90 days in Bolivia with Quechua woes

Wed, 6 Jun 2001 17:48

From La Paz, Bolivia

You probably are wondering, "Where in the world is Amos?" Actually you more likely to be thinking of the fastest way to delete this email. Yet again I am jamming your mailbox with my bombastic bullshit.

Today, I am still in La Paz, Bolivia. But wait, I was in La Paz two months ago. What am I still doing here? It is a very good question. I never expected to spend 90 days in Bolivia, but somehow I have managed to do it. Bolivia has so much to see and it is so cheap, that I became mired here. On Tuesday my 90 day tourist card will expire, so I will be forced to continue onto Peru.

I don´t plan to see much of Peru or Ecuador. I don´t have the time or money to fiddle around in those countries. Likewise, Colombia will have to be a quick flyby. Colombia is currently too dangerous for citizens of the US to even think of traveling through by bus. I will fly into Cali from Tulcan, Ecuador, and then on to Tegucigalpa, Honduras via the San Andres Islands.

Hopefully, I will "hit" The States by mid-August. It really will be a hard impact when I cross the border to my own country. I am prepared to get searched and questioned thoroughly by immigration, since I will be crossing the US border on foot bearing a lumpy backpack. I probably won´t smell too good; my clothes will have mores stains than color. Last time, I crossed in that fashion, they put me through a ringer of questions. They did electronic searches on my passport and driver´s license, in addition to thoroughly searching me for drugs. On this trip I have passed through 16 countries and I have never been treated as badly as my own country treated me the last time I crossed the US border.

The question remains, "What have I been doing here in Bolivia for 3 months?" Allow me to recount the most salient details of the last month and a half.

I have sort of made La Paz my base of operations. I keep returning to it after venturing into the hinterlands. La Paz stinks of human urine and trash, but it has character and energy. It is in a basin, just below the Bolivian Altiplano. In the distance, Mount Illamani towers over the city at an altitude of about 6400 meters.

The city is hardly pleasant or safe. Three times I have had condiments squirted on me. It is a tourist trap, but with no beaches included. While you are trying to clean yourself off, a "nice" gentleman in a suit approaches with a hankerchief and "kindly" offers to help wipe off the stains. While he is "helping" you, he also "kindly" relieves you of your wallet.

I have never fallen for the bait, but I have had other close brushes with thieves in Bolivia. In Sucre, 2 women worked in concert to distract me, while another nicely dressed gentleman eased 150 dollars and my credit card out of my front pocket. Fortunately, I turned my head just in time to see my money dissappearing under his jacket. I grabbed ahold of the gentleman and screamed for the police. The strange part was that the pickpocket acted like nothing had happened. He even had the audacity to ask me, "Why are you yelling, nothing happened." In the police station, he acted as if it was an everyday occurrence. I figure that he paid a twenty dollar bribe and was let go. In Puerto Suarez, a narco-trafficer told me he was not afraid of the police. Twenty bucks got him out of any sticky situations with the authorities. Later when I recounted to Bolivians what happened to me in Sucre, they asked me if the police had robbed me afterwards. Bolivians have so little trust in their law-keepers.

In this trip, I have been robbed three times. In Asuncion, Paraguay, somebody decided that my clothes hanging to dry needed a new owner. I hope my pants fit him. In Argentina, some poor soul couldn´t find shelter for the night, so he took refuge in my tent. Before leaving, he decided that I had too many things to carry around in my backpack. I wish he would have left my watch. I missed the next bus because I didn´t know what time it was. My worst incident was in Arequipa, Peru. The police outside the market decided I was a suspicious character who should be detained. While interrogating me, they lifted 100 soles (30 dollars) out of my backpack.

All in all, I have been lucky. Six times I successfully evaded robberies. In 11 months, nothing important has been stolen. In fact I try to think of it as part of the traveling adventure. I now have lots of neat stories to recount.

Besides the interesting brushes with flying condiments, La Paz also offers fun with the police and protesters. In the last half of April, thousands of campesinos marched on foot into La Paz from cities all over Bolivia. The majority marched for 2 and a half weeks from Cochabamba, but I saw campesinos from as far away as Tarija. They marched in defense of indigenous community rights and to protest the government´s destruction of coca fields.

