Bolivia

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Bishop's Blessing

 

 

Queridos amigos,

In some ways it´s hard to believe that a week from now, Dan and I will be back in Albany, listening to American music, sipping on Dunkin Donuts iced coffee and swapping winter for summer. It seems like we just arrived in Cochabamba. But in other ways, these six weeks have seemed like six years. We have a just the tiniest glimpse of what the life of a missionary is like and, boy-oh-boy do we ever respect those brave and generous people who answer that call.

Part of what is making our homecoming so joy filled is the prospect of restoring health to our bodies. Dan spent a night last week in agony with what appeared to be food poisoning. The next day, I followed suit. After a trip to the laboratory (involving a process beyond description in an e-mail to civilized people) I found out that I had not only a parasite, but amoebas and a bacterial infection. (My stomach was basically a petrie dish. Here in Bolivia they call it "estomago zoologico.") Dan has yet to be tested, but he´s pretty much in the same boat. We´re just grateful that we haven´t ended up in the hospital, the way four of our classmates have. Our digestive misfortunes ALMOST stopped us from flying to La Paz on Friday to embark on a two-day excursion to Lake Titicaca, the largest high-altitude lake in the world, but we couldn´t pass up an unrepeatable chance to experience such an incredible place with the classmates we´ve grown to love. Mother nature protested our decision by giving us temperatures in the 20s complete with hail, sleet, snow and seas so rough we almost had to abort the three-hour boat ride to Isla del Sol with it´s ancient Incan ruins. (If you want to know what´s it´s like to put a queasy parasite-ridden stomach to the ultimate test, Dan or I can paint you a picture.) Saturday´s adventure climbing the two mountains on Isla del Sol was worth the effort, though. And the chance to loll around Copacabana on Sunday, celebrate Mass at the famous basilica, watch the weekly car blessings and eat trucha Del lago (Lake Titicaca trout) and fondue was remarkably restorative.

The most unforgettable experience of my six weeks here was being able to meet the child I sponsor through the CFCA program (Christian Foundation for Children and Aging). Fileberto, a 13-year-old from the rural "altiplano" countryside, came to Cochabamba to visit with me for four hours one Sunday. I learned from talking to Fileberto and his social worker that he is the second of six kids and lives in an adobe house with metal scraps for a roof. His family has no drinkable water and no electricity. Their only possession is a homemade lantern they rigged with a rusted gas can and a rag that provides them with an incredibly dangerous source of light at night. He walks five hours one-way to school every Monday, lives there with other rural poor kids until Friday, and walks back home to spend weekends with his family. Unbelievably, my teeny $1 per day donation pays for his tuition and room and board at that school. Our day together marked the first time he´s been to a city, the first time he´d been in a restaurant, the first toilet he´d ever seen and the first time he´d ever even heard of a movie. (I told him it´s a story with pictures that are shown on a wall.) We spent time together telling riddles, which is how he and his siblings entertain each other at night in the country. He told me that he hopes to be a mechanic one day. At the end of our visit he gave me a hand knitted chulo (Andean winter hat), a scarf (that is long enough to be a stole and I hope to use as a stole one day) and a bag of wheat that a teacher of mine said was enough food to sustain a family of 8 like Fileberto´s for three days. At the end of our visit I could barely make it into the taxi without balling.

If you´re interested in sponsoring a child, I couldn´t overstate my recommendation for this organization. http://www.cfcausa.org/

Some friends have requested updates on the dog situation in my neighborhood. It´s been going much better, thanks for your concern. They seem to have grown more accustomed to my presence. Until Friday, that is, when I walked down my street rolling my bright red carry-on luggage for my trip to Lago Titicaca behind me. I don´t know if it was the color of my luggage or what, but they were on me like bulls in Pamplona. I picked up rocks (usually that scatters them) but that only made them madder. I finally threw a rock at one creeping toward me with bared teeth and he almost smiled like a sinister cartoon dog. Thankfully, a woman came out of her yard, which distracted them enough for me to back my luggage down the street and haul it up a dirt road and around another block to get it to the language institute. As they say here, "¡Que pena!"

