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August 26, 2007

Getting to Work

Josefina, the president of the weaving cooperative, reviews the designs for the new products that we'll be developing. That might look like a dingy canvas tote bag in her hand, but it is actually a carefully engineered, sophisticated R&D prototype for a killer beach bag.
Brigida and Pastora check the colors of the thread against the designs. We've learned together how to create drawings that are easy for everyone to understand and that generate consistent results. As a part of this process, the women have learned to work with measuring tapes and use the color code numbers used by the thread manufacturers.
Everyone helps out.
Making looms....
Installing looms....
The women put me to work too.  I learn how to spin the thread onto the loom...
And then Josefina takes over for the important work...
The women work on the prototypes at home for several days.
Santiago and I check in with them to see how it is going...
They work carefully and make great progress....
Santiago carefully reviews every detail with Adela, pointing out how each product can be improved. 
We check the dimensions of the product, the faithfulness to the design and the quality of the weaving.
Then we all review the costs and decide on prices for the products together.  By the end of the week, we have samples of three new product lines, in four different color combinations. And they are gorgeous.
Then they finally let me play.

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The Road to Salvatierra

The road to Salvatierra is dusty orange in the dry season, and muddy orange in the rainy season.

My "Super Bronco" bicycle.  Paid for by the US State Department.  Red, white and blue, with a basket in front perfectly designed for carrying thread to the Salvatierra weavers.

The perfect fuel for bicycling to Salvatierra.

The Super Bronco can swim.

The Super Bronco.  Now super broken. 

 

 Salvatierra!!

 

 

 

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August 18, 2007

Missing the Forest for the Trees

The bus trip to Guarayos was full of sounds that I remembered:  the cacophonic sing-song of “cunapé caliente” at the bridge over the Rio Grande, where women take advantage of the logjam of trucks and buses to hawk their famous gooey yucca pastries.  The bridge was built in the 1950s by USAID as a railroad trestle over the river.  It is now shared by trains and traffic. Because the bridge is still only one lane, everyone has to take turns.  Long turns, given that the bridge is a mile long. The wait can be five minutes or two hours. 

Bridge over the Rio GrandeWhen we finally started rolling, the calls for cunapés faded under the clankety-clank-clank-boom as we roll over wood planks; boards are laid between the rails for truck and bus tires.  They are temporary and wobbly.  The bridge is a terror; it strains to support the economic flow of the main artery of the agricultural heartland of Santa Cruz:  cattle, soy, rice, and wood travel from the north day and night.  Then a surprise to my right:  a new bridge under construction. 

A man gets stands up and hawks a miracle cure-all for diabetes, gout and stomach aches.  A child laughs, then bawls.  The bus grinds along.

The rolling hills of Guarayos from the highwayAfter about three hours, the dry flat plain breaks into the rolling hills of Guarayos.  Sunflower fields become cattle pasture, peppered with palm trees.  We make a few stops; in Yotau the children call out “aceite de cusi!” and wave bottles of the local palm oil at the passengers.  They sell well: the oil is supposed to make thick hair supple and shiny.

As the sun falls into the horizon, swollen and red, we arrive in Ascension de Guarayos, the provincial capital.  I try not to spend too much time in Ascension.  I visit a few friends, hug the families that adopted me when I was there as a volunteer, buy a bicycle and climb on the next bus to Urubichá.  Formerly a sleepy village on a dirt road, Ascension has become a filthy, loud highway town.  Karaoke machines blast out of chicken joints. Drunks stumble along the road into teenage whorehouses. Motorcycles whine, trucks roar. And the sawmills scream all night as they turn the trees into dust and money.

Ten years ago, Guarayos was 95% forest.  Now, forest cover is about 70% and declining rapidly.  The agricultural frontier is chasing the forest away:  Russians, Mennonites and Brazilians are flocking to the region to rent or buy land, deforest it and satisfy the global demand for soy and rice. (Land is cheap because corrupt indigenous leaders are selling it under the table.) The global maw is also chewing wood.  When I arrived in Guarayos in 2002, there were four sawmills. The machinery was rickety and old, held together with paper clips and spit. Now there are nineteen well equipped sawmills running twenty four hours a day. 

