DAY TO DAY

DAY TO DAY

11.05.1994

Days begin early here.  The sun is up and it is light by 6.15 a.m.  (except on cloudy days) - and Simon is standing by the bed at first light hitting me with his paw just in case I had not noticed that it was day already. In summer (December - March) night falls around 7 p.m.  In winter it gets dark around 6.30 p.m.  Both morning and evening bring flocks of green parrots which fly over the house squawking raucously.  Watching their gregarious activity drives home how cruel it must be for them to be confined to a cage all alone.  They love to wheel about and circle in groups calling all the while to one another.  Oropéndolas flute and trill in the trees, and, each time they do, it looks as though they are about to topple off their perch.  Yellow-bellied and paltry tyrannulets dee-dee-dee and cheeyip-cheeyip-cheeyip respectively, scolding their fellows as they go.  Simon gets a crick in his neck watching them all.  His other morning duty is to be on the look-out for bicycles.  As soon as he sees one, he leaps up and runs to the fence barking like a mad thing.

The temperature then rises steadily throughout the day to reach 30 odd or 26 degrees depending on the seasons.  May 10 was the first day that we did not sweat since we arrived here because the temperature only reached 20ºC and the day was overcast.  That was the onset of winter.  Now we are beginning to sweat again as spring settles in. Until now we have just been sweating all over all day since the humidity is high.  I often think of what one of my teachers at primary school said to us in class once: horses sweat, gentlemen perspire and ladies glow.  Not much glowing going on around here, just pure honest-to-goodness sweat!

Activity begins equally early.  People are out and about their business by 7 a.m. and activity continues steadily throughout the day.  No business hours prevail: people just sit and sell their produce until it is gone either in the village or by the roadside.  Cooking also goes on outside and people make great cauldrons of food which they eat themselves and sell to others.  

Housework is a bit of a pain.  There are no washing-machines, so I have devised a method whereby I have bought a big tub which I put the clothes in to steep.  After a while I get in and tread on them for  a while to beat them up a bit and then I rinse them.  There are no vacuum cleaners, of course, so it's the old sweeping brush.  Until a couple of weeks ago there was no floor mop either.  They are not to be found in any Latin American country except Mexico (we have had scouts in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil) but even in Mexico there are no buckets to squeeze them out.  The method of washing floors is either (if you have a surfaced floor - most floors in the Chapare are dirt floors - but no furniture) swilling water on the floor and then pushing it out the door with a rubber thing on the end of a pole similar to what you would clean windows with except that for floors the handle is longer, or, if you do have a tiled floor and furniture (and most people here do not), then a floorcloth is wrung out and pushed around the floor with the rubber device mentioned above.  From my point of view, a very unsatisfactory method of cleaning floors, because you have to plosh in water all the time.  


However, a few weeks ago when Robert was in Santa Cruz, he came across a shop which sold mops and mop-pails (albeit rather small for the mops) which were brought in by a Spanish lady, so he bought a supply of mops for us and for Monica and Filippo, the Italian agronomist and his Texan born - of Polish and Swiss parents - girl-friend).  I have since seen that the Chilean supermarket also has mops, but they don't have the pails.  I think I am going to start a business importing mops and pails!  

When night falls, candles are lit and things go on as usual.  Outside the settlements, people sit by the roadside and chat.  I cannot fathom this fascination with the road: people sit by it and even lie with their torso and head on it. It is my ever-present horror that some time one will not get up and we will not see him and drive straight over him in the dark.  However, they usually do get up in time and I have never heard of such an accident taking place! I subsequently learned that the reason why people sit by the roadside is that the petrol fumes make for a mosquito-free environment!

In Ivirgarzama, the village closest to the dairy and where I go to shop, apart from a nun with a grey habit, I am the only "white person" to frequent the town.  This means that there is no opportunity to pass unnoticed.  With this white skin and fair hair I stick out like a sore thumb.  Being white and fair means that the nearest identification the people can make is that I am a "gringa" - not a good identification at all, given the appallingness of U.S. policy in Latin America.  However, it is a disturbing yet salutary experience to be the victim of discrimination.  Normally we equate discrimination with the poor and the black, and here I am white and very well off in comparison to most of the other people around me.  Here, however, both attributes work against me.  If I am a "gringa", then I represent the powers of physical repression which come in and try to put a violent end to their way of life.  And if I am rich, then I also represent the powers of economic repression which take from the people and give nothing in return, imposing neo-liberal economic remedies which are totally inappropriate for these countries (Are they appropriate for any country?) bringing nothing but increased misery for the poor. Since the dogs always go with me in the car, I am known as the "lady with the dogs".

At first when we were driving about trying to get to places and we stopped to ask the way, I found it strange that people never seemed to know where it was that we wanted to go.  I couldn't believe that they wouldn't know the villages in their own areas.  Later I came to realize that seeing "gringos" in the vehicle they simply refuse to provide any information, such is the degree of mistrust of their powerful neighbour to the north.


Perhaps the most ubiquitous feature is the bugs.  There are millions of them both big and small.  Not so many flies, but butterflies and moths of incomparable beauty, praying mantises, enormous grasshoppers which, I suppose, must come into the biblical category of the "locusts" of plague fame, beetles, bees and wasps and a host of other things which I cannot identify as yet.  However, perhaps the greatest variety is found in ants.  There are ants of every size and specialization.  At night a veritable army of one kind ascends one particular type of tree outside the house, each ant chomps its way through a leaf and carries its booty off to the anthill.  They have made a real highway across the grass.  Another large, elongated ant called a "tucandera" can inject a venom so strong that if it bites you you can have a fever for about 24 hours.  Then there is a diminutive ant which crawls around in the grass during the day.  If an unsuspecting foot gets in their path they swarm all over it injecting minute quantities of venom which within 15 seconds makes the injected spot start to itch.  But in the realm of itches, so far there is none to beat the itch resulting from the  bite of a tiny red spider.  It gets on people's legs and up their trousers biting all the way.  The itch is unbearable but it is fatal to scratch.  Then you are really done for, because you can't stop and you can scratch the skin down to the very flesh.  A bit too late I learned that the remedy is to apply alcohol liberally the minute you feel that you have been bitten, so we now keep bottles of alcohol in strategic places for use in emergencies.  With the onset of winter the many bugs diminished for a while, (That gave my legs some time to recover!) but they are on the increase again.