Magazine # 47
RELEASE DATE: 2015-02-01
image
EDITORIAL BY SARA SHAHRIARI
The fantastical and the real, Andean tales and Grimm’s fairytales, the vastness of the world and the pluck and spirit of the children we spoke with for this issue were on the BX team's minds as we brainstormed cover options this month. Yesica, our brave and adventurous cover model, took to the idea with gusto, turning a sun-dappled forest glade (just off the highway between La Paz and El Alto) into an otherwordly stage, and showing us a new, sassy take on Red Riding Hood. In this issue we focus on the experiences of childhood by talking with young people about their daily lives, aspirations, and free time. From Yesica, who wants to be a dentist, to Rina, who is torn between plans to become a clown or go to university, our writers found that childhood dreams and amusements haven't changed much since their own primary school days. We also take a look at President Evo Morales' tough upbringing on Western Bolivia's high plains, where he helped his family plant potatoes and tended sheep and llamas, and how leadership on the soccer field may have foreshadowed the future leader's ability to unite and motivate people. Of course the idea of childhood is inextricably tied up with family, and to a great extent all our childhoods are formed by the people who raise us, and what they think is right or wrong, good for us or bad for us. In this issue we feature the beautifully told story of a young man who was abandoned as a baby on the street, adopted from a Bolivian orphanage, and raised by a loving Belgian family. Today he has returned to Bolivia and is searching, with only meager records and recollections to guide his way, for his birth mother. We also hear from a few mothers on their experience raising children in La Paz and El Alto. Nadia, an Australian and new mom living on the outskirts of El Alto with her husband and his family, talks us through the delicate cultural negotiations of raising a child far away from where, and how, she herself was brought up. We also explore the difficulty of obtaining affordable daycare (something that will resonate with many mothers far beyond Bolivia), and the great lengths that many parents go to when it comes time to enroll their children in school. Here in the Southern Hemisphere the new school year has just begun, and as the streets once again fill with packs of uniformed young people we salute their energy and imagination—and perhaps envy them those gifts just a little bit.
INTRODUCING: YESICA
February 24/2015| articles



Yesica is eight years old, wears a bright pink top and a contagious smile. Sitting together in the early morning sunlight we talk boyfriends, animals and what she wants to be when she grows up.

What’s your favourite food?

I love rice pudding, but that's only for breakfast. For dinner my favourite thing is Plato paceño. I’m also a big fan of fruit and vegetables, carrots, onions, papaya, mango, strawberries, you name it. I don't like api con pastel, though.

Talk me through your average school day

Well, school hasn’t started yet so I’m allowed to get up later and relax. During term time, I have to get up really early. I put on my uniform, which is a waistcoat and my heeled trainers and then make my bed as usual. When we are all ready, we head to school. I have around five classes before break and five afterwards, ten in total!

What's your favourite subject at school?

I love maths but if I had to choose another, it would have to be languages.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be a dentist when I'm older because I'd like to look after people's teeth.

If you could make one wish, what would it be?


To have a doll of my own.

Do you have brothers or sisters?

Yes, I have a little sister who I get on with quite well.

Where is your favourite place in La Paz?

Parque Kusillo is my favourite because it's really pretty and there are lots of games and activities there. I also really like the green Teleferico line because it's really very long! I like La Paz but I wish I'd been born in the United States. I haven't actually been there, but I think it would be really nice.

What do you like doing with your friends?

I don't have any friends, only classmates who I learn with. I do have three boyfriends (she says, counting methodically on her fingers), but, (she whispers) I'm going to keep this a big secret.

If you could be one animal, which one would you be and why?

A monkey, I think, because they are really nice.

Who is the funniest person you know?

Virginia, a friend of my mothers.

