Number 2

The bus takes a rigid turn, and I wake up feeling playfully disheveled. When my eyes finally begin to focus, I catch my first glimpse of Lake Titicaca through the window on my left side. As I lean forward to better see the lake, various shades of blue ricochet off ragged yellow mountaintops, forming dripping cascades of watercolor that transcend a logical horizon. The bus eases down a winding rock path, and each turn cuts the view of the lake into a reflective shard of the lovely mosaic. My whole body breaks into a big grin.

 ~

“Aly!”, our program director Heidi calls. I shrug my backpack over my shoulder and walk across the field to meet my new host brother. I lean in to kiss his cheek as a greeting and realize that he doesn’t speak Spanish, only his native Aymara. And so, we must rely on crinkled laugh lines to tell our stories. My new brother ties the bag of food on his back in a colorful blanket, easily dispersing 50 pounds of weight on his shoulders. We start up the hill, and my roommates and the other members of my host family follow us into the break of the trees. Earlier that week, I had cheerfully volunteered myself to live with a family on top of the hill. I had been picturing the type of hill that often appears in quaint children’s illustrations, a round green lump behind stick figures and reddened one-room schoolhouses. But as I begin to hike up the path, I soon realize that my host brother is no Jack and I am no Jill and that I am instead facing a full-fledged mountain. The path steepens and all my pieces of chocolate cake, smuggled cheese empanadas and double-portioned lunches start to bite me in the ass. I cough out a half-hacked desperation for air- and I swear that an empanada is going to pop out right there with my breath. The hike to the house takes almost an hour, but as we rise, the view begins to level, shifting from a covered, forested expanse to a wide picture of uninterrupted blue.

The house sits isolated on a wide expanse of land- a huddled compilation of adobe. A few animals roam letting out random spurts of oinks and neighs. We drop our stuff off in one of the rooms and the bright aqua of the walls rebels against the great splash of tan outside. The whole family piles into the kitchen, and while it is dark and hosts only a small stone stove and a few scattered benches, the warmth invokes a deep perception of beauty. Our host mother Valentina boils water and serves us cups of sugar with a light undertone of coffee. And right there- right there in all the space between eyes gushing from the smoke, rising steam from coveted mugs and hands wrapped around cups of sugar water- we begin to feel warm.

~

We wake up to a bright sun and a crisp morning. I trek to the bathroom, nodding my hellos to the chickens and the cows. The bathroom is an eco-friendly dry toilet; instead of flushing water, you scoop dirt onto the waste to eradicate any smell. The toilet is split in two: the front half is a small porcelain basin with a drain and the back half is an empty passageway to the ground below. So yeah, you pee in one half and anything else comes out and down the back. I lift the lid to the toilet and right there in the front half lays a giant piece of (okay, I’m just going to whip out the necessary vocab here) shit. Now, I know traveling Americans may be a lot of things: loud, boisterous, direct. But did we really have to be the people who shit in the wrong side of the toilet?

Yes, it could have been one of the family members’, but as I stood there looking down at that misplaced log, I resolve that I won’t let us become the Americans who shit in the wrong hole. It was my duty (lol) to fix this. (Side note- have you ever been completely flabbergasted by the turns your life takes? Like, how did my uprising in Broomfield, Colorado somehow lead me to stare at a stranger’s shit on a hill in Bolivia? I digress.)

And so, I reach in, grab some stranger’s poop and throw it into the other half of the toilet.

~

I grasp my shovel and face a room filled with cow and sheep feces. My family is making fertilizer to help grow potatoes. So, we have been tasked with beating the poop into fine piles. We were going to shovel. We were going to swing the shovels hard against pachamama. We were going to beat the shit out of it (Okay I know, but the puns are so easy. Beating the shit out of shit!? I can’t). The process really is lovely. Think about it. These badass women make all of their own natural fertilizer, avoiding chemicals and the dangers of mass mono-cropping. Honestly, good food starts with poop.

I step into the room and my foot squishes down into the cow and sheep caca. I bend over to start smashing the hard clumps into fine soil. The four of us rotate, each whacking our shovels for only 15 minutes before our arms slump with fatigue. Meanwhile, our host mom and sister, Valentina and Christine, work straight through without a break. This continues for four hours, and my slowly sizzling nose and lower back grow redder with every inhale of flailing poop flakes. My jeans have become a giant wiping mat; my toenails curl over squished brown piles. We have finally formed a mini-mountain of poop. Christine motions that we are going to shovel some of the broken feces onto a tarp and then lift the tarp over the wall to throw the soon-to-be-fertilizer outside of the room. Christine shovels a pile of poop onto the tarp, and I reach down to grab one side. Christine’s 2-year-old daughter Criciella sits along the wall, her round cheeks framed by a yellow sweater and a soft pink cap. Her eyes are big and brightened by fluttered lashes. Christine and I pick up the tarp. My upper body strength is definitely non-existent, so I am already shuddering under the weight. Just as I start to lift the tarp over the wall, the corner of my side snaps and the whole pile of dung flies off the tarp and lands all over Criciella.

I just. Um, I just. Yes, Aly. You literally just threw poop all over a 2 year-old-child. Criciella looks up at me, and she is all sorts of brown. Fifty shades of shit…

And I really have nothing to say for myself here.

~

A while back I listened to a great presentation about a man who has traveled the world with his Bolivian folk band. His band had performed at festivals all over Europe, South America and the United States- revitalizing Bolivian culture one trip at a time. When he described his travels, he merely shrugged and with the warm ease of wisdom, said: “We’ve seen the world. That’s it.”

This week I lived on the shores of Lake Titicaca. And the name ‘Lake Titicaca’ is a buzzword. It’s one of those great travel snippets that I can throw out to get the oos and aws as I try to prove myself as someone noteworthy. Someone who is not just Aly, but instead the girl who has traveled to THE Lake Titicaca. But the story is so much simpler than that. I shoveled poop. That’s it.

The Bolivian music band has seen the world. That’s it. And I guess the scary, crazy, beautiful thing is that it’s possible an incredible life may arrive on your doorstep in simple packaging- plain enough that you could miss it.