presidential election season here, so there are loads of them), and hosts wild traditional parties on the first Friday of every month, where I get to dance around fires, drink chicha, chew coca, and burn tiny effigies of money, visas, and other important documents. For luck. The FSD staff and my fellow volunteers have also been lovely, and we´ve been making time to cook and to go out and visit the campo now and then. I´ve met Chilean anarchist artisans, and Brazilian journalists, and I find I like to speak in as many languages at once as possible. My Quechua is a struggling mess, but it´s pretty fabulous on the tongue.

I have also contracted amoebas in my stomach and watched a possibly disease ridden tick hang out on my leg until it was removed by a talented 3 year old. I keep telling myself that someday I´ll work a job where strange diseases aren´t so common, but it´s hard for me to really believe that. The folks living in the Southern Zone are super sweet and have invited me to stay with them for a weekend, which should be a much more in my face development experience than watching our projects stall, sputter, and reinvent themselves on the ground. Looking forward to that, I think.

Two months seems somehow like ages and like nothing. I suppose that´s the general nature of time. I´m excited to to travel, excited to stay around, excited to come home, and can´t seem to stop coming up with 1000 different plans for the rest of these next few years. But hey, living the fight has never been about being at peace in the present, so I think I´m ok.

Living here proves everything I´ve ever learned about Latin America wrong, incomplete, or so spot on it´s almost alarming. My dad tells me that science says it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert on something. So I suppose I´m on my way. Though what, exactly, this makes me an expert on remains unclear.



Oh right- and Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Friday, November 6, 2009

November Fifth

7:30 - wake up

8:30- walkin to work

9:30 - my office

10:30 - translating

11:30 - writing a grant. sometimes.

12:30 - headed home for lunch in the front seat of the trufi

1:30 - lunchtime

2:30 - headed to Santa Barbara

3:30

4:30 - women´s cooperative meeting

5:30 - we are way out of town

6:30 - back to the office

7:30 - headed to a Red Tinku meeting. ¨Work enslaves you, asshole!¨

8:30 - dinnertime

9:30 dirty feet and yoga

10:30 - in my friend´s car

11:30 - guitarists perform, folks dance

12:30

1:30


2:30 - lights out!


You can see what November 5th looked like all across the world for folks I know here. It might take a few days for everyone to get their photos up and posted, so make sure you check back later.

Also, my photos from this last month should be visible here, and you shouldn´t have to create an account to see them. But it is free to do, if it´s easier that way. Some folks have had trouble with the link in the email, so let me know if you want to see them and can´t, but don´t ever respond directly to those email invitations, as that email address is invalid.

I´ve been working a lot lately translating for a World Bank competition and starting a grant proposal, and spent the last two weekends traveling, first in the rain forests of Chapare, and then in the little mountain towns of Sucre and Potosi. All is well, and I´ll try to have something more to say soon. Cheers,
m

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

I had a silly charming story to tell and instead decided to post this boring rant about politics and slums. That´s how it goes.

This week, while sifting through some volunteer abroad sites, I came across this advertising line which probably expresses what I most despise about concepts of development work:

After your first few days sampling the delights of these two cities, you can, if you wish, get down to some serious work with street children, or perhaps volunteer with orphans!

My instant grumblings went something like- howcanthesepeoplebeokmakingmoneyofftheideathatcharitymakesyoua
goodpersonandworkingabroadisasacrificeforthepoordefencelesssuffering
peopleof theworldmerrrrrrrrr.

And then I found myself in Santa Barbara for the first time. Santa Barbara is a slum, a product of neoliberal policies, privatization, modernization, and internal migration. It is a community built on the highest point of a steep, rocky, dusty mountainside to the south of Cochabamba. It may be the first place I have ever been where people told me the folks were poor, and when I looked around, instead of thinking about how calm and idyllic their meager living spaces were (re: Mexico, Nicaragua), I just thought- shit, this looks miserable. But the thing is, I immediately started to think- well, it could be worse. I bet in India and Africa you really see how horrible and disgusting and... and I caught myself and thought- what the hell? Is that what I want? To see people suffering? To be shocked? To be justified in all my years complaining about the state of the world? And if what I want to see is suffering then, on some level, don´t I buy into my most hated- I came here to save the world and do good- bullshit? I know that I don´t, which should be enough, I suppose. But if I´m not just spectating here, what do I think I can do?


