I first came to Bolivia in 2008 to spend seven months volunteering at a rural college. The Unidad Académica Campesina-Carmen Pampa is a small university nestled in a little village about 40 minutes by minibus from Coroico, in the heart of Bolivian coca and coffee country. It is a place where hundreds of students, largely the children of farmers and other rural dwellers from all over Bolivia come to study agronomy, veterinary science, nursing, education or ecotourism. These students mingle with faculty and administrators, who are often from La Paz, and with a small band of foreign volunteers from all over the world. It’s an intriguing mix of cultures and perspectives from all over Bolivia and the world concentrated in one little place.
Integrated into this microcosm of higher education is a rural community of coca, fruit and coffee farmers; chicken breeders and sheep herders; shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Undoubtedly, the campus serves as a force that ties Carmen Pampa together, but an additional, largely agrarian economy continues here as well. And so during a recent visit to the village it was not a surprise to meet Benita Mollisaca, an elderly coca farmer, harvesting in her cocal (see the cover of this issue). She is just one of many people who would be here regardless, with or without the college. She is a true local campesina.
In this issue of Bolivian Express we step outside of our urban confines to learn more about the Bolivian countryside, or the campo. We visit tourist destinations that provide a taste of rural life, from wineries in Tarija to coffee farms in the Yungas to ayahuasca ceremonies outside of La Paz. We meet craftspeople bringing a bit of the country to the city, including talented artisans near Santa Cruz and restaurateurs providing farm-to-table dining experiences in Bolivia’s major cities. We talk with some young women bringing Bolivian craftspeople onto the stage of global high fashion. And aside from the market and tourism opportunities coming from the countryside, we take a critical look at some of the key issues facing rural communities in Bolivia, including dangerous effects of climate change and the challenges in providing adequate healthcare to far-flung communities.
In working on this issue of the magazine, we realized that the campo is not just another place to visit and experience; in fact, country and city are deeply intertwined here. In every story that we chased, we discovered profound connections between the rural and the urban, and witnessed how what happens in the cities in Bolivia has profound impacts on the countryside, and vice versa.
One of the most important forces shaping rural communities in Bolivia, including in communities surrounding Carmen Pampa, is migration. As agriculture continues to be a difficult way of life, and as major industries – particularly mining – change and adapt to global market and environmental forces, more and more rural residents are moving to the city, at least part-time, in search of economic opportunities. In my travels around Bolivia I’ve seen this much too often. Two years ago I visited the village of Yulo, about three hours from Potosí, where nearly half the homes were empty. Knocking on doors was more often than not a lost cause, and I remember neighbors calling to us as we waited on countless doorsteps. ‘No hay nadie,’ they would say. ‘Todos se fueron.’ Entire families had uprooted and moved to Argentina in search of work. In many places in rural Bolivia, all that remain are the elderly and the very young. Working-age adults and students have moved elsewhere.
In many ways, Benita is lucky (which may explain her infectious belly laugh that never ceased throughout our photo shoot). While she wakes early every day to work in her fields, her son remains by her side. Despite graduating from the college in Carmen Pampa a few years ago with a nursing degree, Reynaldo has opted to stay at home to help his parents in the fields. He certainly has the option to come to El Alto or La Paz and look for work in a clinic or health centre, but instead is happy to be in his community, with his family, picking coca and avocados in the morning sun.
The Bolivian countryside has its own attractive forces that keep people rooted there, and makes it something not to be missed by visitors here. We hope this issue of Bolivian Express offers a window into this often-overlooked side to the Bolivian experience.
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Liquid Enlightenment in Valle de las Animas
Photo: Jerusa Pozo
I once heard that if you want to move forward, occasionally you have to exorcise your demons, give yourself a spiritual jolt. One ‘huasca’, they say.
Just 45 minutes outside of Cota Cota, in La Paz’s Zona Sur, is the Valle de las Animas, a place where even Bolivians can feel like a gringo in their own home. Here everything is different. It’s like entering another world.
