Child Labor

Today I had the chance to visit the owner of a small pasta factory in a town about an hour outside of Cochabamba.

We drove out of town, past small, earth-colored homes set upon dun brown hills. The starkness and lack of color reminded me of La Paz. We moved into an arid landscape. A green cactus lined the roads. My companion, Reynaldo, said it’s edible and delicious. We passed a polluted, but beautiful lake, lined with cafes and a hotel overlooking the mountainous panorama. A lot of new homes were being constructed along the roadside. These houses would look out over arid plains and towards the brown mountain ridges that rose in the distance. Reynaldo said the construction is spurred by remittances from Spain – emigrants sending money back to families to build new homes.

The pasta factory is owned by a 47-year-old man who has a university student as his “concubine.” They’ve been dating since 2000, but just starting living together six months ago. They already have two children.

“We were planning to get married this year,” Wilson said, “but she needs to finish her studies first.”

“Can one not study and get married at the same time?” I asked Reynaldo.

“It’s probably that he hasn’t made up his mind yet,” Reynaldo said. “If he marries her, she’ll own half of the business and he’s probably nervous about giving up any ownership.”

Wilson showed himself to be a very distrustful, jealous and avaricious man. He has a store, where he could sell his product. But it’s only open once a week because he doesn’t have time to manage both the factory and the store.

“Can’t you hire an employee to run it for you in your absence?” I asked him.

“No, you can’t trust anyone here. When people sell large quantities and they are taking in thousands of dollars, they begin to be careless and think that they can take some of that money. The owner across the street had an employee run off with $8,000. Then they use the money to emigrate to Spain or the U.S., so it’s really hard to do anything about it.”

But the store across the street works daily and the owner was not on site today. Clearly he makes enough of a profit that it’s still in his interest to operate, even with an occasional loss.

“Do you not have any family members or people you trust who you could hire?” Usually relatives can recommend a distant relative or friend that can be relied on. I myself hired someone who entered and cleaned my apartment in my absence, and had full access to all my belongings. I don’t believe that reliable workers don’t exist in Bolivia.

“No,” he said. “You can’t trust anybody.” He doesn’t even trust his family to touch any money, although they live on the factory site. If a customer wants to buy some noodles, they call him and he drives the hour there to make the sale himself.

I later asked Reynaldo, “If he were to pay someone an attractive salary, such as $200 a month, do you think they’d work honestly?”

“Yes,” Reynaldo said.

When we arrived at the site of the factory and his family’s home, we were greeted by giant guard dogs. “If we didn’t have these, the place would be overrun by thieves,” his mother said. She was an elderly woman, with a crooked row of gold teeth on the bottom and none on top. She wore a round hat and a worn blouse, apron and skirt over her heavyset body.

We weren’t allowed to see the factory itself. “Wilson is jealous and doesn’t let anybody at all go in there,” his sister said.

We did however see his employees, a group of young boys, carrying 50 kg bags of noodles from a porch into a storehouse. They were overseen by the elderly mother and by a handicapped brother. Both of them sat guard to make sure they didn’t steal anything.

“How old are they?” I asked the sister.

Her daughter, no more than 10 herself, immediately said, “18.”

They didn’t look it. I asked about the small one.

“One of them is 18, another 20, another 23,” the sister said.

I later approached the two smaller ones and asked their ages. One didn’t speak Spanish, but I found out they were 13 and 14. They earned 500 bolivianos (about $60) per month.

These boys live on the factory premises and seem to have nothing to look forward to professionally in life. I left the factory and the home with a terrible feeling. I’ve met plenty of Bolivians (and Kyrgyz) who earn thousands of dollars a month, yet see nothing wrong with paying their workers a pittance. And then they complain about not being able to trust their workers not to steal. But this was the first time I’d seen children and it really upset me.

Reynaldo and our driver, said the situation was pretty normal. “Those boys are just carting bags,” the driver said. “I’ve seen children forced into much more difficult and dangerous work.”

He said that while yes, the owner should be paying more (the minimum wage in bolivia is 800 bolivianos ($100) per month), one needed to think of what the alternative for the boys would be. “These kids come to town from the countryside to seek work. Many times they are sent by their parents. Their parents have a ton of kids and can’t maintain them. So it’s not so much a question of exploitation as survival.”

Then he relented, admitting that the need for survival created a situation in which people could easily be exploited. “Many people exploit these populations. Because they are so unsophisticated. They don’t know anything about their rights. The employers know that these people will never go complain to a labor office about their rights.”

On the drive back to Cochabamba, we passed a laguna on the edge of town, with a running/biking path around it. Seemed like a nice place for the community. But according to them, it’s not.

“All the drug addicts hang out around here,” they said. “There have been all kinds of violent crimes – not just robberies, but also rapes and even murders.”

