Doug: My first week

My time in Santa Cruz has been great.  As Michael mentioned, we have visited many great projects and met many great people.  The people here are everything I expected and more.  Every person I have met, whether rotarian, waiter or taxi driver,  has been friendly and willing to go above and beyond to help me out. That has really helped to make the adjustment to life here comfortable.

As a teacher, I have found the vocational visits very interesting.  Most of the schools for poorer children are not even comparable to the worst schools I have seen in the States.   Things I take for granted like, computers and books are rare or absent in most cases.  Paint is peeling off the walls and in some places the windows were broken or absent.  There is also the problem of finding and keeping qualified professionals.  People who can help and are willing to take low salaries....ok, really low salaries.

 I wish I could post pictures but, I forgot my cable!  I promise to borrow someone elses camera to upload some very soon.  As they say a picture is worth a million words and I don´t want to encourage Michael to try and match that!

Today we depart

Yesterday, we had a light schedule. We toured a day-care center for children with disabilities. Ann was particularly interested in it because she teaches special education. It was a nice, well-equipped facility. We were told there is a waiting list of 100 to get in.
We had lunch at a beautiful resort hotel. I asked about rooms and was told they cost around $100 American per night – half, I think, what they would have cost in the states. I sat with Javier Aguilera, a handsome, soft-spoken man who told me he ran a company he founded that rents construction equipment. He said business was good because Santa Cruz is growing rapidly. But there are always problems. Sometimes he will invest in training his employees only to see them leave for better jobs. The companies that are his customers are often slow to implement better equipment because the workers learn by watching others rather than in schools and are unwilling to learn new techniques. I asked him if we could tour his facility after lunch and he was happy to take us. He had cement mixers, industrial drills, jackhammers, soil compactors, and all manner of heavy equipment, all in good repair. His office was in the second storey of a nice, modern building.
Marlene, my hostess, took us shopping in the city center, where I found some things for my family at a craft store. Many items such as wind chimes, wall hangings, and jewelry boxes, are boldly colored with bright images of animals of the Amazon: birds, reptiles, and flowers.
Doug, Judah, and I came back to Marlene’s house to have some beers and a chat. Her boys were home and we played chess and juggled with them. Fernando and Maely came over and we exchanged gifts, me giving them a copy of my book and them giving me a copy of a book by a friend of theirs about a cello teacher here in Eastern Bolivia.
Fernando and I spoke about the GSE experience and the value of international travel. He said that he was an exchange student to New York State in the 1960s. There was considerable anti-American sentiment in South America. “Yankee go home!” He expected people from the United States to be bad people. But when he arrived, he was pleasantly surprised to find them warm and friendly. Are people like this everywhere? When we go see them and live with them and share their lives, dreams, inspirations, and aspirations, we can find out.
We attended the meeting of Marlene’s Rotary Club. There were around 25 members and it was evident they were good friends with one another. Three teenagers from the United States attended, being exchange students sponsored by her club. I sat with a girl from western New York and the others were a boy from northern Idaho and a girl from Anchorage, Alaska. All had quickly learned Spanish and loved the experience, although they were ready to go home.
After the meeting, Marlene took Judah and I to a casino that looked like it could have been in Las Vegas. Judah and Marlene played black-jack, but I simply watched. I find casinos to be dreadful places, where people fret away their time and money amidst swirling cigarette smoke. Nobody looks happy. I took a taxi home when Judah said, “We might be here for awhile!” I assumed the barking of Marlene’s dogs that awoke me in the middle of the night was her arrival home.
Today is our last day in Santa Cruz. I just said goodbye to Marlene’s boys as they left for school. Soon I will pack my things and we will be underway to the airport for the short flight to Sucre, the white city. Everyone speaks highly of Sucre. The city has a population of around ¼ million and lies at over 9000 feet elevation. (Note, we don’t have cities at 9000 feet where I come from.) The air is crisp and cool. It will be another new world for us.
Fernando and many other people have asked me how I have liked Santa Cruz. To those I knew wouldn’t be offended, I said, “To be honest, it’s not my kind of place.” It is hot, flat and crowded. I like cool, mountainous, and sparse. But the people have made all the difference. They have been warm, open, and generous beyond my grandest expectation.
Michael

Snippets

Life is passing by in intense bursts here in Bolivia.

