A Long Time Coming

Well, my dear family and friends, I have been waiting nearly a month for the many shards of my experience here in Bolivia to coalesce themselves into a mosaic that I might describe to you. Yet, the only sense I can make of my experience here is senselessness. That is not to say that the experience is bad, just imperfectly comprehensible so at to leave me somewhat disoriented and uncertain. I am not in order, but rather disordered, freed of course from the psychological implications of the term.

I walk on dirt roads past dark brown women wearing hats and carrying heavy buckets of goods bought from a vast open air market who are dressed in many colors and wear a rainbow wrap around them that in the back forms a place to carry babies. They smile a "buen dia" and reveal missing teeth, or even present teeth edged in silver or gold. This experience does not exist in the U.S., at least in the worlds I've traveled. It reminds of a my first and only time in Venice, when I told a dear friend, an Italian who passed many years in Venice, that the only way I could relate Venice to my existence was through Disneyland. There, Mickey and Minnie might be able to show me something similar or even invite me to partake in some approximation of it. My normalcy was insufficient to account for what I saw. So it is here, but without the aid of Donald and Goofy, or even the local Indian reservation with the statue commemorating a time and fashion disappeared but for occasional ceremonies.

The limits of my normalcy of course challenge me. I am comfortable with my family here, the professors and staff at the language institute, my fellow students, the lady who runs the internet place and her family, the pharmacist and her 4 year-old daughter who is starting to learn English. These are all aspects of a world familiar to me--a purpose (study), a basic social structure, tools of communication, buying necessities from a store--and I am having lots of fun within them. Yet, this world of comfort feels so insular, so small in comparison to the much greater foreignness of labrynthine markets, directions given by landmarks instead of addresses, hordes of stray dogs traveling in mixed-breed packs, the feel of cobblestone rocks pressing through the soles of shoes, packed buses where passengers are too scared to tell you that someone is picking your pocket, mountains made of broken rocks without trees where llamas and sheep graze in the wild and that reach so high into the sky that you need to chew coca leaves to climb them, trucks with the body of oil transports that instead are filled with water to take to the places the infrastructure doesn't reach.

In Brazil—or at least in Rio and Salvador, just two cities of a vast country--I did not feel so foreign (I might have if I would have wandered off into the more rural areas). Certainly, the language was different, as were some customs. But the dress, the daily activities, the roads, the scale of business, even the poverty were at least cognizable. The racial makeup probably didn't hurt, as I was in the midst of lots of people of various shades and, even when the only white person, I could be comforted by the familiarity of the blackness that was around, even if culturally different.

This disorder, perhaps, is culture shock, and I am feeling it in the country’s third largest city with a metropolitan population nearing a million. It inspires fear. Fear inspires the desire for refuge. At last, four weeks into my year here, I am afraid enough to write to all of you.