Maria suggested I not visit the giant white statue of Christ on a nearby hilltop, even though it’s the tallest in the world. The cable car is under repair and it’s dangerous to walk, both because of feral dogs and because the isolation makes it a target for robbery.

In a book I’m reading by Isabel Allende, she quotes an InterAmerican Development Bank report as saying that Latin America is the second most violent area in the world, after Africa. My taxi driver yesterday claimed that Hispanic men in the U.S. could act aggressively because they are separated from their families – that it’s the spouse and children that help control the aggression. Yet Allende writes of widespread domestic violence. Where does it originate from? How can it be eliminated? Finding answers to such questions would make the world an immeasurably better place.

Approaching Independence Day

Independence day is coming up next Monday and the city is getting ready. There is going to be a military parade in Santa Cruz. The black graffiti sprawled across the city walls, usually criticizing President Evo Morales, is now criticizing the military as well. In the street medians, small entrepreneurs sell flags. The red, yellow and green cloths, waving in the wind, add a nice color to the city. Today I saw two workers lifting a large flag up the tall Christ statue in a traffic roundabout.

I’m taking advantage of the three-day weekend to visit some far-away Jesuit churches on the Mission Circuit. It will be a full weekend, including two all-night bus trips. But it’s my own chance to see this part of Bolivia. I only have four weekends left.

The sun is cautiously emerging and in the past few days we’ve occasionally felt the warmth of its rays, a welcome touch.

a day in the life

I spent the first part of the day in a busy, lower-income part of the city called Ramada. The office was surrounded by small shops – selling stationary, glass display cases, party supplies, snacks. Buses, taxis and cars filled the street in a noisy congestion. At 9 in the morning, one man sold cups of red gelatin through the windows of the micro buses to passengers.

The clientele was varied. In contrast to the areas I’ve been spending time so far, here I saw women with dark, lined faces and long black braids, dressed in pleated skirts and aprons. They sat next to a white man and a Hispanic woman, a couple, applying for a debit card. A little girl sat the desk with her mother. Her tiny face so pensive and patient, I felt I could almost see her mind developing.

The staff were young, professional and seemed comfortable and capable. But the air smelt of flour and sex, of the dust of life that collected on the customer’s clothing.

I spent the day with Vanessa, an experienced customer service representative. She had a glamorous photo of herself copied across her computer screen, in 15 repetitions.

Despite what seemed to be an unusually strong interest in herself, she interacted well with the various clients. One middle aged woman came in looking for funding to get a refrigeration storage space at the slaughterhouse where she works. This simple woman carried a cell phone, a sign of the increased access the poor have to technology. She told me she sells trip, heart, and cattle innards.

“Before, we used to give those things away,” she said. “But in the past 30 years, they have become popular.” She works in the largest slaughterhouse in Santa Cruz, the same one that supplies meat for Burger King hamburgers.

“Yes,” Vanessa concurred. “Those parts are really delicious. We’ll have to invite you to try some.”

I feel the strong emphasis on meat here, which makes me feel like I’m in a cowboy-like atmosphere. The love of meat is really no different than in Siberia or in Kyrgyzstan. However, there seem to be less vegetables available here. Inside of the ubiquitous tomato and cucumber salad served in Kyrgyzstan, here the meat usually comes with potatoes, dehydrated potatoes, and rice – a huge carbohydrate collection. Even the beans, the nice source of fiber so common in other parts of central and south America, are virtually absent here.

I think there are vegetables available in the market. But since I don’t have access to a kitchen, I eat all my meals out. I usually balance it with a full lunch (since that is the main meal of the day here) and a chef salad or soup in the evening from my hotel.

Vanessa took me with her to lunch at a local café. We watched the local news on television. The 309 passengers on the LAB flight to Spain that had still not departed were rioting at the Santa Cruz airport. They were originally told that LAB couldn’t find the funds for jet fuel. Three LAB managers were brought to jail for corruption for diverting the funds collected for this flight. In the meantime, the passengers, stuck at the airport, were going to miss the April 1st deadline for entering Spain without a visa.

A former Miss Bolivia (a single mother of an 11 month old daughter) was arrested for trafficking cocaine and was said to be an addict. And a car accident resulted in two serious injuries. The TV camera showed one of the men being removed from the car, his face streaming blood.

“Poor guy,” Vanessa said.

I instinctively turned my face away from the TV. “How can they show that on TV?” I asked. “How would you feel if you were dying and the world watched.”

“They don’t follow the laws,” she said. But then went on to tell me how she watched the entire video of Americans being beheaded in Afghanistan a few years ago. “It’s quite a process,” she said. “And the sounds they make, it’s just awful. They take a knife and slice all the way through the head, then they put the head on the stomach of the victim.”

“Didn’t you have nightmares after watching that?” I asked. I myself found the still photos just before death, knowing what would happen imminently, disturbing enough.

