by Ursula Pike
Training began the next day, and my fear that I didn’t have the skills to help anyone grew. Each week I learned more about the other volunteers who came with me to Bolivia. The training group was a mix of kids who’d just graduated from private colleges, sheltered southern boys leaving their town for the first time, first-generation college students who had worked construction during their summers, and retirees looking for adventure.
“If I can help one person, I will feel like I have succeeded,” a girl from New Jersey said when the trainers asked why we were there. Everyone was open to adventure and to new experiences and, most of all, ready to help people. I kept quiet because I didn’t know what this group would think about my reasons for joining.
Peace Corps was the best and only option for doing what I wanted to do: see the world, learn some skills, and help people. I sent my application in even though I had doubts about the organization’s mission. In college, I heard Noam Chomsky refer to the Peace Corps as the peaceful wing of the State Department. To me, that meant it was more about making the US look good overseas than about bringing real development. But no private business or nonprofit organization working outside the United States could give me the same opportunity for free the way the Peace Corps could. It was the practical choice. My mother’s job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs taught me that stable jobs could be complicated. She was often the only Native woman working in an agency that was supposed to be helping Natives.
“It’s a good government job,” I told my grandmother. Helping people was part of the draw, but I was uncomfortable with the assumption that I knew how to help simply because I had grown up in the United States. It reminded me of the time in college when a white man came into our Native American student center and, without asking for permission, began writing on the chalkboard about the Red Man’s mistreatment, as he phrased it. He added an exclamation at the end of his message and smiled smugly, seemingly delighted by his understanding of the problems facing Native communities. Now I was here in Bolivia, wondering if they would see me as I had seen that man.
Jodi, an artist from Georgia, lived with a family a few houses away, and we walked together to the training center each day. She was in my Microenterprise with Youth training program, which meant that our projects would involve working with kids learning vocational skills. Jodi’s blonde hair, blue eyes, and charming southern drawl made me initially discount her as a frail flower. She had had a difficult time getting accepted into Peace Corps too.
“That damn recruiter didn’t think I could squat in a latrine,” she told me one day after we jogged across the crowded highway that we barely survived every day on our way to class. “So I offered to show him how good I could squat.” Jodi had a prosthetic leg.
“What would you do if your leg fell in a latrine?” I asked.
“This leg cost $15,000. What do you think I’d do? Jump in after it.” We laughed, and she told me about the special foot her doctor gave her so that she could wear sandals.
“Do you worry about what it will be like once you are sent to work somewhere?” I said. I didn’t know whether I was the only one concerned about being able to do the work.
“I figure we’ll learn it once we get there. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.” She bubbled with confidence, and I hoped I would feel that certain eventually.
The next week, our training group visited an organization helping homeless children in the city of Cochabamba to see for ourselves what life was like for poor kids in Bolivia. A man named Javier led the tour. With his khaki pants and boots, he looked like any engineer, but his long graying hair wasn’t typical of Bolivian men. I knew Bolivia had one of the highest rates of child labor, but I didn’t understand exactly what that meant until I walked through the city with Javier pointing out the children shining shoes on every corner, collecting tickets on buses, working at food stalls in the market, and sweeping the sidewalks outside homes and businesses.
“In the countryside, children tend llamas and goats or work in the mines,” Javier continued. I remained silent as always, thinking about the lives these children must lead, how impossible it must be to finish school in these situations. “See those kids huddled under blankets in the park?” He pointed to a group hidden behind a bench.
“They are sniffing glue.” He pointed out small discarded plastic containers piled in parking lots. As if on cue, a boy nearby with a dirty sweater cupped a plastic container to his nose and closed his eyes. It was heartbreaking to see, but I didn’t know what to do with this information. Addiction, poverty, and the lack of a social safety net were beyond my control. If I were living on the street, I would probably want to be high all the time too.
Why did the story always have to begin with a portrait of poor, suffering creatures who needed help? The tragic story of these kids was uncomfortable and overwhelming, but also familiar. I was reminded of documentaries of Native American reservations that always included images of untended children and Native people lying on the street next to boarded-up stores, heartbreak on top of heartbreak, making it impossible to see the subjects’ humanity. These stories held no hope for their subjects and presented them as victims of their addictions or fate or a cruel system that didn’t value them. It made them pitiable, powerless creatures.
The layers of dust hanging above the city penetrated everything. A few weeks of constant dust, sweat, and diesel fumes left my clothes dirty, and other than wearing them while I took a shower—an option I considered—I hadn’t figured out how to wash them. Bonnie, the mother of the house, said that her teenage daughter would wash my clothes, but I was not going to make Morelia hand-scrub my underwear and socks. That seemed absolutely colonial. I asked to wash my own clothes. The following Sunday, armed with a bar of soap and every last piece of dirty clothing in a stuff sack, I left the house with Rosa and Morelia.