Well, for starters, the people who live in Santa Barbara are amazing. That was always a part of the idea, what I wanted. To learn. And I don´t know what it says, that they are so lovely. That we can make inhospitable awful places into homes, I suppose, unlivable lives into... lives. Whether that should be considered a good thing or not is hard to say. And then of course we of Pro Habitat are up there to do development work. So there are our projects. I like them. Sure they are community and empowerment based and all that, but of course, at the bottom line, they aren´t exactly political tools. But still. If the world is one enormous disaster, it´s nice to know that there is in fact some bizarre and intricate patchwork of projects spreading across it. That there is no real answer but there are folks driving pick-up trucks, and community groups talking. And that might be enough, from the development perspective. It´s up to collective action and politics and whatnot to meet it half way, in the transformative sense, i suppose.

And so, speaking of transformative politics, on Saturday I went to see almost every Latin American president come and talk in a stadium filled with indigenous peasants and assorted South American residents. I went with Red Tinku, a social movement I´ve joined up with. Their movement seems to consist primarily of selling leftist books and conducting free popular education classes in the plaza most nights. Within five minutes of meeting the organizer he had sent me to make photocopies. Well, I wouln´t be one to knock the revolutionary fire of the xerox machine. Anyhow. We went and sat in the 100 degree sun. I was forced to wear a Bolivian flag and felt somewhat silly. We waved flags and yelled. Chavez, Morales, Correa, Ortega, Zelaya, and Cuba´s vice president (sadly, no Raul), sat onstage and watched dancers dance, singers sing. They declared the creation of a new Latin American currency. Talked about unity. Sometimes it´s hard to see how politics on that level connect with reality in its everyday forms. It´s nice to hear about the revolution and the possibilities, but life changes so little, and so infrequently. For the first time that I´ve ever heard of, the presidents met with the folks from the social movements here and said- sup? what can we do with you? And that´s kind of amazing, to me. But when do meaning and reality coincide? And can our eco bathrooms be a part of the change? Does it matter so long as the folks building them are making demands?


And of course, in the end, I do believe in all this. That a better world is possible. It´s below, and to the left, as the Zapatistas like to say. That collective action and solidarity and struggle can produce change, even on the daily level where you feel it, and that change is necessary. I don´t know about how it will be led or constructed or planned or if it can be. I don´t take myself too seriously, as I sort of stumble around and look at stuff, but I do mean it. For the record.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

The place where other people´s heroes come to die

Wow, or, as they write it here in Latin America, GUAU, this has been quite the week. After a single day of work with Pro-Habitat I found myself hopping onto yet another bus, this time to Santa Cruz, a tropical place off to the East. Most of Pro-Habitat was traveling, along with an assortment of community members, youth leaders, a trio of indigenous ladies, a host of representatives from our myriad partner organizations, and a relatively famous old man on a speaking tour. We are currently engaged in this huge project in favor of the Right to the City (El Derecho a La Ciudad), a project which demands equal access to and enjoyment of the city, from access to land and water to cultural diversity and participation, popular control over public spaces and city politics, and collective construction and ownership of property. It´s a pretty inspiring and complex platform which I am excited to learn and think more about. We presented first at a conference for International Habitat Day, where the esteemed old man (Enrique Ortiz) spoke at length, and then got back on the bus to head to Vallegrande, where we presented as a part of the 5th Alternative Social Meeting, which was a kind of smaller scale regional World Social Forum type event.


Vallegrande is the tiny Andean city where Che´s body was brought after he was shot in La Higuera. The town is super old and lovely. We went to see the various places where his body lay in the local hospital, in front of which we took slightly absurd and solemn group photos. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are among the other famous souls who were killed in these mountains, which lead my project director to describe Bolivia as ¨the place where other people´s heroes come to die¨. This may be the single most depressing description of a country I have ever heard.


