by Ursula Pike
“Señorita, what you don’t understand…,” he began, but I couldn’t hear his voice over the steam billowing out of my ears. I asked his wife, doña Florencia the cook, if she had any ideas. She shook her head.
Then one day, with no advance warning, he mentioned the bakery during one of his regular morning lectures to the children. “Señorita, please tell us about the project,” he said, and every head in the cafeteria turned in my direction. I stood up.
“We’ll have our first meeting…next week.” It was a decision I made as I was saying the words. Who knew whether I would ever have another chance?
“We’ll help you, señorita,” four teenage girls who had made bread with Teresa told me afterward. I didn’t know whether they were interested in starting a bakery or simply bored. I didn’t care. I was happy to be doing something. The first class was in a dusty classroom crowded with old school desks. We discussed basic concepts about buying and selling. One afternoon, we walked around the market to see what people were selling and how much they were charging. The girls clung to each other and whispered. I asked a woman how much her bread cost.
“Un peso,” she said, looking at me with a tired frown. This was at least twice what I usually paid for bread, and I knew she was giving me a special marked-up price because I was a gringa. I could pass for a Bolivian woman in a fitted dress and flats, especially on a busy day or in the city. But here in the town, in my town, I was clearly an outsider. Celia, a tall, quiet girl with a crooked smile, looked at me. They needed to be the ones asking. I stepped back and motioned for Celia and the other girls to do the rest of the research.
A few weeks into the project, the girls discussed what they wanted to bake and sell based on their research. Rollos, the sweet turnovers full of jam, were their number-one choice. I looked at their faces and for the first time felt like a real volunteer. This was what I had imagined Peace Corps would be like and how I had pictured myself when I saw brochures full of blonde, freckled girls intently explaining something to African women in headscarves. I wondered if this moment with them would be good for a brochure. Of course, it would be difficult to tell who was saving whom, because their hair was like mine, dark brown, and our skin was the same. They could be my cousins. One afternoon I asked Celia to take a picture of me and two of the girls sitting in the courtyard. Years later, this picture ended up in my high school reunion slideshow. Everyone told me how cute my daughters were and congratulated me for being a brave single mother.
“Doña Teresa, I need your help,” I said as we sat at a long table in the cafeteria and played Chinese checkers the following Friday. “You know I’ve been working with the girls on a bakery project.”
“And?” she said.
“We want to bake next weekend, but we don’t have a recipe. The girls want to make something called rollos, and I was thinking…” I trailed off as I realized that there was so much I needed help with.
“You will need sugar, lard, marmalade, eggs, and milk. I’ll write it down for you.” She jumped her marbles over mine, and I knew she would probably win this game.
“Thank you. I appreciate the help.” I didn’t only need her recipe; I needed her.
“Who else is helping you with this?” she asked. I told her the names of the girls. She looked at me for a long moment. “What time are you going to be baking?”
“Early Saturday, nine o’clock,” I answered.
“Nine?” she said, pausing to move her last marble into place, thus winning the game. “Bueno. You’re going to need some help. I can come for a little while, but need to be home before lunch.” This was a huge favor she was doing for me.
Teresa came early on that Saturday morning after she had already spent several hours baking pastries at home for her brothers to sell at the market. The rollos we were making were sort of like turnovers with marmalade inside. The one ingredient I couldn’t find was azúcar pulverizado—powdered sugar. Teresa poured a cup of granulated sugar onto the surface of a flat rock, then rolled a rock back and forth over the sugar until all of the granules were pulverized under the heavy stone. A pile of white powdered sugar was all that was left.
“Azúcar pulverizado,” she declared as she stood up and brushed off her hands. I was amazed. I thought of every time I had carelessly sprinkled powdered sugar on the table or thrown away a bag that was almost empty. I thought of the unconscious choices a person with wealth makes, the assumptions about what was easy and available. Like my middle school basketball coach, who instructed every player to buy a second pair of shoes for basketball without realizing that my mom could afford only one pair of new shoes. As much as I wanted to charge ahead with this project, I knew I needed to have Teresa and the girls participate in planning, to avoid unnecessary sacrifices my choices would entail.