THE UPBRINGING OF EVO
February 24/2015| articles

The Travails of Young Morales

On 21 January, Evo Morales was inaugurated as president of Bolivia for the third time at the ancient site of Tiwanaku, near Lake Titicaca, in a ceremony that mirrored Incan tradition. Morales emerged from amongst the pre-Columbian ruins decorated in gold and white cloth. He exhibited a chest of gold, silver and copper on his traditional unku, a robe made of specially woven vicuña wool. The metals, drawing upon cosmic energy, are said to encourage one to think first before talking. Upon Morales’s head sat the traditional ch’uku, a hat with four corners to represent the four cardinal points. It was a significant moment in history, as the ceremony declared Morales the spiritual and political figurehead of all the indigenous peoples of Bolivia. Such a setting was a far cry away from the isolated village of Isallawi, in the Orinoca district, where the Bolivian president was born. 

Juan Evo Morales Ayma was born in 1959 into a traditional adobe house constructed of sand, clay and water. Upon the high plains of rural Bolivia, in a poor and bleak area, Morales’s settlement was underprivileged. Few had access to sanitary provisions such as clean toilets and showering facilities, and electricity was nonexistent. As part of a farming family, the young Morales often assisted with planting and harvesting crops—mostly potatoes—and watching over his family’s llamas and sheep. Jimmy Iturri, editor of the Morales biography Mi vida de Orinoca al Palacio Quemado, says that ‘Living in the country affected [Morales] in many ways. There is a different world view, different teachings. The past is ahead and the future is behind.’

An agricultural upbringing meant that throughout his childhood Morales would often make a journey by foot to the Arani province, in Cochabamba, along with his father and his llamas, travelling two weeks in order to exchange salt and potatoes for maize and cocoa. Later, Morales spent six months in northern Argentina, sacrificing an education for two years of work in the sugar cane fields.

Morales’s childhood, like all those inhabiting arid landscapes of Bolivia, was often arduous. Yet amongst his hard work a passion that Morales still pursues to this day was born: football. A homemade ball was never too far from his feet. At the age of fifteen, Morales organised a football team within the community and made himself captain. It was his first experience in leadership.Then after two years he was nominated as the training coach for the entire region. ‘Football was very important to him. It became a fundamental piece of his life. He started being a leader as a football player’, Iturri says.

Morales emerged as a natural leader, but as a teenager he struggled academically. As the future president entered his adolescence, he was expected to work towards academic achievement. Morales moved to Oruro in order to attend high school. A series of manual labour jobs paid for his classes and a place to live; however, although he graduated in 1977, he did poorly academically. Despite this setback, Morales’s ambitious nature later saw him triumph by assuming the mantle of general secretary of the cocalero trade union, a group that campaigned against the imperialist oppression of the United States and stressed the significance of coca as a symbol of cultural identity. All of these experiences helped ready Morales for the position of influence he holds today, regularly addressing thousands of people throughout the country.

‘Evo is unique but, at the same time, he summarises who the people of Bolivia are, with all their virtues and all their defects’, Iturri says. ‘Evo is, in a sense, the formation of the Bolivian people, but without the Bolivian people Evo would not be who he is.’

ILLUSTRATION: OSCAR ZALLES

LIFE LESSONS FOR THE BOYS OF BOLIVIA
February 24/2015| articles

Rethinking How to Be a Man

An hour or so southwest of La Paz lies the town of Viacha, bustling but comfortably so, its maze of brown-faced buildings baking in the midday heat. Corner shops spill onto the pavement; a solitary cow hesitates, then hobbles across the road; a lorry driver abandons his vehicle in search of a cold soda. Yet underlying this flurry of Friday activity, greater, more pressing changes are taking place, specifically across masculine ideologies.

As violence against women continues to be a priority problem across Bolivia, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has seen its two-year campaign against gender discrimination take off, governed by its guiding principle that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. A catalogue of statistics underlines the necessity for a rigorous revaluation of these derechos humanos across Bolivia: Seven out of ten women have suffered a type of violence; out of every ten people physically assaulted, nine are women; and twelve cases of sexual violence are recorded every day, according to information distributed by the UNFPA. Whilst casting this issue as a comparative game of numbers, these statistics go a long way toward assessing the severity of Bolivia’s crisis amongst other South American countries and the necessity for radical change.

