CBBA - LA PAZ - RURRENABAQUE

“Alice came to a fork in the road. 'Which road do I take?' she asked.'Where do you want to go?' responded the Cheshire Cat.

At the airport in El Alto, just outside La Paz, having breakfast and checking emails. We left CBBA yesterday morning, to take a bus to La Paz. It was a great example of "hora Boliviana", Bolivian time conception, as we arrived at the bus station at 8:40 and managed to catch a bus leaving at 8. After a sweaty 8 hour ride without air-conditioner in the blazing sun, we reached La Paz. 

"Malmö, go fuck yourself" my travel partner said as we woke up this morning. Malmö with its maximum altitude of what, 4 metres?, has nothing on La Paz with its 3650 metres and stunning views. It is not flat anywhere, and the landscape somehow reminds me of the moon. When we arrived we met up with my friend, the crazy painter Gabriel, who took us to his little flat in Alto Obrajes where we stayed the night. And now, we already left again - we are heading to the jungle!! 

Sadly, I have a headache from the altitude here, but that just makes us even more eager to head down to the Yungas. I wanted to go there the first time I was in Bolivia, over two years ago, but it was rain season and thus flooded. So now, finally I will get there! I want to couchsurf, breathe fresh air and see animals...

Bring me cuteness!

Ten cuidado siempre...

“No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.” 

After a total of eleven months in Latin America and daily warnings of the thieves here, it finally happened to me. I got robbed!

I was walking down a kind of messy/crowded street with my backpack on, and as I was reaching the end of the street, I automatically reached back to check that the little pocket on it was closed. It wasn't, and my phone and wallet was gone from it. Fuck fuck fuck, I thought, pulled of  my backpack and started looking through it, but nothing else was gone.

Honestly, that was not so bad. I lost an old cellphone (thank you Ewa for giving it to me, I'm sorry I can't return it), about 50-100 SEK, a USB stick and my master card. A bit annoying to loose the card, but my mum <3 helped me to block it immediately so no damage done! Interestingly, I was carrying a macbook, our passports, my camera and 700 SEK as well, and left in the opened outer pocket was our dictaphone, a cable to it and my swiss knife.

So I guess sometimes you are lucky. I didn't get a gun pointed to my head, I didn't even notice it. It means as much to me as if the things had fallen out of my back, because I know it was my fault. I know it is way too easy to open that pocket and take whatever is in there, but I guess I had to learn to not do it by failing. I want to emphasize that Bolivia, or the other South American countries I have been to, are not more dangerous than other places. I am sure there are an equal amount of robberies, rapes and murders in NYC or Barcelona or Paris, but there is more poverty here. Poverty which drives people to the edge of human dignity, when you have nothing more to loose. People here are far, so far from "evil". They are just incredibly poor.

And why are they poor? Because of a world system that makes people in the western world rich on the expense of people in Latin America, Africa and Asia. That is why there are entire populations in poverty, and some of those, out of despair, end up pickpocketing. So who am I to blame them?

My life in songs

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” 

I think about how absorbed I am by my unconditional love for this continent and the life I have lived here.  Hence, if I were to describe myself with two songs, I would pick these:

The lyrics, the images. I feel them, I feel the Andes being my backbone and my veins as the rivers of the Amazon. A fairly good translation can be found HERE

And then Shakira, Gypsy. But the Spanish lyrics are of course better.
About being free, in constant motion and learning from experiences.

Don't try to tie me down, nor dominate me. I'm the one to decide how to commit mistakes (...)

Take me and let's go, life is a pleasure. It's normal to fear what you don't know 
- I want to see you fly.

How to write an essay in CBBA

“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole...and yet...and yet...” 

It's pretty hard to get efficient here. Things take so much more time than you expect them to! It would be easy to complain about this, but hey, this is what makes you realise how privileged we are back home. 

We were promised an office space with wifi, which we thought would be a great place to write. Well, it wasn't. Wifi does not work, people are running in and out, the street outside is heavily trafficked, and the table is way too high for the chairs. Then our room has only one electric outlet, and if we sit for too long on our bed, our bums starts to hurt because it is so hard. We do have one chair, but no table. This is not meant to whine, just describe our reality and the reasons why writing a thesis in Sweden is much more convenient. So what do we do? Well, we have found some places that have wifi. This is a Mexican restaurant: 

And this is Tess, as a great coffee place where we hang out with the other foreigners who like western style places:

Back at our place, I built a table in the courtyard to be able to sit outside to write and read. But I'm afraid it will fall over if I make it any higher, so when I write, I have to bend over until literally have my chest against my thighs. But then I also like having my face pretty close to the notebook when I write.

On the other hand... we have around 25 degrees all the time, which is the perfect temperature even for my picky body. We are surrounded by the most helpful people I could ever imagine (more on that another day). I get to speak my favourite language all the day. We learn new things all the time. Being here is such a great process of self-development  getting to know different sides of myself, getting a lot of new ideas and having to deal with myself. We are honestly not that distracted by our surroundings, since we don't have that many friends here, boyfriend is far, not much going on in this city anyway... We are living our essay and I honestly do believe we will finish it on time, even if many other students who get this scholarship do the writing after they get home. And we are so rich here that we can afford paying someone else to transcribe our interviews, which saves incredible amounts of time and work!