Yesterday I hopefully successfully negotiated with the national GSE coordinator our need for more rest. I told him that our typical schedule of leaving our hosts at 9:00 a.m. and not returning until midnight was making us weary, not to mention leaving us little time to share with our hosts. In spite of my best abilities to be gracious in this respect, the word seemingly arrived back to the club that coordinated our weekend excursion that they were somehow to blame and that we were unhappy with them. Hopefully, feathers weren’t too ruffled. Smiles seemed to return to all faces quickly.

Speaking of our hosts, mine is Marlene de Gionnotti. Marlene is a delightful single mom with two boys. She was educated at Southern Mississippi and is a successful businesswoman. Her house is gorgeous, twice as big as mine, with tasteful decorations throughout. Like many Latina women, she wears lots of jewelry and speaks in an exuberant, rapid-fire way. She is attentive to my every need and I like her very much. It will be difficult saying goodbye in a couple of days.

Every day, the sights and sounds of this exotic place flood the senses.

We were given a walk-through of a public market by a woman named Nina, whose German father settled in Bolivia. Outdoor markets are seemingly ubiquitous in Central and South America. It was a smorgasbord of colors and smells, with everything imaginable being sold. I envisioned many of the garment sellers obtained their merchandise from the black market, with endless racks of t-shirts, sandals, trousers, and linens. Food vendors sold fruits, many of which I’d never seen before, vegetables, grains from large burlap bags, and spices. Our guide bought a small plastic bag full of coca, gathered by hand from a large burlap bag. The entire area is overlain with an endless quilt of tarps and canopies. The meat vendors are nearby, situated indoors where the meats can be refrigerated, but regardless there are flies everywhere. Nina spoke with resignation about the fact that because these vendors were unregistered, they didn’t issue sales receipts and didn’t pay taxes. Her own business was a day-care and educational center for children 1 to 4 years old, and she lamented that legitimate businesses like hers were required to pay taxes, around 15%.

Coca is the plant from which cocaine is made. The people of Bolivia drink tea made from it, and it has a medicinal quality, curing intestinal problems. The peasants also place leaves between their cheek and gum, where it has a mild numbing effect. There is a huge black market in the harvesting and exportation of coca. The cocaine trade kills people and topples governments. I am trying to learn more about it.

At one point, Marlene, her kids, and her friend JuanPablo, and I were parked downtown. Nearby, someone had left their car in a spaced marked for no parking. The proprietress whose access had been blocked told JuanPablo that the last time someone left their car there, she slashed all the tires. He convinced her that that punishment was a bit harsh, so this time she agreed to slash only the front two. It was the most severe sign of hostility I'd seen where most people react to minor traffic indiscretions with resignation and nonchalance.

I went for a run/walk yesterday morning in Marlene’s neighborhood. This is a gated community that is surrounded by a concrete wall. The houses look like they would be right at home in an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. The sun was already hot as businessmen, carrying the daily newspaper, entered their cars for the morning commute. Maids swept sidewalks and watered outdoor flowers, many of which looked like familiar indoor plants back home. The weather is consistently warm throughout the year here, with the only seasonable variation being more rain in the summer from November until January. To me, this consistency is strange, given my life-long experience living where daily and seasonally variable weather is a fact of life. Here, today is pretty much the same as yesterday and pretty much the same as will be tomorrow, forever. Unnerving.

Almost every evening, we attend a Rotary Club meeting where we are featured speakers. We give much the same presentation each time, primarily about ourselves: our families, occupations, and interest. Our hosts seem genuinely pleased that we have chosen to visit with them in their country and we always receive a cordial environment. The one last evening seemed particularly informal and fun. Our team tries to split amongst the crowd so each of us can meet someone in the group. Invariably, I am able to find someone who speaks English, which helps in communicating more than just the most basic information. However, even when I don’t, I still do my best to make conversation. Every sentence I utter has mistakes. For example, yesterday I tried to ask a woman at lunch if she had children. Apparently my phrasing was such that I asked her if she made babies. I am generally undeterred and I would rather make a fool of myself than sit silently, as I don’t mind being laughed at. Embarrassment at my age is not an inhibiting factor. Rotary sent us her to interact with our hosts and I do so at every opportunity.