The Social Alternative was pretty awesome, and mostly what I expected: a bunch of young punk and hippie kids from Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, plus a random bunch from Switzerland and a few unidentifiable gringos. Our delegation was by far the oldest bunch, though I suppose there were a fair assortment of adult types about. Because Mercedes Sosa died just a few days beforehand, we got to have a really lovely ceremony for her wherein they played a gorgeous song and we all stood silently with our hands on our hearts. It was nice to be somewhere where they really felt her death as a social thing, and also to be able to celebrate the legacy of radical music in such a space. There was also a speaker from Honduras, which was really amazing, since she had basically come as a refugee to ask for our solidarity, and everyone in the room screamed and clapped and declared their trans-national Latin American support. It´s amazing that a military coup can still be happening here at all. The echoes of the 80s in Latin America are terrifying even as echoes. So nice to see the United States working so hard to protect democracy now... (Work to shut down the School of the Americas, the US program to turn Latin American armies into assassins and murderers, which coincidentally trained the current Honduran coup leaders, here.)


For reasons I don´t understand but am grateful for, these indigenous and Quechua speaking ladies have taken a particular liking to me. They giggle and pat me on the shoulder a lot. I tried to impress them with my two words of Quechua. Everyone at the social forum wanted to take their picture and they kept dragging me in. I bet my gringa presence really threw off their indigenous photographic charms. My other coworkers took me out for a night and lived up to their Bolivian reputation for drinking hard- I actually had to surreptitiously pour my drinks into potted plants, off of balconies, and hide my glasses behind napkin holders and empty bottles just to maintain a basic sense of consciousness. Guess we´re all friends now though! I also fell for an adorable four year old from the slums, whose father has vowed to take me to see some radical indigenous hip hop artists, which Bolivia is rather famous for, in small, obscure circles, anyhow.


It´s weird to suddenly be busy. I´ve had to cut down on the sulking. When I got back from Vallegrande I felt like I was coming home. That is really something, I think. Hasta la victoria, entonces.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Away


This is how I'm feeling, mostly.

When I landed in La Paz at 5:30 in the morning it was still dark out, and the temperature was a stunning 34 degrees Fahrenheit. I had been dreading the altitude and its possible nose bleed inducing effects for weeks but had somehow managed to eclipse any concept of cold from my mind. I fled the plane with two covertly stolen airline blankets and hit the tarmac breathing ice. At the bus station in Al Alto, hovering 13,000 feet up on a steep incline above La Paz, I could see the snowy caps of the nearest peaks of the Andes as dozens of marvelous looking indigenous women trudged between the buses. Everyone looks so damn cool here. I know nothing of the socio-economic geographies of this country yet, so if El Alto´s bus station is the most hard core I get to see, I will have to go back. Old men in woolen button ups and caps giggled at my state, helped me get my shit together.

On my double decker bus I sat next to an Andean woman; black and grey braids down to her waste, tied together at the tip with bright blue wool strings from which hug woolen bell shaped pieces, a long bright satin skirt, sweater, rainbow cloth tied intricately into a bag, fabulous bowler hat with tassel perched improbably on her head. Apparently I will soon be able to tell the exact region of origin of these ladies by the length of their skirt and shape of their hat. The folks behind us brought on a couple of chickens which clucked quietly and intermittently throughout the ride, like my cat might on a long ride to the vet. At a certain point, as the sun got up over us in the afternoon and we found ourselves gliding neatly along the bends of the Andes, through miles and miles of desert, that same couple pulled out a small boom box and serenaded the bus with classic pop hits from Bolivia and the States alike. Bolivia may be the most bizarre and fascinating place I have ever been.

When I woke up on my first morning in Cochabamba, after a blissful 18 hours if sleep at my hostel, I held my eyes shut and tried to stay floating in that nebulous place where you don´t remember where your body could possibly be in space or time or intent... but when I finally did get the balls to get up and get out the door I had one glorious moment when I couldn´t help but think- fuck yeah. I got here. I moved my little feet along, into one thing that moves, into another, and here I am, in a valley in the middle of South America, in the sun, completely and totally alone. Which is a feeling that fast becomes disquieting. But still. When some well dressed young lady at the French-Brazilian dinner party our neighbors in Brooklyn were holding in their loft upstairs asked me for one piece of profound advice on traveling, all I could think to tell her was: it´s easier than you think. I stand by that. For all my anxious whining, I´m standing here disposed to create a life from scratch, for a while, because I can.

I went into the city center and got myself a phone for cheap. As I worked out its inner workings, I came across the pre-made texting quicknotes. I´ll be there in 5. I´ll be late. I´ll see you soon. Take care. And lastly: Te amare por siempre. I will love you forever. Can´t wait till I settle down enough to start sending that one out to folks.

