The Price of a Life

There were two notable deaths in the province in the last week or so. The first was as a result of torrential rain throughout the region, which caused several landslides and (somewhat ironically) cut off water for a few days in Charazani and other nearby communities. One landslide led to a rock falling on a house and crushing a man inside, which apparently made the national news and led the Governor of La Paz to drop by (hopefully to pledge that at his level of government they would be giving as much aid as possible to help clear the roads and suchlike). Almost a week later, when I walked along the road that leads up to the community where this had occurred, to meet a Kallawaya I know in his community, I saw another landslide that had deprived someone of their kitchen and was blocking a good portion of the road. My friend told me that their problem was that they were lacking a wheelbarrow to clear away the rocks and didn´t have the 350Bs (about £35) that one would cost in Charazani. I wanted to help, but felt that it should really be the job of the local authorities to provide them with a wheelbarrow in their hour of need, and in any case didn´t have anything like that amount on me at the time.

The other death was somewhat more shocking when I heard about it, and was in no way caused by natural phenomena. An old man in a community several hour`s walk away from Charazani had fallen asleep in the street after drinking too much. Two boys aged ten and eleven set alight to some part of him, apparently thinking that they were playing a trick or a joke on him, and that he would wake up, not realising that because he was already drenched in alcohol he would become a human fireball. The whole ayllu (collection of communities) was naturally in shock at these events and a few days later meetings were held to determine what sanction the boys would face for their actions. I was able to observe community justice in action at close quarters, when men and a few women from the four communities that make up the ayllu gathered in the square to debate the fate of the boys. After several hours of discussion, involving back and forth between community leaders, relatives of the deceased, and the boys´ fathers, it was decided that the boys (or their families) should pay reparations of 8,000Bs (around £715 at time of writing) each. The cost had originally been set at 10,000, but after pleading from the boys´ fathers, that they weren´t millionaires and simply wouldn´t be able to repay such a sum, the amount was reduced.

Although the amount seemed small to me considering what they were being made to pay for, when recounting the events to a friend in a nearby community afterwards, she wondered how the boys or their families were going to manage to scrape together the money to pay it back.

The World is Full of Magic

A couple of weeks ago, walking up to the top of a hill where I would be visiting a mine, a sacred lake was pointed out to me on the way. This lake, I was told, was where people from several different communities in the province came to sing and dance in order to ask for rain when there was a a particularly pronounced dry spell. The men I was with suggested that I take a photo of said lake, however, when I went to take the photo my camera lens wouldn´t open. I had been having some problems with the camera ever since I made the foolish mistake a few weeks back of lending it to someone for a few hours and when they gave me it back it was clear as day that they had dropped it on the ground. Once at the mine, by persistently switching the camera on and off again eventually I got it working, and took a few photos of the miners at work. However on the way back down, when again I attempted to take a photo of the lake, with the men accompanying me in the foreground, the lens once more refused to open. The men joked that the lake didn´t want to be photographed.

When the next day I went to visit a Kallawaya in another community and told him of what had happened, he thought it unlikely that my camera had malfunctioned because of the possible displeasure of the lake itself at being photographed. He did though tell me that many of the local lakes were enchanted. For example, he told me, in the lake in the mountain above his community, a man who had gone out fishing one day was driven raving mad after a mermaid appeared to him. He had afterwards tried local remedies to return him to sanity, but according to my Kallawaya friend, these were given to him by quacks, and the only reason he had gone to them were because they were cheap. The man had never found all his marbles again. What he should have done, apparently, and what any right-thinking Kallawaya would have helped him to do, so he told me, was to have been lowered into the lake, with the carcases of five different anmals attached to him (I forget which). The demon spirit within the lake would have taken the animals as offerings and left him alone.

Before leaving my friend`s house, he pointed out to me that the river which I had walked through on my way there had a demon in it. I tried, with great difficulty, to keep this thought out of my mind while crossing on the way back.

My camera still isn´t working, by the way. 

My Little House

Last Saturday I accompanied my friend Valerio (from the Alpaca-herder community of Qullpani in the highlands of Bautista Saavedra) to the town of Laja, almost an hour´s drive away from El Alto in La Paz, where a curious event was taking place.

Saturday was the fiesta for the patron saint of Laja, the Virgin de la Concepcion. Apparently we had already missed the parade by the time we arrived, but in any case all of the action seemed to be taking place on a hill overlooking Laja, where probably around a thousand people had gone to sit and make little houses out of stones and grass. Each of the architects of the houses was putting the building blocks in place in the hope that this time next year they would have a life-size house.

