El fin de una historia

I've been on vacation since Tuesday and it's starting to show. My room is cleaner than it's been for months, I've been sleeping 10 hours every night, and I'm now sending you all two emails in one week...

This is the end of a story I started a couple of months ago with my email about the Carnaval water wars. But I never actually wrote about Cochabamba's Carnaval parade, called "El corso de los corsos" around here (or El Corso for short). The Saturday before Lent begins is Oruro's Carnaval parade, the most famous of all Bolivian Carnaval celebrations (which I went to last time I was here in 2005), and Cochabamba's turn to celebrate comes one week later (We wouldn't want to take away from the Cochabamba party by having it the same day as the Oruro party, after all).

Now, as you may have guess from the water balloon email, the lead-up to Carnaval is quite busy. The streets are full of water balloon throwers and groups practicing their dance steps along the parade route. Two Thursdays before Carnaval is Compadres, the night when men go out and celebrate together, and one Thursday before is Comadres, when the women go out and celebrate (see attached picture). So all told, it's nearly a month of celebration.



This year, the Democracy Center had a party to watch El Corso. We have a beautiful third-story balcony at the office that looks right out onto one of Cochabamba's main streets, Calle San Martin - which happens to be both the street that marching protesters use and the street that parade routes take. Needless to say, we were perfectly set up to host a Corso celebration, and we decided to take advantage of that.

Leny (one of my co-workers, a spectacular Bolivian woman, very multi-talented - she's got her fingers in everything) and I got there early on that Saturday morning, around 10AM. Several groups of our guests were already arriving, and we set to work decorating the office. The parade started shortly after 10. The first group to come through was the military (CITE). Now, I had been to Carnaval in Oruro two years before, but it was nothing like seeing the military groups in a parade. I had been imagining crisp uniforms and one group after another marching in step, but no - not even close. Apparently, El Corso is where the military tries to shed their stern image and really lets loose. There was group after group of young men - in ant costumes (army ants), with giant paper-mache heads, in drag and armed with rifles, and dressed up as monkeys, cavemen, limes (making fun of a new coke/pepsi product), cows, condoms, Roman soldiers, guerrillas, mummies, aliens, puppets of the US (particularly interesting political commentary), vampires, Storm Troopers (yes, I'm talking Star Wars), and the best was - mimicking a popular comedy show about a man whose wife is dominating and practically abusive - a whole troop wearing aprons and handkerchiefs and carrying rags, brooms, and mops, headed by a giant float of a woman sitting on a man's back while he struggled to hold up an ashtray for her cigarette. Utterly fabulous. There were also several (troops? squadrons?) of women - one group parodying Bolivia's top model group, the "Magnificas," dressed in giant plastic trash bags, with the following banner: "Chicas Magnificas del CITE: Ni Magnificas Ni Chicas Premier, Patriotas de Corazon" - roughly translated - "Magnificent Women of CITE (the army): Neither Magnificas nor Premier Models, but Patriots at Heart." Many of the other groups of women had really well-designed costumes - crabs with giant claws, cats with capes, etc.

Needless to say, the army was one of my favorite parts, and watching them pass took pretty much all morning (Dre and Austin, you would have loved it). The traditional folklore groups started about mid-day. Tinkus, caporales, diabladas, morenadas, saya, cueca chapaca, chacarera, and the various smaller indigenous dances and groups were very very impressive as well. We had a lot of fun at the office, cheering on our favorites and even getting dressed up ourselves. Jim got out an old Halloween costume, a nun outfit, and a few friends showed up with Evo (Morales) and (Hugo) Chavez masks. I got my picture with them (see attached).

We also used the opportunity to ch'allar (bless) the office by making an offering to Pachamama, Mother Earth, so that our whole next year would go well, which will be the topic of my next post...

Un dia emocionante

For a Tuesday, yesterday was a pretty exciting.

First, it was Andres' best friend's birthday. She is a mother of a little girl and is pregnant with her second baby, and is a pretty awesome person in general. The first excitement! Feliz cumpleaños to Andrea!

Secondly. Some of you may remember from previous emails that I live in a beautiful old house owned by a lovely woman named Chichi. Those of you with even better memories may remember that she has a 23-year-old son named Jose Miguel. He studied law in college (if you want to be a doctor or lawyer here, you start immediately after high school), finished writing his thesis right after I got here, and yesterday successfully defended his thesis - getting *very* high marks (95 out of 100 - this in a country where grade inflation is definitely NOT the norm). Chichi was very proud, with good reason. The second excitement! Congratulations to Jose Miguel!