We walked along the wide shoulder of the highway, and I wondered whether there might be some community sink down the road. Heavy buses sped by, honking to advertise the available spots left on board. We took a narrow path between thorny bushes, and although it was still early in the day, the weight and bulk of my bag of clothes made me break into a sweat. When I reached the riverbank, I noticed that there were skirts spread across the tops of bushes, and empty shirts hanging from trees. Women up and down the river squatted over plastic buckets, slapping rolled-up clothes against the rocks, and children not much younger than Rosa splashed in the water, screaming and chasing each other.
Maybe they’d said the word rio, but I hadn’t thought we’d be washing clothes in the river. I stopped in my tracks, and the girls kept walking forward.
“Señorita?” Morelia’s voice rose. My eyes widened. I didn’t want to wash my clothes in the river, in any river, but especially not a river running through a city. My life was lived along rivers big and small, and I knew that a stagnant river surrounded by neighborhoods, running under a freeway, had to be polluted. I didn’t want to put my clothes into the water. I wanted to run, but knew I couldn’t because I had asked for this. There was no turning back.
I stepped over a half-submerged tire near the riverbank and swung my bag of clothes over my shoulder, hoping my hesitation would look like confusion. I did what the girls did and watched as Morelia pulled a pair of her brother’s pants out of the bag and pushed them down into the water. It was hard work. In high school, I washed my little sister’s clothes at the Speedy Wash every Sunday, but that was nothing compared to this workout. I balled up my sour jeans, squatted down on the bank, and submerged them in the water.
“Is this water safe?” I asked.
“Yes, for washing,” Morelia said. I wondered how the other volunteers were getting this household chore done. I heard men bragging about how many times they could wear a pair of underwear before it was officially dirty. Soiled, stinky clothes were all part of the adventure. I assumed that those men would happily pay a girl to wash their clothes when the time came. From the road, this might appear as a quaint scene, like
something on a postcard with the caption “Native village women washing their clothes in the river.” But down here on my wet and dirty knees, it was different because I smelled the sulfur seeping out of the mud and saw the empty plastic bags floating down the river.
I scrubbed my jeans with the block of green soap while flicking off the flies that kept trying to land on my hand. The girls expertly wadded up the fabric and rubbed two sides together. When I did this, my knuckles knocked against each other. The girls tried not to laugh. I gave up on my jeans and tried to remove the dirt from my once-white socks, but thick, dirty rings remained no matter how many times I dunked and scrubbed them.
“Señorita, let me help you with these,” Morelia said when she finished her own pile of clothes and started washing a few of mine. I was grateful, but realized that this was exactly what I had wanted to avoid. After an hour on the river, I was ready to leave. Although my clothes weren’t clean, I was tired and ready to accept that I couldn’t do it myself. I stuffed everything back into the sack, and we carried our load back to the house. The heavy bag of laundry bounced against the back of my legs.
I wondered why they didn’t wash their clothes at home where they had running water, but I knew a question like that might sound judgmental. It was another way of saying, “Why don’t you do things the way I have always done them?” Maybe washing clothes at the river was an important place for the women to share knowledge and spend time with each other. But sometimes poverty is glossed over and described as “culture” when really it is an adaptation to a lack of resources. Native Americans turned a little bit of flour, lard, salt, water, and oil into frybread, the golden hunk of fried dough available at any powwow in the United States. Now frybread was part of the culture, but it was an example of what people do when they have few options. Out on the edge of the city where Bonnie’s house was, they had access to water for only a few hours a day, once or twice a week. The water systems in Cochabamba were leaky and underdeveloped because the government hadn’t invested enough in them. Washing clothes in the river was probably not their first choice.
Part of me wanted to show the Bolivians I was just like them and would try to do everything exactly as they did it. I was never going to be the cringing Westerner, whining about something that seemed bizarre or beneath me. Another part of me was embarrassed about washing my clothes at the river because hiding evidence of my poverty, of the differences I knew existed between myself and my wealthier peers, had become second nature to me. In the US, it was OK for us to pull ourselves up out of poverty by our bootstraps, but no one wanted to see actual poverty. How could I “play” at being poor when until very recently, I had been poor? Regardless of my moral confusion, I still had to find a way to wash my clothes.
The next day, I was sitting on a stool in the training center’s kitchen, watching Magda, the cook, toasting grains of rice in a large saucepan. She was a short woman with a full, round stomach that didn’t shake when she laughed, and curly salt-and-pepper hair cut short. Her kitchen was the heart of the training compound, and everyone from volunteers to teachers to the maintenance man passed through while I sat there. In my early days at the Center, Magda had given me papaya for indigestion when I asked her for help. Now, whenever I had a problem, I went to her.
“I tried to wash my clothes in the river yesterday, and it was a disaster.”
Magda winked at me, and I could tell she was holding back a smile. I didn’t want to ask her to wash my clothes, but I wasn’t sure what to do. She motioned to the groundskeeper, who was chewing on the sugar cane stalks left over from lunch.
“Your wife, she washes clothes, yes?”