On the basis that the houses being constructed represented the what would supposedly be reality in a year´s time, I like to think that when someone strode over my plot that a giant would be marauding over my land this time next year, rather in the manner of the BFG.

Each of those making their model houses supposedly has to return for the next two years in order to thank the virgin for helping them to construct their (life-size) house.

As you can appreciate from my construction below, I rather hope that if my some quirk of fate I do end up with a house this time next year (whether constructed by my own two hands or not), it looks nothing like the one I built last weekend.

Questions I am most often asked during fieldwork

What size shoes do you have?

Can you buy me some boots like yours?

Where are you from?

What is the climate like in England?

What is England like?

What altitude is England at?

Do your parents send you money?

How long have you been in Bolivia?

Do you like Bolivia / Charazani / Amarete /etc?

Will you be godfather to my child?

Are you married? (You`re not?! You should marry someone here!)

When are you going to La Paz? (I always have the feeling when I am asked this that people can`t wait to see the back of me.)

What time is it in England?

Will you take me to England?

What language do they speak in England?

Pig in a bag

The other day I got on the bus in Amarete in the high altitude part of the province to take a trip down to a village in the tropical part, and got a bit of a shock due my travelling companion.

A deaf/mute sat down in the seat next to me, and not long had he done so than a woman unceremoniously dumped a bag at his feet, before taking her seat a couple of rows in front. It was only when the bag began to sqeel and wriggle about that I realised there was an animal struggling to get out. The deaf/mute gave it a whack every now and then every time it became a bit too lively. I realised why the women had dumped the pig at his feet when the lady who took money for the tickets chastised him for bringing it on board and he was unable to defend himself.

The Bolivian secret of looking youthful

WARNING: Do not read this post if you don´t like reading about bodily fuids.

The main street in Cochabamba is Avenida Heroinas, so-named after the women who fought to defend the city from Spanish forces in the war of independence. Where Heroinas meets the second main street Avenida Ayacucho on one corner there sits the city post office, and next to it on Heroinas there are a variety of fast food stalls selling burgers, chinese food, and anticuchos (meat on sticks). On the other side of the street on the corner there is usually someone selling DVDs and CDs. One night while accompanying a female friend to her bus on the corner of Heroinas and Ayacucho we passed a little stall I hadn't noticed before, at which a man was selling second-hand American clothes. My friend H was interested in one of the dresses which was hanging up and got into a conversation with him about where and how he got the clothes. When he said that he got them from the port at Iquique (in Chile) H asked if he would be affected by the new law to bring in stricter regulation on bootlegged goods. He was dismissive of the idea, saying that he would only have to bribe the relevant official and he'd be fine. At this I told him about the time I'd had bribed an official at the Bolivian-Peruvian border in order to get a 90-day tourist stamp in my passport when he only wanted to give me 30 days. He told us about how he´d lived in Italy and had travelled throughout the whole of Europe. “Where are you from?”, he asked me. “From England”, I told him, “Oh, I haven´t been there”, he replied. Suddenly the man asked us how old we thought he was. I made a stab at 40, being suitably generous, but not excessively so. Looking very pleased with himself, he told us that he was actually 63, and asked us what we thought his secret must be. “Staying out of the sun?,” I ventured. He dismissed my guess with a grin that indicated he thought that his secret was too good for us to guess. “Semen,” he told us. “Semen?”, I queried. “Yes”, he said, “you have to spread it on nice and thick, every fifteen days”, motioning spreading it on his cheeks. I wondered whether the man was being serious. I asked him the question that occurred most readily to mind: “this is probably a silly question,” I said, “but is it your semen or someone else's?”. H laughed. “My own semen,” he replied, “though you can use someone else's semen, but you mustn't mix the two together”.

H needed to catch her bus so we said our goodbyes, and were about to leave, but before doing so H asked him his name. “A. Hitler”, he said; “Adolf Hitler”. “I'm very rascist”.

He told us that he was there regularly and that we should come back another day. With that we were on our way, not sure what we could possibly add to the conversation.

Later I told a couple of friends about what the man had said and they told me that spreading semen on one´s face, as far as they had heard, was a surprisingly common ageing solution. I was told that it was not uncommon for women to do the same with their results of their menstruation.