At the meeting last night, I sat between Ever (my host over the weekend on our trip to Samiapata) and a man with a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Vanderbilt who worked for a company that manages a 300-mile long natural gas feeding Bolivian energy to Brazil. We talked about what a benefit to our lives membership in Rotary has been, not only for the charitable work done locally and around the world but in the exchange of goodwill in situations like GSE. I told him that joining Rotary was one of the best things I’d ever done, and he concurred.

I was given a ride home after the meeting by another man, Alejandro, also a good English speaker, who told me that the government had murdered three people they said were terrorists a year earlier in the hotel where we had just met. This man was moved to Santa Cruz by his parents when he was young, leaving his hometown of Potosi. Potosi was once one of the richest towns in all of South America, being the heart of mining country, for tin, gold, and silver. It had electricity and other amenities before most of the country. Now, like many coal mining towns in Appalachia, Potosi was faced with diminishing population, poverty, and despair. Alejandro told me that the most intelligent and motivated people left the Potosi area long ago, seeking better opportunities. How similar was his story to what I’ve been told by the people of the coal regions of Appalachia!

Staying healthy and keeping my team healthy is a constant concern. Anne has had digestion problems and she skipped the meeting, so Judah made her presentation for her. I have diarrhea myself this morning and I have two huge insect bites on my side. Tamsen and Doug are sunburned from our walk on Sunday at the archeological site in Samiapata. Judah, who lived for a time in Mexico, seems right at home. We are told that staying healthy becomes an even greater concern as we leave cosmopolitan Santa Cruz and head into higher elevations, where cities are supplied with drinking water of questionable quality, where the sun is particularly intense, and where breathing is more difficult. We are told to eat light meals and limit our exercise for a few days as we acclimate. Light headaches are common for people as they reach high altitudes and I hope to not suffer from more serious migraines that I get sometimes.

Being here is enormously challenging but at least if we can stay healthy, it will be worth every minute.

Michael

Visiting Samiapata

Over the weekend, we took an excursion to a mountain town called Samiapata where a member of one of the Rotary Clubs here in Santa Cruz owns a lovely cabana. The trip took 3 hours and was exhausting. Our team and hosts went in three separate personal vehicles. Anne, Doug and I rode with Ever, a doctor of internal medicine. He spoke the best English, and my hosts are usually kind enough to put me with the person who is the best English speaker to account for my weak Spanish.

Ever earned a PhD in Japan in order to do his medical practice. There are apparently no MDs in Bolivia. While bounding through busy city traffic, weaving from lane to lane, he told me there is no public medicine in Bolivia. A visit to his office costs the equivalent of $20. He was soon to be on his way to Miami to purchase a used endoscope. He said that new ones cost around $35,000, but in his third-world country, doctors like him could only afford used ones from the States for around $10,000. It was worth a trip to Miami to look over the machine personally and decide whether it was in the proper condition for purchase.

Half the trip was on flat land, the other in the mountains. In the flat country, there were a continuing series of habitations, some very nice and others of wretched poverty. Countless vendors, both with open-air stores and from simple carts or hand-held trays sold all manner of goods, from fruits to soft-drinks, cigarettes, and candy.