“Claro,” he said. Magda motioned with her chin toward him. I had to accept that paying someone to do my laundry was my best option right then. We worked out a deal for his wife to wash my clothes. Within a few days, I had a stack of clean, folded clothes, and I was both grateful and uncomfortable. Diez bolivianos—the equivalent of two dollars. It was the first time I had paid anyone to do my laundry. How would I explain paying someone to wash my clothes to my grandmother? But I knew she wouldn’t want me walking around in dirty socks. We were there to help Bolivians, but it was clear that they had to help us every single day. Bolivians made our food, told us the words to use, washed our clothes, and showed us where to go and how to get there, but all I had to give them in exchange was money. I wondered when or whether that would change.
3
La Clase de Baile — The Dance Lesson
An anthropologist from Texas stepped to the front of the large room that doubled as the cafeteria. She had come to teach us about Indigenous Bolivian culture. Her wrinkled khaki pants and authoritative manner reminded me of every anthropology professor I had known in college. Long red wavy hair framed her round face. She was researching gender roles in Quechua societies.
“There are over thirty different Indigenous groups in Bolivia.” I moved up to the front row to hear everything she was saying. The Quechuas, Aymaras, Guarani, Uru, and thirty other tribes occupied every peak and valley of a country that spread across snowy mountain ranges, immense salt flats, tangled jungles, and sweltering savannahs. During the weeks I had been in Cochabamba, I saw enough Native people to know that just as in the United States, the Indigenous people lived in the cities too. They wore jeans and tennis shoes, drank beer, and watched soccer on TV. They spoke an Indigenous language some of the time or never.
“It is not uncommon for a Quechua man to kidnap his beloved and take her home with him, thus saving her and her family from the shame of having run off with a boy.”
“Oh my God,” Laura said, “my grandfather in Mexico did that to my grandmother.”
Everyone laughed. “I’m serious,” she said to me. Presented like this, out of context, the Quechua customs seemed strange and comical, stripped of their significance. Anthropologists often left me feeling like a specimen. In college, there had been a group of anthropology professors who involved themselves with the Native American Student Association. They were earnest but bossy and spoke more than they listened. Yet we needed them to help us navigate the institution’s bureaucracy and find funds for a student powwow. Their research and dedication to Indigenous cultures saved sacred tribal sites and helped rescue dying languages. If they deemed something important, it became important. I tried to focus on what this anthropologist had to say, giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“Women in Bolivia have fewer rights and resources than men.” Bolivian women were the poorest of the poor, and in a country as poor as Bolivia, that was pretty damn poor. It wasn’t the distended-stomach-famine type of poverty we were familiar with that inspired the “We Are the World” video. It was a poverty that required hard choices: school or food, sell your chicken’s eggs or eat them, work three jobs or move to another country so you can send money home. Women, and especially Indigenous women, were the hardest hit by this poverty.
Bolivian women also experienced a high rate of getting beat up by their men. Domestic violence was not even illegal in Bolivia. The overwhelming tide of depressing data points about the Native people was horrible. And familiar. It reminded me of the stories told about Native communities in the US. Native women I knew, women in my family, nearly died at the hands of their boyfriends.
I shifted in my seat and looked around the room to see whether anyone was reacting to what she was saying. The person in front of me whispered something to the blonde sitting next to him, then hid a smirk. A guy next to me drooled as he dozed off. I wanted to elbow him, but knew it was losing game.
“I will not delve into the level of sexual violence Bolivian women experience; there isn’t enough time. Just know that it is an epidemic.” Epidemic. That’s what was said about sexual violence and American Indian women. Of everything I had in common with Native Bolivian women, this one hit me hardest because it wasn’t a statistic; it was my life. From a babysitter’s too-curious teenage son to a family friend with a perverted idea of hide-and-seek, as a child I
had been repeatedly poked, prodded, and assaulted. I knew what the weight of a man felt like before I was a woman.
I survived by following the rules, making good grades, and never dating until I was out of high school. But it wasn’t just me. By the time I reached college, whenever I met a Native woman, I assumed she’d been raped because it was that common. Almost not worth mentioning. From girls who grew up on the rez to urban Indians to girls who attended residential schools—tragedy was our common denominator. I came to believe that this was part of what it meant to grow up a girl.
The anthropologist moved on to discussing the importance of virility for Quechua men, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Native women. This piling on of tragedy by the anthropologist was not giving the whole picture. It reinforced the idea that Native Bolivian women were creatures deserving pity, one-dimensional and helpless. The context and causes were not discussed. This violence was the legacy of colonization, and I shared the impacts of that legacy in my heart, inside my head, and between my legs, yet I didn’t feel pitiful.
What did empowerment and development look like for women who grew up experiencing poverty and violence? How does a woman who knows that her daughter’s life will be impacted by poverty and violence work for a better, safer future? Native women in the United States lived this reality and, like Bolivian women, still managed to start businesses, create art, and make a life for themselves. I wanted to discuss the lives of Native Bolivian women as if they mattered—because they did to me. Not focus on all the ways their lives were wrong. The room was warming up and I wanted to take off my sweater, but I could not figure out how to do it without disrupting the meeting and bringing attention to myself. I sat there sweaty and angry.