Third. Now you should all know at least something about the following, but I'm going to retell it anyway. When I was here in Bolivia the last time (Jan-May 2005), I volunteered/interned for the Democracy Center (yes, the same place I work now) when it had just two staff people - and me. The two staff people were Jim (Shultz), the founder of the organization (which is now 15 years old), and Marcela Olivera, a well-respected researcher, writer, and activist that has worked extensively with Bolivian social movements. When I started working with them, Jim had just finished writing a report on the (unintended) deadly effects of an IMF-imposed budget deficit reduction. I copy-edited the report, finalized the endnotes, and worked with the publisher to make sure the formatting came out right. (I also condensed the report for an article for the Multinational Monitor and got a byline out of it: http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2005/052005/schultz.html.) That and a couple of other projects took me through to the end of my month of working with Jim and Marcela. As y'all know, in May 2005 I was drawn back to the U.S. by Progressive Maryland to direct their canvass office. Before I left, though, Jim asked me to come back to work for the Democracy Center as soon as I could.

Two years later in January 2007, I boarded a plane for Bolivia. Carefully packed away in my luggage were seven tapes, a miniature tape recorder, and a computer that I would spend hundreds of hours with in the next four months. The report on the IMF had actually been the first step in the process of writing the Democracy Center's latest book - Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization. After we published the IMF report in 2005, it had been slightly rewritten and would be the sixth chapter of that book. I got off the plane in Cochabamba ready to get started on my own chapter on Bolivian emigration. The tapes I carried held six interviews with Bolivian emigrants who live in Arlington, Virginia. Two other Democracy Center folks also did interviews in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Barcelona, Spain.

When I arrived in Bolivia, I joined the other book authors - Jim, who was writing a new chapter on Cochabamba's now-famous Water Revolt; Gretchen and Aaron, who had taken on the formidable task of explaining Bolivia's complex oil and gas policies (it's been said that there are only 2 or 3 people in all of Bolivia who really understand them); Christina, who had conveyed the incredibly stark beauty of Bolivia's altiplano (high plains) in her chapter on an oil spill by Enron & Shell in the most important river of the Bolivian highlands; Nick, who was combining his previous experience of working for Jubilee, the international debt relief advocacy group, with up-to-date research on Bolivia's debt history; and Melissa, the second-in-charge in the office, who compiled and edited the seven-author chapter on the Bolivian coca leaf on top of writing a chapter on womens' experiences with globalization.

Most of the other authors had been working on their chapters for nearly a year at that point, and I rushed to catch up. We all pushed hard over the next four months - many late nights and long editing sessions. We put off all other projects - including a proposal to do an international advocacy training, a website update, and campaign strategy advising. We ignored our friends and families (that's you guys) and promised to make it up to them after the book was done (I'll tell you how in a sec). Yesterday at 6:34PM, after several push-backs to our self-imposed deadline (but well before the publishers' deadline of May 1), we finally hit the button (send, not auto-destruct). Our final product is now in the publishers' hands, and the Liberacion del Centro para la Democracia (until the next big project push) is complete. THAT'S THE THIRD EXCITING THING! (PS for those who are part of the cultura chupistica, yes, we did go out last night and did a toast for every piece of the book we sent - beginning with the title page and ending with the bios of the editors, authors, and contributors.)

Now, the answer to the question hanging in y'all's mind since midway through the last paragraph. How am I going to make it up to you!? It has been nearly a month and a half since I wrote anything, after all. So I decided to come back and visit y'all. That's right, May 10 I leave Cochabamba and arrive in Washington, DC the next morning. I will be staying nearly a month in the States, so make plans to see me! Right now! We're gonna go on a camping trip, I'll probably get folks together to see pictures, I'm going to Jeanie's wedding in Charlottesville, and I will be taking LOTS of walks through the woods to enjoy spring in Virginia. Ain't nothing better in this whole wide world. But my time is already starting to fill up, so if you want to do anything specific with me, email me RIGHT NOW and let's make plans.

PS If you're not in the loop round those parts, Maryland finally did it!! They passed the nation's first statewide living wage bill!!! THAT'S RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!