Angarita Noguera is director of the Fondo de Población in Bolivia. Running a workshop series aimed at boys, Noguera and her team have encouraged a widespread understanding of violence against women and of the roles we can all play in its prevention. The program has targeted twelve municipalities, each with varying degrees of success. ‘It is a long process that has been different across all municipalities, but we have seen advances in all of them’, says Noguera. Working with central municipal governments is key to this initiative, she explains: ‘Workshops have been tailored to specific communities, and the UNFPA have worked hard to institutionalise the agenda in each as to make a wider impact’. And whilst the ‘adults’ financially run the show, the boys involved play the actors. ‘It is the young people themselves who are in charge’, says Noguera. ‘They are in the position to reevaluate ideas of gender and inspire local governments to make financial compromises to maintain the scheme’. Word of mouth, in it loosest sense, will secure a future for this program, with or without UNFPA support.

Recent acknowledgement of the scope of this problem on the part of the government and international organizations is clear in the municipality of Viacha. Shelters now support victims of violence, and comprehensive legal services have expanded to offer survivor counselling and psychological services here, as well as in many remote municipalities. But the UNFPA’s wider approach is to prevent violence before its onset. Navigating through its centre, I reach the municipal office of government official Shirley Davalos, who speaks of the success of her six-month workshop series in Viacha and the educational methods used; ‘It is interactive, but mainly it has a youth-to-youth transmission policy’. Once schoolboys themselves, twenty-five young men now make up the Youth and Adolescence Municipal Council in Viacha, a committee that runs workshops focused on exchanging ideas and rethinking identity and, in doing so, creating a dynamic learning experience for the 3,000 young attendees.

Davalos insists that whilst the scheme’s focus is the prevention of violence, the program approaches the issue through the lense of universal human rights. ‘We do not believe in focusing on violence directly; rather, it is better from the other side, in the rescue and reevaluation of our rights’. In striving towards prevention rather than enforcement, rights over rule, Davalos and her extensive team work to a much wider audience willing to understand their own rights as men and those of the women around them. As Davalos herself believes, ‘When you know your rights, you can prevent violence’.

Whilst success in this instance is hard to gage, Davalos has confidence in the scheme’s transformative effects on the local community. Schools, especially those in rural Viacha, have seen both a greater enrolment of young girls and considerably fewer dropouts, and male attendance at the workshops has been impressive. There is a buoyancy amongst the young here, Davalos explains—the girls take pride in their education and the boys facilitate this new confidence. Noguera too has been impressed by the workshops’ uptake in Viacha. ‘You talk to those participating in the program and they tell you about changes in behaviour’, Noguera says, ‘the importance of having an informed idea about violence against women’. If, as the mayor of Camargo, Marco Antonio Barco, suggests, the municipalities must ‘invest to protect’, it is the boys of Bolivia, their ambitions and social understanding, that ultimately will inspire incremental change for female victims of violence.

Yet whilst attendance of the boy’s program has been strong, gaining funds for a similar series for girls has put a halt on proceedings. ‘As an organization of the UN, it’s not in our interest to support the program forever’, says Noguera. ‘Securing new initiative for girls is certainly a priority, but we don’t as yet know what the plan is going to be’. Waning financial support from the Fondo de Población alongside a tight municipal budget have rattled plans for a new anti-violence scheme for girls that was to have been launched this year. Davalos, however, is undeterred. A new strategy will train 600 parents of former participants to lead workshops themselves and subsequently keep this valuable program alive, even on a limited budget. ‘It’s a much more sustainable method,’ Davalos explains, describing ambitious plans to reach beyond schools to universities and youth groups. Sustainability of the scheme throughout these municipalities is precisely what the UNFPA hope to achieve.’By 2016’, says Noguera, ‘the local governments will have been able to implement these workshops on a permanent basis, supported by participants, parents, schools and communities alike’.

PHOTO: ALEXANDRA MELÉAN A.