Allkamari is a spa resort in the valley. Most of its customers are foreigners. The place offers relaxation exercises, spa and cleansing rituals, but its real highlight is the spiritual healing therapies: from San Pedro to the famous ayahuasca, ‘the mother who shows you the way’.
How is this place different than the city? Is it what they eat? Are they happier here (a myth that we buy about country people)? Are they more hospitable? Do they have more values than we do in the city? Do they age better? When I think about things that don’t belong to the city, I immediately imagine ‘pachamamic’ entities, things or people that are connected with nature, like yatiris.
It seems we flip a switch when we leave the city. Not when we're on vacation, but when we barely make it out of La Paz to the countryside that surrounds it. When we go to that place, outside of the city, we become other people. Different laws are at play when you live or experience rural life. There are no status symbols, no occidental codes.
In recent times it has become fashionable to visit rural places in South America to take ayahuasca. People like Sting have gone to the Amazon in Peru to try the precious drink. Although it has been openly marketed in Cusco, where you can find it in pills, in La Paz, ayahuasca is still a taboo subject for many Bolivians. It seems that foreigners are more informed of the sacred plant than the locals.
Tupak Wayra is the shaman at Allkamari. He and his partner, Wara, are leading the ceremony. It's easy to tell who is going to the ceremony for the very first time because newcomers are the most restless. Don is 67 years old. That same morning his plane arrived from California and he will fly back the next day. He wants to take ayahuasca before he dies, a goal that inspires a certain respect among all of us.
One by one, we (the two friendly girls from Iceland; a son of a Bolivian congressman who wants to make everybody believe he is from Germany; four friends from England who think they're going to try something like LSD and have the greatest time of their lives; and me) enter the chullpa. Inside, there are objects you can find in La Paz’s famous Witches Market: llama fetuses, incense, palo santo.
Wayra tell us to introduce ourselves and say why we are there. While we are doing that, we have to hit a stick to the ground, shouting ‘Jallalla!’ The most unimaginable reasons bring people to the valley. Once we introduced ourselves, Wayra offers us the Ayahuasca that Wara was preparing while we were talking.
I am fifth in line to try it. When it's my turn, my hands are sweaty. I'm thinking as if my life will change forever; as if I’m going to jump off a cliff. The drink has a nauseating bitter taste that welcomes you to a world where your traumas, dreams and aspirations are presented to you one by one.
What happened from that time until four hours later I can only describe as a moral shock. Each one of us had a different experience. Mine was something like Dumbo, the scene where he gets drunk for the very first time. I proceeded to dig through a lot of junk in my subconscious. Physically, I think we all vomited in the chamber pot at least once.
The next day we gathered in the chullpa and everyone shared their experiences. The guys from England did not look so happy. One of them began to cry as he recounted what he saw in his journey. One by one, we shared some of what we saw in our personal trips. The man from California had to take a flight in the following hours. He looked pleased.
After the stories, we were asked to take the containers with our vomit and empty them outside of the hut, after which we washed our chamber pots.
Photo: William Wroblewski
Usually the rainy season on the Bolivian altiplano – the arid high plateau that stretches from northern Chile and Argentina, through western Bolivia and to southern Peru – comes at the end of December and lasts through March and April, but this year was different. The province of Pacajes, in the south of the department of La Paz near the Desaguadero River, is suffering from an unusual drought, probably as a result of el Niño. In the past, el Niño brought more rain to some Bolivian lowlands and drought to the area of Pacajes, but now experts think climate change is making el Niño conditions even worse.
I went to this region at the invitation of Clemente Salzurri, a local elder from the area. I was part of a team from Fundación Ingenieros en Acción, an engineering organisation in La Paz that brings water and sanitation projects to rural communities in Bolivia through international partnerships. We planned to visit communities in the municipality of Calacoto, in Pacajes, for a possible future water project.
Our journey started on a recent frigid morning, departing La Paz at dawn to meet Salzurri and community authorities in El Alto to drink some api and eat buñuelos for breakfast. Afterward, we headed towards Viacha, passing Comanche and Coro Coro, finally driving our vehicle on dirt roads and crossing a large bridge over the Desaguadero River. The snow-covered peak of Sajama, Bolivia’s tallest mountain, was always in the background, tucked behind the hills with the llamas, sheep and tholas that dominate the landscape.
