Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving in Bolivia fell at a time when all of us are in a state of heightened emotions and reflection, as we look forward to our very last weekend in Cochabamba, which is already scheduled to the hour.

Yesterday we had a very lovely Thanksgiving dinner with members of our host families, our Spanish teacher, and Amizade staff (over 20 people :-), and, thankfully, I think everyone was honest when they said my pumpkin pie turned out very well. This morning I found myself waking up before my alarm went off, and in a very odd mood. We now have less than two weeks left in this overall experience, and, although I'm actually feeling more ready than ever to go home, it is still always difficult to walk away from these experiences that have such a profound effect on you in such a short amount of time.

At this moment it's really difficult for me to write this post, actually. I just read an article that our professor, Eric, had published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette yesterday about why we should be thankful to be Americans, and I realized just how emotional I am at the moment when I started to tear up at the end, haha. It's a short piece that's very much worth your time and thoughs http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09330/1016436-109.stm.

My favorite quote was:

"American ideals are tied up with the notion that we always can do better. We continue to build a better society. We work to redress the excesses of past generations. Now, for instance, we seek to make our society more environmentally sustainable. We continue to work toward expanding individual human freedoms in our own country and around the world."

I'm not going to comment too much on this, except to say that I agree. I realize as much as anyone that in the United States we have a culture that is at times overwhelmingly materialistic, superficial, and wasteful. I know that there is still sexism, discrimination, and hatred, and that the lofty, theoretical, precepts upon which our nation and government were built do not extend equally to all . However, having now spent over a year of my life in developing countries, and having seen a number of others, I believe that to dwell only upon these few characteristics is a cynical and indeed superficial assesment of what our nation is, and that such a view is short-sighted and insular. I think that it is the easy answer because it does not require you to look any closer at what we are as Americans than turning television screen. There is no person that is perfect, thus there is no government, society, or nation that is perfect, but I think the majority of Americans do give commendable effort.

And being born in the United States, I believe, does give us not only a chance to have the time and means to serve others and share our wealth (I know people are busy, but by this I mean you don't have to worry about making sure the crops get harvested on time so your family doesn't starve over the winter), but somewhat of an obligation to do so. We were born in the United States, we didn't earn a pass to live here and we are no better than the Andean farmers who have never had the chance to learn to read; whether you were born rich or poor on American standards, you unknowingly inherited a certain amount of what is called social capital that most people will never have. Social capital means that just by being born in a well-developed society you have certain opportunities, technology, facilities, communication networks, government institutions, etc, that already facilitate an opportunity to accumulate wealth and carve better opportunities for your children. It is this advantage that allows us to thrive in our culture of consumerism, and it is also the reason we are more capable of changing the world than we realize.

This point has been driven home to me in so many ways over the course of my travels, but I think few experiences exemplify it better than one Bridget and I had last weekend when we traveled to Potosí, an old mining town that, in its prime, was larger than London and was almost singularly responsible for Spain's great wealth in silver and other minerals at the height of it's imperial power. Potosí, which lies many hours south of Cochabamba by bus, is home to the Cerro Rico, a volcanic mountain (although not a volcano; the volcanic movements are what pushed all the minerals so close to the surface of the earth) that has huge deposits of silver, tin, and 96 other natural minerals. The inside of the mine at times sparkles with pyrite and quartz, while colored stalactites and stalagmites drip from the cielings and grow from the floors. There is a thick mineral dust that constantly fills the air, and levels upon levels of mining shafts connected by narrow, roughly carved tunnels that burrow vertically to the roots of the mountain (and, consequentally, scare the daylights out of claustrophobic tourists such as myself).

For the Spanish and for later industrial giants in the region, Cerro Rico was the legendary El Dorado of Bolivia, bringing immesuarable wealth to a select few. For the local populations, systematiclaly persecuted, exploited, and exterminated for centuries in the name of wealth and Western empirial development, the Cerro Rico has for centuries been "the mouth of hell": a grim fate that will inevitably devour them and their children.

The trip we took, just the two of us, included Sucre and Potosí, two historical cities that come up over and over in our reading. Sucre is the de jure capital of Bolivia, but somwhere along the way the centers of power and government shifted to La Paz. Still, it's a lovely colonial town with lots of interesting sites and museums. Potosí is about 2 hours in taxi from Sucre, and is about the same size at 300,000 or so. All in all it ended up being a little more expensive than I had anticipated, but the tour of the mines made it totally worth it.