It was a shocking transformation since last year.  Everywhere people are cutting down mahogany trees and selling them for a pittance. I heard prices as low as $7 per tree (a legal sale would be $300-$500 per tree, depending on the size).  Logging trucks rumble through Urubichá all day.  In Salvatierra, where motorized vehicles were a rarity– the whine of a motorcycle would bring kids running out of their houses to see it – I was startled almost every night by logging trucks passing through the village.

There had always been some illegal logging in Guarayos, but a fabric of control had been holding most of it back.  That fabric had ripped in only a year.  What happened?  When I was Guarayos this past week, I asked many people.  The communities blame the small-time illegal loggers, called pirateros or pirates.  “They come into the communities and take advantage of poor people.”

The pirates say the big logging companies are at fault:  “We get all of the blame, but the big companies are the ones who are really stealing all of the mahogany because they have the money to take it out fast, and hide it behind legal logging.  They are making money; why can’t we?”

Others blame the government forestry agency:  “When we go there to ask for their help, they tell us that we have to pay to fill the gas tanks in their trucks and find people to help them.  Are we supposed to do their job for them?”

Some point fingers at the development agencies who financed community forestry projects:  “They built logging roads and trained people how to cut down trees.  Then they abandoned the projects. They set the stage for illegal logging.”

Everyone blames the law:  “Legal logging is bureaucratic and expensive.  It requires thousands of dollars just to get a forestry engineer to write a forest management plan.  Who can afford that?”

These are all problems that have been mounting.  But the underlying force that is catalyzing the illegal logging is a wrenching transition in the local economy from subsistence to consumer.  This transition was catalyzed when electricity came to Urubichá in 2004 (Urubichá is the closest town to Salvatierra). With electricity came TVs.  And all the other stuff that you can buy if you have electricity. People wanted that stuff.  They wanted it immediately.  How to pay for the stuff?  How to pay the electricity bills?  With few jobs and little industry in the region, the only way to get money fast was to sell their trees.  And once a few people started -- and no one stopped them -- everyone else did too.

Salvatierra is twenty kilometers past Urubichá, at the end of the road.  Salvatierra doesn’t have electricity, but the stuff cycle is spinning there too. A year ago everyone traveled by bicycle in Salvatierra.  Then the first motorcycle appeared (one of the corrupt leaders of the forest management plan used the community’s money to buy a moto for himself). So everybody else wanted a motorcycle too. People don’t make much money in Salvatierra; it is mostly a subsistence economy. So the only thing to do was to sell the only thing of value: the mahogany.  On the black market.  For a fraction of the legal price. 

The same thing is happening all over Guarayos.  Trees are turning into motorcycles. 

Obviously people should be able to choose how they make a living and what they do with their money.  But the money won't last long, and it is being wasted on cheap consumer goods.  Josefina told me a story about an elderly woman in Salvatierra who passed away a month ago.  The sawmill in Urubichá was so busy cutting mahogany that it wouldn’t stop to cut the cheaper wood used for coffins (ochoo).  Her family had to bury her in an old hammock.  “It was shameful. People are too busy thinking about making money. What are they going to do when the mahogany is gone in a couple of years?  They will be just as poor as they were before.  They’ll have nothing.  They won’t even have any wood left for chairs to sit on.”

 

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August 16, 2007

Wild Salvatierra Brownies

The classic recipe, created by a chicken, a dog, a small child, a village and a Gringita.

