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Between light and shadow...
Illustration: Oscar Zalles
Work began for Sarita when she was 12 and worked as a nanny, and now she tells her story as if it all happened a long time ago. ‘My father never wanted me to work. He said, “It doesn’t matter that we have so little, we will be fine.” But the money was not enough. My two older sisters and I left school so that my siblings could study.’ And that’s how this young adult made the decision to go to work.
In many parts of the world, teenagers look for part-time work to have spending money or because they want to become more independent from their families. But Sarita, whose story is like that of many other teens in Bolivia, left her home in Guarayos to work full-time.‘At first I was scared, but the family was good to me’, Sarita says. ‘The hardest part was being far away from my family. Sometimes I would go to my room, look at pictures of my parents, brothers and sisters and cry.’
Today Sarita wants to finish school and then study medicine. She is independent, and she visits her family every two or three months bearing gifts.
‘I think that young people should help their families more’, Sarita says. ‘When you start to work you really learn to value the sacrifices your parents make for you. For me it has not been easy, but I know that I am more independent now and that I can better myself.’
‘Girls are more vulnerable than boys’, says Lidia Mayser, the manager of an anti-child-labour program of the government of Santa Cruz. So why are girls more vulnerable to exploitation? ‘It doesn’t matter that they have to work—be it selling candy, cards, flowers or anything—when they get home they are also expected to do housework’, says Armando Oviedo, manager of Plan International in Santa Cruz. He explains that in rural areas, if there is a choice to make about which children will attend school, the boy is usually chosen because girls are expected to care for their younger siblings.
Bolivia’s Law 548, which was passed in July of this year, allows children as young as 10 to work independently, and children as young as 12 to work for managers, as long as they have written permission from their parents and the local children’s rights office. But in reality, children and teenagers have long worked, and continue to do so, without these permissions.
Across the country from Santa Cruz in the city of El Alto, Pedro, 16, works with his mother. ‘My father died when I was 11 years old and my three siblings and I help my mom sell food. I help most because I am the oldest’, he says. Pedro’s day starts at 7 am, when he helps his siblings, who are 10, 7 and 5, get ready for school. Then he helps his mother prepare pots, plates and silverware and takes them to the center of La Paz, where they sell food near the Plaza Murillo. After the lunch rush, he eats something quickly so he can be at school by 1:30 in the afternoon. ‘I have to bring all my things with me from the house’, he says with a knowing smile. ‘Sometimes I forget my work and the teachers reprimand me. They don’t understand.’
Pedro leaves school at 6:30pm, arrives home around 7:30 or 8, does his homework or sleeps a little, and then at 10 or 11 at night he helps his mother prepare food for the following day. ‘I help her peel potatoes, carrots, make rice or noodles, wash things—anything, it depends on the food. We prepare just two different dishes.’
Pedro wants to do all the things young people his age do, like study, go out with friends, and meet girls—but time for that teenage life is limited. At the same time, he carries heavy responsibilities for someone who is still a teenager. He knows his life is not easy but he doesn’t complain—his mother and his siblings count on him to contribute to the family’s survival.
Computers, Coding and Education in Bolivia
Down behind the market stalls on the streets of Eloy Salmón, La Paz’s most notorious electronics market, young kids work meticulously to crack cell-phones, unlocking technology that, let’s face it, the majority of us wouldn’t know where to begin with.
Certain that this underground work is not being taught by the current education system, I began to wonder, in countries such as Bolivia where computer access is less readily available, how is the next generation learning about the technological world we live in?
Bolivia as an emerging nation is displaying signs of rapid growth when it comes to technology. The number of smartphone users is on the rise, and according to the Pew Research Center in the United States, the pervasiveness of cell phone ownership here means that countries such as Bolivia have skipped phone landlines altogether and have moved straight on to mobile technology, giving the population access to the Internet without the need for computers at home.
It seems, however, that younger Bolivians want more education when it comes to technology. Mauri Wilde, 18, is currently studying Ingeniería en Inteligencia Artificial, and believes that the subject is not given the importance it deserves in schools. Since the age of 16, Mauri has taught himself how to code, learning programming languages such as Javascript, C++ and HTML from online tutorials, books and friends. ‘The demand in this field is incredibly big’, Mauri says, ‘and is yet to be given the attention it deserves.’
Sandro Centellas, director of the Carrera de Ingeniería Eléctrica at the Universidad Pública de El Alto (UPEA), speaks of students’ interest in learning technology in Bolivia. When asked whether his students begin university with any prior knowledge, he stated that whilst there exists some teaching in high schools, they know the basics but not the understanding behind it. “Being a good computer programmer is like being a professional footballer... you can’t just become a star when you’re 18 or 19, you have to begin from an early age. We can’t expect to have very few resources in Bolivia and then produce a hundred Bill Gates’.”
The current Bolivian government under Evo Morales is making inroads in this area, pledging earlier this year to provide free laptops for every final-year high-school student. By incorporating information and communication technology into the education system, the initiative aims to prepare students for the future. The Quipus computers, which are manufactured in El Alto by Bolivia’s first state-owned computer production plant, are to be rolled out to every student at this level by the end of the year. As this time, however, the children are not allowed to take the computers home.
At UPEA, interest for studying technology-related subjects is on the rise. The Ingeniería Eléctrica faculty has shown significant growth in the three years since its launch in 2011, starting out with just fifty students and now at 170. Several of the students here are working with the Raspberry Pi, a computer the size of a credit card that is being used in English schools to teach school children as young as 5 how to code (a rather frightening realization for those of us that freak at the first thought of coding). Link it to a TV screen and a keyboard and—voilà!—you have a fully functioning desktop computer.
