Observations bordering on feminist ranting...

People talk about marriage a lot more in Bolivia than they do in Quebec. People will ask if you're married in the same kinds of situations in which they ask where you're from and what you're doing here. Most guys who seem to be interested in me will ask pretty early on in the conversation whether i´m married.

This is kind of surprising, in a way, because every woman i know who has kids is a single mom. The lady who cleans our house is a single mom. My boss is a single mom. I see partnerless moms on the streets asking for change all the time. I thought both the families we lived with were single mom families. It turns out one lady, who was visiting for a month and a half, actually has a husband in la paz. None of us ever saw him around here. I talked to my roommates about this and they were at first surprised and then thought about it and realized the same was true for most of the women they knew.

I think the way society percieves sex and marriage here is really unequal, as far as gender goes. There doesn't seem to be much pressure on men to deal with the consequences of their actions, ie actually help raise the children they father. But at the same time, there's this obsession with marriage, which seems to apply a lot more strongly to women, which seems to imply that sexual freedom for women here is kind of weak.

When guys ask me if i'm married, i guess this is a way of sounding out whether i'm available. I find this super weird, because the question, in my mind, should be whether i'm interested in them, not just whether i'm available. It seems like these guys care a lot more about whether or not some other guy has already laid claim to me than they do about my own volition.
Alright alright, patriarchy, objectification, blah blah blah, i'll stop before i start frothing at the mouth.

Hanging out with the kids in the parc

I'd told my grandmother i'd buy her some gum here and send it to her..  (canadian gum is ridiculously intense, while bolivian gum is milder, the way she likes it)  

So, saturday i went to the main plaza and hung out on a parc bench to find a chico selling chicles. 

It's always like this when i go to the plaza: at first it's incredibly quiet, non-working kids (i think of them as tame kids) playing with balloons, a pair of tourists making out on the bench next to mine.  

Nina, a girl i met the day before, shows up and we talk a little.  

Then a little dude shows up wanting to sell us gum ("chicle?") (that's not a brand; all gum is chicle.)

Then an older kid, a shoe shiner, shows up to help him negotiate.  I buy six packs of chicle and somehow a shoeshine gets worked into the deal.  

While i'm getting my first shoe shine, (they're more or less skate shoes, they don't really need shining) three or four other kids show up.  They sit on their shoe shine boxes and show Nina their WWF wrestling stickers.  They try to sell them to her but she declines, as they've already been stuck.  The kid shining my shoes spins the brush over the backs of his hands, twirls it, and whips the rag around like a pro, careful not to dirty my neon pink and neon green shoelaces.  

I ask Christian, the kid selling gum, if i can take his picture.  (for my grandmother) 

I wasn't sure how this part was going to go, because in some situations people here will never let you take their picture.  The two things i've especially wanted to photograph are the markets at Tarabuco and the dried llama foetuses at the mercado campesino, but every time i ask i get a sour look and a "no".

"Si!" says Christian, and everyone gets excited.  I take his picture, he takes my picture, Nina gets out her camera and the boys start photographing us, themselves, each other, pigeons, stray dogs.  They do cartwheels and handstands for the camera.  After every photo they crowd around the camera to see how it came out.  I get a list of email addresses and promise to email them all copies.   

I get an impromptu quechua lesson.  Cecilio, who i've gotten lessons from before, commandeers my slingshot (anarchist dayplanner, not weapon) and pen, and teaches me how to say "i speak quechua, i speak a bit of quechua, and i love you."

Nina and i decide to take the bus up to the mercado campesino, which is a huge outdoor market, and Ceci tells us to say we're universitarios because it's cheaper.  He writes that down too.  I know this but thank him anyway.  

Nina is impressed that the kids can write.  She comments that they all have the same supplies. 

"Is there some kind of organization.." Nina asks..

"They're unionized!" I smile..  "The organizers are the older ones, 14 or 16.  I don't know if it's totally collectivized.. i think it might be, because when one's working the others kind of help.."

"Yeah, there doesn't seem to be competition between them.."

"Exactly.  And the union supplies the polish and everything."  