Within a couple of hours, we had several dozen rollos. We giggled as we ate the few that had turned out funny looking. The room was sweltering from all the baking. The inkling of accomplishment energized me. We sold half that afternoon and the remaining the next morning. I meticulously kept track of who sold what and how much money they would get at the end of the day, because the whole point was to teach them that by working they could get something in return.
Teresa finally invited me over to her house after that first weekend with the bakery. I met her mother, who wore a pollera, had long gray braids, and laughed at her own jokes. The three of us spent a Saturday afternoon drinking chicha on their patio while they told me stories about living in Kantuta before it had electricity. Teresa’s three younger brothers came in and introduced themselves while we sat there. They had recently graduated high school and worked around town. Like Teresa, they spoke Quechua with their mother but Spanish with me and each other. I noticed Teresa watching them as they spoke to me. I wondered if she had briefed them about my visit. Sitting there with them was relaxing, and I was happy not to feel the pressure of trying to help anyone.
Teresa and her family were Catholics, like most Kantutans. But the Children’s Center was run and supported by an Evangelical Christian organization, and all of the other staff were Evangelicals. Even though the staff members were friendly with Teresa, I always sensed a slight tension between her and the other teachers. I thought it was because she was the only single mother on the staff and, as the child of a single mother myself, I knew that people thought they had a right to judge a woman’s life. Now I saw that it was bigger than that. Like me, she was struggling to fit in at the Center. For the first time, I realized that she and I could support each other.
After several weekends spent working with the girls and gaining momentum for the bakery, I went to Cochabamba for a party with other volunteers. I spend the day enjoying the anonymity of the big city and bought sugary treats that I never could find in Kantuta. Before catching a cab to the party, I went to the large telephone office and called my mother. Standing in the clear Plexiglas stall, pressing the receiver into my ear, I told her about the success of my project. I felt like a real volunteer, and I wanted to tell someone.
The party was in one of the crash pads volunteers shared in the city. Most volunteers worked in the countryside, but for many, sharing an apartment in the city was more convenient and cheaper than any hotel. I had never considered getting one, then found out that for five dollars a month, I could have a spot on a couch for the three or four days a month I was in the city. Even I could afford five dollars. The party that night was at a place on the edge of town near the lake and was full of people I did not know.
“You’re Ursula, right?” asked a tall Latino guy from Montana who was returning to the States in a few weeks. “How’s it going at your site?”
“Great, but sometimes I think it is the Bolivians who are helping me.” I explained my project and the help Bolivians had given me every step of the way. The beers loosened my tongue, and I decided to be honest with him.
“Peace Corps lets us know ourselves at our lowest depths,” he said. People didn’t usually talk about the dark side o
f the experience. He gave me a hug that I didn’t realize I needed. I immediately developed a crush on him. Then a beautiful Bolivian woman walked up and put her arm around him.
“Conoces Arianna, sí?” he introduced his fiancée. In that moment, I remembered that I had met her a few months earlier. I needed to be more careful with my crushes. Besides being gorgeous, she was genuinely warm, which was probably good for him.
I was glad to have an answer whenever people asked me what I was working on, and to listen to them describe their projects. I was able to hear their struggles without thinking that everyone was doing more than I. The spirit of celebration made me accept a few too many glasses of whiskey, and then someone handed me a pipe with a nugget of pot. Thinking I was invincible and forgetting my low tolerance for weed, I inhaled deeply. But my capacity for whiskey mixed with other substances was low, and before long I wandered outside and passed out in a field next to the house.