In total, doing a field study is inconvenient, but it rocks. Actually, my life in general is generally not that convenient, but it rocks.

Mornings in CBBA

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different."

If anyone ever wondered what Bolivian Folklore sounds like, this is it:

And this is VERY popular, especially at the primary school next to our home. So we are usually woken up to the sounds of the roosters out neighbour keep in our garden, then we are reminded of the traffic of the big road outside our patio, and then when school starts, this song is often played. NOISE.

But the mornings are nice.We wake up early, usually around seven, since the sun shines in. Sometimes I write my diary, or read the novel I'm currently captured by (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle). Then Tess wakes up, and we look out the windows to observe the mountains which look slightly different every day, depending on the light and clouds. We crawl out of our sleeping bags (Thank you dad and Ewa for that Christmas present!) and go down to have breakfast - a huge bowl of fruit from the market around the block.

And by the way, there is this song, who was once stolen from another Bolivian band (Los Kjarkas) and made world famous. This is the original....

Hard work hopefully pays off...

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” 

We are two hard working women indeed!

Last week were as I’ve already written ups and downs, but when we reached the weekend, we had managed to conduct seven interviews in five days. And remember, we cannot just walk up to any random dude on the street – these are all representatives of an organisation or institution, which requires a bit more formality.

Our plan has been to do the last interviews this week, adding up to 12-15 in total. As the transcription is a VERY time-consuming process (I listen, translate to English and then Tess types it) we are gonna try to hire some linguistic students at the local university to help us with that. It shouldn’t be too expensive considering how much time we would actually save. Next week we intend to finish the work in CBBA, to be able to leave next weekend.

We are getting a bit tired of this city… the climate is lovely indeed, but it is very polluted (one of the most contaminated cities in South America according to a professor we interviewed) and noisy. The mountain range is beautiful, but too far away! So, from here we are heading to Rurrenabaque, which is in the Amazonas region where Tess is gonna do a consultant job for U&We and then we are hoping to do some Eco-tourism in Parque Madidi! 

Plaza during demonstrations

View from our rooftop room

Downs and Ups

“How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.” 

I am obviously in the rollercoaster of the thesis – yesterday I felt like a complete idiot! Who do I think I am, coming from fancy Sweden and assuming that in two months I will have a better understanding than the locals about the extremely complex situation of the water management in Cochabamba?

Days like those I am incredibly happy to be with my partner in crime Tess – what would I do without her?! When I’m sobbing, she comforts me and rationally explains why we are not idiots, that our research purpose has a different approach which although it will not change the world, will result in a presentable thesis. Then she tells me I can have an ice cream, and everything feels manageable again.

We decided to broaden our perspective a little and include more stakeholders, and today we have conducted another two interviews. It is a little bit tricky since we cannot just go out in the street and ask anyone, but need representatives from selected stakeholders. But so far we have done five interviews, and we have possibly five more this week. All in all we might possibly end up with 15 interviews, which would be a huge amount of data. But then we are free to choose what will be interesting to us, which is way better than struggling with too little information.

On the personal level, we are still in awe of this country. We see so many beautiful things every day, and the people are incredibly nice and helpful wherever we go. This past Sunday was Día del Peatón, pedestrian day, which meant no motorised vehicles from 9am to 5pm. As I was doing a participatory observation from 8.30am to 10.30, I had to walk 45 min to get back home. What an experience! It felt like two weeks after the apocalypse, or post-oil-peak. So calm and quiet, and the air is less contaminated. I was walking in the biggest roads and saw entire families biking everywhere and people selling juice and ice cream in the middle of the streets. I was filled with joy and prosperity when I got back home. This happens three days per year here in CBBA, and it is surely an eye-opening experience…

Five desks later...

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

It seems like one day in CBBA is a compromised week. So much happens all the time! During the weekend we became culturally overwhelmed, with an excursion in the city that brought us to la cancha, which according to the rumour is the largest market in South America. From there we visited the last lagoon of Cochabamba – Cocha means lagoon and bamba means flat or flat land in quechua, the indigenous language spoken here. In the night we were taken to a chicha brewery called Chernobyl for a peña, a traditional folklore party. Chicha is a fermented corn drink, which not has that much alcohol but still managed to get my stomach out of order and kept me still for all of Sunday. The Bolivian experience.

This week our thesis has taken some big steps ahead – we have managed to book one interview and two meetings/interviews via email. We went to the local authority with a letter presenting us and asking for an interview, but ended up getting passed around from desk to desk and at table number five, we got an interview straight ahead which was complemented by another chat at the next desk. Feels really great to have started the data collection! The transcription however takes forever, since some subjects speak really fast and we have to translate from Spanish to Swedish or preferably English. So much hard work for a Bachelor thesis! But at the same time, after this job, everything else will feel super easy…

We also met up with Mathilda, another MFS grantee doing her study here in CBBA and we had a really nice time discussing our perspectives on Bolivia. She is writing about racism towards the indigenous population, such an important topic!

This continent is wonderland. There is so much magic here, that I somehow forget about when I’m in Europe. I forget the power that lies in truly believing, and I forget how to really listen to what is around – not only sounds, but also to wishes, desires, connections, heartbeats. Life is worth more here.