We have read a good bit about Potosí and the Cerro Rico, and about the centuries of cruelty and inhumane treatment the workers in the mines have suffered at the hands of the dominant powers that established themselves centuries ago in this region. In Eduardo Galeano's provocative work Open Veins of Latin America, he describes the mines in their prime (around the mid 1500s-1700s) in this way:

"In three centuries Potosí's Cerro Rico consumed 8 million lives. The Indians, including women and children, were torn from their agricultural communities and driven to the Cerro. Of every ten who went up into the freezing wilderness, seven never returned... Soon after the mine began operating, in 1550, the Dominican mink Domingo de Santo Tomás told the Council of the Indies that Potosí was a 'mouth of hell' which swallowed Indians by the thousands every year, and that the rapacious mine owners treated them ´like stray animals.´"

Of course the extremity of worker exploitation and the loss of life is nothing today like it was in the age of Spanish imperialism; however, the contemporary situation is still a sobering reality that I will not be able to translate well here, I don't believe. But, I'll try.

Entering the mine was not terribly pleasant to begin with because I really am pretty claustrophobic, although we did get a lot of comic relief from the ridiculous outfits we were given to wear, complete with rubber boots, over-sized black suits, helmets, headlamps, and bandanas. I was later grateful, though, that I summed up the courage, and we did make the most of it while inside. We entered into a shaft that was opened during the time of Spanish rule, and followed it along with our guides and fellow foreigners (Europeans and Canadians) until we had to make the descent to the lower shafts. Each shaft was usually just a little too short for me to stand up straight, although there were larger caverns from time to time. To get into the lower shafts you shimmy/scoot/climb your way down narrow little tunnels that curve downward and sidways so you can't see anyone else most of the time. At times they were small enough that you had to literally crawl, and at those times I was practicing some serious mental self-calming and deep breaths, haha.

It was a Saturday, so there were less workers than usual, but we did meet three.

The first was in the second level, where it is actually relatively cool due to a combination of the fresh air leaking in and being carried in long tubes that run through all the shafts, spraying in cold air. As we got deeper, though, it got increasingly hot because it is a volcanic mountain; apparently in some areas it reaches up to 60 degrees Celcuis (140 degrees F!). Anyway, the first worker we met was a 59yr old man who, for the last 25yrs of his life has been busy shoveling piles of wet minerals from carts that come from other parts of the mine into piles, which are then once a week put into large, circular buckets that are hauled out of the roof of the mine on hooks.

The man was aged far beyond his years, although he was certainly strong as an ox, as our Spanish compañero put it. In 6 years, at 65, he will be able to retire with a pension from the government, to enjoy the few years of life he may have left. The guide didn't hear me when I tried to ask how much the pension is, but I can't imagine it is anywhere near the compensation he deserves for 31 years of servitude to the mountain. The guide had us help shovel the pile he was working on until it was gone, and we brought him a bottle of pop, for both of which he seemed relatively grateful.

From there we went down to the fourth level, where it was much hotter and a bit hard to breathe. In this level we made our way to where there were two other workers, being supervised by an older man. The boys were croutched in a hole at the base of a small, man-made, cavern, tinking away at the rock with large hammers, inspecting the stone they broke off, then either putting them in their bags or tossing them away. The workers in the mine choose their own schedules and amount of hours to work each day, and are paid not by the hour but by the kilogram of minerals and the quality of the rocks they bring up. Thus, the boys were picking away at the mountain in search of the most mineral-rich chips they could get, which they will then haul up in bags on their back weighing about 40kilos (at least that was how much the one our guide brought up for one of the workers weighed, and they were still speeding past us as we all made the ascent, commenting to one another in quick Quechua). These boys work 11 hour days, and they will be able to sell their minerals for 3-15 Bolivianos (a little under $.50 to just over $3) per kilo depending upon the quality of the stone to one of the many privately-owned refineries in the area around the mines.