In the first hours of the morning, I stood up and saw that my ankles were covered in red welts from some biting insect. Ants? Mosquitoes? I had no idea. Why hadn’t anyone come to get me? I lumbered back to the house, where I found a floor crowded with curled-up bodies, the room smelling like whiskey, stale cigarette smoke, and bong water. The danger of passing out in a field alarmed me. I drank quite a bit, especially during training, but had never passed out on the ground in a neighborhood I didn’t know. I missed Kantuta. It was where I wanted to be now, not here. I drank in Kantuta, sometimes to excess, but I always made it back to my house. What would Ximenita think if I passed out in the street? Qué barbaridad! I could imagine her saying it now. I caught the bus to Kantuta the next day, happy to be heading back to a town that was starting to feel, not exactly like home, but at least like a safe place.
10
Misiñawi — Cat Eyes
Strikes across the country shut down the schools for weeks, and the children from the Center went home. The teachers’ union was not satisfied with the small raise the government had promised teachers. Most teachers I knew made less than half the $200 monthly stipend I received. But teachers weren’t the only ones protesting; factory workers, coca farmers, and others who opposed the government of the US-supported president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada were also involved. Roadblocks of trees and rocks were used to create literal stoppages of food and fuel to pressure the government to meet protesters’ demands. Because Bolivia had so few roads, blockages of selective roads could bring everything to a crashing halt. Protests like this were common because Bolivians, especially Indigenous Bolivians, had few elected officials representing them. The teachers in Kantuta marched through the streets at night with candles. I saw my landlord’s wife, but wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to wave at her from the sidelines as though it were an Independence Day parade down Main Street.
I was still able to buy food and supplies at the market, but didn’t attempt to travel to Cochabamba for fear of getting stuck on the wrong side of the blockades. Both the charango workshop and the bakery project sat idle, but every day I still walked up to the Center because I knew my friends would be there, and I had nothing else to do.
“Sabes que? Estoy pensando en dejar mi pollera.” Ximenita said one morning as we all snacked on the last of the bread. I dipped it in my coffee, softening the edges a little. I didn’t understand what she meant by dejar mi pollera (leave my skirt), and looked at her.
“Dejar, quitar?” She said it a different way, but I still didn’t get it. I understood that the words meant to leave, to quit, but still was confused.
“Ah, Ursula, don’t you understand?” Teresa asked. “She doesn’t want to be a cholita anymore.” Ximenita didn’t want to wear the traditional Quechua dress anymore.
“Why would you want to do that, and what would you wear?” I knew there were fewer Bolivian women wearing polleras than in previous decades, but I didn’t think this was how it happened—one day a woman decides to stop being a cholita. Ximenita explained how expensive the pollera was and how much money she’d save if she could dress in regular skirts and dresses. Teresa and Florencia nodded their heads in agreement. Both women were children of pollera-wearing cholitas, but they didn’t wear traditional clothes. It had to be about more than money.
“And everyone says that cholitas are from the countryside and thinks that they are Indios,” Ximenita said. Cholita was synonymous with Indian.
Bolivians told me all the time that they were proud of their Incan ancestors, and the kids often bragged that Kantuta meant Sacred Flower of the Incas in Quechua. Yet they knew what many people, especially the wealthier, whiter population of Bolivia, thought about los Indios. Few wanted to be seen as an Indian. For a young woman like Ximenita, living in town for the first time in her life without family nearby, being seen as a cholita made it that much harder for her to succeed. Maybe she didn’t want to be a cook’s helper for the rest of her life.
“What do you think I should do?” Ximenita looked straight at me. All I could think was, This is not right. The choice she faced symbolized why cultures disappear, why languages get lost, why my grandmother told my mother not to braid her hair in high school because it made her look too Indian. I thought Ximenita should stay a cholita, but it wasn’t my place to say. It was easy for me to think my friend should wear a pollera when I didn’t have to walk through the world as a cholita. And I understood why she wanted to tuck away her Indigenous identity, despite being proud of it, in order to survive. Maybe she wouldn’t put it in those terms, but that’s what seemed to be happening. The feminist in me wanted her to be able to do whatever she wanted.
“You know, I’m an Indian, like you,” I said. They all laughed.