  • One patty of chocolate from Salvatierra’s wild chocolate trees (or 4 squares of supermarket baking chocolate)
  • ¾ cup of “butter”
  • 2 cups of sugar
  • 1 teaspoon of vanilla
  • 3 eggs (2 if using crocodile eggs)
  • 1 cup of flour
  • 1 cup of Brazil nuts, crushed into little pieces with a rock
  • ½ cup of guaparu berries (dried cherries or cranberries work too)
  • 20 liters of pure cane alcohol

Stoke up the kitchen fire, place the cooking stone in the center.  Preheat the clay oven by filling it with firewood and lighting it (make sure the dog isn’t in the oven this time). In a smoke-scorched dented old pot, melt the chocolate and “butter” (lard) over the kitchen fire. When melted, remove from heat, stir with a stick, and add sugar and vanilla. Find another stick since the first one probably broke. Fish the pieces of broken stick out of the pot. Stir in eggs. Stir hard and for a while. Recruit young child to stir, convincing him it is a “fun game.”  

Add flour without breaking stick again, stirring, stirring, stirring. Shoo chicken away from the nuts, stir into batter (nuts, not chicken).  Add berries, and don’t let child stir anymore since he will be sticking his hand in the pot and licking the batter in gulps.

Find a square metal 20 liter can of pure cane alcohol.  Cut and dismantle it to form a 9”x13” baking pan.  Save alcohol for village drunken bash.  Grease pan with “butter”.  Fill with batter.  Shoo away chicken, child and dog.  Clean coals out of oven with long pole, brush clean with palm leaves (fire has heated oven enough when the palm leaves combust). Put pan in oven.  Brownies are done when entire village is surrounding oven because of delicious smell.

 

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Es Mejor Dar Que Recibir

 

 

"It's better to give than to take."

This message is scrawled on the wall of the Santa Cruz bus terminal.  I pass it every time I head out to Salvatierra.  The first time I saw it, I had just arrived as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 2002. I was moved by the message, and inspired:  wasn't that what I wanted to do, why I was here in Bolivia? To give... my time, my experience, my skills?

Oh my.  I quickly realized that I was the one with a lot to learn. I arrived in Salvatierra with the sophistication of a child. I had to be taught the very basics: how to wash clothes in the river by banging them with a paddle, how not to fall into the latrine, why I must drag my feet when I wade across the river to avoid stepping on a stingray.  I couldn't even talk.  The people of Salvatierra did a lot of giving; I did a lot of taking. 

It was at least a year before I wasn’t a burden on the community and could actually offer anything of value.  By then, the message in the bus terminal had taken on another meaning about giving and taking.

Salvatierra is in an area called Guarayos.  Guarayos is mostly indigenous, inhabited by the Guarayos people (sensibly).  It is also heavily forested.  These two qualities made it extremely attractive to international development projects; for development agencies nothing is hotter than indigenous rights and forest conservation.  As a result, Guarayos was crawling with aid projects.  Land Cruisers rumbled down the streets, the restaurants at noon in Ascension de Guarayos were filled with professionals wearing smart polo shirts with logos of international organizations; the same Land Cruisers were parked outside of the bars at night.

Some of these projects – in health, education, forestry, etc. – were great. And there were talented, dedicated people working in Guarayos.  But most projects were terrible wastes of time and money.  People didn’t care.  As long as the money flowed in from the Americans, the Dutch, the Germans, everybody was happy:  free meals, hotel rooms, trips in the Land Cruisers, trips to Santa Cruz, nice salaries, high status.  Boring trainings, useless reports, arrogant attitudes, unfinished projects.

Giving, giving, taking, taking.  There was no incentive to get anything done.  Why work yourself out of a job?

This troubled me so much that I abandoned the development agency that I was working with.  I decided to do my own thing with the communities, following my own conscience.

That is, in part, why Salvatierra Imports is important to me.  There’s no giving or taking because it isn’t a development project; it’s a business.  We work together, we do things fairly, we make great stuff, we sell it, we all benefit.

Are all development projects a waste?  Of course not.  Maybe things were particularly bad in Guarayos.  And not all good works can, or should, be handled by private enterprise.  But when we want to do good, maybe we should think a little bit about what it means to give, and to take.