On Sunday, Dan and I will be back in Boston and our end-of-summer assignments in Schenectady and Stuyvesant Falls will begin. We hope to be able to see you soon and catch up on the summer experiences we´ve missed.

Thanks be to God for this experience and to all of you for your love, prayers and support.

Con amor y la paz,
Scott (& Dan)

 

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¡Hola everyone!

Sent July 11, 2010

 

A lot has happened since Scott and I wrote to you last. During our second two weeks we have had class first thing in the morning, at 8:00, and we finish before noon, so that we can have almuerzo (lunch, the main meal of the day) with our families. We have heard various presentations as part of our weekly lecture series: one on the history of Bolivia, one on a spirituality of mission work, and one on the drug trade and American policy towards cocoa-producing South American countries (Bolivia, Columbia, Argentina, Chile). Also, Fr. Mark Scalese, one of the Jesuit priests studying here for six weeks, is a filmmaker and teacher of film and media at Fairfield University in Conn. He presented a couple of his short films (a fiction & a documentary) and led a brief discussion.

 

In class, we are about to begin our last two-week set of classes. The focus has been slowly shifting away from grammar and vocabulary towards conversation. Though we still have our one-on-one classes three periods each day, these last two weeks of classes include one hour of conversation in a group of two students and a teacher. This, we hope, will help us work on comprehension and listening skills as well as help our response time. As far as the grammar goes, I think I´m sounding less like a 1st grader (though the 5-year olds at the 'orfanato' at which we volunteered still have a better command of the language than we) now that I finally understand indirect object pronouns, subjunctive, gerunds, and the personal "a" in Spanish. I think the trick with understanding Spanish- (or any romance language-) grammar is to get used to thinking in a different order: e.g. "For him it I bought." or " I am going to the market for to acquire mate de cocoa."

 

The most exciting thing that we have done in the past couple of weeks is to take a three-day tour of the Missiones Jesuitas in Chiquitanía, near Santa Cruz. Almost all of the students went on this trip, including all of the Jesuit novices and priests, the Dominicans, the Dioceseans, the Campus Ministers, and the College Students. It was a wonderful educational and spiritual journey. The area has a fascinating history (the successes of the Jesuits and the indigenous peoples), exceptional architecture (baroque-chiquitano) and beautiful music (also heavily influenced by the Baroque style, but taken in a different direction by the Chiquitanos, Moxas, and other indigenous peoples). Wood carvings (tallados de madera) are probably the most popular form of art out here. Not only did they carve the angels, saints, and tabernacles that adorn the church, but also musical instruments. We even had a chance to see some of the original hand-carved harps, violins, and organ pipes which dated back to the 1700s.

 

The other most exciting thing that we have done is to hike to the peak of Mt. Tunari, which overlooks the 8,445 foot-high city of Cochabamba at 17,060 feet. It was exhilarating, exhusting, and breathtaking (in more than one way). The vistas of the Andes and of the city were worth the cost of the guide (guía), the bus, and the inability to take more than 30 steps at a time. Though I must admit, even with my long legs, it was hard keeping up with the Bolivian and Korean nuns who were with us.

 

We hope that everyone is doing very well at home despite the heat and that you are all excited that Spain won the World Cup today. You are all in our prayers.

 

Peace,
-Dan

 

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Seminarian Scott VanDerveer shares his first days in Bolivia!

 

Greetings from Cochabamba! After a week and three days I can officially say that (Seminarian) Dan (Quinn) and I are thriving todayin our new South American home. We´ve dodged illness, altitude problems and a snafu with our passport photos that almost ended our trip before it started. (More on that later.)

The academic program here is incredible! We had no idea when we arrived that the quality of instruction would be so high. Every student here is taught one-on-one by four different professors a day. We students are each assigned a small classroom and the professors come to us for hour-long class sessions. All the instruction is in Spanish (many of the professors don´t speak English and those that do don´t let on that they do). We are given lots of homework every night but that makes up only a fraction of the time we spend with our noses in Ingles-Español dictionaries, in order to just make it through the next conversation.