I tell her about Nanta, the drop in center they go to, and we stop by Nanta on the way to the mercado.  Nanta is operating at the usual level of chaos, kids running around, hanging out, playing soccer in the empty swimming pool.  Vayu's there, we talk to him for a bit and Nina asks him about the center.  A kid interrupts to try and sell him a chicken sandwich.  

"I told you, i don't eat chicken.  Here, go ask Franz, maybe he'll buy one"  

Vayu is the only other resident vegetarian in sucre that i know of.  

The conversation is interrupted again while Vayu rescues several kids from a tree. (or vice versa.)  

The kid with the chicken sandwiches comes back.  

"No..  I've told you five times-"

"Six, now"

"Okay, six times.  I don't eat chicken." 

We laugh, talk a little more, then go on to the mercado.  

In the pictures: Christian is the kid with the hat and the sucker.  Cecilio is the one with the popsicle. 

the inspiration came last friday...

click to get a better view....

worse things have happennned.   it's not the first time i've had food poisoning, anyway.  

Just try this in north america...

I went to potosi two weekends ago with Isabelle and Adhemar.
We met in the bus terminal, bought our tickets for 15 Bols. If you do the math, it´s cheaper to take a three hour bus ride to the next city in Bolivia than it is to buy one ticket for the metro in Montreal. (or the subways in NYC or toronto).
Well, it would have been 18 bols with the bus terminal tax. But we didn´t pay that.

While we bought our tickets Adhemar asked what colour the bus would be and surprisingly, in light of why he was asking, they told him, "azul".
One thing i´ve learned about Bolivia is people are less fascistic about making a profit than they are in North America.
We left the bus station, hung a right, and proceeded to hang out on a street corner. I was sort of curious what we were doing.
"...Isn´t the bus leaving right now?"
"Yep. It´ll come from over there."
In five minutes or so, a blue bus came along, and we crossed to the side of the street it was on. A bunch of people, mostly from the country, were doing the same thing.
The bus slowed down, i won´t exactly say it stopped, and about eight of us climbed on. This, i´m told, is how you take the bus the Bolivian way.

If only this would work for airport taxes...

The Invisible Hand: The Black Market!

I was listening to Revolver this morning, in mp3 format, and reflecting on the fact that when that album came out, Beatles fans had no choice but to actually buy the legitimate, legal album. Imagine!

This is especially strange to me in my present environment, because in all my time here i have not ever (ever!) seen a legal cd or dvd. Or computer software. Even if you wanted to buy a proper, legitimate cd, you really wouldn´t be able to. All cds in Bolivia are burnt, and come in a clear plastic sleeve with two pieces of paper: a colour photocopy of the front of the album and a black and white copy of the back. They cost around a dollar canadian.

We can look at this as an incredibly corrupt culture with no respect for copyrights, or we can analyze this from an economic viewpoint. The legal supply of the commodity is so expensive, read inaccessible, relative to the average income, that the demand has turned elsewhere: the black market! Aaaah, so THIS is the invisible hand Adam Smith was raving about!

Behold, free market economics in all its glory! If there was a little government regulation on the prices of CDs, or, you know, social welfare programs so people didn´t have to work for half a week (literally) to buy a CD, maybe the black market wouldn´t be thriving the way it is!

Not that i´m advocating buying CDs. Unless they´re independent. If they´re not you might as well download the thing and mail three bucks to the band, it´s more than they get from a major record label anyway.

Fashion Report: The Nineties Didn't End. (they just moved to south america)

My first week in Bolivia, i spent a few days in bed getting over a stomach virus. The hotel TV was sympathetic and offered me a solid hour of Madonna music videos every afternoon. Nothing newer than "frozen" (that´s the sort of dark one from the mid nineties where she has black hair). Amazing! Just what the doctor ordered:

"You have a virus.. antibiotics won't really help, but i'll give you a prescription to calm your stomach. Don't eat anything spicy, stick to bread or rice or maybe chicken soup, nothing fried." (the infamous white diet) "Just relax and watch as many music videos from between the mid 80s and mid 90s as you can."
I´m sure he said that! But then again, i´d only been speaking spanish for a few days.