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August 12, 2007

A mad dash of meetings in the city before leaving

It's been a mad dash of meetings the past few days as I've been preparing to head to Salvatierra:  Gabriela Flores of From the Mountain introduced me to Jennifer Marcy of the Craft Center of CHF International  http://www.craftscenter.org.  The Craft Center is a trust provider for the new World of Good socially conscious internet marketplace that eBay is launching.  We chatted over coffee at Fridolein, near the main plaza, and Jennifer told me about her current visit.  The Craft Center has been helping artisans develop products and reach markets for years.  They have been particularly successful in the Chapare (a gorgeous, rugged mountainous region filled with cloud forests and coca fields), implementing USAID alternative development projects ("alternative development" is a code word for "please grow anything but coca").  One of their successful groups is ArteTropic, which makes handicrafts out of jipijapa (pronounced hippy-hoppa), a fibrous plant that can be woven into baskets and shaped into whimsical little animals. Their artisans have a store in Cochabamba that will be well worth a visit.

Unfortunately much of the USAID funding is getting shifted into other priorities ("priorities" is a code word for "Iraq"). So the Craft Center is pulling out of Bolivia in September. 

That same morning we met with Patricia de Rojo of ArteCampo.  ArteCampo is a local umbrella organization that represents over a dozen rural artisan cooperatives; we've been ordering products from them for several years.  We have an order of wool rugs and ceramic mobiles that is about to be sent out; twelve large boxes were waiting for me when I arrived. Patricia pointed out a recent piece, a painted triptych from the Urubichá Painters Workshop: instead of wild animals and jungle, the artisan painted a scene of the Urubichá beauty pageant, Miss Cunatai.  (Cunatai means "Miss" in the local indigenous language, Guarayos....So "Miss Miss".) Local beauties paraded on a dirt street past pigs and palm frond roofed huts. I have seen that pageant many times, and the painting was right on.  "We are not very happy with this," Patricia opined.  I loved it; it was a perfectly bizarre convergence of languages and cultures.  

We then visited the store and workshop of Claudia Mercado, who produces the jewelry designs based on the Jesuit Mission Church motifs that we feature on our Web site. Claudia is talented and versatile; she studied at the Parsons School of Design and worked as a designer at Calvin Klein. She has since returned to Bolivia to start her own design lines of jewelry and accessories ("I missed the countryside most of all," she told me).  She and Gabriela did a quick brainstorm and came up with some excellent ideas for a new product line that we want develop with the women in Salvatierra.  While we were talking, Sandra Flores of BCCN (Bolivia Competitiva en Comercio y Negocios, funded by USAID), stopped by to meet us briefly.

Gabriela arranged dinner that evening with Marcelo Arauz. Sr. Arauz is the visionary behind Festivales APAC which organizes the International Baroque Music Festival of the Chiquitos Missions. The Festival is the largest baroque music festival in the world.  It attracts over 40 groups who play throughout the Bolivian countryside in the original 18th century missions. The festival will be held next year from April 24 - May 3.  Sr. Arauz told me that the struggle for funding is worse than ever; many of the corporate sponsors are leery of backing major events in Bolivia because the uncertainty about the trajectory of Bolivia under the Morales government.  Business is slow, exports are down. 

Opinions are deeply divided about Morales.   Crucenos generally abhor him and his policies: re-nationalization of oil and gas companies, relaxation of coca restrictions, a reluctance to allow regional autonomy, and constant blockades are the major complaints.  At the same time, he has made impressive reforms: cracking down on corruption, raising the minimum wage, demanding higher royalties on the gas extracted by foreign companies, sending those resources to local governments for health and education programs. There are computers in the schools and Cuban doctors in the countryside, where before there were none.