They estimate that six weeks here is the equivalent of two years of university-level Spanish, which I would believe is true. Yet a student in our group calculated the per-hour cost of the program and it came in under $10! Padre Raymundo, the director here told me that the tuition is low because Maryknoll subsidizes about 1/3 of the cost for each student. They do it because it´s part of their mission... they only admit students who will use their Spanish for ministry. Businesspersons and tourists looking to learn Spanish for fun are not invited. This is part of why the students here are so inspiring. Together we celebrate Mass, go to lectures on South American issues, go on hikes up 17,000 ft. mountains, and even take dance classes (salsa, meringue, cumbia, folk)... and all of it (except the current event lectures) is in Spanish. It´s very noisy at night in Cbba.with music, kids, dogs, fireworks and traffic, but we sleep like babies because our brains are so, so tired from the many hours of studying and speaking Spanish all day. It´s wonderful, but totally exhausting.

Every student here lives alone in a host family, and according to Maryknoll, this is a big secret of the program´s success. (The only exception is the religious who live with their communities in the city.) I live with Ruth and Luis B. and their 22-year-old son Pablo, a dental student. Dan lives with Ruth´s older sister in a high rise apartment building near downtown Cbba.
The reality of Bolivia is all around us. My house is in the middle of a semi-rough neighborhood where I´m not permitted to walk alone after dark (which now during the winter is around 6 p.m.) Every day the second biggest challenge I face (after speaking Spanish) is avoiding the growling pack dogs on my route to the Institute. (Some days I wind up having to double back and take a different route because I can´t get past them. The German Shepherds are the scariest.) On my route I see poor people washing their clothes, their dishes and their babies in a filthy canal. There´s a scarcity of water here so people use the water they can find. At night bonfires made up of garbage fill the air with sour smoke.

Thanks be to God, Dan & I have both stayed healthy since we arrived (which irritates me a little bit because Dan doesn´t worry about germs and eats food that falls on the ground and manages to stay healthy with little effort, while I meanwhile pour hand sanitizer on absolutely everything and would boil myself if I could). Many of our classmates have not been so lucky and have wound up hosting amoebas in their GI systems. It turns out that amoebas are the biggest risk here. Parasites come in second, E coli is third and Salmonella is a distant fourth. The water here is swimming with trouble. We even have to keep our eyes and mouths firmly closed in the shower. We´d love to have some salad, but we´d wind up at a clinic a few days later for sure. So far, caution and vigilance have thankfully seen us through. The altitude has given us some bloody noses, but no big problems.

We´ve had some great adventures in the city, especially at "La Cancha," the biggest street market I have ever seen. I don´t have the imagination to picture anything bigger or more chaotic. I bought some deodorant right across from a freshly harvested bull head sitting on a counter (The furry, hooved legs were laying on the floor below; they were also for sale). I bought some pants around the corner from the bird market which featured cages the size of a microwave with 150 birds inside.

The memory of the birds reminds me to tell you how exotic this country is! There are two falcons on the Maryknoll grounds! Everyday I awake at 4 a.m. to the crowing of a rooster, and the cackles of wild parrots. The pack dogs howl in concert at night before bed. The hummingbirds here are the size of Blue Jays and they fly around full-size Poinsettia TREES. Sometimes Bolivia reminds me of the movie Avatar.

I hope to tell you more about our studies and upcoming adventures we hope to embark on soon (to the 400-year-old Jesuit missions near the border with Paraguay and Lake Titicaca and Copacabana) as well as some of the hilarious things we´ve ACCIDENTALLY said while feebly trying to express ourselves in Spanish. However, the next update may be awhile, because more than 30 of us share two computers and it´s taken me several days worth of computer time to pull this all together one paragraph at a time.

We miss everyone at home very much. Although we are truly savoring our time here, we also look forward to being back at home when the time comes.

Thank you for your support of and trust in us.

Gratefully, with faith,
Scott :-)