COCHABAMBA

COCHABAMBA


03.01.1994

Our arrival in Cochabamba was a bit fraught.  After an early start at 4.30a.m. (up even before the birds!) we caught the 8a.m. plane.  As the flight is a mere 35 minute hop, the dogs were out of their boxes before they knew they were in them.  That was not the problem.  Having had no breakfast, everyone was starving, but the political head of the project (appointed 6 months ago) based in La Paz was over-nervous about the project (because it was such a disaster) and he had arranged for all kinds of meetings.  All day long people were coming and going, with the result that, although some of the other people managed to escape for a while, Robert was trapped and had to meet them all.  By 6p.m. he told them all to go away, that he had just arrived and could not solve their 4 year old problems in one day.  When he had had time to evaluate the situation he would be in a position to discuss these matters with them.  O's original plan was that everyone should head down to the project area that same evening (a 4-5 hour drive on a dreadful road) while he remained in Cochabamba to meet the Minister of the Interior who was arriving to inaugurate this new stage of the project the next day.  Robert told him that he would also stay over in Cochabamba that night, so, as I had (with considerable difficulty) managed to find a hotel which would take me and my dogs, we headed off for there and had a good night's rest. The project head had wqashed nhis hands of my welfare right from the very start.

The following day Robert set off for the Chapare and I remained behind in Cochabamba until he had a chance to evaluate the situation down there.  

Cochabamba sprawls out in a wide valley surrounded by gentle hills.  It is built mainly on a grid system and the hotel where I was staying (Hotel Diplomat) is on one of the main arteries, called the Paseo del Prado.  This is a wide avenue with a central garden strip and plenty of trees.  In general in the town there are plenty of trees and little squares which meant that finding a place to walk the dogs was not too difficult.  Our first impression is that it is an agreeable place. There are not too many tall buildings and most of the houses are low with a little garden in front or behind.

On one of the hills which form the bowl in which the town lies there is a statue of Christ like the ones in Rio and Lisbon, except that the Cochabambinos (as the people of Cochabamba are called) wanted theirs to be bigger, so it is 12 cm. taller than the others.

According to the radio, Cochabamba is the town where people eat the most in Bolivia.  On average they consume 1,500g/day whereas in El Alto, a 100% indigenous settlement near La Paz airport, the average is 1,068g/day. ( In rural areas it is much, much less than that). I have to confirm that the portions served in restaurants are enormous.  Apparently people have coffee first thing.  Then at 10.30 they go out for a plate of something. Around 12.00 the lunch break begins until 2.  At 6 offices etc. close and shortly afterwards people have dinner.  Life in Cochabamba seems to revolve around eating.  On Sundays the main restaurants and hotels announce their menu in the newspaper so people can choose where to eat out that day.


The social structure is apparently fairly homogeneous (at a certain level, of course).  The mind-set apparently is that no individual or clan should get too prosperous or big for their boots.  If they should show signs of doing so, the remaining groups converge in a concerted effort to prevent this.  From what I have seen so far, society seems to be more homogeneous that in La Paz.  All these remarks must be considered within the context that the indigenous population is grossly marginalized and under-privileged. I think you could say that they are also fairly homogeneously poor.  If I were an indigenous person here I think I would be leading an uprising like the one in Chiapas in Mexico.

The indigenous population in Cochabamba is mostly Quechua.  One group of women wear mainly brown skirts (polleras) and shawls.  Both men and women wear a conical felt hat with a narrow upturned brim.  They are very poor indeed.  Another group wears more colourful clothing and they seem to be less poor than this first group.  I have yet to learn the ethnic differences.  Many of these people have come to the city in search of work: many of the men work carrying people's shopping for them or carrying loads in the market and the women have no option other than to sit in the streets and beg or sell whatever they can. Since I wrote that originally I have discovered that the really wretchedly poor people wearing the brown clothes are people who have come from Potosí, the centre where first silver was mined in colonial times, and later tin was of more importance.  In 1972 when the price of tin collapsed on the world market thousands of people were left without a job and had to emigrate.  Then in 1985 the government of the day "rationalized" the tin mining industry making thousands unemployed. At first people were very generous to them but too many years have gone by and now not only the original people are beggars but also the next generations and there are no prospects for them.

Searching for a place to eat, I came across a vegetarian restaurant called GOPAL.  It is cheap (you can eat as much as you want for 6 bolivianos which is about US$1.50) and many students eat there.  You can also pay a monthly fee which entitles you to have all your meals there and that works out cheaper. I made friends with a young boy called David who works there.  He was fascinated by the dogs which is how our conversation started. He is Quechua and was born in Tarija in the south of the country, but was brought by his parents to Cochabamba when he was a baby.  He is the youngest of 12 children, the others are all married. His parents live in Santa Cruz now (that is the main development area) where his father deals in cattle.  As he was not in agreement with this he left home and fends for himself.  He lives and works in the restaurant.  Many indigenous families come to the restaurant after it finishes serving with their little tin pots and they are given the food that has not been sold.