It is difficult to navigate the complicated web of public opinion about Evo.  Much of it seems to be based on regional bias (Evo Morales is from the mountains of Cochabamba, not the tropics of Santa Cruz).  The Santa Cruz anti-Evo interests are very powerful, and they have mobilized their propaganda machine. Posters such as these are common:

 


 

 

 

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August 11, 2007

A gift of music

I had $2000 stashed in my bra since New Orleans.  It was a donation to the System of Choruses and Orchestras (SICOR), and I wanted to get it out of my bra and into SICOR's hands as soon as possible. So I quickly walked to the central plaza, holding my arms close to my chest, rolling a suitcase filled with a violin and over fifty music books (donated by Jennifer Leland).

I found the SICOR offices; Edgar Salazar Gonzales, the administrator, greeted me warmly:  “Que milagro verte!” A big hug, and then he brought me in to see the director and founder, Ruben Dario Suarez Araña.  I got all of the news.  SICOR is now composed of 18 youth orchestras through the department of Santa Cruz, including the newest in Yacuiba.  Orchestras traveled to Chile and Venezuela this year.  They received an award for administrative excellence at an international meeting of businesses in Guatemala. They hired a child psychologist to work with the children that come from the countryside to study music; she is helping them adapt to city life.  And they are giving concerts constantly, including a few mini Baroque Festivals.  In fact that very night there would be a concert of La Orquesta de Cuerdas Hamacas, the string orchestra of the neighborhood called Las Hamacas.  He invited me to go.  Of course I would.

And then we talked business.  I told him that the donation was specifically for administration (last year our donation was for scholarships for students from the provinces to come to Santa Cruz). “Thank you,” replied Ruben. “No one ever wants to fund administrative overhead.  Of course they want to pay for instruments and scholarships and music professors.  And we are very grateful for those donations, always. With this one office and our staff of four people, we are able to manage 18 orchestras with 600 children involved.  But no one ever wants to pay for the office and staff.  This money really helps.”

SICOR needs help.  The money from the government hasn’t come through. They are hoping for a grant from the Inter-American Development Bank, but the process is long. Ruben is taking out personal loans to keep everything going.

SICOR started eleven years ago in Urubichá, founded by Ruben and Padre Walter.  The Baroque Music Festival had launched several years prior (founded by Marcelo Arauz), and brought musicians from around the world to play the rediscovered music manuscripts of the 18th Century Jesuit missions. Interest and awareness of the Baroque music heritage of the region grew.  So Ruben and Padre Walter started a youth orchestra in the parish of Urubichá. The idea spread quickly, and Ruben organized youth orchestras throughout the Chiquitanía: San Ignacio, San Javier, Santa Cruz.  

SICOR has since become a cultural phenomenon in Santa Cruz.  It has created jobs: music students are now music teachers, artisans are making instruments to supply the orchestras, and tourism to the provinces has flourished as people flock there to see the concerts.  Music education provides structure and discipline to youth at risk:  the flagship orchestra, Hombres Nuevos, is in Plan 3000, an infamously impoverished neighborhood in Santa Cruz.  The orchestra is the pride of the neighborhood and the city.

The concert that night was a complete delight.  Forty kids from age 7 to 17 played their hearts out to a crowd of several hundred in a pleasant outside amphitheater.  Local dignitaries made nice speeches, and Edgar gave brief histories of each music piece.  When Miss Bolivia and Miss Cochabamba appeared, the concert became the major social event of Santa Cruz (of course the photographers and video dudes didn't pay attention to the orchestra for the rest of the evening; too busy shooting the beauty queens...particularly Miss Bolivia as she gorged on potato chips and slugged coca-colas during Vivaldi). 

The kids were phenomenal; and their pride and love of music were contagious.  Three encores, three standing ovations.  I was grateful for their gift.

