Ice Cream

I don’t know how I feel about ice cream in Bolivia. As I face the window of yet another heladeria, I see the tubs of perfectly lumped ice cream huddled together under harsh lighting. The ice cream always looks more like an aggregate of bubblegum- the mounds of flavors roll in shiny hills as if a thin layer of wax rests on top. I guess it’s just too perfect. But I shrug and order two scoops anyways as my chocolate addiction bubbles to a saliva-induced fervor.

The ice cream is a welcome retreat from the sticky heat of Santa Cruz. My face sweats in a permanent shade of red, and crazy, humidified curls fly in every direction (kind of like a tomato ran into a copper-shaded dust bunny). I basically make-out with my cone as I find my way to the nearest bench, hoping to only get more intimate with my dulce de leche. As I reluctantly come up for air, I realize my friends have not followed me to the bench and now sit across the plaza. I should really feel socially excluded, but I am just happy that I no longer have to maintain a façade of being ‘clean’ and ‘wiping my face’.

Just as my cone and I start to get down and dirty, an older man approaches me and asks if he can share the bench. This is one of my favorite things about Bolivia. In the US, everyone works so hard to not share space. We love to claim things in full- as if our asses would be personally offended that someone wanted to be close to them. In Bolivia, you are weird and strange and sad and definitely stare-worthy if you are sitting alone. It’s a whole new kind of personal space.

I ask the man if he lives in Santa Cruz. He leans forward cupping his ear, then instead of waiting for me to repeat my question laughingly ganders: “Guess how old I am!”. I venture 80, he proudly proclaims “90!”, and then he is painting his life story in the space between us.

~

Alberto Gutierrez was young when he began to work in an office of the Bolivian embassy. One week, his boss- the head of the office- received an invitation to attend a conference at the United Nations in New York City. Alberto was in charge of the office for the week. Within that week, Bolivia experienced an overthrow of its government by a military dictator. Overnight, Alberto went from having a secure job in the embassy to being a representative of the fallen state. He was given two choices: flee to Germany in exile or await an inevitable assassination.

Alberto shares this with a slight grin and his large caterpillar eyebrows furrow over thick frames. He continues, revealing that he eventually followed neither of those options. Instead, he went to work in Quito, Ecuador- somehow keeping a job with the embassy. There, he met his wife and together they moved first to Buenos Aires and later to Paris so that she could study. Barely pausing, Alberto takes a big breath here and shouts, “C'est la vie!”.

I just look at him blankly, not quite sure if he is producing some new word in Spanish or if I was actually hearing French. He repeats “c'est la vie!” six more times, so by now I am very concerned that I am missing something incredibly important. I venture out a timid attempt at clarification, ¿Frances?.

He breaks into the largest smile and with all the light and infuried passion of a crazed Tinker Bell tells me that of course it is French. He tells me that c'est la vie means that this is life and that life is crazy and interesting and that we must take advantage of it all. He says that he has learned this, and that I must know the moment of his life that he will never forget:

Alberto was sitting in a plaza in Paris, waiting for his wife to come out of class. The door to the school opened and a whole stream of people flooded the staircase. One woman trips and falls, sprawling into the hurried crowd of people. The man next to her mockingly exclaims, “c'est la vie!”, or “That’s life!”. Just then, the woman rises to her feet. She throws her arms in the air to shout,

“No, I am life!”.

And there’s the moment Alberto will never forget. He shudders in small increments of nostalgic laughter and then announces we are getting ice cream.

~

I spend a few hours with Alberto and our little moment, our kind of knick-knack corner of the universe, ends with him tipping his hat before turning to walk back to the plaza. Earlier this week, I also met a French couple named Claire and Yen. I had been aimlessly walking with my friend along a road in Samaipata (a small hippie haven outside of Santa Cruz) when we found the couple backpacking to town. They had been living in Paris when they woke up to realize that they were both profoundly unhappy with their lives. Overworked, tired, confused, pressured to settle down. And so, they both quit their jobs to backpack through South America for six months- no concrete plan ahead of them.

While Claire shared this with me, I couldn’t help but think of Alberto claiming that life is interesting. I looked up to see huddled mountain tops black against the falling sun, and he sure as hell seemed to be right. Life was interesting.