“No, but I had a real headache, from the extent of the cruelty,” she said.

Vanessa is one of 8 daughters in a family with 8,000 hectares of land. She hates the current government.

“It’s a socialist government that wants everything under its control,” she said. “It’s the worst that could have happened to our country. He wants to get rid of the rich.”

Her dream is to inherit her father’s land, raise cattle and grow the cattle feed. “I don’t make much in the bank,” she said. “But I’m working in order to learn, so that someday I can establish something for myself.”

**

Most employees here have two hour lunch breaks, and the majority go home. The importance of family is clear and I think it works out to be a very nice schedule to allow people to balance work and family. They go to work or school for a few hours in the morning, spend a quality lunchtime together, then go back for several more hours, and then have the evening together. In this way, I think people are more refreshed for the two periods of time they spend at work, and since they are able to see their families throughout the day – in the morning, afternoon, and evening, as well as weekends, there is less conflict in balancing work with family, even with only 3 weeks annual vacation.

In the late afternoon, most employees provide their workers with a snack. The day before yesterday, they brought me a square of yucca with some slivers of meat. Yesterday it was a yogurt and a small package of cookies. This is another tradition that makes the work day pass with more ease and comfort.

I suppose it’s still a matter of learning the local products, but I’m glad to be eating out so much now. Because what I’ve seen in the small supermarket near my hotel and the stalls I’ve gone by, doesn’t appeal to me at all. There are the standard junk-food products – the sodas, the Pringles, and the candies. Chocolate cereal flakes seem to be common as is gelatin. Then there are the local products – the fried plantains that are so greasy they are almost see through, the yogurt in weak packaging that somehow scares me, the juice made from mystery fruits and questionable hygiene, the fried empanadas with a mystery surprise inside. They seem to like sweets, and there are a lot of rolls and cookies, but those I’ve tried so far are pretty dry and not very sweet.

While none of the groceries appeal to me particularly, I do like the entrees they are able to prepare from them. One afternoon, I had lunch with some colleagues at a popular local restaurant, La Casa de la Camba. There, a man dressed in white and wearing a sombrero directed our car into the parking space. And all the servers were similarly dressed in the style of horsemen from the pampas. There we had fried yucca with a tasty, green hot sauce, greasy rice with duck and plantain, chicken, beef and rice with milk and cheese (like rice pudding, but without the sugar).

**

I learned quite a bit more about the city and the country where I’m living. Bolivia is divided into nine departments, the equivalent of states and Santa Cruz is one of these. The rainy season, which continues through April, has been strong this year and a department to the north, Beni, suffered serious floods. During the rainy season, the countryside fills with water, roads are ruined, and entire areas become very difficult to access. The rumor is that this year, the combination of El Nino and La Nina will bring drought after the rain, so farmers are collecting water in tanks and the city of Santa Cruz is relying on its wells.

Bolivia used to be driven by mining. But the main industries in Santa Cruz today are wood, petroleum, agriculture and cattle. There is also a large hill full of iron being exploited by an Indian enterprise, Jindu. It is the most expensive city in Bolivia and the most dangerous. Cochabamba had been developing into the eastern capital of Bolivia, but due to constant political problems and protests, companies started to move to Santa Cruz instead. At the same time, many people migrated to the area for the fertile soil.

“The very rapid growth in Santa Cruz has made development disorganized,” my Spanish teacher Oscar told me. “Five years ago there were three rings. Now there are seven.”

He told me there has also be a large increase in street children in the past few years. These kids sniff shoe glue and are called chuferos. One afternoon we drove past a group of women and children seated on a median. Police circled around them, trying to convince them to move.

Maria told me they were chuferos. They wanted to stay there in order to rob from people to get money for the glue. She said the parents gave the glue to their children.

“I’ve even seen a mother giving her baby glue,” she said. “If the children are high, they don’t feel hunger.”


**

There are two statues in the city that have grabbed my attention. The giant white Christ, with arms outspread in the middle of a rotunda, is a focal reference point. What stands behind him is north, and in front of him is south.

In addition, there is a giant statue of liberty on top of the New York Mall. It’s strange to be driving through a city and suddenly seeing the pointed crown of this icon.

I learned how people who are paid salaries, have to save their receipts for all their purchases in a month, which is subtracted from what they owe.

“Why can’t there just be a simple tax?” I asked my colleague Maria. To avoid people getting fake receipts, one is asked for their last name and ID number every time they buy anything. It’s quite time consuming to repeatedly give that information and then save all the slips.

“They started out with a tax that was simply a percentage of income. But people protested and made blockades,” she said.

So rather than have all my purchases go to naught, I give Maria’s name and ID number every time I make a purchase. And much to her gratitude, I hand her my pile of slips.