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August 10, 2007

The flying menagerie

The airplane from Miami to Bolivia was a flying menagerie, a Hollywood back lot of costumed characters.  Oddly clad Mennonite women wearing dumpy flowered dresses and head scarves, their men in straw hats and overalls. A commission of Japanese youth from the Buddhist Compassion Relief, dressed optimistically in white pants and blue shirts.  (Those white pants will need relief and compassion soon.)  Cholitas sporting full-skirted polleras, braids and bowler hats.  The bright-eyed adventure tourist in newly bought hiking pants and shiny backpacks, eager to climb every mountain. And of course the fleshy-faced khaki pant-wearing American DEA contractors occupying first class, trying to look cool, yet fidgeting nervously.

The altitude wreaked havoc when we stopped briefly in La Paz, 14,000 feet.  My pen exploded and my brain when soft.  When I stumbled off the plane in Santa Cruz, now only 1000 feet above sea level, my ears were still filled with altitude.  That made it easier to breeze through customs, since I couldn’t hear when they tried to stop me.

Entering Santa Cruz from the north by the airport took me through the outer rings of dust that surround the city like space debris.  Ravaged countryside, industrial parks, drive-in love motels (where couples pull up into private garages in their cars and discreetly tryst).  Then the graffiti appeared:  “R” with a circle around it, “Resistencia al narco-comunismo”, “Evo es hijo de Chavez”.  In a city that had always seemed too relaxed for strident political expression, these ubiquitous anti - Evo Morales sentiments raised my eyebrows.

We entered the old city center, where Santa Cruz is still an overgrown jungle town.  Lichen-covered ceramic tile roofs slouched into the streets, supported by spindly wooden pillars.  Hand-painted signs decorated the walls. 

It was early in the morning, and the hotels were full. I struggled to find a place to crash; after many tries I finally pounded on the entrance to the Residencial Bolivar.  The door opened and I stumbled into the lush courtyard of the ancient house.  The dry warm winds rustled through the palm trees, running through the leaf fronds like fingers. A startled toucan clicked its tongue.  Ahh….I finally relaxed. I was in Bolivia.

I crashed and slept for hours.

 

 

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August 09, 2007

Where in the world is Salvatierra?

Where in the world is Salvatierra?

At the end of a long dusty bike path in the jungles of Bolivia, across two rivers in dugout canoe, sits a remote indigenous village of 50 families.

I had spent two years working with the village of Salvatierra as a Peace Corps volunteer. Those years are hard for me to describe -- but I'll try: they were strange, wild, exhilarating and humbling.  The people taught me about the important things (kindness, fragility, humor). And when I left, and they gave me a gift that only travel to a far off place can provide:  a little bit of perspective. 

I knew that I couldn’t leave for good; I had figure out a clever way to go back.  Often, and with a purpose.  So three years ago, in the closing months of my Peace Corps service in Bolivia, an idea began to grow.   It originated with the women, actually.  They wove beautiful hammocks in the traditional Guarayos way.  But the local market wouldn’t pay what they were worth.  So they suggested – insisted, strongly, over and over and over – that I sell the hammocks in the US.  "Sell them and that will pay for you to come back."  Ahhhh.....a good idea, I thought.  It turned out to be a great idea.

So we – my mother Kathryn and I – started Salvatierra Imports.  (We have since expanded to include the art and handicrafts of other Bolivian cooperatives; now we are selling from over 10 different groups.)

Now, Partners of the Americas (http://www.partners.net) is sponsoring me to return to Salvatierra.  This blog is the story of that return.  For the people who know Bolivia and Salvatierra, I hope what I describe will add color to faded memories.  For those who have never had the chance to make the trip, I’ll take you to a place at the end of the world.  A place that is beautiful, fragile and changing quickly. 

The village of Salvatierra

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August 07, 2007

Packing, repacking, scrambling, panicking

I am getting ready -- packing, repacking, scrambling, panicking -- to head back to Bolivia for the first time in over a year.  Back to Salvatierra!

 My packing list:

  • one violin
  • a pile of bicycle patches
  • Mardi Gras beads
  • photographs of P-51s
  • many cheap LED flashlights
  • a digital audio recorder and microphone
  • a dingy canvas bag

An oddball packing list!  Read later to find out why....

 

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