I´m still figuring absolutely everything else out.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Bolivia, ahoy

I've been nerding out a little in order to rev up properly for my time in Bolivia. For those at which I have yet to gush, I should mention that I will be working for Fundacion Pro Habitat, a local non profit that works to improve the lives of squatter residents in the south of Cochabamba. To this end they run programs in sanitation, market building, housing construction, and political lobbying, and partner with other grassroots organizations including a group of women's cooperatives that organize in a horizontal manner. It's pretty much my fantasy job, and it should be interesting to see if participating in this kind of action actually makes me happy.

Squatter's rights has long been an interest of mine, and for those interested, Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World provides a pretty decent overview of the sociological phenomenon across the globe. The Bolivian context is of particular interest to me. Bolivia is one of the poorest, most rural, and most indigenous countries in Latin America. With the election of indigenous president Evo Morales in 2005, the indigenous population is becoming a stronger and more visible political and cultural force. The rural/urban dynamics of Bolivia, charged with hundreds of years of formulations of cultural and geographic meanings, continue to impact social interactions and daily lives. As neoliberal policies devastated rural livelihoods across the country, cities like Cochabamba experienced high levels of immigration, and the squatter settlements that filled these cities took on an indigenous, marginalized, and castigated character. Daniel Goldstein's book, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia provides an amazingly detailed investigation of the urban dynamics of performance, protest, and citizenship in this context. Benjamin Dangl's The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia provides a more basic overview of Bolivian history and social action in recent years.

Bolivia is perhaps most famous, in the activist and lefty world at least, for the large scale protests that took place in major urban centers in the early 2000s rejecting the privatization of water and gas. These resource "wars" were immensely successful and represent one of the few cases of a local population triumphing over large corporations. They are also yet another example of community solidarity, mass political understanding, and direct action. With Morales's public defense of the coca leaf and his partnerships with other, more radical Latin American democracies, politics have remained central to Bolivian social life. I am excited to visit some of the dynamic projects in action in La Paz, El Alto, and Cochabamba, as well as to see a bit of reality in action. Of course I don't expect to find some marvelous utopia of revolutionary struggle. What interests me most is, in fact, daily life and how it is understood and lived in these contexts. I am hoping to learn, and to lend a hand in any way I can. Working for this non profit is the best way I can imagine to try out this bridging of justice and aid, action and development. Fundacion Pro Habitat seems committed to this idea, prioritizing empowerment over construction or statistics. The struggle to combine activism and aid, and my ongoing struggle to understand if that is possible or even worthwhile, will hopefully be both illuminating and engaging.

I begin in ernest on Saturday, after a red eye flight tomorrow evening into La Paz followed by an 8 hour bus ride down the Andes into Cochabamba. Today the weather forcast in Cochabamba simply read: smoke. I have some misgivings. I am hoping for the best. Cheers

Friday, September 11, 2009

Oh, Mexico...

Given that every breath exhaled by a North American about Mexico these days comes loaded with warnings, fears of flues, drugs, violence, and danger, I think it's time to find some new words to be define the subject. Words like beauty, tranquility, kindness, and joviality. And of course, normal words. Giant messes and paragraphs and pages of words. Words for 109 million people. Some of the kids I met there begged me to declare publicly that people are just the same everywhere, which is true, to an extent I suppose. But we are attached both to our roots and to our exact and individual present: it isn't always a global world.

Oh Mexico, you crossroads of indigenous, colonial, religious, ceremonial, modern, revolutionary histories. You combination of forgotten lore, neglect, treasure, reverence, and celebration. It's impossible to imagine the wealth and depth of history in this country, both old and new. As present as modern capitalism and economics may be, as evident as the paths of domination and exploitation, immigration and poverty might be, within it all is a constant reinvention and reliving of what in means to be Mexican, to be in Mexico. And then each kilometer is different, geographically, economically, culturally. It's amazing: you drive for 5 minutes and everything changes, jungle to forest, forest to desert, and you suddenly look around and crane your neck to find out when and where the change happened, the cactus appeared, disappeared, but you can't tell- you've dropped clear into another region. So of course, no generalizations. But still. It's all happening to everyone, at once, this living in the world thing, you know? We must be able to say something about it.