Salzurri described the region, Pacajes, as the Land of the Eagle People (in Aymara, paka means ‘eagle’, and jaqi means ‘people’), who lived in the territory long before the time of the Inca empire. The Pacajes belonged to the Aymara kingdoms that were later conquered by the Incas. Some relics of this culture can still be seen in the different chullpas, or adobe monument graveyards, along the way.
Water is what brings life to this area. Communities survive mostly on herds of llama, sheep and a few crops like potatoes and barley. They count on the rainy season for water, and things go awry when the rains do not come. The communities build cotañas, or artificial ponds, to collect water during the rainy season and hope to get enough to get through the dry season. This time, we saw the cotañas almost dry and with many animals around looking to quench their thirst. Many will probably not survive the dry altiplano winter.
One of the communities that we visited that caught our attention was Jancko Marca. As we approached the village, Gladys, a local leader, showed us a dry area where there once was a small lake. We saw a local home water well, about 14 metres depth. There was still water at 12 metres, but the owner told us that in the past his family could get water at four metres. The situation worsened at the water wells near the primary school – here, none had water. Community members told us that teachers have to bring water from La Paz to get by.
The community’s water shortages and their emergency situations are self-evident, and our team plans to visit again and start looking for a possible international engineering partner in order to assist Jancko Marca.
On our way back, we took another road to try to get home early and catch one of the main roads to La Paz. Salzurri guided us, and we were confident that the terrain was dry. But, ironically in this land where water was usually hard to find, some rain had fallen in the past weeks and suddenly our vehicle was trapped in a wet clay and sandy terrain. One of the back tires was completely underwater. We had to find a way out and looked for stones and dry thola branches, using the jack to lift the vehicle. Our diverse group, Aymara men and woman, a gringo, some Bolivian engineers, all strained to get the vehicle unstuck. And after an hour of trying, the car was finally free. Together we solved this one small problem, and together we all hoped that, when we return, we’ll be able to solve the another, seemingly intractable one.
After thinking about the whole ordeal, it looks like the diverse teamwork that I saw trying to get out of this situation is a good sign for the challenge to bring water to this troubled village. It will take the participation of everyone involved.
Photo: Amy Booth
The switch is instant. I’m in a dry river bed with my tour guide, David. One moment, he is explaining in clear, relaxed Spanish how fossilized dinosaur footprints are formed. The next, another tour guide passes and he switches into a swift, lilting chat punctuated by explosive little sounds, entirely unintelligible to me. He is speaking Quechua. David is one of several million Bolivians who are bilingual in Spanish and an indigenous language.
In the undulating, dusty national park of Torotoro, in northern Potosí, everyone from the shopkeepers to the toddlers speaks Quechua. Spanish feels like the language of tourists and outsiders, a lingua franca used to communicate but not to crack jokes or declare love.
We are four hours' drive on unpaved roads from Cochabamba, the nearest city. On the bus during the journey here, we passed small ramshackle huts made of adobe, the dried-earth building material traditional in the area. Small children spurred large herds of goats and sheep at the side of the road. Every so often, I would see a sign marking projects completed under the government's drive to eradicate extreme poverty.
Quechua – technically a family of languages given the difference between the varieties – is the most widely spoken indigenous language family in South America. Famously, it was the language of the Inca empire. Estimates vary, but the number of speakers is thought to be over 8 million – more than Danish, Finnish or Slovak.
Quechua is not a language for the faint-hearted. Like such notorious tongues as Hungarian and Finnish, it is agglutinative – grammatical information, such as tense and possession, is stuck onto nouns and verbs to form colossal monster words that translate into half a sentence of English. The well-respected Jesús Lara Quechua-Spanish dictionary gives the example of janpunkipuni, which translates as ‘You'll come anyway.’
