Navidad -- Buena Vista
I lost track of days and ended up arriving in Santa Cruz to meet Eric earlier than expected. Instead of spending a week in what the locals call the Financial/Industrial Capital of Bolivia, I decided to hitch a ride to the first small town I could find. This turned out to be Buena Vista, about two hours north of Santa Cruz.
The shared taxi I took on the way there squeezed ten people into the small sedan. To fit inside the cab, I hung my head and upper torso out the front seat window like a dog, tongue out in the wind. With all the Christmas traffic on the highway, we stopped at a gridlocked bridge. A truck carrying a bulldozer crashed, dropping the heavy machinery on its side, blocking both directions of traffic. There was enough space for individual people to pass across the bridge, so our driver let us out and returned half our fares so that we could catch another cab on the other side of the bridge. As we walked by, we could see all the cars condemning themselves to hours longer waits even after the bulldozer was fixed. Consistent with my theory that people down here never learn in elementary school how to wait in line, cars started to fill both lanes, trying to cut all the stopped cars. In turn, each side of the bridge was filled with about two kilometers of cars facing the same directions in both lanes. I have no idea how the cars later escaped.
Buena Vista is a small town. On Christmas Eve the only activity to do is attend the Church's rendition of Jesus's birth. After the nativity play by the local students, the priest rose to the stage to thank everyone for attending. He made a point to thank "Gregorio who came all the way from the US to watch this play." It was my first night in Buena Vista and already strangers knew me by name.
At midnight, as tradition goes, the entire town filtered out to the plaza to watch the children light fire crackers and celebrate JC's birth. Unfortunately, the big news of the night was a drunk driver railed into a parked car. At first, I though this guy purposefully rammed into an enemy's vehicle, after the first contact, the driver continued to accelerate. But it turned out the driver was just drunk. Since police are ineffective and are too easily bribed, fists seemed to be the way disputes are settled in small town Bolivia. The festive Navidad ended in tears and screaming.
On Christmas day, the owner of the hostel (or collection of spare rooms with extra beds) invited me to her family's dinner. And just like large celebratory dinners at home in Newton, the two sons brought out guitars and spent the night sharing Latin ballads. They kept playing Hotel California, expecting me to know every word to sing along. One of the younger kids, an eight year old named Nicolas, came up with what I thought was the cleverest nickname for me yet, Gringorio.
When the family headed back to Santa Cruz, they invited me along in their SUV. Flat screen DVD players were attached to the front sun visors. This was when I finally realized that Bolivia's elite are extremely wealthy, while the poor are very poor. The night before, two girls I had befriend had told me a story of how their mother flipped out when their maid called in sick. No one in the family knew how to cook and they were incapable of knowing what to do. The maid never took a sick day again.
A little disgusted, I continued pressing the issue. Is there a lot of inequality and racism directed towards with the indigenous population? Racism doesn't exist, I was told, and the indigenous are just jealous of the country's elite. Indigenous President Evo Morales, she continued, just wanted to steal land that the indigenous population didn't own. Hearing this, I was gravely taken back. These two girls appeared to be such caring people before this conversation. But, from what I found, this sadly appeared to be the common perception from Bolivia's elite.
The shared taxi I took on the way there squeezed ten people into the small sedan. To fit inside the cab, I hung my head and upper torso out the front seat window like a dog, tongue out in the wind. With all the Christmas traffic on the highway, we stopped at a gridlocked bridge. A truck carrying a bulldozer crashed, dropping the heavy machinery on its side, blocking both directions of traffic. There was enough space for individual people to pass across the bridge, so our driver let us out and returned half our fares so that we could catch another cab on the other side of the bridge. As we walked by, we could see all the cars condemning themselves to hours longer waits even after the bulldozer was fixed. Consistent with my theory that people down here never learn in elementary school how to wait in line, cars started to fill both lanes, trying to cut all the stopped cars. In turn, each side of the bridge was filled with about two kilometers of cars facing the same directions in both lanes. I have no idea how the cars later escaped.Buena Vista is a small town. On Christmas Eve the only activity to do is attend the Church's rendition of Jesus's birth. After the nativity play by the local students, the priest rose to the stage to thank everyone for attending. He made a point to thank "Gregorio who came all the way from the US to watch this play." It was my first night in Buena Vista and already strangers knew me by name.
At midnight, as tradition goes, the entire town filtered out to the plaza to watch the children light fire crackers and celebrate JC's birth. Unfortunately, the big news of the night was a drunk driver railed into a parked car. At first, I though this guy purposefully rammed into an enemy's vehicle, after the first contact, the driver continued to accelerate. But it turned out the driver was just drunk. Since police are ineffective and are too easily bribed, fists seemed to be the way disputes are settled in small town Bolivia. The festive Navidad ended in tears and screaming.
On Christmas day, the owner of the hostel (or collection of spare rooms with extra beds) invited me to her family's dinner. And just like large celebratory dinners at home in Newton, the two sons brought out guitars and spent the night sharing Latin ballads. They kept playing Hotel California, expecting me to know every word to sing along. One of the younger kids, an eight year old named Nicolas, came up with what I thought was the cleverest nickname for me yet, Gringorio.
When the family headed back to Santa Cruz, they invited me along in their SUV. Flat screen DVD players were attached to the front sun visors. This was when I finally realized that Bolivia's elite are extremely wealthy, while the poor are very poor. The night before, two girls I had befriend had told me a story of how their mother flipped out when their maid called in sick. No one in the family knew how to cook and they were incapable of knowing what to do. The maid never took a sick day again.
A little disgusted, I continued pressing the issue. Is there a lot of inequality and racism directed towards with the indigenous population? Racism doesn't exist, I was told, and the indigenous are just jealous of the country's elite. Indigenous President Evo Morales, she continued, just wanted to steal land that the indigenous population didn't own. Hearing this, I was gravely taken back. These two girls appeared to be such caring people before this conversation. But, from what I found, this sadly appeared to be the common perception from Bolivia's elite.
0 comments:
Post a Comment