And so yes, I've seen evidence of health concerns, military men, fears of police, the presence of poverty. But. For starters: swine flue? No one follows the instructions on the signs not to shake hands or kiss hello, everyone is still walking, talking and living. But then Carlos can't get a tetanus shot anywhere in Monterrey. But then folks die every month from preventable diseases. But then Mexicans in the US are dying in the desert by federal decree. Some things to consider, some things more dire than swine flue, perhaps, to those who live here. The military men only manifested on the state borders, where they looked for drugs headed north. The local police were much more problematic and exploitative. As per usual, the local problems are the worst. But even they are not interpreted as something horrific here. Just a part of the day, a part of the discussion over beers and tortillas.

The most stunning thing about the poverty here is that it is largely rural and not dire, comparatively speaking, which is to say, no one is outright starving or terribly ill or suffering, for the most part. The kind of poverty in action here is older. We stayed with these families, we talked with them, and really it seemed enviable. This lifestyle of tranquility, living with your family, working with your family, working hard but working in order to live together. Oh, cultural relativity. This is not to say that there is not poverty in Mexico. Of course there is urban poverty, desert poverty, the struggle to live. But to me it's more important to remember that what's worst is oppression, exploitation, suffering, fragmentation, and sadness. Thus material poverty should not necessarily be our primary target. Being able to eat until you're overweight and relax until you're obese, buy whatever you want and work overtime does not seem like a right we need to fight for abroad. Their lives may already be better than ours. The work that needs to be done has to do with empowerment more than development, justice more than food. And sadly the legacy and current practice of injustice, in Mexico as across Latin America, across the world, will be harder to fight. When you can't throw money at something, can't pick up a gun against it, where do you begin?

Mexico's cultural and historical memory is strong, despite what urban folks might tell you. Their cities are full of art and practices in remembrance of an indigenous past about which they are still proud of and outraged by. The rural areas keep up their ties to their heritage, to thousands of years of traditions and stories of a hundred different ancient societies. The Mayas are not the only history remembered. And the revolutions are still memorialized and interpreted on a yearly basis, through ceremony and celebration. It is the economic side of this country which seems so silently, invisibly turbulent these days. Under the sheen of neoliberal policy and practice rages a war of perceptions, lived experiences, rejection, embrace, and reinvention. As the rest of Latin America sways left and begins to redefine itself, invent new words for itself, grow and transform, it will be interesting to see where Mexico's roots will lead it. Somehow this trip has made me more optimistic. These people I have met are so strong, so full of their lands and stories, I feel somehow that despite the great oppressive forces of our times, there is power in their hands. And something good will come of it.

Monday, August 31, 2009

There once

Was a young girl from Nicaragua
Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar
They came back from the ride
The young girl inside
And the smile
On the face
Of the jaguar

Thanks to Salman Rushdie´s Jaguar Smile, I can tell you that that proverb is a lovely revolutionary allegory. Thanks to the years that have passed since I read it, I can also tell you I am about to mangle it. However, I believe that the jaguar is meant to be the people of Nicaragua, and the girl the revolution. First the revolution rode on the backs of the people, and then the people consumed it, were filled by it, and the people smiled and all were happy. I think the reverse can also be construed, but I prefer it this way.

Where Mexico is stunning, Nicaragua is wild. Where Mexico is difficult, Nicaragua is impossible. I was deathly ill within three days. One cannot even imagine asking about camping places. One sees signs for ¨prospective¨ tourist areas. Yet it’s so gloriously beautiful here, and pure jungle. In Managua, the capital (an ugly city, just what you might expect modernization to force onto the wilds, cement and telephone wires) I saw graffiti celebrating 30 years of Sandinista revolution, and was filled with joy. Until I realized that, as it continued for miles and miles, it could not possibly be spontaneous. but must be paid for and regulated by the party. Perhaps nothing here is real except the banana trees that line the horizon, and the jungle that rises to the sky on the sides of the volcanoes. That might be enough, though. For a country with such a fiery history, what I can see is mostly smoke, dust, bicycles, and green. But I love it here, with my second family, and the constant, massive rains.

I am in the airport. New York awaits me, I suppose. Onwards!