As the road entered the mountains, we stopped to pay a toll. I asked Ever if the road was paved all the way. No sooner than he assured me that it was, we encountered the first of many dozens of unpaved sections, lasting a few hundred yards. There were vehicles of every description: cars, busses, trucks, motorcycles, and in every condition from new but muddy to ancient and decrepit. Lane markers were largely non-existent, and where they did exist were consistently ignored. Passing was done at any time and in any place thought to be at least marginally safe. Our speed was constantly changing, as we would accelerate over good pavement and then brake hard for the dirt sections, for a slower vehicle, or for any of a million road hazards. Many of the dirt sections were wet, muddy, and rutted. There were few guard rails and significant drops towards the river below. The lower section was a deep canyon, with reddish cliffs hanging overhead. At one point, we passed the construction site where a bridge, perhaps 100m in length, was being made of concrete. However, there were no cranes in evidence and seemingly no ability to transfer the concrete from the on-site mixing machine onto the bridge itself. Forms for the concrete were held in place by thousands of pieces of wood.

We got a late start for the long, exhausting trip and it was well after dark before we arrived at the village. Still, there were countless people walking along the road, largely unprotected from traffic. There is seemingly an endless supply of pedestrians, with no amenities (e.g. sidewalks, crossing markers) for them. There were also animals – dogs, chickens, horses, goats, and even cows – ambling along the road. Yet we miraculously saw no road-kill. How could these animals never get hit?

Motor vehicle safety is nonexistent. We saw people on motorcycles without helmets (sometimes the driver wears one but the child on the gas tank doesn’t, nor does the wife behind him), people bouncing along in the back of large trucks, and cars without functional tail-lights. The passenger seat belt in Ever’s car didn’t work, so I simply went without.

It was late at night before we bought food for breakfast, arrived at the cabana, then departed again to have dinner in the village. Afterwards our guests took us dancing until past midnight. (Note: this was advertised as a “rest day.”)

The next day, we spent all morning visiting an Inca ruin historic site at the top of a 2000m mountain. It was not as grand as Macchu Picchu, but fascinating and beautiful nonetheless. Our guide was a hefty, jovial man who carried a stick that he used to draw figures in the soil to explain his thoughts, much as a teacher uses chalk on a black board. His explanations migrated seamlessly from Spanish to English and back again.

Before departing for Santa Cruz, Ever bought gasoline to top off his car. There were no electric pumps in the village. So the gasoline was poured into a large measuring cup with a spout from a jerry-can and then into the spigot.

The drive back into the city was equally long and tiring, especially because of the increasing heat due to the decreasing altitude and to the increasing traffic. We arrived back in the city by 7:00 p.m. but it was nearer 9:30 before Marlene, my host, could retrieve me and have me “home.” I was dead-tired, but I became rejuvenated by a conversation with her and her two boys over a late dinner of rectangular pizza. Her boys are Gabriel, age 14 and Leonardo, age 12. Both attend an English school. Leonardo was particularly interested in my books and asked me to explain in detail the writing process and the sources of my inspiration. I told him about a new novel I have in mind and asked him to participate in the plot development. I invited both boys to visit with us and to consider Virginia Tech or one of our other Virginia universities when they’re ready for college. My GSE experience thus far has afforded me far too little time to spend with Marlene and her boys as I like them all very much.

Our itinerary has been too full and the entire team is tired. I have written to the GSE coordinator for the host district to ask that we be afforded more REAL rest time and he has responded with understanding, saying,

“The wornness and affection of Rotarian people of Bolivia make this things happened. I just talked with (the district Governor’s) representative to fix the schedule for these last days you´re going to spend in Santa Cruz. We will fix all the schedules. Don´t worry...”

The graciousness of our hosts is unbelievable.

Michael

On language and friendship

We are in the city of Santa Cruz, which has grown from a mere 60,000 or so fifty years ago to over a million today. There are several Rotary Clubs here, perhaps six, and we are hosted by a new one almost every day. So we’re meeting a steady stream of new people who come into and out of our lives with maddening speed and frequency.

Yesterday, the Rotary Club of Santa Cruz, which is the first club here and the “mother” of the others, was our host. The president of the club, Bolivar Carvalho, and several club members escorted us to a rehabilitation center that they have funded and built since Rotary International’s 100^th anniversary six years ago. "Rotary implored us to think big, and we did." It is a totally modern, spotless facility. It is not a hospital for acute injuries but a rehabilitation center where victims of accidents, mostly burns, can receive longer-term care.

