Sergio's Fifth Birthday Party

Yesterday afternoon, Oscar’s wife Rosario and her two children stopped by my apartment to drop off an invitation to Sergio’s fifth birthday party. The invitation read 4:30 this afternoon.

I arrived at 4:40, thinking I was late. But barely anyone was there. I later found out that other people’s invitations read 3:30. Yet many didn’t show up until five.

Oscar and his family rent an attractive house, surrounded by flowering trees and enclosed with a large black gate. In the back of the house is another building with three separate doors. These seem to be rooms, or apartments, that other families live in.

The theme of the party was cars. I think there was a movie about cars recently, because everything had the same logo – the folded cardboard gift boxes, the sticks put into the gelatin cups and the soda bottles, the Congratulations Sergio poster on the wall and the pull-string bell piñata.

They had a two-man DJ ensemble, who blasted children’s music so loud as to rock the eardrums and make conversing very difficult. Nevertheless, I was able to meet an interesting woman from Cuba and her Bolivian husband. They left Cuba a few years ago due to the worsening economic conditions there. She is an English teacher and has a sister in Miami. But she found it impossible to speak any English when she went to see her sister in Miami. “It’s a purely Spanish city,” she said.

We talked about the importance of the family in Bolivian life and about the way the work culture supports strong families here.

“In the US, the work culture drives families apart,” she said, and I agreed. “It becomes normal for children to leave at 17 or 18 and the parents end up alone, just seeing their children at Christmas or holidays,” she said. “And the majority of them end up in a nursing home. But not here. Here, old people remain a part of their families until the very end.”

I told her how delayed childbearing can make it difficult for some middle-aged people to take care of both children and elderly parents. They told me that here, people have children much earlier, age 21 or 22 on average, but frequently at 15 or 16.

I surprised that the lack of having an abortion option probably played a role.

“Yes,” she said, and her husband nodded. “It’s really a debate here. There are cases of young girls who are violated and are forced to bear the children. There was recently a case of a 12-year-old who was raped. And during all the time they spent going to court, she eventually carried the child to term. They delivered it by C-section, but still. Someone of that age doesn’t have the capacity to be a mother.”

She told me that the numbers of unwanted children are high – that many families continue to have one child after another after another. That children are abandoned, mistreated, and many turn into criminals. She said that birth control is available, but the lack of education and a culture of using it mean it is not very effective.

What I find most troubling is the lack of options for women who are victims of violence. The other day in the newspaper I read an article about some neighbors who found a woman in their neighborhood. She was about 30 years old and seemed to have been drugged and violated. What if she should become pregnant?

As if suffering the violent act wasn’t enough, can any lawmakers or religious leaders with a conscious truly believe she must continue to be reminded of the horror for another nine months, or twenty years?

Back to the birthday party, where the upper-middle-class children in attendance seemed to have been wanted, we were served muffins, donuts and sodas as we tried to shout to each other over the music. The adults sat in a semi-circle around the patio, while the children sat in the center on small red, blue and yellow chairs. The boys sat separately from the girls.

When the festivities began, the DJ led the children in games – a dance contest, hot balloon, musical chairs. One girl, when she was eliminated in hot balloon (the equivalent of hot potato) ran to her mother crying. Sergio blew out the candle on his cake, then everyone was served a slice of cake with an empanada and another soda.

Finally, the piñata was brought out. Unlike Nicaragua, where they still have artistically made paper-mache piñatas, broken with a bat and blindfold variety (which I prefer), here the piñata was a commercialized paper bell with a bunch of strings. The children gathered under the bell. Rather than take turns at pulling the strings, the birthday boy was able to yank them all at once, guaranteeing that the piñata burst apart on the first try.

“Don’t look up at the piñata!” the DJ told the kids. “Look down!” As though children could look away from candy.

The bell burst and toys and sweets rained down in a cloud of dust and confetti. After the children gathered their treasures, they then swept the dust and confetti into piles with their hands and threw it in each other’s faces.

Each child was given a gift box. I wondered whether that was an American import. And while Sergio received gifts from everyone who came, he didn’t open any of them during the party.

It was a nice way to spend an afternoon and a rewarding little peak into local life.

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.

Adaptation

I’ve just spent my second night with my new Uzbek family and things are getting easier. They bought a small portable heater during my absence, but even better, they lit the stove last night. It was wonderful to finally feel warm and I enjoyed learning how to remove the metal rings and to put in chunks of shiny black coal with the metal tongs. It’s my first experience with a coal stove and I think it works pretty well. The coal is less heavy and less work than chopping wood.

Nigora, the woman of the household, told me she prefers coal to other options. “I have neighbors who keep everything neat and tidy by using a gas stove,” she said. “But then the city cuts off the gas and they start to freeze, for one day, two days, a week. They run around shivering and saying how cold it is while we stay warm. I don’t like to deal with such psychological stress.”

I’ve made more progress unpacking and it’s starting to feel a little more like home. I’ve also started to get into routines that make things easier here – always go to the bathroom before leaving work (taking advantage of the indoor toilet), hang my bath towel and what I plan to wear the next day over the heater before going to bed, hang onto any paper trash that could be burned, take a hunk of bread with me when heading to the toilet or shower to build better relations with the dog that barks at me on the way.

There are still some aspects that I’ll have to get used to. I have almost no privacy, as Nigora comes in every hour or two, either to check on the stove, or to bring me tea or something to eat. I have no access to running water without going outside to the toilet. I noticed the absence of that yesterday while finding something sticky as I unpacked my suitcase. I had nothing to wipe it off with. And of course, leaving the warmth of my room to head across the courtyard to the bathroom is never very appealing. To get to the shower this morning, I felt as though I was bundling up for a trip to the Artic. Stepping outside into the morning blackess with plastic sandals over my socks, I walked through a layer of snow that had fallen during the night. Luckily, once I made it to the shower, I found scalding hot water and was very appreciative of that. Returning to my room in a winter jacket, with a towel wrapped around my head, I passed Nigora, who was sweeping the snow off the sidewalk.

There are also the unique sounds of residential life. A car started up across the street and the two caged turkeys gobbled in unison. I’m not sure whether either of them will live past New Year’s. Through my bedroom window, I hear the steady chirp of birds and the banging of pots, as Nigora cooks on her outside stove.

Now that it’s warmer, I think I’ll like living here. It’s excellent in terms of safety, it’s nice to have dinner prepared and I like having someone outside work to talk with. But best of all, I hope I’ll be able to learn more about local life and culture. If I were back in my apartment, I don’t know what I’d do for New Years, possibly the most important holiday of the year here. But now that I’m living with a family, I automatically have people to spend the holiday with and I’m sure it will be much more interesting.