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.
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