But really, if you're wondering where it went, it's all here. The clunky black dress shoes with unneccesarily thick soles, the straight, wideleg jeans, the smooth, longish sweaters, baby tees, the tees with random numbers on them in poor imitation of sports jerseys, the undercuts, the adidas tear away track pants...

I really enjoy this.. it's deliciously nostaligic for me. And more genuine than the "retro" 90's dance parties that are already starting to go down back in north america.

At the rate we're retrofying lately, fashion is practically eating its own tail.. we're like four year olds running in circles faster and faster.. i imagine us one day getting dizzy, stumbling around a bit, falling over and throwing up on the grass... and i can't wait to see how that metaphor looks in reality. (If you can call fashion reality).

wrote this friday, it's warmer now, the fleas haven't struck again

I have bites, maybe fleas. it happens. both the girls i live with have had them. seven bites on my left hand and i suspect an eighth somewhere under my jeans, but no way am i taking off enough clothing to confirm that.

Because, it's cold. It's the warmest part of the day and i'm in my room, wearing hatscarfgloves(fingerless), two pairs of pants, snowboarding socks and legwarmers, long underwear, tee, longsleeved tee, sweater, hoodie. I hover over a jar of tea, praying to the steam and refusing to acknowledge that the day will only get colder.

I stopped at the supermarket on the way home at lunch and found myself in an awquard situation: my money was in the pocket of my -inside- pair of pants.

Ahhhh, but i don't like the supermarket anyway. They try to sell people on shopping there by promoting it as sort of a way to distinguish yourself. The slogan: "a way of life"

"a consumeristic, bourgeois, plastic way of life..." i sneer inside my own head while i slide my hand down the back of my pants and dig around nonchalantly for the pocket with my cash.

The good thing about it being cold, though, is there's not many places the fleas (if that's what they are) seem to be able to get to.

Probably they'll go away in a few days, they usually do. Probably it'll warm up in a few days, it usually does.

Who Cares? (demographically speaking)

Sometimes i eat supper at a restaurant near my house, which is frequented about equally by locals and tourists. Around seven a kid usually comes in and plays flute and sings. He´s probably between 8 and 10. He starts with a preamble (good evening, enjoy your meal, i´m just gonna play you a bit of music, if you like it help me out with some change), which he´s obviously recited verbatim many times, which he delivers quickly and all in one breath. He usually plays the same three songs, while pacing around the restaurant. He plays and sings pretty well but never sounds like he´s really into it. He finishes with another very short speech more or less like the introductory one and then makes the rounds of the restaurant asking for change as unobtrusively as possible.
I like to pay attention to social demographics, so here they are: people who appear to be from here almost always give him change. His chances with them are probably 90 or 95%. Tourists, who probably have a much larger income, are a lot less likely to give him anything. I´d say he´s got about a 65% chance with them.
Also, anytime i see someone come into a restaurant and ask for food, the people working there will give them something.
Maybe foreigners feel like poverty here isn´t their problem because these people don´t belong to the same (artificially constructed) "nation" as them. Maybe they´re still operating on the first world belief that people asking for change are just lazy, despite the fact that here they´re mostly children, single mothers, or elderly, which (i think?) is not the same as lazy.
Maybe Bolivian culture is a little less individualistic, maybe there´s still a bit more of a sense of social solidarity here.
It's interesting, anyway. I´ve tried to imagine what would happen if this kid were to show up and play in a Canadian restaurant. Probably there´d be a franchise policy or something to justify kicking him out.

Similar situation: there´s a bunch of kids in Sucre right now who basically travel and juggle and sell handmade jewelry for a living. If i happen to be wearing my black hoodie and look low key enough they´ll treat me as an equal, but if i look any nicer i become a potential customer.
They´ll juggle in intersections during the red lights, and surprisingly, about half the cars that pass them when the light changes will give them some change. Compared to montreal´s squeegee punks, these kids are doing really, really well. And the situation is almost exactly the same, in terms of the quality of life and degree of relative poverty of everyone involved.

Anyway.. i guess what we in north america see as a socially acceptable level of generosity is a lot more arbitrary (and, well, stingy) than we might think.