Friday, August 21, 2009

Something about health, something about revolutions

On Revolutions:
It´s possible that, at the bottom line, Carlos and I see the world in the same way, as a disaster with beautiful potential which can be accessed all the time. But our methods of enacting change, and therefore our methods of living, are at opposite ends of pretty much every spectrum pretty much all the time. It´s been good to receive so much to think about, really. Carlos is primarily about inner peace and tranquillity, which of course is a state I can hardly even visualize. But at heart, this idea of living your values daily, and putting your ideas into practice in your life, learning as you construct, is a basic revolutionary principal which we share. Whether we have to be at peace or have to struggle in order to find a better world; that is the point where we diverge. We always seem to find people, in the mountains, in the towns, who want to talk to us about our revolutionary potential. About the youth who will change the world. I suppose it helps that we find ourselves in remote locations, but still, it's heartening to find adults and farmers who tell us we are onto something good.

On top of this general tendency, we get the 2012 legend and all its myriad formulations. I have come to enjoy the interpretation given to it here. In 2012 (the Mayan date for the end of the world), what's to come is not so much global destruction and the elimination of the human race (a la the upcoming film where it seems John Cusack will fly a plane as a giant boat crushes the White House), but as a time of intense changes in social, political and economic structures, in lifestyles and global conditions. Or rather, a word will end, but it will only be this terrible kind of world we have created. Disaster may strike, but it will only mean that we will have to learn to live together in new ways. In fact, basically, this interpretation means that disasters will come and they will force the global revolution, and the anarchist autonomous hippie punk socialist revolution, the better world we've been dreaming of, will be forced into existence, and everything will change. We will have to learn to live together, share, and recreate the modern world. It means that our generation will live to see it. If you know, you buy into that Mayan legend stuff...

On health:
Carlos is obsessed with natural and indigenous medicine. It is one of his primary passions and something we are often reading about, looking at, or trying out. I have actually become rather interested in the practice as well, which seems strange in some ways, because natural medicine is pretty much at direct odds with public health programs. But then, massive social change and activism are also mostly at odds with public health. It seems tragic, really, that things which are so closely tied in reality can be so isolated in both the academic and professional worlds. Natural medicine has its values, and even though it drives me crazy when Carlos tells me that Malaria and Dengue are just health myths invented by those in power which we can ignore, I can see that natural medicine can be healthier, more sustainable, and more honest than dealing with giant drug companies. It is another form of DIY action, I suppose, a means of putting power, once again, into the hands of people. That doesn´t mean that the absence of doctors and lack of access to services can be dismissed, or that there is no need for health systems and planning. It is something to consider though, and so now I'm left with yet another paradigm to think about as I try and do something that I think is positive.

I have also been doing a series of interviews with health providers here in Oaxaca for the Public Health Delivery Project, a venture organized and sponsored by Harvard's medical school and Paul Farmer's non-profit, Partners In Health (my favorite health non-profit ever). The program aims to create an online forum for health practitioners to share best practices and discuss challenges and successes in the health world. The survey project aims to collect data from health programs all over the world in a attempt to aggregate and analyze data and basically look at the way we provide health care and figure out how to do it better. You can join up with this program at ghdonline.org, or learn about it at globalhealthdelivery.org/blog. I interviewed a lady from a project called Puente al Salud, a non profit doing community work in Oaxaca, as well as a doctor at Hospital Carmen, a private hospital in the city. These two interviews provided the perfect example of the gap between community work and health services. While Puente did amazing projects with nutrition, empowerment, training, and community development, they offered no clinical or advanced medical services. The private hospital, on the other hand, provided no social services but had a high capacity for technical health provision. The doctor I spoke with there told me that private care is actually cheaper than the public option, which I imagine is true, but the lack of community connection was striking. The lack of a single organization that can provide both health and justice was expected but somewhat frustrating. It was satisfying to get in some studying time on my favorite subject, however. Onwards, then.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Endings


The beaches in Mexico are really about as fantastic as any cinematic fantasy might lead you to believe. You really can camp right on the sand, beside some small family´s home and makeshift restaurant, and wake up to spend the day in a hammock, next to the big blue ocean and a line of cold one dollar beers.


You can also wake up on that beach at four in the morning as a gale blows suddenly in, upsets your tent, soaks everything you own, drenches you, forces you to run up the beach under the roof of said family run restaurant, ditch everything you own, and sleep in the car.

Carlos and I both have colds.

