Bingo and Babies

After a visit to the gym, I treated myself with a stop at the local spa. With only a month left in Bolivia, I wanted to take advantage of the luxury while in a country where I can afford it.

From there, I went downtown to the 24th of September Club, on the central square. There, a non-profit was holding a bingo event to raise money to help children with Down’s Syndrome. I went with three colleagues. A card valid for six games of bingo and a raffle cost $20. That’s quite a bit to some of my colleagues, so we each shared a card, contributing $10 each.

The event was organized well and attracted several hundred people. They sat on white plastic chairs at white plastic tables, amidst tall wooden columns and under a shimmering crystal chandelier. The prizes, donated by local merchants, were good – trips to Brazil and Buenos Aires, a bicycle, a stove, jewelry. No one at our table won anything though.

I soon became bored with the monotonous bingo process. I thought back to the bingo games I played as a child, at my grandmother’s country club. I remembered the excitement my brother and I felt, the way we’d hold our breath when we needed only one more number, the frustration when someone else called out bingo just before we had it. I remembered the joy of winning small prizes - $10, $20. And I remember when my brother won what seemed like the jackpot at the time - $70. Wow, he was lucky, and rich.

Bingo is a nice game in that anyone can play it – from the children, to the elderly – and one always has the hope that they hold out a chance of winning.

The people in attendance – mainly upper class families, some of whom had children with Down’s Syndrome – seemed excited by the event and participated with vigor. I was impressed with the quality of the organization and I think it was successful in raising a good amount of money for the organization.

My colleague Lorena told me that integration for people with Down’s Syndrome is difficult in Bolivia, that while they are capable of working, many employers aren’t willing to give them the opportunity. She told me some parents pay employers to give their children the opportunity to work, to contribute something meaningful.

From there we all went to a café in the popular Montsenor district. In the blocks heading away from the giant Christ statue, the streets are filled with one café after another, as well as a selection of great restaurants – Italian, Mexican, duck, frozen yogurt. About 20 colleagues got together to celebrate the baby showers of two women, both named Claudia, and due in August and September respectively.

I was really curious to see what a Bolivian shower is like. The fact that they refer to it as a “baby shower,” in English, made me think it was probably imported from the States. For much of the time, it wasn’t much different from any other gathering of friends at a café, except that two of the attendees were visibly pregnant. Both males and females came, they ordered coffee, tea and snacks, and chatted amongst themselves.

At one point they presented congratulatory cards to the two women, which everyone had signed. And they presented them each with an attractive green baby carrier, purchased through a collection. There wasn’t too much planned or personalized about it – no games, no stories, no pictures.

Toward the end, the Claudia who is due in September made the rounds around the tables with a gold chain. She swung it over the palm of both men and women to predict the number and sex of the children that person would have in the future. After raising and lowering the chain toward the palm three times, she let it move of its own accord. If the chain swung up and down, it would be a boy, if it swung in a circle, it would be a girl, if it didn’t move, there wouldn’t be any children.

My colleague Maria was upset, because when she’d had it done the previous day, it hadn’t moved at all over her right palm.

“I’m never going to be a mother!” the 29-year-old, currently without a boyfriend, lamented. “Try my left hand,” she insisted.

There, she received the answer that she’d have one girl. They explained that since Maria is left-handed, her energy came only from her left hand.

When they did it to me, they told me I’d have a boy, then a girl. The third time it didn’t move, which meant two biological children would be it. I told them I’d get back to them in several months to let them know how accurate their predictions were. But they seemed to believe pretty strongly.

Only my German colleague, Helen, refused to be tested – either not believing in the game passed down by Bolivian grandmothers, or not wanting her reproductive future to be made public knowledge.

Orientation

My Spanish teacher, Oscar, didn’t have time to prepare my lesson for this morning, having stayed up too late for the comedy club performance. So rather than reschedule the lesson, we decided to have a mobile lesson.