He did not go to school as a child because, although education is free, the family must buy the school books and materials, which his family could not afford to do.  A further complication is that at day school children must wear a uniform, which must be clean and pressed.  This is not so easy when you have no water or facilities.  Now that he is earning a basic living, he goes to night school and is finishing his primary education.  


After lunch he brought me some coca leaves and explained that for his people these leaves were a treasure, because, when they chew them, their fatigue and hunger are alleviated.  The indigenous people also use them to foretell the future.  They take a handful of leaves and, depending on how they fall to the ground, they are interpreted. "When the Spaniards came to rob our lands", he said, "they came in search of gold, but they did not recognize our gold which is the coca leaf, because the leaf was damaging to them whereas for us Quechuas it brings us nothing but good: it is a gift from our gods".

The same sentiment is reflected in a legend noted by Antonio Díaz Villamil about the encounter between America and Western culture:  "And when the white man wants to do as you do and dares to use these leaves as you do, they will have the opposite effect.  Their sap, which for you is your life force, for your overlords will be a repugnant and degenerating vice.  While for you Indians it is a spiritual good, it will cause idiocy and madness in them"  (La Leyenda de la Coca) - prophetic words indeed!

Someone was supposed to be contacting me at the hotel to help me find a house to rent in Cochabamba.  However, since nobody materialized, on Saturday when Robert came back from the Chapare we bought the newspaper and set out to find something ourselves.  We eventually found a 3 bedroomed house with a little garden for the dogs (about the size of the grass patch around our house) in the San Pedro area of the town - just under the great statue.  The lady was asking for US$700 but Robert managed to get her down to US$400 and negotiated for her to install a washing machine.  This she has still to do.  The important thing is that the house has a phone.  In fact, at the beginning the phone was really the landlady's office fax number but she has paid and signed for a new phone for us, which they put in on Friday Jan. 8th. We are insisting that she has the phone classified so that we can make international calls direct because normally people do not have that facility and you have to go through the operator.  She seems to think that having to do that will make sure that people pay for their calls but we pointed out that we could just as well make calls through the operator and not pay for them.  Apparently 2 evangelical missionaries went off leaving a US$1,000 phone bill unpaid.  Robert told her she should never trust missionaries and that in the bible it says that faith without good works is useless, and he would rather have the good works!  

We had found another larger house which we had bargained down from US$900 to 500, but we decided not to take it, because it was more than we wanted to pay, it was too big to clean from my point of view and the garden had been slabbed over.  As you can see, rents are not cheap.  This, I think, is due to the fact that there are a host of UN and US agencies here which gives rise to the same phenomenon which occurred in Puerto de Santa María when General Motors moved in - the rents soar.  Apparently Robert's predecessor was paying US$1,900 per month!  Apart from the fact that we could not afford that, even if we could, I think it is immoral. Our neighbour round the corner is the head of the American Drug Enforcement Agency and he has an armed guard on his door 24 hours a day even, like now, when he is not here.


The landlady runs a balanced food business which is next door to her house.  She was married to one of the directors of the Banco de Santa Cruz, but he was a womanizer and after 18 years of marriage she decided to get out.  She went to Central America for 2 years and then came back.  Her husband had divorced her by then and married his erstwhile girlfriend.  He now has another 18 year old girlfriend apparently.  She then adopted two children, a boy and a girl, and, poor woman, they both turned out to be mentally deficient.  The girl is 14 now with severe behavioural problems and the boy 13.  She was going to adopt another little 3 year old now.  The mother died a week or so ago and the father cannot look after the children (there are 6 of them) and work at the same time, and the rest of his family is too poor to take on any more obligations.  However, the father did not want the three sisters, one aged 11, another 9 and the small one 3, to be split up, so she was considering fostering them, although she thought that three was a big handful to take on.  In the end the poor man decided that he was going to try and keep the family together.

A rented house here, it turns out, only has the bare essentials of furniture.  There are no pots and pans, dishes, cutlery or anything else.  This meant that I had to go out and buy at least the basics to get by.  The only ones who had all their utensils were the dogs. If I had known that I would have brought a lot more things.  The landlady took me to the big open market, called La Cancha, which functions every day except Sundays.  They sell everything there, clothes, shoes, sheets, towels, food, cleaning implements, crockery, etc etc.  It is a huge place.  So I was able to get the things I needed to be going on with.  