The gadget has found success with children, adults and hobbyists around the globe, due to the numerous digital projects that can be achieved with it—anything from music machines and security camera systems to weather stations and even parent detectors. The developers at Raspberry Pi launched the initiative with a target audience of around 1,000 English school children. But speaking with Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation, it seems the tiny computer has surpassed expectations in enormous quantities; worldwide sales have been reported to nearer 4 million, with an estimated 200 being used here in Bolivia.
At UPEA, student Raul Quispe demonstrated his final-year project using the Raspberry Pi. He has created a system that detects the attendance of both students and teachers at the university, using heat and face-recognition technology and a webcam, which then detects a face and compares it to a database of images.
Talking on the topic of the Quipus laptops, professor Sandro Centellas suggested a future government investment into Raspberry Pis for Bolivian school children, teaching them not just to use technology in today’s world, but also to understand the building blocks behind it. In Bolivia, the Raspberry Pi retails at around $65USD, twice of that in the UK. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that it would be an extremely cost-effective initiative compared to the Quipus laptops.
Whilst the current Bolivian government has seen overall public spending double in the past eight years, social spending on the likes of education has increased in real terms, but fallen as a percentage, according to the Centre for Research on Globalization. However this is a nation experiencing strong economic growth, with a president who has pledged to ‘pensar en lo grande y no lo pequeño’ (‘dream big and not small’) when it comes to technology. With initiatives such as the Quipus laptops beginning to emerge, this could be the start of a new era that places emphasis on the teaching of technology in Bolivian schools, thus preparing a young generation with the skills they desire in order to interact with the evolving technological world around them.
Raspberry Pi, known as the “Tartita de Frambuesa” in Latin America, is available at tecbolivia.com; Model B retails at $70.00 USD.
In all societies, age appears to be one of the principal defining attributes of activity and social image. Age and sex form the basis for social classification, coding and structuring in a demographic sense. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the definitions of classifying concepts, such as infancy, youth or old age, are generally vague due to the imprecise end point of one stage and the beginning of the other. These limits vary according to different schools of thought and focal points.
Who are the young people? In Bolivia, last year, under the slogan ‘All Young People Matter’, President Evo Morales put forward the ‘Youth Law’. It established that youth lasts between 16 and 28 years of age. Nearly 24 percent of the Bolivian population qualifies as ‘youth’ according to this legislation.
Youth: Is It a Privilege?
When one person says to another ‘You look so young!’, ‘You sound young’, or ‘You seem younger’, the reply is always ‘Thanks!’ Is being young a privilege, an attribute or a circumstance? Certainly, this explanatory criteria is not defined through its manifestation psychologically or culturally; rather it’s through the external contemplation of how someone looks on the outside: prettier, better looking, slimmer, etc. The social role of being young is confirmed by the gaze of others. You would never find a job announcement that specifies ‘Looking for a well-presented young person’.
Nowadays, being young is a valuable attribute—youth is the power supply of the ego, not just in terms of vitality, but also in terms of appearance: esthetics, beauty, dynamism, etc. Through this, you can see people’s growing preoccupation with increasing, or extending as much as possible, their youthfulness. People try various things to make themselves look young. For example, they resort to a variety of cosmetic products that are gaining great popularity in the media in La Paz. These include mother of pearl, snail slime, and the more exotic donkey’s milk and semen (for those interested, the last two items are sold in the Feria 16 de Julio in El Alto).
David Llanos, a sociologist and university teacher, says that youth isn’t an equal opportunity offered to everyone who finds themselves inside the governmentally defined statistical category. In Bolivia, it is more likely that the period of youth will be shorter amongst the working classes and longer amongst the middle and upper classes. The same can be seen—in terms of gender—with women: a man is more likely to be viewed as youthful than a woman, since a woman’s responsibilities, the ‘way they should be’, means women work double-duty due their responsibilities in the home, with children, at work and more.
Generally, some upper- and middle-class young people enjoy not only the opportunity to study, but also to postpone their entrance into adult life; they marry and have children later on and enjoy a less demanding period of life with minimal family responsibility in order to capitalise upon or consolidate their role as a young person.
This means youth-evoking marketing transforms the market: We buy youth, we sell it, it intervenes in the market of desire as a vehicle of differentiation and legitimacy.
Some people think that youth is a state of mind. Helen Caro, a student at La Paz’s San Andrés University and the coordinator of the city’s second youth parliament, says that ‘Youth is a attitude. I believe that you never stop being young.’ However, as Daniel Mamani, a law student at San Andrés, mentions, it can reflect a value system in which ‘the way you look is how I looked and the way I look is how you will look’. This is all relative—you are 50 years old but feel young nevertheless, although in the eyes of fellow citizens you are not eligible for a bank loan, nor are you considered for a job offer, a grant or more training.
While it is very difficult to determine when you stop being young, there are circumstances or rites of passage, such as military service or marriage, that mark the passing from youth to adulthood. Perhaps this is the reason why many people in Bolivia do not update their marriage status on their identity cards—they prefer to appear single or as students, to try and immortalise themselves as young people and mark differently the commitments of adult life.
When does someone stop being young? The search for answers and all of the doubts surrounding them inhabit an uncertain and vague territory. Let’s say that the concept of youth is not static; rather that it constructs itself around a certain social, cultural and historic setting. It is better to bypass the subject (the person, youthful or not) and try to interpret a given reality from the basis of each individual’s history, life and significance.