He started out by showing me the Montsenor, the café district, where locals like to go out for a couple of coffee. We stopped by an Italian café for a morning drink and pastry. While there, I saw a Mennonite man walk by, dressed in dark navy, neat overalls and a straw hat.

Oscar told me there are Mennonites here from the United States, Mexico, Germany and Canada. I asked about their relations with the local population.

“They used to be very closed and kept themselves separate,” he said. “They couldn’t marry Bolivians. But now there are two types. The conservatives continue as before. The revelados can marry Bolivians. They still maintain the clothing, but the spouse doesn’t have to.”

He also told me about some Japanese colonies near Santa Cruz, where almost the entire population is Japanese. His sister married one of these Japanese men. I’d like to visit one of the villages, as a Japanese world in the middle of Bolivia sounds pretty surreal to me.

We drove around town and Oscar helped me to orient myself a bit more. Santa Cruz is divided into rings. Ring 2 wraps around the center, ring three around ring two, and so on. Each ring is divided into different neighborhoods.

He told me that my neighborhood is called Equipetrol, which is known as a wealthy area. It was the first wealthy barrio in Santa Cruz. Now it’s known as a popular street hangout for young people. On Thursday through Saturday nights, they park trucks along the road and drink beer, blasting music from oversized speakers. It’s the kind of low-cost, 1980s, means of meeting other young people that I saw around the Minneapolis lakes growing up.

We drove across the Pirai river, which separates las Colinas del Urubo, the very wealthiest part of Santa Cruz, from the rest of town. Brown water flowed only through a very narrow part of the wide, brown bed. Oscar said that from December to February, it rained daily and the river was swollen. But now they are expecting a drought to follow and the water has largely dried up.

From the bridge, we could see the fancy white homes with red tiles of Urubo. I asked who lived there and Oscar said mostly owners or employees of petroleum and gas companies, cattle owners and large farmers.

We saw some residents biking on quality mountain bikes and a group of young people driving an open-air 4-wheel vehicle, for the fun of it.

“There are very large class differences here,” Oscar said. “We have both very rich and very poor.”

As we drove down the streets lined by the large-leaved chapeo tree and mango trees, Oscar pointed out to me a few of his favorite restaurants. Then we stopped by the zoo. The zoo has quite a good collection of tropical birds – 150 species and almost 1000 birds. Though the conditions for many are very side – small, square wire cages.

The macaws – the endangered blue-throated macaw, and the rainbow colored scarlet macaw, among others – screeched around us. Their sound couldn’t be contained in the little cages. They needed the vast expanse of a dense jungle to call across and to drown their desperate sounds.

I had to remember that while Santa Cruz is a sunny, plains town, we are actually quite close to the Amazon. Some of the animals were saw were purely fantastic, as though they’d come from a unique world of their own.

The quiet, black and white toucans, with huge, bright yellow beaks, tinged with red, were so perfectly groomed as to appear fake. The harpy eagle looked like a combination of an owl and an eagle, with huge claws of spun golden-brown threads. The Andean Condor was a larger than life-size bird in the vulture family. And my favorite of all was the sloth, a freaky looking creature with a small head, a runted tail, and long arms with strong, curved claws. It looks like a very primitive ape, or an ancient antecedent to the human. Due to its snail’s pace of movement, it was allowed to roam freely on the zoo grounds. Watching this creature move, one slow stretch at a time, disgusting and beautiful and captivating all at once, was the most fascinating thing I’ve seen in Santa Cruz so far.

In the evening, we ate at one of the nicest restaurants in Santa Cruz, el Candelabro. A combination French-sushi-piano bar place, we ate on finely covered tables by candlelight. This was a place where one could feast on gazpacho, grilled seafood, and chocolate cheesecake, the entrees served under platters that resembled medieval caps of armor. A group of waiters gathered around the table to reveal the entrees to the diners all at once, so there could be a collective exhale of awe. Again, not a scene I expected to encounter in Bolivia.