I had just finished and was coming out when I had my first bad experience: a fellow came up on my right and pulled my chain off my neck.  I was really upset, not because of the chain which, after all is only money, but because the pendant is the one I had made with my father's signet ring.  If I had known that she was going to take me to the market I would not have worn it, but it was too late.  As the fellow approached I could see him out of the corner of my eye and I thought there was something odd about him, so I stopped to let him pass in front of me.  However, he stepped around behind me and that was that.  The people in the market told me he was known as "El Chino".  The next two mornings were spent at the police station, but so far no luck, despite the fact that I was able to tell them who they were supposed to be looking for.  I keep going back just to let them see that I am not giving up although I don't really hold out much hope.  I have to go back again on Wednesday at 5.30.  Now I am going into jeweller shops and asking them to phone me if anyone comes in trying to sell them the pendant.  You never know.

We have taken this house for a variety of reasons.  The first is that Cochabamba can provide all the services, such as mail, telephone etc. which we might need and the electricity supply is more constant than in the Chapare, at least during the rainy season, so that I should be able to do my translations here. However, this short experience of town living is enough to confirm my suspicion that I am not a townie - too many people, too much noise, and a plethora of dogs which bark at anything and everything because they have nothing better to do.  Each house here has a minimum of two dogs which are never taken out, so, I imagine, are bored stiff and their only diversion is to bark at passers-by, whether human or canine.  


From that point of view Robert also prefers the jungle area where the project is, so long as it is raining because, when it is not, all the cars, which people drive like demons possessed, raise an infernal amount of dust.  Another reason for taking a house here is that everyone warned us against taking the dogs to the Chapare, saying that they would be dead within 2 months because a "worm" would get into their feet and kill them. However, I went to the Post Office and looked up the vets in the town.  Quite by chance the one I contacted was a girl who had got a grant to study at the University of Liège and then did research into rabies at the Pasteur Institute.  She told me that the infections the dogs were likely to pick up down there were the same as here (and Andalucía) except that, due to the high humidity, there was a risk of fungi (for both humans and animals) and she told me that the only precaution was to dry the dogs' paws and, if necessary, to wash them with sulphur soap which has a drying effect.  She also sold the same dog food they were used to getting (Pedigree Chum, here called Champ, made in Brazil), so armed with my dog food and sulphur soap I am ready to face the jungle - and the sooner the better as far as I am concerned.  However, until such times as I have the infrastructure set up here (mail box, telephone, fax etc) I shall stay put.

In Cochabamba lots of people ride bicycles.  This is proving to be a problem because Simon seems to be suffering from the same problem the Indians had when the Spaniards arrived in America riding horses.  He cannot understand why these people have wheels instead of legs and he does not like it at all.  Fortunately, he has not bothered about other differences such as women wearing bowler hats and so on.  

Our things were supposed to arrive on December 7th but they did not turn up in La Paz until December 31st.  Since the Ministries did not go back to work until January 7th, we could not get our tax-free certificate without which they could not be cleared through customs.  

January 22nd.  Our boxes arrived.  I say our boxes advisedly, because about half the contents did not.  Almost every single item of value, from the computer to my Irish linen tea towels, had been removed in a meticulous operation. The sole exception was the laser printer, because that was in a box of its own and presumably it would have been too obvious to hand over a consignment of goods one box short. In all, goods to the value of about US$11,000 have disappeared.  The Minister of the Interior was instigating an investigation to see what had happened, but from the customs weigh-in certificates it is clear that this happened even before the stuff reached La Paz.  It seems that the shipment was routed through Lima which, apparently, is a notorious black spot for "pilferage".  We are (or rather I am, because Robert is in the Chapare) now in the throws of making an insurance claim and I can only hope that Lloyds of London don't put up any resistance and also that they don't take for ever, because I now have hardly any clothes.  Before January 22nd. I had 2 skirts, 2 blouses and 1 dress, but I was confident that other things would soon be arriving.  Now, however, .......

The dogs are quite happy and have suffered no stress whatever.  They do not get their long walks because as yet I have not found a place to take them, but I hope that when we get down to the Chapare there will be places to let them run in safety.  I was hoping to go down there next week, but with all this insurance business I may have to stay here.

UNESCO , I have to say, have come up trumps.  They sent me a short translation just to try out the system.  I have just returned it to them.  I sent 2 copies, one by ordinary mail and another by urgent mail, so that we can see the difference between the two methods. I am now waiting for a second text which is to come by mail this time.  I hope it comes soon, because it has to be back in Paris by the end of this month.