But really all of Vera Cruz was lovely, from the beaches (Roca Partida, Monte Pio, and Barra de Sontecomapan, for those who might someday end up nearby) to the monkey filled lagoon, the jungle and the mountains. Carlos and I are always surprised to find ourselves driving over mountains. Going from over 100 degrees into a freezing mist is rather stunning.

Oaxaca is lovely, as is my mother. We have been wandering the city and are off to explore the nearby crafts towns, more ruins, and a famously large tree in the next few days. Tales and pictures to be posted later!

From here I head on and out, which feels strange, but for the best. I have said so many goodbyes in the last four years, they don´t really feel like goodbyes anymore. I have faith that strangeness and luck will bring me back south (still missing out on Chiapas) and back with these various companions once again, in some way, at some point. My flights from here to Nicaragua go in all the wrong directions, first north when I need to go south, then too far south, then back up north... I look forward to being done with planes for a while. Looking forward to being home in the states for a while as well, which will be happening in September. Rambling soon. Seriously, I have actual thoughts on some of the subjects I studied in regards to this place, to be posted later.
m

Monday, August 10, 2009

Southwards

I actually had begun to think we would never escape from Mexico City. First we were waiting on a delivery, then the car mechanic, and then, the day we actually headed out of the city, the police stopped us 15 minutes into the ride and attempted to take away our car because the license plate ended in a 3, and 3s do not drive in Mexico city on Wednesdays. Luckily police bribery case number two of the vacation saved the car, but we had to leave it in a park till the next morning.

We did, however, manage to get out the next day, and after the two hours necessary just to leave the massive city itself, we made our way to Cuernavaca, which was very pretty. From there we went on to Tepotzlan, where we camped in the dark in the middle of a massive thunderstorm, and later climbed up a huge mountain (on a very official and well marked vertical trail) to sit atop a pyramid and look at the lovely valley. We continued on toward Puebla via the national park which hosts two of the largest volcanoes in the region. We drove over the mountains, into the mist, and at the topmost viewpoint I stood in the cold and ate a chocolate bar on the roof of that world.


In Puebla we mostly ate, and pointed at things and said- that’s pretty. Because it all was. We crashed with the family of a guy we picked up and drove around back in Xilitla. They were super adorable and cooked us many massive meals. We stayed in a room that was a shed up until 10 minutes after our arrival. There were cockroach bodies and old engines next to our bed, but we didn’t mind. ´We are in our twenties! In addition, Puebla was hosting an indigenous cultural festival this weekend, which meant lots of music and crafts all the time.


From there we headed to Vera Cruz, where we are crashing at a musical engineering school that Carlos worked for years ago in Monterrey. I thought I would hate Vera Cruz, but actually it pretty much rocks. There was gorgeous music and dancing all over the center until past midnight. We have a whole crew to take us around as well, which is nice.

From here we go in search of deserted beaches. On the 15th we meet up with my mom in Oaxaca, where we will explore and take a few classes and such, after which I head to Nicaragua and Carlos goes on toward Chiapas. I am somewhat sad to be missing the Southern coast and jungles, but this was the only way to make plans work. Of course, now that the trip is ending, I really want to keep going, though who knows how I would feel if I were, indeed, headed onwards. In any case, cheers! Photos at some point. Hope all is well back North.

m

Saturday, August 1, 2009

A Small Photo Capture of Mexico City











We have been exploring this city in a strange, slow way, but it´s been nice. I love to ride the subway. I somehow have an immense capacity to sit still if I am also in motion. We go one place per day, more or less, and we never have any idea what we´re doing, really. And it´s not terribly obvious, even in areas where it should be, where the things to do and see are actually located. I have been to an assortment of museums and plazas and bars. I like how loud and colorful and cheap the city is. I like catching glimpses of its massive sprawl creeping up the mountain sides. So far my favorite things have been seeing the modern art exhibit at the autonomous university (UNAM) and wandering around Coyoacan. One night we drove home in the rain listening to eighties hits, one night we went to the new Harry Potter movie, one night we watched jazz and argued over peace vs. rage in making social change, one night a very wealthy friend picked us up, drove us around for hours listening to opera, and then took us to an insane club made into a fake cave. There we acquired an even wealthier companion, whose house was, apparently, nice enough to be price-featured on google maps, and who told us the revolution was coming, via civil war, and he knew, because his boss was in the arms trade between the narcos and the government. Mostly I sit still and watch things. It´s warm and the food is delicious.