As we hike, David tells me how to say ‘Hurry up’ in Quechua, grinning at my clumsy attempts. Although he repeats the phrase several times, I can’t make the long words and guttural sounds stick in my head, and I wonder whether Quechua speakers find it equally hard to learn Spanish. Its vocabulary has little in common with Indo-European languages, making memorising vocabulary a tall order – although many Spanish words have been incorporated over time. It is also just one of over 30 indigenous languages recognised in Bolivia's 2009 constitution.
Back in Cochabamba, however, the bars and restaurants of the city centre may as well be a different country. High-rise offices and sleek restaurants jostle with grand colonial buildings. There is not a block of adobe in sight. Here, Spanish dominates once again. It is the international language spoken throughout Bolivia. It is the common tongue, used in national papers and television. Not everybody speaks it, though. While Quechua prevails in communities such as Torotoro, up on the altiplano that surrounds La Paz, indigenous communities are more likely to speak Aymara. And around the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, you might encounter Chiquitano or Guaraní.
When Basilia arrived in Cochabamba at the age of 15, Quechua was the only language she knew. Back home in northern Potosí, she lived in a village of 200 families who spoke Quechua and Aymara. There was no electric lighting, water came from the river, and to this day the roads are not paved. Here, her family's plot of land was small, so when the potato harvest was bad there was no food. In search of a change, they migrated to the city. ‘I couldn't speak one word of Spanish,’ Basilia says. ‘Not even a little bit. It was difficult.’
Basilia moved to Cochabamba in 1995. ‘When I arrived, I worked in a guesthouse,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes they would send me out to buy meat, but I would come back with nothing because the shopkeepers and I couldn't understand each other.’
But now she is completely fluent in Spanish. She’s lucky, though, because many who speak an indigenous language as a mother tongue don’t learn Spanish. In Cochabamba's city fringes and surrounding towns, it is not uncommon to meet people who can only speak Quechua, especially women and older people.
Being immersed in a new language is a full-spectrum challenge. Even people who are fluent in their second language sometimes struggle to be themselves in that language. If they can't find the words to express ideas quickly enough in a conversation, they might just say nothing, even if in their first language they are naturally garrulous. Communicating complicated ideas can suddenly become a process of crude approximations, making them seem ineloquent.
Moreover, when the speaker is fluent, other speakers might not realise they are struggling to convey the finer points of the conversation, leading them to believe the person they are speaking to is less intelligent or observant than they really are.
This raises the question of whether language barriers exacerbate prejudice against indigenous people in Bolivia. Before the 1952 Revolution, voting was subject to literacy requirements, which excluded many indigenous people.
Inequality in the Bolivia is still very high – according to World Bank figures, the country had a Gini coefficient of 48.1% in 2013, making it the 23rd most unequal in the world. The stark divide is clearly visible: While some Bolivians live in spacious houses with private swimming pools, others live in single-room adobe houses with no access to running water or sewage.
Census data show that people who only speak an indigenous language live mostly in rural areas, which tend to be poorer than cities. Historian Herbert S. Klein notes that among literate speakers of native languages, there has been a shift from monolingualism towards bilingualism, and from there towards monolingualism in Spanish.
In December of last year, the construction of a Quechua research institute in Cliza, Cochabamba, was announced. Built over a 13-hectare site, the facility will cultivate knowledge of the Quechua language and culture. Responsible for the project is the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura de la Nación Quechua, which was inaugurated in 2013 to recover ancient Quechua practices and promote Quechua culture. Perhaps spaces such as this will help speakers of Bolivia’s native languages to discover more about their linguistic and social heritage.
Splashing his face in a mountain stream or chatting about how to climb the steeply slanted tectonic plates that form Torotoro's striking scenery, David appears content in his beautiful, remote place.
As for Basilia, she has not returned to her hometown in 10 years. Her family is in Cochabamba now. Her children's first language is Spanish, although they understand Quechua and are learning to speak it. But be it through choice or necessity, some speakers will never learn Spanish.
‘Some Quechuistas will die Quechuistas,’ Basilia says.