“You’re not an Indian. Maybe a little Indígena, but not an Indian.” Teresa said. I was a bit crushed by this comment, seeing as connecting with Native people was my reason for being there. When I asked them what the word Indio meant to them, they described loincloth-clad savages who lived in the jungles along the border with Brazil.
“And you probably shouldn’t tell anyone about being Indian; people can’t tell by looking at you,” Florencia suggested. Whether they wore a pollera or not, I knew all three of these women were Indigenous. They spoke Quechua, could prepare traditional foods such as uchuku, and held ch’allas and other ceremonies that the people from this part of the Andes had been practicing for centuries. Even their aversion to the use of the word Indio was similar to Native people in North America. Indian was the old word, a word my grandmother used, but only within the family. In my Native American Student Association group, we called ourselves Native or American Indian more often than Indian.
I kissed Ximenita’s cheek as I stepped out, and told her I loved her no matter how she dressed. The next time I saw her she was wearing a new sleek, tapered skirt and T-shirt. Her hair was no longer braided and instead rippled down her back in dark streaks. She was as lovely as ever, and I told her so. This had been her choice to make, but I hated that the world made her choose.
The strikes apparently wouldn’t be ending anytime soon, and doña Florencia told me that she had decided to visit her mother in the countryside. When she asked me whether I wanted to come along, I jumped up and immediately said yes. Except for the well christening in the country with Daniel, I hadn’t spent any time with people in the countryside. I imagined the time in el campo would be idyllic and relaxing; the stars easy to see, the sunsets uninhibited, the air fresh. The day-to-day struggles of my work were grinding me down. Buzzing with anticipation, I packed my sleeping bag, a portable water purifier, and a roll of Bolivia’s best single-ply purple toilet paper. I rolled up my travel mosquito net and stuffed it into my big backpack. When I met up with doña Florencia, her teenage daughter Lena, and her two younger boys the next day, the wide grins on the kids’ faces made me think they were as excited to take me to their grandma’s house as I was to accompany them.
Doña Florencia was not a poor woman. Her husband was the director of the Children’s Center, and she w
as the cook, but we did not even discuss the possibility of paying someone to take us to her mother’s farm. We were walking. She and her children carried bulging woven plastic bags full of mangos, tomatoes, and bread for her mother. I wore thick-soled leather boots with microfiber socks to wick away moisture. Doña Florencia and her children wore flip-flops.
“It’s not far,” she said when I asked how long of a walk it was. She motioned with her chin and pointed with her lips to the horizon. “Just over there.” Nothing but more of the rolling dry hills that surrounded Kantuta on all sides.
We followed the wide, unpaved road leading east out of town. I followed behind the children as we walked along in single file. The car horns, clucking chickens, and barking dogs of Kantuta faded with each step and were replaced by the sound of the wind stirring the eucalyptus trees lining the dry riverbank. The red clay tiles on the houses on the horizon stood out next to the brown and green of the landscape. I followed the oldest boy down a steep embankment and across a wide, almost-dry riverbed. I realized we were now well out of Kantuta. There were no houses or fences or roads as far as I could see, only rolling hills and the same dry scrub wildness stretching in all directions. I had no idea where we were. In the small stream flowing weakly at the bottom of the riverbed, a half-submerged plastic bag bobbed on the surface. “Just over there” had a different meaning for me than for doña Florencia. For her, it was a place you could arrive after a day of walking.
As we walked, the children asked me about my family back home in the United States. They were surprised to hear that I only had one sister. Doña Florencia told me about her big family. Did she say she had six or seven siblings? I often confused the two numbers. Seis, siete. Doña Florencia had walked this road to and from Kantuta every day as a child to attend school. I couldn’t imagine a child crossing this distance daily. It reminded me of my own grandmother’s stories about going to school with her sister in the mountains of California. They would sing songs and clap their hands as they walked, hoping to scare away the rattlesnakes that hid under rocks. Long walks through snowy winters and rainy spring months made them strong as it must have made doña Florencia strong.