Really fucking interesting.

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.

A Little Unwrinkled

My brain feels like plastic wrap. It is stretched, much too tightly wound over a large glass pan. There’s probably pie in the pan. Let’s say chocolate, just for gigs. The plastic wrap barely clings to the edges and trembles stressfully as the tension threatens to send it into a warm semi-sweet collision.

As I struggle to catch every word of Chichi’s Spanish, my brain stretches like plastic wrap. There is a dizzying combination of clausulas hipotéticas, and everything swims in various combinations of the past, present, possible future and future. But really the point is this: Spanish is hard. I glance around the classroom, and my three classmates sit looking both awestruck and dumbstruck.

However, I absolutely adore my Spanish teachers. Have you ever encountered people who make you feel as if they are dripping caramel into every inner crevice of your soul- leaving you a little buzzed with stickiness but also sweet like cinnamon? Beba is famous for her besas, as she enters every room with a kiss and wink. My favorite moment with Beba happened a few weeks ago. I was having one of those afternoons in which I was just totally delirious. All of my motor senses (the few I can normally muster) were completely done for and a permanent giggle waited at the base of my throat. I know you know this feeling. Think back to the horror of having math after lunch hour. Yeah, that kind of delirious. Anyways, Beba was searching for her reading glasses in her bag. She pulls out a pair with a victorious gruff and turns to walk toward the board, sliding on the lenses as she shifts. She looks over at me, and my sudden burst of laughter sends pieces of me shimmering like rebounding elastic throughout the room. I am snickering and giggling and snorting and huhaffing and hohohoing and everything in between.

Beba had put her sunglasses on instead of her reading glasses. SUNGLASSES!

Okay so I know this is not funny. And you might just stop reading here. But, I just want to let you know that I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. I mean, I was crying and every teardrop was a waterfall (sorry not sorry Coldplay). Beba was shaking too, delaying class in the noble pursuit of silliness. Sunglasses!!! So classic. And for that little moment, my favorite moment, I may not have been speaking Spanish but I sure as hell was speaking joy.

Then there’s Chichi. Chichi always seems to be bursting with something. Our Spanish class is usually hardcore riding the struggle bus. I mean, most of the time it takes us a solid 5 minutes to spit out such gems as, “Dogs make me happy.” At least we are being painful together. But every struggle, every mishappened verb and every fumbling attempt at el pretérito is met with Chichi’s exuberance. She just bursts, one hand clenched to her heart and a fist in the air. She is proud of our little “Dogs make me happy”, and you know, it’s great to have someone on your team. I’m telling you, she’s my caramel.

Chichi eventually wraps up her overwhelming exploration of clausulas hipotéticas and opens up a poem for us to read out loud. Of course, everyone but Abby has forgotten their text books, so we cuddle close around her copy. The poem is about moments. It is about past pain. It is about dreams to live life a little recklessly.

I know you all have been bombarded with the YOLO discourse. So yeah, you go grab life by the horns. I encourage you to go live. Shout out a big L-I-V-E! But for me, the poem wasn’t really about this kind of life lesson.

Chichi’s reading glasses have large, thick lenses that transform her almond-colored eyes into a comical set of googly eyes. As we read, her googly eyes begin to well with tears and her glasses are being all filled up. She’s bursting, a little softer and a little stiller this time. I just want to smile back at her. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how we heal ourselves. I mean, there is so much diversity in how we meet pain:

I fell apart.

I was shattered.

It hit me.

I held it all in and then I exploded.

It just hurt.

But how do we put ourselves back together again? Maybe we should say fuck it to the YOLO mentality here and stop our pursuit of the ever-changing ‘what happens next’. Let’s sit still instead. I am sitting and I am reading some poem in Spanish in Bolivia and I am huddled close with a body of arms around me. I sit still. I sit still with all my little wrinkles and let a pair of brown googly eyes drip some more caramel into me, smoothing them out just a touch. I sit still and just as I am about to really break into a full-fledged kumbaya, Chichi knocks over her glass of water, loudly clamoring, “Shit!”.

She ends the moment with: “I always curse in English.”