Of course, I had to go and see them enter the city. Very few bore more than the clothes on their backs. They had marched without food, water, or money for over 2 weeks. They had depended upon people along the way to give them food and shelter. Often they went hungry and slept in the cold Altiplano without blankets. When I saw them at the end of their journey, they looked cold, hungry, exhausted, and still very determined. Stoicly chewing coca, they waved rainbow flags which simbolized their indigenous roots. The majority were poor cocaleros who depended on the coca fields for their livelihood. There were also campesino unions from other areas who were protesting the government´s indifference to their plight.

Of course, the Bolivian government didn´t let the marchers enter La Paz. They rounded them up and bused them back to Cochabamba. Two and a half weeks of marching went to no effect. Instead the government organized a counterprotest in downtown La Paz. They paid thousands of Pacenos to stand in the Plaza de San Francisco and to wave white banners for peace and flags of Bolivia and La Paz. The demonstration was supposed to prove that Pacenos supported the government and wanted peace.

The government, however, failed to carry out the show. A few people started to shout protests against the farce. The police moved in and sprayed everyone with tear gas. Not only the protesters, but also the paid banner wavers, were hit by the stinging gas. I was watching the whole spectacle on the edge of the plaza. I had never experienced tear gas before. While the rest of the crowd ran for cover, I stood rooted watching the police shoot gas cartidges. The feel of the gas in my eyes and clogging my lungs was one of the worst sensations I have ever encountered. I felt as if I was sufficating and my eyes were on fire. I was lucky I was far away from the center of the plaza. One person died after being hit in the head by a gas cartidge.

I was accompanied by Dora, my friend who teaches kindergarten in El Alto. She pulled me away from the crowd and told me to breath through my shirt. She looked for cigarrettes and a lighter to burn away the gas. Dora is an old veteran of encounters with the police. She was a union representative for school teachers. Last year Bolivia shut down for 2 months in a general strike. All the roads were blockaded, and people in the cities starved. Dora marched every day in the streets of La Paz for her union. The government finally capitulated, but has never fulfilled its promises. For this reason, many of the major unions are threatening to start another general strike this year.

I have made side trips to Sorata, Copacabana, and the Chapare, but I keep returning to La Paz. All roads in this part of Bolivia lead back to the city. However, I had a special reason to keep returning. Dora has proven to be a very interesting friend and guide to the city. We hung out, drank tea, and compared life stories. Finally last week we started holding hands. The last 7 days have been very exhilerating for me. It has been very interesting trying to express emotions in Spanish, which is a much more romantic language than English. Unfortunately, Dora and I have to part ways next Tuesday when I leave Bolivia. I will miss her terribly.

Aside from dating Dora, I have been studying Quechua for the last month and a half. It as proven to be a bigger challenge than I had imagined. There are 13 million Quechua speakers in the world, but very few learned it from a textbook. Few Bolivians know how to write the language, and fewer seem to understand the grammer. There are almost no decent books available to teach yourself Quechua. After a thorough search through Bolivian bookstores, I found one horrid grammerbook and started studying. When I show my book to most Bolivians, they tell me it is the first time they have ever seen Quechua written. When I ask how you pronounce a letter in Quechua or where the accent falls in a word, they are at a total loss.

Quechua is full of glottal stops and aspirations which do not exist in European languages. Furthermore, its grammer is totally alien. Verbs can be used as nouns. There are 7 different ways to make a noun possessive. Quechua words are simply impossible to memorize. I can spend 10 minutes repeating out loud a Quechua word, and forget how to pronounce it 5 minutes later. Quechua shares nothing in common with the Romance languages which I have studied previously. In Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin, all words have common roots which make sense to my English ears. Unfortunately, Quechua did not decend from the common Indo-European language.

To my ears Quechua sounds like an endless stream of indecipherable agglutinations. Most Quechua words are only 2 or 3 sylables, but they inevitably add a couple infixes and suffixes to the end to confuse you. For example if you want to say "your teachers," you say in Quechua "yachacheqninkicheqkuna." The word for teacher is "yachacheq." Then you add "ni" because the word ended in a consenant. Next, tack on "nkicheq" to say signify a possesive "your." Finally, peg "kuna" to the end to make it plural. If you understood all that, you are doing better than me. My tongue often ends in a twisted knot when I try to say the simplest frases. I think there is a reason why Quechua is a dying language. It is too difficult to say anything in the blasted language. I will bid you farewell for now. Look for my next update from Peru. I promise a full account of the Inca Trail and the Inti Raymi celebration in Cuzco.

Cheers and dare to look for the nearest train, plane, or passenger pigeon,

Amos.