Much of the tour was given in Spanish, but the Rotary guides and my teammates were quick to provide enough translations for me to hopefully understand what was going on. One of the Rotary members, Fernando Soriano, spoke fluent English (more about him in a moment), and he made sure we all understood the vital work being done.

Burns are a frequent accident among the poor children of the country. “Here’s a typical situation,” we were told. “Imagine a family of three children where the six-year old it left during the day to care for a 3-year old and a 1-year old while the parents – or single parent – is away working. No six-year old child is prepared to take care of him- or herself, not to mention other children. Many families heat and cook over open fires. Children are often burned. When they are burned, they not only suffer the intense pain of the injury, but they feel shame and often leave school and become withdrawn.”

The center can always use more money because the needs are overwhelming.

Driving back into the city center for lunch, Fernando spoke in perfect English about his intimate familiarity with and fondness for Southwest Virginia. One of his twin sons, Javier, attended high school in Abingdon, as an exchange student. Javier loved the area so much that he stayed and earned his bachelor’s degree at Emory and Henry College and then a master’s degree at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. Fernando and his wife had made several trips to the area where their hosts never let them stay in hotels, only in their home.

Later that afternoon, we met Javier. He is a totally engaging, bright young man. He spoke about his admiration for his dad and for the Rotary club and the work they were doing for the community, and of his experiences in Southwest Virginia. I liked Fernando, his wife Mealy, and Javier, very much.

Still later, Bolivar escorted us around the old city center, into various museums and the impressive cathedral. Bolivar made the effort to speak English for us whenever we didn’t understand what we were being told, while Judah carried most of the translation task.

That evening, we gave the program at their club meeting, which began with dinner shortly after 8:00 p.m. and lasted until 11:00 p.m. or so. I had several conversations with club members, some who spoke English and some who did not.

One man was an engineer, a graduate with a master’s degree in Civil Engineering from University of Texas. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech, which he knew about and spoke well of. We talked about the Bolivia’s infrastructure and power generation systems. Another man was a former Davis Cup tennis player, and he worked in coordination tennis activities in Bolivia. He was in charge of the student exchange program. He admitted to me that getting students from the USA and other first-world countries was a hard sell. “Few of them want to come to Bolivia.” I told him that the challenges for an American here would be great, but worth it, and to look for student looking for a challenge.

Everyone was extraordinarily warm and welcoming. We were treated like celebrities.

I left the meeting with the profound realization that speaking different languages is a barrier to communication but no barrier whatsoever to friendship.

Michael

Me? I’m a simple man, a small town family man. I love my small town. People drive with courtesy, in marked traffic lanes. People leave their doors unlocked when they’ll only be away for a short time. I awake with the sunrise, never setting an alarm clock. I go to my office by 8:30 a.m. I pack a lunch which I eat at my desk. I come home at 5:30 and have supper by 6:00 p.m. with my wife. I drink a dark beer. I go for a walk in the evening, 5 to 10 kilometers, with one of my dogs. I shower and go to bed by 10:15 p.m.

I am in Bolivia.

In Bolivia, my life isn’t like this.

In Bolivia, people drive with sort of a cooperative aggression. I think they go to work, and they must get up in the morning, because they are up during the day. They eat lunch from noon until 3:00 p.m. What I mean is not that they start eating at noon or any time until 3:00 p.m., but that lunch takes three hours. They often eat a snack at 5:00 p.m. They socialize until 8:00 p.m. Or 9:00 p.m. Or 10:00 p.m. They drink lots of wine. Last night’s dinner was served around 10:30 p.m. Or was it 11:00 p.m.? By then, my eyes are drooping. I smile a wan smile and implore to my hosts, “Estoy consado” (I’m tired) and hope they are not offended. Within a short time, like an hour, a grouping of hosts form to preliminarily think about how I might be delivered back to my host home.

I write this post at 8:30 a.m. According to the itinerary our hosts have given us, we are to visit a hospital this morning, departing at 8:00 a.m. My hostess is evidently still asleep. I have no idea who will pick me up or take me to the team gathering point.

It is an amazing life here in Bolivia!