It wasn't until they told us that I realized how old the boys were, and I'm still reeling at the fact. The first, and the only one who uttered a word in the 15 minutes we were there, had just turned 15, and was in his 2nd year of work. The second was 19, and had been working since the age of 14. This is normal. The kids from the families in Potosí often need to work to support their families beginning as young as 12 for various reasons, and, once that is their fate, escape is nearly impossible. I was very suprised when we stopped at the miners market and the guide showed us the dynamite they use and explained that there is no age limit to buying it, even a five year old can, but now I understand why that is. We brought these boys pop and dynamite, actually, for which we got a meek gracias.

I can't remember the names of the boys we saw, and I never saw their faces, which strikes me as a morbid symbol of truth: these are the faceless, nameless victims of progress, whose voices are silenced as soon as they enter the earth, where they will be buried alive for the next 50yrs, unless death takes them first. When I got out of the mine I took the silver ring out of my pocket, which I bought bought for a few dollars in Chapare, and it felt cold and sinister.

But, what are we to do? A question that has come up in class has been on how to live, not promoting good necessarily, but just without causing harm. It's more a more comlicated question that one would think. It is impossible to have the scope to fully understand the consequences of our actions, as we are all, on this earth, so profoundly interconnected. I suppose we can start by being conscious comsumers, by buying free trade goods and shopping at thrift stores, for instance, but the level of guilt I could have the capacity to feel just be having been born into the life I lead has the potential to be unbearable.

Yet, from this guilt there also comes a profound sense of thankfulness for who I am and what I have been given in life, which I have been trying to embrace as closely as possible in these few days, so that it does not so easily escape me as tends to happen all too often. And I am glad that, before even being legally allowed to buy a beer in my home country, I am becoming as aware as I can of the realities of this world we live in, and formulating ways to live my life in a way that will reflect this knowledge. In this way, also, I feel extremely priveleged.

By writing this I am not trying to send a message that we should all feel guilty for going shopping on Black Friday or not giving much of your salary to charity. The knowledge of the suffering of others does not alleviate the individual battles we all face in life and the needs of those we love. However, I do think that it is worth considering just how complicated things really are.

We were talking last night about how we can express this experience to others in a way that will make them more compelled to get involved in global projects like Amizade, no matter the scale, and someone said that doing a trip like this "necessarily complicates things". I think that's a perfect way to express what this trip has been for me. It has been fun, to be sure, but it has also been frustrating and challenging in ways I did not anticipate. It has been impactful, and not as fulfilling, perhaps, as I had hoped in some ways; I think I will leave more overwhelmed by how complicated the world is than when I came, rather than with a deeper understanding of it. This, though, may be just as valuable as the illusion of deeper understanding.

We, as humans, are limited in scope and the capacity to hold knowledge and to understand that which is foreign to us. There is an argument that any attempt to be a "global citizen" is misguided and harmful because we cannot predict the results of our actions in communities that are unknown to us, and we cannot truly understand any community we were not raised in. I think in some ways that is true, but that it certainly has its limitations. I think the recognition of our minute place in the world and our own limits is an important step in becoming a better global citizen because in some ways it helps to take the weight of the world off of our shoulders. I know that I can't reach all the orphans in the world, or in Bolivia, or in Cochabamba, but I have reached some; just as I realize that by walking or riding my bike instead of buying a car won't reverse global warming, but as least I'm doing what I can to decrease my own carbon footprint.

If we all did our little part and were proud of that little part we did there would be far less want, I think. I know that I cannot understand the culture here fully, but I feel an affinity with Latin America that draws me here regardless. I could be volunteering at a soup kitchen at home instead, an equally as admirable task, but I prefer to be here so I am. I don't think everyone shares my passion and my views in this particular area, but I do think that we should all try to find our own niche where we can develop that passion. Don't be discouraged to help one person just because there are millions more in need, because if we each did that then imagine what a world we'd live in.

I know this is all very idealistic, and that things are far more complicated, as always, than they seem, but it is something to consider and to be thankful for. We should be thankful just to have the ability to give and to serve, and from that gratitude will stem a feeling of obligation to extend our own happiness to others. I think the ability to give is a privelage that we can no longer ignore, and is an obligation we should accept.

Ok that's that :-)

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving, and is getting all geared up for Christmas. I, for one, will be happy to be home with my family on that day, and I can't wait to meet the new little sibling that will be waiting for me when I get back! Have a good one.

Con Amor,

Alanna