Snapshots

I've been in Bolivia three weeks now! Hard to fathom! I really like it here so far. The missionary community is very friendly and welcoming, helping all us new people get situated, telling us the best places to shop, the safe places to eat, and lots of other helpful advice. I'm so grateful for them because life would have been a lot rougher otherwise!

How can I describe the culture here? It doesn't help that in the first place I'm not that observant. I think I just accept most things as “that's the way it is here,” and it ceases to make an impression. Maybe if I tell you a few little snapshots, you'll get an idea.

One of the main forms of transportation here is a “truffi,” a 15 passenger van with aisle seats that fold up and down to let people get by. The truffis drive a predetermined route but don't have scheduled stops; if you want to get on, you stick your arm straight out and they'll stop if they have room. When you want to get off, you say something like “I want to get down” or “At the corner, please” and they stop to let you off. I said they were 15-passenger vans, but often they have more people than that. The most I counted while I was on was 21 people, which included some smaller children. It also isn't imperative that every sit so if there's no room, people stand by the sliding door. Did I mention they don't require seatbelts here?

It's a warm culture, and the people enjoy greeting and visiting each other a lot. A greeting is often accompanied by an exchanged kiss on the cheek, which was a little strange at first. The first week we went to church here, the church 'started' at 10am but the first 40 minutes were spent saying hi to people and visiting with them. The actual 'service' started at 10:40am. We joke a lot about “Bolivian time” because from a western viewpoint, things always start late; they just have a different interpretation of time than we do.

Virtually all the houses are surrounded by high walls with barbed wire or sharp glass on the tops to discourage people from climbing over. Pickpocketing is apparently not uncommon so we always have to be careful of where we keep our money.

Although we use English at school and among the missionaries, most of the Bolivians don't speak much English. I've been blessed with a room mate who can get by pretty well in Spanish, which has been a huge help shopping at the market or trying to read labels in the store or taking a taxi or truffi to wherever we're trying to get to.

Taxis are another fun part about being here. It's a step of faith every time you get in and tell the driver where you want to go. If we haven't been somewhere before, we take a taxi and tell the driver the cross streets we want and hope that he can find it. Sometimes they tell us they don't know where that is so we have to wait and call another taxi. Once our taxi driver took a back way to the school that we weren't familiar with, but it turned out he didn't know exactly where to turn (I guess that was supposed to be our job), and we ended up having to call Amalia, the Short-Term Coordinator, on a cellphone and have her talk to the taxi driver and tell him where to go.

The school compound is on a highway with three and a half lanes in each direction (the half lane is for the truffis and taxis to use when pulling over to pick people up). People regularly run across this and other roads wherever and whenever they want. Cars always have the right of way, so look lively!

The dominant religion is a cross between Catholicism and spiritism. Somewhere along the way, the virgin Mary got confused with Mother Earth and a whole lot of religious practices got mixed together. Last week there was a huge religious festival in the neighbouring town of Quilla Collo because some years ago some children saw the virgin Mary in a field. Now on that day, people walk from Cochabamba to Quilla Collo, starting any time after 8pm the night before and continuing most of the night. They bring with them something to have blessed by Mother Earth that they then bring home with them to hopefully bless their household all year.

I hope that gives you a little taste of what I've experienced so far.

TTFN